by Tim Weaver
‘It was a bit stressful, but I’d say he liked it about as much as any of us like our jobs. He’d come home sometimes and tell me he’d had enough of it, but the next day – if things went well – he’d be completely different. I didn’t really look harder than that, to be honest. We all have ups and down, bad days and good days.’
I glanced at the photo of Sam again: the gaunt, thin features, the suit hanging off him, a faint look of disquiet in his face. Maybe there were more bad days than good.
‘So, he didn’t seem any different the day he disappeared?’
‘No. And, if he was, it was so subtle I missed it.’
‘You two were getting on okay?’
‘Fine,’ she said, eyes flicking to the window and then back to me. She didn’t elaborate. Instead she just sat there, looking for me to pick up the conversation and move it forward, the muscle tone changing at the side of her face; tighter and more rigid, like she was clenching her teeth.
Did you just lie to me?
I let it go for the moment, and decided to come back to it when I had a better feel for who she was and why she might sidestep the question.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Half a mile from Gloucester Road Tube station,’ she said. ‘We bought a place in a little mews about five years back. This was when Sam used to get bonuses.’
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes.’ But there was a forlorn expression on her face now, like she didn’t want to be living alone in a house they’d bought as a couple. ‘I used to be the manager at a deli in Covent Garden, so most days, as long as he wasn’t too swamped with work, we’d walk to the Tube together.’
‘You don’t work at the deli any more?’
‘I was made redundant in March last year.’ She paused; and then her cheeks started to colour, as if she thought she’d second-guessed me. ‘Don’t worry: I’ll have enough to pay you. I’ve got another job now, at a restaurant in Bayswater. I’ve got some savings; money we kept for a rainy day. I figure this is the day we were talking about.’
‘I wasn’t worried about the money,’ I said.
But she just nodded.
‘How long were you unemployed?’
‘Almost eleven months.’
‘So you started working again early this year – January time?’
‘January the sixteenth.’
Thirty-one days after her husband disappeared. I wondered, for a moment, how that must have felt: starting a new career, a new part of your life, while the biggest part of your old one had vanished into thin air.
‘How did you both cope financially during the time you were out of work?’
She shrugged. ‘Sam’s bonus helped buy that place, but we’d still been lumbered with a massive mortgage, even by London standards. Suddenly we were in a situation where his wages had been frozen, he wasn’t bringing home anything extra and I wasn’t bringing home anything at all. You can cut out the restaurants and the clothes and the weekends away, but you can’t do without your home. Defaulting on our mortgage was the thing that worried us the most.’
‘What about now?’
She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Can you pay the mortgage on your own?’
‘Sam didn’t take any money with him the day he disappeared, and he hasn’t taken any out since. So my rainy-day fund will last me another three or four months.’
‘And after that?’
A humourless smile. ‘Well, I guess I’ve just got to hope you find him.’
If she thought finding her husband would solve all their problems, she was going to be disappointed. If he’d gone for a reason, he’d purposefully removed himself from his marriage, his job and his life. There was no instant fix. If I found him, if he was even alive, things would never be the same as they were before.
I changed direction. ‘So, his commute was Gloucester Road to Westminster and then change to the Jubilee? Or did he get the DLR from Tower Hill?’
‘He changed at Westminster.’
‘The Circle or District?’
‘Circle.’
‘He never got the District?’
‘Rarely.’
‘Why?’
‘One of the reasons he left HSBC was because he didn’t really like the guys he was working with there. It wasn’t any massive conflict of interest, more that Sam just couldn’t take to them, and the way they worked. You know how you meet some people in life who, from minute one, you just know you aren’t going to see eye to eye with?’
I nodded.
‘That’s why he started looking for a way out of there, and that’s why he ended up moving to JPM to work with his friend from university.’ She looked at me, and could see the question in my face: Yeah, but why did he never get the District line? ‘Three of them lived in Wimbledon,’ she said.
‘So they used to get the District line.’
‘Right.’
‘But the chances of them bumping into each other must have been minimal.’
She shrugged. ‘Sam got into a routine with the Circle.’
‘Do you think these guys had anything to do with Sam’s disappearance?’
She shook her head: absolute certainty. ‘No. It wasn’t anything serious. They just rubbed each other up the wrong way and it started making Sam unhappy.’
I noted that down. ‘When did you report him missing?’
‘The evening of 16 December. He never came home, I couldn’t get him on his mobile, and his boss had left a message on our answerphone wondering where he was.’
‘He hadn’t turned up for work at all?’
‘No.’
‘You went to the police?’
‘Yes. They were pretty thorough: wanted to know about his friends, relatives, his medical history, his financial details. They came to look around the house too, and even took away his toothbrush to get a DNA sample. When I told them that he hadn’t turned up to work, the officer said he’d check the CCTV footage from the stations too.’
‘But he didn’t find anything?’
‘No. He called and said they were in the process of requisitioning the CCTV footage from the Tube. A couple of weeks passed and I heard nothing. So, I chased him up and he returned my call a few days later. He said they hadn’t found anything.’
‘At all?’
‘He said Sam didn’t get off the train again.’
‘And that didn’t bother him?’
There was a bleakness in her face. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What was the guy’s name?’
‘PC Westerley. Brian Westerley.’
They weren’t exactly bringing out the big guns for Sam’s disappearance, but then he wouldn’t have raised many flags at the Met: a man in his late twenties, good job, solid marriage, just about in the black, no history of mental illness. There wasn’t an obvious reason for him to go missing, which meant more manpower and more resources would be needed to find him. I’d seen the full force of the police emerge in the aftermath of a disappearance on another case, when a seventeen-year-old girl vanished into the ether. But she’d ticked three big boxes: white, female and a minor. Sam was different, his circumstances different. There was no media pressure and no headlines. The Met had palmed off his case on a PC, and it had been allowed to drift.
Despite that, there was still one massive question mark over this whole thing: how exactly did a man get on to a train and never get back off again? It might not have bothered Westerley enough to pursue it to its conclusion, but it bothered me.
‘I’ll call Westerley and see what he says.’
‘I hope he’s helpful.’
I doubt he will be. The last thing the police wanted was an outsider sniffing around trying to solve one of their cases, even if it was a low-priority one like Sam Wren. A detective I used a lot during my days as a journalist used to have a shelf in his filing system marked ‘DGAS’; as in ‘Don’t Give a Shit’. That was where the low-priority missing people, the drug addicts and the repeat o
ffenders got stashed and forgotten about. But I’d never met a cop who didn’t start giving a shit the minute an outsider stepped into view.
‘Does Sam have any family?’
‘A brother. Robert.’
‘Is he here in London?’
‘He works here. But he lives in Reading.’
‘I’ll need his address,’ I said.
She reached into the handbag and brought out a diary. She’d prepared for this day; prepared for the questions I was going to ask. She leafed through it, found the page she was looking for and then ripped it out of the book. She set it down in front of me. It was a list of names – numbered 1 to 15 – of the most important people in Sam’s life. Each name had full contact details.
‘That’s everybody I could think of,’ she said.
Each name had an entry after it, headed ‘Relationship to Sam’. His brother was top, followed by friends and work colleagues. ‘This’ll work,’ I said, smiling.
‘If I think of anyone else, I’ll let you know.’
I folded the piece of paper up. ‘I’ll need to have a look around the house.’
She nodded. ‘Whenever you need to.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘I’m working the morning shift. I’ll be home about two.’
‘I’ll be there for three.’ She gave me the address and I noted it down. ‘Can I take this?’ I asked her, and touched a finger to the photograph of her husband.
‘Of course.’
I nodded my thanks and pulled it towards me. Part of the reason for going to the house – apart from the fact that it was one of my routines; a way to understand the person better – was to find out if there were any older photographs of him. I wanted to see how he looked; if he had always been as thin as he was at the end.
My watch beeped gently. Eleven o’clock.
‘One last thing before I go,’ I said. Outside the rain had stopped and with it had come a strange kind of silence. No drizzle drifting against the window any more, no people passing in the street. She studied me expectantly. ‘If I start looking into this, there can’t be any secrets between us.’
Her eyes flicked to her coffee cup and up again. ‘Secrets?’
‘Any secrets, any conflicts that existed between the two of you, any problems Sam might have been having, I need to know about them. I’m not here to make a judgement on you. I’m here to find Sam.’
I let that sit there for a moment.
But she didn’t take the bait.
If she was lying to me, the lie would surface eventually. They always did. Usually families lied out of some misguided belief that it might affect how I did my job; as if my performance was based on how picture-perfect their life was. But the truth was, no life was perfect. Everyone had secrets.
It’s just some were buried deeper than others.
4
I walked Julia Wren back down Long Acre and then watched her disappear into the Tube station at Covent Garden. The streets were starting to empty now, the noise drifting away, a different, softer city emerging from the shadows. I took out my phone and thumbed through the address book until I got to the name I wanted: Ewan Tasker.
‘Task’ was in his early sixties, retired for a couple of years but still employed in an advisory role at the Met. Before that, he worked for the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the precursor to the Serious Organised Crime Agency. Our relationship had started off slowly: he’d come to me with a story he wanted to break about Kosovan organized crime, hoping to force one of its leaders out into the open; I used it as a bargaining chip, and a way to secure him as a long-term source. We sparred for a while but eventually, over time, became good friends. These days, I wasn’t able to offer him column inches in return for his help, so he made me turn up to a charity golf day once a year on his birthday. For me, it was eighteen holes of misery. For him, it was hilarious.
‘Raker!’ he shouted down the phone. ‘What time do you call this?’
It was late, but I knew he’d be awake. Task enjoyed his golf, but he wasn’t built for retirement: he’d spent the first six months driving his wife up the wall, and the next six on bended knee begging any agency he could find to give him something to do.
‘How you doing, old man?’
‘I’m good. Up to my arse in work, but otherwise good.’
‘I’m not sure lifting beer cans to your mouth counts as work, Task.’
He laughed. ‘I didn’t even have time for a pint at the clubhouse this morning, and you know I always make time for a pint or ten.’
‘I thought you were just advising the Met part-time?’
‘I am. Normally it’s more sedate: meetings once a week at Scotland Yard, the rest of the time here at home reading up on cases and offering my devastating insight.’
‘But not this week?’
‘There’s a few things going on,’ he said, ‘but nothing exciting. Not yet, anyway. You been following this Snatcher stuff?’
‘Not closely.’
‘You’re losing your touch, Raker.’
I smiled. ‘If I ever had it. I only know what I’ve read in the papers: he gets inside their houses and takes them from their beds.’
‘Yeah,’ Tasker said. ‘He’s got some balls, I’ll give him that.’
‘You’re not working that case, are you?’
‘No. Definitely not my area. But it’s the water-cooler case at the Met: everyone’s talking about it, everyone’s got an opinion. The press are all over it like flies on shit.’
‘Can’t blame them. It’s the biggest story of the year.’
‘Spoken like a true hack.’ He laughed. ‘So what can I do for you?’
I needed to get hold of the CCTV footage from the day Sam disappeared on the Tube, but I didn’t have any sources at Transport for London, or at the Transport Police. Task’s contacts at SOCA – soon to become the National Crime Agency – were a decent alternative: they’d be policing organized crime, people trafficking, e-crime and fraud at the London Olympics, which meant securing CCTV footage through them wouldn’t raise any flags and probably wouldn’t require a lot of paperwork. They’d be watching the Tube for suspicious activity anyway, and as a way to identify potential suspects, so it was natural they’d be analysing footage as prep in the months leading up to the Games. I told Task what I needed.
‘What do you want the footage for?’
‘A guy I’m trying to find – he disappeared somewhere on the Circle line.’
‘Disappeared how?’
‘Just disappeared. Got on the train and never got off again.’
‘You serious?’
‘You know me, Task: I don’t have a sense of humour.’
Another laugh. ‘That’s true.’
‘His wife came to me tonight and asked me to find out where he went. The Met opened a missing persons file on him and had one of their uniforms look into it.’
‘Sounds like they pulled out all the stops to find him.’
I smiled ruefully. ‘PC Plod doesn’t seem that bothered.’
‘You gonna call him?’
‘Yeah. I’m sure I can look forward to my usual warm welcome from the Met.’
‘I can ask around if it’s easier.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you a shout if I need a hand.’
‘Okay, well, I’ll put in a request now, but it won’t get picked up until the morning. I can probably cash in a favour and get it prioritized, so I might be able to get you something for mid-morning. You going to be home?’
‘Yeah. You coming past?’
‘I’ve got a golf tournament up in Ruislip. I can’t promise anything, but if I’ve got something, I’ll drop it in. Probably be around about 10, 10.30.’
‘Perfect. Thanks, old man.’
‘Don’t thank me yet. You owe me a round of golf.’
Fifteen minutes later, the Piccadilly line train pulled into Gloucester Road Tube station. It was 11.35 and the platform was deserted. Somewhere above me, whe
re the Circle and District lines ran parallel to one another, Sam Wren had stepped on to a carriage and never got off again.
As the doors wheezed open, I leaned out and took in the length of the station. The morning of 16 December 2011 wouldn’t have looked like this. Sam had got on at another line, on another platform, and was headed in a different direction. He would have been surrounded by commuters too. But, at its heart, the mystery remained the same: how did a man disappear from the inside of a train? If he’d ridden the Tube to the end of the line, he would still have had to get off, because every journey terminated somewhere. And if he had got off at one of the other stations on the Circle line, rather than at Westminster, his exit would have been recorded on CCTV.
Maybe Julia honestly believed neither had happened. Maybe the PC who opened Sam’s missing persons file, who sat down and watched the footage, didn’t care enough to take more than a cursory glance and find out. But the reality, however well concealed, was that Sam must have got off at some point.
Because there weren’t any genuine magic tricks.
Only illusions.
5
Liz left early the next morning. She didn’t need a lot of sleep, which was probably one of the other reasons she was so good at what she did. Less sleep meant more prep time, and more prep time meant she was better in court. Often I’d stumble through and find her hunched over a laptop in the front room, having been up for hours. But not today.
I got dressed and headed next door – to my real home. It was chilly inside. My house faced north, so only got sun in the mornings and evenings, on either side of the property. But that was okay. The summer was good, but I preferred a cooler home.
Moving around, I started getting things together for the drive over to Julia Wren’s later. Once I’d had an office, a place that separated work and home. But it became clear pretty quickly that the two always merged, however much I tried to avoid it, so when the lease ran out on the office, I shifted everything back home: files, pictures, memories.
I sat down at the desk in the spare room, and while my Mac hummed into life, took in my surroundings. Folders. Files. Notepads. Pens. Opposite, pinned to the wall, was a corkboard I’d had in my office. It was full of photos given to me by the families: missing people, some barely even in their teens, freeze-framed in a different life.
