by Tim Weaver
‘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, where 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.
I was good at finding them. Liz once said I had a kind of gravitational pull, an ability to drag the lost back into the light – and although she had only been joking, I did feel a connection to them. Sometimes it felt like more than that. Sometimes it felt like a responsibility; an unwritten contract. And maybe that was the reason I was drawn so quickly into their world – and why, at times, I’d been prepared to go as far as I had.
Ewan Tasker very rarely let me down, and at just gone 10.30 he pulled into the driveway in his dark-blue Porsche 911 Turbo. It sounded better than it was. He’d had it for years, but while he loved it like his daughter, hardly a month went by without something falling off it.
He got out, locked it and made his way up to the open porch. His frame filled the doorway: six-three, sixteen stone, wide and strong even if his muscle definition had started to fade. His black hair was being reclaimed, grey streaks passing above his ears, but it was one of his few concessions to age.
I made coffee and we headed through to the back garden. There was a small patio area immediately outside, with a table and a couple of chairs. Task eased into a seat with a theatrical sigh, playing on the fact that he was sixty-two and already in semi-retirement – but he wasn’t just physically imposing: he was quick-witted and sharp too.
‘You’re not convincing anyone with your OAP act,’ I said.
‘I like to lure people into a false sense of security.’ As he leaned forward to sip his coffee, I saw a USB stick in the breast pocket of his shirt. He took it out and handed it to me. ‘That’s everything I could get for you in the time I had available to me this morning. It’s a pretty fast turnaround, even for a man of my skills. Luckily for you I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a geek.’ He pointed to the USB stick. ‘One thing: you asked for footage from inside every eastbound Circle line carriage between 7.30 and 8. That’s a problem. The District, Jubilee, Northern, Waterloo and City lines all have onboard CCTV already, but the Circle and Hammersmith lines are late to the party. My guy tells me that they’re in the process of refurbishing all those trains and that a lot of them are in service now – but, going back six months, to when your man disappeared, they didn’t have cameras.’
‘So it’s just the station cams on here?’
‘Right. Sorry.’
‘No – this is great. I really appreciate it, Task.’
But the truth was, it wasn’t great: having onboard footage would have helped narrow dow
n Sam’s route in and out easily, and given me a much closer view of his movements. Now I’d have to rely on picking him out from a platform camera positioned about twenty feet up, and tracking him through a London rush hour.
I looked down at the USB and turned it with my finger. Task had got me footage from every Circle line station for the day Sam Wren disappeared. That was 36 stations, which meant about 19 hours of CCTV for each station, and roughly 680 hours of video total. Sam got on to the Tube at approximately 7.30 on the morning of 16 December, which made things easier. But if – as expected – it wasn’t obvious when he got off, it was going to make for a hell of a morning.
6
After Task left for his golf tournament, I ran the footage from Gloucester Road. Sun poured through the window of the spare room, the air still, the heat prickling against my skin. I felt the familiar buzz that came at the start of a case. The lack of onboard footage was a problem, but not an insurmountable one. I’d just have to work around it.
Onscreen, there was a time clock in the bottom left, with the date adjacent to that. It was 5.30 a.m. In the video, there was no one in shot. Off to the left, the District line platform was visible; on the right were two Circle line tracks, one for westbound trains, one for eastbound. At 5.38, a woman entered the shot, walked to the middle of the platform and stood there checking her phone. Three minutes later, more people joined her. Then more. By 6 a.m., the station was starting to get busy.
I grabbed the timeline on the video window and dragged it right, stopping at 6.50. By now, the station was in full flow, people filing off the trains, but mostly filing on. The camera above the entrance to the platform gave a good view. If the Wrens’ house was half a mile from the Tube station, and he was averaging two miles per hour, Sam would enter at about 7.20, and be in shot by 7.30.
He took a little longer.
At 7.45 a.m., he emerged on to the eastbound platform, moving in a mass of bodies. It was incredibly busy, even for a weekday morning. At one stage, he got stuck behind an old couple – tourists – who looked shell-shocked by the carnage unfolding around them, but eventually he found a space on the platform, about two lines back from the edge. He was holding a takeaway coffee in his left hand, which was why he must have taken longer to get to the station, and a briefcase in his right. The coffee was interesting. It suggested a routine; as if this day wasn’t that different from any other and he hadn’t been expecting any surprises. And yet, in the washed-out colours of the CCTV footage, he looked even worse than in the photo Julia had given me: paler, thinner, his eyes dark smudges against his face. He just stood there the whole time, staring into space. Did you have a plan? I thought. Or did you only decide to take off once you were on the Tube?
The train emerged from the edge of the shot, its doors opening, and the scramble began. You could tell the regular commuters: they barged their way on to the train, eyes fixed on the doors, everyone around them expendable. Sam was the same. When someone tried to move in front of him, he shuffled into their line of sight.
Then he was on the train.
The doors closed.
And the train was gone from shot.
I got up, poured myself a glass of water, returned and loaded up the second video – South Kensington – and fast-forwarded it. Sam’s train had left Gloucester Road at 7.51; two minutes later it was pulling into South Kensington. I leaned in, trying to get a handle on the chaos. Like Gloucester Road, the platform was packed: shoulder to shoulder, men and women stood on its edges, jostling as the train doors opened.
A second’s lull, and then people started pouring out. I shifted even closer to the screen and pressed Pause. This time, I edged it on manually using the cursor keys. The camera was about three-quarters of the way down the platform, and was taking in about 80 per cent of the train. At Gloucester Road, Sam had boarded the second carriage from the front, so – unless he’d spent the two-minute journey sprinting from one end of the train to the other, barging commuters out of the way – he would be visible if he got off.
But he didn’t get off.
The whole place was jammed. I played it and replayed it a couple of times just to be sure, but there was still no sign of him.
It was the same story at Sloane Square.
At Victoria, it was going to be even harder to pick him out. It doubled up as a mainline station, so the platform was just a sea of heads. Then I saw something else: a group of men and women, all dressed in the same red T-shirts, all holding placards.
A demonstration.
I downsized the video file and googled ‘16 December protest’. The top hit was a report from the Guardian about a march on Parliament by opponents of the government’s spending cuts. I remembered it. Authorities had asked that protesters use the Circle line, and commuters, tourists and everyone else use the District. The warning looked to have been heeded by some, but not all. And certainly not by Sam. If he’d planned his escape beforehand, he couldn’t have picked a better day.
I checked Victoria’s footage, without any sign of him, then moved on to the next stop, St James’s Park. More protesters. More commuters. The same thing: train arrived, no sign of Sam, train departed. Next I loaded up Westminster. Zipping forward to just after 8 a.m., I hit Play. Sam’s train wouldn’t be arriving for another five minutes, but I wanted to get a sense of how it was before his arrival.
Westminster was a battlefield: a sea of faces, a mass of bodies. Basically the perfect place to instigate an escape plan. The doors opened. I watched closely, every head, every face, while my mind continued to turn things over.
The station had been set up to funnel people off and away from the trains as fast as possible. In the middle, one of the exits had a sign on the wall next to it that said: PROTESTERS EXIT HERE. At the far end of the station, I could just about make out another sign above another exit: NON-PROTESTERS EXIT HERE. The attempt to smooth traffic flow hadn’t worked: the platform was jammed with people not moving at all.
As Sam’s train emerged into the station, I hit Pause and inched it on again with the right cursor. When the doors opened it was like a dam breaking: people poured out – almost fell out – a mix of suited executives, tourists looking lost, and legions of red shirts, all heading for the march. The wave of movement had been too fast, and scattered in too many directions, to keep track of properly, so I stopped the video before it got any further, dragged the slider back sixty seconds and started again.
This time I went even more slowly. I knew which carriage Sam had been in, so kept my attention fixed on it as the doors slid open. A ton of people spilt out – but not Sam. Once or twice, I thought I spotted him – fair hair, black suit, blue tie – but then a face would turn in my direction and it was someone else. I rewound the footage a third time and concentrated on the protesters. If I was assuming he might use the demonstration as cover, I had to consider the possibility he might pull on a red T-shirt too. I slowed the action down to a crawl and searched the sea of faces. Anyone who looked like him. Anyone with a T-shirt over a suit, or over a shirt and tie. Anyone carrying a jacket, a briefcase or both. There was nothing. On the fourth and final run-through, I kept my eyes on the carriage itself. As it emptied, I hoped to glimpse Sam still inside the train. But, once again, there was no sign of him.
Then, further down the platform, a fight broke out.
At first, there was a swell of movement, like the eye of a whirlpool, and then it spread out, crowds pushing back in all directions, trying to avoid being caught up. Pretty soon it became obvious what was going on: two men, one in the red of the protest march, another in a white T-shirt with a Union Jack on the back, were throwing punches at each other.
Six Underground staff, stationed at equal distances along the back wall of the platform, descended on them immediately, but not before people had stopped to watch and the whole station had come to a halt. From the carriages of the train, people peered out, trying to see what was going on. Some even stepped on to what space they could find on the platfor
m to take a look. From the bottom of the shot, another member of London Underground emerged, waving his hands, presumably telling people to move up the platform and create space. But it was complete chaos: people seemed to be ignoring him, unable to hear him or see him, or more interested by what was going on further up. Within ten seconds, the Tube staff had created a kind of makeshift wall, three of them in a semicircle around the fight, the other three trying to break it up and move everyone on. It took another twenty seconds for them to put an end to it, and then the two men were taken off through the exit at the middle of the platform, and the remaining staff got things moving again. As the man in the white T-shirt got closer to the camera, I could see what was printed on the front: CUT NOW, STRONGER LATER.
But, throughout it all, there was still no sign of Sam.
Not even a close call.
I replayed the entire thing again, from the moment his train entered the station to the moment it left. I went back to the possibility that he had moved between carriages, but it just seemed improbable: there was barely room to breathe inside the trains, let alone manoeuvre yourself from one carriage to another. It seemed much more likely that he’d got on and remained inside the same carriage between Gloucester Road and Westminster. There’d been no face like his, no one dressed exactly like him, no one with the same build or holding the same briefcase. Despite the crowds, I would have spotted him.
Which meant he was still on the train.
And there were thirty more stations to check.
Three hours later the train terminated at Hammersmith. I paused the footage and edged it on. About twenty people filed off, a couple in clumps, but most out on their own and easy to identify. None of them was Sam Wren. I’d followed his train all around the Circle line, even – in something approaching desperation – retreating back from Gloucester Road to Edgware Road in the ten minutes before he got on, and hadn’t spotted him once. Not leaving the train, not even moving around inside it.
The camera at Hammersmith was angled lower than some of the other stations, giving a better view of the carriages, and there was no one left inside. I let the video run anyway and, a few minutes later, two Tube staff, both in bright-orange high-visibility waistcoats, emerged from the bottom of the shot and started walking the length of the platform, checking each carriage. A couple of minutes later, the doors closed, they had a quick word with the driver, then the train pulled off and melted into the tunnel.
