by Tim Weaver
So where the hell is he?
I’d have to go through the whole thing again.
Every second of video. Every station. Every face.
Every moment in Sam Wren’s vanishing act.
7
9 January | Five Months Earlier
Healy entered the office, the traces of old Christmas decorations still hanging limply from whiteboards and computer monitors, and headed for his desk at the back of the room. In the two months he’d been off, it had been used as a dumping ground: printouts, files, random stationery and magazines made up a landslide of discarded items. Cups from the machine had been stacked up in towers as well, one after the other along the edge of the desk. In places, they’d obviously been knocked over and the coffee never cleared up: sticky residue formed in pools, and there were marks on the carpet where it had run off.
The only thing that hadn’t been touched were his photos, pinned to the wall on the left of his desk. There were five: individual shots of his wife and three kids, and then a picture of all of them, in happier times, on a holiday in Majorca. He sat down at the desk and wheeled in closer to the photos, his eyes falling on Leanne. Something tremored in his throat, like a bassline coming up from his chest, and he turned away from her before the emotion could take hold.
He started to clean up, sweeping everything on his desk off into a bin, and then grabbed a dishcloth from the kitchen area and rubbed off the coffee stains. About ten minutes later, at just gone 6 a.m., he looked up to see two men enter the office, laughing at something one of them had said. When their eyes locked on Healy, they briefly stopped – frozen for a moment – and then they tried to disguise the movement by continuing their conversation. They all knew each other – the two men were Richter and Sallows – but the division inside CID would be something he’d have to live with: some of them understood why he’d done what he did, the road he’d walked and the laws he’d broken; others only saw him as reckless. A man that couldn’t be trusted.
About twenty minutes later, his desk clean and his computer on, he saw someone coming towards him out of the corner of his eye. The office was busy now. He’d had a short conversation with a couple of detectives – a guy called Frey who had joined in the time he’d been off, and who told him he was sorry about Leanne; the other a cop called Sampson who he’d known professionally since they’d first got their uniforms – but mostly it had been nods of the head, or just a complete blank. People hadn’t been openly hostile so far, but as he turned to see who was approaching, he knew that was about to change.
‘Watch out,’ a voice said, ‘it’s the Return of the Living Dead.’
There were a couple of titters from elsewhere in the room. Healy looked out and saw Richter and Sallows smiling as Eddie Davidson stepped in closer.
‘How you doing, Eddie?’ Healy asked. He didn’t make eye contact, just fiddled around with the things on his desk: straightening, adjusting, tidying, trying to defuse the situation. Davidson was a DS in his early fifties, podgy and aggressive, with small dark eyes, thick black hair and an unruly beard. He had always been the worst-dressed detective on the force, and Healy noted that he hadn’t disappointed today: too-tight jeans, a red T-shirt with some kind of road-sign motif on it, and a leather jacket which he’d zipped up as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far: his belly was a big round mass.
Davidson was a decent cop: not the best, not the worst, but good enough. What he definitely was, though, was a zealous believer in the religion of the police force, which was why he hated Healy. Healy had gone against the religion and moved against his own. There was some added bad blood too: in a moment of desperation, as he’d searched hopelessly in the shadows for the man who’d taken his daughter, Healy had pulled a gun on Davidson.
‘How’s it feel to be back?’ Davidson asked.
‘It feels good.’
‘Yeah?’
The whole office stopped, some covertly eyeing the two of them, some fully turned around in their seats. Healy looked up. ‘Yeah, it feels good.’
‘You screwed up yet?’
Healy felt the first pulse of anger rise in his throat, and then pushed it back down again. Movement registered with Davidson – the tightness in Healy’s neck, the tension in his muscles – and he realized he’d got to Healy; picked at a wound and made it bleed. He looked out to the rest of the office, like he was working the crowd, and then shuffled in even closer. Healy glanced at him. ‘Was there something else, Eddie?’
Davidson smirked. ‘Is that a fucking joke? You walk in here after two months and ask me that? Do you even remember what you did?’
Healy looked at him again. ‘I remember.’
‘You remember waving a gun in my face?’
They stared at each other. Healy didn’t reply this time, but suddenly it felt like the office was closing in. Other detectives stepped closer, the whole room squeezing shut around him. He laid a hand flat to the desk and leaned back in his chair, keeping his eyes fixed on Davidson, but gaining some room to breathe. Davidson noticed, pulled an empty chair in from behind him and wheeled in close to Healy again, so the two of them were almost touching knees.
‘Let me be clear on something,’ he said quietly, ‘just so there’s no grey areas here: no one wants you back, Healy.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind, Eddie.’
‘You do that. Because you can play by the rules, you can pretend nothing ever happened, but the truth is you’re not a cop any more. You’re not one of us, and you never will be. You’re just a snide, back-stabbing piece of shit.’
It took everything he had not to reach across and grab Davidson by the throat. But then, through his peripheral vision, he saw someone else enter the office, pausing in the doorway. A few people noticed, returning to their work.
‘Have we got a problem here?’
They all looked around at DCI Melanie Craw, a tall, slim woman in her forties. She was leaning against the door frame, arms crossed, a resigned expression on her face.
‘No problem, ma’am,’ Davidson said, immediately backing away.
‘What about you, Healy?’
He glanced at her, and then back to Davidson. Davidson, his face out of sight of Craw, was half smiling. ‘No,’ Healy said eventually. ‘There’s no problem.’
That night, as Healy made his way outside to his car, sleet sweeping across the car park, he noticed something wedged in place beneath one of the wipers. He reached forward and removed it, brushing off the moisture.
It was a toy knife.
He looked back at the station and, at one of the windows, he saw movement: there and then gone again. But he got the message. A snide, back-stabbing piece of shit.
8
Before heading out to Julia’s, I made a couple of quick calls. The first was to Spike, an old newspaper contact of mine. He was a twenty-something Russian hacker, here on an expired student visa. During my days as a journalist, he’d been an incredible source of information. He could get beyond any firewall without leaving a trace of himself, bagging names, numbers, email addresses, even credit histories and contracts while he was there. As long as I forgot about the fact that he was basically a criminal, and that I was his accessory, he was an unbeatable information source.
‘Pizza parlour.’
I smiled. ‘Spike, it’s David Raker.’
‘David!’
He had been here so long now, he hardly had an accent at all; just a slight twang, refined and smoothed by hours of watching English-language TV.
‘How’s things at the pizza parlour?’
He laughed. ‘Good, man. It’s been a while.’
‘Yeah, a few months. Did you miss me?’
‘I missed your money. So, what can I do you for?’
‘I’m hoping it’s pretty simple. I need a financial check done on someone. Bank accounts, credit cards, mortgage, investments, pensions – basically anything you can lay your hands on. I need the whole thing, A to Z.’
‘Who’s the victi
m?’
I gave him Sam Wren’s name, address and personal details, as well as a mobile number Julia had passed on to me. ‘I’ll need his phone records as well.’
‘What dates are we looking at?’
‘The last eighteen months, from today back to January of last year. I’ll be on my mobile, or I can pick up emails on the move. Just let me know when you get something.’
‘You got it. I’ll give you details of my bank too.’
Spike’s ‘bank’ was a locker at his local sports centre. For obvious reasons, he was a cash-only man, and he used the locker as a drop-off, changing the combination every time someone deposited his fee there.
Next, I dialled Sam’s brother Robert at work, and immediately got his voicemail. He was out of the country on business until Friday. That was another forty-eight hours away. I left a message, telling him who I was and what I was doing, and gave him my number.
Finally, referring back to Julia’s list of names, I cold-called PC Brian Westerley, the cop who’d filed Sam’s missing persons report. He answered after three rings, sounding pretty chirpy. By the time I’d told him who I was and why I was calling, the mood had changed. Pretty quickly I realized, if I was going to get anything from him, I’d have to work for it – or back him into a corner. Often, uniforms were the most difficult cops to deal with; their relative lack of power meant they took the first chance they could to lord it over someone.
‘I can’t release any kind of information to you,’ he said. He sounded in his late fifties and originally from somewhere in the north-east. ‘If Mrs Wren wants to come and see me again, she can.’
‘She already came to see you.’
He paused, uncertainly. I’d just lied to him but, even from our short conversation, it was obvious he was having trouble remembering the details of the case. He probably recalled the train part – because how many missing persons enquiries started like Sam’s? – but not much else. The truth was that Julia had called him a couple of weeks after she filed the missing persons report to chase up the contents of the CCTV footage, rather than actually gone to see him. But it didn’t really matter. If she’d turned up and perched herself on his lap, he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell me who she was.
‘I’m not sure Mrs Wren came to –’
‘You completely forgot to follow up her husband’s case,’ I continued, laying it on thick. ‘It was devastating for her. She’s still waiting for you to call her back.’
I felt bad about playing him, but the alternative was telling him the truth and getting a brick wall in return. I didn’t say anything else; just left the rest of the conversation there, unspoken. He worked it out pretty quickly: if she was pissed off, she was willing to do something about it; and if she was willing to do something about it, she was willing to file an official complaint.
‘What is it you want?’ he said eventually.
‘I’d like you to pull the file.’
‘I clock off at four and then I’m not back in until Friday.’
Same as Robert Wren. I hated having to wait. ‘Can you pull it now?’
‘No. I’m not in front of a computer and I need to get some more pressing things completed before I go. If that’s not good enough, then do what you have to do.’
He’d called my bluff, but I remained silent for a moment so he knew I wasn’t backing down lightly. I could have called my contacts at the Met and got them to grab the file for me, got the thing printed out and delivered, but by taking a chance on Westerley I’d alerted him to my interest in Sam Wren; and if he logged on to the database and found another cop had been snooping around in Sam’s file, my source would be compromised.
‘Okay,’ I said, giving him my mobile number. ‘Call me back Friday.’
9
The Wrens lived on a narrow street, permit parking on one side, houses on the other. Every home was identical but attractive: bricked on the ground floor, plastered and painted cream on the first. Doors sat at the bottom of two downward steps, and the windows housed rectangular flower baskets, the trays full of pink geraniums. As I drove up to Julia’s place, the door opened and she came up the steps holding a key fob, a remote control attached. I bumped up on to the pavement and buzzed down my window.
‘Here.’ She handed me the remote. ‘There’s underground parking just around the corner at the end of the road. Head left and you’re there.’
When I returned to the house, the door was ajar. I stepped through and pushed it shut behind me. Immediately inside was a long hallway, floored in laminate. The kitchen was directly in front and Julia was standing at one of the counters, pouring water into a kettle. Tucked into an alcove next to the kitchen was a corkscrew staircase.
As I moved towards the kitchen, I eyed the other rooms off the hallway: a bathroom, a bedroom doubling up as a graveyard for cardboard boxes, and a living room. In the living room were hundreds of books in a bookcase, surround sound, a TV, an expensive Blu-Ray player, a Sky decoder, and a big leather sofa. A coffee table sat in the centre, loaded with art books as big as slabs of concrete, and a bowl of fresh fruit. I could see photos of Sam too, squared into a pile.
‘Tea or coffee, David?’
She brought out a tin of instant. I preferred my coffee through a percolator, but I didn’t want to offend her on the first day. ‘Coffee, thanks. Black, no sugar.’
We moved through to the living room and sat on either end of the sofa. She had made herself some kind of fruit tea; it smelt tangy and sweet. She placed it down next to the photos, and pushed them across the coffee table towards me. ‘That’s the last five years of Sam’s life,’ she said, eyes fixed on the top picture, where her husband was standing, wine glass raised, black suit buttoned up, in a hospitality suite at the Emirates Stadium. Immediately I could see a physical difference in him: bigger around the face, better-colour skin.
‘When was this taken?’ I said.
She ripped her eyes away. ‘March last year.’
We talked for a while about Sam, about the kind of person he was, the things he liked doing, the places they’d been together. She’d told me about a time, when they first got together, that he’d been sent on a business trip to Barcelona and – on the quiet – had paid for her to come too. ‘He was very spontaneous like that,’ she said, and then the smile slipped away, as if she realized how prescient that was. After all, there was nothing more spontaneous than getting up one day and not bothering to tell your wife you were leaving.
I listened some more as she continued building a picture of their marriage. They both got on. They liked the same things. They’d talked excitedly about having kids. But the whole time she was holding back. There was a reservation to her; moments where she stopped herself before she wandered into territory she couldn’t back out of. The previous night I’d wondered if she was timid or just nervous, but as she’d started to warm up, I realized it wasn’t timidity – and it might not have been nerves either. There was a secret sitting between us, and we both knew it.
‘Let me ask you something,’ I said, placing down the photograph I’d taken from her the night before. ‘Is there a reason Sam lost a ton of weight before he disappeared?’
She studied me, surprise in her face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You must have noticed that between March and December last year he’d lost a lot of weight.’
Her eyes flicked between the pictures. ‘I never …’ She paused again. She was about to say she’d never realized. But it would have been a lie. She had realized. She’d noted the changes in his face; the changes in his body. She’d seen everything. ‘Financially, we were stretched,’ she said eventually.
‘That’s why he lost weight?’
She looked up from the pictures. ‘This house cost us £850,000, and our mortgage was £3,000 a month. That was more than my entire wage packet, every month. Sam was on £78,000 a year basic, which meant he was bringing home just over £4,000 a month. Maybe that sounds like a lot, but once you start chipping away
at it with the mortgage, council tax, gas, electricity, water, insurance policies for both of us, food for both of us, phone bills, even things like Oyster cards for both of us, it starts to disappear fast. And it only got worse after I lost my job.’
In her face I could see the financial burden had weighed heavily on them both, but I expected the bitterness she felt at him leaving her on her own weighed even heavier. I saw the logic in everything she was saying; knew how a big mortgage and big bills could grind you down and spit you out, especially if you were down to one wage and that wage couldn’t cover everything you needed it to. But I had become good at reading people and, when I looked at Julia Wren, it was obvious there was more to it than that.
I decided to play hardball. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
She stared at me, eyes locked on mine, but I knew I was right. If I’d been wrong, she would have been indignant; instead there seemed a kind of sad resignation to her, as if she felt I’d outwitted her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I wanted to tell you last night but I just …’ Another pause. She looked up. ‘I feel responsible. Guilty.’
‘About him losing weight or leaving?’
‘Both.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged. Another long silence. This time I could see her trying to put it all into words. ‘Our marriage was good. Great. That part wasn’t a lie. We’d been together seven years, married for four, and I can honestly count on the fingers of one hand the amount of serious fights we had. One, maybe two. And usually they resolved themselves pretty quickly. We just seemed to be on the same wavelength.’ She paused and laced her fingers together. ‘But in those last months, it became different. We started fighting. Niggly stuff at first, and always about his work. He just seemed to have become consumed by his job. I think he felt, because I wasn’t bringing anything in, and because his wages had been frozen and his bonuses phased out, he had to single-handedly find a replacement for the money we were missing out on.’
