by Tim Weaver
Heading out of the Tube, I walked the half-mile to the Wrens’ street, then did a 180 and retraced the same route, just as Sam would have done the day he went missing. Fifteen minutes later I was at the main entrance, passing through the three thin arches that would lead me back into the earth.
I took the stairs down to the Circle line platform. The crowds had thinned out in the time I’d been outside. The westbound train was already in the station, but I wanted to go eastbound, so I took a seat on one of the grey metal benches and watched the other passengers. People had always fascinated me: what made them different, how they lied and covered up, how they emoted and broke down. I hadn’t missed the crush of the commute in the years since I’d given up journalism, but I missed the opportunity to watch and learn from the crowds. All the books on kinesics, on the language of the body and the psychology of interviews, helped fill in the blanks. But I’d never learned more than on weekday mornings when I’d been surrounded by a sea of commuters.
Once I was on the eastbound train, I got out at every Circle line station, took the escalators or the stairs up to street level and then made my way back down again. At Westminster – the station that would have been the best and most obvious escape route on the day Sam vanished – I spent a couple of minutes moving between the Circle and Jubilee lines. On a regular work day, Sam would have made the switch in order to go east to Canary Wharf.
Then, about two hours in, I started the journey in reverse – and for the first time a part of me wondered what I was hoping to achieve. In any investigation, you had to feel like you were moving forward; every place you went to, every person you spoke to, had to push the case on. Riding the Tube was a way of understanding Sam better, of getting a feel for his routine. His life. But I’d found nothing of him. No trace of him here, and no trace of him on the footage.
I pushed the doubts down and carried on.
At 11.30, I got back to the gateline at Gloucester Road and noticed a couple of Tube employees. One was standing in a booth watching people pass through; the other was talking to a group of Japanese tourists and pointing to a map. The one in the booth looked up as I approached. He was small, wiry, his eyes dark, his face pale. Close in, his skin seemed too thin, as if it were tracing paper that was about to tear.
‘Morning.’
He nodded in reply. Nothing else.
I ignored the lack of response and pressed on, introducing myself and telling him about Sam. When I was done, I got out a photograph and showed it to him. It was a long shot given the number of people who must have passed through the station every day, but it was a question that needed to be asked. Sometimes, even when you built cases on precision and reason, you had to throw a little mud at the wall and see what stuck.
‘Don’t recognize him,’ he said, his eyes straying across the photo and then away again. He shifted back on the stool he was on, and his thin summer jacket opened a little. Underneath I could see a badge pinned to his shirt: DUNCAN PELL. I assumed, given he was at the gateline, that he was a regular customer-service assistant. It was hard to see him as anything more, as a station supervisor or duty station manager.
‘Are you here permanently?’ I asked.
His eyes came back to me. ‘What?’
‘Do you always work out of this station?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, a frown forming across his brow, as if I was suddenly speaking in a language he didn’t understand. All the time his eyes continued darting left and right; to the gateline, then to the entrance, then back again. Basically anywhere but me.
‘My guy used to pass through here every day.’
Pell snorted. ‘So do a lot of people.’
‘You don’t recognize any of the faces that pass through here?’
‘Some.’
‘But not this one?’
I held up the photograph in front of him again. He glanced at it and away, off to where a group of girls in their late teens were entering the station. Then he shrugged. ‘It’s busy,’ was all he offered, still watching the girls rather than me. I nodded, put the picture away, but didn’t move. The momentary pause seemed to make him uncomfortable. His eyes switched to me, away, then back and there was something in them.
A flash of fear.
‘Right, I’d better be off, Dunc.’ The other member of staff was back at the booth. He looked at me, looked at Pell, then must have assumed he’d interrupted a conversation, and held up both hands in apology. ‘Oh, sorry – didn’t mean to jump in.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I think we’re done.’
Pell glanced at me sideways and then shifted away, further back into the booth. The other guy reached down and grabbed a portable ticket machine off the floor, slinging it over his shoulder. He was an RCI; a ticket inspector. When he came up, he looked between us again and must have sensed something was going on.
‘Is everything okay?’
Pell didn’t say anything, so I stepped forward and introduced myself. I held up the picture of Sam again. ‘Do you recognize him?’
The RCI patted the breast pockets of his jacket and then reached into the left one and removed a pair of half-moon glasses. He looked older than Pell – forty-three or forty-four – but was taller, broader and in better condition. His nose was uneven – angled slightly left – like it might once have been broken and not properly reset, and I wondered if he’d grown up in and around boxing clubs. He had the build of a middleweight. ‘Did he use this station?’ he asked, eyes still studying the photograph.
‘Every day.’
But he’d already started shaking his head. He looked up, lips pursed, face telling me everything I needed to know. ‘I’m sorry. We get so many people through here.’
I took the picture and thanked him.
‘Did you recognize him, Dunc?’ the man asked.
Pell’s face dissolved into panic again as he was drawn back into the conversation. He ran a hand across his face, stubble crackling against his hands, and I saw he was wearing a silver ring with an old rune symbol imprinted on it. Then he looked down at the floor. He brushed an imaginary hair from the thigh of his trouser leg, cleared his throat, reached down further to his boots – black steel toecaps with red stitching in them – and scratched something else unseen from them. He didn’t want to answer.
‘Dunc?’ the RCI asked again.
‘No,’ Pell finally said, then quietly added, ‘No, I didn’t.’
The RCI started frowning, as if he didn’t understand what was going on with Pell, then turned to me and shrugged. ‘I can ask around if you like.’
‘No, it’s fine. It was a long shot.’
‘Okay, well, I’d better be off.’
I nodded. ‘Thanks for your help.’
He smiled and headed through the gateline. When I turned back to Pell, he was out of the booth and standing next to the ticket machines about thirty feet away – like he was trying to put some distance between us.
But it didn’t matter.
Distance or not, I’d remember Duncan Pell.
16
Spike texted to tell me he’d emailed through Sam’s financial history and phone records, so, back home, I made myself a sandwich, then sat down and booted up the computer. There were two PDFs waiting for me.
The first one took in everything he’d ever paid into or set up: bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, ISAs, healthcare, insurance policies, pensions and student loans. A man’s adult life reduced to twenty-five pages. There weren’t many surprises, but there was a more detailed breakdown of the couple’s life and health insurance, and a year’s worth of statements from both bank accounts.
Sudden, unexplained changes in insurance policies are one of the warning signs in the moments before a person goes missing, but the Wrens’ policies seemed pretty standard, and the premium had remained consistent for the last three years. The biggest concern, as Julia had outlined the day before, was their mortgage: they had just shy of £600,000 to pay back; massive by any standard.
> I moved on to the bank statements.
The first set was for the Wrens’ joint account. Before June 2011, they’d never been in the red. Then Julia’s redundancy caught up with them. Suddenly they were struggling to make ends meet every month. The patterns of their life which had marked out the first three months of 2011 – the restaurants they ate in, the cinemas they went to, the places they went on weekends – began to dry up, and soon the only constant was the lack of those things. By autumn 2011, they hardly seemed to go out at all.
The second set of bank statements was for Sam’s own personal account, which had little activity, and none after the day he disappeared until it was closed on 3 April 2012. I flipped back through my notes to the discussion I’d had with Julia about their finances. Halfway down I’d written, ‘Julia had account closed and money transferred to joint account on 3 April this year.’ It must have been painful for her: the moment she finally accepted he was gone.
Sam’s mobile was registered to Investment International but doubled up as a personal phone. In the second PDF, Spike had secured names and addresses for every incoming and outgoing number. During the week, most of the calls were to other businesses, or to clients, although there was at least one call a day made to Julia, a text or a call to his brother Robert, and more irregular calls to friends of his. The one he called most often was a guy called Iain Penny, but there were other repeats – David Werr, Abigail Camara, Esther Wilson, Ursula Gray – and when I cross-checked them with the list Julia had given me, I saw they were Investment International employees. On weekends, business-related calls were stripped out, leaving Julia, Robert Wren, Iain Penny – who, judging by the number of texts that had passed between them, was a good friend as well as a work colleague – and a few others: a cousin in Edinburgh, an aunt and uncle in Kent, a few to his boss, a man called Ross McGregor.
The document was split into two sections: twelve months of records for the period beginning 1 January 2011 and running through to the day Sam went missing on 16 December; then, secondly, the six months to 1 June this year. After 16 December there wasn’t a single call made from the phone by Sam, but a lot of people had tried to call him: Julia, his brother, Ross McGregor, friends. There was a call from a number at the Met too, which was presumably PC Brian Westerley, who had opened the file on Sam.
Then I noticed something.
Cross-checking the phone records with Julia’s list for a second time, I realized I’d made a small oversight: Ursula Gray. Her calls came during the same periods of time as the other people Sam worked with – between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays – but while Ross McGregor, David Werr, Abigail Camara, Esther Wilson and Iain Penny were all down on Julia’s list of names as work colleagues of Sam, Ursula Gray wasn’t.
She wasn’t on the list at all.
Which meant Julia didn’t know anything about her.
In the period between 7 January and 2 September 2011, Sam and Ursula Gray had had 97 telephone conversations with each other, and sent 186 texts. After 2 September, contact dropped off dramatically: 4 calls and 10 texts in September, half that in October and none at all in November and December.
Straight away, my thoughts turned back to the conversation I’d had with Julia the day before.
Did you think he might have been seeing someone else?
Because he was working so many hours?
Right.
I really don’t think so.
You never had any reason to suspect him?
No.
You didn’t entertain the possibility?
I thought about it a lot at the start. I checked his email, checked his phone, but Sam just … For a man, he didn’t have much of a sex drive.
I wrote down Ursula Gray’s name and address.
Julia seemed unconvinced by the idea of Sam cheating on her, though I wondered how much was belief and how much was denial. In reality, nothing in the phone records backed her up. And, sooner or later, it seemed likely she’d have to face the truth about her husband: that he’d lied to her – and, worse, that the man she thought she knew, she didn’t really know at all.
17
Investment International was on the thirty-seventh floor of One Canada Square, right at the heart of Canary Wharf. Around it, vast buildings climbed their way into the cloudless sky, its colour an unending blue like the surface of a glacial lake. The size of the towers seemed only to amplify the heat, as if there were no space for it to escape, and One Canada Square was the biggest of them all: fifty storeys high, a mountain of steel and glass, its windows blinking in the sun like thousands of eyes.
I’d called ahead to check with the receptionist that Sam’s boss and friend Ross McGregor was in, but only that. I didn’t speak to him, or anyone else. The more time you gave people to prepare, the easier it was for them to bury their secrets. That was assuming McGregor – or anyone else at Investment International – had any secrets to bury.
I entered the building, crossed the foyer and rode the elevator up.
Ten seconds later, the doors opened out on to a smart reception area with brushed glass panels running the length of the room on my left, a curved front desk in front of that, and black leather sofas in a line on the right. Beyond the sofas were floor-to-ceiling windows with fantastic views towards South Quay.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
The receptionist looked like she’d left school about five minutes ago: she couldn’t have even been nineteen, her blonde hair scraped back into a ponytail, her skin flawless. She had the traces of a south London accent, but was obviously trying to put the brakes on it now she was working out of a Canary Wharf office block.
‘I’m here to see Ross McGregor.’
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘I don’t, no.’
She blinked. ‘Uh, okay.’
‘My name’s David Raker. I’m sure he’ll be able to spare the time to see me.’ I gave her my best smile. ‘I’ll wait over here.’
I went and sat by the window and looked at the view. The receptionist made a call, but I couldn’t hear exactly what was being said; her voice was lost behind the drone of a plane close by, dropping out of the sky towards London City Airport. After a couple of minutes she came over and told me McGregor wouldn’t be long, and then offered me something to drink. I thanked her and asked for a glass of water.
Ross McGregor emerged a quarter of an hour later and was immediately on the defensive, a scowl on his face, suspicion in his eyes as he zeroed in on me. He was a tall man in his thirties, with thick black hair – glistening slightly – swept back from his face, blue eyes and pockmarked skin. As I stood and waited for him to come over, I saw he was wearing a blue and white pinstripe shirt, a terrible maroon tie and thick black braces. Wall Street was obviously a film that didn’t come out of his DVD player much.
‘Mr McGregor, my name’s David Raker.’
I held out my hand and he took it gingerly. ‘Ross McGregor,’ he said, eyes still narrowed. ‘What is it I can do for you?’
‘I’m here about Sam Wren.’
His expression immediately softened. ‘Oh. Right.’
‘Julia said you wouldn’t mind if I came over.’
It wasn’t strictly true, but already the dynamic had changed. McGregor had known Sam since university, had headhunted him for the company. I was playing on their friendship, using it as a way in.
‘Do you have a few minutes, Mr McGregor?’
It looked like the wind had been taken out of his sails. He’d puffed himself up at the thought of coming out here to see me, readied himself for a fight. I wasn’t sure who he’d expected – because I wasn’t sure who would drop by an investment firm, thirty-seven floors up, on the off-chance of a meeting with the MD – but he hadn’t expected me and he hadn’t expected to hear the name Sam Wren.
‘Mr McGregor?’
He seemed to start, as if he’d drifted away. ‘Let’s go through,’ he said, gesturing towards a door at the far end of the glass panels.
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We passed the front desk, where he told his receptionist to bring us some coffee, and then moved through the door. On the other side of the panels was a room about the same length as the reception area with sixteen desks in it, all of them filled. Some of his employees were on the phone, some were staring into their monitors.
McGregor veered left towards an L-shaped kink in the room. Off to the right was his office. It was entirely encased in glass, standing on its own like a transparent mausoleum. There were no windows on this part of the floor, but any potential darkness was offset by a series of bright halogen lamps running across the ceiling. Inside was his desk, a big leather chair, filing cabinets lined up behind him and a second table with six chairs around it, which I assumed he used for meetings. His screensaver was an extreme close-up of the side of a pound coin, shot in black and white. We sat down at the second table and he pushed the door shut.
‘I didn’t know Julia was trying to find him,’ McGregor said as he shuffled in at the table. ‘When did this start?’
‘Tuesday.’
He nodded. ‘You had any joy?’
‘Not yet.’ I got out my notepad, laid it on the table, and then removed a business card and pushed it across the desk towards him. ‘I find people,’ I said, ‘but not for the police or any other agency. Just so we’re clear.’
‘You work for yourself?’
‘Yes.’
He leaned back in his chair. ‘Do you get many jobs?’
‘Well, I’m not on the breadline.’ But I could see in his face what he really wanted to ask: how much money did I make? ‘Can you tell me how you first got to know Sam, and how he ended up here?’
‘Sure.’ He paused. He looked much more composed now. ‘We both did Banking and Finance at London Met. I was a mature student. Arsed around for a couple of years after school, did some travelling, that kind of thing. Then came back, signed up for the course, and that was how I got to know Sam. I only really became friendly with him in the second year, but we hit it off straight away. After finishing, he went into the graduate programme at HSBC and I got a job at J. P. Morgan. He didn’t really like the people at HSBC so he jumped at the chance to move across to JPM with me.’
