by T. M. Logan
The police hadn’t asked about his email yet. Maybe there were lots of legal hoops they had to jump through before they were allowed to access it? But there was no time for that, not now.
Abbie took out her phone. The signal was getting weaker the further they drove into the Peaks.
She would have to be quick.
67
Abbie
As Ryan drove them up winding roads into the hills above Castleton, Abbie tried to remember the password her dad always used for Netflix and Spotify. The password was always the same, she knew that much, it was only changed by a number. She’d tried to encourage him to use a password storing app, but he said it was all too complicated and involved for his taste. I’m old school when it comes to technology, he’d say. I’m the boss of it, not the other way around. He liked to keep his passwords simple – which meant they were never very secure.
She went to the Hotmail login page and entered his address, followed by the password she’d last seen him use: AbbieRose7.
Invalid username/password.
She tried AbbieRose8.
Invalid username/password.
Come on, Abbie. How many tries would it give her before she was locked out? She held her breath and typed AbbieRose9.
The screen changed as her dad’s inbox appeared, unread emails stacked one after the other.
She said a silent thank you to her dad for being so bad with passwords.
There were 284 emails, 259 of them unread. She scrolled through the list, looking for anything that might be relevant to his disappearance. Anything that might explain his actions, his movements since the weekend, hoping to find tickets for a train or a plane, a hotel or a hire car, that would give an inkling of his plans. A last-minute trip away, perhaps. Even secret correspondence between him and another woman, even that would be better than this emptiness, this void of not knowing.
But it was all just routine stuff. Daily news round-ups from The Guardian and the BBC, new job postings from Indeed, emails from his bank and from Netflix. Junk mail about holidays, cars, YouTube videos and special offers, with the occasional new blog post thrown in.
There were three emails red-flagged as urgent from the last five days: the first from a recruitment agency about a job, another saying that the insurance on his car was about to expire. The most recent had only dropped in an hour ago, while they’d been at Ladybower Reservoir. The sender was [email protected] and it was right at the top of her dad’s inbox. The red exclamation mark in the subject line marking it as a priority.
The road snaked ahead of them, higher into the Peaks. One tenuous bar of reception on her phone.
She tapped the screen with her forefinger to open the email.
Dear Mr Collier,
Please find attached another copy of the invoice for work commissioned by you as discussed at our meeting of 11th June.
I note that you have not responded to the hard copy invoice and report posted to your home address on Thursday 9th July, and I would like to remind you that our payment terms are five working days from receipt of the final report and that this invoice is now overdue.
There is a full breakdown of costs and expenses incurred in the attached PDF.
I have also included below a link to an electronic copy of our original report, hosted on our secure server, in case you did not receive the hard copy. My apologies for any confusion but we appear to have two email addresses on file for you so for completeness this email has been sent to both [email protected] and [email protected]
You can access the report using your password at the following link:
http://midlandinvestigations/secure/dyy94th0122kwpa/M_502983
As previously agreed, this report is strictly confidential and not for onward circulation, copying or dissemination in any form.
I trust that you have found our services satisfactory and look forward to settlement of the invoice at your earliest convenience.
The email signature was Joel Farmer, Director, Midland Investigations Ltd.
She threw a quick glance at Ryan, right beside her in the driver’s seat, his strong hands on the wheel as they headed higher into the Peaks. She didn’t need to read the report to know what her dad had done. It was professional snooping of some kind, his last-ditch attempt to dig up some dirt on Ryan, some random facts to justify his paranoia and his obsessive refusal to accept his prospective son-in-law into the family.
She returned her gaze to the mobile, clicked on the first PDF and caught her breath. An invoice for £5,167.44 including VAT, broken down into a series of line items: standard background check; enhanced background check; career history; vehicle surveillance; administrative fees.
The enhanced background check on its own was £3,000.
More than five thousand pounds spent on an investigator. Five thousand pounds. What kind of sales pitch would her dad have been given for that? And why had he fallen for it? He wasn’t a gullible man – in fact he was usually the opposite, a sceptic about almost everything. Her choice of boyfriends most of all.
It occurred to her with a chill that he might have fallen out with this Joel Farmer over the unpaid bill. Her dad might have been angry at being ripped off for so much, to receive so little. He could have had an argument which turned serious, which turned violent, and who knew what kind of people this private investigator mixed with?
She shivered, batting the thought away.
If Joel Farmer had hurt her dad, if he was involved in his disappearance, then why send the report again? To cover his tracks?
It didn’t seem very likely.
She checked the date. A paper copy of the report had been posted to her father last Thursday, so presumably he’d seen it on the Friday or Saturday before he disappeared. If there was anything in it, anything bad, he would never have kept it to himself. He would have flagged it to her – to Mum – as soon as he possibly could.
She sent her mother a quick text.
Did Dad say anything to you about getting a report from a private investigator? x
Switched back to the email and read the line again.
Posted to your home address.
She sighed, feeling a pang of sadness that her dad had been willing to pay these people for something so stupid. She switched back to the PDF of the invoice. The last line of the client address was visible at the top of the screen, and her sadness turned to frustration: the postcode was NG9 instead of NG2. No wonder her dad hadn’t replied or paid his bill – they’d sent it to completely the wrong part of town. They’d exploited her father, tried to rip him off for more than five thousand pounds, and they couldn’t even get his address right.
So where had it ended up? Abbie scrolled all the way to the top of the PDF. At the top left was her dad’s name—
But the address below it didn’t match.
16 Leslie Road, Beeston, Nottingham NG9 2PQ.
She frowned, blinked. Confusion swirled inside her head.
16 Leslie Road was a familiar address. One she knew very well.
Her address, and Ryan’s.
She cast a sideways glance at her husband in the driver’s seat as she tried to make sense of it.
Not a random address. Not random at all. But why would Dad have wanted this report sent to her and Ryan? Maybe he thought she wouldn’t accept it from him, since they’d fallen out. Better to have it come from a third party. But wouldn’t he want to see it for himself first, and then present it to her?
How could the investigator have made a mistake like that, mixing up the two addresses?
Unless—
Unless it wasn’t a mistake.
Unless it had been changed deliberately. But why? And by whom?
And why did Joel Farmer have two email addresses for her dad in their system? Abbie had always given her father a gentle ribbing about his Hotmail address, telling him he should switch to Gmail and create an account name that didn’t include his year of birth. But he’d had the
same address forever – like twenty years or something – and had never got around to changing it. Creating a second address that was nearly identical didn’t sound right, it didn’t sound logical.
I note that you have not responded to the hard copy invoice and report posted to your home address . . .
She’d seen no report addressed to her dad. Nothing formal like that arriving in the post at their house.
But there was a memory floating up from somewhere in the back of her mind. Ryan lighting the chiminea in the back garden at the weekend when she’d got back from shopping, feeding in balled-up sheets of paper to get it going. Glowing fragments of charred paper swirling up into the evening sky. It was the first time he had lit the chiminea since she’d moved in. The only time.
Don’t be silly. That’s irrelevant.
But there was a sinking feeling in her stomach, a sadness for her dad mixed with – what was it? Nerves? Fear?
She clicked on the link and began to read.
68
REPORT: M502983/20
PREPARED FOR: Edward Collier
PREPARED BY: Joel Farmer, Director, Midland Investigations Ltd
DATE: 08/07/20
STATUS: STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL – NOT FOR ONWARD CIRCULATION, COPYING OR DISSEMINATION OF ANY KIND
Executive summary
The client MR EDWARD COLLIER requested an enhanced background check of the subject MR RYAN WILSON (hereafter referred to as ‘the subject’) with particular regard to his employment, educational and personal information.
This has now been completed as instructed with a start date of 10/09/86, the subject’s date of birth.
The enhanced background check has discovered a number of discrepancies in the subject’s personal, professional and educational history.
In our professional opinion, these discrepancies would tend to suggest significant areas of concern regarding the subject’s background.
Further services are available on request.
Professional background – discrepancies/areas of concern
The British Army has no record of service matching the subject’s information.
Educational background – discrepancies/areas of concern
The University of Manchester has no record of an undergraduate matching the subject’s information.
The University of Manchester has no record of any kind of degree award or qualification to an individual matching the subject’s information.
Personal background – discrepancies/areas of concern
The subject’s record shows evidence of incarceration for violent offences.
Abbie tore her eyes from the screen, blinking hard.
What?
She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry as she scrambled to make sense of everything. There had to be a reasonable explanation for this. There was always a reasonable explanation. Private investigators weren’t the police, they didn’t have the same knowledge or expertise or access, they were just guys who set themselves up on the internet to take money from people who wanted easy answers.
She told herself this, repeating it in her head until it sounded right, knowing all the while that she didn’t quite believe it.
Because the report was quite specific.
Because Ryan had either been an army officer, or he hadn’t. He’d either graduated with a first from Manchester Uni, or he hadn’t. These were parts of his past he had talked about in great detail, at length, at different times over the course of their relationship: who he was, what he’d done, where he’d come from. There wasn’t a lot of room for equivocation.
And if he’d lied about those things, what else had he lied about?
Abbie flinched as Ryan changed gear and his hand brushed her knee.
She shifted in her seat, angled the phone’s screen away from him and forced herself to read on.
Personal background
The subject was born Ryan Steven Getzler in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada on 10/09/86 to parents Steven Robert Getzler, an insurance salesman, and Kate Davidson Getzler, a teacher. One sibling, Stacey (b.1985). Interrogation of media cuttings stored in the Lexis-Nexis database yielded the attached cutting from the Regina Leader-Post dated 19/11/97.
A press cutting was embedded in the page. Grainy black and white newsprint dominated by a photograph of a burned-out two-storey house, firefighters in a snowy front yard damping down timbers in the foreground. Inset into the main picture was a smaller image, one of those family portraits you get done in a studio. Everyone in their Sunday best: the father in an oversized suit and striped tie, wife in a dress and jacket, girl in a pinafore dress and braids. A boy of ten or eleven in a white shirt and little bowtie, his oil-black hair slicked to the side.
Abbie used her finger and thumb to zoom in on the image. Even now – even looking at it in a car, on the screen of a mobile phone, an old image digitised and copied and attached to an email more than twenty years later – she could still tell that it was Ryan. The name was different but his little face, his grin, his jawline. His eyes. They were unmistakeable.
The story sat under a big banner headline stretched across the width of the front page:
PARENTS, DAUGHTER, DIE IN BLAZE
MAPLE CREEK – An eleven-year-old boy was the sole survivor of a devastating fire that ripped through his family’s home on Sunday night.
Humboldt Elementary School pupil Ryan Getzler escaped by climbing out of his bedroom window and scaling an oak tree that grew close to the house, according to a statement given to investigators.
His parents, Steven and Kate Getzler, and sister Stacey, are all feared to have perished in the fire which broke out around 2.30 a.m. Sunday while the family slept. Firefighters are still working to determine the cause of the blaze . . .
She scrolled quickly through the rest of the story, which was padded out with quotes from police, firefighters and the mayor of the small town of Maple Creek. The only other mention of the boy Ryan was to say he was in the care of the child welfare authorities until his next of kin could be located.
Abbie came out of the old news story and returned her attention to the main report.
Following the fire, the subject was brought to the UK to live with a great aunt in Rusholme, Manchester. After her death a year later (1998) he entered the care of social services and was fostered by Mrs Eileen Jackson of Longsight, Manchester. He adopted her name in 2001 and his name was legally changed to Ryan Steven Jackson.
Mrs Jackson was listed as a missing person by her brother, John, in September 2005.
The subject was married to Lori Anne Fowler on 2nd February 2006.
Another newspaper cutting was embedded in the page, this one from the Manchester Evening News. A story dated 29th November 2007.
‘TERROR’ HUSBAND JAILED
A MAN who carried out a ‘campaign of terror’ against his wife has been jailed for 22 months.
Ryan Jackson, 20, subjected his new wife to months of physical and psychological abuse that put her in hospital on five separate occasions, Liverpool Crown Court heard.
The court heard that Jackson’s assaults on Lori Fowler, 19, started within weeks of their wedding day. Jackson, of Charnwood Grove, Toxteth, was convicted on charges of assault, wounding and possession of an offensive weapon. He was also convicted of fraud and possession of a controlled substance . . .
The accompanying picture was a police mugshot taken against a green background, presumably from when he was arrested. The man’s hair was shaved close to his scalp, with stubble to match, and fresh bruises on the side of his face.
There was no question it was Ryan.
Abbie swallowed hard, resisting the urge to look across at Ryan in the driver’s seat. She didn’t want to read on, but she couldn’t stop either. Heart skidding in her chest, she lowered her eyes to the phone’s screen again.
The subject served 11 months in jail before being released on licence.
A petition for divorce was filed by Lori Fowler during
his imprisonment, and they formally separated soon after his release from prison in October 2008. All attempts to trace Ms Fowler for the purposes of this report have been unsuccessful. She does not appear in any searches of the electoral register and no record of name change, remarriage, application for a passport, credit card, mortgage or rental property could be located.
A smaller news article, not much more than a few paragraphs, related how Ryan Jackson had been questioned in April 2009 by Merseyside Police detectives investigating the disappearance of Lori Fowler.
He was later released without charge.
Investigations indicate that the subject changed his surname from Jackson to Wilson by deed poll in August 2009. No further criminal convictions, county court judgements, adverse media coverage, marriage records or name changes are apparent following this date.
Abbie lowered the phone, making sure the screen was still angled away from Ryan. Her eyes flicked right to the man in the driver’s seat, the man she had come to know, to trust, to love. A man she was planning to spend her life with, raise children with, grow old with. Who had told her wonderful stories about the future they would share together.
A man whose story didn’t match up with the facts.
A man who had reinvented himself at least twice, shedding his past like a snake shedding its skin, changing his name and starting again. Once when he was in his teens, to rid himself of his birth name and sever any connection to his real family –
His dead family.
– and then again after he came out of jail and split with his first wife. He hadn’t been in the forces, he’d been in jail. He had become Ryan Wilson and invented a brand new history for himself, a first-class degree and an officer’s commission in the army, and then somehow managed to blag his way into an office job. Working his way up from the bottom, building his new identity piece by piece. Perhaps it had just been a case of applying for enough jobs until someone didn’t bother to take up references. Or perhaps it was a case of finding his true calling, a man who was handsome and charming, persuasive and charismatic – a rainmaker – and that was more than enough in a salesman’s business where the genuine rainmakers made their own rules.