The David Raker Collection

by Tim Weaver

  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 down 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 c
ontinued 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 platform 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.

  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 d
etective 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.