by Tim Weaver
‘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 victim?’
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.
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.’
‘And how was he going to do that?’
‘Sam was one of those people who always felt like he needed to be doing more. He was his own harshest critic. If he wasn’t improving, going further, earning more, he saw it as some kind of failure. He hated standing still. So, the longer he went without the bonuses, the longer his wages remained frozen, the more it started to frustrate him, and the more hours he was clocking up while trying to put it right. That was when the niggly stuff started: I’d ask him what the point was of working long hours if he knew there wasn’t going to be a reward at the end of it.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘Nothing, really.’
‘He didn’t tell you why he was still working so hard?’
She shook her head. ‘I was living the life of a single woman, feeling him slip into bed at eleven, and back out again at six. Some weeks we probably weren’t saying more than a couple of words to each other. It wasn’t a marriage any more.’
‘And it was never like that before?’
‘No. I mean, he always worked hard. He did his fair share of late nights. But there was always a compromise. We’d get away at weekends, or he’d come home early one day to make up for working late on the others. But not in those last six months.’
‘He never talked to you about it? The exact reasons why he was working so late all the time, who his clients were, that kind of thing?’
‘No.’ She brought her tea towards her and held it below her chin. ‘He’d always talked to me before. I knew his clients by name, I knew who they worked for and what he thought of them, because he always came home and opened up. He’d laugh about them, talk about the jokes they’d shared, the things they’d discussed, the places they’d been for dinner. He’d share his day with me. But, at the end, when I asked about why he was working so hard all the time, he’d just fob me off.’
‘By saying what?’
‘He didn’t want to bring his work home.’ She looked at me. ‘That’s all he kept saying to me: “Leave work at work.” So, I tried to come at him from a different angle. I tried to bring it up at weekends, casually, when we had a little time together; when the office wasn’t open. But he just refused to discuss it.’
‘But he wasn’t bringing any more money home.’
‘No.’
‘So, do you think he was working harder and longer hours because it was just the type of person he was – the type you just described him as being – or because he had some other venture on the side?’
‘Oh, I’d say the first.’
‘Why?’
‘We had a joint account which I checked regularly when things began to change. There was no extra money coming in.’
None he let you know about, I thought. I took down some notes, and then realized there was no easy way to phrase the next question, even though it was an obvious place to head. ‘Did you think he might have been seeing someone else?’
For a moment she was taken aback, her eyes widening, her cheeks flushing, but she must have asked herself the same question. ‘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 …’ She stopped, shook her head, then glanced up at me. Her cheeks coloured a little. ‘For a man, he didn’t have much of a sex drive. I mean, most men, it’s all they ever think about, right? The men I was with before Sam, they were always angling for it. But Sam was never like that, right from before we were even married. We used to have sex a couple of times a week to start with, but then it dropped off after that. By the end, we weren’t doing it at all.’
I nodded and let her compose herself in the silence.
‘So why is it you felt responsible for him leaving?’
She shrugged. ‘We fought.’
‘Everybody fights.’
‘But these weren’t just fights. These were screaming matches. I wanted to know what was going on; why he was working so hard when he knew there was no chance of earning any more money. So I kept chipping away at him, but the more I tried to find out what was happening, the more angry he got, and the more we fought.’
I nodded, as if her reasoning were sound, but the reality was he wouldn’t have left because they were fighting. If you fought with your partner, you separated or moved on. You didn’t engineer your disappearance.
‘What about when you didn’t discuss his long hours?’
‘That was the weird thing: as long as we didn’t talk about it, as long as I didn’t try to find out what was going on, we got on brilliantly.’
‘How was he with friends and family?’
‘Exactly the same.’