The David Raker Collection

by Tim Weaver

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.

  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.’

  ‘Working with you, or for you?’

  ‘For me,’ he said, picking a hair off his cuff.

  ‘And then you left J. P. Morgan?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He shrugged. ‘I got the hump with a couple of the bosses there, and just fancied trying something myself. So I set up this place.’

  ‘What do you do here?’

  ‘We make people lots of money,’ he said, like it was the dumbest question he’d heard all day. ‘That’s the bottom line. We specialize in emerging markets: Russia, Latin America, the Middle East, the Far East. That’s why I poached Sam. He knows those markets. I didn’t just hire him ’cause he was my mate.’

  ‘So he was good at what he did?’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘No problems you can remember?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘He didn’t run into any trouble with anyone?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m looking for a reason he might have left. One of the possibilities is that he ran into problems here: lost a client money, got tied up in something he shouldn’t have.’

  McGregor made an oh expression. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I run a tight ship. I like to keep an eye on what’s happening out there. This is my baby. My investment. It’s in my interests to keep the balance sheet close because I need to make sure we’re not losing our clients money and pissing away the goodwill we’ve built up over the last five years. Most of my people out there, they’re good, but they need a steady hand. Someone to step in and tell them what to do, and to make sure they’re not making bad decisions. Sam was different.’

  ‘He didn’t need his hand held?’

  ‘I’d pull him in here for a meeting now and again, but mostly I let him run riot. He was my biggest earner. I cut him some slack.’

  I got the sense that, in a weird way, McGregor was enjoying this: being the centre of attention, being some kind of go-to man in the hunt for Sam. In fact, as I studied him – his eyes scanning the office like it was a palace – I realized whatever friendship had existed between the two of them had always been a firm second place to status in McGregor’s eyes. His job, the money he made, wandering the office as the boss – that was what was important to him; not Sam, not the people out there working for him.

  ‘Julia mentioned that things have been tough recently.’

  McGregor looked disappointed I’d brought it up. ‘Yeah. Things have been hard since the economy went down the shitter. But it’s the same for everybody.’

  ‘You froze wages and cut bonuses, correct?’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m just trying to find out why Sam left.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t leave because his wages were frozen.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I froze them in December 2010. He left in December 2011. If he had a serious problem with me trying to save his job by freezing his money, he wouldn’t have spent a year thinking about it, then buggered off without saying anything.’

  His eyes flicked to the door behind me and the receptionist came in, a carafe of coffee in one hand, two mugs in the other. She laid it all down on the table and started to pour. She asked if I wanted milk, but I told her black was fine. She knew how McGregor took it without asking. After she was done, his eyes lingered on her as she left.

  ‘So, you think he would have come to see you if there was a problem, either with the job, with a client or with the wage structure?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Was he the kind of guy to speak his mind?’

  He shrugged. ‘We were mates, but he knew who was in charge.’

  We’d returned to McGregor’s favourite conversation topic: him as boss. Either he was paranoid about his staff challenging his position of authority, or being in charge was a drug he couldn’t get enough of. Either way, it was starting to piss me off.

  ‘Was Sam any different in the six months before he vanished? Maybe he wasn’t as effective at his job, or he seemed distracted by something?’

  ‘Not that I noticed. He was bringing in money and developing his client base, and that was …’ He stopped himself. He was about to say, and that was all I cared about, but – even to his ears – it sounded like the wrong thing to admit out loud. McGregor would only have noticed something was up with Sam if it had impacted negatively on his bottom line. In an emotional sense, he had no opinion of his friend, if he was ever really that. This conversation was going nowhere.

  ‘Was there anyone
else Sam worked closely with here?’

  He eyed me as if unsure of where I was going. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, was there anyone –’

  And then his phone started ringing. He plucked the receiver from its cradle. ‘Ross Mc Gregor.’ He listened for a couple of seconds. ‘No, I absolutely did not tell him that. I told him we would be selective about the type of opportunity we’d present him. There’s a difference.’ More silence. ‘He hasn’t got the first idea about nickel export. He probably wouldn’t be able to tell you where Norilsk is on a map.’ He listened for a few seconds more. ‘Okay, I’ll be round in a minute.’ He put the phone down. ‘I’ve got a mini emergency.’

  ‘I can wait here.’

  He looked towards the filing cabinets at the back. ‘No offence, but I can’t leave you alone. Half the company secrets are in here.’

  ‘Can I have a look at Sam’s workstation?’

  ‘No. You’ll need a warrant for that. There’s too much sensitive information on there, and I can’t have you poking around in our client database. We’ve cleared most of Sam’s personal stuff out anyway, if that’s what you were after.’

  ‘I’d like to ask around out there, then.’

  He glanced at his watch and made no effort to suppress a sigh. I didn’t care that he was annoyed. He may have been his boss, he may have thought of himself as a friend, but he wasn’t close to Sam, and that made McGregor a dead end. But there was still the possibility that someone at Investment International knew what was playing on Sam’s mind in those last few months.

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ he said finally. ‘But don’t distract them too much.’

  18

  McGregor took me out onto the floor and introduced me to everyone. I watched the faces of his employees as he told them I was trying to find Sam. Some reacted, some didn’t. Then he pointed towards a small meeting room on the far side of the office, wedged in a space next to the kitchen. I set up in there and started inviting them in one by one.

  The first couple of interviews produced nothing more than an idea of how the office was divided: on one side were the people – mostly in their twenties – who went out drinking together three or four times a week; on the other – overwhelmingly, men and women with kids – was a separate group who headed home as soon as work was done. Everyone got on during the day, they told me, but the ones who did the drinking spent their whole week with half an eye on Friday. Friday was the big night out.