by Tim Weaver
‘Stuff like what?’
She shifted in her seat, her eyes flicking to me, then out through the window behind me. For the first time she looked uncomfortable. But then, a second later, she managed to completely change her expression, as if she’d raised a disguise. I wasn’t sure whether she was hesitant because she genuinely didn’t like office gossip, or because I’d strayed close to something and now she was trying to back away from it.
‘Ever hear Sam talk about a woman called Ursula Gray?’
Her face remained impassive. ‘Ursula?’
‘Gray.’
Another shake of the head. ‘No, I haven’t heard that name before.’
Normally I could get a handle on people pretty quickly, but Esther Wilson was different. Phlegmatic. Cool. I thanked her and watched her go. When she got to her desk, she opened the top drawer, reached in and took out a packet of cigarettes. I scooped up my notes and walked to the door of the office just in time to hear her tell one of the others that she was heading out for a smoke.
21
Esther Wilson headed out of the big glass doors of One Canada Square. As soon as she was outside, she swung her bag across to her front and started to dig around inside, taking out her mobile. Then she crossed South Colonnade and headed towards Jubilee Park. I was eighty yards back, on the opposite side of the road, where the shade had formed in thin strips around the bases of the towers. Eventually, as she entered the park, the shade disappeared and I had to hang back and watch her cut across the grass and find a bench facing the Citigroup Centre. She was talking to someone on her phone.
The call lasted about three minutes. After she was done, she remained where she was but kept looking back across her shoulder to Heron Quays. She seemed flustered. About five minutes after that, she glanced back again – around fifty feet to the right of where I was standing – and spotted someone, giving them a quick wave. The park and its approach was crowded, so it was difficult to zero in on who it was until another woman broke through, making a beeline for the bench. She looked about the same age as Esther and wasn’t too dissimilar in looks: slim and attractive, a little taller, but not by much. She had blonde hair, scraped back into a ponytail, a red skirt and a white blouse.
The woman perched herself on the bench and Esther immediately launched into conversation. No smile, no greeting. The blonde didn’t seem perturbed, as if she expected it to be like that, which presumably meant she was the woman Esther had called. I moved a little closer, positioning myself against one of the park’s snaking stone walls, and got a clearer view of the other woman. If she’d walked here – if Esther had phoned her out of the blue in the middle of the afternoon – then her work must have been somewhere close by. That was backed up by the fact that she hadn’t brought anything out with her. No bag. No jacket. Esther thumbed open a packet of cigarettes and offered one to the woman.
The conversation went on for a couple of minutes, the other woman eventually taking part. But mostly it was Esther talking. Finally, the blonde reached out, put a hand on Esther’s arm and spoke sternly and seriously to her. When she was done, she stubbed her cigarette out and then – looking at her watch – got up and left.
I followed her, leaving Esther on the bench, back across the park in the direction of the docks. She wasn’t heading for the bridge across to the South Quay, so she had to be heading into one of the buildings running in an L-shape around Bank Street, right in front of us. The routes and grass verges of the park were busy so it became easy to merge with the crowds, but I kept a good distance just in case. On the other side of the park, she moved in a diagonal towards 40 Bank Street, a thirty-three-floor tower towards the corner of Heron Quays. I made up some of the distance between us and, as she entered the foyer, stepped through after her and followed her around, past the front desk, to the elevators. I didn’t look much like I belonged in the world of investment banking, but no one paid me much attention as I waited, just behind the woman, for the lift to arrive. Twenty seconds later, the elevator doors slid open and we both stepped in.
I moved past her to the back. She didn’t even look up. By now she had her phone out and was scrolling through her messages. A couple of others shuffled into the space. One older guy – in a dark, expensively tailored suit – looked me up and down like I’d just crawled out of the sewer, but by the time the doors closed, everyone was facing forward, there was silence, and the space had filled with the choking stench of male aftershave.
The woman was across from me, on the other side of the elevator, half turned, her hip against the side of the lift, her eyes fixed on her phone. Up close, she seemed older – early thirties – but she was still very attractive. There was a hint of Asian in her, in the shape of her eyes, in her nose and chin, but you could only see it if you looked hard.
The elevator pinged, she looked up and, when the doors opened, she moved left and out of sight. This time I let her go. On the wall in front of me was the name of her firm: Michaelhouse Credit.
Back out in the sun, I grabbed my phone, went to the browser and found Michaelhouse Credit on the web. Halfway down, they had a ‘Meet the Team’ page. The woman wasn’t on there. It was just management. I scrolled further down and found a list of partners: other financial firms in Canary Wharf that the company worked alongside.
This’ll have to be my route in.
I dialled the number for the company and waited for it to connect.
‘Michaelhouse Credit.’
‘Oh, hi. My name’s Alex Murphy and I’m calling from Credit Suisse. I just had a meeting with one of your team but she didn’t leave her name or contact details with me.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir,’ the woman said. ‘Shall I put you through to the –’
‘She had blonde hair and was wearing a red skirt.’
‘Oh, that’s Ursula.’
‘Ursula. Right.’
‘Ursula Gray.’
22
Ursula Gray emerged from the elevator into the cool, air-conditioned lobby at 40 Bank Street just after 5.15. I was right across the foyer from her, leaning against the glass front. Three or four men followed her out and they were all looking at her. It wasn’t hard to see why. Not only was she beautiful, but she was immaculately dressed. Her blonde hair hung loose at her shoulders now, not in a ponytail like earlier. As soon as she was out of the lift, she took her phone from her handbag and started checking it.
‘Ursula?’
When she heard her name, she glanced towards me, automatically closing in on herself. It was a natural defensive movement. She didn’t think she knew me, and – even though the foyer of the building was thick with other office workers – she couldn’t be sure what I wanted. I held up a hand to tell her everything was fine and, as I took another step towards her, there was a flicker of recognition in her eyes. We’d never met but Esther would have given her my name and it didn’t take much work in Google to find details of my previous cases and pictures of how I looked.
‘I’m David Raker.’
She chose not to reply initially, but then she seemed to change her mind, as if her silence was some sort of indication of guilt. ‘Do I know you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You do.’
‘I’m pretty sure I don–’
‘You were with Esther Wilson in the park today.’
A momentary pause. Nothing in her face. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I know who you are, Ursula. You know who I am. I don’t care what you’ve done, all I care about is Sam Wren.’
No response.
‘I’m trying to find out where he went.’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
I didn’t bother replying to that: she saw the answer in my face. ‘Why don’t you let me buy you a drink?’
We found a bar on South Colonnade. On the walk over, Ursula didn’t say much. Maybe she was working out a plan. That was the downside with cold-calling people who had something to hide: they automatically felt the need to suppress and create becau
se they hadn’t prepared and were scared about saying the wrong thing.
I ordered a beer and she asked for a glass of wine.
‘Julia Wren has asked me to find out what happened to Sam.’
She brushed some hair away from her eyes but didn’t say anything.
‘I think you can help me.’
‘How?’
I took a copy of Sam’s phone records out of my pocket and unfolded it in front of her. ‘This shows that you two called each other 97 times between 7 January and 2 September last year, and you sent each other 186 texts.’
A flutter of panic for the first time. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know what I’m talking about,’ I said, and turned the phone records around so she could see her number, his number, the minutes they’d spent talking and the texts they’d sent. ‘I don’t care what it was that you and Sam were doing. I don’t. Really. But I’ve been paid to find out what happened to him – and that’s what I’m going to do.’
The bar was crowded now, music and laughter and mobile phone conversations in the background – but all I got from Ursula Gray was silence.
‘Ursula?’
She shook her head. ‘I … I don’t know where to …’
‘Were you sleeping with Sam?’
She reached out for her wine glass and slid it towards her. No indication that she was or wasn’t. No indication she’d even heard the question. But then she shivered – as if a long-dead memory had crawled its way out of the ground – and looked up. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly, taking a sip from her glass, her eyes fixed on a space off to my left. ‘I wanted to be with him.’
‘Did he want to be with you?’
‘At the time I thought he did. But at the end …’ She smiled momentarily, but it wasn’t a smile with any warmth and, for the first time, her defences were down.
‘You started seeing him in January last year?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did it begin?’
‘Michaelhouse were doing some work with I2, and he was seconded across to my office. He trained me, I trained him, we sat next to one another and forged a good friendship. There was flirting too, I guess.’ Another smile, this time more genuine. ‘A lot of flirting. And then, one night just before Christmas, we all went to the same party – this event over at the North Quay site – that Esther had got us tickets for. I’d just split up from my boyfriend, Esther didn’t know much about Sam’s personal circumstances, and I didn’t bother to ask. We flirted, we got drunk. That was how it began.’
‘Did you sleep together that night?’
She glanced at me, a mixture of embarrassment and incredulity. And then reality seemed to kick in and she realized that their secret wasn’t a secret any more.
‘No, we didn’t sleep together that night.’
‘So, what happened?’
‘We just kissed.’
‘You already knew Esther?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve known her for years. She’s one of my best friends. We went to university together, did the same course, lived in the same house.’
‘Did she know about you and Sam?’
‘No. Not during the time it was going on.’ She looked down into her wine glass. ‘I told her after Sam went missing, though. I hated not being able to tell anyone. Bottling it up only made it worse. So I told her, but made her promise to keep it to herself.’
Which was why she’d lied to me: to protect her friend.
I backtracked. ‘How did Sam react the day after you kissed?’
‘He was cold as ice,’ she said distantly, replaying the morning after in her head. ‘He didn’t talk to me for a couple of weeks. That really hurt. But then, slowly, he started to come back round, and one day at lunch we got chatting about what had happened.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he liked it.’
‘That was when the affair began?’
‘Yes.’ She traced a finger through the condensation on the side of her wine glass. ‘That was when it began. He came back to my place after work one Friday evening.’
‘And after that?’
‘After that …’ Her eyes flicked to me and away: more embarrassment, but not about the affair, or the idea of it, but about having to reveal details of their sex life to a stranger. ‘Are you asking me how often we had sex?’ she said finally, trying to paint me as some kind of voyeur.
‘I want to understand why Sam left.’
She sighed. ‘We would do it every day at work. We found an empty office on the forty-sixth floor in Sam’s building and we’d go there.’
‘What about evenings?’
‘Sometimes, if he convinced her he was working late.’
‘Weekends?’
‘No. Never weekends.’
That tallied with what the phone records showed: there were no conversations between Sam and Ursula on Saturdays and Sundays. ‘Why not weekends?’
‘He wanted to be with her.’
‘It sounds like he was conflicted.’
‘He was. I think he always loved her, even when we were doing what we were doing. He told me a couple of times he wondered what life would be like with me, if we were a couple, but that was about as far as it went. I wanted him more than he wanted me. I …’ A pause. ‘I felt something for him. I thought he felt something for me. But now I can see the relationship for what it was. I can see what he wanted from it.’
‘Which was what?’
‘Sex,’ she said, as if the answer was obvious. ‘I was like a bloody schoolgirl; so wrapped up in it, I couldn’t see the difference.’
‘Did he ever talk about his sex life with Julia?’
‘A little.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he didn’t fancy her.’
For a man, Sam didn’t have much of a sex drive, Julia had said to me.
‘Did he say why he didn’t fancy her?’
‘No.’ She brushed more hair away from her eyes. ‘He obviously loved her. I could see that after a while; can certainly see it now. But he used to say – when it came to sex – she didn’t do it for him.’
‘In what way?’
‘In any way.’
I wrote that down. It seemed weird that he would feel like that about Julia – and yet still commit to getting married.
‘Do you think he cheated on her before he met you?’
‘No.’
‘How come?’
She looked out through the windows of the bar. ‘He was ballsy and confident in his work, single-minded, which was why I was attracted to him in the first place. But he wasn’t like that at all in bed. Not to start with, anyway. He seemed almost … inexperienced.’
‘How?’
A frown cut across her face, but it was more a look of discomfort than anything else. ‘Maybe “inexperienced” is the wrong word,’ she said, ‘because that suggests he didn’t know what he was doing. He definitely knew what he was doing. But there was always …’ She faded out, and then looked up. She wasn’t going to finish. I didn’t know if it was because she couldn’t articulate what she meant – or she was hiding something. There seemed to be a hint of a half-truth in her eyes, a flicker, a shadow, but not enough for me to build an accusation on.
‘There was always what?’ I pressed.
‘I think he was twisted up over what we were doing.’
‘He felt guilty about cheating on Julia?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that why you think he cooled things off towards the end?’
She seemed surprised I knew about the change in their relationship, but the phone records showed the calls and texts between the two of them had started to die out from 2 September. The relationship had been burning itself out. ‘In the last two or three months, he’d tell me he was busy over lunch, or pretend he had a meeting, or had to work late,’ she said, not exactly answering the question, and I decided not to jump in but come back to it later. ‘He just changed.’
‘Changed how?’
‘Became different. Preoccupied.’
‘Did you ever talk about it?’
‘I never got the chance. He became very quiet, really highly strung and stressed out. It was never like that before. He was easy-going and fun.’
This was returning to the same place all conversations about Sam seemed to retreat to: he was a nice guy, he was easy-going, he didn’t have any reason to leave, but he changed in those last few months. The minor details were different, but everyone was saying the same thing. His finances, his affair, how he felt about Julia, everyone had a theory, but no one had an answer.
‘Nothing else sticks with you?’ I asked.
She glanced at me, down to her wine, then back up. A frown formed on her face. ‘There was this one time …’ She paused again, trying to recall the details; rubbed a hand across her forehead. ‘It was about two or three months after we started seeing each other. He came back to my place for a couple of hours and we …’ She looked at me. Had sex. I nodded for her to continue. ‘Anyway, he started to ask about my previous relationships.’
‘What did he ask?’
‘It was weird. He wanted to know the details. Like, all the details. He wanted to know how long I’d gone out with each of them, how many times I’d slept with them, what our sex life was like, that kind of thing.’ She paused, forefinger and thumb pinching the neck of her glass. ‘I only really thought about it after he disappeared, because it never struck me as odd at the time. We weren’t married, we were just having sex. Him wanting to know what I’d done, what I liked, it was all a part of it; part of the affair. The excitement. When it’s taboo, when it’s risky, when people see it as wrong, you’ll do anything. Try anything. Because it doesn’t matter any more. All the stuff you’ve always wanted to do, you just …’ She looked at me, shrugged. ‘You just do it.’
‘So why did it feel weird when he asked?’
‘It was just strange coming from him.’
‘You pegged him for a straight arrow?’
She nodded. ‘Definitely.’
I looped the conversation around to a point we’d left unfinished earlier. ‘How did you react when he started cooling things off?’