by Tim Weaver
‘It didn’t bother you that you couldn’t find him?’
He muttered something I couldn’t make out, but it was obvious he didn’t like this line of questioning. It made him look amateurish, and if he felt like this was a character assassination, he’d close up. I moved things on.
‘What background did you do on Sam?’
‘Background?’
‘Relationships? Finances? Work?’
A pause. ‘I looked into it,’ he said, but it was an obvious lie. If he’d been twenty years younger, he might have seen it as a challenge. But not now. Now he prioritized his cases according to how difficult they were, and how much of it would blow back at him if it didn’t get put to bed. There wouldn’t be a lot of fallout from Sam Wren’s disappearance because he didn’t tick any of the boxes: he wasn’t underage, he wasn’t female, he didn’t suffer from mental health problems and he wasn’t a danger to the public.
‘Did you recover any personal possessions?’ I asked.
‘Like?’
‘Well, he had a briefcase with him the day he disappeared, for one.’
‘I put in a call to the Tube’s lost property department to see if there was anything with Wren’s name on it. But that was a dead end.’
‘But you took his toothbrush away, right?’
‘Right. We always try to do that in missing persons. You never know when it may come in useful. We got some fingerprint lifts and a DNA sample from the brush.’
‘Did either of those lead anywhere?’
‘Nowhere new.’
That stopped me. ‘What do you mean, “new”?’
‘We obviously had his details on file from that incident twenty months back. He was never charged with anything, but it’s just something we do.’
‘What incident?’
‘That fight he was involved in.’
‘Fight?’
‘Oh, I thought you’d know this.’
I’d done a basic background check on Sam the day after Julia had first approached me to see if he had any kind of record. He didn’t. Julia hadn’t mentioned anything about a fight either, which meant one of two things: she’d lied to me, or at least chosen not to say anything – or, more likely, it was so minor, she hadn’t thought to bring it up.
‘What was the fight about?’ I asked.
‘Uh …’ I heard Westerley turn a couple of pages. ‘Two men started at each other’s throats at the entrance to Gloucester Road Tube station at about 7.45 a.m. on the morning of 14 October 2010. One of them, a Simon Mbebeni, claimed the other, Robert Stonehouse, racially abused him at the ticket machine. Stonehouse had a mate with him, James Quinn. Quinn’s been done for public order offences before and, in the subsequent interviews, admitted to having something of a problem with the UK’s immigration policy, so who knows who really instigated it? Maybe Stonehouse, maybe Quinn, but Stonehouse admitted telling Mbebeni’ – more pages being turned – ‘ “You can’t get away with that here, you fucking monkey” after Mbebeni appeared to jump the queue. He also admitted to throwing the first punch and breaking Mbebeni’s nose in the process, but only after Mbebeni had pushed him into the ticket machine.’
‘So where does Sam come in?’
‘He entered the station about ten seconds after it all kicked off, and tried to help Underground staff break it up. He had to contend with Quinn, Quinn got aggressive and attacked Mr Wren. Mr Wren fought back and punched Quinn in the throat, probably not intentionally, but Quinn blacked out and got rushed to hospital. It looked like Mr Wren was going to be charged, but his solicitor eventually got the charges dropped.’
‘What did the others get?’
‘Stonehouse got a year, Quinn six months and Mbebeni got a suspended sentence, a fine and two hundred hours’ community service. One of the London Underground employees was also cautioned – CCTV footage showed him laying into Stonehouse big style.’
‘Who was the employee?’
‘Uh, his name was …’ A pause as he searched for it. ‘Duncan Pell.’
The guy in the booth I’d talked to at Gloucester Road the day before. Interesting. He’d been weird when I’d tried to ask him questions: defensive, introverted, agitated. Something didn’t sit right then, and it sat even less comfortably now. If he had the capacity to put his fist through someone’s face, plainly he was no shrinking violet.
‘Pell got a caution and a £500 fine,’ Westerley went on, ‘but his representative argued – successfully – that he was trying to protect the public from Stonehouse and Quinn, so Pell got to keep his job and didn’t have to do community service. I have to say, it probably helped that Quinn was a massive racist, and that Stonehouse threw the first punch at Pell. It’s much easier to get people on your side when you don’t start the fight and when one of the men you’re up against thinks Hitler was an okay kind of guy.’
‘What do we know about Pell?’
‘Know about him?’
‘What’s his background?’
More pages being turned.
‘Ex-army. He enlisted at sixteen, worked his way up to lieutenant, left at thirty-one after two years in Afghanistan. Prior to that, he’d been in Bosnia. So basically perfect preparation for working on London Underground.’ He chuckled to himself.
I thanked him and hung up. The clock was showing 11.49. My mind returned to the very start of the case; to Sam getting on the Tube.
I dialled Ewan Tasker’s number.
‘Raker.’
‘How you doing, Task?’
‘Yeah, good. You?’
‘Tired.’
‘What, you been up bumping and grinding with the missus all night?’
I smiled. ‘You’ve got a one-track mind.’
‘It’s the only action I get at my age.’
‘Listen, I need another favour from you. Last one, I promise.’
‘That’s what you always say.’
‘I need some more CCTV footage.’
‘From when?’
‘Same day, 16 December, but I need everything – literally, everything – you can lay your hands on. Ticket halls, walkways, escalators, elevators, everything.’
‘Gloucester Road only?’
I thought about it. On the footage I had, Sam disappeared between Victoria and St James’s Park. ‘Gloucester Road through to, say, Westminster, just to be on the safe side.’
‘You got it.’
‘One other thing.’
‘Here we go.’
‘Same deal,’ I said. ‘But Gloucester Road on 14 October 2010.’
‘Just Gloucester Road?’
‘Just Gloucester Road.’
‘October the …?’
‘Fourteenth.’
‘That’s nineteen, twenty months back.’
‘Right.’
‘What are you going back that far for?’
‘I’m going to watch a fight.’
34
Julia Wren was the manager of an Italian called Sal’s on Bayswater Road. The plan had been to call her, to find out when she’d next be home and to tell her what I’d found out about Sam. It was going to be painful, but she deserved to hear it. Instead, when she picked up, she insisted I came to her work. She was on shift until midnight, and she wanted to hear where I’d got to. ‘It might not be the sort of thing you want to discuss at work,’ I said to her, but that only seemed to harden her resolve. So I headed for the restaurant.
Inside, it was half full and Julia was sitting at a table near the back, going through some receipts and cross-checking them against printouts. She seemed a little brighter than the last time I’d seen her, perhaps because she thought I might be bringing some positive news. But by the end of this, she would probably wish I’d never arrived.
As one of her waiters got me a glass of water, we talked about the restaurant, and then finally she asked how things were going with the case.
‘I need to tell you a couple of things about Sam.’
An expectant look. ‘Okay.’
&n
bsp; ‘Some of it’s going to be hard to hear.’
Now a frown started to form. ‘Okay,’ she repeated.
‘Maybe we should discuss this somewhere more private.’
‘Just …’ She paused. ‘Just tell me.’
‘How well did you know the people he worked with?’
‘I knew them well enough,’ she said, but she was uncertain of herself now.
‘Who did he talk about?’
‘Ross, obviously. Iain. Sam and I used to go out with Iain and his girlfriend from time to time. There were a couple of others too. Esther. Abi. I think a guy called Dave.’
‘Did he ever talk about his secondment to Michaelhouse?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Ever mention an Ursula Gray?’
‘Ursula?’ A pause. ‘Yes, he mentioned her.’
‘Much?’
She stopped. Frowned. ‘Quite a bit, I guess.’
‘What did he used to say about her?’
‘I can’t really remember. Nothing that particularly sticks with me. He used to tell me what they’d been working on; clients they’d been to see.’
‘Did you ever meet her?’
‘No.’ A hesitation. ‘Yes. Uh, I mean, not really.’
A weird answer. I studied her for a moment. ‘Not really?’
‘A couple of times. I never chatted to her much.’
I paused, letting the silence prepare the way for what I was about to tell her, when I noticed a subtle change. Her eyes snapped to me, as if she was worried I might notice something, and I was reminded of that first night I’d met her, when she’d skipped around the fact that she and Sam had been fighting. Back then, it had been out of some misplaced belief that I would judge her. Now it felt different. Now it felt like deception.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘Sure.’
I watched her. ‘Julia?’
She flinched at the mention of her name, and when she looked up she had an expression etched into her face that didn’t house one grain of truth: a smile that was as thin as paper, eyes that held no warmth, a mouth so small and tight it was like she’d tried to force it closed to prevent anything coming out.
And, in that moment, I suddenly understood.
She’d managed to convince me that the lie she told me that first night was about the two of them fighting; about the guilt she felt in continually pushing him for the truth about his work. But it wasn’t that at all. Not even close to it.
It was the affair with Ursula.
‘You knew about it,’ I said.
She didn’t reply and, in the silence, I had to bite down hard to prevent myself reacting. I leaned back in my seat and drew my coffee towards me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said finally.
I didn’t respond, trying to figure out what her reasons might be for telling me another lie.
‘I found out late last August,’ she said quietly.
‘Then why the hell didn’t you tell me that?’
‘I just …’ She paused as the waiter passed, and then watched as he disappeared down to the front of the restaurant where a waitress was busy laying tablecloths and putting out cutlery. ‘When I read about you, when I was researching you, I read this article about your cases. And this one bit of it stuck with me. It said you never took on work like this. Affairs. Stuff to do with money. I thought, if I told you the truth, you’d never agree to help me.’
‘It was a newspaper report, Julia.’
She looked at me, puzzled.
‘It’s fiction. No one’s called me “Mindhunter”. The tabloids just made it up like they make everything else up. Journalists don’t decide what I do and do not take on. I decide it. You should have told me everything.’
‘I just didn’t think you’d –’
‘You should have told me.’
‘I didn’t want to do anything to stop you from helping me.’
I said nothing, and looked away.
‘Look at me,’ she said, but was gesturing towards the restaurant. ‘I’m a manager of an Italian restaurant on £27,400 per year, have no husband, no brothers or sisters, both my parents are gone, and I’ve got a mortgage so big, some days it’s all I can do not to cry at the thought of it. At least with Sam, whatever his flaws, I had a home. He had a good job, was on good money and – even if we had to become more frugal – it’s easier to face up to those sacrifices if you’re doing it with someone else.’
‘So not telling me about the fact he was having an affair for the best part of a year would do what exactly? Stop me from bringing him back so he can pay the mortgage?’
She frowned. Hurt. To her, it felt like she was bleeding out and all I was doing was picking and prising at the wound. I realized I was just offloading on her now, letting the frustration out, but it was difficult not to. I was sick of the lies.
‘You know Robert has offered to help you out?’
‘He offered to help Sam out.’
‘He said you didn’t have to worry about the mortgage.’
‘Did he?’
‘You don’t believe him?’
She smiled, but there was nothing in it but sadness and humiliation. ‘How exactly do you ask someone for £3,000 a month for an indefinite period?’
‘He’s family.’
‘He’s Sam’s family.’
I didn’t bother responding. If she didn’t want to end up homeless, she was going to have to find a way of swallowing her pride.
‘How did you find out?’
This time there was no movement in her face, no bunched muscles or lack of eye contact. No hidden half-truths. ‘He left his Facebook up one Saturday while he popped to the shops.’ She stopped. I’d checked Sam’s Facebook on the first day and the messages hadn’t been there. He’d deleted them all. ‘I saw she’d mailed him and my curiosity got the better of me. She was flirty and intelligent, and men like those things. Even Sam.’
She meant, Even Sam who never wanted sex. Except he did want sex. He thought he wanted it with Ursula because he thought Ursula might be willing to experiment with him. But then even that wasn’t enough.
‘What did the messages say?’
A jealous twist to her face, and she tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear. ‘She didn’t recount what they did, but the suggestion was there, barely even hidden.’
‘Any specifics?’
‘In one of the emails she told him she couldn’t stop thinking about him.’
‘Had he responded to her?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’
‘Not that I could find.’
That made sense: Julia found out about Sam and Ursula in August. By then, Sam was already trying to kill off the relationship. By mid October it was all over.
‘Did you confront him about it?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
She looked at me as if she’d spotted something unspoken in my question. ‘Do you think I haven’t got any pride – is that it?’
‘Don’t turn this around.’
‘It would have been the easy thing to have forgotten about him. Easier than lying to you. But sometimes you’ve got to be realistic.’
‘Realistic?’
‘I couldn’t afford to be on my own, and Sam …’
‘Sam what?’
She took a deep breath and made minute adjustments to the papers on the table in front of her. ‘I think Sam was doing something much worse.’
‘Like what?’
‘I think he may have been involved with someone else.’
‘Other than Ursula Gray?’
‘Yes.’
I sat back in my chair, hands wrapped around the warmth of the coffee cup. ‘Who would he be involved with?’ I asked, but then realized she wasn’t talking about another affair. She was talking about Adrian Wellis.
She pursed her lips, as if this was the bit she liked least. ‘One Sunday, just before he disappeared, I got home early from having lunch with a cou
ple of friends. I called out to him three or four times but he never heard me. Never heard me come up the stairs either. When I got to the top, the bedroom door was open and he was sitting on the edge of the bed with this big bag in his lap, talking to someone on the phone.’
‘Who was he talking to?’
‘I don’t know. But, whoever it was, Sam kept saying to them, “I can’t invest a bag full of dirty money. You need to transfer it legitimately.” He just kept repeating it, over and over, getting angrier and angrier. But eventually he seemed to get shouted down.’
‘The bag was full of money?’
She glanced at me. ‘Yes. Full of it.’
It was Wellis’s money. Sam had seen a hole in Wellis’s finances, found out who he was, and – all the way up until the end – Wellis took revenge by turning the screw. Wellis had his boot on Sam’s throat and wouldn’t let go.
‘Did you ask him where he got the money?’
‘No. I just stood there and watched him.’
‘Why?’
She paused. ‘After the call ended, he started crying.’
‘So you never said anything to him?’
‘No. I was scared. I suppose that was another reason I didn’t say anything to you to start with; why I kept some of these things to myself. He was obviously involved in something bad. I was scared about what might happen if it got out that I knew. And …’ She paused. ‘And the other thing was, I’d never seen him cry before; not once in all the time we were together. So I knew he was hurting.’ She stopped again, and I understood the subtext: a part of her wanted him to hurt, for all that he’d done to her. ‘To me, it didn’t really matter if it was hurt over wherever the money had come from, or hurt over the affair, or both, because I realized as long as I didn’t say anything, as long as I didn’t tell him what I knew, that regret, that pain, it wouldn’t go away.’
‘He’d have to live with it.’
She nodded. ‘I don’t hate him, I don’t wish harm on him, but I think he got off a little easy. He owes me. That’s why I want you to find him.’
I pushed my coffee cup aside. There was no telling how much damage this had done. Her senseless lies – spun out from a mix of fear, financial doubt and a misguided desire for revenge – were as harmful as they were aimless. ‘What if he’s dead?’
A movement in her eyes, like a flame dying out. She understood what I meant: what if the time you’ve wasted has cost you? ‘I hope he’s not.’