by Tim Weaver
‘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?’
‘React?’
‘Did you just accept it?’
She shrugged. ‘I could see myself becoming a bunny boiler, the psycho bit on the side, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t bear the silence; going from all-in to all-out.’ She stopped; looked downcast. ‘So, no, I didn’t just accept it.’
‘What did you do?’
She glanced at me, a reluctance in her face. ‘I started following him.’
‘When was this?’
‘Things started to change in early September, and by the middle of October I wasn’t getting anything from him: no calls, no texts. I found that very hard.’
‘So you started following him at the end of October?’
‘End of October, beginning of November.’
‘How many times did you follow him?’
‘Only twice. The second time I started feeling ridiculous. I was
angry with him – jealous and hurt, I suppose – but I got a dose of clarity halfway through the evening the second time and that was when I left.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘Both times, it was just down there, to the Hilton.’ She was pointing over my head, in the direction of South Quay. ‘He just sat there in the bar by himself.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Nothing. Just drinking. Like he was deep in thought.’
‘That was it?’
‘That was it.’
Deep in thought. But about what?
‘You never told Sam you followed him?’
‘No. He would have flipped.’
‘And done what?’
‘He wasn’t violent, if that’s you mean. We only ever had one fight in the time we were seeing each other. But he wouldn’t have taken kindly to me following him.’
‘What was the fight about?’
‘It was a Friday night,’ she said, remembering it instantly. ‘August, in the weeks before he started getting weird. He was in the shower and his phone went off. It was right there next to me on the bed, so – without even thinking, really – I glanced at the display to see who was calling. It was just an automatic reaction. I saw the name, it didn’t mean anything to me, so I just assumed it was a client of his. When he came back out, I told him his phone had gone off and he was fine about it. Really relaxed. Then he checked to see who’d called, and it all changed.’
‘Changed how?’
‘He went absolutely crazy. Started accusing me of snooping around in his phone, of going through his private things. It just came out of nowhere. I tried to tell him I hadn’t done anything, that I hadn’t looked at his messages, that I didn’t even know who the guy was who’d called him, but he wouldn’t believe me. I’d never seen him like that.’
‘Who was the caller?’
‘Some guy called Adrian.’
‘No surname?’
‘It just said Adrian.’
I noted it down. He definitely wasn’t on Julia’s list, which meant she didn’t know about him, and although I didn’t remember seeing an Adrian in the phone records, it didn’t mean he wasn’t there. Spike had got me eighteen months of calls and texts from Sam’s phone, and – in the first run-through – I’d concentrated on repeating numbers and the people who’d contacted Sam the most. Adrian was a reason to go back to it.
‘Did you ever find out who this Adrian guy was?’ I asked.
‘No. Sam was too busy screaming in my face. I was determined not to sit there and take it, but I couldn’t fight back. He just blitzed me; completely shouted me down.’
‘Did he apologize?’
‘The next day, yeah. But a couple of weeks after that he started backing away. That was the end for us. That was the moment things really changed.’ She paused, one of her eyes blurring. ‘And then four months later he was gone.’
23
By the time I got back to the car, I had a name: Adrian Wellis. There had been just one call in the entire year and a half I had records for: 5 August, just as Ursula had described. The call lasted eight seconds, which presumably meant he’d dialled in, got voicemail and then hung up. Sam never phoned back; Wellis never tried again. And yet, in order for Ursula to read his name on the display, Sam must have put Wellis into his address book. So why would Sam go to that kind of trouble for a person he was never going to ring?
As Spike had done with all the other numbers, he’d managed to source a street address off the back of the call. Tierston Road, Peckham. It was only five miles from Canary Wharf, which meant I could have been down there inside thirty minutes, barring traffic jams. But heading down now meant heading in blind.
Liz had once said to me that the reason I did what I did, the reason I put my life at risk for the missing, was because I was trying to plug holes in the world that couldn’t be filled; trying to prevent other people from feeling the way I had. She meant Derryn. She meant her death, and everything – all the grief and anger – that came after. I understood that, saw the truth in it, even told her – and maybe believed – that I could control that part of me and become a different person. Not detached exactly, but not so affected by the people I found either. When you became affected by them, by their stories, by the people they’d lost, you took risks: you stepped into the dark, not knowing what was there – and the only armour you took into battle was the debt you felt to the families.
I knew Liz was right and, for a time, I’d resisted the temptation to stray back into the shadows. I stayed rooted to the right side of the dividing line, taking the cases, working them and closing them off, then leaving them alone. But it couldn’t be like that for ever. Seeing through my commitment to the lost, to their families – however I did it and whatever it took – was who I was. It was woven into me. When Derryn died, a little part of me went too – and the space she left behind was never filled; only replaced, temporarily, by the people I returned to the light. I wanted to be with Liz, wanted to be in her life. But she’d never fully understood that part of me.
That was the fault line in our relationship.
And, ultimately, maybe the force that would tear us apart.
Adrian Wellis lived in a tatty two-storey red-brick terrace house with a concrete garden and sheets for curtains. Behind it was a sink estate called The Firs: a monolithic series of concrete blocks, housing almost ten thousand people.
Outside it was still hot and airless: clouds didn’t move in the sky, leaves didn’t move in the trees, just the faint shimmer of a heat haze coming off the tarmac. All along the road, windows were open, but at Wellis’s gate there was a strange, eerie kind of silence to the place. No music. No kids. Only the distant sound of cars on the Old Kent Road and the occasional squawk of a bird. The doorbell didn’t work, so I knocked a couple of times.
No answer.
There were two mottled glass panels in the door. Inside was a hallway with three doors off it. Stairs off to the right. Close to the door was a light bulb with no lampshade.
I knocked again and waited.
The front garden was a mess; only a garden in name. Everything had been paved over and left to decay. The slabs were uneven, weeds crawling through the gaps between them. Four big concrete blocks were in a pile at the end of the driveway. On top was a flowerpot, no flowers in it, just earth.
When there was no answer for a second time, I headed out, down to the end of the road, and around to the back of the houses. Every home had a six-foot-high fence marked with a number. Wellis’s had been painted on, the paint running the full length of the gate and collecting in a pool on the step at the bottom. He’d never bothered cleaning it up. I tried the gate. It was locked.
Walking back around to the front, I knocked for a third time.
‘Mr Wellis?’
Again, nothing. No sound of movement from inside. I put my ear to the door, just to be sure, but the house was quiet. No voices. No television. For a brief second I thought about trying to pick the locks – then reality kicked in. In broad daylight, it was too risky.
All I could do now was wait.
24
27 February | Four Months Earlier
It was just before 9 a.m. when Healy walked past the visitor centre in the prison. Inside, a network of tables and chairs were bolted to the floor, populated by identically dressed prisoners and the people who had come to see them. Everything was under surveillance by CCTV, while guards circled the room, their eyes moving from table to table.
Beyond it, the corridor ahead looked sick: pale green linoleum, matching walls, empty noticeboards and reinforced windows into vacant, dark rooms. At the end was a counter, a window pulled across, with a guard on the other side at a computer. He had silver hair and milky eyes, half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose. When he saw Healy approaching, he slid the window across.
‘How you doing, Colm?’
‘Pretty good, Clive. You?’
The guard nodded. He had a slow, considered style,
which Healy had never been able to read in all the years he’d known him. It could have been age, or it could have been a natural distrust of people. ‘You’re late today,’ the guard said.
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Well, you better get going.’
Healy’s eyes drifted up for a second to the sign on the wall above the window. Black letters on peeling white paint: ‘High Security Unit’.
‘Yeah,’ Healy said. ‘I better get going.’
After passing through security, he moved along another corridor, doors on either side, the distant sound of voices audible. The prison cells were directly adjacent, though there were no windows until he got to the end of the corridor. He slowed up. Two rooms, both behind security doors, but with reinforced glass panels that Healy could see in through. He stepped up to the first.
Inside, seven men were seated on chairs in a semicircle. Different faces, different builds, but all dressed in prison uniforms. Healy got in even closer to the glass. As he angled his body, he saw her. The psychologist. All the prisoners were watching her. She was perched on the edge of a chair opposite them, talking.
‘There you are,’ Healy said quietly.
It was biting cold as he waited in his car outside. Snow was shovelled into piles all around him, the early morning still blanketed by a fuzzy kind of half-light. After a couple of minutes, the woman exited the prison and started to head out across the car park. Her scrawny frame was hidden beneath a sheepskin coat, her hair tied into a messy, uneven ponytail, her eyes fixed on her phone. Ever since his return to the Met, he’d been using the database to find out about her, looking into her life piece by piece, building a picture of who she was. But not within sight of Craw. Not within sight of anybody else.
Her name was Teresa Reed. Forty-eight. Divorced, no kids. She’d been coming to the prison on weekly visits for nineteen months. Same day every week, same purpose: to interview and talk to the prisoners. To Healy, none of that really mattered, other than the fact that she didn’t have kids. That suited him fine. If she’d had kids, it would have made it harder to formulate his plan, and harder still to execute it. With kids, there was guilt, fuzzy thinking, emotion, a million reasons not to hurt her. Without them, she had no responsibility to anyone but herself, and no one to miss her.