‘Did he owe any cash to anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Any problems with alcohol or drugs?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘Anyone he fell out with in those last six months?’
Again, she shook her head.
I’d been through the list of names she’d given me, and the two best angles seemed to be his brother and his work. Julia had painted a picture of a reliable, decent man, one not prone to big mood swings or changes in character. Yet something had altered. In his work, in how he dealt with his wife, he changed completely in the half-year before he vanished. He got secretive. Stressed. Lost weight. And, ultimately, whatever had been eating away at him was enough for him to leave one morning in the middle of December and never come home again.
10
At the top of the stairs, there were three doors. The first opened up into a small, smartly decorated bathroom, all black slate tiles and chrome fixtures. Adjacent to that was a spare room that probably looked the same the day the two of them moved in: plain cream walls, curtain poles without any curtains attached, no furniture except for a desk and a leather chair, and a PC. The third was their bedroom. It was small but unusuaclass="underline" the ceiling was slightly slanted, dropping down the closer to the window it got, and a series of shelves had been built into a V-shaped alcove on the far wall. The room looked out over angled red roofs to a residents-only park, gated and locked, and dominated by huge oak trees. It was hot and stuffy: the window was closed, and sunlight was streaming in across the bed.
All of Sam’s clothes were still in his wardrobe, but everything he’d once owned was a mess: shoes were piled up at the bottom, clothes were half on hangers. Julia had left it exactly as it was; all she’d done was close the doors and seal it off from the world. I turned to his bedside table. Inside one of the drawers were four different novels by four different authors, each with a bookmark about halfway in. In the next drawer down was a shoebox full of gimmicky boy toys: corkscrews, alarm clocks, beer mats, battery-powered lumps of plastic that looked like they’d come from an expensive Christmas cracker. She’d called him spontaneous – but, in missing persons, spontaneity meant you didn’t place a lot of importance on routine. It meant you were impulsive, moved around, started things but didn’t finish them. Four half-finished books also suggested he was finding it difficult to concentrate.
Sam wasn’t a creature of habit, and that would immediately make him harder to find. People who thrived on routine left a footprint: the same route in and out, the same stop-off’s along the way. It seemed likely he’d thought about disappearing in advance, because you didn’t just walk away from a marriage, a home and a job on a whim. But I doubted he’d made the decision to actually follow through with it until he got up on the morning of 16 December. There were big question marks, though: why didn’t he take any money with him? Why was he working so late for no obvious reward? And how did he exit a train without being caught on film?
Underneath the bed were some empty suitcases, a box of dusty LPs and a pile of photo albums. I pulled the albums out and started to go through them. They were the trips abroad Julia had mentioned: New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Prague. Not a beach in sight. City breaks would have suited Sam’s working life as they’d mean less time out of the office. They probably also suited the type of person he was. Seven days on a sunlounger would have driven him insane.
Sliding the albums back under the bed, I did a last circuit – going over everything again – and then made my way across the landing to the spare room. Thankfully, it was cooler. Sam’s PC was Alienware, built for gaming, and on top of the hard drive were a pile of games. I sat down and booted it up.
On the desktop was a folder, created three months before, where Julia had placed all of Sam’s files. Word docs, spreadsheets, gaming software and a couple of illegally downloaded films. I fired up the web browser and started going through the history. Most of the recent pages shared a similar theme: my cases. A tabloid account of one I’d had the October before showed a picture of me emerging from my house:
He’s a private investigator who doesn’t waste his time trying to trap cheating spouses and get to the bottom of insurance scams. Instead, publicity-shy Raker is an action man who has been labelled ‘Mindhunter’ for his ability to track down some of the country’s most vicious criminals.
It was a complete lie. No one had ever called me that or was ever likely to, but I understood why Julia Wren needed to believe it.
As I continued to move through the internet history, there was a jump of three months, presumably between the first time Julia had started searching for someone to help find Sam, and the last time Sam had used the computer. He’d custom-set his internet history so that it remembered the last 350 pages, regardless of how far back they were logged. The date of Sam’s last session was 11.12 p.m. on 15 December – the night before he vanished – and the last site he’d been to was an Arsenal fan forum. Not exactly indicative of a man contemplating his disappearance – if he was even contemplating it in the first place. There was always, in the background, the possibility that something else had happened to him. An accident. A desperate decision. Something worse than both. No evidence supported those theories, and nothing so far backed them up. But, as I scanned the rest of the links in his internet history, the idea didn’t entirely fade.
11
Once I was back home, I returned to the CCTV footage. This time, rather than watch it in Quicktime, I opened the Gloucester Road video in a custom-built film-editing suite Spike had passed on to me during one of my first cases. In that one I’d been trying to spot a woman entering her place of work in some footage I’d shot, but she’d been so far away all I could see was a vague blur. The software, built by Spike, allowed me to select a portion of the video and zoom in for a closer look. The quality of the recording didn’t become better – in fact, it became much worse, which was the reason I didn’t use it a lot – but, once you’d pinpointed the person you wanted to track, it allowed you to follow them more easily, even if all they were at that kind of magnification was a blur of pixels.
I selected the area around Sam and then used the zoom function, stopping about 50 per cent of the way in. The quality of the recording deteriorated, and his features became less defined, but by cutting out the noise around him – the other people, the detail of the Tube station – I was able to follow him on to the train before he disappeared from view. This was the point at which I’d lost him the first time. Now, though, the zoom function allowed me to identify a thin red tag on his briefcase – little more than eight or nine pixels in length – and a couple of seconds after vanishing, the briefcase, along with the red tag, reappeared: Sam was standing midway inside the carriage, hidden behind a sea of legs.
But he was there.
The briefcase and his legs were all that was visible, which was why I’d missed it the first time: his trousers were the same colour as 95 per cent of those around him, and without the red tag it would have been impossible to tell which briefcase belonged to him. I inched the video on a frame and the doors started to close. At the very last minute another commuter made a dive for the doors and managed to sneak on, and after that Sam finally did disappear from view: his legs, his briefcase, any indication of where he was in the carriage. My impressions from the first watch were right: there was no way he could have moved from where he was. There were too many people around him, too much traffic either side to transfer between carriages, which meant, when he moved between stations on the Circle line, he would be in the same place. And I’d have the red tag.