Выбрать главу

‘Morning.’

He nodded in reply. Nothing else.

I ignored the lack of response and pressed on, introducing myself and telling him about Sam. When I was done, I got out a photograph and showed it to him. It was a long shot given the number of people who must have passed through the station every day, but it was a question that needed to be asked. Sometimes, even when you built cases on precision and reason, you had to throw a little mud at the wall and see what stuck.

‘Don’t recognize him,’ he said, his eyes straying across the photo and then away again. He shifted back on the stool he was on, and his thin summer jacket opened a little. Underneath I could see a badge pinned to his shirt: DUNCAN PELL. I assumed, given he was at the gateline, that he was a regular customer-service assistant. It was hard to see him as anything more, as a station supervisor or duty station manager.

‘Are you here permanently?’ I asked.

His eyes came back to me. ‘What?’

‘Do you always work out of this station?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, a frown forming across his brow, as if I was suddenly speaking in a language he didn’t understand. All the time his eyes continued darting left and right; to the gateline, then to the entrance, then back again. Basically anywhere but me.

‘My guy used to pass through here every day.’

Pell snorted. ‘So do a lot of people.’

‘You don’t recognize any of the faces that pass through here?’

‘Some.’

‘But not this one?’

I held up the photograph in front of him again. He glanced at it and away, off to where a group of girls in their late teens were entering the station. Then he shrugged. ‘It’s busy,’ was all he offered, still watching the girls rather than me. I nodded, put the picture away, but didn’t move. The momentary pause seemed to make him uncomfortable. His eyes switched to me, away, then back and there was something in them.

A flash of fear.

‘Right, I’d better be off, Dunc.’ The other member of staff was back at the booth. He looked at me, looked at Pell, then must have assumed he’d interrupted a conversation, and held up both hands in apology. ‘Oh, sorry – didn’t mean to jump in.’

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I think we’re done.’

Pell glanced at me sideways and then shifted away, further back into the booth. The other guy reached down and grabbed a portable ticket machine off the floor, slinging it over his shoulder. He was an RCI; a ticket inspector. When he came up, he looked between us again and must have sensed something was going on.

‘Is everything okay?’

Pell didn’t say anything, so I stepped forward and introduced myself. I held up the picture of Sam again. ‘Do you recognize him?’

The RCI patted the breast pockets of his jacket and then reached into the left one and removed a pair of half-moon glasses. He looked older than Pell – forty-three or forty-four – but was taller, broader and in better condition. His nose was uneven – angled slightly left – like it might once have been broken and not properly reset, and I wondered if he’d grown up in and around boxing clubs. He had the build of a middleweight. ‘Did he use this station?’ he asked, eyes still studying the photograph.

‘Every day.’

But he’d already started shaking his head. He looked up, lips pursed, face telling me everything I needed to know. ‘I’m sorry. We get so many people through here.’

I took the picture and thanked him.

‘Did you recognize him, Dunc?’ the man asked.

Pell’s face dissolved into panic again as he was drawn back into the conversation. He ran a hand across his face, stubble crackling against his hands, and I saw he was wearing a silver ring with an old rune symbol imprinted on it. Then he looked down at the floor. He brushed an imaginary hair from the thigh of his trouser leg, cleared his throat, reached down further to his boots – black steel toecaps with red stitching in them – and scratched something else unseen from them. He didn’t want to answer.

‘Dunc?’ the RCI asked again.

‘No,’ Pell finally said, then quietly added, ‘No, I didn’t.’

The RCI started frowning, as if he didn’t understand what was going on with Pell, then turned to me and shrugged. ‘I can ask around if you like.’

‘No, it’s fine. It was a long shot.’

‘Okay, well, I’d better be off.’

I nodded. ‘Thanks for your help.’

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.