‘What dates are we looking at?’
‘The last eighteen months, from today back to January of last year. I’ll be on my mobile, or I can pick up emails on the move. Just let me know when you get something.’
‘You got it. I’ll give you details of my bank too.’
Spike’s ‘bank’ was a locker at his local sports centre. For obvious reasons, he was a cash-only man, and he used the locker as a drop-off, changing the combination every time someone deposited his fee there.
Next, I dialled Sam’s brother Robert at work, and immediately got his voicemail. He was out of the country on business until Friday. That was another forty-eight hours away. I left a message, telling him who I was and what I was doing, and gave him my number.
Finally, referring back to Julia’s list of names, I cold-called PC Brian Westerley, the cop who’d filed Sam’s missing persons report. He answered after three rings, sounding pretty chirpy. By the time I’d told him who I was and why I was calling, the mood had changed. Pretty quickly I realized, if I was going to get anything from him, I’d have to work for it – or back him into a corner. Often, uniforms were the most difficult cops to deal with; their relative lack of power meant they took the first chance they could to lord it over someone.
‘I can’t release any kind of information to you,’ he said. He sounded in his late fifties and originally from somewhere in the north-east. ‘If Mrs Wren wants to come and see me again, she can.’
‘She already came to see you.’
He paused, uncertainly. I’d just lied to him but, even from our short conversation, it was obvious he was having trouble remembering the details of the case. He probably recalled the train part – because how many missing persons enquiries started like Sam’s? – but not much else. The truth was that Julia had called him a couple of weeks after she filed the missing persons report to chase up the contents of the CCTV footage, rather than actually gone to see him. But it didn’t really matter. If she’d turned up and perched herself on his lap, he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell me who she was.
‘I’m not sure Mrs Wren came to –’
‘You completely forgot to follow up her husband’s case,’ I continued, laying it on thick. ‘It was devastating for her. She’s still waiting for you to call her back.’
I felt bad about playing him, but the alternative was telling him the truth and getting a brick wall in return. I didn’t say anything else; just left the rest of the conversation there, unspoken. He worked it out pretty quickly: if she was pissed off, she was willing to do something about it; and if she was willing to do something about it, she was willing to file an official complaint.
‘What is it you want?’ he said eventually.
‘I’d like you to pull the file.’
‘I clock off at four and then I’m not back in until Friday.’
Same as Robert Wren. I hated having to wait. ‘Can you pull it now?’
‘No. I’m not in front of a computer and I need to get some more pressing things completed before I go. If that’s not good enough, then do what you have to do.’
He’d called my bluff, but I remained silent for a moment so he knew I wasn’t backing down lightly. I could have called my contacts at the Met and got them to grab the file for me, got the thing printed out and delivered, but by taking a chance on Westerley I’d alerted him to my interest in Sam Wren; and if he logged on to the database and found another cop had been snooping around in Sam’s file, my source would be compromised.
‘Okay,’ I said, giving him my mobile number. ‘Call me back Friday.’
9
The Wrens lived on a narrow street, permit parking on one side, houses on the other. Every home was identical but attractive: bricked on the ground floor, plastered and painted cream on the first. Doors sat at the bottom of two downward steps, and the windows housed rectangular flower baskets, the trays full of pink geraniums. As I drove up to Julia’s place, the door opened and she came up the steps holding a key fob, a remote control attached. I bumped up on to the pavement and buzzed down my window.
‘Here.’ She handed me the remote. ‘There’s underground parking just around the corner at the end of the road. Head left and you’re there.’
When I returned to the house, the door was ajar. I stepped through and pushed it shut behind me. Immediately inside was a long hallway, floored in laminate. The kitchen was directly in front and Julia was standing at one of the counters, pouring water into a kettle. Tucked into an alcove next to the kitchen was a corkscrew staircase.
As I moved towards the kitchen, I eyed the other rooms off the hallway: a bathroom, a bedroom doubling up as a graveyard for cardboard boxes, and a living room. In the living room were hundreds of books in a bookcase, surround sound, a TV, an expensive Blu-Ray player, a Sky decoder, and a big leather sofa. A coffee table sat in the centre, loaded with art books as big as slabs of concrete, and a bowl of fresh fruit. I could see photos of Sam too, squared into a pile.
‘Tea or coffee, David?’
She brought out a tin of instant. I preferred my coffee through a percolator, but I didn’t want to offend her on the first day. ‘Coffee, thanks. Black, no sugar.’
We moved through to the living room and sat on either end of the sofa. She had made herself some kind of fruit tea; it smelt tangy and sweet. She placed it down next to the photos, and pushed them across the coffee table towards me. ‘That’s the last five years of Sam’s life,’ she said, eyes fixed on the top picture, where her husband was standing, wine glass raised, black suit buttoned up, in a hospitality suite at the Emirates Stadium. Immediately I could see a physical difference in him: bigger around the face, better-colour skin.
‘When was this taken?’ I said.
She ripped her eyes away. ‘March last year.’
We talked for a while about Sam, about the kind of person he was, the things he liked doing, the places they’d been together. She’d told me about a time, when they first got together, that he’d been sent on a business trip to Barcelona and – on the quiet – had paid for her to come too. ‘He was very spontaneous like that,’ she said, and then the smile slipped away, as if she realized how prescient that was. After all, there was nothing more spontaneous than getting up one day and not bothering to tell your wife you were leaving.
I listened some more as she continued building a picture of their marriage. They both got on. They liked the same things. They’d talked excitedly about having kids. But the whole time she was holding back. There was a reservation to her; moments where she stopped herself before she wandered into territory she couldn’t back out of. The previous night I’d wondered if she was timid or just nervous, but as she’d started to warm up, I realized it wasn’t timidity – and it might not have been nerves either. There was a secret sitting between us, and we both knew it.
‘Let me ask you something,’ I said, placing down the photograph I’d taken from her the night before. ‘Is there a reason Sam lost a ton of weight before he disappeared?’
She studied me, surprise in her face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You must have noticed that between March and December last year he’d lost a lot of weight.’
Her eyes flicked between the pictures. ‘I never …’ She paused again. She was about to say she’d never realized. But it would have been a lie. She had realized. She’d noted the changes in his face; the changes in his body. She’d seen everything. ‘Financially, we were stretched,’ she said eventually.
‘That’s why he lost weight?’
She looked up from the pictures. ‘This house cost us £850,000, and our mortgage was £3,000 a month. That was more than my entire wage packet, every month. Sam was on £78,000 a year basic, which meant he was bringing home just over £4,000 a month. Maybe that sounds like a lot, but once you start chipping away at it with the mortgage, council tax, gas, electricity, water, insurance policies for both of us, food for both of us, phone bills, even things like Oyster cards for both of us, it starts to disappear fast. And it only got worse after I lost my job.’