Vanished (21 page)

‘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 couple 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.’

‘But if he is?’

She had a look on her face now that I’d most often seen in the grieving: all greyness and distance, like there wasn’t enough thread in the world to stitch her life back together. Her loss was incomplete. A circle that didn’t join. Until there was a body, until there was a reason, there was no closure. It was the heart of missing persons.

‘I want to know where he went,’ she said finally.

As I watched the faint trace of tears in her eyes, the
grief, the anger, I decided not to tell her about who Sam really was. That time would come. But it wasn’t now.

Eventually, she looked up. ‘Will you find him for me?’

‘Let’s be really clear on something first. You holding back all this information because you think it will somehow affect the way I do my job – it just means it takes longer to find him, and you have to pay me more money. It’s
insane
. I get sick of people lying to me, but I accept it as part of my job. What I can’t accept is being lied to by the one person I expect to tell me the truth. So, if you do it again, I walk.’

She nodded.

I let the silence sit there between us, let her chew on my anger, and then I got out my notepad and flipped it open. ‘Did Sam ever tell you about a fight he was involved in?’

‘A fight?’

‘At Gloucester Road Tube station, back in October 2010.’

Recognition sparked in her face. ‘Oh right, yes. He was interviewed by the police about that. The whole thing was ridiculous. He was trying to act as peacemaker.’

‘Did he ever mention a guy called Duncan Pell?’

‘Was he the one who worked for London Underground?’

‘Yeah. You remember him?’

‘Of course. They met up one time.’

That stopped me. ‘Who – Pell and Sam?’

‘Yes.’

‘They
knew
each other?’

‘Yes. Duncan was really grateful to Sam for helping him out because things got quite nasty in that fight. So he offered to buy Sam a drink. And Sam accepted.’

The extra CCTV footage from Ewan Tasker turned up at 9 a.m the next morning. It had been sent in a plain envelope, with no return address. Inside were two unmarked DVDs. Liz had left early to prep a case, even though it was a Saturday, so I set to work straight away, firing up my Mac and playing the first disc.

The footage from 14 October 2010.

The fight at Gloucester Road.

In the desktop folder, Task appeared to have got me the whole week, 11 October through to 17 October. Each sub-folder contained a different day. Alongside the folders was a Word document, which turned out to be a note from him: ‘Had to get a week here – once you go back further than a year it’s saved in seven-day blocks.’ I double-clicked on 14 October. Inside were two different video files: 5 a.m.–2 p.m.; 2 p.m.–12 a.m. I opened the 5 a.m.–2 p.m. footage and then dragged the slider forward to 7.30.

At 7.33 a.m., Duncan Pell drifted into view. He came from the left-hand side of the camera, up from the booth he’d been in when I’d talked to him at the station. He was focused on something: head still, eyes fixed, cutting through the crowds like a knife.

Then I realized what he was doing.

There were three doors into the ticket hall. At the left-hand one, propped against a sandy brick pillar, was a man
holding a piece of cardboard. It was difficult to make him out at first, but as Pell arrived he shifted around and I saw him more clearly: not all that old – forty maybe – but dishevelled, dirty, cloaked in a long winter coat and a thick roll-neck sweater, with dark trousers and dark boots. He had a beard, unruly, uncared for, and a black holdall on the floor next to him.

The slightly washed-out quality of the footage made it hard to see the writing on the cardboard, but I could make out one of the words right at the top.
Homeless
. I leaned in even closer as Pell started talking to him. After a minute, Pell was gesturing, pointing over the homeless man’s shoulder, then – when the man didn’t appear to get the message – he started jabbing a finger into the man’s arm as if delivering a warning. After that, the man shrank a little, the resolve disappearing, and he bent down, picked up his holdall and moved off. Within a couple of seconds, he was gone from view.

Pell returned to his booth, out of sight.

Three minutes later, at 7.41, two men entered the station.

They were laughing at something. One of them was tall, skinny, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with a thin jacket – all despite the cold – the other smaller, but not by much, and dressed more practically: a thick coat over denims and white trainers. I didn’t know what James Quinn and Robert Stonehouse looked like, but these two seemed a decent fit: they had small, combative faces, they were the only men I’d seen enter the station together in the fifteen minutes I’d been watching, and as I saw one of them take out an Oyster card and gesture towards the self-service machines, a well-dressed black guy arrowed in from the
right of the picture and nipped into the queue in front of them.

Simon Mbebeni.

Over the phone, PC Brian Westerley said the official police report had Stonehouse as the instigator, and I watched as the taller of the two men – the one wearing a T-shirt and summer jacket – said something to his friend. Mbebeni turned around, frown on his face, and spoke to them. Stonehouse smiled at Mbebeni and shrugged. Mbebeni – six foot, around fifteen stone, plainly not about to be intimidated – took another step towards them. And then Stonehouse threw a punch.

It missed Mbebeni and he moved quickly to react: he pushed Stonehouse back into a ticket machine on the right, Quinn getting knocked aside on the way through. Stonehouse came back, fists swinging, and connected with Mbebeni’s face. A second later, as the footage glitched a little, I could see blood all over Mbebeni’s shirt.

Then, from the top of the picture, came Sam Wren.

At first he seemed oblivious to what was going on, checking his phone, but then he looked up and was pulled right into the eye of the storm. As Stonehouse and Mbebeni squared off again, Quinn stepped back into Sam. All around the ticket hall, people had stopped and backed away, some looking on in horror, others faintly amused. Quinn turned to see who he’d bumped into, Sam said something – an automatic reaction to being hit – and Quinn punched him. It was just like a lot of fights: created out of nothing. Sam clutched his face and took a couple of steps back.

Then he moved towards Quinn.

I paused the video. This was only the second time I’d seen Sam in motion. I’d looked at photographs of him over and over, and I’d watched footage of him disappearing into thin air. But now here he was, a different man at a different time. He looked bigger around the face, healthier, but he also looked more assertive, more forceful, and not only because he’d just been attacked. Maybe this was the Sam everyone talked about: the one who worked as an investment banker, who earned six-figure bonuses, who could swim with the sharks. At the end he was none of those things. At the end he was small, confused and forlorn. A man with none of the fight left in him.

I started the video again. Within a couple of seconds, Pell emerged from the same position as earlier, heading towards Stonehouse and Mbebeni, and then Sam was on Quinn – Quinn half turned away from him – and throwing a punch. It looked clumsy, but because of Quinn’s position, it was devastating: it connected with Quinn’s throat, and – in the blink of an eye – his legs gave way and he hit the floor. It was difficult to make out Sam’s face after that: he was bent over, hands on his knees, blood dripping from his face to the floor, as more Tube staff emerged. One made for Quinn, the other for Stonehouse.

Except Pell already had Stonehouse.

Mbebeni was somewhere off to the side, leaning against a wall, looking dazed. Stonehouse was wrestling with Pell, the two of them locked together, arms on each other’s shoulders, gritted teeth, fierce, unrelenting expressions like neither of them was about to give in. Finally, Pell got the better of Stonehouse: he swept his legs out from under him – a quick, efficient movement – and Stonehouse hit
the deck hard. I remembered for a moment what Westerley had told me about Pell being an ex-soldier, and that immediately seemed obvious in how he moved, in how precise he was. But as the clock rolled on, as I expected Pell to suppress his opponent and keep him there until he had help, he instead went on the attack. When Stonehouse hit the floor, Pell clamped a hand around his throat and jabbed a fist into the side of Stonehouse’s face. Once. Twice. Three times. Stonehouse was done already, limp and unresponsive, but Pell just continued punching, over and over, even as Stonehouse lay there unconscious, until finally, like a light switching off, he stopped, got up and looked down, a foot placed either side of the body.

About ten seconds later, a couple of cops rushed in through the doors at the front of the station, and Pell stepped away from the body for the first time, straightening out his jacket and looking around the hall. His eyes locked on to Sam, and he moved across and said something to him. Sam looked up at him, as if he didn’t know who Pell was or what he wanted, then he seemed to process whatever it was that Pell had asked, and started nodding slowly. A few seconds later, Sam pointed to Quinn on the floor. He must have known by then that he’d done some serious damage to him. Quinn hadn’t moved an inch.