Vanished (2 page)

‘Full of meetings.’

We stayed like that for a moment. This was new for both of us. It had been two and a half years since my wife
Derryn had died of breast cancer, and almost sixteen since we’d first met. Liz was married at twenty-one, pregnant six months later and divorced shortly after that. She spent two years bringing up her daughter Katie, before returning to the law degree she’d started and completing her training as a solicitor. She hadn’t dated seriously since before she’d married her husband.

‘Where are we eating?’ she asked.

‘There’s an Italian place I know.’ I shifted us – still together – around to face the closed restaurant just down from where we were standing.

She squeezed me. ‘You’re a funny man, Raker.’

‘I booked us a table at a South African place just off Covent Garden. We can get drunk on Castle Lager.’

‘South African?’

‘Ever had babotie?’

‘Can’t say I have.’

We started walking slowly. ‘Well, tonight’s your lucky night.’

The restaurant was in a narrow cellar in a side street between Covent Garden market and the Strand. The stone walls had holes carved in them, framed photographs of South Africa sitting inside. In the one closest to us, the Ferris wheel at Gold Reef City was caught in black and white, frozen for a moment against a markless sky. I’d spent a lot of time in and around Johannesburg in my previous life as a journalist, and been stationed there for a year in the run-up to the elections in 1994. It had been a different place back then, more like a war zone than a city, its people massaged by hatred and fear.

Liz let me choose, so I ordered two bottles of Castle, peri-peri chicken to start and babotie – spiced mincemeat, baked with egg – for the main course. While we waited for the food to arrive, she talked about her day and I told her a little of mine. I’d just put a case to bed a couple of days before: a seventeen-year-old runaway who’d been hiding out close to Blackfriars Bridge. His parents, a couple from a sprawling council estate in Hackney, had told me that they only had enough money to cover my search for three days. It took me five to find him, the job complicated by the fact that he had no friends, talked to pretty much no one, and, when he’d left, had literally taken only the clothes on his back. No phone. No cards. No money. Nothing even remotely traceable. I’d been to see his mum and dad and told them to pay me for the three days, and then return when they felt they could afford to square up the extra two. They were good people, but I wouldn’t see them again. I wasn’t normally in the business of charity, but I found it even more difficult to leave things unfinished.

After the babotie arrived, conversation moved on from work to Liz’s daughter and the university course she was doing. She was finishing the final year of an economics degree. I hadn’t had the chance to meet her yet, but from the way Liz had described her, and the photos I’d seen, she appeared to be almost a mirror image of her mother.

I ordered two more bottles of Castle and, as Liz continued talking, caught sight of a woman watching me from across the restaurant. As soon as we made eye contact she looked down at her food. I watched for a moment, waiting for her eyes to drift up to me a second time, but she just continued staring at her plate, picking apart a steak. I
turned back to Liz. Ten seconds later, the woman was looking at me again.

She was in her late twenties, red hair curling as it hit her shoulders, freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose. She had a kind of understated beauty, as if she didn’t realize it, or she did but wasn’t bothered enough to do anything about it. The thin fingers of her right hand grasped a fork; those on her left were wrapped around the neck of a wine glass. She was wearing a wedding ring.

‘You okay?’

The woman was looking away again now, and Liz had noticed me staring at her. ‘The woman in the corner there – do you know her?’

Liz looked back over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘She keeps looking this way.’

‘Can’t say I blame her,’ Liz said, smiling. ‘You’re a good-looking man, Raker. Not that I want to inflate your ego or anything.’

We carried on eating. A couple of times I glanced in the woman’s direction, but didn’t catch her eye again. Then, about thirty minutes later, she suddenly wasn’t there any more. Where she’d been sitting was empty; just a half-finished steak and a full glass of wine. Money sat on a white tray on the edge of the table, the bill underneath it.

She was gone.

Just before we left, Liz got a call from a client. She rolled her eyes at me and found a quiet spot in an alcove. I gestured to her that I’d meet her upstairs when she was done.

The rain that had been in the air earlier had now arrived. I pulled my jacket on and found shelter a couple of doors down from the restaurant. Across the street people emerged from Covent Garden Tube station, a few armed with umbrellas and coats, but most dressed in short sleeves or T-shirts, blouses or summer skirts. After about five minutes I spotted a figure approaching me from my left, moving in the shadows on the opposite side of the street. When she got close, the light from a nearby pub illuminated her, freeze-framing her face, and I realized who it was.

The woman from the restaurant.

She crossed the street and stopped about six feet away.

‘Mr Raker?’

I immediately recognized the look in her eyes. I’d seen it before, constantly, repeated over and over in the faces of the families I helped: she’d either lost someone, or felt she was about to. Her face was young, but her eyes were old, wearing every ounce of her pain. It gave her a strange look, as if she was caught somewhere in between, neither young nor old, not beautiful or ugly. Just a woman who had lost.

‘I’m really sorry I had to come up to you like this,’ she said, and pushed her hair behind her ears. She seemed nervous, her voice soft but taut. ‘My name’s Julia. Julia Wren.’

‘What is it you want, Julia?’

‘I, uh …’ She paused. A bag strap passed diagonally across her chest. She reached behind her and pulled it around, opening up the front flap. She took out her purse and removed a piece of paper from it. As she unfolded it, I could immediately see what it was: a printout. ‘I read about you,’ she said. ‘On the internet.’

It was a BBC story, a photograph showing me being led out of a police station, flanked by a detective, two uniforms and my legal counsel, Liz. Three days before the picture had been taken, I’d gone right into a nest of killers and almost lost my life. Eighteen months had passed since then, but my body was still marked by the scars.

There had been other stories on the same case. Many other stories. I’d given no interviews, even to the people I’d once worked with, who’d called begging for comment. But it had gone big. For a week it had played out in the nationals until, like all news stories, it eventually burned itself out. For everyone else, it was consigned to history.

But not for this woman.

‘Have you been following me for long, Julia?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

I believed her: I’d spotted her straight away in the restaurant, and seen her the second she started to approach me. If she’d been following me for any length of time, it wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Tailing was an art. If you followed someone, you had to stay invisible at the same time.

‘I’ve read about you,’ she continued, nodding at the printout. ‘I mean, you can see that. I read about what you did when you found that place up north. How they tried to hurt you. What …’ She stopped, looking down at the scars on my fingers. ‘What they did to you. Then I saw another story about you in the papers last year. To do with that man the police found. The one who took those women. When I saw those stories, I thought, “That’s a man who can help me.” ’

‘Help you?’

‘Do you believe in fate?’

I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t.’

That seemed to stop her in her tracks. But then she found her feet again. ‘I saw you and your …’ Her eyes drifted to the restaurant. ‘Your friend. I saw you walk past me. The man I’d read about on the internet. So when you passed me I couldn’t help but see it as fate. And I suppose I lied a little. I did follow you – but only after I saw you tonight. I followed you to the restaurant because I wanted to be sure it was you. And when I saw that it was, I realized I needed to speak to you.’

‘What do you want, Julia?’

‘I want you to find my husband,’ she said, pausing and kneading her hands together. For a moment she seemed to shrink into the shadows: head bowed, shoulders hunched, protecting herself in case I turned her away. ‘Six months ago he got on to the Tube at Gloucester Road. And he never got off again.’

Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in a café on Long Acre. Liz had taken my car and gone home, doing a good job of disguising her curiosity. She’d seen enough in the eight months we’d been dating to know this wasn’t how it normally worked. I liked some sort of plan in place before I met the families; liked to know who they were, and where they were coming from. But, with Julia Wren, there was no plan. She was a blank.

We ordered coffees and sat at the window, neon signs smeared in the drizzle, the sky black and swollen. She laid the printout on the table, manicured hand across it as if scared it might blow away. Often, they were caught halfway between expectation and fear: expectation that this might be the moment their loved ones came home; fear that it would be in a body bag.

She glanced at me, tucking a cord of red hair behind her ear. I couldn’t tell yet if she was naturally timid or just nervous. ‘I read that you used to be a journalist.’

‘In a past life.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘It definitely had its moments.’

‘You got to travel, I expect.’

‘I got to see a lot of the world, but it was more like a busman’s holiday.’ I smiled. ‘With added warzones.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘The States on and off for five years. South Africa before and after the elections. Israel and Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan.’

‘You must have seen some things.’

An image formed in my head: running for my life through a South African township, bullets ripping holes through the air, bodies scattered across the road, blood in the gutters, dust and debris and screams of pain. ‘Let’s just say you gain an appreciation of what people are capable of.’

She paused. Rocked her head from side to side as if sizing up her next question. I knew what was coming. ‘Did you give it up because of your wife?’

‘Yes.’ I didn’t offer anything more. ‘Why don’t you tell me about your husband?’

She nodded and produced a photograph from her bag. ‘This is Sam.’

He was in his late twenties, had bright blue eyes, fair hair and a nose that seemed too big for his face. He was unusual-looking, but not unattractive. In the picture he was dressed in a black suit and red tie, and standing in the front room of a house. At a guess, he looked about five-nine, but a little underweight. The suit didn’t fit, and there were minor hollows in his cheeks where his skin seemed like it was pulled too tight. I made a note to ask her about that later: people were underweight either because they were ill, weren’t eating enough – or had something to worry about.

‘When was this taken?’

‘Six months ago. Tenth of December.’

I pulled the photograph in closer. There was a Christmas
tree reflected in one of the windows. ‘How long after this did he disappear?’

‘He was gone six days later.’ She paused. ‘The sixteenth.’

About two hundred and fifty thousand people went missing every year in the UK, and while two-thirds of them were kids under eighteen, the next commonest group was men between the ages of twenty-four and thirty. Sam Wren was a perfect fit for the statistics. The reasons why adult men went missing were often predictable – relationships, financial issues, alcoholism, mental illness – but the resolutions normally weren’t. Many were reported missing long after they’d disappeared, when it was impossible to pick up the trail. And even if that wasn’t the case, even if they were reported missing within a day or two, they had often planned their escapes in advance, given thought to their route out, and had a fair idea of how to cover their tracks. Sam had been gone six months and, as I looked at the photograph, I imagined – at the moment it was taken – he’d already firmed up his exit strategy.

I gestured towards the picture. ‘Tell me about the day he disappeared.’

She nodded but then paused. This is where it started, where it began to unravel, where the road split, and eventually she was either lying next to him in bed again or standing over him in a morgue.

‘He left a little earlier than normal,’ she said, starting quietly. ‘Usually he was gone by about 7.20, 7.30. That day, it was 7, 7.10.’

‘Any reason why?’

‘He just said he had a lot of work on. That wasn’t
unusual. He’d often head off at that time on the days he knew were going to be busy.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He worked for an investment bank in Canary Wharf. He advised people on where to put their money – stock, shares, that kind of thing.’

‘Which company was that for?’

‘It’s called Investment International. I2 for short. It was set up a few years back by a guy Sam worked with at J. P. Morgan. They’d been to university together. Sam had originally gone into the graduate programme at HSBC but never really liked it, so his friend helped him make the move to JPM, and then got him involved at I2 as soon as it got off the ground.’

‘Was the company doing okay?’

She rocked her head from side to side. ‘Not great. They’re a relatively small company, so the recession hit them pretty hard. Sam’s wages were frozen at the end of 2010, and so were his bonuses.’

‘Did he still like his job, despite that?’

‘It was a bit stressful, but I’d say he liked it about as much as any of us like our jobs. He’d come home sometimes and tell me he’d had enough of it, but the next day – if things went well – he’d be completely different. I didn’t really look harder than that, to be honest. We all have ups and down, bad days and good days.’

I glanced at the photo of Sam again: the gaunt, thin features, the suit hanging off him, a faint look of disquiet in his face.
Maybe there were more bad days than good
.