Tim Weaver - Vanished

‘He didn’t need his hand held?’

‘I’d pull him in here for a meeting now and again, but mostly I let him run riot. He was my biggest earner. I cut him some slack.’

I got the sense that, in a weird way, McGregor was enjoying this: being the centre of attention, being some kind of go-to man in the hunt for Sam. In fact, as I studied him – his eyes scanning the office like it was a palace – I realized whatever friendship had existed between the two of them had always been a firm second place to status in McGregor’s eyes. His job, the money he made, wandering the office as the boss – that was what was important to him; not Sam, not the people out there working for him.

‘Julia mentioned that things have been tough recently.’

McGregor looked disappointed I’d brought it up. ‘Yeah. Things have been hard since the economy went down the shitter. But it’s the same for everybody.’

‘You froze wages and cut bonuses, correct?’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Yeah.’

‘I’m just trying to find out why Sam left.’

‘Well, he didn’t leave because his wages were frozen.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I froze them in December 2010. He left in December 2011. If he had a serious problem with me trying to save his job by freezing his money, he wouldn’t have spent a year thinking about it, then buggered off without saying anything.’

His eyes flicked to the door behind me and the receptionist came in, a carafe of coffee in one hand, two mugs in the other. She laid it all down on the table and started to pour. She asked if I wanted milk, but I told her black was fine. She knew how McGregor took it without asking. After she was done, his eyes lingered on her as she left.

‘So, you think he would have come to see you if there was a problem, either with the job, with a client or with the wage structure?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Was he the kind of guy to speak his mind?’

He shrugged. ‘We were mates, but he knew who was in charge.’

We’d returned to McGregor’s favourite conversation topic: him as boss. Either he was paranoid about his staff challenging his position of authority, or being in charge was a drug he couldn’t get enough of. Either way, it was starting to piss me off.

‘Was Sam any different in the six months before he vanished? Maybe he wasn’t as effective at his job, or he seemed distracted by something?’

‘Not that I noticed. He was bringing in money and developing his client base, and that was …’ He stopped himself. He was about to say, and that was all I cared about , but – even to his ears – it sounded like the wrong thing to admit out loud. McGregor would only have noticed something was up with Sam if it had impacted negatively on his bottom line. In an emotional sense, he had no opinion of his friend, if he was ever really that. This conversation was going nowhere.

‘Was there anyone else Sam worked closely with here?’

He eyed me as if unsure of where I was going. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, was there anyone –’

And then his phone started ringing. He plucked the receiver from its cradle. ‘Ross Mc Gregor.’ He listened for a couple of seconds. ‘No, I absolutely did not tell him that. I told him we would be selective about the type of opportunity we’d present him. There’s a difference.’ More silence. ‘He hasn’t got the first idea about nickel export. He probably wouldn’t be able to tell you where Norilsk is on a map.’ He listened for a few seconds more. ‘Okay, I’ll be round in a minute.’ He put the phone down. ‘I’ve got a mini emergency.’

‘I can wait here.’

He looked towards the filing cabinets at the back. ‘No offence, but I can’t leave you alone. Half the company secrets are in here.’

‘Can I have a look at Sam’s workstation?’

‘No. You’ll need a warrant for that. There’s too much sensitive information on there, and I can’t have you poking around in our client database. We’ve cleared most of Sam’s personal stuff out anyway, if that’s what you were after.’

‘I’d like to ask around out there, then.’

He glanced at his watch and made no effort to suppress a sigh. I didn’t care that he was annoyed. He may have been his boss, he may have thought of himself as a friend, but he wasn’t close to Sam, and that made McGregor a dead end. But there was still the possibility that someone at Investment International knew what was playing on Sam’s mind in those last few months.

‘Yeah, all right,’ he said finally. ‘But don’t distract them too much.’

18

McGregor took me out onto the floor and introduced me to everyone. I watched the faces of his employees as he told them I was trying to find Sam. Some reacted, some didn’t. Then he pointed towards a small meeting room on the far side of the office, wedged in a space next to the kitchen. I set up in there and started inviting them in one by one.

The first couple of interviews produced nothing more than an idea of how the office was divided: on one side were the people – mostly in their twenties – who went out drinking together three or four times a week; on the other – overwhelmingly, men and women with kids – was a separate group who headed home as soon as work was done. Everyone got on during the day, they told me, but the ones who did the drinking spent their whole week with half an eye on Friday. Friday was the big night out.

Six interviews in, I met Abigail Camara, one of the prominent names on Sam’s phone records. ‘He sat opposite me,’ she said, proper East End accent, ‘so we used to have a lot of banter during the week. We were both big football fans. He was a Gooner, I’ve got a West Ham season ticket. That’s what we generally used to text each other about. Taking the piss and that.’

‘Did you notice any change in him before he disappeared?’

‘Change?’

‘Did he seem any different?’

She shrugged. ‘Not really. He was always a pleasant fella. He took his work seriously, but he always gave you the time of day. I liked him a lot.’

A few others failed to add much to my picture of Sam, then another name from Julia’s list, and Sam’s phone records, came to see me: Dave Werr. Almost off the bat, he started telling me a story about how they’d once dragged Sam kicking and screaming into a strip club. ‘This was, like, a couple of years back,’ Werr said, smile on his face. ‘We’d been out on the razz on a Friday, just like normal, but it was friggin’ freezing and the girls didn’t want to leave the wine bar we were in. So we split, grabbed Sammy and got the Tube across town to a strip club one of the boys had complimentaries for.’ He broke off and laughed; a long, annoying noise like a hyena. ‘Sam looked like he was shitting himself.’

‘He didn’t seem keen?’

‘He didn’t fancy it at all.’ He laughed again and then, when that had died down, gave a little shrug. ‘Sammy just wasn’t that sort of boy. Wasn’t a Jack-the-Lad type. He liked a few jars with us – liked a laugh – but he was all about his missus.’

‘All about her how?’

‘Some Fridays, and a few week nights too, he’d tell us he had to get home to her. He’d get twitchy, y’know. Be looking at his watch. And then all of a sudden, he’d be up on his feet and telling us he was leaving. When we asked him why, he said it was ’cause he wanted to get back and spend the evening with her. The women thought it was sweet – but the blokes thought he was wet.’ Werr let out another blast of his laugh.

‘Was he always like that?’

‘Into his missus?’ He paused; thought about it. ‘Probably more later on.’

‘When’s later on?’

‘The last seven or eight months, I guess.’