Tim Weaver - Vanished

I ordered a beer and she asked for a glass of wine.

‘Julia Wren has asked me to find out what happened to Sam.’

She brushed some hair away from her eyes but didn’t say anything.

‘I think you can help me.’

‘How?’

I took a copy of Sam’s phone records out of my pocket and unfolded it in front of her. ‘This shows that you two called each other 97 times between 7 January and 2 September last year, and you sent each other 186 texts.’

A flutter of panic for the first time. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You know what I’m talking about,’ I said, and turned the phone records around so she could see her number, his number, the minutes they’d spent talking and the texts they’d sent. ‘I don’t care what it was that you and Sam were doing. I don’t. Really. But I’ve been paid to find out what happened to him – and that’s what I’m going to do.’

The bar was crowded now, music and laughter and mobile phone conversations in the background – but all I got from Ursula Gray was silence.

‘Ursula?’

She shook her head. ‘I … I don’t know where to …’

‘Were you sleeping with Sam?’

She reached out for her wine glass and slid it towards her. No indication that she was or wasn’t. No indication she’d even heard the question. But then she shivered – as if a long-dead memory had crawled its way out of the ground – and looked up. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly, taking a sip from her glass, her eyes fixed on a space off to my left. ‘I wanted to be with him.’

‘Did he want to be with you?’

‘At the time I thought he did. But at the end …’ She smiled momentarily, but it wasn’t a smile with any warmth and, for the first time, her defences were down.

‘You started seeing him in January last year?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did it begin?’

‘Michaelhouse were doing some work with I2, and he was seconded across to my office. He trained me, I trained him, we sat next to one another and forged a good friendship. There was flirting too, I guess.’ Another smile, this time more genuine. ‘A lot of flirting. And then, one night just before Christmas, we all went to the same party – this event over at the North Quay site – that Esther had got us tickets for. I’d just split up from my boyfriend, Esther didn’t know much about Sam’s personal circumstances, and I didn’t bother to ask. We flirted, we got drunk. That was how it began.’

‘Did you sleep together that night?’

She glanced at me, a mixture of embarrassment and incredulity. And then reality seemed to kick in and she realized that their secret wasn’t a secret any more.

‘No, we didn’t sleep together that night.’

‘So, what happened?’

‘We just kissed.’

‘You already knew Esther?’

She nodded. ‘I’ve known her for years. She’s one of my best friends. We went to university together, did the same course, lived in the same house.’

‘Did she know about you and Sam?’

‘No. Not during the time it was going on.’ She looked down into her wine glass. ‘I told her after Sam went missing, though. I hated not being able to tell anyone. Bottling it up only made it worse. So I told her, but made her promise to keep it to herself.’

Which was why she’d lied to me: to protect her friend.

I backtracked. ‘How did Sam react the day after you kissed?’

‘He was cold as ice,’ she said distantly, replaying the morning after in her head. ‘He didn’t talk to me for a couple of weeks. That really hurt. But then, slowly, he started to come back round, and one day at lunch we got chatting about what had happened.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said he liked it.’

‘That was when the affair began?’

‘Yes.’ She traced a finger through the condensation on the side of her wine glass. ‘That was when it began. He came back to my place after work one Friday evening.’

‘And after that?’

‘After that …’ Her eyes flicked to me and away: more embarrassment, but not about the affair, or the idea of it, but about having to reveal details of their sex life to a stranger. ‘Are you asking me how often we had sex?’ she said finally, trying to paint me as some kind of voyeur.

‘I want to understand why Sam left.’

She sighed. ‘We would do it every day at work. We found an empty office on the forty-sixth floor in Sam’s building and we’d go there.’

‘What about evenings?’

‘Sometimes, if he convinced her he was working late.’

‘Weekends?’

‘No. Never weekends.’

That tallied with what the phone records showed: there were no conversations between Sam and Ursula on Saturdays and Sundays. ‘Why not weekends?’

‘He wanted to be with her.’

‘It sounds like he was conflicted.’

‘He was. I think he always loved her, even when we were doing what we were doing. He told me a couple of times he wondered what life would be like with me, if we were a couple, but that was about as far as it went. I wanted him more than he wanted me. I …’ A pause. ‘I felt something for him. I thought he felt something for me. But now I can see the relationship for what it was. I can see what he wanted from it.’

‘Which was what?’

‘Sex,’ she said, as if the answer was obvious. ‘I was like a bloody schoolgirl; so wrapped up in it, I couldn’t see the difference.’

‘Did he ever talk about his sex life with Julia?’

‘A little.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said he didn’t fancy her.’

For a man, Sam didn’t have much of a sex drive , Julia had said to me.

‘Did he say why he didn’t fancy her?’

‘No.’ She brushed more hair away from her eyes. ‘He obviously loved her. I could see that after a while; can certainly see it now. But he used to say – when it came to sex – she didn’t do it for him.’

‘In what way?’

‘In any way.’

I wrote that down. It seemed weird that he would feel like that about Julia – and yet still commit to getting married.

‘Do you think he cheated on her before he met you?’

‘No.’

‘How come?’

She looked out through the windows of the bar. ‘He was ballsy and confident in his work, single-minded, which was why I was attracted to him in the first place. But he wasn’t like that at all in bed. Not to start with, anyway. He seemed almost … inexperienced.’

‘How?’

A frown cut across her face, but it was more a look of discomfort than anything else. ‘Maybe “inexperienced” is the wrong word,’ she said, ‘because that suggests he didn’t know what he was doing. He definitely knew what he was doing. But there was always …’ She faded out, and then looked up. She wasn’t going to finish. I didn’t know if it was because she couldn’t articulate what she meant – or she was hiding something. There seemed to be a hint of a half-truth in her eyes, a flicker, a shadow, but not enough for me to build an accusation on.

‘There was always what?’ I pressed.

‘I think he was twisted up over what we were doing.’

‘He felt guilty about cheating on Julia?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that why you think he cooled things off towards the end?’

She seemed surprised I knew about the change in their relationship, but the phone records showed the calls and texts between the two of them had started to die out from 2 September. The relationship had been burning itself out. ‘In the last two or three months, he’d tell me he was busy over lunch, or pretend he had a meeting, or had to work late,’ she said, not exactly answering the question, and I decided not to jump in but come back to it later. ‘He just changed.’