Tim Weaver - Vanished

His eyes came back to me. ‘About ten, maybe twelve years ago, Sam and I went on a cheapo package deal to Ibiza. Had a week there. We were both single, no ties, just went over to have a bit of fun. One night we were in this club and we’d had an absolute ton to drink, and we got separated. I’d seen him earlier in the night with this girl, really attractive, and they’d been getting on, so I left them to it. I hooked up with another girl, we had a good time …’ He paused, twirled his finger: and the rest of it . ‘Anyway, she left and I went looking for Sam. About five minutes later, I found the girl he’d been chatting to – but she was with some other guy. I asked her where Sam was and she said he’d left in the middle of the evening and never come back. She was pissed off, understandably.’

He looked around him again, but the nearest people to us were a couple of men on a table on the far side. ‘I looked all over the club but couldn’t find him anywhere, so I went outside. Nothing out front, but around the back – in the car park – I found Sam talking to someone. I was drunk. Annoyed. I’d spent half the evening trying to find him and all the time he was in the bloody car park. So I started over towards him, ready to let him have it, but when I got closer he started kissing this woman, and I thought, “Leave it until the morning. Let him have his fun for tonight.” ’ He brought his coffee towards him, eyes distant, replaying the moment over. ‘Except …’

‘It wasn’t a woman.’

He looked at me, not sure how I’d put it together. ‘Right.’

‘It was a man.’

He nodded. ‘How did you know?’

‘Was that the first time?’ I asked, sidestepping the question.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you bring it up the next day?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He called it a “mistake”. Said he was drunk, didn’t know what he was doing. But it wasn’t much of a lie. We could both see through it. After that, he just … broke down.’

‘No one else knew?’

‘No. He made me promise not to tell anyone. Not a soul. When he started dating Julia, I had to sit there saying nothing to her, nothing to Mum and Dad before they passed on. They died without even knowing who their son was. Mum would have understood. Dad was more old-fashioned, but he would have come round. I used to have screaming matches with Sam, telling him over and over it wasn’t fair on Julia, on his family, that mostly it wasn’t fair on him . But he was so conflicted. He just didn’t know how to handle it.’

‘Did he ever do anything about it?’

‘You mean talk about leaving Julia?’

‘Or cheat on her.’

I knew the answer – but I wanted to see if he did.

‘He never talked about leaving her,’ he said after a while. ‘I know it sounds weird, but those two were really close. He loved her – maybe not in the way a husband should love his wife, but he still loved her. He was just so confused: he could pretend he was something he wasn’t in front of her, so she didn’t get hurt. But I was like the release valve. When we got together, he let it all come out. I felt so desperately sad for him.’

‘So did he cheat on her?’

They were close, Sam confided in his brother, so I expected Robert Wren to start talking about Ursula Gray. But instead – as he traced a finger across the table, collecting spilt sugar granules into a pile – he didn’t mention her at all. Maybe he didn’t even know.

‘One time, I was over in Canary Wharf seeing a client, so I met him for lunch. This must have been, I don’t know, late November – a few weeks before he disappeared. He seemed a bit quiet, but that was how he was sometimes. Not around Julia, but around me. I understood that. I knew what he was trying to process. At the end of the meal, he became quite emotional. Not crying exactly, but everything he said was very heartfelt. He said he loved Julia – just kept saying that over and over – and, as we talked some more, I started to realize it was all born out of guilt. He felt guilty about something. Not just keeping this secret from her, lying to her, but something else.’

‘What?’

He didn’t reply, but I rode out the silence.

‘Sam might have been a risk-taker at work, able to put on a front for them, but he wasn’t like that outside. Not with this. He’d spent years – from before I even saw him at that club – pushing these feelings down … and, finally, he did something about it.’

‘You mean he’d met someone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘He didn’t really give me many details, but I got the subtext.’

‘Which was what?’

Wren coloured a little. ‘He’d paid for a prostitute.’

I remembered Wellis’s words from earlier: He used our service once. Must have been a month before he left . ‘How did he meet him?’ I asked.

‘He didn’t say.’

‘Did he tell you the guy’s name?’

‘No.’

‘Where they met?’

‘No.’

‘ When they met?’

‘Uh …’ He massaged his brow. ‘I’m pretty sure it was 11 November. I remember I flew out to California for a conference the next day.’

‘Did Sam say anything about the guy he met?’

‘Not really. I think he might have said the guy was foreign.’

I set him up with a nice little Albanian kid. Fresh out of the fridge, this kid was. That’s how you want them: young and willing and ready to bend over . I sighed, looking out to the boats, to the people on the edges of the docks. The first man Sam had slept with had been brought into the country in the back of a lorry, against his will. I doubted either of them imagined their lives turning out that way, even if there was a strange kind of symmetry to their meeting: both were prisoners, one of them chained to Adrian Wellis, the other shackled to his own guilt.

Wrong time, wrong place .

That was how Wellis described the eventual death of the Albanian kid.

I turned back to Robert Wren. ‘He definitely never mentioned the guy’s name, or where the two of them met? I need you to think hard about that for me.’

Wren looked off, to a space behind me, his mind ticking over. ‘He never named the guy or said where he lived, but I do remember him mentioning one thing.’

‘What was that?’

‘It was just a …’ His eyes finally came back to me. ‘It was weird. He said the prostitute lived in this place where there were no lights. He said he got to his door, on to the floor this guy was on, and all the bulbs were out. It was completely black. Sam had an iPhone, had some sort of torch app on there, so he got that out and used it to navigate his way along the corridor. And when he got to the flat he said it felt …’ He stopped. ‘He said it felt like someone was there.’

‘In the corridor with him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he have a look around?’

‘Yes. He said he shone his torch around.’

‘And no one was there?’

‘No.’

‘So there wasn’t anyone with him?’

Wren looked at me and shrugged, and I could read the gesture as clearly as if he’d spoken the words. I guess not. But then, that was who my brother was at the end.

A tormented, confused man.

32

12 March | Three Months Earlier

Healy tabbed through the next page of search results. It was getting hard to concentrate now. He’d been at it for hours, trying to find any sort of opening. A pinprick, a puncture, however small. But the third victim, Joseph Symons, was just like the others: a man who left nothing of himself, or his kidnapper, as he was pulled away into the dark.

He leaned back in his seat and looked down to the board where the two faces had become three and the map had been widened further. They all lived in similar places – decaying, decrepit housing estates or tower blocks – and they were all men who weren’t immediately reported missing: single, no ties, no reason for their disappearance to raise any alarms. But, after a while, even the lonely are missed. All three had some friends or some family that started to get concerned by the lack of contact, and all three had been gone between four days and two weeks by the time the pile of hair was found on their pillow. The first victim – Steven Wilky – barely registered as a blip on the radar, but when one of the tabloids got wind of the second, Marc Evans, it became uncontainable. Evans was the son of a respected politician, estranged from his father but not completely out of touch. Twelve hours after the police kicked down the door of his flat, the headline that would define the case ran on the front pages: ‘Invasion of the Body Snatcher’.