Vanished

6

After Task left for his golf tournament, I ran the footage from Gloucester Road. Sun poured through the window of the spare room, the air still, the heat prickling against my skin. I felt the familiar buzz that came at the start of a case. The lack of onboard footage was a problem, but not an insurmountable one. I’d just have to work around it.

Onscreen, there was a time clock in the bottom left, with the date adjacent to that. It was 5.30 a.m. In the video, there was no one in shot. Off to the left, the District line platform was visible; on the right were two Circle line tracks, one for westbound trains, one for eastbound. At 5.38, a woman entered the shot, walked to the middle of the platform and stood there checking her phone. Three minutes later, more people joined her. Then more. By 6 a.m., the station was starting to get busy.

I grabbed the timeline on the video window and dragged it right, stopping at 6.50. By now, the station was in full flow, people filing off the trains, but mostly filing on. The camera above the entrance to the platform gave a good view. If the Wrens’ house was half a mile from the Tube station, and he was averaging two miles per hour, Sam would enter at about 7.20, and be in shot by 7.30.

He took a little longer.

At 7.45 a.m., he emerged on to the eastbound platform, moving in a mass of bodies. It was incredibly busy, even for a weekday morning. At one stage, he got stuck behind an old couple – tourists – who looked shell-shocked by the carnage unfolding around them, but eventually he found a space on the platform, about two lines back from the edge. He was holding a takeaway coffee in his left hand, which was why he must have taken longer to get to the station, and a briefcase in his right. The coffee was interesting. It suggested a routine; as if this day wasn’t that different from any other and he hadn’t been expecting any surprises. And yet, in the washed-out colours of the CCTV footage, he looked even worse than in the photo Julia had given me: paler, thinner, his eyes dark smudges against his face. He just stood there the whole time, staring into space. Did you have a plan? I thought. Or did you only decide to take off once you were on the Tube?

The train emerged from the edge of the shot, its doors opening, and the scramble began. You could tell the regular commuters: they barged their way on to the train, eyes fixed on the doors, everyone around them expendable. Sam was the same. When someone tried to move in front of him, he shuffled into their line of sight.

Then he was on the train.

The doors closed.

And the train was gone from shot.

I got up, poured myself a glass of water, returned and loaded up the second video – South Kensington – and fast-forwarded it. Sam’s train had left Gloucester Road at 7.51; two minutes later it was pulling into South Kensington. I leaned in, trying to get a handle on the chaos. Like Gloucester Road, the platform was packed: shoulder to shoulder, men and women stood on its edges, jostling as the train doors opened.

A second’s lull, and then people started pouring out. I shifted even closer to the screen and pressed Pause. This time, I edged it on manually using the cursor keys. The camera was about three-quarters of the way down the platform, and was taking in about 80 per cent of the train. At Gloucester Road, Sam had boarded the second carriage from the front, so – unless he’d spent the two-minute journey sprinting from one end of the train to the other, barging commuters out of the way – he would be visible if he got off.

But he didn’t get off.

The whole place was jammed. I played it and replayed it a couple of times just to be sure, but there was still no sign of him.

It was the same story at Sloane Square.

At Victoria, it was going to be even harder to pick him out. It doubled up as a mainline station, so the platform was just a sea of heads. Then I saw something else: a group of men and women, all dressed in the same red T-shirts, all holding placards.

A demonstration.

I downsized the video file and googled ‘16 December protest’. The top hit was a report from the Guardian about a march on Parliament by opponents of the government’s spending cuts. I remembered it. Authorities had asked that protesters use the Circle line, and commuters, tourists and everyone else use the District. The warning looked to have been heeded by some, but not all. And certainly not by Sam. If he’d planned his escape beforehand, he couldn’t have picked a better day.

I checked Victoria’s footage, without any sign of him, then moved on to the next stop, St James’s Park. More protesters. More commuters. The same thing: train arrived, no sign of Sam, train departed. Next I loaded up Westminster. Zipping forward to just after 8 a.m., I hit Play. Sam’s train wouldn’t be arriving for another five minutes, but I wanted to get a sense of how it was before his arrival.

Westminster was a battlefield: a sea of faces, a mass of bodies. Basically the perfect place to instigate an escape plan. The doors opened. I watched closely, every head, every face, while my mind continued to turn things over.

The station had been set up to funnel people off and away from the trains as fast as possible. In the middle, one of the exits had a sign on the wall next to it that said: PROTESTERS EXIT HERE. At the far end of the station, I could just about make out another sign above another exit: NON-PROTESTERS EXIT HERE. The attempt to smooth traffic flow hadn’t worked: the platform was jammed with people not moving at all.

As Sam’s train emerged into the station, I hit Pause and inched it on again with the right cursor. When the doors opened it was like a dam breaking: people poured out – almost fell out – a mix of suited executives, tourists looking lost, and legions of red shirts, all heading for the march. The wave of movement had been too fast, and scattered in too many directions, to keep track of properly, so I stopped the video before it got any further, dragged the slider back sixty seconds and started again.

This time I went even more slowly. I knew which carriage Sam had been in, so kept my attention fixed on it as the doors slid open. A ton of people spilt out – but not Sam. Once or twice, I thought I spotted him – fair hair, black suit, blue tie – but then a face would turn in my direction and it was someone else. I rewound the footage a third time and concentrated on the protesters. If I was assuming he might use the demonstration as cover, I had to consider the possibility he might pull on a red T-shirt too. I slowed the action down to a crawl and searched the sea of faces. Anyone who looked like him. Anyone with a T-shirt over a suit, or over a shirt and tie. Anyone carrying a jacket, a briefcase or both. There was nothing. On the fourth and final run-through, I kept my eyes on the carriage itself. As it emptied, I hoped to glimpse Sam still inside the train. But, once again, there was no sign of him.

Then, further down the platform, a fight broke out.

At first, there was a swell of movement, like the eye of a whirlpool, and then it spread out, crowds pushing back in all directions, trying to avoid being caught up. Pretty soon it became obvious what was going on: two men, one in the red of the protest march, another in a white T-shirt with a Union Jack on the back, were throwing punches at each other.

Six Underground staff, stationed at equal distances along the back wall of the platform, descended on them immediately, but not before people had stopped to watch and the whole station had come to a halt. From the carriages of the train, people peered out, trying to see what was going on. Some even stepped on to what space they could find on the platform to take a look. From the bottom of the shot, another member of London Underground emerged, waving his hands, presumably telling people to move up the platform and create space. But it was complete chaos: people seemed to be ignoring him, unable to hear him or see him, or more interested by what was going on further up. Within ten seconds, the Tube staff had created a kind of makeshift wall, three of them in a semicircle around the fight, the other three trying to break it up and move everyone on. It took another twenty seconds for them to put an end to it, and then the two men were taken off through the exit at the middle of the platform, and the remaining staff got things moving again. As the man in the white T-shirt got closer to the camera, I could see what was printed on the front: CUT NOW, STRONGER LATER.

But, throughout it all, there was still no sign of Sam.

Not even a close call.

I replayed the entire thing again, from the moment his train entered the station to the moment it left. I went back to the possibility that he had moved between carriages, but it just seemed improbable: there was barely room to breathe inside the trains, let alone manoeuvre yourself from one carriage to another. It seemed much more likely that he’d got on and remained inside the same carriage between Gloucester Road and Westminster. There’d been no face like his, no one dressed exactly like him, no one with the same build or holding the same briefcase. Despite the crowds, I would have spotted him.

Which meant he was still on the train.

And there were thirty more stations to check.

Three hours later the train terminated at Hammersmith. I paused the footage and edged it on. About twenty people filed off, a couple in clumps, but most out on their own and easy to identify. None of them was Sam Wren. I’d followed his train all around the Circle line, even – in something approaching desperation – retreating back from Gloucester Road to Edgware Road in the ten minutes before he got on, and hadn’t spotted him once. Not leaving the train, not even moving around inside it.

The camera at Hammersmith was angled lower than some of the other stations, giving a better view of the carriages, and there was no one left inside. I let the video run anyway and, a few minutes later, two Tube staff, both in bright-orange high-visibility waistcoats, emerged from the bottom of the shot and started walking the length of the platform, checking each carriage. A couple of minutes later, the doors closed, they had a quick word with the driver, then the train pulled off and melted into the tunnel.

So where the hell is he?

I’d have to go through the whole thing again.

Every second of video. Every station. Every face.

Every moment in Sam Wren’s vanishing act.