Vanished

8

Before heading out to Julia’s, I made a couple of quick calls. The first was to Spike, an old newspaper contact of mine. He was a twenty-something Russian hacker, here on an expired student visa. During my days as a journalist, he’d been an incredible source of information. He could get beyond any firewall without leaving a trace of himself, bagging names, numbers, email addresses, even credit histories and contracts while he was there. As long as I forgot about the fact that he was basically a criminal, and that I was his accessory, he was an unbeatable information source.

‘Pizza parlour.’

I smiled. ‘Spike, it’s David Raker.’

‘David!’

He had been here so long now, he hardly had an accent at all; just a slight twang, refined and smoothed by hours of watching English-language TV.

‘How’s things at the pizza parlour?’

He laughed. ‘Good, man. It’s been a while.’

‘Yeah, a few months. Did you miss me?’

‘I missed your money. So, what can I do you for?’

‘I’m hoping it’s pretty simple. I need a financial check done on someone. Bank accounts, credit cards, mortgage, investments, pensions – basically anything you can lay your hands on. I need the whole thing, A to Z.’

‘Who’s the victim?’

I gave him Sam Wren’s name, address and personal details, as well as a mobile number Julia had passed on to me. ‘I’ll need his phone records as well.’

‘What dates are we looking at?’

‘The last eighteen months, from today back to January of last year. I’ll be on my mobile, or I can pick up emails on the move. Just let me know when you get something.’

‘You got it. I’ll give you details of my bank too.’

Spike’s ‘bank’ was a locker at his local sports centre. For obvious reasons, he was a cash-only man, and he used the locker as a drop-off, changing the combination every time someone deposited his fee there.

Next, I dialled Sam’s brother Robert at work, and immediately got his voicemail. He was out of the country on business until Friday. That was another forty-eight hours away. I left a message, telling him who I was and what I was doing, and gave him my number.

Finally, referring back to Julia’s list of names, I cold-called PC Brian Westerley, the cop who’d filed Sam’s missing persons report. He answered after three rings, sounding pretty chirpy. By the time I’d told him who I was and why I was calling, the mood had changed. Pretty quickly I realized, if I was going to get anything from him, I’d have to work for it – or back him into a corner. Often, uniforms were the most difficult cops to deal with; their relative lack of power meant they took the first chance they could to lord it over someone.

‘I can’t release any kind of information to you,’ he said. He sounded in his late fifties and originally from somewhere in the north-east. ‘If Mrs Wren wants to come and see me again, she can.’

‘She already came to see you.’

He paused, uncertainly. I’d just lied to him but, even from our short conversation, it was obvious he was having trouble remembering the details of the case. He probably recalled the train part – because how many missing persons enquiries started like Sam’s? – but not much else. The truth was that Julia had called him a couple of weeks after she filed the missing persons report to chase up the contents of the CCTV footage, rather than actually gone to see him. But it didn’t really matter. If she’d turned up and perched herself on his lap, he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell me who she was.

‘I’m not sure Mrs Wren came to –’

‘You completely forgot to follow up her husband’s case,’ I continued, laying it on thick. ‘It was devastating for her. She’s still waiting for you to call her back.’

I felt bad about playing him, but the alternative was telling him the truth and getting a brick wall in return. I didn’t say anything else; just left the rest of the conversation there, unspoken. He worked it out pretty quickly: if she was pissed off, she was willing to do something about it; and if she was willing to do something about it, she was willing to file an official complaint.

‘What is it you want?’ he said eventually.

‘I’d like you to pull the file.’

‘I clock off at four and then I’m not back in until Friday.’

Same as Robert Wren. I hated having to wait. ‘Can you pull it now?’

‘No. I’m not in front of a computer and I need to get some more pressing things completed before I go. If that’s not good enough, then do what you have to do.’

He’d called my bluff, but I remained silent for a moment so he knew I wasn’t backing down lightly. I could have called my contacts at the Met and got them to grab the file for me, got the thing printed out and delivered, but by taking a chance on Westerley I’d alerted him to my interest in Sam Wren; and if he logged on to the database and found another cop had been snooping around in Sam’s file, my source would be compromised.

‘Okay,’ I said, giving him my mobile number. ‘Call me back Friday.’