Vanished

11

Once I was back home, I returned to the CCTV footage. This time, rather than watch it in Quicktime, I opened the Gloucester Road video in a custom-built film-editing suite Spike had passed on to me during one of my first cases. In that one I’d been trying to spot a woman entering her place of work in some footage I’d shot, but she’d been so far away all I could see was a vague blur. The software, built by Spike, allowed me to select a portion of the video and zoom in for a closer look. The quality of the recording didn’t become better – in fact, it became much worse, which was the reason I didn’t use it a lot – but, once you’d pinpointed the person you wanted to track, it allowed you to follow them more easily, even if all they were at that kind of magnification was a blur of pixels.

I selected the area around Sam and then used the zoom function, stopping about 50 per cent of the way in. The quality of the recording deteriorated, and his features became less defined, but by cutting out the noise around him – the other people, the detail of the Tube station – I was able to follow him on to the train before he disappeared from view. This was the point at which I’d lost him the first time. Now, though, the zoom function allowed me to identify a thin red tag on his briefcase – little more than eight or nine pixels in length – and a couple of seconds after vanishing, the briefcase, along with the red tag, reappeared: Sam was standing midway inside the carriage, hidden behind a sea of legs.

But he was there.

The briefcase and his legs were all that was visible, which was why I’d missed it the first time: his trousers were the same colour as 95 per cent of those around him, and without the red tag it would have been impossible to tell which briefcase belonged to him. I inched the video on a frame and the doors started to close. At the very last minute another commuter made a dive for the doors and managed to sneak on, and after that Sam finally did disappear from view: his legs, his briefcase, any indication of where he was in the carriage. My impressions from the first watch were right: there was no way he could have moved from where he was. There were too many people around him, too much traffic either side to transfer between carriages, which meant, when he moved between stations on the Circle line, he would be in the same place. And I’d have the red tag.

At South Kensington and Sloane Square I struggled to make him out, but when the train pulled into Victoria I picked up the briefcase again. He’d shifted position, closer to the doors. He was half turned, luckily with the red tag facing out towards the camera, but he was definitely still on the train, standing still as people got off and on around him.

I moved on to St James’s Park.

And that was when he disappeared.

The carriage was still packed, so – again – it was unlikely he could have swapped to the ones either side of his, but I couldn’t see the tag, or anything recognizable as Sam. I moved to Westminster: played it and replayed it, magnifying the open doors of the carriage further with the zoom function. Nothing. At Westminster there was more going on – a bigger crowd, Tube staff funnelling protesters, then the fight – and, at one point, Sam’s carriage even emptied a little as people stepped out to see what was going on further up the platform. That was the point at which he should have been visible, even without the zoom on.

But I couldn’t see him anywhere.

I paused it and moved between passengers: those at the doors of the carriage looking out at the fight, and then the clumps of protesters stepping around them. Beyond that, a few remained inside. A man in a suit, his face buried in a book. Another demonstrator in a red shirt with checked sleeves, reaching down to pick up a protest sign. A woman with headphones on, blissfully unaware of everything. Through the scratched, reflective glass of the carriage, it was difficult to make out their faces, but I knew instantly neither of the men left behind were Sam. Both of them were taller, weightier and older, dressed differently with different colour hair. And as the footage moved on, the second man – the protester – left the carriage anyway, sign hoisted up, moving quickly to catch up with the others.

Somewhere, somehow, I’d managed to lose Sam.

As I got to Hammersmith for the second time with no further sign of Sam, the house was starting to get dark. I glanced at the clock: 9.30. I was fried. I closed the footage and shut down the Mac, then showered. As the cool water ran down my face, my mind rolled back once again to what I’d seen, and then over everything Julia Wren had said earlier. I didn’t need to have seen him on the footage to move things on: I already had Sam’s work, his brother and the obvious loss of weight. The case was already shifting, and would do so with or without the recording. But the video was a useful starting point and, in an odd way, a symbolic one; a means of zeroing in on Sam’s physical location that day, and – in the moment he exited the train, wherever that might have been – a way to get inside his head.

By choosing a station to leave at, he would have given me a compass bearing for that area of the city, and while it might not have led me to him, it would have given me an advantage. But most of all it would have helped erase the impossible: that a man really could step on to a train and then – three stops later – disappear into thin air.