Vanished Read Free Page B

the day we were talking about.’
    ‘I wasn’t worried about the money,’ I said.
    But she just nodded.
    ‘How long were you unemployed?’
    ‘Almost eleven months.’
    ‘So you started working again early this year – January time?’
    ‘January the sixteenth.’
    Thirty-one days after her husband disappeared. I wondered, for a moment, how that must have felt: starting a new career, a new part of your life, while the biggest part of your old one had vanished into thin air.
    ‘How did you both cope financially during the time you were out of work?’
    She shrugged. ‘Sam’s bonus helped buy that place, but we’d still been lumbered with a massive mortgage, even by London standards. Suddenly we were in a situation where his wages had been frozen, he wasn’t bringing home anything extra and I wasn’t bringing home anything at all. You can cut out the restaurants and the clothes and the weekends away, but you can’t do without your home. Defaulting on our mortgage was the thing that worried us the most.’
    ‘What about now?’
    She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Can you pay the mortgage on your own?’
    ‘Sam didn’t take any money with him the day he disappeared, and he hasn’t taken any out since. So my rainy-day fund will last me another three or four months.’
    ‘And after that?’
    A humourless smile. ‘Well, I guess I’ve just got to hope you find him.’
    If she thought finding her husband would solve all their problems, she was going to be disappointed. If he’d gone for a reason, he’d purposefully removed himself from his marriage, his job and his life. There was noinstant fix. If I found him, if he was even alive, things would never be the same as they were before.
    I changed direction. ‘So, his commute was Gloucester Road to Westminster and then change to the Jubilee? Or did he get the DLR from Tower Hill?’
    ‘He changed at Westminster.’
    ‘The Circle or District?’
    ‘Circle.’
    ‘He never got the District?’
    ‘Rarely.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘One of the reasons he left HSBC was because he didn’t really like the guys he was working with there. It wasn’t any massive conflict of interest, more that Sam just couldn’t take to them, and the way they worked. You know how you meet some people in life who, from minute one, you just know you aren’t going to see eye to eye with?’
    I nodded.
    ‘That’s why he started looking for a way out of there, and that’s why he ended up moving to JPM to work with his friend from university.’ She looked at me, and could see the question in my face:
Yeah, but why did he never get the District line?
‘Three of them lived in Wimbledon,’ she said.
    ‘So they used to get the District line.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘But the chances of them bumping into each other must have been minimal.’
    She shrugged. ‘Sam got into a routine with the Circle.’
    ‘Do you think these guys had anything to do with Sam’s disappearance?’
    She shook her head: absolute certainty. ‘No. It wasn’tanything serious. They just rubbed each other up the wrong way and it started making Sam unhappy.’
    I noted that down. ‘When did you report him missing?’
    ‘The evening of 16 December. He never came home, I couldn’t get him on his mobile, and his boss had left a message on our answerphone wondering where he was.’
    ‘He hadn’t turned up for work at all?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You went to the police?’
    ‘Yes. They were pretty thorough: wanted to know about his friends, relatives, his medical history, his financial details. They came to look around the house too, and even took away his toothbrush to get a DNA sample. When I told them that he hadn’t turned up to work, the officer said he’d check the CCTV footage from the stations too.’
    ‘But he didn’t find anything?’
    ‘No. He called and said they were in the process of requisitioning the CCTV footage from the Tube. A couple of weeks passed and I heard nothing. So, I chased him up and he