16
Spike texted to tell me he’d emailed through Sam’s financial history and phone records, so, back home, I made myself a sandwich, then sat down and booted up the computer. There were two PDFs waiting for me.
The first one took in everything he’d ever paid into or set up: bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, ISAs, healthcare, insurance policies, pensions and student loans. A man’s adult life reduced to twenty-five pages. There weren’t many surprises, but there was a more detailed breakdown of the couple’s life and health insurance, and a year’s worth of statements from both bank accounts.
Sudden, unexplained changes in insurance policies are one of the warning signs in the moments before a person goes missing, but the Wrens’ policies seemed pretty standard, and the premium had remained consistent for the last three years. The biggest concern, as Julia had outlined the day before, was their mortgage: they had just shy of £600,000 to pay back; massive by any standard.
I moved on to the bank statements.
The first set was for the Wrens’ joint account. Before June 2011, they’d never been in the red. Then Julia’s redundancy caught up with them. Suddenly they were struggling to make ends meet every month. The patterns of their life which had marked out the first three months of 2011 – the restaurants they ate in, the cinemas they went to, the places they went on weekends – began to dry up, and soon the only constant was the lack of those things. By autumn 2011, they hardly seemed to go out at all.
The second set of bank statements was for Sam’s own personal account, which had little activity, and none after the day he disappeared until it was closed on 3 April 2012. I flipped back through my notes to the discussion I’d had with Julia about their finances. Halfway down I’d written, ‘Julia had account closed and money transferred to joint account on 3 April this year.’ It must have been painful for her: the moment she finally accepted he was gone.
Sam’s mobile was registered to Investment International but doubled up as a personal phone. In the second PDF, Spike had secured names and addresses for every incoming and outgoing number. During the week, most of the calls were to other businesses, or to clients, although there was at least one call a day made to Julia, a text or a call to his brother Robert, and more irregular calls to friends of his. The one he called most often was a guy called Iain Penny, but there were other repeats – David Werr, Abigail Camara, Esther Wilson, Ursula Gray – and when I cross-checked them with the list Julia had given me, I saw they were Investment International employees. On weekends, business-related calls were stripped out, leaving Julia, Robert Wren, Iain Penny – who, judging by the number of texts that had passed between them, was a good friend as well as a work colleague – and a few others: a cousin in Edinburgh, an aunt and uncle in Kent, a few to his boss, a man called Ross McGregor.
The document was split into two sections: twelve months of records for the period beginning 1 January 2011 and running through to the day Sam went missing on 16 December; then, secondly, the six months to 1 June this year. After 16 December there wasn’t a single call made from the phone by Sam, but a lot of people had tried to call him: Julia, his brother, Ross McGregor, friends. There was a call from a number at the Met too, which was presumably PC Brian Westerley, who had opened the file on Sam.
Then I noticed something.
Cross-checking the phone records with Julia’s list for a second time, I realized I’d made a small oversight: Ursula Gray. Her calls came during the same periods of time as the other people Sam worked with – between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays – but while Ross McGregor, David Werr, Abigail Camara, Esther Wilson and Iain Penny were all down on Julia’s list of names as work colleagues of Sam, Ursula Gray wasn’t.
She wasn’t on the list at all.
Which meant Julia didn’t know anything about her.
In the period between 7 January and 2 September 2011, Sam and Ursula Gray had had 97 telephone conversations with each other, and sent 186 texts. After 2 September, contact dropped off dramatically: 4 calls and 10 texts in September, half that in October and none at all in November and December.
Straight away, my thoughts turned back to the conversation I’d had with Julia the day before.
Did you think he might have been seeing someone else?
Because he was working so many hours?
Right.
I really don’t think so.
You never had any reason to suspect him?
No.
You didn’t entertain the possibility?
I thought about it a lot at the start. I checked his email, checked his phone, but Sam just … For a man, he didn’t have much of a sex drive.
I wrote down Ursula Gray’s name and address.
Julia seemed unconvinced by the idea of Sam cheating on her, though I wondered how much was belief and how much was denial. In reality, nothing in the phone records backed her up. And, sooner or later, it seemed likely she’d have to face the truth about her husband: that he’d lied to her – and, worse, that the man she thought she knew, she didn’t really know at all.