33
Outside Robert Wren’s offices, the day was baking hot and tourists were everywhere. I returned to the car, parked under cover five minutes’ walk away and, in the shade, realized I’d been awake for thirty hours. I could feel myself drift, the pull of sleep strong and comforting. And then, like an alarm clock going off, my phone burst into life. It was a central London number – but not one I recognized.
‘David Raker.’
‘Mr Raker, it’s PC Brian Westerley here.’
Westerley had promised to call me back today – Friday – and he’d followed through on that promise, despite any misgivings he may have had. That marked him out as a straight arrow; someone who was true to his word and wouldn’t fall back on his commitments. He may not have been the greatest cop in the world – his sloppy work on Sam’s case suggested as much – but if he had an old-fashioned attitude towards responsibility, he may still have some useful insight.
‘PC Westerley – thanks for calling me back.’
‘Well, I didn’t have much choice, did I?’
I let him have his moment. ‘Did you get a chance to pull the file?’
‘Yes. I don’t know what you expect to find, though.’
‘Maybe nothing,’ I said. ‘Or maybe you have some insight I hadn’t considered or wasn’t able to find.’ It was a crude tactic but the uniforms at the bottom of the food chain usually spent half their existence wiping boot prints off their faces.
‘Okay,’ he said. There was already a change in his tone, suggesting my tactic had worked. ‘What do you want to know?’
We started talking about Sam, about the day he disappeared and about the file Westerley had opened on him. He said he’d initially spoken to Julia at the station on Earls Court Road, but had followed it up with a visit to the Wrens’ home.
‘Julia said you pulled the footage from the Tube as well.’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you able to locate Sam?’
I heard him leaf through a couple of pages. He was probably trying to get back up to speed on the fly. It didn’t really matter, though. If he’d managed to locate Sam, spotted where he got off the train, Julia wouldn’t have hired me to find him. ‘He got on the Tube,’ Westerley said eventually, sounding like he was reading directly from his own report, ‘and he didn’t get off again.’
Thanks for the info. ‘You didn’t see him get off?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘How far did you follow the footage?’
‘All around the Circle line until it terminated at Hammersmith.’
‘It didn’t bother you that you couldn’t find him?’
He muttered something I couldn’t make out, but it was obvious he didn’t like this line of questioning. It made him look amateurish, and if he felt like this was a character assassination, he’d close up. I moved things on.
‘What background did you do on Sam?’
‘Background?’
‘Relationships? Finances? Work?’
A pause. ‘I looked into it,’ he said, but it was an obvious lie. If he’d been twenty years younger, he might have seen it as a challenge. But not now. Now he prioritized his cases according to how difficult they were, and how much of it would blow back at him if it didn’t get put to bed. There wouldn’t be a lot of fallout from Sam Wren’s disappearance because he didn’t tick any of the boxes: he wasn’t underage, he wasn’t female, he didn’t suffer from mental health problems and he wasn’t a danger to the public.
‘Did you recover any personal possessions?’ I asked.
‘Like?’
‘Well, he had a briefcase with him the day he disappeared, for one.’
‘I put in a call to the Tube’s lost property department to see if there was anything with Wren’s name on it. But that was a dead end.’
‘But you took his toothbrush away, right?’
‘Right. We always try to do that in missing persons. You never know when it may come in useful. We got some fingerprint lifts and a DNA sample from the brush.’
‘Did either of those lead anywhere?’
‘Nowhere new.’
That stopped me. ‘What do you mean, “new”?’
‘We obviously had his details on file from that incident twenty months back. He was never charged with anything, but it’s just something we do.’
‘What incident?’
‘That fight he was involved in.’
‘Fight?’
‘Oh, I thought you’d know this.’
I’d done a basic background check on Sam the day after Julia had first approached me to see if he had any kind of record. He didn’t. Julia hadn’t mentioned anything about a fight either, which meant one of two things: she’d lied to me, or at least chosen not to say anything – or, more likely, it was so minor, she hadn’t thought to bring it up.
‘What was the fight about?’ I asked.
‘Uh …’ I heard Westerley turn a couple of pages. ‘Two men started at each other’s throats at the entrance to Gloucester Road Tube station at about 7.45 a.m. on the morning of 14 October 2010. One of them, a Simon Mbebeni, claimed the other, Robert Stonehouse, racially abused him at the ticket machine. Stonehouse had a mate with him, James Quinn. Quinn’s been done for public order offences before and, in the subsequent interviews, admitted to having something of a problem with the UK’s immigration policy, so who knows who really instigated it? Maybe Stonehouse, maybe Quinn, but Stonehouse admitted telling Mbebeni’ – more pages being turned – ‘ “You can’t get away with that here, you f*cking monkey” after Mbebeni appeared to jump the queue. He also admitted to throwing the first punch and breaking Mbebeni’s nose in the process, but only after Mbebeni had pushed him into the ticket machine.’
‘So where does Sam come in?’
‘He entered the station about ten seconds after it all kicked off, and tried to help Underground staff break it up. He had to contend with Quinn, Quinn got aggressive and attacked Mr Wren. Mr Wren fought back and punched Quinn in the throat, probably not intentionally, but Quinn blacked out and got rushed to hospital. It looked like Mr Wren was going to be charged, but his solicitor eventually got the charges dropped.’
‘What did the others get?’
‘Stonehouse got a year, Quinn six months and Mbebeni got a suspended sentence, a fine and two hundred hours’ community service. One of the London Underground employees was also cautioned – CCTV footage showed him laying into Stonehouse big style.’
‘Who was the employee?’
‘Uh, his name was …’ A pause as he searched for it. ‘Duncan Pell.’
The guy in the booth I’d talked to at Gloucester Road the day before. Interesting. He’d been weird when I’d tried to ask him questions: defensive, introverted, agitated. Something didn’t sit right then, and it sat even less comfortably now. If he had the capacity to put his fist through someone’s face, plainly he was no shrinking violet.
‘Pell got a caution and a £500 fine,’ Westerley went on, ‘but his representative argued – successfully – that he was trying to protect the public from Stonehouse and Quinn, so Pell got to keep his job and didn’t have to do community service. I have to say, it probably helped that Quinn was a massive racist, and that Stonehouse threw the first punch at Pell. It’s much easier to get people on your side when you don’t start the fight and when one of the men you’re up against thinks Hitler was an okay kind of guy.’
‘What do we know about Pell?’
‘Know about him?’
‘What’s his background?’
More pages being turned.
‘Ex-army. He enlisted at sixteen, worked his way up to lieutenant, left at thirty-one after two years in Afghanistan. Prior to that, he’d been in Bosnia. So basically perfect preparation for working on London Underground.’ He chuckled to himself.
I thanked him and hung up. The clock was showing 11.49. My mind returned to the very start of the case; to Sam getting on the Tube.
I dialled Ewan Tasker’s number.
‘Raker.’
‘How you doing, Task?’
‘Yeah, good. You?’
‘Tired.’
‘What, you been up bumping and grinding with the missus all night?’
I smiled. ‘You’ve got a one-track mind.’
‘It’s the only action I get at my age.’
‘Listen, I need another favour from you. Last one, I promise.’
‘That’s what you always say.’
‘I need some more CCTV footage.’
‘From when?’
‘Same day, 16 December, but I need everything – literally, everything – you can lay your hands on. Ticket halls, walkways, escalators, elevators, everything.’
‘Gloucester Road only?’
I thought about it. On the footage I had, Sam disappeared between Victoria and St James’s Park. ‘Gloucester Road through to, say, Westminster, just to be on the safe side.’
‘You got it.’
‘One other thing.’
‘Here we go.’
‘Same deal,’ I said. ‘But Gloucester Road on 14 October 2010.’
‘Just Gloucester Road?’
‘Just Gloucester Road.’
‘October the …?’
‘Fourteenth.’
‘That’s nineteen, twenty months back.’
‘Right.’
‘What are you going back that far for?’
‘I’m going to watch a fight.’