9
The Wrens lived on a narrow street, permit parking on one side, houses on the other. Every home was identical but attractive: bricked on the ground floor, plastered and painted cream on the first. Doors sat at the bottom of two downward steps, and the windows housed rectangular flower baskets, the trays full of pink geraniums. As I drove up to Julia’s place, the door opened and she came up the steps holding a key fob, a remote control attached. I bumped up on to the pavement and buzzed down my window.
‘Here.’ She handed me the remote. ‘There’s underground parking just around the corner at the end of the road. Head left and you’re there.’
When I returned to the house, the door was ajar. I stepped through and pushed it shut behind me. Immediately inside was a long hallway, floored in laminate. The kitchen was directly in front and Julia was standing at one of the counters, pouring water into a kettle. Tucked into an alcove next to the kitchen was a corkscrew staircase.
As I moved towards the kitchen, I eyed the other rooms off the hallway: a bathroom, a bedroom doubling up as a graveyard for cardboard boxes, and a living room. In the living room were hundreds of books in a bookcase, surround sound, a TV, an expensive Blu-Ray player, a Sky decoder, and a big leather sofa. A coffee table sat in the centre, loaded with art books as big as slabs of concrete, and a bowl of fresh fruit. I could see photos of Sam too, squared into a pile.
‘Tea or coffee, David?’
She brought out a tin of instant. I preferred my coffee through a percolator, but I didn’t want to offend her on the first day. ‘Coffee, thanks. Black, no sugar.’
We moved through to the living room and sat on either end of the sofa. She had made herself some kind of fruit tea; it smelt tangy and sweet. She placed it down next to the photos, and pushed them across the coffee table towards me. ‘That’s the last five years of Sam’s life,’ she said, eyes fixed on the top picture, where her husband was standing, wine glass raised, black suit buttoned up, in a hospitality suite at the Emirates Stadium. Immediately I could see a physical difference in him: bigger around the face, better-colour skin.
‘When was this taken?’ I said.
She ripped her eyes away. ‘March last year.’
We talked for a while about Sam, about the kind of person he was, the things he liked doing, the places they’d been together. She’d told me about a time, when they first got together, that he’d been sent on a business trip to Barcelona and – on the quiet – had paid for her to come too. ‘He was very spontaneous like that,’ she said, and then the smile slipped away, as if she realized how prescient that was. After all, there was nothing more spontaneous than getting up one day and not bothering to tell your wife you were leaving.
I listened some more as she continued building a picture of their marriage. They both got on. They liked the same things. They’d talked excitedly about having kids. But the whole time she was holding back. There was a reservation to her; moments where she stopped herself before she wandered into territory she couldn’t back out of. The previous night I’d wondered if she was timid or just nervous, but as she’d started to warm up, I realized it wasn’t timidity – and it might not have been nerves either. There was a secret sitting between us, and we both knew it.
‘Let me ask you something,’ I said, placing down the photograph I’d taken from her the night before. ‘Is there a reason Sam lost a ton of weight before he disappeared?’
She studied me, surprise in her face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You must have noticed that between March and December last year he’d lost a lot of weight.’
Her eyes flicked between the pictures. ‘I never …’ She paused again. She was about to say she’d never realized. But it would have been a lie. She had realized. She’d noted the changes in his face; the changes in his body. She’d seen everything. ‘Financially, we were stretched,’ she said eventually.
‘That’s why he lost weight?’
She looked up from the pictures. ‘This house cost us £850,000, and our mortgage was £3,000 a month. That was more than my entire wage packet, every month. Sam was on £78,000 a year basic, which meant he was bringing home just over £4,000 a month. Maybe that sounds like a lot, but once you start chipping away at it with the mortgage, council tax, gas, electricity, water, insurance policies for both of us, food for both of us, phone bills, even things like Oyster cards for both of us, it starts to disappear fast. And it only got worse after I lost my job.’
In her face I could see the financial burden had weighed heavily on them both, but I expected the bitterness she felt at him leaving her on her own weighed even heavier. I saw the logic in everything she was saying; knew how a big mortgage and big bills could grind you down and spit you out, especially if you were down to one wage and that wage couldn’t cover everything you needed it to. But I had become good at reading people and, when I looked at Julia Wren, it was obvious there was more to it than that.
I decided to play hardball. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
She stared at me, eyes locked on mine, but I knew I was right. If I’d been wrong, she would have been indignant; instead there seemed a kind of sad resignation to her, as if she felt I’d outwitted her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I wanted to tell you last night but I just …’ Another pause. She looked up. ‘I feel responsible. Guilty.’
‘About him losing weight or leaving?’
‘Both.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged. Another long silence. This time I could see her trying to put it all into words. ‘Our marriage was good. Great. That part wasn’t a lie. We’d been together seven years, married for four, and I can honestly count on the fingers of one hand the amount of serious fights we had. One, maybe two. And usually they resolved themselves pretty quickly. We just seemed to be on the same wavelength.’ She paused and laced her fingers together. ‘But in those last months, it became different. We started fighting. Niggly stuff at first, and always about his work. He just seemed to have become consumed by his job. I think he felt, because I wasn’t bringing anything in, and because his wages had been frozen and his bonuses phased out, he had to single-handedly find a replacement for the money we were missing out on.’
‘And how was he going to do that?’
‘Sam was one of those people who always felt like he needed to be doing more. He was his own harshest critic. If he wasn’t improving, going further, earning more, he saw it as some kind of failure. He hated standing still. So, the longer he went without the bonuses, the longer his wages remained frozen, the more it started to frustrate him, and the more hours he was clocking up while trying to put it right. That was when the niggly stuff started: I’d ask him what the point was of working long hours if he knew there wasn’t going to be a reward at the end of it.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘Nothing, really.’
‘He didn’t tell you why he was still working so hard?’
She shook her head. ‘I was living the life of a single woman, feeling him slip into bed at eleven, and back out again at six. Some weeks we probably weren’t saying more than a couple of words to each other. It wasn’t a marriage any more.’
‘And it was never like that before?’
‘No. I mean, he always worked hard. He did his fair share of late nights. But there was always a compromise. We’d get away at weekends, or he’d come home early one day to make up for working late on the others. But not in those last six months.’
‘He never talked to you about it? The exact reasons why he was working so late all the time, who his clients were, that kind of thing?’
‘No.’ She brought her tea towards her and held it below her chin. ‘He’d always talked to me before. I knew his clients by name, I knew who they worked for and what he thought of them, because he always came home and opened up. He’d laugh about them, talk about the jokes they’d shared, the things they’d discussed, the places they’d been for dinner. He’d share his day with me. But, at the end, when I asked about why he was working so hard all the time, he’d just fob me off.’
‘By saying what?’
‘He didn’t want to bring his work home.’ She looked at me. ‘That’s all he kept saying to me: “Leave work at work.” So, I tried to come at him from a different angle. I tried to bring it up at weekends, casually, when we had a little time together; when the office wasn’t open. But he just refused to discuss it.’
‘But he wasn’t bringing any more money home.’
‘No.’
‘So, do you think he was working harder and longer hours because it was just the type of person he was – the type you just described him as being – or because he had some other venture on the side?’
‘Oh, I’d say the first.’
‘Why?’
‘We had a joint account which I checked regularly when things began to change. There was no extra money coming in.’
None he let you know about, I thought. I took down some notes, and then realized there was no easy way to phrase the next question, even though it was an obvious place to head. ‘Did you think he might have been seeing someone else?’
For a moment she was taken aback, her eyes widening, her cheeks flushing, but she must have asked herself the same question. ‘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 …’ She stopped, shook her head, then glanced up at me. Her cheeks coloured a little. ‘For a man, he didn’t have much of a sex drive. I mean, most men, it’s all they ever think about, right? The men I was with before Sam, they were always angling for it. But Sam was never like that, right from before we were even married. We used to have sex a couple of times a week to start with, but then it dropped off after that. By the end, we weren’t doing it at all.’
I nodded and let her compose herself in the silence.
‘So why is it you felt responsible for him leaving?’
She shrugged. ‘We fought.’
‘Everybody fights.’
‘But these weren’t just fights. These were screaming matches. I wanted to know what was going on; why he was working so hard when he knew there was no chance of earning any more money. So I kept chipping away at him, but the more I tried to find out what was happening, the more angry he got, and the more we fought.’
I nodded, as if her reasoning were sound, but the reality was he wouldn’t have left because they were fighting. If you fought with your partner, you separated or moved on. You didn’t engineer your disappearance.
‘What about when you didn’t discuss his long hours?’
‘That was the weird thing: as long as we didn’t talk about it, as long as I didn’t try to find out what was going on, we got on brilliantly.’
‘How was he with friends and family?’
‘Exactly the same.’
‘No problems?’
‘Speak to Rob, his brother. See if he says anything different. Sam may have said something to him – you know, brother to brother – but somehow I doubt it.’
I changed tack. ‘He didn’t ever complain about feeling unwell?’
‘In what sense?’
‘In any sense.’ I nodded towards the last picture she’d taken of him, thin and pale. ‘I just want to be sure I’m not missing anything.’
She shook her head. ‘Sam didn’t get ill much. And when he did, he rarely let it affect him. He even went into work when he had shingles.’
‘Any favourite places you guys used to go to?’
She thought about it, but not for long. ‘Not really. At least, not the kind of place he might disappear to. We liked to holiday, but that all stopped after I lost my job.’
‘Did he owe any cash to anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Any problems with alcohol or drugs?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘Anyone he fell out with in those last six months?’
Again, she shook her head.
I’d been through the list of names she’d given me, and the two best angles seemed to be his brother and his work. Julia had painted a picture of a reliable, decent man, one not prone to big mood swings or changes in character. Yet something had altered. In his work, in how he dealt with his wife, he changed completely in the half-year before he vanished. He got secretive. Stressed. Lost weight. And, ultimately, whatever had been eating away at him was enough for him to leave one morning in the middle of December and never come home again.