Vanished by Tim Weaver

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 hewas 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.

10
    At the top of the stairs, there were three doors. The first opened up into a small, smartly decorated bathroom, all black slate tiles and chrome fixtures. Adjacent to that was a spare room that probably looked the same the day the two of them moved in: plain cream walls, curtain poles without any curtains attached, no furniture except for a desk and a leather chair, and a PC. The third was their bedroom. It was small but unusual: the ceiling was slightly slanted, dropping down the closer to the window it got, and a series of shelves had been built into a V-shaped alcove on the far wall. The room looked out over angled red roofs to a residents-only park, gated and locked, and dominated by huge oak trees. It was hot and stuffy: the window was closed, and sunlight was streaming in across the bed.
    All of Sam’s clothes were still in his wardrobe, but everything he’d once owned was a mess: shoes were piled up at the bottom, clothes were half on hangers. Julia had left it exactly as it was; all she’d done was close the doors and seal it off from the world. I turned to his bedside table. Inside one of the drawers were four different novels by four different authors, each with a