bookmark about halfway in. In the next drawer down was a shoebox full of gimmicky boy toys: corkscrews, alarm clocks, beer mats, battery-powered lumps of plastic that looked like they’dcome from an expensive Christmas cracker. She’d called him spontaneous – but, in missing persons, spontaneity meant you didn’t place a lot of importance on routine. It meant you were impulsive, moved around, started things but didn’t finish them. Four half-finished books also suggested he was finding it difficult to concentrate.
Sam wasn’t a creature of habit, and that would immediately make him harder to find. People who thrived on routine left a footprint: the same route in and out, the same stop-off’s along the way. It seemed likely he’d thought about disappearing in advance, because you didn’t just walk away from a marriage, a home and a job on a whim. But I doubted he’d made the decision to actually follow through with it until he got up on the morning of 16 December. There were big question marks, though: why didn’t he take any money with him? Why was he working so late for no obvious reward? And how did he exit a train without being caught on film?
Underneath the bed were some empty suitcases, a box of dusty LPs and a pile of photo albums. I pulled the albums out and started to go through them. They were the trips abroad Julia had mentioned: New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Prague. Not a beach in sight. City breaks would have suited Sam’s working life as they’d mean less time out of the office. They probably also suited the type of person he was. Seven days on a sunlounger would have driven him insane.
Sliding the albums back under the bed, I did a last circuit – going over everything again – and then made my way across the landing to the spare room. Thankfully, it was cooler. Sam’s PC was Alienware, built for gaming, andon top of the hard drive were a pile of games. I sat down and booted it up.
On the desktop was a folder, created three months before, where Julia had placed all of Sam’s files. Word docs, spreadsheets, gaming software and a couple of illegally downloaded films. I fired up the web browser and started going through the history. Most of the recent pages shared a similar theme: my cases. A tabloid account of one I’d had the October before showed a picture of me emerging from my house:
He’s a private investigator who doesn’t waste his time trying to trap cheating spouses and get to the bottom of insurance scams. Instead, publicity-shy Raker is an action man who has been labelled ‘Mindhunter’ for his ability to track down some of the country’s most vicious criminals.
It was a complete lie. No one had ever called me that or was ever likely to, but I understood why Julia Wren needed to believe it.
As I continued to move through the internet history, there was a jump of three months, presumably between the first time Julia had started searching for someone to help find Sam, and the last time Sam had used the computer. He’d custom-set his internet history so that it remembered the last 350 pages, regardless of how far back they were logged. The date of Sam’s last session was 11.12 p.m. on 15 December – the night before he vanished – and the last site he’d been to was an Arsenal fan forum. Not exactly indicative of a man contemplating his disappearance – if he was even contemplating it in thefirst place. There was always, in the background, the possibility that something else had happened to him. An accident. A desperate decision. Something worse than both. No evidence supported those theories, and nothing so far backed them up. But, as I scanned the rest of the links in his internet history, the idea didn’t entirely fade.
11
Once I was back home, I returned to the CCTV footage. This time, rather than watch it in Quicktime, I opened the Gloucester Road video in a custom-built film-editing suite Spike had passed on to me during one of my first
Sam wasn’t a creature of habit, and that would immediately make him harder to find. People who thrived on routine left a footprint: the same route in and out, the same stop-off’s along the way. It seemed likely he’d thought about disappearing in advance, because you didn’t just walk away from a marriage, a home and a job on a whim. But I doubted he’d made the decision to actually follow through with it until he got up on the morning of 16 December. There were big question marks, though: why didn’t he take any money with him? Why was he working so late for no obvious reward? And how did he exit a train without being caught on film?
Underneath the bed were some empty suitcases, a box of dusty LPs and a pile of photo albums. I pulled the albums out and started to go through them. They were the trips abroad Julia had mentioned: New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Prague. Not a beach in sight. City breaks would have suited Sam’s working life as they’d mean less time out of the office. They probably also suited the type of person he was. Seven days on a sunlounger would have driven him insane.
Sliding the albums back under the bed, I did a last circuit – going over everything again – and then made my way across the landing to the spare room. Thankfully, it was cooler. Sam’s PC was Alienware, built for gaming, andon top of the hard drive were a pile of games. I sat down and booted it up.
On the desktop was a folder, created three months before, where Julia had placed all of Sam’s files. Word docs, spreadsheets, gaming software and a couple of illegally downloaded films. I fired up the web browser and started going through the history. Most of the recent pages shared a similar theme: my cases. A tabloid account of one I’d had the October before showed a picture of me emerging from my house:
He’s a private investigator who doesn’t waste his time trying to trap cheating spouses and get to the bottom of insurance scams. Instead, publicity-shy Raker is an action man who has been labelled ‘Mindhunter’ for his ability to track down some of the country’s most vicious criminals.
It was a complete lie. No one had ever called me that or was ever likely to, but I understood why Julia Wren needed to believe it.
As I continued to move through the internet history, there was a jump of three months, presumably between the first time Julia had started searching for someone to help find Sam, and the last time Sam had used the computer. He’d custom-set his internet history so that it remembered the last 350 pages, regardless of how far back they were logged. The date of Sam’s last session was 11.12 p.m. on 15 December – the night before he vanished – and the last site he’d been to was an Arsenal fan forum. Not exactly indicative of a man contemplating his disappearance – if he was even contemplating it in thefirst place. There was always, in the background, the possibility that something else had happened to him. An accident. A desperate decision. Something worse than both. No evidence supported those theories, and nothing so far backed them up. But, as I scanned the rest of the links in his internet history, the idea didn’t entirely fade.
11
Once I was back home, I returned to the CCTV footage. This time, rather than watch it in Quicktime, I opened the Gloucester Road video in a custom-built film-editing suite Spike had passed on to me during one of my first
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