Vanished

sacrifices if you’re doing it with someone else.’

‘So not telling me about the fact he was having an affair for the best part of a year would do what exactly? Stop me from bringing him back so he can pay the mortgage?’

She frowned. Hurt. To her, it felt like she was bleeding out and all I was doing was picking and prising at the wound. I realized I was just offloading on her now, letting the frustration out, but it was difficult not to. I was sick of the lies.

‘You know Robert has offered to help you out?’

‘He offered to help Sam out.’

‘He said you didn’t have to worry about the mortgage.’

‘Did he?’

‘You don’t believe him?’

She smiled, but there was nothing in it but sadness and humiliation. ‘How exactly do you ask someone for ?3,000 a month for an indefinite period?’

‘He’s family.’

‘He’s Sam’s family.’

I didn’t bother responding. If she didn’t want to end up homeless, she was going to have to find a way of swallowing her pride.

‘How did you find out?’

This time there was no movement in her face, no bunched muscles or lack of eye contact. No hidden half- truths. ‘He left his Facebook up one Saturday while he popped to the shops.’ She stopped. I’d checked Sam’s Facebook on the first day and the messages hadn’t been there. He’d deleted them all. ‘I saw she’d mailed him and my curiosity got the better of me. She was flirty and intelligent, and men like those things. Even Sam.’

She meant, Even Sam who never wanted sex. Except he did want sex. He thought he wanted it with Ursula because he thought Ursula might be willing to experiment with him. But then even that wasn’t enough.

‘What did the messages say?’

A jealous twist to her face, and she tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear. ‘She didn’t recount what they did, but the suggestion was there, barely even hidden.’

‘Any specifics?’

‘In one of the emails she told him she couldn’t stop thinking about him.’

‘Had he responded to her?’

‘No.’

‘Not at all?’

‘Not that I could find.’

That made sense: Julia found out about Sam and Ursula in August. By then, Sam was already trying to kill off the relationship. By mid October it was all over.

‘Did you confront him about it?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

She looked at me as if she’d spotted something unspoken in my question. ‘Do you think I haven’t got any pride – is that it?’

‘Don’t turn this around.’

‘It would have been the easy thing to have forgotten about him. Easier than lying to you. But sometimes you’ve got to be realistic.’

‘Realistic?’

‘I couldn’t afford to be on my own, and Sam …’

‘Sam what?’

She took a deep breath and made minute adjustments to the papers on the table in front of her. ‘I think Sam was doing something much worse.’

‘Like what?’

‘I think he may have been involved with someone else.’

‘Other than Ursula Gray?’

‘Yes.’

I sat back in my chair, hands wrapped around the warmth of the coffee cup. ‘Who would he be involved with?’ I asked, but then realized she wasn’t talking about another affair. She was talking about Adrian Wellis.

She pursed her lips, as if this was the bit she liked least. ‘One Sunday, just before he disappeared, I got home early from having lunch with a couple of friends. I called out to him three or four times but he never heard me. Never heard me come up the stairs either. When I got to the top, the bedroom door was open and he was sitting on the edge of the bed with this big bag in his lap, talking to someone on the phone.’

‘Who was he talking to?’

‘I don’t know. But, whoever it was, Sam kept saying to them, “I can’t invest a bag full of dirty money. You need to transfer it legitimately.” He just kept repeating it, over and over, getting angrier and angrier. But eventually he seemed to get shouted down.’

‘The bag was full of money?’

She glanced at me. ‘Yes. Full of it.’

It was Wellis’s money. Sam had seen a hole in Wellis’s finances, found out who he was, and – all the way up until the end – Wellis took revenge by turning the screw. Wellis had his boot on Sam’s throat and wouldn’t let go.

‘Did you ask him where he got the money?’

‘No. I just stood there and watched him.’

‘Why?’

She paused. ‘After the call ended, he started crying.’

‘So you never said anything to him?’

‘No. I was scared. I suppose that was another reason I didn’t say anything to you to start with; why I kept some of these things to myself. He was obviously involved in something bad. I was scared about what might happen if it got out that I knew. And …’ She paused. ‘And the other thing was, I’d never seen him cry before; not once in all the time we were together. So I knew he was hurting.’ She stopped again, and I understood the subtext: a part of her wanted him to hurt, for all that he’d done to her. ‘To me, it didn’t really matter if it was hurt over wherever the money had come from, or hurt over the affair, or both, because I realized as long as I didn’t say anything, as long as I didn’t tell him what I knew, that regret, that pain, it wouldn’t go away.’

‘He’d have to live with it.’

She nodded. ‘I don’t hate him, I don’t wish harm on him, but I think he got off a little easy. He owes me. That’s why I want you to find him.’

I pushed my coffee cup aside. There was no telling how much damage this had done. Her senseless lies – spun out from a mix of fear, financial doubt and a misguided desire for revenge – were as harmful as they were aimless. ‘What if he’s dead?’

A movement in her eyes, like a flame dying out. She understood what I meant: what if the time you’ve wasted has cost you? ‘I hope he’s not.’

‘But if he is?’

She had a look on her face now that I’d most often seen in the grieving: all greyness and distance, like there wasn’t enough thread in the world to stitch her life back together. Her loss was incomplete. A circle that didn’t join. Until there was a body, until there was a reason, there was no closure. It was the heart of missing persons.

‘I want to know where he went,’ she said finally.

As I watched the faint trace of tears in her eyes, the grief, the anger, I decided not to tell her about who Sam really was. That time would come. But it wasn’t now.

Eventually, she looked up. ‘Will you find him for me?’

‘Let’s be really clear on something first. You holding back all this information because you think it will somehow affect the way I do my job – it just means it takes longer to find him, and you have to pay me more