A Disappearance

This was my (unsuccessful) entry into a recent ghost story competition.

“How’s the world of crime, Jim?”

Without waiting for an answer, Peter Bellingham beamed wholeheartedly at his brother-in-law, and handed him a glass of Scotch. The bottle was old and the measure exceedingly generous; he was fond of his sister’s husband and was in any case possessed of an open-handed and cheerful good nature.

The question was a professional one. James Donaldson was a London CID officer, not yet very senior, but already considered reliable and conscientious by his superiors. Occasionally relations and friends who read too many murder mysteries referred to him as a Scotland Yard man, and he did not always correct them.

“Well,” said Donaldson. “At the moment…” He faltered, and then tried again. “I can’t…look, are we talking in confidence?”

“Absolutely,” said Bellingham. “You know me.”

Donaldson hesitated.

“Do tell the tale,” said Bellingham. “I never see you nowadays. The kids are asleep, Jenny and Kate aren’t back until the morning, we certainly shan’t be overheard. I doubt there’s another house within a mile.”

Donaldson took a sip from the whisky – it really was excellent whisky, and not his first of the evening – and gazed at the fire in the grate, blazing up nicely. He looked round the room, with its exposed beams in the ceiling and the fine old furniture, and the ancient oak panelling.

“About a month ago I was given a missing persons case. They come up all the time. Runaway kids, mental illness, wives doing a bunk from violent husbands, people looking for a brand new life. We deal with everything. This was an odd one though. An investment banker, of all things. A successful fellow, made his firm millions over the years. Esterley his name was. Richard Esterley. Worked for Harcourt McGill. He had no close family. It was a friend who raised the alarm, a bloke by the name of Sanchez. He lived in the same building, a couple of floors down. Used to feed the fish when Esterley was overseas. He said he hadn’t seen him for days and was getting worried. Initially we treated it as low priority – an adult, no reason to suspect foul play, but – well, after a while it became clear that it was not a normal case.”

“Over the next couple of weeks, I spoke to a lot of people. All sorts. The basic shape of the thing was this. Everything was unremarkable until about mid-July, Monday the eighteenth. On that day Esterley showed up to work as normal. His closest friend at the office was a man called Wilson. He says that Esterley was acting completely normal until he, Wilson, mentioned a big story that had broken that morning. Maybe you remember? The Sandor affair. Big private investment firm went bust after the Fraud Squad arrested four senior executives. Esterley apparently took the news very badly. Wilson says he seemed like he’d taken a punch to the gut. Hardly said a word for the rest of the day.”

“The same night, Esterley was at home. We have Sanchez’s word for that. They drank beer and played video games. Esterley had bucked up a bit – Sanchez says they talked about sport and girls, mostly. About midnight, Esterley said he needed to do some work and Sanchez left, but as he was leaving, Esterley said something strange about having to go to a meeting. Sanchez thought this was damn odd, with it being so late, but assumed it was the beer speaking, especially as the man Esterley said he was meeting had a strange name. Apollo, or something.”

“The next day, Tuesday, it seems Esterley showed up to Harcourt as normal. Wilson says he seemed a lot more cheerful, much more in line with his usual manner. Joked with Wilson about his family – the man has five children! – flirted with a receptionist. Didn’t even mention Sandor. The whole day was perfectly ordinary, as was the whole of that week.”

Donaldson paused, and shifted in his seat. A log fell in the fireplace, making a sudden noise, and he noticed Bellingham start slightly.

“We now come to the Tuesday of the following week. The twenty-sixth. Esterley had trouble entering the Harcourt office at Canary Wharf. His security pass wouldn’t work. I had this from his boss, John Cooper, and from a security guard. They let him in, and had an IT bod come up to have a look at the pass. But then there was another problem. Esterley couldn’t log in to their secure intranet. Not on any PC, not on his work phone or his personal phone. Cooper says they tried all the usual fixes and tricks, but they couldn’t re-establish him on the system. I spoke to the IT chap myself, and he was adamant. There was no trace of Esterley on their system. It was like he’d never been there at all, he said. Which was ridiculous, of course, he’d worked for Harcourt for twelve years.”

“What did they do?”

“Well. Here the plot thickens. At first they had him try to access his email on a colleague’s computer. But no joy there either. Account not available and all that. User not found. Enter IT, again, to see what can be done. Not much, as it transpired. Esterley’s entire email account had vanished. They couldn’t even restore it from backups.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly that. I don’t understand all the mumbo-jumbo myself but the long and the short of it is that Harcourt keep backups of all their company email accounts on their own secure servers. Only, in this case they couldn’t find the data. Even the Head of IT became involved, but it couldn’t be done. Funnily enough, he used the same words as the tech who’d tried to reactivate Esterley’s intranet access. It was like he’d never been there at all.”

“The pass card was unfixable too, and every time they tried to create a new one for him the system refused. A few days later they discovered that all emails sent to Esterley’s address since about one a.m. that Tuesday had bounced back.”           

“What on earth did they do?”

“About the only thing they could do. Cooper told Esterley to take a few days’ leave while they tried to get to the bottom of it. They were worried, you know. Esterley was a star man, worth huge amounts of money to them. He managed some of their richest clients, and in that world the personal touch counts for a lot. But all of a sudden he had no access to contact details, correspondence history, account records, none of it.”

“Was it a cyber-attack?”

“That’s the only feasible explanation, isn’t it? But no evidence of one was ever found.”

“So that was when Esterley went missing?”

“Not quite. Sanchez saw him again, and so did – well, some other people. But I’ll come to them. Sanchez first. He ran into Esterley the next day, Wednesday twenty-seventh. Esterley was hanging around the front door of their block, trying to tailgate someone in. Naturally Sanchez asked why; had Esterley lost his keyfob? No, says our man, he had his fob, but it wasn’t working.”

“The two of them went upstairs, and Esterley went into his flat. After that, we have a gap. No-one seems to have spoken to Esterley for a couple of days. Sanchez saw him again on the Friday evening. I spoke to Sanchez personally, and his report of the meeting was both unsettling and, I am convinced, quite honest. He dropped in to make sure that all was well, aware of what had happened at Harcourt McGill. Well, our man Esterley was in a rare old state. He’d tried to shop online but his bank cards were being turned down. What was more, he couldn’t access his social media accounts or his personal email. He made Sanchez search for him on Twitter and Facebook, always with the same result. That account does not exist. He couldn’t start new accounts because he couldn’t use his email account. Sanchez says – and I have no reason to doubt him – that he sat with Esterley for more than an hour, trying to start a new personal email account, without success.”

At this point Bellingham was leaning forward, eyes wide and mouth gaping open. The glass of whisky on his elbow table had been entirely untouched for several minutes.

“Jim – are you telling me someone was systematically deleting every part of this man’s digital life?”

“I am, and I’m not,” replied Donaldson. “After I’d been handed the case, I talked to our specialists and asked if such a thing was possible. That is, whether a specific individual could be permanently erased from the internet, and from electronic entrance systems, in the way that Esterley seemed to have been. They said no, it was out of the question. They’d never heard of anything like it.”

“I bet they hadn’t.”

“Sanchez left Esterley about ten o’clock on that Friday. He had to leave then, to catch a train. This is where things took a very peculiar turn.”

Donaldson paused, running a single fingertip absentmindedly around the top of his glass.  

“No-one knows what happened over that long weekend. Sanchez came home from Scotland on the Monday and immediately went round. He’d been a bit worried, he said, leaving Esterley alone on the Friday night with everything that was happening. Well, when he went up to the flat, the door was ajar and there was no-one there. That was when he called us.”

“I won’t bore you with the details of a routine investigation. As I said, it wasn’t treated as a high priority at first – a grown adult, and a man to boot, with no reason to suspect violence or coercion. But when I’d begun to gather statements from Sanchez, and the Harcourt people, and once we realised that he’d taken literally nothing with him, I took it a bit more seriously.”

“All the same, no leads turned up until we had a call from a doctor – an accident and emergency specialist, from one of the big London hospitals. He’d seen on Twitter or something that Esterley was missing, and he was convinced that an unidentified patient he’d treated, and later admitted to one of their wards, on the night of Sunday thirty-first, had been Esterley. Seems this poor bloke had been found passed out in the street, with nasty head injuries and no ID on him, and an ambulance called.”

“That sounds promising.”

“It did sound promising. And when I spoke to him, we compared photos. He had some they’d taken of their mystery man, and it was Esterley all right. There was only one problem – when this doc saw him, both his legs were gone below the knee. Not recently, mind. They were stumps, like a surgeon would leave, and appeared to have healed long before. Now that threw me, I can tell you. Esterley was not an amputee. Later on, I checked with his colleagues and with Sanchez. I also tried to ask his GP about it. I’m sure by now you can guess what happened when the GP tried to access his records.”

Bellingham – who had by now lapsed into a most uncharacteristic uneasy silence – did indeed guess.  

“Esterley himself of course told the doctor that he was not an amputee, in no uncertain terms. He seemed terrified and baffled and angry, says the doctor, when he was told about having no lower legs, but the doc didn’t know what to think or what to say.”

“Having found out what ward he was taken to, I went up and had a conversation with the nurses. Oh yes, they said, they remembered the amputee all right – admitted after an accident, suspected concussion and contusions, identity unknown. Made quite an impact, it seems. Still devastated by the loss of his lower legs, in fact made quite a row about it when he emerged from sedation, even though they’d been gone for years by the look of the stumps. But what happened to him, I asked them. Where is he now?”

“It’s funny you should ask that, says one of the nurses. It was him that left in the middle of the night. You wouldn’t have thought it possible for a man with no feet. But he did a runner. A runner! She actually said that, Peter. I thought I must be going off my nut. A man with both legs amputated below the knee absconding from a hospital ward in the middle of the night…well, it’s against reason. It couldn’t happen.”

“But it did happen,” interjected Bellingham, with a distinct lack of conviction.

“It was Esterley’s second night in the hospital – Monday. He’d certainly gone by the following morning – his absence was noticed soon after six. I found the nurse who was on duty that night. She was at her station by the doors to the ward and swears blind that he didn’t pass her, but she also says she went to the ladies at least once.”

“Didn’t anyone else see him leave?”

“Not a soul. I asked the security people, and a few folks who’d been on the graveyard shift that night. It was as though he’d just – well, there wasn’t hide nor hair of the bloke.”

“What about CCTV?”

“I thought of that. Nothing doing. Not a sign of him on any of the cameras.”    

Donaldson’s face was creased with worry and confusion in a way that Bellingham had never seen before.

“Since then no-one has had any sight of him. I was about at my wits’ end. Kept thinking what the hell was I going to report to my Inspector. Then – well, then I spoke to another of the nurses. You should talk to the chaplain, she said. The RC one. He spent a long time with our mystery man. Great, I thought, no doubt he’ll tell me that Esterley was raptured or something.”

“At any rate, I sat down with this priest. He was a youngish guy, about our age. O’Gorman was his name. I liked him. Asked him to tell me what he’d talked about with Esterley, whether he could shed any light on the business of the legs. Or any of it, really.”

“What did he say?”

The policeman paused for a long time before beginning his answer. Bellingham felt suddenly that the stillness of the room was oppressive, that speech or sound must break in and rescue them from the smothering silence. And yet he dare not say anything at all; his brother-in-law seemed to be grappling with some unstated, unnameable difficulty.

“Esterley,” he began at last, “attributed everything that had happened to him to a deal he’d made the night after he heard about Sandor. To cut a long story short, it seems that he’d illegally used Harcourt funds to invest very heavily in Sandor. He’d had a good tip about a possible acquisition that would have put Sandor’s share price through the roof. Instead the price absolutely crashed following the arrests. He was down by more than twenty million. He had to recover the money, somehow.”

“That evening, Monday eighteenth, he received an email, to his personal account, from an unknown sender. He would have deleted it, but it made very detailed and specific reference to his predicament and promised help. It was from a man who claimed to represent Apollyon Investment Services. Esterley said he had never known anyone of that name, but that he had once or twice heard vague rumours in the City of a very rich, very secretive man who would get people out of trouble in exchange for future services. As he didn’t have much choice, he agreed to meet with the man from Apollyon that night, on a video call. That was the meeting he told Sanchez about.”

“According to O’Gorman, Esterley gave only the briefest account of this meeting. Said that a kind of dark cloud seemed to overlay his memory of that night. He does recall adding a digital signature to a long agreement. The upshot of it, in any case, was that he got his money. By the next morning he’d plugged the hole in the Harcourt trading account.”

“Esterley’s version of the next week and a half, via O’Gorman, didn’t add much to what I already knew. O’Gorman couldn’t think of anything Esterley had said which would shed any light on the digital vanishing act. The poor bugger found it as inexplicable and disturbing as you and I do.”

“But what about the legs?” muttered Bellingham, almost to himself. “The legs! What did O’Gorman say about the legs?”

“Not much. Esterley’s explanation of that is barely an explanation at all. He left the flat on Sunday afternoon, the thirty-first, to go for a walk. Was in a very grim frame of mind after the week’s events and wanted to get some air. Preoccupied, as you might imagine, hence the door left ajar. At that point his feet were perfectly fine, both present and correct. He remembers suddenly falling in the street and hitting his head, and nothing else, until he woke up in hospital, with half his legs gone.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Bellingham.

“That’s what Esterley worried about,” muttered Donaldson.

“What do you mean?”

“On that last afternoon, he asked O’Gorman for confession. You know what I mean, you’ve seen it on TV. O’Gorman won’t tell us what he said during that part of the conversation. And quite right too, I suppose, although it’s bloody inconvenient in my position. After O’Gorman left, no-one else seems to have talked to Esterley. Nurses were too busy and one who did try was politely rebuffed. He ate some dinner and that night – well, whatever happened, happened then.”

Donaldson tossed off the rest of his drink and stood up.

“So that’s my story. That’s the case that has baffled Scotland Yard, as the newspapers used to say. The man who accepted twenty five million pounds from a mysterious stranger, and then evaporated off the face of the earth. We’ve looked for this Apollyon concern, of course. Checked with the financial crime squads. Asked the City of London force whether they know of it. Even put out feelers to a few of our informers in organised crime. No-one’s heard of it. At least, no-one’s willing to say they’ve heard of it.”

He glared down at the dying fire, and stirred it with a poker.

“One last thing, Peter. Grab that Bible up on the shelf there. O’Gorman couldn’t tell me what Esterley said to him in Confession. But he did hand me a note with some Bible reference on it. Told me to look it up. I never did – but come on, let’s look now. Find a book called James, look at chapter four, verse fourteen.”

Bellingham fiddled awkwardly with the unfamiliar book, and its flimsy pages. Finally he paused, placed a finger on the page and read in a low, subdued tone.

"You never know what will happen tomorrow: you are no more than a mist that appears for a little while and then disappears."