Lost in Manchester - 21. Missing Person. April 2010. Adam (and Mark, Sam, Simon)

Adam lay on his bed, turning his mobile slowly over and over in his hands, staring blankly out of the window as he mulled over the text message that had come through. The door to the hallway was shut, leaving him enclosed in his blank white box room.

He switched the phone screen on again and read the message for the fifth time.

Can you come over this evening, about seven? Now confirmed that Steve has been missing for months. We need to talk.

On the other side of the closed door he could hear the voices of James and Nancy. They had bumped into one another in a club a week ago and had started up again. The noises in the hall were unmistakeably flirtatious and he realised he was going to be captive here until that all cleared up.

The muffled noises took on extra life. It sounded like it was moving towards foreplay. He moved across to flick his iPod on, but then the noises changed. There were harsh words, Nancy said something about being fucking frigid, and James replied with something he couldn’t hear. Then followed a noise like James had thrown a bucket of ice water over her, and shortly afterwards, the sound of the front door slamming after both of them. The flat went silent.

He looked at the message one more time, then replied to confirm he would be there.

 

Adam approached the small golden light that was cutting through the evening mist at the far end of the car park, marking the entrance to the block of flats he was heading for. He could see a figure at the doorway speaking into the intercom, and as he approached, the blurred figure took the shape of Sam.

“Hey” Adam said as he drew close, his voice creating vapour clouds. “Guess you got the same text I did”.

“I guess so” Sam replied. He pushed open the door as they were buzzed in. “All a bit mysterious.”

 

They arrived at Simon’s apartment and found that Mark, the hyena, was already there, relaxing back on the armchair with a glass of wine, looking somewhat tipsy. Mark looked different from before, more tense and older somehow. It took Adam a few moments to realise, but then it struck him that the characteristic smirk nestling across his features, ready to break into laughter at any time, was absent.

“Please, sit down, make yourselves comfortable” Simon said, gesturing to the sofa. “Thanks for coming at such short notice”.

Adam and Sam took a seat, but Simon remained standing, walking across and leaning his bum against the wooden table that stood between the lounge and the kitchen.

“Guys, it’s been three weeks since Paul disappeared, but according to what I’ve found out, it’s been about four months since anybody last saw Steve. His disappearance seemed to come totally out of the blue, right after he split-up with Paul. There’s nothing else to show that the two disappearances are related, but from where I’m standing it looks suspicious”. He looked from face to face of the seated guests. “I actually think we need to start seriously considering the prospect that Paul might be in a lot more serious trouble than we’ve realised so far”.

Sam’s face was a map of confusion. “Simon, I’m not really sure what you’re saying”.

Simon breathed deeply. “Ok, I think we need to start wondering whether Paul might have done something a lot worse than just fraud”.

A silence descended and hung in the air for several seconds. Adam, Sam and Mark exchanged glances, which were a mix of shock, uncertainty and scepticism.

“This is fucking ridiculous” Mark said reaching forward to put his wine glass down on the coffee table. He gestured to Simon, before turning to make eye contact with the other two. “She actually thinks Paul killed his ex-boyfriend.”

Simon raised his eyebrows to confirm this was exactly what he was thinking.

Mark rolled his eyes. “You’ve been watching way too much fucking Poirot on daytime TV love. This is what working from fucking home does for you”.

Sam smiled. “Sorry Simon, but i’m with Mark on this. There’s no way Paul could have done that. If he was capable of something like that, then we’d have known”.

“Right, like you knew he was capable of inventing a false life and stringing us all along.”

Simon and Sam stared at each other for a few seconds. Mark turned to Adam and raised an eyebrow, and the other two also turned to get the fourth view on this.

Adam shrugged. “I don’t know. I think maybe we have to accept that this guy is not at all the person we thought he was. I honestly feel like whatever friendship I had with him is meaningless. It was all a lie. So honestly, who knows what he might have done?”

Mark stood up and minced across to the kitchen, grabbing a couple of wine glasses and bringing them back across to the table.

“People don’t disappear for four months” Simon said. “Something has happened to Steve, and I don’t think he was the suicidal type. I think we need to draw together everything we know that might throw up a clue about what happened”

Mark poured the glasses full of wine from the open bottle on the table and handed them to Sam and Adam.

“I think you’re going to need these gents. This could be a long night of who-fucking-dunnit”

 

“So what are we talking about here?” Adam asked. “How deep have you looked?”

“I’ve been everywhere” Simon answered. “I’ve gone through Steve’s online profiles - his Facebook and his Gayzer. Both had regular updates right up ‘til November last year, then stopped dead. I’ve been to his flat, and I’ve tried him at the weird little office he worked out of, underneath the railway arches, and he’s never at either. I tried knocking on neighbours’ doors at both, and nobody has seen him in months. I’ve messaged some of his friends off Facebook, not that he has many, but the ones that replied said the same. Nobody has heard from him since November”.

“I think he’s probably gone off travelling” Mark said offhandedly, clearly an argument he had put forward to Simon already.

“Really? For four months? Without ever mentioning it to anyone or posting any updates online?” Simon said. “I don’t think so.”

Adam watched as Mark shrugged and took a healthy slug of wine.

 

Mark could still vividly picture Paul’s laughing face, sitting back with a gin and tonic in hand on the rooftop balcony of Kweer bar. The two of them met there regularly to gossip about conquests and bitch about opposition councillors. A lot of the time they didn’t invite Simon, and it was just the two of them. It felt exclusive. They had been the closest of friends, from soon after they first met.

Paul was the closest thing Mark had ever had to a best friend. The kind of intimate, loyal best friend that everyone used to have back at school, but that Mark never did. He had always been the weird kid, not helped by being short, freckly, bespectacled and hopelessly unathletic. He had always known he was the weird kid, but knowing it hadn’t seemed to help at all. In fact he had carried on being the weird kid as he became an adult. It wasn’t an easy mould to escape from. But finally, after 26 years of life, he had found in Paul somebody who was entirely on his wavelength. Someone who was an outcast just like him. Someone whose eyes saw the same world that he did.

He remembered talking with Paul about Steve, soon after the dinner party.

“Poor fucking Steve” Mark had said. “Having to meet us awful Tory boys, and then having you being a total cunt to him all evening”, he giggled over the glass.

Paul almost spat his mouthful of gin and tonic out and looked up at Mark over his glasses.

“Well he’ll have to get fucking used to that if he wants to stick around” Paul said and emitted his guttural snigger.

“You think he will stick around then?” Mark asked, trying not to sound like he was too concerned.

Paul rolled his eyes. “Oh, fuck knows. He is a little fucking lapdog though, so he might be pretty hard to shake off.”

“Well, you might have to get him put down then” Mark had said and they had both fallen back laughing.

He didn’t share this story with the others. It had been nothing more than a stupid joke. They had both been laughing. Mark tried hard to remember it. They had definitely both been laughing.

 

“I can’t buy that he was some kind of psycho” Sam said. “I mean, he was a bravado kind of guy, sure, and so all the lies is… well, I mean, I’m struggling to get my head round it, but at least I can see that he was capable of that. But killing someone? Without any reason? I can’t see any way that that was in him.”

“Well maybe there was a reason. Maybe there was a good motive.” Simon said. “Maybe Steve knew something. Maybe Paul had confided everything in Steve, and Steve was going to give him away.”

“Fuck me” Mark said, “this is Paul and Steve. It’s not a psychological crime drama.”

“Simon, if you’re serious about this” Adam said, staring intently at him, “why don’t we take it to the police?”

Simon shifted uneasily, and Mark sat forward again putting his glass down, the smile dropping from his face.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea” Simon said. “There’s nothing firm to go to them with.”

Adam’s eyes narrowed. “Are you that bothered about protecting your party from a possible bad news story that you’d hold back information about a serious crime?”

Simon’s face was stern. “Of course not. Look, if we had any kind of real evidence, I would be straight down there. The fact is there’s no evidence that anything happened here, but I can’t be the only one that feels a bit uneasy about it?”

Adam looked sceptical but he didn’t pursue the point.

“And” said Mark, “if the police are involved it means she can’t carry on being fucking Hercule any more”.

“So basically, we’re back to the original problem” Sam said. “We need to find Paul, to get to the bottom of this”.

 

Simon opened another bottle and brought it across to the coffee table, pulling up a chair on the far side so he could join the circle.

“Ok” Sam said, “how about we go through everything that we think we know about him. There must be some kind of lead in all of the things he’s told us. Mark, you’ve known him longest, how about you start?”

Mark turned his nose up. “Get her to start” he said wafting his hand in the direction of Simon.

Simon looked irritated. “For fuck’s sake Mark, don’t you want to solve this?”

 

As the two bickered, Adam’s mind wandered back to those first days after he had moved out from the old flat, and the story was beginning to unfold.

It had taken a couple of days for the internet connection at the new place to go live, but as soon as it did, Adam had found himself glued to his laptop. He had spent hours trawling Paul’s profiles on Facebook and Gayzer, reading through every message posted up from Paul’s clubbing friends, his political friends and all the students that he must have met through various boyfriends. He read every word of the forty-something comments that had been posted on the Paul is Missing page that Simon had set up, and he befriended and exchanged online messages with Paul’s friends, whose varied interests in the case ranged from concern, to curiosity, to debt reclamation. He had used several search engines to check every derivation of Paul’s name and keywords relating to his work and his hobbies, and had found snippets of references to him in all kinds of places.

It had felt invasive, analysing so closely the detail of the online information about a person, even though it was all displayed publicly. You could find out a whole lot about a person from snippets on the internet. Somehow it felt like reading Paul’s diary or rooting through his clothes drawers. Like it was crossing some kind of line. There was a kind of intrigue in having that license to do it though.

One thing that his search had done was to refresh his mind of the various stories Paul had told about his life, things that were probably a mixture of truth and fabrication. The story of his childhood in rural Shropshire, his rich family and successful parents, his excellent academic background and first-class degree, the progress through United Tobacco and so on.

One thing that had struck him though was that the friends on his profiles almost all seemed to be based in Manchester or nearby. There was nobody there from earlier in his life. No family members or school friends from Shropshire, no university friends or old work friends from when he was in Bristol. There were hundreds of people listed as friends, but they all seemed to be Manchester people, or friends of Manchester friends. It was like his life had only begun three years ago.

For the most part the online searching had given nothing away. But there was one thing he remembered that puzzled him. Somebody had asked Paul a few months ago how his treatment was going. He never replied to the question.

 

“So what we’re fairly sure of”, Simon was summarising, “is that his name was Paul Griffiths and he was in his mid-twenties. He talked to a lot of people about his home in Shropshire, which makes me think that’s likely to be true. He always talked about a rural village out there, but I don’t think he ever told anybody what it was called…”

Simon trailed off.

“What about his job?” Adam asked. “I mean obviously he wasn’t doing the job he said he was, but he must have worked in law?”

Simon shook his head. “I checked the register of lawyers. There’s no Paul Griffiths registered. He definitely wasn’t a lawyer”.

Mark gulped down a mouthful of wine. “She’s investigated everything Adam”. Simon shot him a dirty look.

“But what about all his law books? And that article about the case he was working on?”

“And the young lawyer of the year prize” Sam added.

“The article I guess he must have faked. The prize doesn’t even exist. I checked it.” Simon answered.

“Come on, that’s elementary Sam” Mark said, and gulped another mouthful of wine.

“For fuck’s sake Mark, are you done with the detective references?”

Mark stroked his chin and adopted a Columbo voice. “Well there’s just one more thing I don’t get…”

He waited to see the nonplussed look on Simon’s face and then fell back laughing.

“There’s not much I do get” Sam said.

Simon looked across to him.

“Well the money. I mean, he lived in this great apartment, bought expensive clothes, we ate out all the time and he always paid. I mean, I know he owes you guys, but it still doesn’t explain how he lived this life for two and a half years. He must have been earning somehow?”

Adam nodded slowly. “You think maybe he was dealing?”

“No way” Mark said shaking his head. “He was way too off his face on the drugs at weekends to be able to sell the fucking things”.

“I think he probably inherited” Simon concluded. “I think his family are rich, and they’ve let him live this lifestyle. They probably don’t give a shit what he’s up to”.

Sam nodded. “Guess you’re probably right”.

 

They were all quiet for a few moments, before Adam spoke again.

“On Facebook somebody posted on his wall a few months ago asking how his treatment was going. Do we know what that was about?”

He looked to Sam whose face was blank.

“To be honest” Simon answered, “I’ve heard a whole lot of lies he told people about his health, from speaking to his friends these last few weeks.”

Adam sat up suddenly.

“Wait, shit, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. Someone told me he’d had a heart attack last year, a couple of months before he moved in with me.”

“Oh no, that one was true” Mark piped up. “I was there. It was only a minor one. Too much fucking Ketamine. God I wish I had some K on me now”.

“Oh” Adam said, slightly disappointed, and turned back to Simon.

“He told a couple of people he had cancer, so maybe that’s what the comment was about. It’s a nasty lie to tell people”.

“You’ve done your homework” Adam said, impressed.

Mark gave a withering look. “She’s hardly done anything else but this for the last three weeks”

“Maybe the cancer was real?” Sam said, staring into space. They all turned and looked at him.

“If he has a terminal illness, then maybe that’s why he did it. Maybe he wanted to try a new life. Escape his reality, you know?”

They each mulled over the thought.

 

Sam thought back to a Sunday morning in January. Paul was home from clubbing earlier than normal, maybe about 3 or 4am. Sam was working the following day so he had left around midnight, but he’d invited Paul back to the flat after. He remembered being woken as soon as the front door opened, and Paul fumbling noisily through the flat, into Sam’s room. Sam was in a half-sleeping stupor and wanted just to welcome Paul quickly into bed and drop straight back to sleep.

Paul had come stumbling into the room though, holding his forehead with one hand and a bent pair of glasses in the other. Sam had immediately sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Paul’s face was in shock and his glasses looked destroyed.

“Babe, what the hell happened?” he had asked.

Paul had rolled his eyes, held up a hand, and pretended to be entirely unconcerned.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. It looks worse than it is. I was walking back with a stupid fucking multi-coloured feather boa from the club round my neck. Then these three brainless twats decided they didn’t like the boa, so they punched me in the face and took my wallet”.

“Shit. Let me see?” Paul sat at the side of the bed, and Sam examined his patient. Paul had a big lump on his forehead, but there didn’t look to be much else in the way of scratches or bruises.

“Is it hurting?”

Paul had smiled weakly, “I’ll live”.

“Did you get a proper look at them?”

Paul answered the question by holding up the bent glasses.

“You know what, shit happens” Paul had concluded. “It’s just a pain in the arse, because my bank’s not open tomorrow and I need to get over to Leeds. Come on though, let’s get to sleep.”

Sam had woken early the next morning to go out and withdraw cash for Paul to see him through. When he thought of it, he couldn’t remember ever getting that money back. In fact there were other things that had never seemed quite right about that night. The bump on his forehead. If he had been punched in the face, why was there a bump on his forehead? And the glasses, they were bent out of shape. Why would somebody bend them like that? Wouldn’t they just throw them on the floor, in which case they might be scratched or smashed?

He didn’t want to question it though. Because, that moment had been real. When he had put his arms around his boyfriend and comforted him and cared for him, it had been genuine. Their friendship and when they laughed together, those things were honest and real. That night, they had spooned, and Sam had stayed in that awkward position until he felt Paul’s body relax and drop to sleep. Paul had needed that love that night. Sam had felt it. It wasn’t something you could fake.

Paul might have lied to the rest of the world about a lot of things, but not their relationship. That part was real. He had to believe that had been real.

 

“You know what” Mark said, “more than anything else here, I hope he’s ok, wherever he is”. Mark sounded as sober as he had all evening.

Adam saw the same look in Mark’s eye that he saw in Sam’s. The same crisis of emotions, the same love, and the same sense of betrayal.

“I hope so too” Sam said.

Adam stayed silent. Although he had lived with the guy for six months, he honestly felt like they had never known each other at all. He glanced across at Simon, whose face was stormy. Simon took the last sip of his glass of wine and put it down on the table.

“Well I don’t give a fuck how he is. I hope he’s lying in a shop doorway somewhere rotting”.

 

It had been three weeks, but Simon couldn’t stop the video of that afternoon in the bank, looping round in his head. He had waited more than ten minutes in the long queue at the bank on Piccadilly Gardens, the account book for the LGB Young Conservatives in his hand. And there he was, staring into the pitiful face of the middle-aged woman behind the counter, unable to find the words he needed.

“I’m sorry Sir, but I’ve double checked and the balance I’ve given you is definitely correct. She passed him the list of transactions from the last year. We have your signature on all of the transactions. If you don’t remember making any of them though, then I’ll need to arrange for you to meet with our fraud team.”

He had been put on the spot. He knew the consequences if something like that got out. But there it was in black and white in front of his eyes. Paul had been transferring money month after month to his own account. He was livid, but he had to control himself. He couldn’t afford to give anything away. He tried to focus and think of the words he needed to get out of this situation.

There were tutting noises behind him. He turned and saw that the queue had got even longer. Further back the face of a Conservative councillor from Cheshire, a friend of his father’s, gave a nod of acknowledgement and looked expectantly on at him. He turned back to the clerk.

“I’m sorry sir, but there is a long queue behind you. If you can’t recall co-signing for any of these transactions, then you need to let me know, and I can pass you through to one of my colleagues”.

He blushed crimson, a facial response he thought he had left behind in puberty.

“No, erm, no, it’s fine. No, actually, I think I do remember them after all. I’m sorry to waste your time”.

She smiled at him like he was a moron.

“Ok, is there anything else I can help with today?” she said, repeating the scripted line, but really meaning get the hell out of my queue.

He thanked her, mumbled an apology to the people waiting behind him, and walked quickly away. All he could think about was finding Paul and getting some answers.

 

“We’re not getting anywhere here” Sam concluded. “Let’s face it, he’s a master at covering his tracks. He’s left no trace”. Sam’s face betrayed a certain pride in the art of Paul’s disappearance.

“Maybe this is what he does” Adam said. “Goes somewhere for three years, makes new friends, lives the life, borrows money, then disappears off the face of the planet”.

“Well fuck that” Simon said angrily. “Not this time”.

“Simon, it’s a fucking dead end. It’s all dead ends” Mark said. “I think it’s time we all move on.”

“What, you think I’m going to let him get away with it?”

“You’re fucking obsessed love. None of us can move on, until you accept that he’s outsmarted us. He’s gone.”

“Maybe he’s right” Sam said. “Maybe it’s time to let it rest.”

“Well, it’s easy for you two. He didn’t run off with thousands of pounds of your fucking money” Simon spat out.

“Well it’s your own stupid fucking fault for loaning it to him in the first place” Mark replied. “Face it, you’re never going to see him again”.

Mark’s tone had changed. He almost sounded like he was defending Paul. Or protecting him.

 

In the three weeks since Paul’s disappearance, Mark had single-handedly drunk his way through four bottles of gin, two bottles of vodka and two bottles of rum, as well as countless bottles of wine at Simon’s. The empty bottles were lined up around the kitchen bin in his lonely flat, just across the road from where Paul and Adam had lived.

He couldn’t face the quiet solitary evenings that had become his new life. He felt like he had lost a partner. Not that Paul was ever his boyfriend. In fact dating Paul would have been a sure fire way of losing his friendship. Paul wasn’t a boyfriends person. What they had was better. Friendship, companionship, a voice to chat to every day about the crap at work and the funny stuff that happened. So losing him had felt like losing a boyfriend. It had sent him spiralling back to three years ago when he was nothing more than the misfit with the big specs and the stupid laugh.

The last thing he had heard from Paul was a text, which he worked out must have been sent shortly before Paul’s phone had been disconnected. He hadn’t shown it to Simon or the others. All it had said was:

Don’t worry about me, and thanks for the memories. X

He knew then that he would never see Paul again.

 

Adam excused himself and went to the bathroom.

He could hear Mark and Simon continue to argue and the sound of Mark stomping down the corridor and out the door.

When he returned to the lounge, only Simon was left.

 

“Sorry Adam. Mark stormed off and Sam went after him. I’ll sort it with them tomorrow”. He sighed deeply. “I don’t think we were getting anywhere with it anyway”.

“You’re pretty angry about Paul still.”

Simon shook his head despairingly. “I had him Adam. I had him after I found out about the account, and then I let him feed me more lies, and I ate them up all over again. I don’t see how we’re ever going to find him again.”

Adam gave a sympathetic smile. “And what about Steve?”

“Fuck knows. Maybe I should let the police know he’s a missing person. Or maybe it’s none of my business and I should leave it alone. Maybe he did just disappear off for a bit to get some space after they broke up. Maybe people do that. To be honest, it’s been so long since I’ve been in a relationship, I can’t even remember what it’s like splitting up”

Adam slumped back down on the sofa. “Tell me about it. I’m so sick of dating”.

Simon came over and topped up his glass with wine.

“I know, it’s bloody awful. Hey, can we stop talking about fucking Paul and just have a moan about men instead?”

Adam smiled and cleared his coat off the sofa seat next to him, and Simon sat down by his side.

“Happily. You know I was told this city would be like a gay man’s funfair when I first moved here.”

“Yeah? Well I keep ending up in the house of horrors” Simon said straight faced.

Adam laughed.

“Do you know, the last guy I dated”, Simon continued, “we got on well, and we chatted quite comfortably, and everything, it was all looking so promising. And then we went back to my place, started getting down to stuff, and he whipped down his boxers, and it was just like - I should say, I’m not a size queen or anything - but it was like, it didn’t reach beyond the end of his pubes.”

Adam laughed again.

“Man, I’ve been there too. And guys with B.O., guys with no sense of humour, dumb guys, guys who are much older than they claim, guys who are much shorter than they claim, guys who show up late and don’t even apologise…”

“Tory guys?” Simon asked, arching an eyebrow.

“No actually, not yet” Adam said smiling, noticing again the nice frame of Simon’s torso. He looked up and saw how close they were sitting on the sofa.

Simon’s smile dropped away.

“Maybe we should rectify that then”.

They paused a second, then moved their lips in together and started to grapple the backs of each other’s heads. Seven minutes later, the bedside lamp in Simon’s room was projecting a shadow puppet drama across the canvas of the white bedroom wall, as two sets of clothes lay strewn across the floor and they christened the beautifully crisp newly washed sheets.