Nathan Trentham: Missing Wife

 Nathan Trentham: Missing Wife

The husband sat with his coat still buttoned. “She left for work Tuesday. Didn’t come home. Phone goes to voicemail. Bank card hasn’t moved.”

Trentham wrote the name, the employer, the route. He did not write “affair” until the husband said the marriage was fine.

Wednesday he walked the route she claimed. The office confirmed she had not been in since Monday. A barista on Leather Lane remembered her buying two coffees most mornings, one with oat milk she never drank. Trentham asked who took the second cup. The barista shrugged. “Man in a grey coat. Didn’t talk much.”

He found the grey coat through a parking fine on a side street the wife’s Oyster card had never touched. The man was a solicitor she had retained three months earlier, quietly, for a separation. The papers were drafted. She had not signed them.

Thursday evening Trentham waited outside the solicitor’s building. She came out carrying a small suitcase and the oat-milk coffee. She saw him and stopped.

“He told you I was missing,” she said.

“He did.”

“I’m not. I’m late.” She looked at the suitcase. “Tell him the papers are signed. Tell him not to look for me at the station. I’ll write.”

Trentham nodded. He did not follow her to the train. On the way back he bought a tea he let go cold, and wrote the husband a short letter that said she was alive, she had left on purpose, and the rest was for solicitors.

Jacques Guillaume: Business deal gone bad

Jacques Guillaume: Business deal gone bad

The client was a mid-sized textile importer who had wired €420,000 to a Swiss-registered company for a shipment of specialty fabrics that never left the port of Genoa. Guillaume met him in a café near Place Bellecour. The paperwork looked clean: invoices, a letter of credit, even a video call recording of the seller. Guillaume’s first step was to reverse the company registration through a contact in Zurich. The firm existed for eleven weeks, used a virtual office, and listed a director whose real identity traced to a man already wanted in Marseille for similar frauds.

Guillaume flew to Genoa the next day. Dock records showed the containers had been booked but cancelled two hours after the wire cleared. The freight forwarder, a small family firm, had been paid a modest fee to generate the paperwork and then told the goods were “rerouted.” The money had moved through two shell accounts and landed, briefly, in a bank in Monaco before disappearing into a network of crypto wallets. Guillaume spent three days reconstructing the path with a forensic accountant he trusted from an old case. The final wallet belonged to a name that matched a known associate of the Marseille fraudster—someone who had once worked in the same district as Guillaume’s old unit.

He returned to Lyon with the chain of transfers and a recording of the associate boasting about the score in a bar. The client recovered roughly a third of the funds after the banks froze the intermediate accounts; the rest was gone. Guillaume handed over the file and the recording without comment. The importer asked whether the man could be found. Guillaume gave him the last known address in a suburb of Marseille and the name of a local lawyer who handled such recoveries. “The deal was never real,” he said. “Only the money was.” He took the train back to Lyon that evening, ordered a single pastis at his usual bar, and opened the next file. 

Mikael Eino: Bank robbery

Mikael Eino: Bank robbery

The branch on Hämeentie had been hit at 09:12. Two men, masks, one sawn-off that never fired. They took the counter cash and a single safety-deposit box the manager swore was empty. No shots. They were gone in four minutes. Cameras caught a van with plates that belonged to a car crushed in Vantaa the week before.

Eino stood in the lobby after the uniforms left. The floor was still wet from the night cleaners. He asked who had booked the box. A woman, paid cash, gave a name that matched no registry. She had visited once, three days earlier, and stayed eleven minutes.

He walked the block in the sleet. A kiosk owner remembered the woman because she bought a stamp and asked, in careful Finnish, whether the post office still took parcels for Germany. Eino checked the afternoon collections. One parcel, posted at 14:40 the day before the robbery, addressed to a freight forwarder in Hamburg, sender name the same false one on the box.

The robbery had been the noise. The box had held documents, not cash. By the time the van was found burnt in a quarry past Espoo, the parcel was already on a ferry.

Eino wrote the freight company’s name in the notebook and closed it. The local men would be caught or not. The woman was already somewhere the sleet did not reach. He stood a while under the bank’s awning, listening to the traffic, then went home without turning the radio on.