by Tim Weaver
‘I don’t think anyone you know will be coming in here.’
He studied me, a frown forming on his face. Then he looked back over his shoulder and took in the room for a second time. Four men at the bar. Two in the booth a couple down from us. Two more beyond that, hands touching on the table. He turned back to me. ‘Is this a gay bar?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Then you’re probably right.’
A silence settled between us.
He got out his phone, placed it on the table and watched the barman bring over his drink. He scooped it up immediately. By the time he was finished, it was half empty. He pushed it aside and leaned forward. ‘So, what did you call me for?’
‘I think you know.’
He eyed me. ‘Look, I couldn’t say anything to you earlier. It was too risky. If they found out I was telling you about …’ He stopped.
‘Telling me about what?’
He didn’t reply.
‘The five other women?’
A flitter of surprise on his face. ‘I don’t know what –’
‘Save the circus act, Healy.’ I reached into my jacket pocket and placed a folded piece of paper down on the table between us. He picked it up and unfolded it. In front of him were photographs of the five missing women I’d discovered on the site, as well as Megan and Leanne. ‘I’ve found them. I know they exist. I’ve seen them on the wall of the incident room, so I know they’re linked. Question is, why doesn’t the public know about them?’
His eyes flicked to me but he didn’t say anything.
I leaned forward, pushing my beer aside. ‘Do their families even know they’ve been linked? Do their families know anything?’ I paused and waited for him to answer. He didn’t. ‘You want to know what I really don’t understand? Why you’re happy to play along with this bullshit cover story when your daughter’s one of them.’
He looked up at me, his fingers resting on the beer bottle now.
‘Healy?’
‘You don’t understand,’ he replied quietly.
‘What don’t I understand?’
‘What it’s like.’
This time I didn’t respond. His eyes drifted outside, and for a moment it was like looking right into his head: the anger, the sadness, the need to hit out, bubbling away below the surface.
‘You think I don’t care about my daughter?’ he said finally, still studying the people passing on the street. ‘You think I don’t care about finding her? I care. I care so much it’s like I’m being eaten up from the inside.’ He looked at me, fire in his eyes now. ‘I needed to find out what you had on Megan Carver, because I’ve hit a dead end. I don’t know where to go next with Leanne. So that’s why I needed you. But what I don’t need, what I won’t put up with, is you getting in the way. Because I’m going to find the person who took her – and I’m going to fucking kill him. And you aren’t going to stop me, and neither are those other pricks.’
He meant Phillips and Hart. He meant Davidson. He meant everyone.
‘So are you working her disappearance by yourself?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘Because no one else cares about her.’
He turned in the booth, back towards the door, as if he didn’t trust me to look out for him. Then he faced me again, his eyes focused beneath the ridge of his brow.
‘The police don’t give a shit.’
‘About Leanne?’
‘About any of them.’
‘Why?’
He went to speak and then hesitated. I’d seen it in him earlier. No mistakes. No errors. No slip-ups. He’d worked his daughter’s disappearance for so long, off the books and without the knowledge of his bosses, that he’d completely insulated himself. Everything he knew, anything he’d managed to find out about her, no one else got to hear about. He finished his beer and gestured for the barman to bring him another.
‘Okay, here’s how I see it,’ I said, trying to jump-start the conversation. ‘You’ve got seven women. They all look the same. They’ve been registered as missing persons, but they’ve not been linked – at least publicly. Thirty thousand people go missing in London alone each year, so I understand how they’ve managed to stay off the radar. But what I don’t understand is why the police haven’t gone public.’
The barman brought Healy’s third beer. After he had gone, Healy looked up at me and a look of disgust moved across his face. ‘They’re just one part of the jigsaw.’
‘And what’s the other part?’
He turned his beer bottle around, that same look on his face. No mistakes. No errors. No slip-ups. But then he glanced at me again, and I could see what he was thinking: it was different now. The stakes were as high for both of us. He was illegally pursuing a case under the noses of his bosses. I was out on bail for the abduction and probable murder of a teenager.
‘The other part is Frank White,’ he said.
I looked at him. ‘So I was right?’
‘Yeah. You were right.’
‘How are Megan and Frank connected?’
‘Your number-one fan DS Davidson works for Jamie Hart, not Phillips. Hart’s in charge of a murder investigation team looking into the disappearances of the women.’
‘So it’s definitely a murder investigation?’
‘We’re assuming they’re all dead.’
He stopped. Realized what he’d said. He’d just committed his daughter to the ground alongside the others. A flicker of emotion in his face, and then it was gone again.
‘Where does Phillips fit in?’
‘Phillips works in the same office as Hart, but not on the same investigation. He’s SDC7 – just like White was. He’s heading up a task force trying to put the cuffs on Akim Gobulev.’
I frowned. ‘Wait a second, Phillips works organized crime?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So why’s he coming after me?’
Healy glanced over his shoulder again, checking the door. And as he did, everything suddenly shifted into focus. The link between Megan and Frank White.
‘The surgeon,’ I said quietly.
He looked back at me as the connections started to snap together in my head. The links between events – and everything in between.
‘They think the surgeon’s involved in the women’s disappearances?’
‘They don’t think he’s involved,’ Healy said. ‘They think he’s the one taking them.’
42
I stared at him, waiting for him to tell me it was a joke. But then I saw the anger in his face – and suddenly felt some of my own, burning in the middle of my chest. I’d been trying to peel away the layers of Megan’s disappearance for six days and the whole time the police were sitting on the answers. They’d lied to me. They’d lied to the Carvers.
They’d lied to everyone.
‘Why keep them secret?’ I said, and – in that moment – I heard the timbre of my voice and saw Healy attach to it. For a second he thought he’d glimpsed a kindred spirit; someone with the same anger and sense of injustice. I realized then that I’d have to reel myself back in again. One of us had to remain in control.
‘Phillips has people on the inside and they’re all coming back with the same intel. The guy’s a freak. Wears a mask to meets. Surgical gloves. Bandages around his arms, so he doesn’t drop fibres or flakes of skin. And he doesn’t even get paid in cash any more. Instead it’s medical supplies and hospital equipment. Scalpels, forceps, hooks, retractors, mallets, beds, gurneys. Rumour has it, the Russians even agreed to bring in an ECG for him. He changes their faces and he sews up their wounds, but only so it pays for what he’s really into.’
‘The women.’
‘Right. He’s a killer. And now he’s got two task forces on his tail. Phillips wants him for his connections to the Russians. And Hart wants him because they think he’s got seven dead bodies stored somewhere.’
Even in the noise of the bar, the word dead seemed to hang in the air.
>
‘So that’s the reason there’s two DCIs in that place?’
He nodded.
‘Why hasn’t any of this been made public?’
‘He put a bullet in White’s face, so that immediately promotes him to the top of the shitlist in every department at the Met. It’s personal. But that’s not what it’s really about. What it’s really about is Phillips getting the surgeon, squeezing him for everything he’s got, and then shutting down the Russians in London.’ He looked up. Turned his beer bottle. ‘But go public with this prick’s sideline in women, and the surgeon goes underground … and his little black book gets flushed down the U-bend.’
It took me a second to realize what he’d just said. ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. Do you even know what you just told me?’ When he didn’t react, I leaned in to him. ‘You’re saying closing down the Russians is – what? – the bigger win?’
‘You know what I said.’
‘Yeah, you’re saying it’s more important that the police get their nails into organized crime than find seven missing women – one of whom is your own daughter.’
I waited. Nothing from him again.
‘That’s it?’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘This is a conspiracy of silence. The police are sitting on their hands while those women lie dead somewhere.’
‘They can close down the Russians.’
‘Them is you, Healy. You’re the police.’
‘I’m not the same as them.’
‘But you think what they’re doing is all right?’
‘I don’t think it’s all right,’ he spat, fingers squeezing the beer bottle. ‘Why the fuck would I be talking to you if I thought it was all right? They’re burying my girl in a fucking filing cabinet. So let me make it clear for you: when I find her, I’m going to kill the piece of shit that took her, and I’m going to rip out his heart and stick it down his fucking throat. Is that clear enough for you?’ He eyed me. ‘You can come with me, or you can back down. But if you come with me, be prepared for it to get bad.’
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about finding Leanne or going up against the police. ‘Do you know why the surgeon was there that night?’
‘At the warehouse?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Something came in with the guns. Whatever it was, he made off with it.’
Everything’s connected.
‘It was the formalin.’
‘The what?’
‘Liquid formaldehyde.’
He paused. ‘Like the tissue preserver?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Like the tissue preserver.’
He pressed a hand to his forehead and started massaging it. If the surgeon had already taken seven women, Healy didn’t need me to tell him why he wanted the chemicals.
‘The police can’t keep this quiet,’ I said.
‘Can’t they?’
‘No.’
‘They’ve done a pretty good job up until now.’
‘But the surgeon won’t come up for air again until he’s absolutely sure it’s safe. He’s not going to risk a repeat of what happened that night in the warehouse.’
Healy shrugged. ‘They’re not going to put the women out into the public domain. Because if the surgeon thinks they’re about to collar him, they’ve lost him, and they’ve lost the names and numbers of every Russian arsehole in the city.’
I leaned back in the booth. He met my eyes.
‘We can help each other,’ he said. ‘You want to find the Carver girl so you can give her parents the answers we couldn’t get them, right?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Right?’
I nodded.
‘And I want to find him so I can …’
He trailed off. For a second, I could see some of my own reflection. A man torn apart by loss. He’d never laid his daughter to rest. He didn’t even know where she was and what had happened to her. His last memory of the two of them together was a screaming match. The blurred line between what the law told him he should do, and what he was going to do, was indistinguishable. Maybe there wasn’t even a line now.
‘How are they pinning the women on this guy?’
He looked as if he’d expected me to ask. ‘Their necklaces.’
I remembered the shoebox containing Megan’s belongings. I’d taken it from her wardrobe. Inside had been photographs, letters and jewellery – and a shard of smoothed obsidian on the end of a chain. Glass. ‘You mean the glass necklace?’
‘Yeah. Because he’s wrapped up like the Mummy the whole time, no one knows what he looks like, or what he’s called. So the Russians nicknamed him Dr Glass because of a chain he wears around his neck. It’s a smoothed piece of obsidian with the inscription PC in the back. It’s basically the only thing they know about him.’
Megan’s had MC carved into it.
‘Are they his initials?’
Healy shrugged. ‘Who knows? But all the women had one in their possessions, with their initials inscribed in the back, so it’s a fair assumption.’ He stopped. A flicker of sadness passed across his eyes. ‘All the women … except for Leanne.’
‘She didn’t have one?’
He looked down at the table. ‘Phillips lied to you about a lot of stuff today. But he didn’t lie about Leanne. They can’t one hundred per cent link her to Megan, or to any of the others.’
‘Because she didn’t have a necklace?’
‘Right.’ He stared at me. ‘There were a lot of problems at home too. We used to fight a lot. On paper … Leanne was a good candidate for a runaway.’ A pause. More sadness – and then steel. ‘But I know he took my girl. I know it.’
I nodded, let him have a moment. ‘Is that it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s how they’re pinning seven women on this guy?’
I looked at him. He didn’t reply.
‘It’s a link, but it’s tenuous. What happens if they’re on sale in Asda? Suddenly, him and fifty thousand other people have got one.’
A moment of silence settled between us.
‘What else aren’t you telling me, Healy?’
He glanced over his shoulder to the door. Looked like he was about to say something, then stopped. When he turned back, he held up a finger. ‘There’s more,’ he whispered. ‘But …’ He paused again, checked his surroundings a second time. ‘I’ll tell you. But not here.’
‘You’ve told me everything else.’
‘I need to show you,’ he said.
I let my mind tick over for a moment, trying to figure out what he meant. ‘Have any of the other missing women got connections to the youth club?’
‘No. Just Leanne and the Carver girl.’
‘Which means you need to get some background on Daniel Markham,’ I said. ‘Because, at the moment, he’s the best hope we’ve got of finding out what happened to them.’
43
Healy picked up me at seven o’clock the next morning. It was still dark. He had a Vauxhall estate with straw all over the back seats and muddy paw prints on the inside of the doors. The car stank of wet dog. It looked like he was dressed in the same clothes as the night before, apart from the tie. He had the seat all the way back, but his belly still almost touched the wheel, and his legs were arched under it. He wasn’t exactly fat, but he was a big man, and thirty pounds of extra weight added a lot of bulk.
The drive over to Mile End was about fourteen miles. Neither of us said much for the first half-hour. It was slow going, and I got the sense that, like me, Healy was mulling things over: everything we’d discussed the night before, and everything that awaited us. At one point he started fiddling around in the side pocket of the door, and after a couple of seconds brought out a file. He handed it to me.
‘You want a coffee?’
I looked at him. ‘You a coffee fan?’
We were moving east through Paddington, and there was a Starbucks ahead. He bumped up on to the pavement outside and switched on his hazards. ‘I need it to fun
ction in the morning,’ he said, and pointed towards the file. ‘And you’ll need some to get through that.’
I looked at the folder and flipped it open. Inside were missing persons files for all seven women.
‘How do you take it?’ he asked.
‘Black.’
He got out and headed into the shop.
I opened up the folder and pulled out the files. Megan’s was on top. I read through it. The investigation added up to very little. They’d identified the email from the London Conservation Trust as a potential line of enquiry, and made mention of the map on the website, but both leads had hit dead ends. As I’d suspected, without pinpointing the guy in Tiko’s, they didn’t have Sykes, and they didn’t have the connection to the woods. Attached were interviews with everyone who had ever worked at the youth club. I searched for Daniel Markham’s and read over it. It was bland enough not to raise any alarms, and the answers he gave were solid and believable. Like the file at the youth club, it listed him as single – but this time it said he was divorced from his wife Susan.
There wasn’t much space in the car, but I attempted to lay the seven different files out on the dashboard, next to one another. Then I discovered there weren’t seven.
There were eight.
The eighth file was thin and different from the others. Inside was a single sheet of A4, all the pertinent details blacked out. No name. No address. No personal information, other than the place of birth and family status. Mother dead. Father still alive. One sister. The only other thing that faced out at me was a photograph. Female. Blonde hair. Blue eyes.
I set the file aside and started to move through the others one by one. Photos of the women looked out at me. None of them had a record, so the pictures were all personal, taken by friends and family members. Megan, at seventeen, was the youngest by a clear three years. The rest fluctuated between twenty and forty-five.
It was unusual for serial crime to cover such a wide age range, but he was picking victims based on appearance, not age. What criteria did blonde, blue-eyed, medium-build women fill for him? And what else tied them together? I read on a little further and discovered that all the women were single or not dating seriously, and most were pursuing careers rather than jobs that just paid the mortgage. They were intelligent, attractive and well educated. Even Megan, still at school, could be put into that bracket. The only one who looked out of sync was Leanne: average at school, plainer than the others.
