by Tim Weaver
And right on the edge of its light: a shape.
He was hunkered down behind a tree trunk. Changing magazines. The SFO wouldn’t hit him from the crate. He wouldn’t even see him.
But I could.
I brought the MP5 up slowly to my shoulder. Stock against my body. Finger around the trigger. I was surrounded by oily darkness, as thick as the inside of a tomb. But as soon as I fired, I would give my position away. I had to get it right.
Aim.
Concentrate.
I thought of my dad teaching me to fire guns. Of him running through the woods behind our farm with me when I was a teenager. Firing a replica Beretta at targets he’d assembled.
Concentrate.
I squeezed the trigger.
The noise was immense. It crackled across the path seconds after the bullet went through the gunman’s face. One side to the other. In the periphery of the light, I could see a flash of red. And then he was down. Slumped to his side. Half in the woods, half on the path.
I got to my feet and ran.
Fnip. Fnip.
Bullets hit the space behind me. I clipped a tree with my shoulder, unable to distinguish it as I moved further away from the two torches on the path. Then I hit another and almost knocked myself out. I fell back into the undergrowth.
Quiet.
Nothing now. Just the gentle patter of rain against the canopy. My thoughts were racing: would they hear the gunfire from the road? How long would it take them to get support teams here? It had taken us thirty minutes to walk this far. That probably meant half that at a run. I rolled over. Grass and fallen branches cracked under me.
On the other side of the tree line, about thirty feet away in a diagonal to my right, was another dead PC. His torch was pointing towards him, right up close to his face. It turned his skin red, and the blood at his mouth even redder. Beyond that, further up the trail, was what was left of the crate, just a vague shape against the night. I could see a dead PC lying alongside it. Back the way I’d come, Crane was still down on the floor. He hadn’t moved. It meant the last SFO was still alive – or the remaining assassin couldn’t be sure. If he knew for certain, Crane would just get up and walk off.
Movement.
Opposite me, across the trail, on the other side of the woods. I squinted into the darkness. Nothing now. Just the tree line and the swathes of black beyond.
But then it came again.
More movement.
Suddenly, gunfire erupted from the direction of the crate, and the whole area lit up. The bodies on the trail. Jill strapped to a tree, further back in the direction I’d come. Crane on the floor of the path. The SFO, MP5 to his shoulder, was firing towards the space I’d seen movement. And the source of the movement: the other assassin, hidden behind a tree, facing in my direction.
We were looking at one another.
And his gun was aimed.
I ducked – late – as two bullets whipped across the trail and hit the tree behind me. They’d missed me by an inch. Through the undergrowth, on my side, I saw him for a second. And then he was gone. The SFO had stopped firing.
The Dead Tracks were black.
No sound but the rain.
I very gently sat up and shifted sideways, moving on my backside, dragging myself through the undergrowth as quickly and as quietly as I could. After about ten feet, my arm hit a tree. I stopped. Lifted the MP5 to my shoulder and aimed it back in the direction of the gunman.
Click.
The SFO was reloading. I was closer to the crate now, could hear the gentle sound of the magazine being fitted back into the gun. A brief moment of silence.
Then more gunfire.
The SFO’s bullets hit the tree the man was using as cover. But he was protected. His cover was good.
Except he’d made a mistake.
He was still facing the same position I’d been in before. As soon as the MP5 lit up the woods, he fired twice into the space I’d been. But I wasn’t there. Through the sights I could see his balaclava, eyes showing: a moment of hesitation as he realized I was somewhere else. He scanned the woodland, moving left along the edge of the trail. Then surprise as he picked out my position about thirty feet across from him.
Aim. Concentrate.
Hit the target.
I fired.
His head ruptured, blood spattering against the tree, and his body fell backwards against the floor of the woods. No sound. Through the corner of my eye, I saw the SFO look in my direction and nod. He’d known I was there. He’d tracked my movement from the first time I’d fired. I nodded back. We both realized he’d used me. He’d given me enough light and enough time to take the shot and banked on me hitting the target. I wasn’t an expert marksman. With less time to line up the shot I might have missed. But I knew enough to hit two stationary targets, both of which hadn’t seen me first. Maybe he knew what I could do. Maybe he’d read what the police had on file about me. Or maybe he’d just taken a chance. Either way it had worked.
Movement to my left. I swivelled.
Crane was up and on his feet, sprinting away.
I headed after him, bending down to pick up the torch lying next to the dead PC’s face. The burnt, nauseating stench of gunfire drifted along the trail, and there was the tang of blood in the air, thick and fresh. Crane looked back at me, then veered right, into the woods. I followed. I shone the torch out in front of me and saw him about fifteen feet ahead, my heart thumping in my ears, my hands greased with sweat and rain. He was trying to get some distance between us. Trying to pull away. Trying to lose me and fade into the night. But without a torch, the woods were like a maze.
A second later he fell.
Out of the night, a huge oak tree emerged, springing from the dark like a wall of wood. He clipped it with his shoulder as he went to avoid it. Stumbled. Shifted to his left. As he tried to stop himself from falling, a bramble grasped at his foot, reaching up from the forest floor. He lurched forward and toppled over, hitting the ground hard, the wind thumped out of him, his wrists – locked together – catching under his body. He rolled over, looking up, breath forming in front of his face.
For a moment, he couldn’t focus. He stared up in my direction but slightly off to the side. Then he rocked his head from left to right, his eyelids fluttered and he readjusted. His eyes fixed on me. I shone the torch down at him, off to the side of his face, so he could see me as clearly as the darkness of the woods would allow.
‘Who were they?’ I said.
‘Russians.’ He coughed then smiled, blood and saliva smeared across his teeth. ‘They were scared about what I might be forced to tell the cops. They can get to me in prison. But they can’t get to me in a police station. So I made a deal.’
‘A deal?’
‘The Ghost needs his face doing again. He’s paranoid. Thinks the police are closing in on him the whole time.’ He paused, ran his tongue across his teeth. ‘So I told his people that if he got me out of this, I could delay the police – and I’d do Gobulev’s face for free.’
‘This was about a facelift?’
‘No, David,’ he said. ‘This was about protection. Have you any idea how valuable I am to the police? Have you any idea how much I’ve seen? The Russians were taking out an insurance policy. And anyway, how many plastic surgeons do you think there are in this country willing to work for people like Gobulev?’ He paused. ‘I’m the star witness. I’m the key. I’m God.’
A trickle of blood escaped from his lips and ran down his face. He reached up with his handcuffed wrists and brushed it away. It smeared across the scar on his chin.
‘How did they know?’ I asked him.
‘Let’s just say, when I asked for a phone call, I didn’t call my lawyer.’
As I stared at Crane, a wind whipped across us, passing through grass and bushes and leaves, as cold as a sheet of ice. A gentle whisper followed in its wake; a far-off noise like a voice repeating itself over and over again.
From the ground, Crane
studied me. ‘You can feel it.’
‘I don’t feel anything.’
‘But you knew what I was talking about.’ In the light from the torch, his eyes widened in delight, flicking back and forth across my face. ‘It has a power, this place. All the secrets, the lies, the death, the destruction. It leaves its mark.’
‘You’re done,’ I said quietly.
He shook his head. ‘I’m not done yet, David.’
I looked at him, studied him, his eyes flashing in the subtle glow of the torchlight. I brought the MP5 around and placed it against his head. His eyes crossed for a moment, focusing on the barrel above his eyes. Then he looked back at me.
‘We’re the same,’ he whispered.
My fingers touched the trigger. My left hand squeezed the barrel. The stock cut in against my shoulder. All this misery. All this pain. If I pulled the trigger now, no one would cry for him. No one would miss him. He’d be buried in a cemetery somewhere with no one at his graveside. If I pulled the trigger, no one would mourn him.
‘We’re the same, David.’
But if I pulled the trigger, he’d be right.
I moved the MP5 away from his face and tossed it into the undergrowth behind me. His expression dissolved. He thought he’d still been in control, even as he looked down the barrel of the gun. He thought we were the same. But we’d never be the same.
Not now. Not ever.
‘You were right about me,’ I said to him quietly. ‘I’ve killed. But I did it to survive. I did it because the alternative was dying myself. And there hasn’t been a day that’s gone by – not a single day – I haven’t wished I could have done it differently, even though the people I hurt were men just like you: men who feel nothing when they take a life. There’s not been a single day when I don’t think about what I’ve done. So you can hunt me, and you can torture me, and you can try to kill me. And one day, who knows, maybe one of you will succeed.’ I reached down, grabbed his collar and pulled him to his feet. ‘But don’t ever say we’re the same. Because you’ll never understand me. You’ll never know who I am. And we’ll never be the same.’
And then I led Aron Crane back through the darkness of the Dead Tracks.
76
Three weeks later, police were still trying to unravel the lie that was Aron Crane’s life: his wife, his child, his victims, his reasons. The six women he’d left floating in formalin were there for reference. He could have buried them in the ground like Milton Sykes had, but as he got closer to working on Megan, he needed to be able to refer to the problems he’d encountered during surgery, and the mistakes he’d made along the way.
To start, as had been the case when he was first arrested, he refused to talk. But he did open up a little eventually. Police brought in the best psychologist they could find and he worked some details out of Crane. Small details, like how he pushed his wife Phedra off the decking on the top of his house. Whatever his reasoning, the psychologist failed to illicit any emotion from Crane about the moment he leaned over the railings and looked down at his dead wife, pregnant with his child. Any sign he missed her, or regretted what he’d done. He buried them in the woods, and in all the time people tried chipping away at him, it proved the only chink in his armour. The only way to get him to talk. Crane may have been a wall of silence, but Phedra was the tiny hole that would never seal over.
He pleaded guilty to murdering the six women he preserved in formalin, killing Susan Markham and kidnapping Megan, Jill and Sona, but said virtually nothing during the trial, other than to confirm his name. After four days, the jury found him guilty and he was given seven life sentences, to run concurrently. I watched the news every day during that time, waiting to see an egotistical flash, or hear how he’d smiled at jurors while recounting the horrific things that he’d done. But reporters always described him as subdued, and after a while I realized – without his project, without the opportunity to move from one stage to the next – he had nothing left. When he was even incapable of expressing any regret over what he’d done to his wife and child, it was obvious there were no hidden depths to him. Nothing else to his make-up. With no control and no power, there was no Aron Crane.
After the search of the Dead Tracks was completed, a smaller forensic team went over the burial site Crane had discovered to recover what was left of the thirteen women Milton Sykes had murdered. They found twelve. The thirteenth grave had animal bones in it, but no human remains. Even before an anthropologist had got close to the bodies, I knew what their conclusions would be. Sykes knew the woods better than anyone: the tiny ravines, the trails, the clearings, the hiding places. He’d lived on its edges all his life. Crane had lucked out by finding the twelve Indian women, but inside those fifty acres, tied to the roots of the place, Jenny Truman would remain hidden. And as long as she lay hidden, maybe there would always be a feel to its paths. A sense that something was trying to get away, to claw its way out of the ground and finally find peace.
The investigation into Russian organized crime continued after Crane was sentenced, and police visited him frequently in prison in the months after, trying to build a case. No one outside the task force knew how much Crane was willing to play ball, or how much he even really knew, but I heard from a couple of people that the prison service had rolled out an unofficial protection detail on the advice of the police – to prevent Crane being got at on the inside – and that they were closer to Akim Gobulev than they’d ever been.
Maybe that was true. But I hoped, most days, the police remembered the sacrifice they’d made to get there. Six dead women, including Leanne. Three more – Megan, Sona and Jill – lucky to be alive. Susan Markham. And then Crane’s own wife and child.
Eventually, I went to visit Jill at home. She still had heavy bandaging around the top of her forehead where surgeons had sewn her skin back on to her scalp. But otherwise she looked good. Minimal bruising. Little visible damage. She made some coffee while I stood at the kitchen door listening to her description of the night the man she thought was Aron Crane had come for her.
As we talked, she played with the St Michael pendant at her neck, occasionally glancing at the photographs of her husband looking down at us from the mantelpiece. I saw a lot of myself in her at that moment; having to remind herself over and over that the one person she could rely on, the one person she could trust most in this world, was gone for good. And as I left her house and walked to my car, I realized – after what Crane had done to her – it might be a long time before she gained enough distance to trust again.
Megan was discharged at the same time as Jill. She’d suffered bumps and bruises but the baby was fine. James and Caroline Carver picked her up at the hospital, crying among a scrum of photographers as they walked her back to the car. Soon Megan was crying too. She told them she was sorry for the secrets she’d kept, and sorry for ever believing Daniel Markham. When they got home, the tears stopped for a while as the Carvers told her everything that had happened while she’d been gone. And then they took their pregnant daughter back upstairs to her bedroom and the Carvers – James, Caroline and Megan – spent ten minutes on the edge of her bed, holding each other, while Leigh played on the floor beside them.
Megan gave birth to a baby girl a week early. They called her Faith. She wouldn’t ever know her father, and – given everything he had done – maybe that was for the best. But, one day, Megan might tell her of the things she’d had to endure to bring her daughter into the world – and how it was worth every moment of the doubt and fear she’d experienced along the way.
The Healy family finally buried Leanne on 3 November. It was a big Catholic ceremony in a huge church near their home in St Albans. The Irish side of the family flew over from Cork, packing the aisles at the front, and Leanne’s friends filled out the middle. I sat at the back next to Phillips, Chief Superintendent Bartholomew and a couple of other members of the task force who had helped Healy, in those first few weeks after her disappearance, to try and find Leanne.
Until the shoot-out at the woods, Healy wouldn’t have wanted Phillips there, and Phillips wouldn’t have come. But in the bullet Phillips had taken in the leg, and in the wounds Healy had taken in his chest, they had some common ground. As well as that, Phillips had agreed to stand as a character witness for Healy at his review hearing. It was a selfish gesture in many ways, there as a way to prevent Healy from talking publicly about everything the task force had kept suppressed. But Phillips was highly rated and it would look good for Healy to have him there. At the wake afterwards, they talked uncomfortably for a while – Phillips signed off on sick for a month; Healy indefinitely suspended pending a review by the Directorate of Professional Standards – and then Phillips hobbled away on crutches and headed back down to London.
Most of the others who’d been there with us that night weren’t so lucky. Jamie Hart had spent his first three days rigged up to life support after a bullet perforated his lung and lodged in his throat. Forty-eight hours later, his wife decided to turn the machine off. Three uniformed officers had also been killed, and the paramedic died on arrival at Whitechapel. The SFO who had provided the cover for me had taken a bullet, but survived, and so had one of the dog handlers. Aron Crane might not have fired the guns, but he was responsible for a bloodbath.
When the sun started falling in the sky, I left the wake and walked back across Verulamium Park to my car. As I started the engine, I looked up and saw Gemma Healy coming across the grass towards my BMW. She was in her late forties, but wore it pretty well: dark hair, a petite frame, tiny creases funnelling out from green eyes, and a strength and assurance in her movements that suggested she’d known pain and handled it better than her husband. For a moment, I thought she was heading to the church. But then she continued towards me and waited while I buzzed the window down.
‘Hello,’ she said softly. She also had an Irish accent, stronger than her husband’s. ‘We’ve never met before, but I know who you are.’
