David Raker 01 - Chasing the Dead

by Tim Weaver

  I paused. A bizarre start.

  ‘Understood?’ he said again.

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Okay,’ he continued, ‘so the lab lightened the Polaroid. Alex is in the middle of the shot, in what looks like the front bedroom of a house. The whole background is a little out of focus, but there’s clearly a window behind him, and on the other side of that, some kind of veranda. To me, it looks like the type of thing you’d get on the front of a farmhouse.’

  ‘Anything else visible through the window?’

  ‘Just grass and sky.’

  ‘No recognizable landmarks?’

  ‘No. It’s taken from a weird angle. Kind of shot from below. Alex is looking down. The window, and the veranda, they’re both on a slant because of the angle. You on email there?’

  ‘Uh, I’m not at home.’

  ‘I can email you a copy.’

  ‘You asked about prints before,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’

  There was a hesitant pause. ‘There’s two sets of prints.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You know a Stephen Myzwik?’

  ‘Is that a Stephen with a ph?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Something sparked. The name was on the pad I took from Eagle Heights.

  Paul. Stephen. Zack.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Stephen Myzwik, aka Stephen Milton. Thirty-two years of age, born in Poland, moved to London, served ten years for stabbing a sixty-year-old man with a piece of glass. After that, he violated the terms of his parole, and, under the alias of Stephen Michaels, used a fraudulent credit card to rent a vehicle in Liverpool.’

  I could hear him turning pages. He’d obviously printed them out from HOLMES – the police database where all serious cases were logged – like he’d done for me a couple of days before.

  ‘Wait a minute…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s stuff missing here.’

  I thought of something.

  ‘There were pages missing in Alex’s file as well.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What was missing?’

  ‘A couple of pages. Some of the forensic stuff. The pathologist’s report.’

  More pages being turned.

  ‘Where the fuck have they gone?’

  ‘Has someone deleted them?’

  ‘Deleted information from the computer?’ A long silence came down the line. I could hear him flicking through the file, faster this time. Then he stopped. ‘This file’s fucked.’

  Something had got to him. Something more than just pages missing from a file.

  ‘Do you want me to call you back?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got time for this shit. I’ll look into it later. Let’s just get it over and done with.’ He started on the file again. Pages turned. ‘He’s dead, anyway.’

  ‘Who, Myzwik?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Somehow another dead body wasn’t all that surprising. First Alex, then Jade, now Myzwik: all of them dead – or supposed to be.

  ‘How’d he die?’

  ‘Looks like his body was dumped in a reservoir near here.’

  ‘Near Bristol?’

  ‘Yeah. Divers dredged him up about two months later. He must have made some dangerous friends.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘They’d been chopped off?’

  ‘With a bandsaw.’

  Just like Jade.

  I heard Cary flicking through more pages.

  ‘You said there were a second set of fingerprints?’

  ‘Yeah. They’re Alex’s.’

  ‘That’s not such a surprise, is it?’

  ‘Depends,’ he replied. ‘We took Alex’s prints off some of the stuff he left behind when he went missing. I did that – set up the missing persons file myself.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Have you got any idea why Alex disappeared?’

  ‘I haven’t managed to find that out yet, no.’

  A long drawn-out pause.

  ‘The prints we pulled off the photograph match some pulled off the wheel of a silver Mondeo used in a hit-and-run six years ago.’ More paper being leafed through. ‘Witnesses recall seeing a white male about Alex’s age having a big fucking barney in the parking lot of a strip joint called Sinderella’s in Harrow. I quote: “At eleven twenty-two p.m. on 9 November it is alleged the suspect drove the silver Mondeo–”’

  ‘Wait a minute. Ninth of November?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s the day before Alex disappeared.’

  ‘Correct. “Suspect struck the victim – Leyton Alan Green, 54, from Fulham – as he was coming out of

  We both stopped to take the information in.

  ‘Alex killed someone?’

  ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘This Green guy – has he got a record?’

  ‘No. He’s clean.’

  ‘And the car was a rental?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What did Hertz say?’

  ‘Not a lot. Alex used fake ID. Registered under the name Leyton Alan Green.’

  ‘Cute.’

  ‘Yeah. You could say that.’

  ‘You believe it?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  I paused and tried to take it in. Things were changing fast.

  ‘Can I get a copy of those files?’

  He didn’t reply straight away.

  Then, quietly, he said: ‘I sent them to you yesterday.’

  It took me three hours to get home. I parked at the end of my street and sat and watched the house. A biting wind pressed at the windows. Snowflakes blew across the street. Without the engine on, and the heaters off, the car cooled down almost instantly, and slowly my body started to react: adrenalin passing out of my system, cold crawling back in. I still had no coat, no shoes, no socks. I reached down to the ignition, my hands shaking now, my teeth chattering. Every cut in my face and feet, every bruise on my body, ached. I turned the key. The heaters kicked back in, the noise of the engine with it. And, finally, as I slowly started to warm up, my body began to settle.

  Leaning in against one of the heaters, I looked down the street again, towards my house. The road had always been quiet, so I was hoping anything out of place would stick out a mile. But I also knew from the night before that they weren’t just barmen and youth pastors – they were trackers and marksmen. And they were killers. They could fade in and out, and they could disappear. The advantage was still with them.

  I looked at the clock. 11.27. They were probably starting to realize Zack and Jason weren’t coming

  I got out of the car, locked it and crossed the road towards the house. I looked up and down the street. No one sitting in cars. No one watching the house. They’d removed everything from my pockets the previous day, including my keys, so I headed around the back of the house and took the spare key out of one of the dead hanging baskets next to the rear door.

  Inside, the house was cold. I approached each room carefully, just in case, but there was no one inside and nothing had been touched. The files Cary had sent the day before were on the floor, under the letterbox, handwritten but otherwise anonymous.

  I showered and briefly caught sight of myself in the mirror.

  There were cuts all over my face, bruises creeping down my throat and across the muscles at the top of my chest. My body was toned, but now it was marked as well. A reminder of how badly they wanted me dead.

  I dug out the warmest clothes I could lay my hands on: a pair of dark jeans; a long-sleeve thermal training top I used for jogging; a T-shirt; a black zip-up top; and a black overcoat Derryn had bought me one Christmas. I packed some extra clothes into a holdall,

  At the bottom of the garden, I looked back up the drive and glimpsed Liz moving around in her front room. In the windows of the house, I could see my reflection.

  A man on the run.

  A wound crawled out from my hairline. My face was bruised. I looke
d gaunt and tired. I wondered whether I’d allow myself to sleep again until this was over. It could be days, weeks, months. It could be never. Maybe the next time I closed my eyes would be with one of their bullets in my chest.

  I turned and started towards Zack’s car again.

  Then stopped.

  There was someone leaning in against the passenger window, the hood up on his coat, cupping his hands against the glass. I backed up and crouched down behind one of the garden walls. He glanced along the street towards the house, didn’t see me, and moved around the front of the car to the driver’s side. He tried the door. When he stepped away from the car a second time, I caught a glimpse of his face and

  He looked back at the house and fixed his gaze on the front. I could see his eyes narrowing, as if he knew something was up. It was like he’d studied the street before my arrival – had seen which cars were where, and who they belonged to – and now saw a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit.

  He patted the front of his jacket. Has he got a gun? I unzipped the holdall and took out the knife. It wouldn’t be much of a fight, unless he got close without seeing me. But it was better than surrendering. If there was one thing I’d learned over the past couple of days, it was that there was no point in surrendering. They’d kill you anyway, whether you gave them what they wanted or not. Fighting back didn’t give me much of a chance – but it did at least give me something.

  I gripped the knife as hard as I could, adrenalin pumping my heart faster. But then the man took another look at the car, spun on his heel and headed the other way. I watched him go, reaching the end of the road. He looked back once and disappeared around the corner.

  I stayed put. It was a trap. Had to be. He knew the car belonged to them, and if it was parked in my street,

  I got to my feet and headed across the street, flipping the locks on the car with the remote and sliding in and starting it up in one swift motion. I looked in my rear-view mirror, put my foot to the floor and drove away. When I got to the bottom of the road, I checked my mirrors again. There was no sign of him – at least for the moment.

  There was a Starbucks about three miles north. I left the car in a multi-storey a mile down the road. If I was driving one of their vehicles, it made it easier to find me. I’d noticed a satellite tracking sticker on the front windscreen. If they were smart – which they were – they’d call the tracking company and locate the car.

  I chose a sofa at the rear of the coffeehouse with the least amount of lighting above it, and sat with my back to the wall. I used their wi-fi connection to log into my Yahoo. In my inbox there was an email from Cary. The subject line was Pic. Underneath, he had written: This doesn’t exist on the server any more – if you want another copy, tough. It’s gone.

  I dragged the attachment to the desktop and opened it up. It had been blown up big. At its default size I could make out the side of Alex’s face and some window in the background. I took it down in size.

  The photograph was much lighter. Alex’s face was more defined. I could make out the scar on his right cheek, the one he’d got playing football as a kid, and could see his hair properly now. It wasn’t shaved, as it had been when Mary saw him, but it was cut so close his scalp reflected light coming in through the window. Cary was right. It was taken at an odd angle. It

  I looked at the view through the window.

  Beyond the veranda, beneath the endlessly blue sky, just a tiny speck in the corner of the photograph, was another patch of blue. A different shade. I moved closer to the screen and zoomed in.

  Sea.

  The room overlooked the sea.

  Then I noticed something else. I resized the picture, and zoomed in on the window pane on the left-hand side. There was a reflection in the glass: veranda railings looking out over a hillside covered in heather; a sign nailed to a railing, reading backwards in the reflection. I flipped the photo to reverse the picture, and the writing read the right way.

  LAZARUS.

  A couple of days before I’d seen the same name on Michael’s mobile phone.

  I got a second coffee and called Terry Dooley, one of my old contacts at the Met, to tell him the car I’d hired the day before – still in Bristol – had been stolen.

  ‘You don’t call me for months and then you call me up to tell me your hire car’s been stolen?’ Dooley said. It sounded like he was having lunch. ‘Fuck do I care?’

  ‘I can’t get down to your hole in the ground to report it. So, I need you to fill in the paperwork for me.’

  He laughed. ‘Do I look like your secretary?’

  ‘Only when you’ve got your lipstick on.’

  anything I want.’

  ‘You still owe me.’

  ‘I don’t owe you shit.’

  ‘I’ll email you the details, you fill out the form for me and liaise with the rental company, and I’ll carry on pretending I don’t know where Carlton Lane is.’

  He stopped eating.

  Carlton Lane was where Terry Dooley and three of his detectives were one night about four years before I left the paper. There was a house at the end, hidden from the street by trees, that doubled up as a brothel. One of Dooley’s detectives ended up having too much to drink and punched a girl in the face when she told him he was getting a bit rough. She got revenge the next day by leaking enough details to the newspaper to protect her income and the brothel while landing Dooley and his friends in serious trouble. Luckily for Dooley – and his marriage – the call came through to my phone.

  ‘You gonna use that on me for the rest of my days?’ he said.

  ‘Only when I need something. So you’ll do it?’

  He sighed. ‘Yeah, whatever.’

  ‘Good man, Dools.’

  And then he hung up.

  I emailed him all the information he’d need to complete the paperwork, then called the car rental company to fill them in, and request a replacement car. They said I’d have to pay an excess on the stolen vehicle, but because I’d taken out premium insurance cover when I’d hired it, the amount would be minimal. Next, I called Vodafone. I told them my phone had been in the car when it was stolen and asked them to redirect all incoming calls to the new phone. They set it up there and then.

  After that, I put the two files Cary had sent on the table in front of me.

  The first was Myzwik’s. It detailed his record before and after prison, right up until his body was discovered in the reservoir. There was a black-and-white photograph of him from his last arrest. The file confirmed that Myzwik’s body was brought ashore by police divers after part of his coat had been spotted floating on the surface of the water. They’d found his credit cards in a wallet on the other side of the reservoir. Forensics had worked on the recovered hands, but a definitive fingerprint match couldn’t be made, owing to the amount of time the body had been underwater.

  Then something hit me.

  I reached down into the holdall, took out Alex’s file, and flicked to the odontologist’s findings. Teeth had been found in Alex’s stomach and windpipe.

  But not just on the enamel.

  In both files, in both pathology reports, traces of the same bonding glue had been found on the root of the tooth as well.

  Oh, shit.

  Parts of the odontologists’ findings were missing from both files; but wherever they’d gone, and whoever had deleted them, they hadn’t got rid of enough. Because I knew what I was looking at now.

  Myzwik couldn’t be fingerprinted because the longer the body was in water, the less accurate the technique became; without a face, no one could ID him either. And as Alex’s body was more skeleton than flesh, burnt black from a two-thousand-degree fire, dental records were all anyone had to go on.

  And neither was his body.

  The second file was much thinner than the first.

  Leyton Green owned two electronics stores in Harrow, and a third in Wembley. The night he died, he’d been driving a dark blue Isuzu Trooper. It was new, bought the week before
from a dealership in Hackney. The police had done some background checks on the vehicle, toying with the idea of the murder being related to the purchase of the jeep. But, like everything else in the case, it was a dead end.

  The report detailed the night Green was hit by the silver Mondeo. Eyewitness accounts were thin on the ground. A couple of people identified the Mondeo. No one could identify who was driving it.

  Towards the back were some photographs. The biggest was of the murder scene. Green’s body was under a white sheet, only the sole of his shoe poking out. Blood had stained the sheet. Little circles of chalk were dotted around the body, ringing pieces of the Mondeo. The next pictures confirmed this: shots of pieces of the bumper, and even a chunk of the bonnet. He must have been hit hard. Close-ups of his face followed, bloodied and battered. One of his left hip, black with blood and misshapen, where the Mondeo had struck him.

  I was about to return the printouts to the holdall when right at the back, close to a description of the strip bar, I found another photo. Staring up at me,

  The same man I’d seen in a photograph in Mary’s basement.

  Leyton Alan Green was Alex’s Uncle Al.

  Gerald opened the door a fraction. Recognition sparked in his eyes and he pulled it all the way back. ‘What the fuck d’you want?’ he said, glancing over his shoulder to where the guillotine sat in the centre of the room, pieces of card and cellophane strewn on the floor around it. Half-finished IDs lay on top of empty cartons of food.

  ‘I need to speak to you.’

  ‘You did all your talkin’ last time.’

  ‘I want to buy something from you.’

  He smirked. ‘You must be outta your fuckin’ mind.’

  I reached into my pocket. He backed up half a step, as if I might be taking out a gun. Instead, it was my wallet. I opened it up. There was over £800 in it.

  He glanced at the money, then back at me. ‘You shouldn’t be walkin’ around with that.’