The Dead Tracks dr-2

by Tom Weaver

  Liz offered to make me a cup of Kona coffee from the packet I'd bought her so, after parking the car, I wandered around to hers. One of the sofas had folders and loose legal papers scattered across it. I sat down on the second one and could see books with names like The Dictionary of Law and Solicitor Advocate stacked up by the fireplace. She came back in, armed with two coffees, sat down next to me and glanced at the books.

  'Fascinating, huh?'

  I took one of the mugs. 'I think I'm too terrified to find out.'

  'Fortunately I've got a photographic memory.' She winked. 'Actually, that's not true. But I do seem to be good at remembering lots and lots of really boring, really technical things.'

  'So if I'm a vampire, Does that make you… a robot?'

  She laughed — and then a momentary silence settled between us. 'Thanks for the meal tonight,' she said.

  'Thank your friend.'

  'No, I mean…' She paused, took a sip from her mug.

  'I mean, thanks for asking me out. I know you didn't have to.'

  'I didn't have to - but I wanted to.'

  She nodded. 'I know how hard this must be.'

  I looked at her. Her eyes were dark. She moved a hand to her face and tucked some hair behind one of her ears, and I felt a sudden, unexpected pull towards her.

  'Are you okay?' she asked.

  I put down my coffee. Liz followed my hand, then looked back up at me. I placed my fingers on hers and eased her mug from her grasp, putting it down next to mine.

  Then, slowly, I leaned in and kissed her.

  At first she backed away a little, her mouth still on mine, as if she didn't want me to feel like I had to. Then, as I moved a hand to the back of her head and pressed her in harder against me, she responded. We dropped back on to the sofa, me on top of her, feeling her contours and her shape beneath me. I breathed in her scent as we kissed, one of her legs moving between mine. She moaned a little, and a feeling raced through me, like every nerve ending in my body was firing up. When I looked at her, she was staring up at me, her eyes sparking.

  And that was when I broke off.

  Slowly, the look dissolved in her face.

  'I'm so sorry, Liz.'

  She reached for one of my arms and squeezed it. 'You don't have to be sorry,' she said gently, but I could see the disappointment in her eyes. Derryn flashed in my head, a series of images that were there and then gone again: the night I first met her, the day we married, the two of us on a beach in Florida, and then at the end of her life - wrapped in sweat-stained sheets - as she lay dying in our bed. I shifted closer to Liz and apologized again, but I'd razed the moment, and what remained between us was exactly what had always been there.

  My doubts. My fears. My guilt.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  When I woke at nine the next morning, the house was cold. I started the fire in the living room and put on some coffee. While I was waiting for it to brew, I padded back through to the bedroom to find my phone. It said I'd missed two calls. The first had been from Jill, as expected, at eight the previous evening. I'd also got a text from her: Hi David. We're meeting in the Lamb in Acton, at 8.30. See you there? Jill. The second missed call was from Ewan Tasker at 7.5 5 a.m.

  Tasker was the contact I'd mentioned in passing to Jill. He was working for the Metropolitan Police now, in an advisory role, but previous to that he'd been part of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, before it was assimilated into SOCA. Like the other sources from my paper days, our relationship was built on being mutually beneficial, but over ten years we'd gradually become good friends. The last time I saw him was at his sixtieth birthday almost a year previously. He'd held it in a golf club in Surrey. We sat by the windows, looking out at the course, both of us nursing whiskies. He was mourning the onset of his sixties. I was mourning the death of my wife.

  I tried returning the call, but no one answered, and I allowed my thoughts to quickly turn back to Megan, the man in the nightclub — and Milton Sykes.

  In the spare bedroom I booted up the computer, logged on to the internet and printed out everything I could find on Sykes. I wanted as much information as I could get on his life, his upbringing, his crimes and his arrest. I wasn't sure how it fitted into what I had, but the obvious physical similarities between Sykes and the man in Tiko's couldn't be ignored — and neither could the idea of a copycat. I noted down the most important information and moved carefully through the rest, making sure nothing was missed. When I was done on the first read-through, I flipped back to the start and reread it. Then a third time. Two hours later, I had sixteen pages of notes.

  I turned back to the computer and logged into my Yahoo. There was an email waiting. It was sent from Terry Dooley's home address: no subject line, no message, but a PDF attachment. I dragged it to the desktop and opened it up. It was the missing-person's file Colm Healy had set up for his daughter, and a few miscellaneous pages tagged on to the end covering the subsequent search for her.

  I started going through it.

  Leanne Healy disappeared three months before Megan, on 3 January. She was older, at twenty, and not nearly as capable at school. She'd left at sixteen with middling results, and gone to college to study Beauty and Holistic Therapies, before dropping out after six months. From there she got a job in a local supermarket, which she stuck for another year and a half, then went back to college, this time to do a National Diploma in Business. She completed the course two years later with decent, if unspectacular, grades, and had spent the time between the end of her course and the date she disappeared struggling to find work. On 2 January she'd finally got something: as a full-time office junior at a recruitment agency. Twenty- four hours later, she was gone.

  Physically she wasn't too dissimilar to Megan. Neither of them were overweight, but they definitely weren't skinny girls. They had a nice shape to them, but their height — five-five to five-six - would have prevented them from turning heads in the way they might have done at a few inches taller. Megan was definitely the better-looking of the two. She had a natural warmth, obvious in her pictures, which added to her attractiveness. Leanne looked harder work, and less inclined to make the effort, which came across in the only photograph in the file; she was standing outside a house, straggly blonde hair covering part of her face. In the light, and because of the fuzzy quality of the picture, her smile looked more like a scowl.

  Surprisingly, Healy's version of the events leading up to Leanne's disappearance didn't differ all that much from his wife Gemma's. Neither account mentioned him hitting her, although Gemma said he'd become 'angry and aggressive' when he found out she'd been having an affair. Healy himself tried to claim the moral high ground early on in his own statement, talking about the sanctity of marriage, before admitting he 'may have scared' his wife when she told him the truth about her affair. He described 'getting a little closer to her' than he should have done, and 'swearing at her'. At one point, midway through the transcript, Gemma told her interviewer, 'If Colm dedicated as much time to his family as his work, Leanne probably wouldn't have left that night.'

  The last person to see Leanne alive was one of her brothers. They'd been home together on the afternoon of

  Sunday 3 January, watching a DVD. In the middle of it, Leanne told him she needed to pop out. She left at three- thirty, and never came home again. At eight, her brother called Gemma, who was at a friend's house having dinner, and told her what had happened. Gemma phoned Healy, who was at work. Seven hours later, Healy called in her disappearance, and she was registered as a missing person.

  Right at the back of the file was a black-and-white MISSING poster, the same photo of Leanne in the corner. Leanne Healy. Age at disappearance: 20. Leanne has been missing from St Albans, Hertfordshire, since $ January. Her whereabouts remain unknown. There is growing concern for her welfare. Leanne is 5ft 6in tall, has shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes and is of medium build. After that it listed a confidential helpline number and, right at the bottom of the p
age, a list of places she most often went before her disappearance.

  The list of places were mostly pubs and clubs, as well as the address of the college she'd gone to, and the name of a coffee shop just around the corner from her parents' house, where she'd spent most Saturday mornings studying in the run-up to her exams. But then, in among them, I spotted a name and address I recognized: Barton Hill Youth Project, 42 Chestnut Road, Islington, London.

  The same youth club Megan had gone to.

  And the place she'd met the man who'd got her pregnant.

  The Hole

  Sona woke. The first thing she could see was a line of light above her, about an inch wide and maybe six feet in length. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized she was lying on a mattress in some kind of hole. It had a dirt floor and brick walls, water trails running down them. Above her, out of reach, was a trapdoor. The thin line of light was where it didn't fit properly against the mouth of the hole.

  The hole must have been eight feet deep. It was cut out of the floor, and through the sliver of light above she could see snatches of a steel cabinet, a sink and a clear bottle of something sitting on a counter.

  It looked like some kind of utility room.

  'Help me!'

  No sound came back. No response. No movement. She got to her feet, using the wall for support, and then stopped for a moment: her head still throbbed, and she could feel bruising around her jaw. She closed her eyes, trying to compose herself, then started circling the hole, angling her head in order to get a better look at what was beyond the trapdoor. All she could see were parts of the same unit: more of the steel sink, more of the same cabinet. Nothing else. No shadows shifting. No sign of life.

  'Mark!'

  Silence.

  'Mark, please!'

  More silence.

  This time she screamed until her voice gave way, until her heart was racing in her chest — beating a rhythm against her ribcage — and tears were blurring her vision. After she wiped them away, she closed her eyes and saw him there in the darkness: lying next to her in her bed and then leading her into the woods.

  Bzzzzzz.

  Her eyes snapped open.

  A noise from above. She reached up, her fingers clawing at the walls, nails dragging through the water trails. 'Help me! I've been kidnapped! Help me!'

  Then everything - her voice, the water against her fingers, the gentle buzz from somewhere up above — was drowned out by the sound of feedback. It burst from the walls of the room above the hole, turned up so loud it was distorting whatever speaker it was being piped from. She covered her ears. Even eight feet under the ground, it was like having her face glued to an amp the size of a house.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.

  And the trapdoor shifted away from the hole.

  Her heart shifted, the noise still ringing in her ears, and a flutter of fear took flight through her chest. When she swallowed it felt like shards of glass were passing into her stomach.

  'Hello?'

  The trapdoor came away completely and the room appeared. She could see the rest of the steel cabinet extending across the length of an entire wall. A bare wall next to that, a huge crack running down it. Another sink.

  A glass-fronted bathroom cabinet, full of pill bottles. A red door, the paint blistered, with a glass panel in it. It was open, but there was only blackness beyond. From the top of the trapdoor cover, a rope snaked off, into the dark of the doorway.

  'Hello?' Sona said again.

  Out of the darkness of the door came a small, transparent plastic tube. It hit the floor of the room above her, rolled across it and tumbled into the hole. She caught it. The tube was about six inches long and packed with cotton wool. She looked up.

  'Mark?'

  Something else emerged from the black of the doorway. It rolled across the floor, over the lip of the hole and fell towards her. It made a dull whup sound as it landed.

  A plastic bottle.

  She picked it up. Inside was a pale blue liquid, the consistency of water. There were no other labels on the bottle, just a handwritten message: Apply ALL of it to your face, then throw it back up.

  'Mark,' she said, looking up again. 'Mark, this is ridiculous, baby. Why are you doing this?' She wiped one of her eyes. 'Why are you doing this?'

  Silence.

  'Mark, tell me what you want.' She paused. 'This isn't you, baby.' Her voice was starting to break up. 'Mark.' She waited for any sign of movement in the darkness. 'Mark,' she said, tears running down her face now. 'Mark, you bastard! Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing thi—'

  'Put it on your face.'

  She stopped, heart lurching. A whimper passed her lips. Fear moved down her back like a finger tracing the ridge of her spine. She swallowed again.

  'Mark?'

  Something shifted in the blackness of the doorway. She could see a small patch of white now, about the size of a coin.

  A face.

  Then he stepped out of the darkness.

  He moved slowly, looking down at her, his feet stopping right on the lip of the hole. It wasn't Mark. It was another man: black hair in a side parting, pale skin, pinprick black eyes. In his left hand he held something big.

  'Where's Mark?'

  'Put it on your face.'

  She took another step back and bumped against one of the walls.

  'Mark!'

  'Put it on your face.'

  'Mark!'

  'Put in on your fucking face'

  Another surge of fear exploded beneath her ribs, and she shrank into the corner of the hole. His voice. What's wrong with his voice? It was tinny and robotic, and there was a constant wall of static behind it. The confusion pushed her over the edge: tears started running down her cheeks, over her lips, tracing the angle of her neck.

  Mark, she went to say again — but this time she stopped herself.

  Because, above her, the man raised what was in his hand - and dropped it into the hole. It came at her fast, landing hard on the ground about three inches to her right. She shuffled away from it, trying to figure out what it was.

  And then she could see.

  The torso from a mannequin.

  Cream and rigid. Punctured and broken. The middle of the chest had a hole in it, gauze spilling out from the hollow inside.

  'You see that?' he said from the top of the hole, fingers twitching, a smile like a lesion worming its way across his face. 'Do you see that dummy?'

  He paused. The word dummy glitched a little, and then there was a fuzzy noise, like interference. Sona whimpered, sinking all the way down into the corner of the hole.

  'I'm going to sew your fucking head to it.'

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I got the number for the youth club, but, after the tenth unanswered ring, killed the call. I then dialled the Carvers' number and asked if I could stop by. James told me they'd be in until midday, but Saturday afternoons were when they took his mother out for a drive. She spent the rest of her week in a nursing home in Brent Cross.

  The journey over took forty minutes. I went via Barton Hill, to get a sense of where it was. It was closed. A brass sign on the front said it was open Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The building was about a quarter of a mile from the Carvers' place - close to King's Cross station, in a thin triangle of land between two main roads — and had all the aesthetic beauty of a shipping container: no windows; corrugated steel panels to about the eight-foot mark, where uniform red brickwork took over; and a big rusting door with an oversized padlock. Maybe all the money had been spent on the inside.

  I got back on to Pentonville Road and headed for the Carvers'. At the house the gate was already open. I walked up the drive and saw James Carver standing in the entrance, filling it with his huge frame, his eyes watching the skies as dark clouds finally began to rupture and rain started to fall. We shook hands and moved inside.

  Caroline was in the kitchen. She looked up and said hello to me. Immediately
I could feel an atmosphere between the two of them. Carver obviously still felt betrayed by her. I imagined, in a strange way, he also felt like he didn't know his daughter as well as his wife had; a feeling magnified further now she'd disappeared.

  We sat in the living room while Caroline put some coffee on. Behind us, in the corner of the room, Leigh was playing with a wooden train set.

  'How are things going?' Carver asked.

  'They're progressing. I've got a couple of good leads. One is the reason I'm here today.'

  He held up his hands. 'Whatever it takes.'

  Caroline came through with a tray of coffees and some biscuits. She laid them down on the glass table between us. I thanked her, and took one of the mugs.

  'Is one of the leads Charlie Bryant?' Carver asked.

  Their eyes were both fixed on me now, waiting for the answer. On the drive over, I'd decided I wasn't going to bring up the events of the previous day — even though they'd probably read about it in the morning papers. But now they were looking at me and asking me what they really wanted to know: Is Megan dead as well?

  'At the moment there's nothing to connect this to Megan, other than the fact that she knew him.'

  Deep down, in their darkest moments, they'd probably glimpsed a similar end for their daughter. Her in a field, or in a backstreet. Them standing in the subdued light of a morgue while Megan's body, naked and broken, lay rigid in front of them.

  'Does the name Barton Hill mean anything to you?'

  Carver frowned. Caroline started nodding.

  'Yes,' she said. 'Megan used to go there until she disappeared. It's a youth club, some kind of community project. They help teenagers with cerebral palsy.'

  'Ah, the youth club,' Carver said, trying a little too hard. I'd been right: he definitely felt like he was standing on the wrong side of the glass now; staring in at a daughter, and her mother next to her, wondering what else lay buried at their feet.