The Dead Tracks dr-2

by Tom Weaver

  'So can you tell me anything else about it?'

  Caroline shrugged. She was still prickly. Carver flicked a look at her. She picked up on it and turned back to me. 'Only what Megan told me. They laid on activities for kids with cerebral palsy, gave them a chance to do something normal, while giving their parents a break.'

  'So what made her decide to start going?'

  'There was a work placement scheme going on at her school,' Caroline said, glancing at her husband. He looked like he didn't know any of this either. 'She really wanted to do something with disadvantaged kids, and kids with disabilities. So she spoke to her teachers and they came back with a list of places where she could go and get some experience for a fortnight. Barton Hill was where she ended up.'

  'And she kept going after the work placement ended?'

  Caroline nodded. 'She liked it.'

  'Did you ever meet the people who ran it?'

  'Only in passing. Jim usually did his weekly accounts on a Wednesday night, so I ended up being the one that ferried her back and forth. I met a few of the people there, just from taking her and picking her up again.'

  'Anyone you remember?'

  She paused, thought about it. 'The guy who ran it was called Neil Fletcher. There were two or three others, but I never really talked to them much.'

  'Did Megan ever talk about meeting anyone there?'

  They both looked at me, eyes brightening, brains ticking over. Suddenly, James Carver was right back in a conversation he'd been slowly drifting out of.

  'Do you think she went off with someone she met there?' he said.

  'No, I don't think so,' I lied.

  I could have told them the truth: that I had a reason to believe she did. That the youth club, and someone who worked there, may have been linked to her pregnancy and her disappearance. But there were things I needed to find out first. There were questions that needed to be answered. And there was a man, somewhere, who knew the truth about where Megan was - and whether we'd ever find her alive.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  An hour later, I was opening the door to the office and my phone was going. I looked at the display. It was Spike.

  'David. Sorry it's taken me a while.'

  'No worries. What have you got for me?'

  I heard him tapping. 'Okay, the PO box number you asked me to look at…' He paused. More tapping. 'It's for a charity called… uh, the London Conservation Trust.'

  Megan had had an email from them. I sat down at my desk and booted up the computer. I'd called them when Spike had first got Megan's telephone records over to me, and all I'd got in return was a short answerphone message. No mention of the charity. No thank you for calling. Just a bored-sounding man in an empty room.

  'Anything else?'

  'The street address is 150 Piccadilly.'

  'One-fifty?'

  'Yeah. The building's called Minotaur House.'

  I pulled a pad across the desk and started to write down the address. Then stopped, 150 Piccadilly.

  That's the Ritz,' I said quietly.

  'Huh?'

  '150 Piccadilly. That's the address for the Ritz.'

  'The hotel?'

  'Yeah, the hotel.'

  The computer pinged as the desktop appeared. I fired up the internet browser and entered the URL for the Ritz. At the bottom was their street address: 150 Piccadilly. I went to Google and searched for Minotaur House, got nothing, then headed to the Charity Commission website. No mention of the London Conservation Trust there either.

  The address was false.

  And the charity didn't exist.

  I thanked Spike, hung up and went to Megan's Hotmail. The email from the London Conservation Trust was right at the bottom. It had been sent on 27 March. Seven days before Megan disappeared. The design of the newsletter was plain and uninspiring: a green banner across the top with a clean but basic logo, all in a pale green. The 'T' of the Trust was a tree. Beneath the logo was a short message, thanking her for her donation of £10 and telling her the money would be put to protecting parkland. There was no street address or phone number. No links or attachments.

  I read the message.

  Dear Megan,

  Thank you for your donation of £10. We want to protect the city's parkland and make a genuine difference - and that means we don't just want to imagine a world where animals are running free in their natural habitat, we want to see it in action!

  At the time of writing, we are engaged in ten different campaigns, and every pound you send to us helps maintain parks and parklands in our capital, and in turn brings flora, animals and people together.

  If you want to be on the frontline, join our march to Parliament next Monday where we will be trying to persuade government ministers to make the protection of local wildlife more of a priority in the coming year. See the website for more details or enter your email to sign up to our weekly newsletter and get the most up-to-date info delivered straight to your inbox!

  Yours sincerely,

  G. A. James

  I put the London Conservation Trust, LCT and the name G. A. James into Google. The LCT got no hits, and the name got nothing in relation to the charity. The incongruous nature of the email had stopped me briefly the first time I'd read it earlier in the week, but only because it was totally out of sync with every other message in Megan's inbox. In truth, it sounded enough like a charity newsletter to pass under most people's radar; a little too jokey and vague, but nothing that would immediately stand out. I scanned it again, reading it over for a second time. See the website for more details.

  Except there was no website.

  Or was there?

  The email address the message had been sent from was info@lct.co.uk. I put www.lct.co.uk into another tab on the browser and hit Return. Within seconds, a website was loading. It was a plain site. No real design. No flair. It mirrored the newsletter in its pale green colouring, but the banner at the top, which was presumably where the logo was supposed to be, had corrupted and failed to load. Down the left was a menu with five options: HOME, ABOUT US, OUR PROJECTS, CONTACT, DONATE. The rest of the page had nothing on it except under construction! in big black letters and some random letters and numbers right at the bottom. When I tried the options on the left, they all took me through to 404 Error pages, except for the last one: DONATE. Clicking on that brought up a secure login box, asking for a username and password. What charity asked you to enter a username and password before donating? And where was the option to sign up to the newsletter? I doubted there was one. Everything about the site was off — but it must have been created for a reason, to serve some purpose.

  As an experiment, I put in Megan's email address as a username and the password for her Hotmail account below that. The box juddered, flashed up Incorrect username and password, and closed. I clicked on DONATE again. This time, I tried Megan's email prefix, 'megancarveri 7', for the username and the same Hotmail password.

  Wrong again.

  Think.

  The police would have worked Megan's phone records in the same way I had. They would have seen that the street address for the PO box was phoney and the building name false. They would have been led to the email, then to the website. Their technicians would have eventually bypassed the security on the website and found what was beyond. But they still hadn't found Megan. Maybe it meant there was nothing beyond the security box — or at least nothing that led to Megan's whereabouts. So why would someone go to the trouble of creating the website and the email if there was nothing worth finding?

  Think.

  I looked at the random numbers at the bottom of the webpage: 21112303666859910012512612713213313414214414803206. It wasn't an error message — or, at least if it was, it was unlike any error message I'd ever seen. Grabbing a pen, I rewrote all fifty numbers on to my pad, and then circled an area in the middle that immediately stood out: 125126127 and 132133134. One hundred and twenty- five through to one hundred and twenty-seven, and one hundred and thirty-two t
hrough to one hundred and thirty-four.

  They were both sequential.

  I went back to the start and worked through from the beginning, applying the same logic throughout. If I assumed the list was one long, gradually increasing series of numbers, fifty suddenly became eighteen: 2 11 12 3036 66 85 99 100 125 126 127 132 133 134 142 144 148. Except I'd cheated, because right at the end was 03206, and I didn't know how they fitted in so had left them out. Even taking each number on its own, or every two, there was no obvious pattern.

  Tabbing back to Megan's inbox, I read over the newsletter again.

  There were no numbers in the message. Nothing to tie the sequence to the site. Not one scrap of evidence to suggest the numbers even meant anything. So why are they there? I looked around the office, trying to pull inspiration out from somewhere. My eyes passed pictures on the walls, photographs, the front pages I'd written and the stories I'd broken. What aren't you seeing? Without a user- name or password, I'd have to enlist the help of Spike to get past the security for me. And that meant time. It meant hours sitting on my hands. It meant wasted days.

  I looked down at the numbers written on the pad again, then back to the email in Megan's inbox, then back to the numbers. What the hell aren't you…

  Then I saw it.

  Copying and pasting the contents of the email into a Word document, I started going through the message again. The first number in the sequence was two. I capitalized and emboldened the second word in the email. The second number was eleven. I capitalized and emboldened the eleventh word. Then I did the same with the twelfth, thirtieth, thirty-sixth, sixty-sixth and the rest.

  Two minutes later, everything had changed.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I leaned in towards the monitor and took in each line of the email, every bold word suddenly coming alive. Three minutes before it had just been a charity newsletter. Now it was the reason Megan had disappeared.

  Dear MEGAN,

  Thank you for your donation of £10. We WANT TO protect the city's parkland and make a genuine difference - and that means we don't just want to IMAGINE a world where animals are RUNNING free in their natural habitat, we want to see it in action!

  At the time of writing, we are engaged in ten different campaigns, and every pound you send OFF to us helps maintain parks and parklands in our capital, and in turn brings flora, animals and people TOGETHER.

  If you want to be on the frontline, join our march to Parliament NEXT MONDAY where we will be trying to persuade government ministers to make the protection of local wildlife more of a priority in the coming year. SEE THE WEBSITE for more details or ENTER YOUR EMAIL to sign up to our weekly newsletter AND get THE most up-to-DATE info delivered straight to your inbox!

  Yours sincerely,

  G. A. James

  A feeling of dread flared in my chest. Megan, want to imagine running off together next Monday? See the website. Enter your email and the date.

  I tabbed back to the LCT website, clicked on DONATE, and put Megan's full email address in as the username. Enter your email and the date. What date? Today's date? The date the email was sent? The date she disappeared? I tried them all and every time the pop-up box juddered and closed. None of them was right.

  You're stumbling around in the dark here.

  The date. The date. The date. I let my mind work back over the last week, trying to recall anything I'd found that might give me a clue as to what that meant: Megan, her parents, her school, her friends, the youth club, Charlie Bryant, the man at Tiko's, his similarity to Sykes… and then I stopped.

  Sykes.

  The last five digits of the numbered sequence. 03206. I hadn't been able to see where they fitted in before. But now I did.

  03 2 06. 3 February 1906.

  I flipped back a couple of pages on my pad, to where I'd made the notes about Sykes. 03 02 06. 3 February 1906.

  The day he was hanged.

  I entered Megan's email as the username, and 03206 as the password. And I hit Return. The security box disappeared and the website began to load a new page. It took a couple of seconds. When it was done, a small map appeared in the centre, about five square inches in size. It had been drawn by hand with black marker pen and scanned, and looked like an approximation of a car park, vehicles — as if viewed from above — on one side, a long thin line opposite them. On the other side of the line was an X and a typewritten message: Meet here at 2.30 p.m. for a romantic woodland picnic!

  It was the Sixth Form car park at Newcross Secondary.

  He knew what he was doing. He knew there was no CCTV coverage in that part of the school and he knew what time her lesson finished. He picked her up and he took her away, and no one even noticed.

  The ultimate disappearing act.

  Except he'd left a trail. Because while the woodland he described could have been anywhere as far as the police were concerned, I'd spotted him in Tiko's, I'd found out who he looked like, and I knew the significance of the website password.

  I knew his next move that day.

  He'd taken her to Hark's Hill Woods.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  There was a coffee shop that doubled up as a deli a couple of doors along from the office. I headed downstairs and ordered a steak sandwich. While I was waiting, my phone started buzzing. It was Ewan Tasker calling about Jill's husband. I was tempted not to answer, not because I didn't want to speak to him, but because I didn't want another case to add to my workload minutes after a major break in the Carver one. But if I didn't answer, Tasker would just assume I wasn't around - and then keep on calling.

  I hit Accept. 'Help the Aged.'

  A laugh crackled down the line. 'Raker.'

  'How you doing, Task?'

  'Good. How are you?'

  'Can't complain. I tried you earlier this morning, but I imagine you were winding your way towards the nineteenth hole. You're not hammered already, are you?'

  He laughed again. 'Not yet.'

  Rain pounded against the window of the coffee shop, making a noise like an army marching. I bent slightly and covered my other ear.

  'So what have you got for me, old man?'

  'You didn't hear any of this from me.'

  'Goes without saying.'

  The sound of paper being shuffled around.

  'Okay. Frank Robert White. Forty-one years of age.

  Married to Jill, no kids. Detective inspector for three years before he got popped, nineteen months of which he spent at the Met. On the evening of 25 October of last year, he was shot once in the chest, high up near the left shoulder, and once in the head, just above the bridge of the nose. He was part of a task force investigating Akim Gobulev. You've heard of him, right?'

  'Yeah. The Ghost.'

  'Right. Gobulev runs Russian organized crime in London, except no one's seen him since he landed at Heathrow ten years back.' More paper being flicked through. You know what his first name means back in Mother Russia?'

  'No.'

  '"God Will Judge". Fucking right about that. He was a pain in my balls at NCIS, but it looks like SOCA managed to get close to him through an informant.'

  'So SOCA were working with White's Met team?'

  'Right. White was SCD.'

  The Specialist Crime Directorate. They were a Metropolitan Police department working across the city on serious and high-profile cases. Homicides, gangs, child abuse, e-crime, money-laundering - it all came under the SCD umbrella. It was split into eight Operational Command Units, and SCD7, which covered organized crime, would have been where Frank White was based.

  'White had put a task force together to support SOCA and work alongside them, and they were about to put the cuffs on Gobulev's… What the hell have I written here?'

  'Plastic surgeon?'

  'Yeah, surgeon.' He sounded surprised. 'You already know all this?'

  'Not much, but some.' I kept it at that. I didn't want an overview from Task; I wanted everything he had. "What do we know about this surgeon?'

>   'Intelligence suggests he's kind of like a gun for hire — except he comes armed with a scalpel and a syringe full of Botox.'

  'So he isn't Russian?'

  'No. Informants put him as English. He did the works on God Will Judge's face - as in, completely changed the way he looked — which is probably why we never found the arsehole in ten years at NCIS.'

  'And presumably why Gobulev took a shine to the surgeon.'

  'Yeah. He uses his medical expertise on a freelance basis — nose job here, brow lift there - but mostly he's just sewing up knife wounds and scooping out bullets for low- level shitheads. It's a way for the Russians to keep their employees out of A&E. Once you hit the hospitals, people start asking questions.'

  'So what happened the night Frank died?'

  'SOCA got a tip-off that the surgeon would be at that warehouse down in Bow, helping Gobulev take delivery of some guns.'

  'But Gobulev wasn't there.'

  Tasker snorted. 'Gobulev doesn’t go to his own birthday party.'

  'So why send the surgeon?'

  'No one was really sure. But the Russian informant reckons there was something else with the guns as part of the delivery.'

  'What?'

  'Currently unclear. White's team screwed up and got spotted early doors and then it turned into the OK Corral. White and the other officer who died got separated from the rest of the task force, and the next time anyone saw them they were bleeding out on the floor of the warehouse and the surgeon was haring away from the scene of the crime in a stolen car.'

  'What about the rest of Gobulev's men?'

  'Three dead at the scene. One was DOA; one decided not to speak in the interview, or during his subsequent trial.'

  'At all?'

  'Not about his involvement in anything, no. The Ghost's a scary man. Maybe Mr Dumb thought a life in clink was preferable to whatever Gobulev would do to him if he talked.'

  'What about forensics?'

  'Not much. The warehouse wasn't exactly a sterile environment. They recovered a ton of fibres, a shitload of hairs, some trace stuff. No matches.'