by Tom Weaver
The rear doors of the youth club were set back in an alcove. I took out my phone, flipped it open and used the light to examine the entrance. Double doors. A cylinder lock. No handle on the outside. I backed up and examined the building. There had been no alarm on the front and there didn't look like there was one on the back either. But everywhere had an alarm these days. If there was no box, it probably meant the alarm was wired up to an old-fashioned open-circuit system; an alarm built with magnets that reacted to the doors opening, but turned off again when they closed and the circuit realigned.
I looked both ways, back across the car park, then took out a couple of straightened hairpins that I kept in the car. Picking locks was an art. You had to get the pins in exactly the right place, and apply the right amount of tension. You had to know the sounds and be able to feel the slightest of movements travelling back from the pins to your hand. I avoided picking locks if I could. Not because it was illegal, but because it was hard. As if to prove the point, it took me twenty frustrating minutes before I heard the pins finally falling into place.
I pressed the door shut for a moment while I readied myself - and then, as fast as I could, yanked it towards me, stepped inside and pulled it shut again. There was a brief noise: a high-pitched squeal lasting a second. I gripped the handle and waited. Placed an ear to the door. The alarm hadn't lasted long, but it might have been long enough to get someone's attention. I gave it five minutes to be certain, and then flipped open my phone and directed its light into the darkness of the building.
Immediately inside, on the left, was a kitchen and a serving hatch. Opposite, in a small anteroom, were some wheelchairs. I moved along the corridor and into the main hall. A stage to my left, a set of double doors to my right and the main entrance in front of me. Next to the entrance, nailed to the wall, was a planner. As I got closer, I could make out the names and photos of everyone who attended the youth club; above that, dressed in identikit green polo shirts, were the people who ran it.
I illuminated the pictures with my phone light. Neil Fletcher was at the top: the man in charge. Caroline had mentioned his name earlier. He was in his forties, black and grey hair, bright eyes, beard, trim. He wasn't the man in Tiko's — but neither was anyone else on the board. There was a woman below him, then two other men: Connor Pointon and Eric Castle. Both looked the same, without obviously being related. Mid twenties, square jaws, same hair, genetically good-looking. Neither fitted the age group of the man Megan had been seeing. But I made a mental note to double-check both.
Swinging the light round, I walked across the hall to the doors at the far end, my footsteps echoing, the door squeaking on its hinges as I pulled one of them open. On the other side were toilets and an office. The office was sparsely decorated and cold. There was a desk up against one wall, a seat pushed in under it. A computer on the desk that looked at least five years old. Behind the desk, right in the far corner, was a filing cabinet.
I opened it up. Inside were files on every kid who had ever attended the youth club, set out by surname. I went through them, just in case, but nothing stuck out. In the next drawer down were the files on anyone who had ever worked there. Each had undergone an extensive Criminal Records Bureau check, which meant — if the man Megan had met had actually worked at the club — he wouldn't have had a record.
I pulled the files, set them down at the desk and turned the lights on. It was a windowless office, so no one would see me from the outside.
In all, there were seventeen files. I went through those on the three men who worked at the youth club first. The more I read about Fletcher, the less like a potential suspect he seemed. Forty-eight, married with two kids — one almost seventeen herself. Of the other two, Pointon was married, with a young daughter; and Castle was Australian, here on an ancestral visa, and wasn't even in the country when Megan first went missing.
I looked through the rest of the files.
The next eleven were female volunteers. Two I recognized immediately: Megan Carver and Leanne Healy. Megan was working part-time in the evenings at the club when she disappeared. Leanne had left two months before she vanished to concentrate on getting a full-time job, though a couple of entries on some kind of attendance form suggested she'd returned several times to help out. There was nothing else to add to what I already knew.
That left the nine other women. If I was assuming Whoever had taken Megan had also taken Leanne, then I had to assume any female that had ever passed through the doors of the club was a potential victim. I wrote down the names of the women, and made a note to cross-check them with disappearances.
The last three files all featured men.
I laid them out in front of me. One was in his early fifties. I immediately dropped that on to the pile with the women. According to Kaitlin, the man I was looking for was in his thirties or - at a stretch - early forties. The two remaining were good fits. Both thirty-five. Neither was married. Both had clean bills of health from the CRB, and both had worked at the youth club in the period when Megan and Leanne went missing. I looked at their names. Daniel Markham. Adrian Carlisle. According to their files, Carlisle had left the youth club three months ago. Markham, though, still worked on a Monday afternoon. His CV listed his full-time job as 'consultant', whatever that meant.
There were phone numbers and addresses for both. I put them into my phone, and ripped out the pictures of the men attached to the files. From the surrounds of a five-centimetre-high photo, Carlisle looked like the kind of guy who'd perfected the art of smiling without meaning it, but was the better-looking of the two: slick, tanned, nice hair, expensive teeth. Markham seemed friendlier. He was also good-looking but in a studious kind of way, with sensible hair and horn-rimmed glasses. I went through both files again and tried to see if there was any mention of where Carlisle went after he left the club. Spike would probably be able to find out for me if I fed him the details when I got home. I collected all the files together and put them back into the cabinet.
Then I heard something.
Two short beeps. Then silence.
Was that the alarm?
Quietly, I pushed the filing cabinet closed and killed the lights. Stepped back from the door and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. After a couple of seconds, I moved into the corridor and up to the doors into the hall, sliding down the wall until my backside touched the floor. I opened the doors about half an inch. Stopped. Listened again. Pulling one of the doors all the way back, I slipped through the gap and into the hall. Paused. Let it fall back gently into place behind me. Without the light from my phone, the room seemed huge and endlessly black. I waited, crouched down, one knee against the floor. I tried to force myself to see things: shapes, doorways, any sign of movement.
But nothing stood out.
Slowly, I moved across the hall. I studied the anteroom with the wheelchairs in it. Then the door into the kitchen. Then the serving hatch.
Now I could see something.
I moved closer. Got out my phone again.
Shone the light towards it.
At first I wasn't sure what I was looking at. It was pink and misshapen, its front turned away from me. Then, as I took another step closer, I realized what it was.
A plastic doll.
Another step, and suddenly it was looking up at me with glazed blue eyes. Its mouth, turned up in a permanent smile, had been smeared with lipstick. One of its legs had been cut off, leaving a dark hole. Its body was facing the other way to its head, away from me.
I shone the phone back into the hall, and then along the corridor to the back doors. Nothing was out of place. The rear doors were still closed.
It was like no one had ever been inside.
Outside the youth club it was cold. In my pockets were the photographs. In my hand was the doll. When I looked down at it, its glassy blue eyes stood out against the night, briefly glinting, and then rolled back under the eyelids.
The car park entrance opened on to a thin sliver of backstreet. I
veered left, towards the road I'd parked on, keeping to the shadows cast by the buildings. Somewhere behind me a horn blared. A couple of seconds later another car joined in, this time louder and longer. I glanced back over my shoulder, an automatic reaction — and, in the darkness, something moved.
I stopped. Turned.
In the shadows of an overhanging building, I could make out a shape within the darkness. The t— of a shoe. Part of a leg. Above that, the curve of an elbow. I started to move back towards the alley, slowly at first, and then faster as I tried to close the space between us. But the silhouette just remained there - unmoving, turned in my direction - until I was about twenty feet away.
Then it broke into a run.
A figure appeared from the shadows like it was torn from the night. Ten feet further on, as I broke into a full sprint, it passed beneath a street light and I could see it was a man, about six foot, dressed in a long dark coat, dark trousers, black boots and a dark beanie. He kept his back to me the whole time, angling his head away, so that even as he turned a corner, running at full pelt, I couldn't see his face.
He disappeared from view as the street we were on narrowed and darkened, before suddenly veering right. And by the time I hit the traffic, noise and crowds on Euston Road, he was gone.
Chapter Thirty-one
Sunday morning, seven-forty. Waiting for me on the floor below the letterbox was the police file Ewan Tasker had promised he'd drop by: everything the Met had on the night Frank White died. It would have to wait for now.
I put some coffee on. Next door, Liz was leaving her house, heading for her car. Friday night came back to me: pulling away from her and then watching her hope go out like a light. For the second it took to make that decision, everything had felt right. It was too soon, too immense, the guilt too much of a weight to bear. But now all that remained was regret. It fizzed in my belly, a dull ache that I couldn't suppress.
I watched her go and then carried the coffee through to the living room, set it down and spread out the photos I'd taken from the youth club on the table. I brought Adrian Carlisle and Daniel Markham to the front. Using the notes I'd logged on my phone the previous night I scribbled down the addresses and numbers for them both. Carlisle lived up near the reservoirs in Seven Sisters. Markham was in Mile End, close to the tube station. There was a landline and a mobile for Carlisle, but only a mobile for Markham.
On the other side of the table, the doll lay on its side. One of its eyes had dropped closed. The lipstick had smeared a little more. I brought it towards me and turned it, studying the hole that had once been its right leg. Then I noticed something inside the body cavity. I grabbed a pair of scissors, made the hole bigger and pulled it out.
My heart sank.
It was a photograph, folded to quarter size: a top-down shot of the shoulders and neck of a female. It had been taken in subdued light. Not darkness exactly, but not far from it. No part of the head or face was visible. No hair creeping into shot. Nothing above the neck. The skin was blotchy, like Whoever was being photographed had just stepped out of a shower. A bruise, starting to yellow, was on the edge of the shot, close to the hardness of the shoulder blade. Shadows cut in from the sides, moving in towards the neck and around the indent at the bottom of the throat. And right in the top corner, someone had carved something into the glossy finish with either a compass point or the tip of a knife blade. It was the number two.
I flipped the picture over. It had no identifying marks on the back. None of the reference numbers or dates that shop-developed pictures were sometimes tagged with. Which meant it had been printed out on a colour photo printer — or developed at home.
But whose home?
Whoever it was had followed me to the youth club and left the doll there. The doll itself had to hold some significance, otherwise why use it? But for the time being, I was more concerned about the fact that someone was tracking my movements, watching from the darkness without me being able to see back in. Because if someone knew I was at the youth club, and this was some kind of message, it meant there was a hole in the case. And if there was a hole in the case, it would only get bigger until I closed it up.
I leaned in closer to the picture, studying the areas surrounding her body, and the background. It looked like she was sitting up. Behind her, despite the lack of light, the room seemed to extend out. It was granite grey close to her body, but - further back - descended into a wall of complete darkness. Maybe the girl in the photograph wasn't even Megan. Or maybe it was. Both possibilities made my blood run cold.
Then I paused.
Brought it in even closer to me.
Right at the edge of the photograph, just above her right shoulder, there was a shape in the dark. I used a finger to trace it.
Cardboard boxes.
They faded off dramatically, but there was a definite L-shape. I could see a thin line, where the horizontal and vertical axes met on the highest box. There was something else too: a small, pale label stuck to its side, half in the shot, half out. The writing on it was obscured by the darkness of the picture. But I could make out a two-line header in thick black letters. Part of it looked like a pi symbol; the rest was Cyrillic.
I grabbed my phone and dialled the number for Spike.
'We must stop meeting like this,' he said, using Caller ID.
'I need your help. Again.'
'Just name the server.'
'It's not computer work.'
'Oh.'
'I've got something here which I need translating. I don't feel comfortable taking it to a high-street service, so I was hoping you might have a look at it for me.'
'What is it?'
'Definitely Cyrillic. I think part of it might be a number.'
'Yeah, okay. Send it over.'
'Thanks, Spike.'
I killed the call and then used my cameraphone to take shots of the photograph, trying to leave out as much of the woman as possible. The fewer questions I got about who she was and what she was doing, the better. Once I had a couple of clear pictures, I messaged them over to Spike. He called me back inside three minutes. When I picked up, the background music he'd previously been playing had been turned off. No sound of tapping keyboards now. No jokes. This was Spike in full-on concentration mode.
He launched straight in: You were right. That symbol, the one that looks a bit like pi, it's the number 80. As for the rest…' He paused. You got a pen?'
'Yeah, shoot.'
The lighting's terrible, but from what I can make out…' He paused for a second time. I could hear movement and then a couple of clicks of a mouse. 'Okay. There's the main header and then another line underneath. The one underneath… Man, I'm not even sure how to pronounce this.' More mouse clicks. 'C-A-R-C-I-N-O-'
'Carcinogen?'
'Yeah. Could be. What Does that mean?'
'It means it'll give you cancer.'
'Shit,' Spike said quietly.
I looked down at the photograph. Spike had translated the easiest, cleanest part. But the header on the top line would be harder to make out.
'Any idea what the other bit says?'
'Difficult to tell. Maybe the name of a company. Looks like an F, maybe an O. An R, an M. Not sure about the fifth or sixth letters. The seventh is definitely an I.'
I wrote that down. F-0-R-M-?-?-I.
'Okay, that's great, Spike. I really appreciate —'
I stopped. Looked at the letters I'd just written down. Scribbled out both the question marks and replaced them with an A and an L. F-O-R-M-A-L-I.
'David?'
I dropped the pen down next to the pad and leaned back in my chair.
'David?'
'It's not the name of a company,' I said.
'No?'
'It's the name of a chemical compound.'
'Form…?'
'Formalin.'
'What's that?'
'Liquid formaldehyde.'
Spike paused. 'That's what they use in embalming, right?'
&n
bsp; 'Right.' I circled the word a couple of times. 'And preserving remains.'
Chapter Thirty-two
By half-ten, I was moving along Whitechapel Road, into Mile End, and I had the heaters on full blast. I'd already been to Adrian Carlisle's house in Seven Sisters. He wasn't home. I tried his landline and mobile and no one answered. I waited outside his place — a three-storey mid-terrace in which he occupied the top floor — for an hour. But there was no sign of him. Now, as I passed into Mile End, I could make out the sandy brick and gunmetal roof of the building Daniel Markham lived in.
It was the first of six identical five-storey apartment complexes. Each one stood parallel to the next, all facing west so that anyone with a home on the east of the building spent their life without sun. In what must have surely been an ironic touch, they were all named after different types of roses. Markham lived in Alba on the ground floor. At the entrance, the glass doors had steamed up and two women were standing talking, coats and scarves tightly bound around them. I parked up and headed towards them.
Then, ten feet short of the doors, a flash of recollection hit me.
The entrance.
It was the block of flats in Megan's photo. She'd been standing where the women were now, looking into the camera of the man she'd been with, that smile etched on her face. Markham. Was he the one she'd been seeing? The man who'd got her pregnant? The man who'd taken her? I quickly headed inside, through the doors to the ground floor and along a small, grey corridor, to flat number eight.
I knocked twice. Elsewhere in the corridor there was the muffled sound of television. Laughter. A baby crying. But no answer from Markham's flat.
'Daniel?'
No response.
'Daniel, my name's David Raker.'
Nothing.
I stepped forward. There was no spyhole in the door. I put an ear to it and listened. After a couple of seconds, I could hear a noise.
