The Dead Tracks dr-2

by Tom Weaver

'I don't think it's all right', he spat, fingers squeezing the beer bottle. 'Why the fuck would I be talking to you if I thought it was all right? They're burying my girl in a fucking filing cabinet. So let me make it clear for you: when I find her, I'm going to kill the piece of shit that took her, and I'm going to rip out his heart and stick it down his fucking throat. Is that clear enough for you?' He eyed me. 'You can come with me, or you can back down. But if you come with me, be prepared for it to get bad.'

  I wasn't sure if he was talking about finding Leanne or going up against the police. 'Do you know why the surgeon was there that night?'

  'At the warehouse?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Something came in with the guns. Whatever it was, he made off with it.'

  Everything's connected.

  'It was the formalin.'

  'The what?'

  'Liquid formaldehyde.'

  He paused. 'Like the tissue preserver?'

  'Yeah,' I said. 'Like the tissue preserver.'

  He pressed a hand to his forehead and started massaging it. If the surgeon had already taken seven women, Healy didn't need me to tell him why he wanted the chemicals.

  'The police can't keep this quiet,' I said.

  'Can't they?'

  'No.'

  'They've done a pretty good job up until now.'

  'But the surgeon won't come up for air again until he's absolutely sure it's safe. He's not going to risk a repeat of what happened that night in the warehouse.'

  Healy shrugged. 'They're not going to put the women out into the public domain. Because if the surgeon thinks they're about to collar him, they've lost him, and they've lost the names and numbers of every Russian arsehole in the city.'

  I leaned back in the booth. He met my eyes.

  'We can help each other,' he said. You want to find the Carver girl so you can give her parents the answers we couldn't get them, right?' His eyes narrowed. 'Right?'

  I nodded.

  'And I want to find him so I can…'

  He trailed off. For a second, I could see some of my own reflection. A man torn apart by loss. He'd never laid his daughter to rest. He didn't even know where she was and what had happened to her. His last memory of the two of them together was a screaming match. The blurred line between what the law told him he should do, and what he was going to do, was indistinguishable. Maybe there wasn't even a line now.

  'How are they pinning the women on this guy?'

  He looked as if he'd expected me to ask. 'Their necklaces.'

  I remembered the shoebox containing Megan's belongings. I'd taken it from her wardrobe. Inside had been photographs, letters and jewellery — and a shard of smoothed obsidian on the end of a chain. Glass. 'You mean the glass necklace?'

  'Yeah. Because he's wrapped up like the Mummy the whole time, no one knows what he looks like, or what he's called. So the Russians nicknamed him Dr Glass because of a chain he wears around his neck. It's a smoothed piece of obsidian with the inscription PC in the back. It's basically the only thing they know about him.'

  Megan's had MC carved into it.

  'Are they his initials?'

  Healy shrugged. 'Who knows? But all the women had one in their possessions, with their initials inscribed in the back, so it's a fair assumption.' He stopped. A flicker of sadness passed across his eyes. 'All the women… except for Leanne.'

  'She didn't have one?'

  He looked down at the table. 'Phillips lied to you about a lot of stuff today. But he didn't lie about Leanne. They can't one hundred per cent link her to Megan, or to any of the others.'

  'Because she didn't have a necklace?'

  'Right.' He stared at me. 'There were a lot of problems at home too. We used to fight a lot. On paper… Leanne was a good candidate for a runaway.' A pause. More sadness - and then steel. 'But I know he took my girl. I know it.'

  I nodded, let him have a moment. 'Is that it?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'That's how they're pinning seven women on this guy?'

  I looked at him. He didn't reply.

  'It's a link, but it's tenuous. What happens if they're on sale in Asda? Suddenly, him and fifty thousand other people have got one.'

  A moment of silence settled between us.

  'What else aren't you telling me, Healy?'

  He glanced over his shoulder to the door. Looked like he was about to say something, then stopped. When he turned back, he held up a finger. 'There's more,' he whispered. 'But…' He paused again, checked his surroundings a second time. 'I'll tell you. But not here.'

  'You've told me everything else.'

  'I need to show you,' he said.

  I let my mind tick over for a moment, trying to figure out what he meant. 'Have any of the other missing women got connections to the youth club?'

  'No. Just Leanne and the Carver girl.'

  'Which means you need to get some background on Daniel Markham,' I said. 'Because, at the moment, he's the best hope we've got of finding out what happened to them.'

  Chapter Forty-three

  Healy picked up me at seven o'clock the next morning. It was still dark. He had a Vauxhall estate with straw all over the back seats and muddy paw prints on the inside of the doors. The car stank of wet dog. It looked like he was dressed in the same clothes as the night before, apart from the tie. He had the seat all the way back, but his belly still almost touched the wheel, and his legs were arched under it. He wasn't exactly fat, but he was a big man, and thirty pounds of extra weight added a lot of bulk.

  The drive over to Mile End was about fourteen miles. Neither of us said much for the first half-hour. It was slow going, and I got the sense that, like me, Healy was mulling things over: everything we'd discussed the night before, and everything that awaited us. At one point he started fiddling around in the side pocket of the door, and after a couple of seconds brought out a file. He handed it to me.

  'You want a coffee?'

  I looked at him. 'You a coffee fan?'

  We were moving east through Paddington, and there was a Starbucks ahead. He bumped up on to the pavement outside and switched on his hazards. 'I need it to function in the morning,' he said, and pointed towards the file. 'And you'll need some to get through that.'

  I looked at the folder and flipped it open. Inside were missing persons files for all seven women.

  'How do you take it?' he asked.

  'Black.'

  He got out and headed into the shop.

  I opened up the folder and pulled out the files. Megan's was on top. I read through it. The investigation added up to very little. They'd identified the email from the London Conservation Trust as a potential line of enquiry, and made mention of the map on the website, but both leads had hit dead ends. As I'd suspected, without pinpointing the guy in Tiko's, they didn't have Sykes, and they didn't have the connection to the woods. Attached were interviews with everyone who had ever worked at the youth club. I searched for Daniel Markham's and read over it. It was bland enough not to raise any alarms, and the answers he gave were solid and believable. Like the file at the youth club, it listed him as single - but this time it said he was divorced from his wife Susan.

  There wasn't much space in the car, but I attempted to lay the seven different files out on the dashboard, next to one another. Then I discovered there weren't seven.

  There were eight.

  The eighth file was thin and different from the others. Inside was a single sheet of A4, all the pertinent details blacked out. No name. No address. No personal information, other than the place of birth and family status. Mother dead. Father still alive. One sister. The only other thing that faced out at me was a photograph. Female. Blonde hair. Blue eyes.

  I set the file aside and started to move through the others one by one. Photos of the women looked out at me. None of them had a record, so the pictures were all personal, taken by friends and family members. Megan, at seventeen, was the youngest by a clear three years. The rest fluctuated between twenty and
forty-five.

  It was unusual for serial crime to cover such a wide age range, but he was picking victims based on appearance, not age. What criteria did blonde, blue-eyed, medium- build women fill for him? And what else tied them together? I read on a little further and discovered that all the women were single or not dating seriously, and most were pursuing careers rather than jobs that just paid the mortgage. They were intelligent, attractive and well educated. Even Megan, still at school, could be put into that bracket. The only one who looked out of sync was Leanne: average at school, plainer than the others.

  So where did Daniel Markham fit in? Megan - and presumably Leanne - he'd got to know through the youth club, but the others had no connection to Barton Hill, and judging by the files, no connection to each other. But they weren't random victims. This was an utterly methodical man. One who plotted, planned and scoped out. He was organized and sociable, he was intelligent and he didn't look out of place. Maybe that was Markham. Maybe that was Glass. Maybe it was both of them, and they were working together — or maybe they were one and the same.

  For a second, I thought of the families, most of whom were still praying for sightings or — in their darkest hour — perhaps even hoping a body would be found so they could at least get some closure. But the police knew things ran deeper. Phillips, Hart, Davidson, they all knew. Anger worked its way up from my stomach.

  Seconds later, Healy emerged from Starbucks, two giant coffee cups in a cardboard tray. I took the files down from the dashboard, collected them together and took the cup he handed me.

  'Right,' he said, bouncing the car off the pavement. 'Time to go.'

  We moved past Hyde Park to the south, and Regent's Park to the north. But then, two minutes further along Euston Road, we hit traffic. Healy braked gently, leaned over and turned up the heaters. It was cold. Mist had started crawling in across the windscreen, and rain had begun dotting the glass. With his foot on the brake, he peeled the lid off his coffee and looked down at it.

  'You find out anything more about Markham?' I asked.

  'Maybe. He's not on the National Computer, but - like you said — if he cleared a CRB check, he won't have any kind of record anyway. His home address is listed as the one we already know about at Mile End.'

  'No other addresses?'

  'No. The guy's Mr Average. You read his interview, right?'

  'Yeah, it listed him as a consultant.'

  'Over at St John's.'

  'The hospital?'

  'It's about a mile from his flat.' Healy paused, looked at me. 'I called them to ask about him. He's a psychiatrist.'

  'That's not much like a plastic surgeon.'

  Healy nodded. 'I don't think he's Glass.'

  'I was thinking the same.'

  'So where Does he fit in?'

  'Were any of the women patients of his?'

  'No.'

  I drummed my fingers on the dash. 'He was divorced.'

  'Yeah.'

  'Did anyone try to find his ex-wife?'

  'She wasn't too hard to find.'

  'How come?'

  'She got placed in a psych facility up in Hertfordshire a couple of years back. Markham tried treating her himself, but couldn't work his magic. When he got given the all- clear after the first round of interviews, it was decided she was a line of enquiry not worth pursuing.'

  'So have you looked since?'

  'I pulled her records after you made bail yesterday. She had some sort of Grade A nervous breakdown after the divorce. Ended up getting fired from her job, got sick, then spent a year trying to kill herself. Markham had to have her committed.'

  'Is she still at the hospital?'

  'No.'

  'Where is she?'

  'Looks like she was released in May last year.'

  'She might be worth talking to.'

  'If you can find her. I called the hospital yesterday to try and get a last known address but she never turned up to any of the post-release support groups, and they never saw her again.'

  'At all?'

  He shook his head. 'At all.'

  We both looked at each other, and I could see we were thinking the same thing: it wasn't coincidence that another woman connected with Markham had disappeared into thin air. 'Did he have an alibi for the day Megan disappeared?'

  'He was working.'

  'Did you ask the hospital if he was working today?'

  'Yeah. They told me that he'd been off ill for two days.'

  'Really?'

  'Really. Some sort of flu virus.'

  'There wasn't much Lemsip at his flat yesterday. In fact, there wasn't much of anything. The place looked like it had been cleared out.'

  'Maybe that's why he's been off work.'

  Except his flat didn't have the look of somewhere completely abandoned. Items remained in place. Furniture. The heating was still firing up. The lights still worked.

  Finally, the traffic started to move. I looked at Healy.

  'There's an eighth file,' I said.

  He brought the cup up to his lips and swallowed some coffee. When he put it down again, his fingers twitched, just as they had the day before. He'd definitely been a smoker once, but not any more. He didn't carry the smell and neither did the car. There were no cigarette packets inside, and — in over an hour of being on the road — he hadn't expressed the need to smoke once. But it still ate away at him, and his fingers still reacted to having nothing to hold.

  'Healy?'

  The files were stacked on my lap, the photograph of the woman in the eighth facing out at me. Healy looked at me, then down at her photo.

  'Later,' he said quietly.

  Static

  When Sona opened her eyes, everything was filled by light. She immediately closed them again, rolled over and crawled across the floor to the wall of the hole. Except the wall wasn't there. And she wasn't in the hole.

  She gradually opened her eyes for a second time and, around her, shapes started to form. The four white walls of the room she was in. Two thin strip lights above her, buzzing constantly. A glass panel built into one of the walls, running halfway down from the ceiling. When she looked more closely, she saw it was a one-way mirror: everything in the room was reflected back at her; nothing visible on the other side.

  She sat up. There was a door in the wall, adjacent to the mirror, and — next to that — a table with a glass of water. Next to the glass was a small piece of card folded in half: an arrow pointed to the water, and the message Drink this had been written underneath. Along from that, hung across the table, was a medical gown. A second card sat on top of it: Put this on, it read. For a second, she thought of her mother reading Alice in Wonderland to her when she was a child. Then a creeping sense of dread washed away the memory.

  Standing, Sona examined herself in the glass. She wasn't sure how long she'd been kept in the hole. She'd started to lose count after a week. But she could see a change in herself. She had a bruise on her face where he'd come for her last time. One of her eyes looked a little puffy too; the kind of look insomniacs wore. She'd slept most nights, but never well. Part of her was always switched on so she'd hear him approach.

  But it wasn't the bruise, or her eyes, that was changing.

  It was her skin.

  She stepped up closer to the mirror and touched a finger to the glass. On the hardness of her cheekbones, on the bump of her chin, at the tip of her nose, little blobs of light formed, dull and matte. Her skin was waxy. When she touched it, it left a trace of itself on her fingers.

  Then something moved.

  She stepped back and gazed at the window. A flicker behind the glass. Or had she imagined it? Fear blossomed in her chest, prickling, moving through her blood and her muscles and her bones. 'Hello?' she said quietly.

  Nothing.

  Drink this. Put this on.

  She pulled the medical gown off the table. It was thin cotton, and there were ties at the neck and midway down the back. Then she picked up the water and drank some. Gown in
hand, she moved to the far corner of the room. Turned, so her back was opposite the glass. Then started undressing. She'd been in the same clothes for however long she'd been kept in the hole. But although she could smell sweat on herself, some of her other scents remained. Perfume. Moisturizer. She could even smell a little of the shampoo she'd used on her hair the day Mark took her to the woods.

  When she was naked except for her underwear, she glanced back at the window. Another brief movement. A tiny blur, like the outline of a shadow. She studied it for a while longer, her own thoughts {he's watching me) sending a shiver down her spine, then slid her arms into the gown and began to tie it at the neck and back. When she was finished, she faced the door.

  Something had changed.

  She looked around the room, spinning on her heel. Walls. Window. Table. Water. Her clothes on the floor. In the mirrors, the only thing she could see was the room and herself.

  Then she realized: it wasn't something she could see.

  It was something she could hear.

  She looked up. The strip lights above her had stopped buzzing.

  Suddenly, the first one blinked, like a flash of lightning, then cut out altogether. The walls lost their brightness. The floor lost its shine. She backed up a couple of steps, her eyes fixed on the only remaining working light, fear squeezing at her throat. There was a pregnant pause. A long, terrible moment where she silently begged it to stay on. Then it blinked once, mirroring the first strip light - and went out.

  Dark.

  She moved in the vague direction she remembered the door being, and when she couldn't find it, she started to panic. Breath shortened. Heart pumped harder.

  'Please,' she said, tears forming in her eyes.

  Crank.

  A noise from her left. Then a line of light opened up in the darkness. The door. A shape filled the gap. Behind its shoulders was a white corridor, lit by a dull bulb.

  'Please don't hurt me.'

  A tremor passed through her voice as she backed away from the door. The shape, still in the corridor, stepped into the room. And then it pushed the door shut.

  'Please,' she said again.

  No response. No sound of movement.

  Nothing until, about five seconds later, a crackling sound started to emerge from somewhere.