The Dead Tracks Read online

  The Dead Tracks

  Tim Weaver

  * * *

  * * *

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand,

  London WC2R ORL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2011

  Copyright © Tim Weaver, 2011

  All rights reserved

  * * *

  For Mum and Dad

  * * *

  'All faces shall gather blackness…'

  Joel 2:6

  * * *

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Sona

  PART TWO

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Hole

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  This is the Beginning

  PART THREE

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  The One that Got Away

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  The Doctor

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Chapter Sixty-five

  Chapter Sixty-six

  Chapter Sixty-seven

  Chapter Sixty-eight

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-one

  Chapter Seventy-two

  Legal Right

  Chapter Seventy-three

  Chapter Seventy-four

  Chapter Seventy-five

  Chapter Seventy-six

  Chapter Seventy-seven

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgements

  * * *

  PART ONE

  * * *

  Chapter One

  We met in a restaurant on the Thames called Boneacres. They were sitting in a booth at the back. Rain was running down the windows and both of them were staring out at a queue of people waiting in line for the Eye. The woman looked up first. Caroline Carver. She'd been crying. The whites of her eyes were stained red, and some of her makeup had run. She was slim and well dressed, in her mid forties, but didn't wear it well: there were lines in her face — thick and dark like oil paint - that looked as if they'd been carved with a scalpel, and though she smiled as I approached, it wasn't warm. She'd been past warm. Most of the parents I dealt with were like that. The longer their kids were missing, the colder their lives became.

  She slid out from the booth and we both shook hands, then she made way for her husband. James Carver. He was huge; a bear of a man. He didn't get up, just reached across the table and swallowed my hand in his. I knew a little about them already, mostly from Caroline's initial phone call a couple of days before. She'd told me they lived in an old church — converted into a four-bedroom home — from which he ran his building firm, a business he'd built up over fifteen years. Judging by the property's two-million-pound price tag, the name brands they were sporting and some of his celebrity clients, it was keeping them pretty comfortable.

  He smiled at me, more genuine than his wife, and gestured to the other side of the booth. I slid in. The menu was open. The restaurant had been their suggestion, and when I looked at the prices, I was glad they were paying.

  'Thanks for coming,' Carver said.

  I nodded. 'It seems like a nice place.'

  Both of them looked around, as if they hadn't thought about it before. Carver smiled. Caroline's eyes snapped back to the menu.

  'We used to come in here before we were married,' he said. 'Back when it was a steak and seafood place.' His wife glanced at him, and he reached over and took her hand. 'Caroline tells me you used to be a journalist.'

  'Once upon a time.'

  'Must have been interesting.'

  'Yeah, it was fun.'

  He glanced at my left hand. Two of my fingernails were sunken and cracked, a blob of white scarring prominent in the centre where the veneer would never grow back.

  Those your battle scars?' he asked.

  I glanced at the nails. 'No. They got added more recently.'

  'So why did you give it all up?'

  I looked at him, then across to Caroline. 'My wife was dying.'

  A real conversation stopper. They shifted uncomfortably. Caroline turned her gaze back to the table, then picked up her menu. He cleared his throat. Before the silence got too long, Carver reached into his jacket and brought out a photograph. Something moved in his eyes, a sadness, and then he turned it around and placed it in front of me.

  'That's Megan,' he said.

  When Caroline had originally called, I gave her directions to the office - but she said she wanted to meet somewhere neutral, as if coming to see me was confirmation her daughter was gone for good. After we'd arranged a time and a place, she told me a little about Megan: a good girl, part of a close family, no boyfriends, no reason to leave.

  She'd been gone nearly seven months.

  Two hundred thousand people go missing in the UK each year — thirty thousand in London alone — but the most powerful media story of them all is the young white female from a middle-class, two-parent family. When Megan first disappeared, there was a lot of media coverage: locally, nationally, some of it even playing out abroad. It ran for weeks, one headline after the next, every TV channel in the country reporting from outside the gates of her home. There was a name for cases like hers that unravelled in the full glare of the camera lens: MWWS.

  Missing White Woman Syndrome.

  In the photograph they'd handed me, Megan was sitting with her mum on a beach. The sand was white, flecked with small stones and twigs and falling away to a sapphire sea. Behind Caroline and Megan, playing, was a small boy, probably four years old. He was half turned to the camera, his eyes looking into the hole he was digging.

  Carver pointed at the boy. That's our son. Leigh.' He looked at me and could see what I was thinking: there was a thirteen-year age gap between their kids. 'I guess you could say…' He glanced at his
wife. 'Leigh was a very pleasant surprise.'

  'How old is the photograph?'

  'About eight months.'

  'Just before she disappeared?'

  'Yes, our last holiday together, in Florida.'

  Megan was very much her father's daughter. She had the same face, right down to identical creases next to the eyes, and was built like him too. Big, but not fat. She was an attractive seventeen-year-old girl: long blonde hair, beautifully kept, and olive skin that had browned appealingly in the sun.

  'Tell me what happened the day she went missing.'

  Both of them nodded but made no move to start. They knew this was where it began; the pain of scooping up memories, of going over old ground, of talking about their daughter in the past tense. I got out a pad and a pen as a gentle nudge. Carver turned to his wife, but she gestured for him to tell the story.

  'I'm not sure there's a lot to it,' he said finally. His voice was unsteady at first, but he began to find more rhythm. 'We dropped Meg off at school, and when we went to pick her up again later, she didn't come back out.'

  'Did she seem okay when you dropped her off that morning?'

  'Yes.'

  'Nothing was up?'

  He shook his head. 'No.'

  'Megan didn't have a boyfriend at the time, is that right?'

  'That's right,' Caroline said sharply.

  Carver looked at his wife, then squeezed her hand. 'Not one that she told us about. That doesn’t mean there wasn't one.'

  'Did she have any boyfriends before then?'

  'A couple,' Caroline said, 'but nothing serious.'

  'Did you meet them?'

  'Briefly. But she used to say that when she finally brought a boy home for longer than a few minutes, we'd know it was the real thing' She attempted a smile. 'Hopefully we'll still get to see that day.'

  I paused for a moment while Carver shifted up the booth and slid his arm around his wife. He looked into her eyes, and back to me.

  'She never expressed a need to travel or leave London?' I asked.

  Carver shook his head. 'Not unless you count university.'

  'What about her friends - have you spoken to them?'

  'Not personally. The police did that in the weeks after she disappeared.'

  'No one knew anything?'

  'No.'

  I picked up the pen. 'I'll take the names and addresses of her closest friends, anyway. It'll be worth seeing them a second time.'

  Caroline reached down to her handbag, opened it and brought out a green address book, small enough to slip into a jacket pocket. She handed it to me.

  'All the addresses you need will be in there, including her school,' she said. That's Meg's book. She used to call it her Book of Life. Names, numbers, notes.'

  I nodded my thanks and took it from her. What sort of stage would you say you're at with the police?'

  ‘We're not really at a stage. We speak to them once a fortnight.' Carver stopped, shrugged. He glanced at his wife. 'To start with we made a lot of headway in a short space of time. The police told us they had some good leads. I guess we got our hopes up.'

  'Did they tell you what leads they had?'

  'No. It was difficult for them at the beginning' He paused. We put out that reward for information, so they had to field a lot of calls. Jamie Hart told us he didn't want to give us false hope, so he said he and his team would sort through the calls and collate the paperwork and then come back to us.'

  'Jamie Hart was heading up the investigation?' 'Right.'

  The waiter arrived to take our orders as I wrote Hart's name on my pad. I'd heard of him: once during my paper days when he'd led a task force trying to find a serial rapist; and once in a Times news story I'd pulled out of the archives on a previous case.

  'So, did Hart get back to you?' I asked after the waiter was gone.

  Carver rocked his head from side to side. The answer was no but he was trying to be diplomatic. 'Not in the way we would have hoped.'

  'How do you mean?'

  'At the beginning, they were calling us every day, asking us questions, coming to the house and taking things away. Then, a couple of months into the investigation, it all ground to a halt. The calls stopped coming as often.

  Officers stopped coming to the house. Now all we hear is that there's nothing new to report.' His mouth flattened. A flicker of pain. 'They would tell us if there was something worth knowing, wouldn't they?'

  'They should do.'

  He paused for a moment, his hand moving to his drink.

  ‘What was the date of Megan's disappearance?'

  'Monday 3 April,' Carver said.

  It was now 19 October. One hundred and ninety-nine days and they hadn't heard a thing. The police tended not to get interested for forty-eight hours after a disappearance, but in my experience the first couple of days were crucial in missing persons. The longer you left it, the more you were playing with percentages. Sometimes you found the person five days, or a week, or two weeks after they vanished. But most of the time, if they didn't resurface in the first forty-eight hours it was either because they'd disappeared for good and didn't want to come home again — or their body was waiting to be found.

  'When was the last time anyone saw her?'

  ‘The afternoon of the third,' Carver said. 'She went to her first class after lunch, but didn't make the next one. She was supposed to meet her friend Kaitlin at their lockers because they both did Biology. But Megan never arrived.'

  'Biology was the last lesson of the day?'

  'Yes.'

  'Does the school have CCTV?'

  'Yes - but very limited coverage. Jamie told us they checked all the cameras, but none of them revealed anything'

  'Have you told him you've come to me?'

  Carver shook his head. 'No.'

  It was better that way. The best approach was going to be cold-calling Hart. The police, understandably, didn't like outsiders stepping on their toes — especially on active cases - and if they picked up my scent, they'd close ranks and circle the wagons before I even got near.

  'So what's the next stage?' Carver asked.

  'At a time that's convenient for you, I'd like to come and speak to you at the house; have a look around Megan's bedroom. I don't expect to find anything significant, but it's something I like to do.'

  They nodded. Neither of them spoke.

  'After that, I'll start working my way through this,' I said, placing a hand on her Book of Life. 'The police have had a look at this presumably?'

  'Yes,' Carver said.

  'Did they find anything?'

  He shrugged. They gave it back to us.'

  Which meant no. A moment later, the waiter returned with our meals.

  'Do you think there's a chance she's alive?' Caroline asked after he was gone.

  We both looked at her, Carver turning in his seat, shifting his bulk, as if he was surprised and disappointed by the question. Maybe she'd never asked it before. Or maybe he didn't want to know the answer.

  I looked at her, then at him, then back to her.

  'There's always a chance.'

  Yes,' she replied. 'But do you think she's alive?'

  I looked down at my meal, a lobster broken into pieces, not wanting my eyes to betray me. But I had to look at her eventually. And when I did, she must have seen the answer, because she slowly nodded, then started to cry.

  Outside, James Carver shook my hand and we watched his wife slowly wander off along Victoria Embankment, the Houses of Parliament framed behind her. Boats moved on the Thames, the water dark and grey. Autumn was finally clawing its way out of hibernation after a warm, muggy summer.

  'I don't know what you want to do about money,' he said.

  'Let's talk tomorrow.'

  He nodded. 'I'll be around, but Caroline might not be - she's got some work at a school in South Hackney.'

  That's fine. I'll catch up with her when she's free.'

  I watched Carver head after his wife. When he got to h
er, he reached for her hand. She responded, but coolly, her fingers hard and rigid. When he spoke, she just shrugged and continued walking. They headed down to Westminster Pier and, as they crossed the road towards the tube station, she looked back over her shoulder at me. For a second I could see the truth: that something had remained hidden in our conversation; a trace of a secret, buried out of her husband's sight.

  I just had to find out what.

  The day had started to darken by five-thirty. I stopped in at the office on the way back from the restaurant. I'd left some notes in there, including some I'd made that morning on Megan Carver. By the time I got home, at just gone seven, the house was black. I hadn't set the alarm, so when