The Dead Tracks Read online

  As the traffic ground to a halt, I reached inside my jacket and took out the photograph of the man from Tiko's, studying the features of his face: the lines, the shape, the prominent brow sitting like a shelf of flesh above a pair of oil-black eyes. It wasn't Sykes. Milton Sykes was long dead. But there must have been enough of a similarity for Healy to believe it was him. Once I was home I'd find out more about Sykes - his victims, his crimes, his history — but, in the meantime, I could start filling in the gaps. I reached across to the phone and scrolled through to T.

  Terry Dooley.

  Dooley was an old contact I'd used during my paper days. His career was twenty-four hours away from being flushed down the toilet after I'd found out him and three of his detectives had spent a couple of hours at an illegal brothel in south London. I stepped in and offered to save his career and his family life all at the same time in exchange for information when I needed it. He reluctantly agreed, realizing the trade-off was better for him. Dooley was all bluster and front, but basically repentant. The one thing he cared about more than his job was his kids, and the idea of seeing them once a week after his wife had dragged him to the divorce courts was more terrifying than any crime scene.

  'What a great end to the day,' he said when I told him who it was.

  'How you doing, Dools?'

  'Yeah, fantastic now I've heard from you, Davey. What do you need this time? Your car cleaned?'

  The last time I'd called him, I'd got him to sort out a problem I'd had with a stolen hire car. Dooley's days of dealing with petty crime were about fifteen years behind him. He'd been working murders ever since.

  'Nothing like that, Dools - although my kitchen needs painting'

  He blew air down the line. 'Funny.'

  'This won't take long.' I glanced at the photograph of the man from the club. You familiar with anyone from the Megan Carver team?'

  'The Carver team?' He paused. 'Not really. They mostly worked out of the stations in and around north London.'

  'How come?'

  The chief super wanted things to look like they were focused locally so her family and the public would think we were on the frontline, asking all the right people all the right questions. Made it look better in the papers if the teams stayed local.'

  'It was all bullshit?'

  He snorted. 'What do you think? I know a few of the faces up there, but not well. I've seen Hart around. He used to work Clubs and Vice with one of the boys on my team. They called him "Skel" - as in "Skeleton". You seen him?'

  'Yeah. He's thin.'

  'Thin? Dooley laughed. 'I don't trust anyone who looks like they just crawled out the fucking ground.'

  'Anyone else?'

  'I know Eddie Davidson. We came through the ranks together, but I haven't seen the Burger King for a few years. The others… only what I've heard. There's some Jock going off like a rocket up there.'

  'Phillips?'

  'Yeah, that's him.'

  'Any idea why him and Hart are working out of the same office?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'I mean, he's a DCI and so is Hart. There's two of them leading a tiny team of about eight detectives. I've never come across a set-up like that before — have you?'

  'Can't say I have.'

  'So what's your take?'

  'My take? Sounds like a one-way ticket to a great big shitheap of politics and personality clashes. I mean, who's the SIO? Who sets out the Policy Log?'

  The senior investigating officer ran the case and was also responsible for determining the parameters of the Policy Log, a set of rules unique to every case, which set out how the investigating team dealt with things like roles, responsibilities, HOLMES searches and the media. Dooley had a point: who made those choices when there were two officers of equal rank working in such close proximity? Something was definitely out of kilter. I just had to find out what.

  'Can I go now?' Dooley asked.

  'What about a guy called Healy?'

  'Colm Healy?'

  'Yeah — you know him?'

  'Yeah, everyone knows Colm. He was a good copper back in the day. Worked murders with me for a while. Nose like a bloodhound.'

  'He's not good any more?'

  'He's had…' He stopped. 'He's had a few personal problems.'

  'Like what?'

  'His wife left him, his kids hated his guts. He had this unsolved which pretty much broke him for a year. He had to take a month off on stress leave, and when he came back he was about half the cop and twice the man. He looked like the Goodyear blimp last time I saw him.'

  'Why'd his wife leave?'

  'Cos he spent most of his life chained to a desk working murders. She ended up banging some other guy, and when Colm found out he flipped.'

  'And did what?'

  'Punched her lights out and put her into a neck brace for eight weeks. She lost the hearing in one of her ears for a while. The kids had already turned on him, so he didn't do himself any favours there. I think he had three - two boys, one girl. Girl ends up having a massive barney with him; tells him she can't even stand to be in the same room as him any more. Just ups and leaves a couple of days later.'

  'Moves out?'

  'Disappears.'

  'As in, vanishes?'

  'Into thin air.'

  'Really?'

  'Yeah, really.'

  I stopped for a moment. Healy's daughter was gone, just like Megan. So that's why he was so interested. Maybe he thought there might be a connection between them. Or maybe he'd already found one.

  'Was she ever registered as a missing person?'

  'Why, you hoping to make some money?' Dooley laughed at his joke. Yeah, Healy and his missus got back together for one last gig and tried to find her. Healy drafted in a couple of guys from the Met to help him out for a few weeks, but the whole thing hit the skids. When nothing turned up, the hired help drifted away and the bosses put them back on other investigations.'

  'Can you email me the missing-persons file?'

  'Yeah, if I wanna get sacked.'

  Bluster and front. This was how Dooley played things, just so he felt like he still had some control. 'Send it to my Yahoo.'

  I got silence as a reply this time.

  In front, brakes lights winked in the night, then disappeared, and I inched the car forward a few more feet.

  'So is that it?' Dooley asked.

  'One more thing.'

  'It's Friday night.'

  'You won't be late for the disco, Dools, I promise.'

  He sighed, his breath crackling down the line.

  'What can you tell me about Milton Sykes?'

  'Sykes?

  'Yeah.'

  'I didn't realize you were digging up cold cases now, Davey. Things must be slow. Who wants to know about him?'

  'I'm just interested.'

  'Ever heard of the internet?'

  'Yeah, I remember someone talking about it once.'

  'Stick his name into Google. You'll get about a trillion hits.'

  'Anything that didn't get released to the public?'

  'I know I might look it,' Dooley said, 'but I ain't that old. How the fuck should I know? They were communicating with smoke signals when Sykes was running around.'

  'Come on, Dools. I know how it works. Knowledge passed down through generations of police officers, like the family secret. You old-timers love to talk about what you would have done differently.'

  He paused, then blew more air down the line. 'What do you wanna know?'

  'You ever had any copycats?'

  He paused. You got someone running around pretending to be Sykes?'

  'No. I'm just asking'. 'No.'

  'No copycats?'

  'No. He's old school now. Most people under forty probably wouldn't even be able to tell you who he was. Sykes is the grandparents' story. Once that generation dies out, no one will even know what he did.'

  'So tell me about him.'

  'What do you want to know?'

  'Everything.
'

  The line drifted a little. It sounded like he was moving. When he started talking again, it was virtually a whisper: 'Okay, you want my theory?'

  'That's why I phoned.'

  Another pause. 'He buried them in the woods.'

  I heard the line drift again. He was moving to a place where absolutely no one would hear him talking. I reached across to the hands-free and turned the volume all the way up. 'Just give me the condensed version,' I said.

  'The condensed version's the same as the long version: he was screwed from day one. His father pisses off the moment he zips himself up, and his mother pops her clogs from tuberculosis two months after young Milton is born. Sykes goes to live with his psychopathic aunty and uncle down the road; she's the bitch from hell, and he's a violent pisshead. Cue sixteen years of being beaten shitless and locked in the dark. School was a total write-off as you might have expected, although he got an A for killing animals and being a weird loner no one liked or spoke to.'

  'What happened after he left home?'

  'He landed a job at a dyeworks near East India Docks. Then women started disappearing. You think we're bad at our jobs; police back then didn't even notice for six years.'

  'How come?'

  'All the women were Indian immigrants working in the textiles factories. Their families reported them missing, but their English was bad or non-existent. Police excused themselves after Sykes was arrested by pretending they couldn't understand what they were being told - but, truth was, they probably didn't give much of a shit.'

  'So how'd he get caught?'

  'He stopped taking Indian girls.'

  'And took a white one instead.'

  'Right. Girl called Jenny Truman. Nineteen. Blonde- haired, blue-eyed. Goes to work at one of the factories in the morning and never comes home again.'

  'Why change?'

  'He was clever. He knew the police wouldn't go hard at the Indian disappearances, so he played things safe. But after a while he couldn't help himself and went after Truman. That was when the police finally decided to get serious. Eventually a couple of witnesses told them they'd seen her leaving with someone matching Sykes's description. So they head down to Sykes's place at Forham Avenue. You know where that is?'

  'No.'

  'That's because they've knocked it down now and built an industrial estate where the road used to be. It was right on the edge of Hark's Hill Woods, this big, overgrown area full of old factories in east London. When the police fumed up at Sykes's house, he excused himself and headed to a toilet at the bottom of his garden - and then made a break for it. Vanished into the woods.'

  'Did they find him?'

  'No. They lost him. But they searched his house and found a dress belonging to Jenny Truman with blood all over it, and a shovel - all hidden in a wall cavity in his kitchen. Three days later, he hands himself in to a police station in Camberwell.'

  'Why?'

  'Said he was tired of running'

  'So they never found the bodies?'

  'Nah,' Dooley said. 'After he got the rope in 1906, they did another search of the woods and came up empty- handed like before. But he must have buried them in there.'

  'Why d'you say that?'

  'He knew those woods like I know the way to the bar. He used to escape there as a kid to get away from his nut- job family. There was this place he talked about in his interviews with police. Locals used to call it the Hanging Tree; this weird, T-shaped oak, all gnarly and messed up, that looked like a giant set of gallows. There are photos of it online. Most people were completely freaked out by it, but not young Milton. He loved it so much he built a tree house in it. You ever been there?'

  'Hark's Hill? No.'

  'It's a strange place. Got this…' Dooley paused, then dropped his voice even further. 'Got this kind of… atmosphere.'

  I smiled. You a psychic now?'

  'Laugh it up. You don't believe me, ask the teams they sent down there in the 1920s to try and put a train track through there.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Back in 1921, the local authority decided they wanted some track running from the factories up on Hark's Hill to the mainline on the other side of the woods. They sent teams in there to clear a path and start laying the foundations for the train tracks, only…' He paused again. 'Only, they got spooked.'

  'Spooked?'

  'They kept seeing things and hearing things.'

  'What sort of things?'

  'No one was ever sure, but enough to put the shits up them. That little project lasted four weeks before the entire workforce decided enough was enough.'

  'They walked?'

  'Like I said, that place…' Dooley sucked in his breath. 'First time someone told me that story I laughed my arse off. But you want to try going down there some time.'

  'Are you serious?'

  'Go down there,' he said, no hint of humour in his voice. You know me: the only thing I believe in is a beer on a Friday night. But you go to enough crime scenes, you start to get a real sense of life and death. And sometimes…'

  'What?'

  'I've worked murders for fifteen years, and some of the places you end up… I don't know, you're standing over bodies in these holes, and you can just feel a place is bad.

  That's the only way I can describe it. You get a sense for places; kind of attuned to things. That's why I'm telling you he buried those women in the woods. Because I went down there, and that place… something's seriously wrong with it.'

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-two

  When I got back to the house, I checked for answer phone messages and then switched on the TV. A reporter was standing near the Royal Docks, the Thames framed behind her. At the bottom of the screen, a ticker tape was running right to left: MET POLICE: WOMAN FOUND IN THAMES RETURNED TO FAMILY. FAMILY HAVE REQUESTED NO NAMES/DETAILS BE RELEASED TO PUBLIC. I remembered the same reporter covering the same story a couple of days before while I was in the cafe close to Newcross Secondary. I didn't know much about it, but I did know that, if it had any legs, it wouldn't have been tucked away right at the end of the hourly bulletin.

  After showering, I went through my wardrobe. Laid a shirt out. Trousers. A pair of shoes I hadn't worn since the funeral. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my reflection in the mirror. That same flicker ignited in my stomach, and I felt all the doubt and the guilt and the fear move through my chest.

  It's too soon, I thought.

  And then I realized, until I did it, it would always be too soon.

  Ten minutes later, Liz answered her door. She looked beautiful. She was wearing a black halterneck dress that followed the shape of her body all the way down to the middle of her calves. Her hair was curled at the ends, falling against her shoulders in ringlets. She had a little make-up on, but not much, and her eyes were dark and playful, looking me up and down.

  'Wow,' I said.

  'Thank you.' She fluttered her eyelids jokingly and reached for a long black coat laid over the back of one of the sofas. 'You look very dashing too.'

  I looked down at myself. I had a black button-up shirt on, a smart pair of denims and a long, black, very expensive Armani jacket I'd bought at a shiny supermall in Dubai when I'd had to spend a week out there with the paper. It had looked great on the hanger, even better on, but decidedly less good coming out of my bank account. Since then, I'd worn it three times, terrified I'd irreparably damage it by subjecting it to fresh air.

  'I feel underdressed,' I said, looking at her.

  'Oh, rubbish,' she replied, slipping on her coat. You look great.'

  I handed her a brown paper bag.

  She took it and looked inside. Her face widened in delight. 'Kona coffee?' she asked. 'Now it's my turn to say "wow".'

  'It's just coffee.'

  'It's Kona coffee, David.'

  'Now you'll be forced to think of me as you drink it.'

  She smiled. 'That won't be a hardship.'

  The restaurant was three miles aw
ay, right on the edge of Gunnersbury Park. On the way over, we talked about our days. When it was my turn, I left out the bit about ending up at a crime scene and spending three hours at a police station. Liz looked at me a couple of times, as if she knew I'd not told her everything, but she didn't probe.