The Dead Tracks Read online

  The hole must have been eight feet deep. It was cut out of the floor, and through the sliver of light above she could see snatches of a steel cabinet, a sink and a clear bottle of something sitting on a counter.

  It looked like some kind of utility room.

  'Help me!'

  No sound came back. No response. No movement. She got to her feet, using the wall for support, and then stopped for a moment: her head still throbbed, and she could feel bruising around her jaw. She closed her eyes, trying to compose herself, then started circling the hole, angling her head in order to get a better look at what was beyond the trapdoor. All she could see were parts of the same unit: more of the steel sink, more of the same cabinet. Nothing else. No shadows shifting. No sign of life.

  'Mark!'

  Silence.

  'Mark, please!'

  More silence.

  This time she screamed until her voice gave way, until her heart was racing in her chest — beating a rhythm against her ribcage — and tears were blurring her vision. After she wiped them away, she closed her eyes and saw him there in the darkness: lying next to her in her bed and then leading her into the woods.

  Bzzzzzz.

  Her eyes snapped open.

  A noise from above. She reached up, her fingers clawing at the walls, nails dragging through the water trails. 'Help me! I've been kidnapped! Help me!'

  Then everything - her voice, the water against her fingers, the gentle buzz from somewhere up above — was drowned out by the sound of feedback. It burst from the walls of the room above the hole, turned up so loud it was distorting whatever speaker it was being piped from. She covered her ears. Even eight feet under the ground, it was like having her face glued to an amp the size of a house.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.

  And the trapdoor shifted away from the hole.

  Her heart shifted, the noise still ringing in her ears, and a flutter of fear took flight through her chest. When she swallowed it felt like shards of glass were passing into her stomach.

  'Hello?'

  The trapdoor came away completely and the room appeared. She could see the rest of the steel cabinet extending across the length of an entire wall. A bare wall next to that, a huge crack running down it. Another sink.

  A glass-fronted bathroom cabinet, full of pill bottles. A red door, the paint blistered, with a glass panel in it. It was open, but there was only blackness beyond. From the top of the trapdoor cover, a rope snaked off, into the dark of the doorway.

  'Hello?' Sona said again.

  Out of the darkness of the door came a small, transparent plastic tube. It hit the floor of the room above her, rolled across it and tumbled into the hole. She caught it. The tube was about six inches long and packed with cotton wool. She looked up.

  'Mark?'

  Something else emerged from the black of the doorway. It rolled across the floor, over the lip of the hole and fell towards her. It made a dull whup sound as it landed.

  A plastic bottle.

  She picked it up. Inside was a pale blue liquid, the consistency of water. There were no other labels on the bottle, just a handwritten message: Apply ALL of it to your face, then throw it back up.

  'Mark,' she said, looking up again. 'Mark, this is ridiculous, baby. Why are you doing this?' She wiped one of her eyes. 'Why are you doing this?'

  Silence.

  'Mark, tell me what you want.' She paused. 'This isn't you, baby.' Her voice was starting to break up. 'Mark.' She waited for any sign of movement in the darkness. 'Mark,' she said, tears running down her face now. 'Mark, you bastard! Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing thi—'

  'Put it on your face.'

  She stopped, heart lurching. A whimper passed her lips. Fear moved down her back like a finger tracing the ridge of her spine. She swallowed again.

  'Mark?'

  Something shifted in the blackness of the doorway. She could see a small patch of white now, about the size of a coin.

  A face.

  Then he stepped out of the darkness.

  He moved slowly, looking down at her, his feet stopping right on the lip of the hole. It wasn't Mark. It was another man: black hair in a side parting, pale skin, pinprick black eyes. In his left hand he held something big.

  'Where's Mark?'

  'Put it on your face.'

  She took another step back and bumped against one of the walls.

  'Mark!'

  'Put it on your face.'

  'Mark!'

  'Put in on your fucking face'

  Another surge of fear exploded beneath her ribs, and she shrank into the corner of the hole. His voice. What's wrong with his voice? It was tinny and robotic, and there was a constant wall of static behind it. The confusion pushed her over the edge: tears started running down her cheeks, over her lips, tracing the angle of her neck.

  Mark, she went to say again — but this time she stopped herself.

  Because, above her, the man raised what was in his hand - and dropped it into the hole. It came at her fast, landing hard on the ground about three inches to her right. She shuffled away from it, trying to figure out what it was.

  And then she could see.

  The torso from a mannequin.

  Cream and rigid. Punctured and broken. The middle of the chest had a hole in it, gauze spilling out from the hollow inside.

  'You see that?' he said from the top of the hole, fingers twitching, a smile like a lesion worming its way across his face. 'Do you see that dummy?'

  He paused. The word dummy glitched a little, and then there was a fuzzy noise, like interference. Sona whimpered, sinking all the way down into the corner of the hole.

  'I'm going to sew your fucking head to it.'

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I got the number for the youth club, but, after the tenth unanswered ring, killed the call. I then dialled the Carvers' number and asked if I could stop by. James told me they'd be in until midday, but Saturday afternoons were when they took his mother out for a drive. She spent the rest of her week in a nursing home in Brent Cross.

  The journey over took forty minutes. I went via Barton Hill, to get a sense of where it was. It was closed. A brass sign on the front said it was open Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The building was about a quarter of a mile from the Carvers' place - close to King's Cross station, in a thin triangle of land between two main roads — and had all the aesthetic beauty of a shipping container: no windows; corrugated steel panels to about the eight-foot mark, where uniform red brickwork took over; and a big rusting door with an oversized padlock. Maybe all the money had been spent on the inside.

  I got back on to Pentonville Road and headed for the Carvers'. At the house the gate was already open. I walked up the drive and saw James Carver standing in the entrance, filling it with his huge frame, his eyes watching the skies as dark clouds finally began to rupture and rain started to fall. We shook hands and moved inside.

  Caroline was in the kitchen. She looked up and said hello to me. Immediately I could feel an atmosphere between the two of them. Carver obviously still felt betrayed by her. I imagined, in a strange way, he also felt like he didn't know his daughter as well as his wife had; a feeling magnified further now she'd disappeared.

  We sat in the living room while Caroline put some coffee on. Behind us, in the corner of the room, Leigh was playing with a wooden train set.

  'How are things going?' Carver asked.

  'They're progressing. I've got a couple of good leads. One is the reason I'm here today.'

  He held up his hands. 'Whatever it takes.'

  Caroline came through with a tray of coffees and some biscuits. She laid them down on the glass table between us. I thanked her, and took one of the mugs.

  'Is one of the leads Charlie Bryant?' Carver asked.

  Their eyes were both fixed on me now, waiting for the answer. On the drive over, I'd decided I wasn't going to bring up the events of the previous
day — even though they'd probably read about it in the morning papers. But now they were looking at me and asking me what they really wanted to know: Is Megan dead as well?

  'At the moment there's nothing to connect this to Megan, other than the fact that she knew him.'

  Deep down, in their darkest moments, they'd probably glimpsed a similar end for their daughter. Her in a field, or in a backstreet. Them standing in the subdued light of a morgue while Megan's body, naked and broken, lay rigid in front of them.

  'Does the name Barton Hill mean anything to you?'

  Carver frowned. Caroline started nodding.

  'Yes,' she said. 'Megan used to go there until she disappeared. It's a youth club, some kind of community project. They help teenagers with cerebral palsy.'

  'Ah, the youth club,' Carver said, trying a little too hard. I'd been right: he definitely felt like he was standing on the wrong side of the glass now; staring in at a daughter, and her mother next to her, wondering what else lay buried at their feet.

  '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 [email protected]. 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?