The Dead Tracks Read online

  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?'

  '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.

  'Daniel, I need to speak to you.'

  Again, with my ear pressed to the door, I could hear a noise. The same one: a creak, or maybe a click. When it came again, it sounded more like a click.

  'Daniel?'

  I leaned in again and tried to separate out the sounds. There was a constant buzz; possibly a fridge. Some peripheral noise from outside the flat. Behind that, whatever was making the clicking sound. Except this time it was preceded by a gentle whirr.

  'Daniel?'

  Click.

  Distantly, there were police sirens. I stepped away from the door and waited until they got closer, until the noise started to cover some of the other sounds inside the building. Then I took another step back — and launched a foot at the door.

  It cracked and swung open, hitting an adjacent wall and bouncing back towards me. I stopped it with a hand. Paused. Looked along the corridor.

  Then I stepped into the flat and closed the door.

  Immediately to my left was a bathroom. Next to that was the bedroom door. In front of me was a short hallway, feeding into a living room and open-plan kitchen. It looked like someone had half moved out and never returned. Dust clung to walls. Windows had been whitewashed, but not very well. Through one, I could see out to the path leading up to the flats, and the entrance itself. It was a good position for Markham: he'd be able to see if anyone approached the building.

  'Daniel?'

  Silence. There was a two-seater sofa in the living room. A lamp next to that. A half-filled bookshelf. Otherwise, the flat was empty. No TV. No music centre. No games consoles, satellite decoders or DVD players. Nothing a single man should have owned.

  The kitchen had been mostly cleared out as well. Only a few things remained. A kettle. A couple of plates stacked in a drying rack. A fruit bowl. A refrigerator in the corner, humming. It was on, but it had been defrosted. The doors were open to both the fridge
and the freezer. There was no food in either. Same story in the bedroom: a bed base, a mattress, no sheets, no duvet. Built-in cupboards, all open. There were some clothes inside, but not many. A couple of shirts. Some trousers.

  Click.

  That noise again. I moved out into the hallway. Looked around. There was very little sound now: no noise from the flat, no noise from outside. Heading into the bathroom, I turned on the light. Toilet. Bath. Basin. Bathroom cabinet with a small mirror on the front. Above me, the extractor fan kicked into life. I opened up the cabinet and looked around inside. A can of deodorant, a razor, some shaving cream. Nothing else. I pushed the cabinet shut - except now it wouldn't close. When I tried again, it just slowly crept back open. I leaned in and looked at the catch. It was broken. The moment I'd pulled the cabinet open, the catch had come loose.