The Dead Tracks Page 24

  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 h
er 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.

  Static.

  To her side: movement.

  'Mark?'

  'You won't feel a thing,' a voice said from somewhere inside the room.

  And then a hand slipped around her face, clamping on her mouth, a tissue pressed against her nose and lips. And within a couple of seconds, she'd blacked out.

  * * *

  Chapter Forty-four

  Healy and I walked up the path towards Alba, the block of flats in Mile End Daniel Markham had once occupied. The doors were open. Just inside, in the foyer, a woman was mopping floors, big puddles of water scattered around her. She didn't even look up as we moved behind her and into the ground-floor flats.

  It was eight-thirty. Commuting hour. A couple of people left their apartments, dressed for work. At Markham's door we waited, listening to the sounds of the building. Televisions. A conversation next door. But no one about to exit their flat. I pushed at the door to number eight and it swung gently away from its frame. The piece of card I'd used to wedge it shut dropped to the floor. Healy stepped back and let me take in the flat — any changes, any suggestion Markham had been back. But it looked exactly the same.

  Healy headed to the living room. I went back to the bathroom and flicked on the light. The bathroom cabinet remained open, the clasp still broken. Nothing else had been moved. I placed my hands either side of it and lifted the cabinet off the wall. The message emerged. Help me.

  'Healy.'

  He appeared a couple of seconds later, looking at me, then at the message on the wall. "You think Markham wrote that?'

  'You don't?'

  He studied the wall, shrugged. 'Why's he asking for help? And why bother hiding it where no one's going to find it?'

  'I found it.'

  'By accident.'

  'But I found it.'

  'So what's your point?'

  'Maybe he wants to be stopped,' I said, looking at the message again. 'Or maybe he's caught up in something, he's scared, and he wants someone else to be stopped.'

  'Who, Glass?'

  'That's what we've got to find out.' Click.

  A noise from behind me. From outside the bathroom.

  As I moved to the door, a memory formed: standing outside the flat the first time I'd been around, my ear pressed against the door, listening to something click inside.

  I walked out into the hallway and looked around. It was narrow and empty. One painting on the wall of a sunset, but nothing else. Healy passed me and went to the kitchen. I headed into the bedroom. Bed base, no mattress. Empty bedside cabinets. No lampshade. In the living room, Healy was opening and closing cupboards. I walked through and looked around. Exactly the same as everywhere else. Nothing had been moved. Nothing had changed inside the flat since I'd last been in. Healy closed a cupboard, noticed me and looked up.

  'You all right?'

  'Did you hear something?'

  He stood up. 'Like what?'

  There was no sound in the flat now. The only noise was from outside: cars passing on the street below; people next door; distant sirens. I scanned the room.

  'Like what?' Healy asked again.

  'Like some sort of click.'

  'A click?

  Then I saw it above the doorway.

  It was sitting on a small black shelf, obscured by shadows, a wire snaking out of it and up through a tiny hole drilled in the ceiling.

  It was a video camera.

  'Someone's watching us,' I said.

  Before Healy had a chance to fall in alongside me, I redirected him back towards the living room and out of sight of the camera. I hadn't spotted it the first time I'd been in, but I saw it now. Small and compact, black, sitting on an equally black shelf in the darkest part of the room. It was easy to miss. If it hadn't been for the click of the zoom, I might never have thought to look up there. Through the corner of my eye, I followed the wire out of the back of the unit and into the ceiling.

  It leads to the flat upstairs.

  Healy disrupted my train of thought. He was moving across the living room to a stool in the corner of the room.

  'What are you doing?'

  He stopped and looked back at me like I'd asked the dumbest question he'd heard all day. 'What do you think I'm doing? I'm going to get that camera.'

  'That's a bad idea.'

  He let out a snort and rocked back on his heels, as if I'd just surprised him with my stupidity a second time. 'Yeah? And what's a good idea? Standing around here with our dicks in our hands?'

  'We need to leave it where it is for the time being.'

  'And why would we do that?'

  'Because it feeds into the flat upstairs.'

  His eyes drifted to the ceiling and then back to me, as if he thought I might be trying to trick him. 'Then what are we waiting for?'

  'We need to play this right.'

  'Right? He shook his head. Who the fuck do you think you're talking to? In case you hadn't noticed, I'm not your apprentice.'

  'Healy,' I said gently, 'cool down.'

  Fire flared in his eyes, and for a moment I wondered whether enlisting his help had been the right thing to do. He'd brought me details of the case I might have spent weeks trying to find. But he also brought a lack of control, and a need for vengeance. I'd sensed it in him the first time we'd met, and I saw it again. For a second, I caught a glimpse of the two of us hours and days from where we were now. And all I could see was me trying desperately to rein him in — and, eventually, not even able to do that.

  'Look,' I said, keeping my voice down, 'if you go off like a rocket, you're going to mess this up for the both of us. I know how you feel, remember that. I know what it's like to lose. But you need to look calm for the camera. You need to turn around and start scouring the flat like you were before, understand? It has to look like we either can't see what's there — or we don't know what to make of it.'

  'And what are you going to do?'

  'I'm going to head upstairs.'

  'You're going to go looking for him?'

  'Yes.'

  'I'm coming with you.'

  I shook my head. 'One of us needs to stay.'

  'Then you stay.'

  'No,' I said, my voice raised for the first rime. You've lost focus. You need to stay here and calm down.' I stopped. 'We need to make it look like we're staying put.'

  His eyes lingered on me. I wondered whether he had come to the conclusion I was right, or was formulating some sort of alternative plan that didn't involve me. I didn't know him well enough to choose between the two. And now I was starting to realize I definitely shouldn't have enlisted his help. Once the anger died down, Healy became a stone wall. No expression. No obvious clue to how he felt. I was good at reading people, but I couldn't read him. And if I couldn't read him, I couldn't trust
him.

  'Fine,' he said, his voice even. 'Do what you have to do.'

  He turned away from me. I waited a moment, wondering if I'd handled it the right way. Then I started walking back towards the camera, keeping my eyes off the lens, trying to make it look as if I was heading back to the bedroom.