The Dead Tracks Page 25

  But then it all went wrong.

  * * *

  Chapter Forty-five

  As I got level with the bedroom, Healy appeared behind me and pushed me inside. For a second I was completely off guard: I stumbled into the bedroom, only just staying on my feet, and crashed into the nearest wardrobe. The door shut behind me. Beyond it, I could hear him heading out of the flat. Hard, fast steps. The front door crashing against the wall as he yanked it open. Footsteps in the corridor outside, fading quickly away.

  Healy, you stupid bastard.

  And then more movement, this time from upstairs.

  I sprinted out of the flat and into the corridor. He was disappearing up the stairs, heading for the second floor, the noise of him echoing through the building. I took the steps two at a time, getting to the second-floor landing just as the door to the flat burst open and a figure emerged from inside, heading off in the opposite direction. It was a man. The same one I'd seen in the alleyway outside the youth club. Long dark coat, dark trousers, black boots, dark beanie. Healy was almost within touching distance; I was about ten feet back and closing.

  At the end of the corridor were two doors, left and right. Both opened on to an external stairwell: the left one headed down; the right headed up. The man got to the end and tried the left one. It juddered in its frame, sticking and then coming out - but not far enough. He couldn't get through it. Switching to the right-hand one, he pulled at it hard - it didn't move an inch, his hand slipping from the handle.

  He was cornered.

  A second later, Healy was on him.

  He grabbed the man by the arm, trying to pull him into his body. Face contorted. Coloured. Fierce, violent anger rupturing like a fault line. But the man moved fast. Jabbed twice. Once to the chest. Once to the throat. Healy stumbled back, his hand at his windpipe - but swiped a leg in an arc. It caught the man in the knee, knocking him sideways, back against the left-hand door. It slammed shut.

  This time Healy came at him harder, hands out, teeth clenched. For a second, the size of him was immense. Not fat, not overweight, just powerful. Driven on by all the injustice and the heartbreak and the revenge; everything he'd felt in the past ten months, channelled. A second after that, he was at the man's throat, pushing him back towards the ground, fingers white. Squeezing. Pulling. But then everything slowed down. I was only feet away when something glinted in the sleeve of the man's coat. A syringe. He jabbed it once, up into the nearest piece of Healy he could find. In the split second it took Healy to react, the man had pushed him aside and was on his feet. He glanced back at me.

  It was the man from Tiko's.

  The man who looked like Milton Sykes.

  He dropped the syringe into a coat pocket and reached into the opposite pocket for something else. A blade emerged. It was a hunting knife: about eight inches long with a rubberized handle and a guthook built into the end of the stainless-steel blade. He swivelled it inside his palm, so the right angle of the guthook was facing out in front of him, then swiped it across the air in front of me. I stepped back. My heels hit the door to someone's flat. But I didn't take my eyes off him. In the periphery of my vision, I could see Healy off to the side of me. He was slumped against a wall, his hand clutching an area above his heart where the needle had gone in. A speck of blood was soaking through his shirt. He looked like he was on the edges of consciousness, his eyes drifting in and out like a television reception.

  The man started to edge around me, back towards the only way out, the knife up in front of him. As he glanced between the two of us, I noticed something weird: his eyes were moving fast, but the rest of his face was still. Completely still. Almost paralysed. It was a weird, detached kind of look. When I stepped towards him, he jabbed the blade forward again. A warning. He did it again as he passed beyond me. He'd come all the way around. Now all he had to do was turn and run.

  I inched towards him.

  'I wouldn't do that,' he said.

  His eyes flicked to Healy, then back to me. His speech was quiet, but sharp and clipped, as if he was trying to disguise his voice.

  'Where are you going to run?' I said, taking another step. He jabbed the knife at me a third time, his forefinger stretched along the edge of the handle and on to the metal of the blade. He was holding it like a scalpel. Like a surgeon. 'You can't get away.'

  Something glinted in his eyes. You and me,' he said, glancing at Healy, but using the knife to indicate he was talking to me. 'We have something in common.'

  'Put down the knife.'

  'We have a connection.' A smile. Small and tight. 'Did you hear me?'

  I studied him. 'Come on, put the knife down.'

  'Did you hear me?'

  'Put the knife down.'

  He jabbed it towards me again. Another small smile.

  'You can't outrun me,' I told him.

  'I know.' He glanced between Healy and me. Healy was almost unconscious now. 'That's why you're going to stay here.'

  'That's not going to happen.'

  'Oh, it is.'

  'No, it's not.'

  He swished the blade, left to right. Whoosh. Yes, it is. You're going to stay where you are…' He stopped, looked down at Healy. 'Or his daughter gets her throat cut, ear to ear.'

  Healy's eyes fluttered. Fixed on the man. Where is she?' he croaked, holding his chest. The man glanced at him and smiled again.

  'You've got to get to her first,' I said.

  'Wrong,' he replied, and jabbed the knife towards me. You don't control anything here, David. I'm in control. I always have been. If I don't make it back, I've made sure things are set into motion and his daughter…' He made a cutting gesture across his throat. 'She bleeds out like a stuck pig.'

  Healy groaned from the floor.

  The man didn't look at him this time, just stared at me. Then he seemed to hesitate for a moment, his eyes flicking back to the flat he'd come out of.

  'It doesn’t have to be like this,' I said.

  He was still staring at the open door.

  'Just give me the knife —'

  'Shut the fuck up!' he screamed.

  Suddenly he was on edge, angry about something. His eyes pinged from me, to the flat, and back again. Another step. More hesitation.

  And then I realized what was wrong.

  He'd forgotten something.

  A trace of emotion passed across his eyes and, as he got level with the flat, he took another last, lingering look inside. Edged closer to the door, as if wondering whether he could take the risk. Then he turned back to me and realized he couldn't.

  And he ran.

  * * *

  Chapter Forty-six

  Five minutes later, Healy was starting to come around, but' his speech was slurred and one side of him — his foot, his leg, his arm, his fingers - lifeless and unresponsive. I propped him up against the wall and then looked into his eyes.

  'How are you feeling?'

  He glanced at me. 'Okay.'

  'Good. And one other thing: don't ever stab me in the fucking back again like that, understood?' He nodded and massaged an area in the middle of his chest where the needle had gone in. 'I'm going to have a look around the flat.'

  I didn't wait for the reply.

  The flat was an exact replica of Markham's but completely empty. Naked walls, naked floorboards, no curtains, no furniture. A flat that had never been moved into. From the ceiling a white cord hung down, but there was no bulb attached; the windows in the living room were the only light. Right in the middle of the room was a wooden crate and a dustbin, turned upside down.

  On top was a laptop.

  A power lead snaked off to a plug, and another moved off across the floor of the flat to a tiny hole in the corner. It must have fed downstairs to the camera. I walked over to the computer. The desktop was plain, and there were two folders on the right-hand side under the hard-drive icon: one labelled 'Feed Stills', the other 'Pics'. In the centre of the screen, obscuring most of the rest of the desktop, was a loadin
g bar, gradually filling up. It had just hit the ninety-two per cent mark. I stepped in closer.

  Then I realized it wasn't loading.

  It was deleting.

  He was erasing everything on the laptop.

  I clicked Cancel, but nothing happened. Went to Force Quit and hammered the Return key. Nothing. It was a waste of time; the deletion had been locked, and the more time I spent trying to figure out how to stop it, the more data disappeared. I clicked on the desktop, and double- clicked on the first folder. 'Feed Stills' opened up. Inside were forty-two photographs. I opened the first one. Healy and me in the flat fifteen minutes before. I closed it. Opened the next one. exactly the same, except this time I was looking up at the camera. Inside the folder, the stills started to delete from the bottom up, but all of them had been modified within the hour, which meant they were all freeze-frames of Healy and me, taken with the video camera.

  Ninety-four per cent.

  I opened up the 'Pics' folder. Inside were ten photographs. I grouped them all, then double-clicked. Slowed down by the deleting process, they opened one by one.

  Ninety-six per cent.

  The first was a shot from the window of Healy and me approaching Alba. I tabbed to the next. Healy picking me up outside my house that morning.

  Ninety-seven per cent.

  The third was a photograph taken from the end of my street the night Phillips and Davidson had arrested me. Rain was falling. I was standing beside my car, behind the police tape, a finger pointing in Phillips's face. To the left of the shot were some people I recognized from the top of my road. He'd been among them the whole time.

  Broken into my house. Set me up.

  Watched it all unfold.

  The next was me outside the youth club the night I'd got inside. Half obscured by shadows, hairpins in the lock.

  Ninety-eight per cent.

  Two photos disappeared from the folder and the desktop simultaneously. I moved more quickly through the remaining pictures. Pictures five and six were of me on the path in the Dead Tracks. I recognized the area. Just past the second length of railway track, close to the clearing. The picture was taken from behind one of the trees, about fifteen feet back from the path. In picture five, I was staring vaguely in the direction of the camera. As if I'd seen him.

  Ninety-nine per cent.

  Another photo disappeared. One left.

  A man with his back to the camera, and a woman facing him. They were talking to one another in front of an entrance to some sort of office building. People were filing out around them. Everything was slightly off, slightly blurred. It had been taken on maximum zoom, and the camera had moved just as the shot had been taken.

  I leaned in closer.

  Looked at the man and the woman for a second time.

  Her face wasn't defined properly. Her outline was smudged. The blur of the picture had turned her eyes into dark blobs. But I still recognized her.

  She was the woman in Healy's eighth file.

  Next to her, back turned, the man seemed immediately familiar. Then I saw the edge of his glasses, the waves of his dark hair, the choice of clothes, the studiousness — and I realized who I was looking at.

  Daniel Markham.

  I got out my phone, flipped it open and selected the Camera option. I wanted a picture of the two of them to show Healy. But as a pixellated version of the laptop appeared on the phone's screen, the deleting process hit one hundred per cent.

  And the photograph disappeared for good.

  I double-clicked on the hard-drive icon, trying to find any trace of the file. But all the information was gone. The laptop had reverted back to its factory settings. There were ways to extract the information if I wanted, ways to retrieve the pictures. Files were never fully deleted from a computer, only the entries for the files; the data itself remained. But the only person who could do that for me, quickly and on the quiet, was Spike.

  I closed the laptop. And then, on the kitchen counter, I spotted something.

  When I'd first swept the flat I thought it had been some kind of kitchen utensil — but the flat was empty. There were no utensils. I got up and moved across to it. It was a metal container, about twelve inches long, and had a removable screw-top lid at one end. As I started fiddling with it, a memory surfaced: the man's hesitation as we'd faced each other out in the corridor, his eyes flicking to the open door.

  As if he'd forgotten something.

  This was what he'd forgotten.

  Healy was still in the same place I'd left him. He had a couple of fingers pressed against his chest. He turned and looked up, wincing at the movement. In one hand I had the laptop. In the other I was carrying the metal container.

  'How you feeling?'

  'I'll survive,' he said, and got to his feet gingerly. His eyes drifted to my hands, and then back up to me. 'So was that the guy from the nightclub?'

  'That was him.' I held up the laptop. 'He left this. He'd set it to delete anything remotely incriminating, and most of it was gone by the time I got up there.'

  Healy nodded. 'What's that?'

  He was looking at the metal container. I crouched down, placed the laptop on the floor and the container next to it. Healy dropped to his haunches beside me, wheezing a little. I reached inside and pulled out a tube from inside the container.

  It was a cylindrical glass cask, about ten inches long and six inches high, full of clear liquid. Both ends were plugged with airtight seals.

  'Fuck me,' Healy said quietly.

  Inside the cask were two human hearts.

  One adult. One child.

  * * *

  Chapter Forty-seven

  By twelve, Healy and I were parked in a street in Beckton opposite a row of seven identical warehouses. On one of them, a big red sign was pinned to the front: DRAYTON IMPORTS. It belonged to Derrick Drayton, the man who owned the warehouse in Bow that Frank White had died in. And the man who had brought in the crate of guns for the Russians - and, I was guessing, the formalin for the surgeon along with it.

  'If you're hoping Drayton is going to drop out of the sky, you're gonna be waiting a long time,' Healy said, both of us with our eyes fixed on the warehouse. A lorry was parked up, its cab facing out. Inside the warehouse, men were removing boxes from the back and filing off out of sight.

  'Drayton's gone. I know that.'

  'His family don't know anything.'

  I looked at him. 'You seriously believe that?'

  'The task force spent three days down here interviewing the entire tribe,' Healy replied. Wife, mum, dad, brother, sister. They looked terrified.'

  'Doesn’t mean they don't know something.'

  Healy had spent the journey over massaging the spot on his chest where the syringe had gone in. Although he claimed to be feeling fine by the time we left Markham's flat, I wasn't about to take any chances — so I offered to drive. The laptop was on the back seat. The cylindrical cask was at his feet, back in its original container. So far, neither of us had made mention of the contents.

  Healy studied me, then turned back to the warehouse, 'What?' I said.

  'You think it's her?' He was still looking at the warehouse, at the men removing boxes from the back of the lorry. When I didn't reply, he turned to face me again. 'Do you think it's Megan?'

  I glanced down at the metal container. 'It could be, yeah.'

  'So the other one…'

  'Would be her baby.'

  He'd probably seen worse. The darkness in men; the moments in life when murderers and rapists and abusers reached into the earth and pulled a little piece of hell out with their hands. I'd been there too. Walked through blood. Stepped over bodies. Flashes of time when, for a second, you realized humanity had vanished, and no rules remained. We'd both known worse than a heart cut from what housed it. But things changed when a child was involved. And, in this case, maybe not even a child: an unborn baby. Healy carried on massaging his chest.

  'Are they preserved in that stuff?'

&nbs
p; I looked at him. 'Formalin? I'd imagine so. I'm guessing Drayton sourced all those weapons for the Russians, and the chemicals came in with the guns. That was the currency the Russians paid Glass with: the formalin.'