The Dead Tracks (20 page)
Authors: Tim Weaver
Slowly,
the look dissolved in her face.
'I'm
so sorry, Liz.'
She
reached for one of my arms and squeezed it. 'You don't have to be sorry,' she
said gently, but I could see the disappointment in her eyes. Derryn flashed in
my head, a series of images that were there and then gone again: the night I
first met her, the day we married, the two of us on a beach in Florida, and
then at the end of her life - wrapped in sweat-stained sheets - as she lay
dying in our bed. I shifted closer to Liz and apologized again, but I'd razed
the moment, and what remained between us was exactly what had always been
there.
My
doubts. My fears. My guilt.
When
I woke at nine the next morning, the house was cold. I started the fire in the
living room and put on some coffee. While I was waiting for it to brew, I
padded back through to the bedroom to find my phone. It said I'd missed two
calls. The first had been from Jill, as expected, at eight the previous
evening. I'd also got a text from her:
Hi David. We're meeting in the Lamb
in Acton, at 8.30. See you there? Jill.
The second missed call was from
Ewan Tasker at 7.5 5 a.m.
Tasker
was the contact I'd mentioned in passing to Jill. He was working for the
Metropolitan Police now, in an advisory role, but previous to that he'd been
part of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, before it was assimilated
into SOCA. Like the other sources from my paper days, our relationship was
built on being mutually beneficial, but over ten years we'd gradually become
good friends. The last time I saw him was at his sixtieth birthday almost a
year previously. He'd held it in a golf club in Surrey. We sat by the windows,
looking out at the course, both of us nursing whiskies. He was mourning the
onset of his sixties. I was mourning the death of my wife.
I
tried returning the call, but no one answered, and I allowed my thoughts to
quickly turn back to Megan, the man in the nightclub — and Milton Sykes.
In
the spare bedroom I booted up the computer, logged on to the internet and
printed out everything I could find on Sykes. I wanted as much information as I
could get on his life, his upbringing, his crimes and his arrest. I wasn't sure
how it fitted into what I had, but the obvious physical similarities between
Sykes and the man in Tiko's couldn't be ignored — and neither could the idea of
a copycat. I noted down the most important information and moved carefully
through the rest, making sure nothing was missed. When I was done on the first
read-through, I flipped back to the start and reread it. Then a third time. Two
hours later, I had sixteen pages of notes.
I
turned back to the computer and logged into my Yahoo. There was an email
waiting. It was sent from Terry Dooley's home address: no subject line, no
message, but a PDF attachment. I dragged it to the desktop and opened it up. It
was the missing-person's file Colm Healy had set up for his daughter, and a few
miscellaneous pages tagged on to the end covering the subsequent search for
her.
I
started going through it.
Leanne
Healy disappeared three months before Megan, on 3 January. She was older, at
twenty, and not nearly as capable at school. She'd left at sixteen with
middling results, and gone to college to study Beauty and Holistic Therapies,
before dropping out after six months. From there she got a job in a local
supermarket, which she stuck for another year and a half, then went back to
college, this time to do a National Diploma in Business. She completed the
course two years later with decent, if unspectacular, grades, and had spent the
time between the end of her course and the date she disappeared struggling to find
work. On 2 January she'd finally got something: as a full-time office junior at
a recruitment agency. Twenty- four hours later, she was gone.
Physically
she wasn't too dissimilar to Megan. Neither of them were overweight, but they
definitely weren't skinny girls. They had a nice shape to them, but their
height — five-five to five-six - would have prevented them from turning heads
in the way they might have done at a few inches taller. Megan was definitely
the better-looking of the two. She had a natural warmth, obvious in her
pictures, which added to her attractiveness. Leanne looked harder work, and
less inclined to make the effort, which came across in the only photograph in
the file; she was standing outside a house, straggly blonde hair covering part
of her face. In the light, and because of the fuzzy quality of the picture, her
smile looked more like a scowl.
Surprisingly,
Healy's version of the events leading up to Leanne's disappearance didn't
differ all that much from his wife Gemma's. Neither account mentioned him
hitting her, although Gemma said he'd become 'angry and aggressive' when he
found out she'd been having an affair. Healy himself tried to claim the moral
high ground early on in his own statement, talking about the sanctity of marriage,
before admitting he 'may have scared' his wife when she told him the truth
about her affair. He described 'getting a little closer to her' than he should
have done, and 'swearing at her'. At one point, midway through the transcript,
Gemma told her interviewer, 'If Colm dedicated as much time to his family as
his work, Leanne probably wouldn't have left that night.'
The
last person to see Leanne alive was one of her brothers. They'd been home
together on the afternoon of
Sunday
3 January, watching a DVD. In the middle of it, Leanne told him she needed to
pop out. She left at three- thirty, and never came home again. At eight, her
brother called Gemma, who was at a friend's house having dinner, and told her
what had happened. Gemma phoned Healy, who was at work. Seven hours later,
Healy called in her disappearance, and she was registered as a missing person.
Right
at the back of the file was a black-and-white MISSING poster, the same photo of
Leanne in the corner
. Leanne Healy. Age at disappearance: 20. Leanne has
been missing from St Albans, Hertfordshire, since $ January. Her whereabouts
remain unknown. There is growing concern for her welfare. Leanne is 5ft 6in
tall, has shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes and is of medium build
.
After that it listed a confidential helpline number and, right at the
bottom of the page, a list of places she most often went before her
disappearance
.
The
list of places were mostly pubs and clubs, as well as the address of the
college she'd gone to, and the name of a coffee shop just around the corner
from her parents' house, where she'd spent most Saturday mornings studying in
the run-up to her exams. But then, in among them, I spotted a name and address
I recognized:
Barton Hill Youth Project, 42 Chestnut Road, Islington,
London.
The
same youth club Megan had gone to.
And
the place she'd met the man who'd got her pregnant.
Sona woke.
The first thing she could see was a line of light above her, about an inch wide
and maybe six feet in length. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she
realized she was lying on a mattress in some kind of hole. It had a dirt floor
and brick walls, water trails running down them. Above her, out of reach, was a
trapdoor. The thin line of light was where it didn't fit properly against the
mouth of the hole.
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.
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!'