The Dead Tracks (22 page)

    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?

    
Think.

    I
looked at the random numbers at the bottom of the webpage:
21112303666859910012512612713213313414214414803206. It wasn't an error message
— or, at least if it was, it was unlike any error message I'd ever seen.
Grabbing a pen, I rewrote all fifty numbers on to my pad, and then circled an area
in the middle that immediately stood out: 125126127 and 132133134. One hundred
and twenty- five through to one hundred and twenty-seven, and one hundred and
thirty-two through to one hundred and thirty-four.

    They
were both sequential.

    I
went back to the start and worked through from the beginning, applying the same
logic throughout. If I assumed the list was one long, gradually increasing
series of numbers, fifty suddenly became eighteen: 2 11 12 3036 66 85 99 100
125 126 127 132 133 134 142 144 148. Except I'd cheated, because right at the
end was 03206, and I didn't know how they fitted in so had left them out. Even
taking each number on its own, or every two, there was no obvious pattern.

    Tabbing
back to Megan's inbox, I read over the newsletter again.

    There
were no numbers in the message. Nothing to tie the sequence to the site. Not
one scrap of evidence to suggest the numbers even meant anything.
So why are
they there?
I looked around the office, trying to pull inspiration out from
somewhere. My eyes passed pictures on the walls, photographs, the front pages
I'd written and the stories I'd broken.
What aren't you seeing?
Without
a user- name or password, I'd have to enlist the help of Spike to get past the
security for me. And that meant time. It meant hours sitting on my hands. It
meant wasted days.

    I
looked down at the numbers written on the pad again, then back to the email in
Megan's inbox, then back to the numbers.
What the hell aren't you…

    Then
I saw it.

    Copying
and pasting the contents of the email into a Word document, I started going
through the message again. The first number in the sequence was two. I
capitalized and emboldened the second word in the email. The second number was
eleven. I capitalized and emboldened the eleventh word. Then I did the same
with the twelfth, thirtieth, thirty-sixth, sixty-sixth and the rest.

    Two
minutes later, everything had changed.

    I
leaned in towards the monitor and took in each line of the email, every bold
word suddenly coming alive. Three minutes before it had just been a charity
newsletter. Now it was the reason Megan had disappeared.

    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
OFF
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

    A
feeling of dread flared in my chest
.
Megan, want to imagine running off
together next Monday? See the website. Enter your email and the date
.

    I
tabbed back to the LCT website, clicked on DONATE, and put Megan's full email
address in as the username.
Enter your email and the date.
What date?
Today's date? The date the email was sent? The date she disappeared? I tried
them all and every time the pop-up box juddered and closed. None of them was
right.

    You're
stumbling around in the dark here.

    The
date. The date. The
date.
I let my mind work back over the last week,
trying to recall anything I'd found that might give me a clue as to what that
meant: Megan, her parents, her school, her friends, the youth club, Charlie
Bryant, the man at Tiko's, his similarity to Sykes… and then I stopped.

    Sykes.

    The
last five digits of the numbered sequence. 03206. I hadn't been able to see
where they fitted in before. But now I did.

    03 2
06. 3 February 1906.

    I
flipped back a couple of pages on my pad, to where I'd made the notes about
Sykes. 03 02 06. 3 February 1906.

    The
day he was hanged.

    I
entered Megan's email as the username, and 03206 as the password. And I hit
Return. The security box disappeared and the website began to load a new page.
It took a couple of seconds. When it was done, a small map appeared in the
centre, about five square inches in size. It had been drawn by hand with black
marker pen and scanned, and looked like an approximation of a car park,
vehicles — as if viewed from above — on one side, a long thin line opposite
them. On the other side of the line was an X and a typewritten message:
Meet
here at 2.30 p.m. for a romantic woodland picnic!

    It
was the Sixth Form car park at Newcross Secondary.

    He
knew what he was doing. He knew there was no CCTV coverage in that part of the
school and he knew what time her lesson finished. He picked her up and he took
her away, and no one even noticed.

    The
ultimate disappearing act.

    Except
he'd left a trail. Because while the woodland he described could have been
anywhere as far as the police were concerned, I'd spotted him in Tiko's, I'd
found out who he looked like, and I knew the significance of the website
password.

    I
knew his next move that day.

    He'd
taken her to Hark's Hill Woods.

    There
was a coffee shop that doubled up as a deli a couple of doors along from the
office. I headed downstairs and ordered a steak sandwich. While I was waiting,
my phone started buzzing. It was Ewan Tasker calling about Jill's husband. I
was tempted not to answer, not because I didn't want to speak to him, but
because I didn't want another case to add to my workload minutes after a major
break in the Carver one. But if I didn't answer, Tasker would just assume I
wasn't around - and then keep on calling.

    I hit
Accept. 'Help the Aged.'

    A
laugh crackled down the line. 'Raker.'

    'How
you doing, Task?'

    'Good.
How are you?'

    'Can't
complain. I tried you earlier this morning, but I imagine you were winding your
way towards the nineteenth hole. You're not hammered already, are you?'

    He
laughed again. 'Not yet.'

    Rain
pounded against the window of the coffee shop, making a noise like an army
marching. I bent slightly and covered my other ear.

    'So
what have you got for me, old man?'

    'You
didn't hear any of this from me.'

    'Goes
without saying.'

    The
sound of paper being shuffled around.

    'Okay.
Frank Robert White. Forty-one years of age.

    Married
to Jill, no kids. Detective inspector for three years before he got popped,
nineteen months of which he spent at the Met. On the evening of 25 October of
last year, he was shot once in the chest, high up near the left shoulder, and
once in the head, just above the bridge of the nose. He was part of a task
force investigating Akim Gobulev. You've heard of him, right?'

    'Yeah.
The Ghost.'

    'Right.
Gobulev runs Russian organized crime in London, except no one's seen him since he
landed at Heathrow ten years back.' More paper being flicked through. You know
what his first name means back in Mother Russia?'

    'No.'

    '"God
Will Judge". Fucking right about that. He was a pain in my balls at NCIS,
but it looks like SOCA managed to get close to him through an informant.'

    'So
SOCA were working with White's Met team?'

    'Right.
White was SCD.'

    The
Specialist Crime Directorate. They were a Metropolitan Police department
working across the city on serious and high-profile cases. Homicides, gangs,
child abuse, e-crime, money-laundering - it all came under the SCD umbrella. It
was split into eight Operational Command Units, and SCD7, which covered
organized crime, would have been where Frank White was based.

    'White
had put a task force together to support SOCA and work alongside them, and they
were about to put the cuffs on Gobulev's… What the hell have I written here?'

    'Plastic
surgeon?'

    'Yeah,
surgeon.' He sounded surprised. 'You already know all this?'

    'Not much,
but some.' I kept it at that. I didn't want an overview from Task; I wanted
everything he had. "What do we know about this surgeon?'

    'Intelligence
suggests he's kind of like a gun for hire — except he comes armed with a
scalpel and a syringe full of Botox.'

    'So
he isn't Russian?'

    'No.
Informants put him as English. He did the works on God Will Judge's face - as
in, completely changed the way he looked — which is probably why we never found
the arsehole in ten years at NCIS.'

    'And
presumably why Gobulev took a shine to the surgeon.'

    'Yeah.
He uses his medical expertise on a freelance basis — nose job here, brow lift
there - but mostly he's just sewing up knife wounds and scooping out bullets
for low- level shitheads. It's a way for the Russians to keep their employees
out of A&E. Once you hit the hospitals, people start asking questions.'

    'So
what happened the night Frank died?'

    'SOCA
got a tip-off that the surgeon would be at that warehouse down in Bow, helping
Gobulev take delivery of some guns.'

    'But
Gobulev wasn't there.'

    Tasker
snorted. 'Gobulev doesn’t go to his own birthday party.'

    'So
why send the surgeon?'

    'No
one was really sure. But the Russian informant reckons there was something else
with the guns as part of the delivery.'

    'Wh
at?'

    'Currently
unclear. White's team screwed up and got spotted early doors and then it turned
into the OK Corral. White and the other officer who died got separated from the
rest of the task force, and the next time anyone saw them they were bleeding
out on the floor of the warehouse and the surgeon was haring away from the
scene of the crime in a stolen car.'

    'What
about the rest of Gobulev's men?'