The Dead Tracks (25 page)

    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.

    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?'