The Dead Tracks (26 page)

    'It's
not the name of a company,' I said.

    'No?'

    'It's
the name of a chemical compound.'

    'Form…?'

    'Formalin.'

    'What's
that?'

    'Liquid
formaldehyde.'

    Spike
paused. 'That's what they use in embalming, right?'

    'Right.'
I circled the word a couple of times. 'And preserving remains.'

    By
half-ten, I was moving along Whitechapel Road, into Mile End, and I had the heaters
on full blast. I'd already been to Adrian Carlisle's house in Seven Sisters. He
wasn't home. I tried his landline and mobile and no one answered. I waited
outside his place — a three-storey mid-terrace in which he occupied the top
floor — for an hour. But there was no sign of him. Now, as I passed into Mile
End, I could make out the sandy brick and gunmetal roof of the building Daniel
Markham lived in.

    It
was the first of six identical five-storey apartment complexes. Each one stood
parallel to the next, all facing west so that anyone with a home on the east of
the building spent their life without sun. In what must have surely been an
ironic touch, they were all named after different types of roses. Markham lived
in Alba on the ground floor. At the entrance, the glass doors had steamed up
and two women were standing talking, coats and scarves tightly bound around
them. I parked up and headed towards them.

    Then,
ten feet short of the doors, a flash of recollection hit me.

    The
entrance.

    It
was the block of flats in Megan's photo. She'd been standing where the women
were now, looking into the camera of the man she'd been with, that smile etched
on her face.
Markham.
Was he the one she'd been seeing? The man who'd
got her pregnant? The man who'd taken her? I quickly headed inside, through the
doors to the ground floor and along a small, grey corridor, to flat number
eight.

    I
knocked twice. Elsewhere in the corridor there was the muffled sound of television.
Laughter. A baby crying. But no answer from Markham's flat.

    'Daniel?'

    No
response.

    'Daniel,
my name's David Raker.'

    Nothing.

    I
stepped forward. There was no spyhole in the door. I put an ear to it and
listened. After a couple of seconds, I could hear a noise.

    'Daniel,
I need to speak to you.'

    Again,
with my ear pressed to the door, I could hear a noise. The same one: a creak,
or maybe a click. When it came again, it sounded more like a click.

    'Daniel?'

    I
leaned in again and tried to separate out the sounds. There was a constant
buzz; possibly a fridge. Some peripheral noise from outside the flat. Behind
that, whatever was making the clicking sound. Except this time it was preceded
by a gentle whirr.

    'Daniel?'

    
Click.

    Distantly,
there were police sirens. I stepped away from the door and waited until they
got closer, until the noise started to cover some of the other sounds inside
the building. Then I took another step back — and launched a foot at the door.

    It
cracked and swung open, hitting an adjacent wall and bouncing back towards me.
I stopped it with a hand. Paused. Looked along the corridor.

    Then
I stepped into the flat and closed the door.

    Immediately
to my left was a bathroom. Next to that was the bedroom door. In front of me
was a short hallway, feeding into a living room and open-plan kitchen. It
looked like someone had half moved out and never returned. Dust clung to walls.
Windows had been whitewashed, but not very well. Through one, I could see out
to the path leading up to the flats, and the entrance itself. It was a good
position for Markham: he'd be able to see if anyone approached the building.

    'Daniel?'

    Silence.
There was a two-seater sofa in the living room. A lamp next to that. A
half-filled bookshelf. Otherwise, the flat was empty. No TV. No music centre.
No games consoles, satellite decoders or DVD players. Nothing a single man
should have owned.

    The
kitchen had been mostly cleared out as well. Only a few things remained. A
kettle. A couple of plates stacked in a drying rack. A fruit bowl. A
refrigerator in the corner, humming. It was on, but it had been defrosted. The
doors were open to both the fridge and the freezer. There was no food in
either. Same story in the bedroom: a bed base, a mattress, no sheets, no duvet.
Built-in cupboards, all open. There were some clothes inside, but not many. A
couple of shirts. Some trousers.

    
Click.

    That
noise again. I moved out into the hallway. Looked around. There was very little
sound now: no noise from the flat, no noise from outside. Heading into the
bathroom, I turned on the light. Toilet. Bath. Basin. Bathroom cabinet with a
small mirror on the front. Above me, the extractor fan kicked into life. I
opened up the cabinet and looked around inside. A can of deodorant, a razor,
some shaving cream. Nothing else. I pushed the cabinet shut - except now it
wouldn't close. When I tried again, it just slowly crept back open. I leaned in
and looked at the catch. It was broken. The moment I'd pulled the cabinet open,
the catch had come loose.

    As if
it had been set up to break.

    And
someone was trying to draw attention to it.

    I
stepped in closer to the cabinet and looked inside. In the corners, it had been
attached to the wall with four screws. I placed a hand on either side of the
cabinet and levered it away. It stuck for a moment, the screws clinging to the
holes that housed them. But when I applied more pressure they began to come out
as it shifted off the wall.

    It
had been deliberately left loose.

    Dust
spilled out from around the screw heads, landing inside the cabinet. Plaster
made a scraping sound behind it. And then, a couple of seconds later, the
cabinet came away.

    In
the space behind it was a patch of cream paint - the original colour of the
bathroom - and the holes that had once housed the screws.

    In
the centre was a message, written directly on to the wall.

    It
said
:
Help me
.

    Back
at the car, rain continued falling. I started up the engine and left the
heaters running. In the pop-out drinks holder was a takeaway coffee. Steam rose
from a hole in the lid.

    I
grabbed my phone. On it was a picture of the message I'd found on the wall. I'd
placed the cabinet back as best I could and wedged the front door of the flat
shut with a folded piece of card. If someone returned to it, it would only take
a second for them to realize there had been a break-in. But that was
if
they returned. It felt like a place that had gone a long time without being
lived in.

    As I
exited the photo again, the phone started buzzing in my hand. The number was
withheld.

    'David
Raker.'

    'David,
my name's Corine. I'm a friend of Spike's.'

    'Corine
— thanks for calling me.'

    After
he'd translated the writing in the photograph for me, Spike had offered to put
me in contact with a friend of his who had some sort of science degree. He was
deliberately vague. He didn't involve the people he liked in his work.

    'Spike
said you had some questions.'

    She sounded
English; softly spoken with a slight northern twang. I wondered how she'd come
to meet an illegal immigrant who never went outside.

    'Yeah.
I was hoping you could tell me about formalin.'

    'Formalin?'
She paused. 'What do you want to know?'

    'It's
what they use in embalming, right?'

    'Not
so much any more. Formaldehyde's kind of frowned upon these days. In fact, some
European countries have banned it altogether.'

    'Because
it's carcinogenic?'

    'Right.
Formalin's only thirty-seven per cent formaldehyde. The rest is methanol and
water. But it's still ridiculously good at what it Does. Drop an animal into a
vat of it and you've got an instant tissue preserver. Just ask Damien Hirst.'

    'How's
it work?'

    'Basically,
the formaldehyde hardens you up. It eats away at the cell tissue, drying out
the protoplasm and replacing the fluid with this firm kind of gel-like
compound. So it not only solidifies the cells and maintains the shape of the
skin, but disinfects the tissue at the same time. And even better than that -
it's incredibly resistant to bacteria.'

    'Where
would I get some?'

    'Formalin?'

    'I'm
talking theoretically — and on the quiet.'

    'Well,
because it's carcinogenic, it's heavily policed, so your best bet would be to
import it from outside Europe — or from somewhere
inside
Europe that
isn't properly regulated. You're taking a chance whichever route you decide.
And you'd obviously need someone who'd be willing to bring it in for you, with
all the associated risks. I don't know where you'd find those kind of people.'

    An
hour later, I pulled into Kensal Green Cemetery: seventy-two acres of
gravestones, mausoleums and parkland, rolling across the city like a blanket.
Nosing the car around to a long colonnade, I bumped the BMW up on to the grass
beside the pillars and killed the engine. A face looked out briefly, and then
disappeared again. I got out and headed across. Beneath the colonnade it
smelled old and musty. About twenty feet to my right, a skinny black guy
wearing a yellow beanie and a shiny green bomber jacket was moving towards me.

    His
name was Ray Smith.

    Smith
was a small-time crook the police had got their hooks into after a botched bank
job in Mayfair five years ago. He'd been the getaway driver, but hadn't got
away fast enough. Smith actually wasn't a bad guy — he'd just got in with the
wrong people. In exchange for a new life as a paid informant, he got to roam
the streets a free man. That was when I got my hooks into him and told the
paper to double whatever the Met paid him. He was small-time, but he had a good
pair of ears. Which was how he got his name. Ray wasn't short for Raymond. It
was short for Radar, as in, he always knew what was going on.

    I
looked him up and down.

    He
was a ten-stone bundle of energy, powered by a mixture of adrenalin and
paranoia, and known for his appalling fashion sense. His bomber jacket was a
nuclear explosion, and on the middle finger of his right hand was a huge,
diamond-encrusted ring.

    'You
travelling incognito, Ray?'

    He
rolled his eyes and looked around him. 'Fuck you.

    'I
shouldn't even be here talkin' to you, man. You're a bad luck charm.'

    'How
do you figure that?'

    You
remember the last time I helped you out?'

    'Sure.
Must have been about two years back.'

    'Correct.
And you know what happened the next day? I get my face kicked in. And then my
fuckin' dog dies. You got the Medusa touch.' He was looking to the side, but his
eyes flicked back to me. 'Listen,' he said. A pause. 'I, y'know… heard about
your girl.'

    I
nodded. He turned and looked along the colonnade behind him, turning his back
to me. I let him have a moment. That second of eye contact was Ray trying to
tell me he was sorry about Derryn. It was about as poignant as our relationship
had ever got.

    I
changed the subject. 'So you still bleeding taxpayers dry?'

    He
turned back to face me. Yeah, still doin' it. And the only reason I'm still
standin' here breathin' is 'cause my boy keeps me outta the limelight.'

    About
fifteen years ago, the police started asking detectives to register their
confidential informants, which as most of them would tell you was one of the
worst ideas in the history of law enforcement. As soon as CIs thought details
of their snitching was available somewhere to find or pass on, the intel dried
up. What most detectives did instead was log two or three CIs they knew they'd
never use, and keep their best ones off the books. Radar was one of the best
ones.