The Dead Tracks (37 page)

    '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.

    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 loading 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.

    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.