by Tim Weaver
I fast-forwarded it on twenty-four hours, but they didn’t return on the Saturday. Then I remembered something James Carver had told me: When they all got paid, they’d often go into the city. Assuming they got paid at the end of the month, that probably meant the last few days of one, or the very beginning of the next.
I skipped on three weeks to the last weekend in November.
Nothing on the Friday, but on Saturday they returned to Tiko’s. Eleven o’clock, just like before. They stuck pretty much to the same routine. In through the crowds. Up to the bar. Up to the second floor, in the same position next to the sofas. Five trips back to the bar, before ending up on the dancefloor permanently. The other discs – December, January, February and March – all followed exactly the same pattern.
The first day of footage on the sixth disc was Saturday 1 April. Forty-eight hours before Megan disappeared. The girls entered the club just before eleven, headed to the bar, and up the spiral staircase to the top floor. They talked for a while and then, as the clock in the corner of the screen hit midnight, Megan turned slightly to let someone through. Suddenly, a feeling of familiarity washed over me.
I paused the footage. Megan was facing the camera, flanked on either side by the others. I’d spotted something; something worth picking out. But I couldn’t pull it out of the darkness. I moved closer to the screen and used the remote control to inch the footage on. In one frame, Lindsey leaned towards Megan. In the next, Kaitlin took a step away.
That was when I saw him.
I realized then that I’d glimpsed him earlier, on another disc, but not really registered him. He’d only been in view briefly, just as he was now. Hidden behind a tangle of bodies; perched on the edge of the sofa furthest from the girls. Dark hair. Black jacket. Black shirt. Jeans. Black shoes.
He was staring right at Megan.
He sat completely still even as one frame jumped to the next. It was like he was frozen in place. His head was angled slightly, his chin almost pressed against his throat, looking up from under his brow. He had pale skin but incredibly dark eyes. Through the scan lines of the footage, they were just holes in his head.
Then Lindsey moved again and he disappeared behind her.
I carried on watching, the footage jumping between frames. More people moved up the stairs. At one point, a group of eight or nine men stood adjacent to Megan, Lindsey and Kaitlin. Twelve minutes later they finally moved again.
And the man was gone.
I fast-forwarded it, past the point the girls left the club at half-two to closing time at four o’clock. He didn’t reappear. I rewound it to the beginning of the evening when they’d first come up the stairs to the second floor. He wasn’t waiting for them then. It was like he’d ghosted in for those few short moments, shielded by the crowds – and then vanished again.
I dropped in March’s DVD for a second time. Skipped forward to the evening of the first Friday in the month. An hour and a half passed. When the onscreen clock showed 00:37, a crowd spread out behind the three girls – and he emerged. I’d missed him the first time. But not now. For five and a half minutes, he sat there watching Megan through the crowds. Same as on the April DVD. Same clothes. Same expression. Dark eyes never leaving her.
Not once.
I went back over all the footage I’d already watched. Every month but the first one, October, he was there. Short periods of time. Never less than five minutes, never more than eight. It would have been incredibly easy to miss him – which is why I assumed he’d gone unnoticed by the police. They would have checked all four thousand hours; been through every single weekday; checked the footage all day, every day for six months, just to be sure. And apart from mornings, the whole time the place was jammed: so many people, so much going on. The man was only in shot for thirty-six minutes of the four thousand hours, with that fraction of time split up into even smaller chunks a month apart. I’d picked him up almost by accident. A fluke.
But he was there.
And he was watching Megan.
15
Friday. After getting up at eight and making some coffee, I sat at the living-room windows, looking out at the garden, and studied the photograph of the man from Tiko’s. I’d taken a picture of the TV screen, pausedon the best view I could get of his face, and printed it out on the computer. Blown up big, the quality deteriorated.
But it was good enough.
He looked like he was in his thirties. Incredibly pale, jet- black hair combed into an old-fashioned side parting. A very angular face, all bone and sinew, his cheeks slightly hollow, his nose thin and straight. The ridge of his brow was prominent, raised, reducing his eyes to two tiny pinpricks of light. It gave him an odd, otherworldly feel: a man painted only in the darkest blacks and whitest whites. Physically, he didn’t look much. Five-ten, maybe even less. No muscle, or at least no indication of any.
But something was off about him. Something ominous.
He looked at Megan the way a hunter looked at its prey. Deep concentration. Patience. His eyes constantly tracking her movements. His posture was slightly bent, as if he spent the whole time trying to make himself smaller, like a bear trap being primed. Because of that, he carried a kind of threat, a suggestion that his build and size wouldn’t matter when it came to it. Because when it came to it, nothing would stop him.
He would get what he wanted.
I called Kaitlin and agreed to meet her during a free period she had at eleven o’clock. After that, I’d try and speak to DCI Jamie Hart. It was going to be a balancing act. I needed his help, because I needed to find out how far the case had progressed before it went cold, but I didn’t want Hart getting too involved or interested in Megan’s disappearance again. Perhaps I was doing the police a disservice. Perhaps they’d already pinpointed the man in Tiko’s as someone to watch. But it was possible, and in fact more likely, that they’d totally missed him. And I didn’t want them finding out about the man before I’d had a chance to try and find out who he was myself.
When I got to the school, I pulled in around the side in the Sixth Form car park, close to the fencing Megan must have scaled in order to avoid being picked up on CCTV. Kaitlin was waiting for me. Her bag was on top of a battered Ford Fiesta, a folder next to it, a set of textbooks next to that. I got out of the BMW. The morning was dry but heavy with the threat of rain. Dark clouds moved across the sky in thick coils. In the distance, beyond the rooftops of the houses surrounding the school, a mist hung, grey and oppressive like a blanket being pulled across the city.
I smiled at Kaitlin. ‘Morning.’
She smiled back, but there was a slight hesitancy to her. Maybe she was expecting me to launch into a tirade about how she should have told the police what she knew.
I held up a hand. ‘I don’t care what you’ve done.’
She seemed to relax a little and then suggested we go to a coffee shop about half a mile from the school. It had two floors. The top one had big floor-to-ceiling windows and small circular tables lined up in front. I bought Kaitlin a latte, and then we took one of the tables, furthest away from everybody else. I got out my pen and pad, and turned to her. She was looking down at the people passing on the pavements.
‘Are you okay?’
She glanced at me, a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes, as if I might be leading her into a trap. ‘I’m fine,’ she said eventually.
‘So when did you first find out Megan was pregnant?’
‘The week before she disappeared.’
‘What happened?’
‘I went round to her house, so we could work on a Biology assignment we’d been given. About an hour after I got there, she said she needed to puke.’
‘Was that the first time she’d felt like that?’
‘No. She said she’d been sick that morning, and had been puking every day for a week. She said it was something she’d eaten.’
‘But you didn’t believe her.’
‘No.’
‘So she told you?’
/>
‘Eventually. She said she’d done a pregnancy test a week after the sickness and the headaches hadn’t gone away.’
‘Did you ask her who the father was?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what did she say?’
Kaitlin glanced at me. ‘I guess this is where it gets confusing.’
‘Okay.’
‘This is the reason I lied.’
I nodded for her to continue.
‘Megan was always very into, like, helping people. You know, charities, that kind of thing. She used to spend her summers helping out at a youth club down the road from her house. I think it was for people with, like, cerebral palsy or something.’ She paused, glanced out of the window. ‘Anyway, she said she’d met someone.’
‘At the youth club?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did she tell you his name?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
She paused again, this time for longer. ‘He was quite a few years older than her. Like, ten or fifteen or something. She thought he’d get into trouble.’
‘With who?’
‘Megan was seventeen. What do you think her parents would have said if they found out she was seeing some guy in his thirties?’
I leaned back in my seat. ‘Did she tell you anything about him?’
‘Just that she thought he was really sexy, and really clever, and that they were in love.’ She shrugged. ‘I’d never heard her talk about a guy like that. Megan was … well, she didn’t meet very many men. When we used to go out, she was never interested in getting together with anyone.’
‘Did she describe him at all? How he looked?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No.’
I thought of the man in the club again. Had that been him? He wasn’t attractive in any way, but he must have been at least fifteen years older than her. Even if the age vaguely matched, though, it didn’t feel right. If she knew him, why would he be waiting there in the shadows? Why would he be there at all? I reached into my jacket pocket and got out the photograph. I pushed it across the table to Kaitlin.
‘Do you recognize him?’
‘Is that Tiko’s?’
‘Yes.’
I’d cropped it in, so the girls were out of shot, but her eyes still flicked to me, then back to the photograph, as she tried to put it together in her head.
‘You recognize him?’ I asked again.
‘No.’
‘You sure?’
‘Positive.’
I took the photo back and folded it up.
‘Did she tell you how many times they’d had sex?’
Kaitlin flushed a little.
‘You don’t have to be embarrassed.’
She shifted in her seat. ‘Four times.’
‘How far along was she?’
‘In her pregnancy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not far. I think about five or six weeks.’
‘Did the guy she was sleeping with know she was pregnant?’
‘Yes.’
‘She told him?’
‘Yes.’
I wrote that down. When I looked up again, she was staring at me, and for the first time I glimpsed the girl underneath.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I just wish I hadn’t lied. Maybe if I hadn’t lied, the police would have found her. Do you think she went off with the man she met? Do you think he …’ She faded out.
‘Listen to me, Kaitlin,’ I said. ‘If, for whatever reason, the police come calling, don’t tell them about the pregnancy. I don’t know if they’ll be back or not. For all intents and purposes, the case is dead. But they could get interested again if they find me snooping around, and the first thing we need to do here is protect you. So if they come calling, tell them about the youth club, and that you think she might have been seeing someone there, but leave it at that, okay?’
She nodded.
‘Good. What was the name of the youth club?’
‘Barton Hill.’
‘It’s close to Megan’s house?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you ever go?’
‘No. She asked me along a couple of times, but … it’s not really my thing.’
I drummed my fingers on the table, thinking. ‘So did you decide not to tell the police about Megan being pregnant because – what? – she wanted to protect the identity of this guy?’
Kaitlin glanced at me. A movement in her eyes. ‘No,’ she said finally. Something else was at play.
‘So why did you lie?’
‘Because I …’ She stopped. Glanced at me again. ‘The day she disappeared, before the police came to talk to me … I got a phone call.’
‘From who?’
Another pause. Longer this time. ‘Charlie Bryant.’
This time it was my turn to pause. I studied her for a moment. ‘Did he know about Megan’s pregnancy?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘She must have told him, or he must have found out somehow. He just called me and told me we couldn’t tell the police anything.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’d be in danger.’
‘From who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t ask him?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me. He said it was best I didn’t know.’ She stopped. ‘At first, I thought it was him getting all weird again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, he was, like, in love with Megan. Totally in love with her. Sometimes he’d go over the top and creep us all out.’
‘With the stuff he said to her?’
‘Yeah, and the way he acted around her. He’d follow her around sometimes. Not like a stalker, but just … I don’t know, just following her, you know? He’d do these drawings for her, paintings, write poems and shit like that. He was always telling her he’d be there for her. He could be a real weirdo sometimes.’
‘So why did you believe him when he called you?’
She stopped, took a long drink of her coffee, then eyed me nervously. ‘He just seemed different that day. Sounded different. He never really cared what the rest of us thought of him. Me and some of the others used to take the piss out of him all the time at school, but he was never bothered by it. He just laughed it off. But that day … I don’t know. He sounded different. When he told me we’d be in danger if we talked, I totally believed him.’ She took a deep breath. ‘For the first time ever, he seemed really scared.’
I was pulling the car out of the school gates when my phone went. I picked it up off the passenger seat and slotted it into the hands-free. It was Spike. He had names and addresses for the eighteen different numbers I’d sourced off Megan’s mobile phone. I told him to put them in an email. There was an internet café about half a mile from Charlie Bryant’s house. I’d pick them up there.
I found a parking space off Holloway Road, opposite a bank of new apartments, and headed towards Highgate. The internet café – apparently without any sense of irony – was called Let’s Get Digital!, but there was a PC right in the corner where it would be hard for anyone to see the screen. I logged into my Yahoo.
There was a PDF attached to Spike’s message. I opened it up.
Eighteen numbers, surnames with each, listed alphabetically. It looked like a copy of a phone bill, except this phone bill had names and addresses as well as numbers. The information had probably been ripped directly from phone company databases and then pasted into the document. His ability to get beyond firewalls wasn’t the only reason Spike got work. He had a certain attention to detail, such as arranging names in alphabetical order, which made things even more appealing to his customers.
I went through the list.
There weren’t many surprises. The mobile and work numbers for both James and Caroline Carver, which I already knew; a mobile and a landline for Kaitlin and the same for Lindsey; four other friends, all girls, whose
names I recognized from Megan’s Book of Life, each with a landline and a mobile. That left two. The first was a mobile phone number for Charlie Bryant. The second was a landline, outer London, no name attached to it, and no street address. Just a PO box number. Spike had written next to it: Working on this – will get a street address and call you back.
I got out my phone and dialled the number. It clicked and connected. After four rings, it clicked again and the echoey, distant sound of an answer machine kicked in. ‘Please leave your message after the tone,’ said a bored-sounding male voice. There wasn’t much more I could do until Spike got me the street address.
But there was something I could do about Charlie Bryant. I knew where he lived – and now it was time to find out exactly how much he knew.
16
It was two-thirty by the time I got to the Bryant house. I rang the doorbell, pressing my face against a glass panel in the door. Rain hammered against the hard plastic roof of the porch, a sound like nails being poured from a bucket. It would have been impossible to hear movement inside, even if there was anyone home. But there wasn’t. The house was dark and silent, and had the cold, lifeless feel that came from being unoccupied. No light. No warmth. No sign of being lived in.
I looked along the house and back up the driveway. It was well protected from the road. Trees at the entrance and lining one side of the property, the neighbours a nice distance away over a mid-sized brick wall. It was unusual for a house in London to have so much space to itself. It made me wonder what Charlie Bryant’s dad did for a living.
Finally, the rain started to fade a little, turning into drizzle.
And then I could smell something.
I stepped down off the porch and walked around to the side gate. The smell started to get stronger. On the other side, I could see a series of bin liners, grass cuttings spilling out of the top. The grass had turned to mulch, sliding across the concrete and staining the brickwork on the house. Next to that were more bin liners, torn by animals, food scattered across the path. The gate was heavy oak, good quality, with a thick wooden bar across the middle. A big padlock was on the other side, visible through one of the slats.