by Tim Weaver
Crack.
I span on my heel. Exactly the same noise as before. And now something else too, just behind it. Is that whimpering? Ahead, in the direction I’d come, trees moved. Leaves snapped and turned. Rain hit the path.
Then I sensed something behind me.
A shape darted into the clearing, about twenty feet from where I was standing. The grass moved. Left to right, then back. Whoever it was, was crouched. The shape moved another couple of feet and then stopped again.
The grass in the clearing settled.
Silence.
‘I can see you,’ I said.
I couldn’t, but I took a step forward. My heart moved in my chest, as if it was readjusting; readying itself for a surprise. Another step. A patch of the clearing, about six feet in front of me, moved. Grass rustled. Shifted left and right again.
‘I can see you.’
Silence.
Then: a scratching noise. I took a step closer, glancing down the path. Around me, the woods suddenly seemed bigger and darker, as if awoken by the imminence of night. More scratching. Definitely whimpering.
Then a dog emerged.
It hobbled a little, pushing between two clumps of waist-high grass either side. It was just a silhouette against the pale green of the clearing. As the first hint of dusk had started to settle, the brightness of the grass was the only thing pushing against it.
The dog moved gingerly towards me.
Even as a silhouette, I could see it was shaped like a greyhound: small, narrow head; a belly that curved up towards its hind legs; no body fat at all. It stopped about six feet from me, its face obscured by the developing shadows. I dropped to my haunches in front of it and held out a hand.
‘Hey boy,’ I said gently. ‘Is it you who’s been running around?’
Thunder rumbled again. I glanced up through the gaps in the canopy. In the distance, the clouds seemed to close up, obscuring the sky.
The dog licked my hand.
I looked down at it.
‘Fucking hell.’
I jumped to my feet and stumbled back, my eyes fixed on the greyhound. It took another couple of steps towards me, its right hind leg dragging in the mud.
And then it was no longer a silhouette.
One side of its face had no fur on it at all. Flesh glistened in whatever light was left in the woods, a sliver of teeth showing through even though its mouth was closed. As it took another step to me, I could see there was something else in the flesh on the side of its face: a square of pink, at odds with the red of the sinew. It took me a couple of seconds to work out what it was.
Skin.
The dog hobbled forward some more.
‘Who did this to you?’
It moaned a little. But now I realized there were other noises as well: wind passing through the trees, falling rain, grass whispering as it moved. I looked along the path, into the advancing darkness. Dooley might be right about this place.
The dog made a soft whimpering sound.
I turned back to it, dropped to my haunches again and slowly made a movement towards it, so it knew I offered no threat. But it hardly flinched. It seemed lethargic and distant, and just looked from my hand to my face; a slow, delayed action.
‘Who did this to you?’ I said again.
It turned its head slightly, grey fur matted with water. Then I saw its eyes fix on something, over my shoulder, back the way I’d come. I turned. Trees moved, rain spotting against the canopy. Soft sounds played in the background.
‘What can you see?’
Standing up, I had a view of about thirty feet in either direction. Thunder stomped across the sky. Five seconds later, lightning flashed, freeze-framing the clouds. The dog whimpered and moved towards me, brushed against my leg. I touched its head and felt my fingers run across the dried flesh of its face. Its nose arched upwards, into the cup of my hand.
‘Come with me,’ I said to it quietly.
It hesitated at first and then – when I beckoned it – it followed me, its leg stiff and dragging in the grass of the path. I moved back the way I’d come. Around me, all I could hear now was a constant patter as rain started to hit leaves, like hundreds of footsteps coming from every direction. A little further on, I could see the gate again. I picked up the pace, but – as I did – I felt the dog hesitate. I looked back. It was standing still and had turned to face back along the path into the woods.
‘What’s the matter?’
It didn’t move. I stepped towards it.
‘What can you see?’ I asked.
It sniffed the air, as if it had picked up a scent. I dropped down and placed a hand gently on its back. It didn’t move. Rain hit my hand and ran off on to its coat.
‘What can you see?’ I said again.
It whimpered once more, for longer this time. And then it started moving off, back along the trail, its leg dragging behind it. I whistled gently for it to return to me, but it either ignored me or couldn’t hear me.
Thirty seconds later, it was gone.
I paused for a moment. Tried to see into the darkness to where the dog had gone. I hadn’t really thought what I would do with it once we got back to the car, but it needed to be looked at. It needed to see a vet. I whistled louder this time, but the rain and the wind and the noise of the woods took the sound off into the night. For a moment, I thought about going back for it – but then a strange feeling passed over me.
Like someone was watching.
I gazed along the track. Eyes moving from one side of the woods to the other. There was no movement and no sound. But the feeling of being watched didn’t disappear. It buzzed just beneath the surface of my skin even as the sounds seemed to wash out of the trees and the dying embers of the day gave way to evening.
And then, finally, the Dead Tracks settled.
30
The quickest route home would have been through the centre of the city, but instead I headed in an arc, up through Whitechapel, Shoreditch and Finsbury, rain popping against the windscreen like shotgun spray. By seven o’clock, I was parked outside the youth club. It was Saturday, so I knew it would still be closed, but it was another thirty-six hours until someone opened the doors, and I couldn’t wait that long. It felt like I had some momentum now – but, more than that, I wanted to look around without someone standing over my shoulder.
To the side of the building was a thin alleyway. I made my way along it, all the way through to a car park at the back. The entrance to it was from a road running parallel to the one I’d parked on. Everything was badly lit: a nearby street light was flickering on and off and there was a square of light from the kitchen of the restaurant next door.
The rear doors of the youth club were set back in an alcove. I took out my phone, flipped it open and used the light to examine the entrance. Double doors. A cylinder lock. No handle on the outside. I backed up and examined the building. There had been no alarm on the front and there didn’t look like there was one on the back either. But everywhere had an alarm these days. If there was no box, it probably meant the alarm was wired up to an old-fashioned open-circuit system; an alarm built with magnets that reacted to the doors opening, but turned off again when they closed and the circuit realigned.
I looked both ways, back across the car park, then took out a couple of straightened hairpins that I kept in the car. Picking locks was an art. You had to get the pins in exactly the right place, and apply the right amount of tension. You had to know the sounds and be able to feel the slightest of movements travelling back from the pins to your hand. I avoided picking locks if I could. Not because it was illegal, but because it was hard. As if to prove the point, it took me twenty frustrating minutes before I heard the pins finally falling into place.
I pressed the door shut for a moment while I readied myself – and then, as fast as I could, yanked it towards me, stepped inside and pulled it shut again. There was a brief noise: a high-pitched squeal lasting a second. I gripped the handle and waited. Placed an ea
r to the door. The alarm hadn’t lasted long, but it might have been long enough to get someone’s attention. I gave it five minutes to be certain, and then flipped open my phone and directed its light into the darkness of the building.
Immediately inside, on the left, was a kitchen and a serving hatch. Opposite, in a small anteroom, were some wheelchairs. I moved along the corridor and into the main hall. A stage to my left, a set of double doors to my right and the main entrance in front of me. Next to the entrance, nailed to the wall, was a planner. As I got closer, I could make out the names and photos of everyone who attended the youth club; above that, dressed in identikit green polo shirts, were the people who ran it.
I illuminated the pictures with my phone light. Neil Fletcher was at the top: the man in charge. Caroline had mentioned his name earlier. He was in his forties, black and grey hair, bright eyes, beard, trim. He wasn’t the man in Tiko’s – but neither was anyone else on the board. There was a woman below him, then two other men: Connor Pointon and Eric Castle. Both looked the same, without obviously being related. Mid twenties, square jaws, same hair, generically good-looking. Neither fitted the age group of the man Megan had been seeing. But I made a mental note to double-check both.
Swinging the light round, I walked across the hall to the doors at the far end, my footsteps echoing, the door squeaking on its hinges as I pulled one of them open. On the other side were toilets and an office. The office was sparsely decorated and cold. There was a desk up against one wall, a seat pushed in under it. A computer on the desk that looked at least five years old. Behind the desk, right in the far corner, was a filing cabinet.
I opened it up. Inside were files on every kid who had ever attended the youth club, set out by surname. I went through them, just in case, but nothing stuck out. In the next drawer down were the files on anyone who had ever worked there. Each had undergone an extensive Criminal Records Bureau check, which meant – if the man Megan had met had actually worked at the club – he wouldn’t have had a record.
I pulled the files, set them down at the desk and turned the lights on. It was a windowless office, so no one would see me from the outside.
In all, there were seventeen files. I went through those on the three men who worked at the youth club first. The more I read about Fletcher, the less like a potential suspect he seemed. Forty-eight, married with two kids – one almost seventeen herself. Of the other two, Pointon was married, with a young daughter; and Castle was Australian, here on an ancestral visa, and wasn’t even in the country when Megan first went missing.
I looked through the rest of the files.
The next eleven were female volunteers. Two I recognized immediately: Megan Carver and Leanne Healy. Megan was working part-time in the evenings at the club when she disappeared. Leanne had left two months before she vanished to concentrate on getting a full-time job, though a couple of entries on some kind of attendance form suggested she’d returned several times to help out. There was nothing else to add to what I already knew.
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 toe 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.
31
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.