by Tim Weaver
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-O-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?’
‘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.’
32
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.
33
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.
‘You do much for them?’
‘Yeah, a fair bit,’ he replied, shrugging. ‘Gotta be done. It’s either that or the boys in blue turn up at my front door and slap the chains on me. And I don’t much fancy a bumming in Pentonville.’
‘Really?’
He frowned. ‘You sayin’ I’m bent?’
I laughed, but tried not to make too much of it. Ray had never killed anyone in his life, but he still maintained a strict code of conduct as if he was the world’s most dangerous hitman. And like most criminals, it was a code all twisted up. No women. No children. Anything to do with drugs was fair game, as long as the product didn’t end up in the hands of kids under sixteen. Guns were out, but knives were in. And no jokes about him deliberately dropping the soap in the showers as homosexuality was against God.
‘So, I need your help.’
He nodded. Stepped closer to me.
‘I’m an importer looking to bring some chemicals into the country on the quiet. Nothing that’s going to flatten a city, but bad enough that they’d be too difficult to get hold of in the UK.’
‘What kind of chemicals we talkin’?’
‘Formaldehyde.’
‘What the hell’s that?’
‘It’s what they’ll coat you in when you die.’
‘Like dead people and shit?’
‘Right.’
‘Not ringing any bells.’
‘It probably came in as a liquid. Would have been called formalin.’
Ray stopped jigging about momentarily, his eyes fixing on mine. Then he started up again, but didn’t make a move to say anything.
‘What is it, Ray?’
Another dramatic pause. ‘There’s this guy. Got a building over in Beckton, near the airport. He’s from up north. Manchester. Somewhere round there.’
‘And he does what?’
‘Imports shit – but ninety-nine per cent of it’s legit. He runs a clean company outta his place. I think he’s, like, a supplier for restaurants. Some of the stuff is actual food, but most of it’s plates and engraved bowls and all that kinda shit.’