by Tim Weaver
‘So what’s the other one per cent?’
‘The way I hear it, he’s got some serious connections. He’s like a fixer. You go to him with what you want and he gets it; brings it in with the bowls and the china plates.’
‘I’m still waiting for the bonus ball.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘You hearin’ anythin’ I’m sayin’ here? He ain’t handin’ me a fuckin’ inventory every week. The guy ain’t a personal friend of mine. But if there’s chemicals comin’ into the city, you can bet your arse they’re comin’ through him.’
I didn’t reply. His eyes flicked to me. His face seemed straight: no movement, no obvious sign that he was hiding anything.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What’s the name of the business?’
‘Drayton Imports.’
‘That’s the guy’s name as well?’
‘Yeah, Derrick Drayton.’
I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote the names on the back of my hand. ‘So, who’s been using him?’
‘I don’t know.’
I sighed and looked up at him. ‘Stop feeding me bullshit, Ray.’
‘I ain’t.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I ain’t holdin’ back!’
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said again.
This time there was a brief hesitation and then that movement in his face I’d been waiting for. He knew something.
‘Ray?’
Another pause. ‘Okay. I shouldn’t be tellin’ you this.’
‘Telling me what?’
‘The police came askin’ about all this shit a few months –’
‘Wait a sec, wait a sec. The police?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What were they asking about?’
‘If I’d heard anythin’ about this Drayton guy.’
‘They tell you why they were asking?’
‘No.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Nothin’. Just asked me if I’d heard anythin’ about this guy, Drayton, who ran it. When I told ’em what I knew, they said I needed to keep my trap shut if anyone asked.’
I paused. Let my mind return to the photograph and the formalin in the background. ‘Did the police ever ask you if you’d heard anything about a missing girl?’
Radar frowned. ‘No.’
‘They just asked about Drayton?’
‘Yeah.’
I paused. ‘So if they know he’s on the take, why haven’t they closed him down?’
‘He disappeared. Most people think he bought a one-way ticket out of the country when he could smell pork on the wind. And the business is squeaky clean. So his family run the place over in Beckton in his absence. You’d have to dial 999 to find out what the police have got planned for him if he ever returns. Especially after the …’ He trailed off.
‘The what?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘The what?’ He didn’t respond. ‘Speak up, Radar.’
He sighed; slid a couple of fingers beneath his beanie and tried to rub his frown away. Eventually he took the hat off altogether and dragged a whole hand across his head, his shaved hair bristling beneath his palm. Another sigh, this time louder.
‘Especially the what, Ray?’
‘This Drayton guy, he’s got a series of properties all over that part of the city. Not just the place at Beckton. And in one of them … somethin’ got fucked up.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s why the police were interested. Way I hear it is that Drayton sourced some guns for some OC outfit and allowed ’em to use one of his buildings as a pick-up point for the weapons.’
‘Organized crime?’
‘Yeah. Russians. The police got wind of it and sent in the cavalry. Only it went wrong.’ He paused. Looked at me. ‘And a couple of coppers got a bullet in the face.’
I looked at him, struck into silence.
Bloody hell.
He’s talking about the night Frank White died.
34
The Frank White file was sitting inside the boot of the BMW, still in the envelope Tasker had mailed it in. I’d brought it with me in case I found the time to skim-read it while chasing leads back to Megan. But now, somehow, Frank White had moved in from the periphery – and he’d tethered himself to her disappearance.
I slid in at the wheel, closed the door and tried to clear my head. The cemetery was quiet. I put the wipers on intermittent, listening to them sweep across the glass. For the moment, there wasn’t a direct connection that I could see. There was a line running from Frank’s death, to the Russians, to Drayton Imports, to the formalin, and on to the girl in the photograph. But the circle wasn’t complete. It felt like something was at work – like on some level the two of them were bound to one another – but even if Megan was the girl in the picture, which wasn’t even certain, the only thing that connected her to Frank White was the fact that the formalin in the background of the shot had probably been imported by Drayton – the man who owned the warehouse Frank was shot in.
And yet I didn’t like the convenience of it all; the coincidence. Because I didn’t believe in coincidences. I believed in structure and meaning. I believed in connections.
People connected. Events connected.
Everything tied up.
I started going through the file. It echoed exactly what Tasker had already told me over the phone. The task force was spotted early on by Russian lookouts, and the operation descended into a shoot-out. Three specialist firearms officers had accompanied White’s SCD7 team to the scene, and one of them had managed to hit the surgeon’s getaway vehicle, a stolen black Lexus. But he still got away. At 11.17 p.m., Frank White was declared dead. Another detective, Kline, was already gone. Two of Akim Gobulev’s men made it through the firefight. One died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital; the other refused to talk. There were five separate attempts by detectives to interview him, and the five transcripts included in the file weren’t more than a page long.
So all they had was the surgeon.
And they didn’t even have him.
Pathology, fingerprint lifts and ballistics confirmed what Tasker had already told me, but the evidence inventory was one of the longest I’d ever seen. The lack of a smoking gun – and the fact that two police officers were lying dead on the floor of the warehouse – had galvanized the forensic teams. It looked like every fibre in the building had been processed. For the people working there, it had become personal the moment White and Kline stopped breathing.
I leafed through the list. Everything bagged at the scene had been catalogued, and it all quickly became a blur: numbers, names and descriptions rolling down one page and on to the next. Hairs. Mud. Dust. Powder. Skin. The eleventh and twelfth pages listed evidence recovered from Gobulev’s men – dead and alive – at the scene. More fibres. Fingerprints. Illegal firearms, the serial numbers removed. Below that, there were two entries for the two 9mm bullets that had killed Frank White. Both were hollow point, which meant they’d expanded in his chest and head as soon as they’d made contact. He would have died quickly.
I moved on through the rest of the file – interviews, photographs of the scene, what they knew about the surgeon – and when I got to the end dropped it on to my lap and looked out at the cemetery again. It was still quiet. No people. No cars. Only the gentle wheeze of the wipers.
Picking up my phone, I dialled the Carvers. James answered, but Caroline was there as well. I asked him to put me on speakerphone, so I could talk to them both.
‘Very quick question,’ I said. ‘Do either of you recognize the name Frank White – maybe someone Megan knew, or perhaps the police mentioned the name in passing?’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell for me,’ Carver replied.
I could feel the tension travel down the line. He was answering for himself, not the two of them now.
‘Same here,’ Caroline said quietly.
People connected. Events connected. Nothi
ng is coincidence. I said goodbye, then dialled Jill’s mobile. She was out somewhere. In the background I could hear people talking.
‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’
‘No, not at all,’ she said. ‘I’m doing some shopping.’
‘Can I ask you a couple of questions?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you ever remember Frank mentioning the name Megan Carver?’
A pause. ‘Wasn’t she that girl who went missing?’
‘Right.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘He never mentioned being involved in the search for her?’
‘No. Why do you ask?’
I paused. You have to ask her – and there’s no easy way to phrase it. ‘Mind if I ask why you decided to come to the support group this week?’
‘What do you mean?’
I mean I’m already working the Megan Carver case, and then you turn up and I end up looking into your husband’s death as well. And now I find out there might be some kind of connection. ‘I just wondered about the timing, that was all.’
She hesitated. I rode out the silence. There didn’t seem to be a lot of mystery to Jill. The grief she felt for her husband seemed real; the shyness seemed genuine. I couldn’t see anything behind her reasons for coming to the group other than to get over the death of someone she’d loved. But, even so, the timing was too perfect. She’d all but asked me to look into Frank’s death forty-eight hours after the Carvers had first brought me Megan. London was a city of seven million people, and yet somehow I’d ended up with both cases within two days of each other.
‘David, I don’t know …’ She paused. ‘I don’t know what you’re asking me.’
‘Frank’s name came up in relation to Megan, and I’m trying to work out why. Because Megan is the case I’m working at the moment. The one I told you about. I’m not accusing you of anything, I’m just trying to find the connection.’
‘I swear to you, I didn’t know they were connected.’
All I had to go on was her voice. The tiny movements in it; the rise and fall of the words. She was either telling the truth or she was a flawless liar.
‘I was struggling to cope,’ she said. ‘That’s why I came to the support group. It’s been nearly a year, and it’s just not getting any easier. I thought the group might help.’
‘Did you know I attended the group?’
‘No.’
‘Had you heard of me before?’
‘Absolutely not.’
I paused for a moment. ‘Okay.’
‘That’s the truth, I swear.’
‘I believe you,’ I said, but wasn’t sure if I was committed to what I was saying. Even if she was telling the truth, something was out of kilter somewhere. ‘I just needed to be sure.’
‘I understand.’
Now she sounded like she was lying. I’d offended her by suggesting she’d arrived at the group with an ulterior motive. Some hidden agenda.
We said goodbye, her voice quiet and distant, and then I turned to the file again, flipping back to the start. I worked it hard: every line, every entry, every detail. But, after twelve pages, the second read-through was the same as the first. No connections. Not to people, not to events and, most importantly, not to the girl I was trying to find.
Then, on page thirteen, I found something.
Midway down, one of the techs had recovered a series of grey hairs. DNA tests revealed that they didn’t belong to anyone present at the scene – because they weren’t even human. They were from a dog.
A greyhound.
No one recalled seeing a dog at the scene, and the warehouse was kept locked up so wouldn’t have been home to any strays – which meant someone brought the hairs with them. Police would have assumed they’d come from a living room somewhere, or a kitchen. But I knew instantly they didn’t come from a house.
They came from the Dead Tracks.
35
As I moved into my road, I could immediately tell something was up. People were standing at the top of the street in the pouring rain looking down towards my house. Blue light painted the buildings and flashed in the windows. Crime-scene tape fluttered in the breeze. An officer was stationed just behind the tape. He watched me approach, eyes narrowed, trying to get a fix on who I was, and what I might want. As I continued my approach in the car, he looked like he was about to tell me to turn around. Then he got a glimpse of my face and recognition sparked in his eyes. He looked behind him. There was a crime-scene van and three cars parked outside. Two were marked. One, a Volvo, wasn’t, but had a lightbar flaring on the front dash. As I stopped the car short of the tape, the officer shouted something and two men emerged from my driveway.
Phillips and Davidson.
I got out of the car. ‘What the hell is this?’
Neither of them said anything. Phillips led the way, a long black coat trailing behind him like a cape. Davidson followed, a cup of takeaway coffee in his hands, the merest hint of a smile on his face.
‘David,’ Phillips said.
We were either side of the crime-scene tape. Phillips looked back at the house. A crime-scene tech was coming down the driveway now, carrying a shoebox. It was one of the ones I’d had stacked in the spare-room wardrobes; full of stuff belonging to Derryn that I hadn’t yet sorted through. It was inside an evidence bag.
‘Where’s she going with that?’
Phillips didn’t reply. Davidson shrugged.
I glared at Phillips. ‘Everything in there belongs to my wife.’
‘Calm down, David,’ he replied.
‘Calm down?’
‘Calm down.’
‘I want that box back now.’
‘Listen to me,’ Phillips said, and his eyes flicked to the crowd at the end of the road. Automatically, I turned and looked towards Liz’s house. It was dark. No one home. I didn’t want her to see this. ‘Just calm down,’ he said again, ‘before you make this worse.’
‘What are you doing in my house?’ I said, ignoring him. ‘Have you even got a warrant?’
Phillips felt around in the pocket of his coat and brought out a piece of paper, sealed inside a waterproof sleeve. He held it up.
‘Did you lie on oath to get this?’
He didn’t reply, just handed it to me.
I looked at it. In the lack of light it was difficult to see the specifics, but I spotted my name at the top and a signature at the bottom.
‘Who the fuck signed off on that?’
‘I need you to come with me,’ Phillips replied.
‘Why would I do that?’ There was definitely a smile on Davidson’s face now. I looked at him. ‘You got something to say to me, fat man?’
He shrugged, still smiling.
Phillips audibly sighed. ‘Okay, David, we’re going to have to make this official.’
Davidson now had a pad in his hands and – despite the rain – was busy writing down what I’d just said. Even as the rage boiled in me, I knew I had to cool off to avoid saying something I’d regret. But when I looked again at the tech loading the shoebox into the back of the van, anger fired in me for a second time. I ducked under the tape. The uniformed officer made a move towards me. Phillips noticed and held up a hand.
‘David,’ he said.
‘You better have a damn good reason for being here.’
Phillips nodded. ‘David Raker, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the abduction of Megan Carver. You do not have to say anything –’
‘What? ’
‘– but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, anything which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be used in evidence. Do you understand what I’ve just said to you?’
‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
‘Do you understand, David?’
I glanced at the two of them. Davidson was still writing. Phillips looked between me and the PC standing to my side.
‘David?’
I stared a
t him.
‘David, do you understand – yes or no?’
Behind him, Davidson continued writing.
‘Yes or no?’
I looked at him. ‘Yes.’
He nodded at the PC again. I heard the metallic rasp of a pair of handcuffs and then felt the officer come up behind me. He guided my arms around to my back and sat them at the base of my spine. Cold, wet metal fed around my wrists and locked into place. In front of me, Davidson made a point of forcibly adding a full stop on to the end of whatever he was writing.
‘This is crazy,’ I said.
Phillips placed a hand on my arm. ‘Time to go.’
This is the Beginning
She had a mattress and two blankets for when she slept. An hour after his second visit of the day, when he would throw down the liquid for her face and the cotton wool to apply it with, the lights would go out, plunging the room into total darkness. The lights would come on again the next day, for the first visit, when he came with her food. With the lights out, all she had was silence.
Some nights, early on, she would yell at the top of her voice, trying to get someone to hear her. When a week passed, she started trying to reason with him when he came in. At ten days, she told him the mattress was uncomfortable. Finally, at two weeks, she changed tactics when he came in with her food.
‘I’m going to kill you, you bastard!’
She only tried once.
After she screamed at him, he paused. Straightened. Looked down at her. A smile broke out on his face; a thin line, like a slash from a knife. As it formed, his mouth peeling open, she realized it wasn’t a smile at all. It was a warning. He was telling her that, even if she never slept again, she wouldn’t see him approach. He’d do what he wanted to her, come for her when he needed her.
And all she would see was a flicker in the darkness.
Sona woke. It was pitch black; the middle of the night. She rolled over on the mattress, springs popping beneath her, and pulled the blanket up to her neck. As she did, she heard something beyond the silence for the first time since she’d been taken: the gentle patter of rain. It was coming down somewhere distantly, softly, consistently. When she shut her eyes and tried to concentrate on the noise, it sounded like it was hitting a metal grate.