by Tom Weaver
Think.
I looked at the random numbers at the bottom of the webpage: 21112303666859910012512612713213313414214414803206. It wasn't an error message — or, at least if it was, it was unlike any error message I'd ever seen. Grabbing a pen, I rewrote all fifty numbers on to my pad, and then circled an area in the middle that immediately stood out: 125126127 and 132133134. One hundred and twenty- five through to one hundred and twenty-seven, and one hundred and thirty-two through to one hundred and thirty-four.
They were both sequential.
I went back to the start and worked through from the beginning, applying the same logic throughout. If I assumed the list was one long, gradually increasing series of numbers, fifty suddenly became eighteen: 2 11 12 3036 66 85 99 100 125 126 127 132 133 134 142 144 148. Except I'd cheated, because right at the end was 03206, and I didn't know how they fitted in so had left them out. Even taking each number on its own, or every two, there was no obvious pattern.
Tabbing back to Megan's inbox, I read over the newsletter again.
There were no numbers in the message. Nothing to tie the sequence to the site. Not one scrap of evidence to suggest the numbers even meant anything. So why are they there? I looked around the office, trying to pull inspiration out from somewhere. My eyes passed pictures on the walls, photographs, the front pages I'd written and the stories I'd broken. What aren't you seeing? Without a user- name or password, I'd have to enlist the help of Spike to get past the security for me. And that meant time. It meant hours sitting on my hands. It meant wasted days.
I looked down at the numbers written on the pad again, then back to the email in Megan's inbox, then back to the numbers. What the hell aren't you…
Then I saw it.
Copying and pasting the contents of the email into a Word document, I started going through the message again. The first number in the sequence was two. I capitalized and emboldened the second word in the email. The second number was eleven. I capitalized and emboldened the eleventh word. Then I did the same with the twelfth, thirtieth, thirty-sixth, sixty-sixth and the rest.
Two minutes later, everything had changed.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-six
I leaned in towards the monitor and took in each line of the email, every bold word suddenly coming alive. Three minutes before it had just been a charity newsletter. Now it was the reason Megan had disappeared.
Dear MEGAN,
Thank you for your donation of £10. We WANT TO protect the city's parkland and make a genuine difference - and that means we don't just want to IMAGINE a world where animals are RUNNING free in their natural habitat, we want to see it in action!
At the time of writing, we are engaged in ten different campaigns, and every pound you send OFF to us helps maintain parks and parklands in our capital, and in turn brings flora, animals and people TOGETHER.
If you want to be on the frontline, join our march to Parliament NEXT MONDAY where we will be trying to persuade government ministers to make the protection of local wildlife more of a priority in the coming year. SEE THE WEBSITE for more details or ENTER YOUR EMAIL to sign up to our weekly newsletter AND get THE most up-to-DATE info delivered straight to your inbox!
Yours sincerely,
G. A. James
A feeling of dread flared in my chest. Megan, want to imagine running off together next Monday? See the website. Enter your email and the date.
I tabbed back to the LCT website, clicked on DONATE, and put Megan's full email address in as the username. Enter your email and the date. What date? Today's date? The date the email was sent? The date she disappeared? I tried them all and every time the pop-up box juddered and closed. None of them was right.
You're stumbling around in the dark here.
The date. The date. The date. I let my mind work back over the last week, trying to recall anything I'd found that might give me a clue as to what that meant: Megan, her parents, her school, her friends, the youth club, Charlie Bryant, the man at Tiko's, his similarity to Sykes… and then I stopped.
Sykes.
The last five digits of the numbered sequence. 03206. I hadn't been able to see where they fitted in before. But now I did.
03 2 06. 3 February 1906.
I flipped back a couple of pages on my pad, to where I'd made the notes about Sykes. 03 02 06. 3 February 1906.
The day he was hanged.
I entered Megan's email as the username, and 03206 as the password. And I hit Return. The security box disappeared and the website began to load a new page. It took a couple of seconds. When it was done, a small map appeared in the centre, about five square inches in size. It had been drawn by hand with black marker pen and scanned, and looked like an approximation of a car park, vehicles — as if viewed from above — on one side, a long thin line opposite them. On the other side of the line was an X and a typewritten message: Meet here at 2.30 p.m. for a romantic woodland picnic!
It was the Sixth Form car park at Newcross Secondary.
He knew what he was doing. He knew there was no CCTV coverage in that part of the school and he knew what time her lesson finished. He picked her up and he took her away, and no one even noticed.
The ultimate disappearing act.
Except he'd left a trail. Because while the woodland he described could have been anywhere as far as the police were concerned, I'd spotted him in Tiko's, I'd found out who he looked like, and I knew the significance of the website password.
I knew his next move that day.
He'd taken her to Hark's Hill Woods.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-seven
There was a coffee shop that doubled up as a deli a couple of doors along from the office. I headed downstairs and ordered a steak sandwich. While I was waiting, my phone started buzzing. It was Ewan Tasker calling about Jill's husband. I was tempted not to answer, not because I didn't want to speak to him, but because I didn't want another case to add to my workload minutes after a major break in the Carver one. But if I didn't answer, Tasker would just assume I wasn't around - and then keep on calling.
I hit Accept. 'Help the Aged.'
A laugh crackled down the line. 'Raker.'
'How you doing, Task?'
'Good. How are you?'
'Can't complain. I tried you earlier this morning, but I imagine you were winding your way towards the nineteenth hole. You're not hammered already, are you?'
He laughed again. 'Not yet.'
Rain pounded against the window of the coffee shop, making a noise like an army marching. I bent slightly and covered my other ear.
'So what have you got for me, old man?'
'You didn't hear any of this from me.'
'Goes without saying.'
The sound of paper being shuffled around.
'Okay. Frank Robert White. Forty-one years of age.
Married to Jill, no kids. Detective inspector for three years before he got popped, nineteen months of which he spent at the Met. On the evening of 25 October of last year, he was shot once in the chest, high up near the left shoulder, and once in the head, just above the bridge of the nose. He was part of a task force investigating Akim Gobulev. You've heard of him, right?'
'Yeah. The Ghost.'
'Right. Gobulev runs Russian organized crime in London, except no one's seen him since he landed at Heathrow ten years back.' More paper being flicked through. You know what his first name means back in Mother Russia?'
'No.'
'"God Will Judge". Fucking right about that. He was a pain in my balls at NCIS, but it looks like SOCA managed to get close to him through an informant.'
'So SOCA were working with White's Met team?'
'Right. White was SCD.'
The Specialist Crime Directorate. They were a Metropolitan Police department working across the city on serious and high-profile cases. Homicides, gangs, child abuse, e-crime, money-laundering - it all came under the SCD umbrella. It was split into eight Operational Command Units, and SCD
7, which covered organized crime, would have been where Frank White was based.
'White had put a task force together to support SOCA and work alongside them, and they were about to put the cuffs on Gobulev's… What the hell have I written here?'
'Plastic surgeon?'
'Yeah, surgeon.' He sounded surprised. 'You already know all this?'
'Not much, but some.' I kept it at that. I didn't want an overview from Task; I wanted everything he had. "What do we know about this surgeon?'
'Intelligence suggests he's kind of like a gun for hire — except he comes armed with a scalpel and a syringe full of Botox.'
'So he isn't Russian?'
'No. Informants put him as English. He did the works on God Will Judge's face - as in, completely changed the way he looked — which is probably why we never found the arsehole in ten years at NCIS.'
'And presumably why Gobulev took a shine to the surgeon.'
'Yeah. He uses his medical expertise on a freelance basis — nose job here, brow lift there - but mostly he's just sewing up knife wounds and scooping out bullets for low- level shitheads. It's a way for the Russians to keep their employees out of A&E. Once you hit the hospitals, people start asking questions.'
'So what happened the night Frank died?'
'SOCA got a tip-off that the surgeon would be at that warehouse down in Bow, helping Gobulev take delivery of some guns.'
'But Gobulev wasn't there.'
Tasker snorted. 'Gobulev doesn’t go to his own birthday party.'
'So why send the surgeon?'
'No one was really sure. But the Russian informant reckons there was something else with the guns as part of the delivery.'
'What?'
'Currently unclear. White's team screwed up and got spotted early doors and then it turned into the OK Corral. White and the other officer who died got separated from the rest of the task force, and the next time anyone saw them they were bleeding out on the floor of the warehouse and the surgeon was haring away from the scene of the crime in a stolen car.'
'What about the rest of Gobulev's men?'
'Three dead at the scene. One was DOA; one decided not to speak in the interview, or during his subsequent trial.'
'At all?'
'Not about his involvement in anything, no. The Ghost's a scary man. Maybe Mr Dumb thought a life in clink was preferable to whatever Gobulev would do to him if he talked.'
'What about forensics?'
'Not much. The warehouse wasn't exactly a sterile environment. They recovered a ton of fibres, a shitload of hairs, some trace stuff. No matches.'
'Fingerprints?'
'Lots of prints, but mostly from the people working in the warehouse, or Gobulev's men. Nothing for the surgeon. Looks like the murder team were pretty exhaustive too. Every print the SOCO came back with, they put through IDENTi.'
The scene of crime officer was the conductor. He documented everything that happened on site, from the moment the first officer arrived to the moment the lights were turned out. At the end, he handed in his report, including fingerprints lifts. After that, all the prints were put through the national automated fingerprint system — which meant the surgeon's prints failed to match up with any of the six million already logged.
'So he hasn't got any priors,' I said.
'No. Although that's working on the assumption he even left his prints at the scene in the first place. They had some prints they couldn't attribute to anyone - but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were his.'
'Everyone leaves prints.'
'Not if you're wearing surgical gloves. Forensics found traces of cornflour at the scene. Looks like it's the same story with ballistics as well. White was shot with a hollow point 9mm, and the markings on the shell…' Tasker paused. I could hear him looking through his notes. 'The markings put the weapon as a GSh-18. Also Russian. Imported illegally, so pretty much impossible to trace.'
'Okay. So, physical description of the surgeon?'
'Medium height, medium build.'
'Anything else?'
'No. He's a mystery man.'
'Anyone see his face?'
'You're gonna like this. The informant said the surgeon used to turn up to meetings wearing a white plastic mask. No markings on it. Just holes at the eyes, nose and mouth.'
'Are you serious?'
'The man without a face.'
I paused and looked around me. Rain continued hammering against the window. Across the road, people ran past, caught in the storm, their coats pulled up over their heads.
'What did Gobulev's people call him?'
'Dr Glass.'
'Anyone know if that was his real name?'
'Doubtful given that he turned up to meets in a mask.'
'You put the alias through HOLMES or PNC?'
The Home Office Large Major Enquiry System was a database used by UK police forces to cross-check major crimes. The Police National Computer held details on every vehicle registered in the UK, stolen goods, and anyone reported missing or with a criminal record.
'Nothing,' Tasker said.
'Nothing flagged up?'
'Nothing for that alias.'
I thought of Jill. I knew the alias of the man who'd killed Frank now, but that wasn't much more than she had already.
'Sorry, Raker—I know it's a whole lot of nothing.'
'No, Task, that's great. I appreciate your help.'
'You need anything else?'
'Any chance you could send me a copy of the file? I made a promise to someone that I'd look into this and I just want to make sure I've ticked all the boxes.'
'I've got a golf competition in Surrey tomorrow morning. We tee off at 6 a.m. I'll put the printouts through your letterbox on the way through.'
'All right, old man. I appreciate it.'
I killed the call and pocketed the phone. I felt sorry for Jill, but the dead end suited me fine. Right now, Megan was my priority.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-eight
Back at the office, I slid in at my desk, started on my steak sandwich and went to Google Maps. Within seconds, I had a top-down satellite view of Hark's Hill Woods. It was a weird slab of land. A square mile of overgrown woodland right in the middle of an incredibly dense swathe of city. North of the woods was a road that looked new, leading to some kind of industrial estate on the north-western corner. A quarter of a mile south was tightly packed housing, unfurling across London all the way down to the curve of the Thames. And immediately surrounding the woods, in the spaces around its edges, were the skeletons of old factories — dyeworks, foundries, munitions plants — some standing but damaged, most collapsed or in a serious state of disrepair. It was obvious that the whole area, save for the redevelopment to the north and the homes to the south, had been completely forgotten about since the end of the Second World War; and the only constant was that the woods had grown bigger and the factories had crumbled further.
After finishing the sandwich, I began filling in some of the background on the area. Putting Hark's Hill Woods into Google got me 98,400 hits, most detailing the Milton Sykes case. I moved through the results. On the third page, a hit halfway down caught my eye. An encyclopedia of serial killers.
I clicked on it.
Heading to S, and then down to Sykes, I found a photograph of him, slightly blurred, and a badly spelt description of what I'd already found: his upbringing, his victims and his connection to the woods. Right at the bottom was what had caught my attention in the two-line description on Google: Sykes was reported to have sometimes used the alias Grant A. James. Grant A. James. The letter sent to Megan from the London Conservation Trust had been from G. A. James. And then I remembered the name in her Book of Life too. The name no one had been able to shed any light on: A. J. Grant.
I leaned back in my chair.
Staring out at me from the computer monitor was a blurry photograph of Milton Sykes and, sitting in the space in between, a succession of unanswered questions. I drummed my f
ingers on the desk, trying to fit all the pieces together. The man at Tiko's. The Grant alias. The email.