The Dead Tracks (21 page)

    
'Put
in on your fucking face'

    Another
surge of fear exploded beneath her ribs, and she shrank into the corner of the
hole.
His voice. What's wrong with his voice?
It was tinny and robotic,
and there was a constant wall of static behind it. The confusion pushed her
over the edge: tears started running down her cheeks, over her lips, tracing
the angle of her neck.

    
Mark
,
she went to say again — but this time she stopped herself.

    Because,
above her, the man raised what was in his hand - and dropped it into the hole.
It came at her fast, landing hard on the ground about three inches to her
right. She shuffled away from it, trying to figure out what it was.

    And
then she could see.

    The
torso from a mannequin.

    Cream
and rigid. Punctured and broken. The middle of the chest had a hole in it,
gauze spilling out from the hollow inside.

    'You
see that?' he said from the top of the hole, fingers twitching, a smile like a
lesion worming its way across his face. 'Do you see that dummy?'

    He
paused. The word
dummy
glitched a little, and then there was a fuzzy
noise, like interference. Sona whimpered, sinking all the way down into the
corner of the hole.

    'I'm
going to sew your fucking head to it.'

    I got
the number for the youth club, but, after the tenth unanswered ring, killed the
call. I then dialled the Carvers' number and asked if I could stop by. James
told me they'd be in until midday, but Saturday afternoons were when they took
his mother out for a drive. She spent the rest of her week in a nursing home in
Brent Cross.

    The
journey over took forty minutes. I went via Barton Hill, to get a sense of
where it was. It was closed. A brass sign on the front said it was open Monday
to Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The building was about a quarter of a mile from the
Carvers' place - close to King's Cross station, in a thin triangle of land
between two main roads — and had all the aesthetic beauty of a shipping
container: no windows; corrugated steel panels to about the eight-foot mark,
where uniform red brickwork took over; and a big rusting door with an oversized
padlock. Maybe all the money had been spent on the inside.

    I got
back on to Pentonville Road and headed for the Carvers'. At the house the gate
was already open. I walked up the drive and saw James Carver standing in the
entrance, filling it with his huge frame, his eyes watching the skies as dark
clouds finally began to rupture and rain started to fall. We shook hands and
moved inside.

    Caroline
was in the kitchen. She looked up and said hello to me. Immediately I could
feel an atmosphere between the two of them. Carver obviously still felt
betrayed by her. I imagined, in a strange way, he also felt like he didn't know
his daughter as well as his wife had; a feeling magnified further now she'd
disappeared.

    We
sat in the living room while Caroline put some coffee on. Behind us, in the
corner of the room, Leigh was playing with a wooden train set.

    'How
are things going?' Carver asked.

    'They're
progressing. I've got a couple of good leads. One is the reason I'm here
today.'

    He
held up his hands. 'Whatever it takes.'

    Caroline
came through with a tray of coffees and some biscuits. She laid them down on
the glass table between us. I thanked her, and took one of the mugs.

    'Is
one of the leads Charlie Bryant?' Carver asked.

    Their
eyes were both fixed on me now, waiting for the answer. On the drive over, I'd
decided I wasn't going to bring up the events of the previous day — even though
they'd probably read about it in the morning papers. But now they were looking
at me and asking me what they
really
wanted to know: Is Megan dead as
well?

    'At
the moment there's nothing to connect this to Megan, other than the fact that
she knew him.'

    Deep
down, in their darkest moments, they'd probably glimpsed a similar end for
their daughter. Her in a field, or in a backstreet. Them standing in the
subdued light of a morgue while Megan's body, naked and broken, lay rigid in front
of them.

    'Does
the name Barton Hill mean anything to you?'

    Carver
frowned. Caroline started nodding.

    'Yes,'
she said. 'Megan used to go there until she disappeared. It's a youth club,
some kind of community project. They help teenagers with cerebral palsy.'

    'Ah,
the youth club,' Carver said, trying a little too hard. I'd been right: he
definitely felt like he was standing on the wrong side of the glass now;
staring in at a daughter, and her mother next to her, wondering what else lay
buried at their feet.

    'So
can you tell me anything else about it?'

    Caroline
shrugged. She was still prickly. Carver flicked a look at her. She picked up on
it and turned back to me. 'Only what Megan told me. They laid on activities for
kids with cerebral palsy, gave them a chance to do something normal, while
giving their parents a break.'

    'So
what made her decide to start going?'

    'There
was a work placement scheme going on at her school,' Caroline said, glancing at
her husband. He looked like he didn't know any of this either. 'She really
wanted to do something with disadvantaged kids, and kids with disabilities. So
she spoke to her teachers and they came back with a list of places where she
could go and get some experience for a fortnight. Barton Hill was where she
ended up.'

    'And
she kept going after the work placement ended?'

    Caroline
nodded. 'She liked it.'

    'Did
you ever meet the people who ran it?'

    'Only
in passing. Jim usually did his weekly accounts on a Wednesday night, so I
ended up being the one that ferried her back and forth. I met a few of the
people there, just from taking her and picking her up again.'

    'Anyone
you remember?'

    She
paused, thought about it. 'The guy who ran it was called Neil Fletcher. There were
two or three others, but I never really talked to them much.'

    'Did
Megan ever talk about meeting anyone there?'

    They
both looked at me, eyes brightening, brains ticking over. Suddenly, James
Carver was right back in a conversation he'd been slowly drifting out of.

    'Do
you think she went off with someone she met there?' he said.

    'No,
I don't think so,' I lied.

    I
could have told them the truth: that I had a reason to believe she did. That
the youth club, and someone who worked there, may have been linked to her
pregnancy and her disappearance. But there were things I needed to find out
first. There were questions that needed to be answered. And there was a man,
somewhere, who knew the truth about where Megan was - and whether we'd ever
find her alive.

    An
hour later, I was opening the door to the office and my phone was going. I
looked at the display. It was Spike.

    'David.
Sorry it's taken me a while.'

    'No
worries. What have you got for me?'

    I
heard him tapping. 'Okay, the PO box number you asked me to look at…' He
paused. More tapping. 'It's for a charity called… uh, the London Conservation
Trust.'

    Megan
had had an email from them. I sat down at my desk and booted up the computer.
I'd called them when Spike had first got Megan's telephone records over to me,
and all I'd got in return was a short answerphone message. No mention of the
charity. No thank you for calling. Just a bored-sounding man in an empty room.

    'Anything
else?'

    'The
street address is 150 Piccadilly.'

    'One-fifty?'

    'Yeah.
The building's called Minotaur House.'

    I
pulled a pad across the desk and started to write down the address. Then
stopped,
150 Piccadilly.

    That's
the Ritz,' I said quietly.

    'Huh?'

    '150
Piccadilly. That's the address for the Ritz.'

    'The
hotel?'

    'Yeah,
the hotel.'

    The
computer pinged as the desktop appeared. I fired up the internet browser and
entered the URL for the Ritz. At the bottom was their street address: 150
Piccadilly. I went to Google and searched for Minotaur House, got nothing, then
headed to the Charity Commission website. No mention of the London Conservation
Trust there either.

    The
address was false.

    And
the charity didn't exist.

    I thanked
Spike, hung up and went to Megan's Hotmail. The email from the London
Conservation Trust was right at the bottom. It had been sent on 27 March. Seven
days before Megan disappeared. The design of the newsletter was plain and
uninspiring: a green banner across the top with a clean but basic logo, all in
a pale green. The 'T' of the Trust was a tree. Beneath the logo was a short
message, thanking her for her donation of £10 and telling her the money would
be put to protecting parkland. There was no street address or phone number. No
links or attachments.

    I
read the message.

    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 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

    I put
the London Conservation Trust, LCT and the name G. A. James into Google. The
LCT got no hits, and the name got nothing in relation to the charity. The
incongruous nature of the email had stopped me briefly the first time I'd read it
earlier in the week, but only because it was totally out of sync with every
other message in Megan's inbox. In truth, it sounded enough like a charity
newsletter to pass under most people's radar; a little too jokey and vague, but
nothing that would immediately stand out. I scanned it again, reading it over
for a second time.
See the website for more details.

    Except
there was no website.

    
Or
was there?

    The
email address the message had been sent from was
[email protected]
.
I put www.lct.co.uk into another tab on the browser and hit Return. Within
seconds, a website was loading. It was a plain site. No real design. No flair.
It mirrored the newsletter in its pale green colouring, but the banner at the
top, which was presumably where the logo was supposed to be, had corrupted and
failed to load. Down the left was a menu with five options: HOME, ABOUT US, OUR
PROJECTS, CONTACT, DONATE. The rest of the page had nothing on it except under
construction! in big black letters and some random letters and numbers right at
the bottom. When I tried the options on the left, they all took me through to
404 Error pages, except for the last one: DONATE. Clicking on that brought up a
secure login box, asking for a username and password.
What charity asked you
to enter a username and password before donating? And where was the option to
sign up to the newsletter?
I doubted there was one. Everything about the
site was off — but it must have been created for a reason, to serve some
purpose.