Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

On the drive back home, I placed my phone in the hands-free and made a couple of calls. The first one was to Liz. It was Friday night, and we were supposed to be going to the new Italian restaurant her client owned in Acton. I told her we were still on, but I'd got caught up at work and would have to re-book the table for eight-thirty. She said that was fine. As I killed the call and thought about what lay ahead, something bloomed in my stomach. Excitement. Or doubt. Or both.

As the traffic ground to a halt, I reached inside my jacket and took out the photograph of the man from Tiko's, studying the features of his face: the lines, the shape, the prominent brow sitting like a shelf of flesh above a pair of oil-black eyes. It wasn't Sykes. Milton Sykes was long dead. But there must have been enough of a similarity for Healy to believe it was him. Once I was home I'd find out more about Sykes - his victims, his crimes, his history — but, in the meantime, I could start filling in the gaps. I reached across to the phone and scrolled through to T.

Terry Dooley.

Dooley was an old contact I'd used during my paper days. His career was twenty-four hours away from being flushed down the toilet after I'd found out him and three of his detectives had spent a couple of hours at an illegal brothel in south London. I stepped in and offered to save his career and his family life all at the same time in exchange for information when I needed it. He reluctantly agreed, realizing the trade-off was better for him. Dooley was all bluster and front, but basically repentant. The one thing he cared about more than his job was his kids, and the idea of seeing them once a week after his wife had dragged him to the divorce courts was more terrifying than any crime scene.

'What a great end to the day,' he said when I told him who it was.

'How you doing, Dools?'

'Yeah, fantastic now I've heard from you, Davey. What do you need this time? Your car cleaned?'

The last time I'd called him, I'd got him to sort out a problem I'd had with a stolen hire car. Dooley's days of dealing with petty crime were about fifteen years behind him. He'd been working murders ever since.

'Nothing like that, Dools - although my kitchen needs painting'

He blew air down the line. 'Funny.'

'This won't take long.' I glanced at the photograph of the man from the club. You familiar with anyone from the Megan Carver team?'

'The Carver team?' He paused. 'Not really. They mostly worked out of the stations in and around north London.'

'How come?'

The chief super wanted things to look like they were focused locally so her family and the public would think we were on the frontline, asking all the right people all the right questions. Made it look better in the papers if the teams stayed local.'

'It was all bullshit?'

He snorted. 'What do you think? I know a few of the faces up there, but not well. I've seen Hart around. He used to work Clubs and Vice with one of the boys on my team. They called him "Skel" - as in "Skeleton". You seen him?'

'Yeah. He's thin.'

'Thin? Dooley laughed. 'I don't trust anyone who looks like they just crawled out the fucking ground.'

'Anyone else?'

'I know Eddie Davidson. We came through the ranks together, but I haven't seen the Burger King for a few years. The others… only what I've heard. There's some Jock going off like a rocket up there.'

'Phillips?'

'Yeah, that's him.'

'Any idea why him and Hart are working out of the same office?'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, he's a DCI and so is Hart. There's two of them leading a tiny team of about eight detectives. I've never come across a set-up like that before — have you?'

'Can't say I have.'

'So what's your take?'

'My take? Sounds like a one-way ticket to a great big shitheap of politics and personality clashes. I mean, who's the SIO? Who sets out the Policy Log?'

The senior investigating officer ran the case and was also responsible for determining the parameters of the Policy Log, a set of rules unique to every case, which set out how the investigating team dealt with things like roles, responsibilities, HOLMES searches and the media. Dooley had a point: who made those choices when there were two officers of equal rank working in such close proximity? Something was definitely out of kilter. I just had to find out what.

'Can I go now?' Dooley asked.

'What about a guy called Healy?'

'Colm Healy?'

'Yeah — you know him?'

'Yeah, everyone knows Colm. He was a good copper back in the day. Worked murders with me for a while. Nose like a bloodhound.'

'He's not good any more?'

'He's had…' He stopped. 'He's had a few personal problems.'

'Like what?'

'His wife left him, his kids hated his guts. He had this unsolved which pretty much broke him for a year. He had to take a month off on stress leave, and when he came back he was about half the cop and twice the man. He looked like the Goodyear blimp last time I saw him.'

'Why'd his wife leave?'

'Cos he spent most of his life chained to a desk working murders. She ended up banging some other guy, and when Colm found out he flipped.'

'And did what?'

'Punched her lights out and put her into a neck brace for eight weeks. She lost the hearing in one of her ears for a while. The kids had already turned on him, so he didn't do himself any favours there. I think he had three - two boys, one girl. Girl ends up having a massive barney with him; tells him she can't even stand to be in the same room as him any more. Just ups and leaves a couple of days later.'

'Moves out?'

'Disappears.'

'As in, vanishes?'

'Into thin air.'

'Really?'

'Yeah, really.'

I stopped for a moment. Healy's daughter was gone, just like Megan. So that's why he was so interested. Maybe he thought there might be a connection between them. Or maybe he'd already found one.

'Was she ever registered as a missing person?'

'Why, you hoping to make some money?' Dooley laughed at his joke. Yeah, Healy and his missus got back together for one last gig and tried to find her. Healy drafted in a couple of guys from the Met to help him out for a few weeks, but the whole thing hit the skids. When nothing turned up, the hired help drifted away and the bosses put them back on other investigations.'

'Can you email me the missing-persons file?'

'Yeah, if I wanna get sacked.'

Bluster and front. This was how Dooley played things, just so he felt like he still had some control. 'Send it to my Yahoo.'

I got silence as a reply this time.

In front, brakes lights winked in the night, then disappeared, and I inched the car forward a few more feet.

'So is that it?' Dooley asked.

'One more thing.'

'It's Friday night.'

'You won't be late for the disco, Dools, I promise.'

He sighed, his breath crackling down the line.

'What can you tell me about Milton Sykes?'

'Sykes?

'Yeah.'

'I didn't realize you were digging up cold cases now, Davey. Things must be slow. Who wants to know about him?'

'I'm just interested.'

'Ever heard of the internet?'

'Yeah, I remember someone talking about it once.'

'Stick his name into Google. You'll get about a trillion hits.'

'Anything that didn't get released to the public?'

'I know I might look it,' Dooley said, 'but I ain't that old. How the fuck should I know? They were communicating with smoke signals when Sykes was running around.'

'Come on, Dools. I know how it works. Knowledge passed down through generations of police officers, like the family secret. You old-timers love to talk about what you would have done differently.'

He paused, then blew more air down the line. 'What do you wanna know?'