Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

'I haven't forgotten about Frank,' I said.

'Oh, thank you so much.'

I nodded to them both, said goodbye again and got into the BMW. As I headed back to the restaurant to pick up Liz, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw them side by side, laughing at something, fading into the night.

Liz offered to make me a cup of Kona coffee from the packet I'd bought her so, after parking the car, I wandered around to hers. One of the sofas had folders and loose legal papers scattered across it. I sat down on the second one and could see books with names like The Dictionary of Law and Solicitor Advocate stacked up by the fireplace. She came back in, armed with two coffees, sat down next to me and glanced at the books.

'Fascinating, huh?'

I took one of the mugs. 'I think I'm too terrified to find out.'

'Fortunately I've got a photographic memory.' She winked. 'Actually, that's not true. But I do seem to be good at remembering lots and lots of really boring, really technical things.'

'So if I'm a vampire, Does that make you… a robot?'

She laughed — and then a momentary silence settled between us. 'Thanks for the meal tonight,' she said.

'Thank your friend.'

'No, I mean…' She paused, took a sip from her mug.

'I mean, thanks for asking me out. I know you didn't have to.'

'I didn't have to - but I wanted to.'

She nodded. 'I know how hard this must be.'

I looked at her. Her eyes were dark. She moved a hand to her face and tucked some hair behind one of her ears, and I felt a sudden, unexpected pull towards her.

'Are you okay?' she asked.

I put down my coffee. Liz followed my hand, then looked back up at me. I placed my fingers on hers and eased her mug from her grasp, putting it down next to mine.

Then, slowly, I leaned in and kissed her.

At first she backed away a little, her mouth still on mine, as if she didn't want me to feel like I had to. Then, as I moved a hand to the back of her head and pressed her in harder against me, she responded. We dropped back on to the sofa, me on top of her, feeling her contours and her shape beneath me. I breathed in her scent as we kissed, one of her legs moving between mine. She moaned a little, and a feeling raced through me, like every nerve ending in my body was firing up. When I looked at her, she was staring up at me, her eyes sparking.

And that was when I broke off.

Slowly, the look dissolved in her face.

'I'm so sorry, Liz.'

She reached for one of my arms and squeezed it. 'You don't have to be sorry,' she said gently, but I could see the disappointment in her eyes. Derryn flashed in my head, a series of images that were there and then gone again: the night I first met her, the day we married, the two of us on a beach in Florida, and then at the end of her life - wrapped in sweat-stained sheets - as she lay dying in our bed. I shifted closer to Liz and apologized again, but I'd razed the moment, and what remained between us was exactly what had always been there.

My doubts. My fears. My guilt.

Chapter Twenty-three

When I woke at nine the next morning, the house was cold. I started the fire in the living room and put on some coffee. While I was waiting for it to brew, I padded back through to the bedroom to find my phone. It said I'd missed two calls. The first had been from Jill, as expected, at eight the previous evening. I'd also got a text from her: Hi David. We're meeting in the Lamb in Acton, at 8.30. See you there? Jill. The second missed call was from Ewan Tasker at 7.5 5 a.m.

Tasker was the contact I'd mentioned in passing to Jill. He was working for the Metropolitan Police now, in an advisory role, but previous to that he'd been part of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, before it was assimilated into SOCA. Like the other sources from my paper days, our relationship was built on being mutually beneficial, but over ten years we'd gradually become good friends. The last time I saw him was at his sixtieth birthday almost a year previously. He'd held it in a golf club in Surrey. We sat by the windows, looking out at the course, both of us nursing whiskies. He was mourning the onset of his sixties. I was mourning the death of my wife.

I tried returning the call, but no one answered, and I allowed my thoughts to quickly turn back to Megan, the man in the nightclub — and Milton Sykes.

In the spare bedroom I booted up the computer, logged on to the internet and printed out everything I could find on Sykes. I wanted as much information as I could get on his life, his upbringing, his crimes and his arrest. I wasn't sure how it fitted into what I had, but the obvious physical similarities between Sykes and the man in Tiko's couldn't be ignored — and neither could the idea of a copycat. I noted down the most important information and moved carefully through the rest, making sure nothing was missed. When I was done on the first read-through, I flipped back to the start and reread it. Then a third time. Two hours later, I had sixteen pages of notes.

I turned back to the computer and logged into my Yahoo. There was an email waiting. It was sent from Terry Dooley's home address: no subject line, no message, but a PDF attachment. I dragged it to the desktop and opened it up. It was the missing-person's file Colm Healy had set up for his daughter, and a few miscellaneous pages tagged on to the end covering the subsequent search for her.

I started going through it.

Leanne Healy disappeared three months before Megan, on 3 January. She was older, at twenty, and not nearly as capable at school. She'd left at sixteen with middling results, and gone to college to study Beauty and Holistic Therapies, before dropping out after six months. From there she got a job in a local supermarket, which she stuck for another year and a half, then went back to college, this time to do a National Diploma in Business. She completed the course two years later with decent, if unspectacular, grades, and had spent the time between the end of her course and the date she disappeared struggling to find work. On 2 January she'd finally got something: as a full-time office junior at a recruitment agency. Twenty- four hours later, she was gone.

Physically she wasn't too dissimilar to Megan. Neither of them were overweight, but they definitely weren't skinny girls. They had a nice shape to them, but their height — five-five to five-six - would have prevented them from turning heads in the way they might have done at a few inches taller. Megan was definitely the better-looking of the two. She had a natural warmth, obvious in her pictures, which added to her attractiveness. Leanne looked harder work, and less inclined to make the effort, which came across in the only photograph in the file; she was standing outside a house, straggly blonde hair covering part of her face. In the light, and because of the fuzzy quality of the picture, her smile looked more like a scowl.

Surprisingly, Healy's version of the events leading up to Leanne's disappearance didn't differ all that much from his wife Gemma's. Neither account mentioned him hitting her, although Gemma said he'd become 'angry and aggressive' when he found out she'd been having an affair. Healy himself tried to claim the moral high ground early on in his own statement, talking about the sanctity of marriage, before admitting he 'may have scared' his wife when she told him the truth about her affair. He described 'getting a little closer to her' than he should have done, and 'swearing at her'. At one point, midway through the transcript, Gemma told her interviewer, 'If Colm dedicated as much time to his family as his work, Leanne probably wouldn't have left that night.'

The last person to see Leanne alive was one of her brothers. They'd been home together on the afternoon of