Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

Sunday 3 January, watching a DVD. In the middle of it, Leanne told him she needed to pop out. She left at three- thirty, and never came home again. At eight, her brother called Gemma, who was at a friend's house having dinner, and told her what had happened. Gemma phoned Healy, who was at work. Seven hours later, Healy called in her disappearance, and she was registered as a missing person.

Right at the back of the file was a black-and-white MISSING poster, the same photo of Leanne in the corner . Leanne Healy. Age at disappearance: 20. Leanne has been missing from St Albans, Hertfordshire, since $ January. Her whereabouts remain unknown. There is growing concern for her welfare. Leanne is 5ft 6in tall, has shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes and is of medium build . After that it listed a confidential helpline number and, right at the bottom of the page, a list of places she most often went before her disappearance .

The list of places were mostly pubs and clubs, as well as the address of the college she'd gone to, and the name of a coffee shop just around the corner from her parents' house, where she'd spent most Saturday mornings studying in the run-up to her exams. But then, in among them, I spotted a name and address I recognized: Barton Hill Youth Project, 42 Chestnut Road, Islington, London.

The same youth club Megan had gone to.

And the place she'd met the man who'd got her pregnant.

The Hole

Sona woke. The first thing she could see was a line of light above her, about an inch wide and maybe six feet in length. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized she was lying on a mattress in some kind of hole. It had a dirt floor and brick walls, water trails running down them. Above her, out of reach, was a trapdoor. The thin line of light was where it didn't fit properly against the mouth of the hole.

The hole must have been eight feet deep. It was cut out of the floor, and through the sliver of light above she could see snatches of a steel cabinet, a sink and a clear bottle of something sitting on a counter.

It looked like some kind of utility room.

'Help me!'

No sound came back. No response. No movement. She got to her feet, using the wall for support, and then stopped for a moment: her head still throbbed, and she could feel bruising around her jaw. She closed her eyes, trying to compose herself, then started circling the hole, angling her head in order to get a better look at what was beyond the trapdoor. All she could see were parts of the same unit: more of the steel sink, more of the same cabinet. Nothing else. No shadows shifting. No sign of life.

'Mark!'

Silence.

'Mark, please !'

More silence.

This time she screamed until her voice gave way, until her heart was racing in her chest — beating a rhythm against her ribcage — and tears were blurring her vision. After she wiped them away, she closed her eyes and saw him there in the darkness: lying next to her in her bed and then leading her into the woods.

Bzzzzzz .

Her eyes snapped open.

A noise from above. She reached up, her fingers clawing at the walls, nails dragging through the water trails. 'Help me! I've been kidnapped! Help me!'

Then everything - her voice, the water against her fingers, the gentle buzz from somewhere up above — was drowned out by the sound of feedback. It burst from the walls of the room above the hole, turned up so loud it was distorting whatever speaker it was being piped from. She covered her ears. Even eight feet under the ground, it was like having her face glued to an amp the size of a house.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.

And the trapdoor shifted away from the hole.

Her heart shifted, the noise still ringing in her ears, and a flutter of fear took flight through her chest. When she swallowed it felt like shards of glass were passing into her stomach.

'Hello?'

The trapdoor came away completely and the room appeared. She could see the rest of the steel cabinet extending across the length of an entire wall. A bare wall next to that, a huge crack running down it. Another sink.

A glass-fronted bathroom cabinet, full of pill bottles. A red door, the paint blistered, with a glass panel in it. It was open, but there was only blackness beyond. From the top of the trapdoor cover, a rope snaked off, into the dark of the doorway.

'Hello?' Sona said again.

Out of the darkness of the door came a small, transparent plastic tube. It hit the floor of the room above her, rolled across it and tumbled into the hole. She caught it. The tube was about six inches long and packed with cotton wool. She looked up.

'Mark?'

Something else emerged from the black of the doorway. It rolled across the floor, over the lip of the hole and fell towards her. It made a dull whup sound as it landed.

A plastic bottle.

She picked it up. Inside was a pale blue liquid, the consistency of water. There were no other labels on the bottle, just a handwritten message: Apply ALL of it to your face, then throw it back up.

'Mark,' she said, looking up again. 'Mark, this is ridiculous, baby. Why are you doing this?' She wiped one of her eyes. 'Why are you doing this?'

Silence.

'Mark, tell me what you want.' She paused. 'This isn't you, baby.' Her voice was starting to break up. ' Mark. ' She waited for any sign of movement in the darkness. 'Mark,' she said, tears running down her face now. 'Mark, you bastard! Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing thi—'

'Put it on your face.'

She stopped, heart lurching. A whimper passed her lips. Fear moved down her back like a finger tracing the ridge of her spine. She swallowed again.

'Mark?'

Something shifted in the blackness of the doorway. She could see a small patch of white now, about the size of a coin.

A face .

Then he stepped out of the darkness.

He moved slowly, looking down at her, his feet stopping right on the lip of the hole. It wasn't Mark. It was another man: black hair in a side parting, pale skin, pinprick black eyes. In his left hand he held something big.

'Where's Mark?'

'Put it on your face.'

She took another step back and bumped against one of the walls.

'Mark!'

'Put it on your face.'

'Mark!'

'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.'

Chapter Twenty-four

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.