Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

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 info@lct.co.uk. 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.

As an experiment, I put in Megan's email address as a username and the password for her Hotmail account below that. The box juddered, flashed up Incorrect username and password, and closed. I clicked on DONATE again. This time, I tried Megan's email prefix, 'megancarveri 7', for the username and the same Hotmail password.

Wrong again.

Think.

The police would have worked Megan's phone records in the same way I had. They would have seen that the street address for the PO box was phoney and the building name false. They would have been led to the email, then to the website. Their technicians would have eventually bypassed the security on the website and found what was beyond. But they still hadn't found Megan. Maybe it meant there was nothing beyond the security box — or at least nothing that led to Megan's whereabouts. So why would someone go to the trouble of creating the website and the email if there was nothing worth finding?

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 TOprotect 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 OFFto 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 MONDAYwhere 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 EMAILto sign up to our weekly newsletter ANDget THEmost up-to- DATEinfo 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!