Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

A plastic doll.

Another step, and suddenly it was looking up at me with glazed blue eyes. Its mouth, turned up in a permanent smile, had been smeared with lipstick. One of its legs had been cut off, leaving a dark hole. Its body was facing the other way to its head, away from me.

I shone the phone back into the hall, and then along the corridor to the back doors. Nothing was out of place. The rear doors were still closed.

It was like no one had ever been inside.

Outside the youth club it was cold. In my pockets were the photographs. In my hand was the doll. When I looked down at it, its glassy blue eyes stood out against the night, briefly glinting, and then rolled back under the eyelids.

The car park entrance opened on to a thin sliver of backstreet. I veered left, towards the road I'd parked on, keeping to the shadows cast by the buildings. Somewhere behind me a horn blared. A couple of seconds later another car joined in, this time louder and longer. I glanced back over my shoulder, an automatic reaction — and, in the darkness, something moved.

I stopped. Turned.

In the shadows of an overhanging building, I could make out a shape within the darkness. The t— of a shoe. Part of a leg. Above that, the curve of an elbow. I started to move back towards the alley, slowly at first, and then faster as I tried to close the space between us. But the silhouette just remained there - unmoving, turned in my direction - until I was about twenty feet away.

Then it broke into a run.

A figure appeared from the shadows like it was torn from the night. Ten feet further on, as I broke into a full sprint, it passed beneath a street light and I could see it was a man, about six foot, dressed in a long dark coat, dark trousers, black boots and a dark beanie. He kept his back to me the whole time, angling his head away, so that even as he turned a corner, running at full pelt, I couldn't see his face.

He disappeared from view as the street we were on narrowed and darkened, before suddenly veering right. And by the time I hit the traffic, noise and crowds on Euston Road, he was gone.

Chapter Thirty-one

Sunday morning, seven-forty. Waiting for me on the floor below the letterbox was the police file Ewan Tasker had promised he'd drop by: everything the Met had on the night Frank White died. It would have to wait for now.

I put some coffee on. Next door, Liz was leaving her house, heading for her car. Friday night came back to me: pulling away from her and then watching her hope go out like a light. For the second it took to make that decision, everything had felt right. It was too soon, too immense, the guilt too much of a weight to bear. But now all that remained was regret. It fizzed in my belly, a dull ache that I couldn't suppress.

I watched her go and then carried the coffee through to the living room, set it down and spread out the photos I'd taken from the youth club on the table. I brought Adrian Carlisle and Daniel Markham to the front. Using the notes I'd logged on my phone the previous night I scribbled down the addresses and numbers for them both. Carlisle lived up near the reservoirs in Seven Sisters. Markham was in Mile End, close to the tube station. There was a landline and a mobile for Carlisle, but only a mobile for Markham.

On the other side of the table, the doll lay on its side. One of its eyes had dropped closed. The lipstick had smeared a little more. I brought it towards me and turned it, studying the hole that had once been its right leg. Then I noticed something inside the body cavity. I grabbed a pair of scissors, made the hole bigger and pulled it out.

My heart sank.

It was a photograph, folded to quarter size: a top-down shot of the shoulders and neck of a female. It had been taken in subdued light. Not darkness exactly, but not far from it. No part of the head or face was visible. No hair creeping into shot. Nothing above the neck. The skin was blotchy, like Whoever was being photographed had just stepped out of a shower. A bruise, starting to yellow, was on the edge of the shot, close to the hardness of the shoulder blade. Shadows cut in from the sides, moving in towards the neck and around the indent at the bottom of the throat. And right in the top corner, someone had carved something into the glossy finish with either a compass point or the tip of a knife blade. It was the number two.

I flipped the picture over. It had no identifying marks on the back. None of the reference numbers or dates that shop-developed pictures were sometimes tagged with. Which meant it had been printed out on a colour photo printer — or developed at home.

But whose home ?

Whoever it was had followed me to the youth club and left the doll there. The doll itself had to hold some significance, otherwise why use it? But for the time being, I was more concerned about the fact that someone was tracking my movements, watching from the darkness without me being able to see back in. Because if someone knew I was at the youth club, and this was some kind of message, it meant there was a hole in the case. And if there was a hole in the case, it would only get bigger until I closed it up.

I leaned in closer to the picture, studying the areas surrounding her body, and the background. It looked like she was sitting up. Behind her, despite the lack of light, the room seemed to extend out. It was granite grey close to her body, but - further back - descended into a wall of complete darkness. Maybe the girl in the photograph wasn't even Megan. Or maybe it was. Both possibilities made my blood run cold.

Then I paused.

Brought it in even closer to me.

Right at the edge of the photograph, just above her right shoulder, there was a shape in the dark. I used a finger to trace it.

Cardboard boxes.

They faded off dramatically, but there was a definite L-shape. I could see a thin line, where the horizontal and vertical axes met on the highest box. There was something else too: a small, pale label stuck to its side, half in the shot, half out. The writing on it was obscured by the darkness of the picture. But I could make out a two-line header in thick black letters. Part of it looked like a pi symbol; the rest was Cyrillic.

I grabbed my phone and dialled the number for Spike.

'We must stop meeting like this,' he said, using Caller ID.

'I need your help. Again.'

'Just name the server.'

'It's not computer work.'

'Oh.'

'I've got something here which I need translating. I don't feel comfortable taking it to a high-street service, so I was hoping you might have a look at it for me.'

'What is it?'

'Definitely Cyrillic. I think part of it might be a number.'

'Yeah, okay. Send it over.'

'Thanks, Spike.'

I killed the call and then used my cameraphone to take shots of the photograph, trying to leave out as much of the woman as possible. The fewer questions I got about who she was and what she was doing, the better. Once I had a couple of clear pictures, I messaged them over to Spike. He called me back inside three minutes. When I picked up, the background music he'd previously been playing had been turned off. No sound of tapping keyboards now. No jokes. This was Spike in full-on concentration mode.

He launched straight in: You were right. That symbol, the one that looks a bit like pi, it's the number 80. As for the rest…' He paused. You got a pen?'

'Yeah, shoot.'

The lighting's terrible, but from what I can make out…' He paused for a second time. I could hear movement and then a couple of clicks of a mouse. 'Okay. There's the main header and then another line underneath. The one underneath… Man, I'm not even sure how to pronounce this.' More mouse clicks. 'C-A-R-C-I-N-O-'

'Carcinogen?'

'Yeah. Could be. What Does that mean?'