Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

'It means it'll give you cancer.'

'Shit,' Spike said quietly.

I looked down at the photograph. Spike had translated the easiest, cleanest part. But the header on the top line would be harder to make out.

'Any idea what the other bit says?'

'Difficult to tell. Maybe the name of a company. Looks like an F, maybe an O. An R, an M. Not sure about the fifth or sixth letters. The seventh is definitely an I.'

I wrote that down. F-0-R-M-?-?-I.

'Okay, that's great, Spike. I really appreciate —'

I stopped. Looked at the letters I'd just written down. Scribbled out both the question marks and replaced them with an A and an L. F-O-R-M-A-L-I.

'David?'

I dropped the pen down next to the pad and leaned back in my chair.

'David?'

'It's not the name of a company,' I said.

'No?'

'It's the name of a chemical compound.'

'Form…?'

'Formalin.'

'What's that?'

'Liquid formaldehyde.'

Spike paused. 'That's what they use in embalming, right?'

'Right.' I circled the word a couple of times. 'And preserving remains.'

Chapter Thirty-two

By half-ten, I was moving along Whitechapel Road, into Mile End, and I had the heaters on full blast. I'd already been to Adrian Carlisle's house in Seven Sisters. He wasn't home. I tried his landline and mobile and no one answered. I waited outside his place — a three-storey mid-terrace in which he occupied the top floor — for an hour. But there was no sign of him. Now, as I passed into Mile End, I could make out the sandy brick and gunmetal roof of the building Daniel Markham lived in.

It was the first of six identical five-storey apartment complexes. Each one stood parallel to the next, all facing west so that anyone with a home on the east of the building spent their life without sun. In what must have surely been an ironic touch, they were all named after different types of roses. Markham lived in Alba on the ground floor. At the entrance, the glass doors had steamed up and two women were standing talking, coats and scarves tightly bound around them. I parked up and headed towards them.

Then, ten feet short of the doors, a flash of recollection hit me.

The entrance.

It was the block of flats in Megan's photo. She'd been standing where the women were now, looking into the camera of the man she'd been with, that smile etched on her face. Markham. Was he the one she'd been seeing? The man who'd got her pregnant? The man who'd taken her? I quickly headed inside, through the doors to the ground floor and along a small, grey corridor, to flat number eight.

I knocked twice. Elsewhere in the corridor there was the muffled sound of television. Laughter. A baby crying. But no answer from Markham's flat.

'Daniel?'

No response.

'Daniel, my name's David Raker.'

Nothing.

I stepped forward. There was no spyhole in the door. I put an ear to it and listened. After a couple of seconds, I could hear a noise.

'Daniel, I need to speak to you.'

Again, with my ear pressed to the door, I could hear a noise. The same one: a creak, or maybe a click. When it came again, it sounded more like a click.

'Daniel?'

I leaned in again and tried to separate out the sounds. There was a constant buzz; possibly a fridge. Some peripheral noise from outside the flat. Behind that, whatever was making the clicking sound. Except this time it was preceded by a gentle whirr.

'Daniel?'

Click.

Distantly, there were police sirens. I stepped away from the door and waited until they got closer, until the noise started to cover some of the other sounds inside the building. Then I took another step back — and launched a foot at the door.

It cracked and swung open, hitting an adjacent wall and bouncing back towards me. I stopped it with a hand. Paused. Looked along the corridor.

Then I stepped into the flat and closed the door.

Immediately to my left was a bathroom. Next to that was the bedroom door. In front of me was a short hallway, feeding into a living room and open-plan kitchen. It looked like someone had half moved out and never returned. Dust clung to walls. Windows had been whitewashed, but not very well. Through one, I could see out to the path leading up to the flats, and the entrance itself. It was a good position for Markham: he'd be able to see if anyone approached the building.

'Daniel?'

Silence. There was a two-seater sofa in the living room. A lamp next to that. A half-filled bookshelf. Otherwise, the flat was empty. No TV. No music centre. No games consoles, satellite decoders or DVD players. Nothing a single man should have owned.

The kitchen had been mostly cleared out as well. Only a few things remained. A kettle. A couple of plates stacked in a drying rack. A fruit bowl. A refrigerator in the corner, humming. It was on, but it had been defrosted. The doors were open to both the fridge and the freezer. There was no food in either. Same story in the bedroom: a bed base, a mattress, no sheets, no duvet. Built-in cupboards, all open. There were some clothes inside, but not many. A couple of shirts. Some trousers.

Click.

That noise again. I moved out into the hallway. Looked around. There was very little sound now: no noise from the flat, no noise from outside. Heading into the bathroom, I turned on the light. Toilet. Bath. Basin. Bathroom cabinet with a small mirror on the front. Above me, the extractor fan kicked into life. I opened up the cabinet and looked around inside. A can of deodorant, a razor, some shaving cream. Nothing else. I pushed the cabinet shut - except now it wouldn't close. When I tried again, it just slowly crept back open. I leaned in and looked at the catch. It was broken. The moment I'd pulled the cabinet open, the catch had come loose.

As if it had been set up to break.

And someone was trying to draw attention to it.

I stepped in closer to the cabinet and looked inside. In the corners, it had been attached to the wall with four screws. I placed a hand on either side of the cabinet and levered it away. It stuck for a moment, the screws clinging to the holes that housed them. But when I applied more pressure they began to come out as it shifted off the wall.

It had been deliberately left loose.

Dust spilled out from around the screw heads, landing inside the cabinet. Plaster made a scraping sound behind it. And then, a couple of seconds later, the cabinet came away.

In the space behind it was a patch of cream paint - the original colour of the bathroom - and the holes that had once housed the screws.

In the centre was a message, written directly on to the wall.

It said : Help me .

Chapter Thirty-three

Back at the car, rain continued falling. I started up the engine and left the heaters running. In the pop-out drinks holder was a takeaway coffee. Steam rose from a hole in the lid.

I grabbed my phone. On it was a picture of the message I'd found on the wall. I'd placed the cabinet back as best I could and wedged the front door of the flat shut with a folded piece of card. If someone returned to it, it would only take a second for them to realize there had been a break-in. But that was if they returned. It felt like a place that had gone a long time without being lived in.

As I exited the photo again, the phone started buzzing in my hand. The number was withheld.

'David Raker.'

'David, my name's Corine. I'm a friend of Spike's.'

'Corine — thanks for calling me.'

After he'd translated the writing in the photograph for me, Spike had offered to put me in contact with a friend of his who had some sort of science degree. He was deliberately vague. He didn't involve the people he liked in his work.