Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

I wasn't sure if he was talking about finding Leanne or going up against the police. 'Do you know why the surgeon was there that night?'

'At the warehouse?'

'Yeah.'

'Something came in with the guns. Whatever it was, he made off with it.'

Everything's connected .

'It was the formalin.'

'The what?'

'Liquid formaldehyde.'

He paused. 'Like the tissue preserver?'

'Yeah,' I said. 'Like the tissue preserver.'

He pressed a hand to his forehead and started massaging it. If the surgeon had already taken seven women, Healy didn't need me to tell him why he wanted the chemicals.

'The police can't keep this quiet,' I said.

'Can't they?'

'No.'

'They've done a pretty good job up until now.'

'But the surgeon won't come up for air again until he's absolutely sure it's safe. He's not going to risk a repeat of what happened that night in the warehouse.'

Healy shrugged. 'They're not going to put the women out into the public domain. Because if the surgeon thinks they're about to collar him, they've lost him, and they've lost the names and numbers of every Russian arsehole in the city.'

I leaned back in the booth. He met my eyes.

'We can help each other,' he said. You want to find the Carver girl so you can give her parents the answers we couldn't get them, right?' His eyes narrowed. 'Right?'

I nodded.

'And I want to find him so I can…'

He trailed off. For a second, I could see some of my own reflection. A man torn apart by loss. He'd never laid his daughter to rest. He didn't even know where she was and what had happened to her. His last memory of the two of them together was a screaming match. The blurred line between what the law told him he should do, and what he was going to do, was indistinguishable. Maybe there wasn't even a line now.

'How are they pinning the women on this guy?'

He looked as if he'd expected me to ask. 'Their necklaces.'

I remembered the shoebox containing Megan's belongings. I'd taken it from her wardrobe. Inside had been photographs, letters and jewellery — and a shard of smoothed obsidian on the end of a chain. Glass. 'You mean the glass necklace?'

'Yeah. Because he's wrapped up like the Mummy the whole time, no one knows what he looks like, or what he's called. So the Russians nicknamed him Dr Glass because of a chain he wears around his neck. It's a smoothed piece of obsidian with the inscription PC in the back. It's basically the only thing they know about him.'

Megan's had MC carved into it.

'Are they his initials?'

Healy shrugged. 'Who knows? But all the women had one in their possessions, with their initials inscribed in the back, so it's a fair assumption.' He stopped. A flicker of sadness passed across his eyes. 'All the women… except for Leanne.'

'She didn't have one?'

He looked down at the table. 'Phillips lied to you about a lot of stuff today. But he didn't lie about Leanne. They can't one hundred per cent link her to Megan, or to any of the others.'

'Because she didn't have a necklace?'

'Right.' He stared at me. 'There were a lot of problems at home too. We used to fight a lot. On paper… Leanne was a good candidate for a runaway.' A pause. More sadness - and then steel. 'But I know he took my girl. I know it.'

I nodded, let him have a moment. 'Is that it?'

'What do you mean?'

'That's how they're pinning seven women on this guy?'

I looked at him. He didn't reply.

'It's a link, but it's tenuous. What happens if they're on sale in Asda? Suddenly, him and fifty thousand other people have got one.'

A moment of silence settled between us.

'What else aren't you telling me, Healy?'

He glanced over his shoulder to the door. Looked like he was about to say something, then stopped. When he turned back, he held up a finger. 'There's more,' he whispered. 'But…' He paused again, checked his surroundings a second time. 'I'll tell you. But not here.'

'You've told me everything else.'

'I need to show you,' he said.

I let my mind tick over for a moment, trying to figure out what he meant. 'Have any of the other missing women got connections to the youth club?'

'No. Just Leanne and the Carver girl.'

'Which means you need to get some background on Daniel Markham,' I said. 'Because, at the moment, he's the best hope we've got of finding out what happened to them.'

Chapter Forty-three

Healy picked up me at seven o'clock the next morning. It was still dark. He had a Vauxhall estate with straw all over the back seats and muddy paw prints on the inside of the doors. The car stank of wet dog. It looked like he was dressed in the same clothes as the night before, apart from the tie. He had the seat all the way back, but his belly still almost touched the wheel, and his legs were arched under it. He wasn't exactly fat, but he was a big man, and thirty pounds of extra weight added a lot of bulk.

The drive over to Mile End was about fourteen miles. Neither of us said much for the first half-hour. It was slow going, and I got the sense that, like me, Healy was mulling things over: everything we'd discussed the night before, and everything that awaited us. At one point he started fiddling around in the side pocket of the door, and after a couple of seconds brought out a file. He handed it to me.

'You want a coffee?'

I looked at him. 'You a coffee fan?'

We were moving east through Paddington, and there was a Starbucks ahead. He bumped up on to the pavement outside and switched on his hazards. 'I need it to function in the morning,' he said, and pointed towards the file. 'And you'll need some to get through that.'

I looked at the folder and flipped it open. Inside were missing persons files for all seven women.

'How do you take it?' he asked.

'Black.'

He got out and headed into the shop.

I opened up the folder and pulled out the files. Megan's was on top. I read through it. The investigation added up to very little. They'd identified the email from the London Conservation Trust as a potential line of enquiry, and made mention of the map on the website, but both leads had hit dead ends. As I'd suspected, without pinpointing the guy in Tiko's, they didn't have Sykes, and they didn't have the connection to the woods. Attached were interviews with everyone who had ever worked at the youth club. I searched for Daniel Markham's and read over it. It was bland enough not to raise any alarms, and the answers he gave were solid and believable. Like the file at the youth club, it listed him as single - but this time it said he was divorced from his wife Susan.

There wasn't much space in the car, but I attempted to lay the seven different files out on the dashboard, next to one another. Then I discovered there weren't seven.

There were eight.

The eighth file was thin and different from the others. Inside was a single sheet of A4, all the pertinent details blacked out. No name. No address. No personal information, other than the place of birth and family status. Mother dead. Father still alive. One sister. The only other thing that faced out at me was a photograph. Female. Blonde hair. Blue eyes.

I set the file aside and started to move through the others one by one. Photos of the women looked out at me. None of them had a record, so the pictures were all personal, taken by friends and family members. Megan, at seventeen, was the youngest by a clear three years. The rest fluctuated between twenty and forty-five.

It was unusual for serial crime to cover such a wide age range, but he was picking victims based on appearance, not age. What criteria did blonde, blue-eyed, medium- build women fill for him? And what else tied them together? I read on a little further and discovered that all the women were single or not dating seriously, and most were pursuing careers rather than jobs that just paid the mortgage. They were intelligent, attractive and well educated. Even Megan, still at school, could be put into that bracket. The only one who looked out of sync was Leanne: average at school, plainer than the others.