Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

'Good. And one other thing: don't ever stab me in the fucking back again like that, understood?' He nodded and massaged an area in the middle of his chest where the needle had gone in. 'I'm going to have a look around the flat.'

I didn't wait for the reply.

The flat was an exact replica of Markham's but completely empty. Naked walls, naked floorboards, no curtains, no furniture. A flat that had never been moved into. From the ceiling a white cord hung down, but there was no bulb attached; the windows in the living room were the only light. Right in the middle of the room was a wooden crate and a dustbin, turned upside down.

On top was a laptop.

A power lead snaked off to a plug, and another moved off across the floor of the flat to a tiny hole in the corner. It must have fed downstairs to the camera. I walked over to the computer. The desktop was plain, and there were two folders on the right-hand side under the hard-drive icon: one labelled 'Feed Stills', the other 'Pics'. In the centre of the screen, obscuring most of the rest of the desktop, was a loading bar, gradually filling up. It had just hit the ninety-two per cent mark. I stepped in closer.

Then I realized it wasn't loading.

It was deleting.

He was erasing everything on the laptop.

I clicked Cancel, but nothing happened. Went to Force Quit and hammered the Return key. Nothing. It was a waste of time; the deletion had been locked, and the more time I spent trying to figure out how to stop it, the more data disappeared. I clicked on the desktop, and double- clicked on the first folder. 'Feed Stills' opened up. Inside were forty-two photographs. I opened the first one. Healy and me in the flat fifteen minutes before. I closed it. Opened the next one. exactly the same, except this time I was looking up at the camera. Inside the folder, the stills started to delete from the bottom up, but all of them had been modified within the hour, which meant they were all freeze-frames of Healy and me, taken with the video camera.

Ninety-four per cent.

I opened up the 'Pics' folder. Inside were ten photographs. I grouped them all, then double-clicked. Slowed down by the deleting process, they opened one by one.

Ninety-six per cent.

The first was a shot from the window of Healy and me approaching Alba. I tabbed to the next. Healy picking me up outside my house that morning.

Ninety-seven per cent.

The third was a photograph taken from the end of my street the night Phillips and Davidson had arrested me. Rain was falling. I was standing beside my car, behind the police tape, a finger pointing in Phillips's face. To the left of the shot were some people I recognized from the top of my road. He'd been among them the whole time.

Broken into my house. Set me up.

Watched it all unfold.

The next was me outside the youth club the night I'd got inside. Half obscured by shadows, hairpins in the lock.

Ninety-eight per cent.

Two photos disappeared from the folder and the desktop simultaneously. I moved more quickly through the remaining pictures. Pictures five and six were of me on the path in the Dead Tracks. I recognized the area. Just past the second length of railway track, close to the clearing. The picture was taken from behind one of the trees, about fifteen feet back from the path. In picture five, I was staring vaguely in the direction of the camera. As if I'd seen him.

Ninety-nine per cent.

Another photo disappeared. One left.

A man with his back to the camera, and a woman facing him. They were talking to one another in front of an entrance to some sort of office building. People were filing out around them. Everything was slightly off, slightly blurred. It had been taken on maximum zoom, and the camera had moved just as the shot had been taken.

I leaned in closer.

Looked at the man and the woman for a second time.

Her face wasn't defined properly. Her outline was smudged. The blur of the picture had turned her eyes into dark blobs. But I still recognized her.

She was the woman in Healy's eighth file.

Next to her, back turned, the man seemed immediately familiar. Then I saw the edge of his glasses, the waves of his dark hair, the choice of clothes, the studiousness — and I realized who I was looking at.

Daniel Markham.

I got out my phone, flipped it open and selected the Camera option. I wanted a picture of the two of them to show Healy. But as a pixellated version of the laptop appeared on the phone's screen, the deleting process hit one hundred per cent.

And the photograph disappeared for good.

I double-clicked on the hard-drive icon, trying to find any trace of the file. But all the information was gone. The laptop had reverted back to its factory settings. There were ways to extract the information if I wanted, ways to retrieve the pictures. Files were never fully deleted from a computer, only the entries for the files; the data itself remained. But the only person who could do that for me, quickly and on the quiet, was Spike.

I closed the laptop. And then, on the kitchen counter, I spotted something.

When I'd first swept the flat I thought it had been some kind of kitchen utensil — but the flat was empty. There were no utensils. I got up and moved across to it. It was a metal container, about twelve inches long, and had a removable screw-top lid at one end. As I started fiddling with it, a memory surfaced: the man's hesitation as we'd faced each other out in the corridor, his eyes flicking to the open door.

As if he'd forgotten something .

This was what he'd forgotten.

Healy was still in the same place I'd left him. He had a couple of fingers pressed against his chest. He turned and looked up, wincing at the movement. In one hand I had the laptop. In the other I was carrying the metal container.

'How you feeling?'

'I'll survive,' he said, and got to his feet gingerly. His eyes drifted to my hands, and then back up to me. 'So was that the guy from the nightclub?'

'That was him.' I held up the laptop. 'He left this. He'd set it to delete anything remotely incriminating, and most of it was gone by the time I got up there.'

Healy nodded. 'What's that?'

He was looking at the metal container. I crouched down, placed the laptop on the floor and the container next to it. Healy dropped to his haunches beside me, wheezing a little. I reached inside and pulled out a tube from inside the container.

It was a cylindrical glass cask, about ten inches long and six inches high, full of clear liquid. Both ends were plugged with airtight seals.

'Fuck me,' Healy said quietly.

Inside the cask were two human hearts.

One adult. One child.

Chapter Forty-seven

By twelve, Healy and I were parked in a street in Beckton opposite a row of seven identical warehouses. On one of them, a big red sign was pinned to the front: DRAYTON IMPORTS. It belonged to Derrick Drayton, the man who owned the warehouse in Bow that Frank White had died in. And the man who had brought in the crate of guns for the Russians - and, I was guessing, the formalin for the surgeon along with it.

'If you're hoping Drayton is going to drop out of the sky, you're gonna be waiting a long time,' Healy said, both of us with our eyes fixed on the warehouse. A lorry was parked up, its cab facing out. Inside the warehouse, men were removing boxes from the back and filing off out of sight.

'Drayton's gone. I know that.'

'His family don't know anything.'

I looked at him. 'You seriously believe that?'

'The task force spent three days down here interviewing the entire tribe,' Healy replied. Wife, mum, dad, brother, sister. They looked terrified.'

'Doesn’t mean they don't know something.'

Healy had spent the journey over massaging the spot on his chest where the syringe had gone in. Although he claimed to be feeling fine by the time we left Markham's flat, I wasn't about to take any chances — so I offered to drive. The laptop was on the back seat. The cylindrical cask was at his feet, back in its original container. So far, neither of us had made mention of the contents.