Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

For a moment, he couldn't focus. He stared up in my direction but slightly off to the side. Then he rocked his head from left to right, his eyelids fluttered and he readjusted. His eyes fixed on me. I shone the torch down at him, off to the side of his face, so he could see me as clearly as the darkness of the woods would allow.

'Who were they?' I said.

'Russians.' He coughed then smiled, blood and saliva smeared across his teeth. They were scared about what I might be forced to tell the cops. They can get to me in prison. But they can't get to me in a police station. So I made a deal.'

'A deal?'

'The Ghost needs his face doing again. He's paranoid. Thinks the police are closing in on him the whole time.' He paused, ran his tongue across his teeth. 'So I told his people that if he got me out of this, I could delay the police - and I'd do Gobulev's face for free.'

'This was about a facelift?'

'No, David,' he said. This was about protection. Have you any idea how valuable I am to the police? Have you any idea how much I've seen? The Russians were taking out an insurance policy. And anyway, how many plastic surgeons do you think there are in this country willing to work for people like Gobulev?' He paused. 'I'm the star witness. I'm the key. I'm God?

A trickle of blood escaped from his lips and ran down his face. He reached up with his handcuffed wrists and brushed it away. It smeared across the scar on his chin.

'How did they know?' I asked him.

'Let's just say, when I asked for a phone call, I didn't call my lawyer.'

As I stared at Crane, a wind whipped across us, passing through grass and bushes and leaves, as cold as a sheet of ice. A gentle whisper followed in its wake; a far-off noise like a voice repeating itself over and over again.

From the ground, Crane studied me. 'You can feel it.'

'I don't feel anything'

'But you knew what I was talking about.' In the light from the torch, his eyes widened in delight, flicking back and forth across my face. 'It has a power, this place. All the secrets, the lies, the death, the destruction. It leaves its mark.'

'You're done,' I said quietly.

He shook his head. 'I'm not done yet, David.'

I looked at him, studied him, his eyes flashing in the subtle glow of the torchlight. I brought the MP 5 around and placed it against his head. His eyes crossed for a moment, focusing on the barrel above his eyes. Then he looked back at me.

'We're the same,' he whispered.

My fingers touched the trigger. My left hand squeezed the barrel. The stock cut in against my shoulder. All this misery. All this pain. If I pulled the trigger now, no one would cry for him. No one would miss him. He'd be buried in a cemetery somewhere with no one at his graveside. If I pulled the trigger, no one would mourn him.

'We're the same, David.'

But if I pulled the trigger, he'd be right.

I moved the MP 5 away from his face and tossed it into the undergrowth behind me. His expression dissolved. He thought he'd still been in control, even as he looked down the barrel of the gun. He thought we were the same. But we'd never be the same.

Not now. Not ever.

'You were right about me,' I said to him quietly. 'I've killed. But I did it to survive. I did it because the alternative was dying myself. And there hasn't been a day that's gone by - not a single day - I haven't wished I could have done it differently, even though the people I hurt were men just like you: men who feel nothing when they take a life. There's not been a single day when I don't think about what I've done. So you can hunt me, and you can torture me, and you can try to kill me. And one day, who knows, maybe one of you will succeed.' I reached down, grabbed his collar and pulled him to his feet. 'But don't ever say we're the same. Because you'll never understand me. You'll never know who I am. And we'll never be the same.'

And then I led Aron Crane back through the darkness of the Dead Tracks.

Chapter Seventy-six

Three weeks later, police were still trying to unravel the lie that was Aron Crane's life: his wife, his child, his victims, his reasons. The six women he'd left floating in formalin were there for reference. He could have buried them in the ground like Milton Sykes had, but as he got closer to working on Megan, he needed to be able to refer to the problems he'd encountered during surgery, and the mistakes he'd made along the way.

To start, as had been the case when he was first arrested, he refused to talk. But he did open up a little eventually. Police brought in the best psychologist they could find and he worked some details out of Crane. Small details, like how he pushed his wife Phedra off the decking on the top of his house. Whatever his reasoning, the psychologist failed to illicit any emotion from Crane about the moment he leaned over the railings and looked down at his dead wife, pregnant with his child. Any sign he missed her, or regretted what he'd done. He buried them in the woods, and in all the time people tried chipping away at him, it proved the only chink in his armour. The only way to get him to talk. Crane may have been a wall of silence, but Phedra was the tiny hole that would never seal over.

He pleaded guilty to murdering the six women he preserved in formalin, killing Susan Markham and kidnapping Megan, Jill and Sona, but said virtually nothing during the trial, other than to confirm his name. After four days, the jury found him guilty and he was given seven life sentences, to run concurrently. I watched the news every day during that time, waiting to see an egotistical flash, or hear how he'd smiled at jurors while recounting the horrific things that he'd done. But reporters always described him as subdued, and after a while I realized - without his project, without the opportunity to move from one stage to the next — he had nothing left. When he was even incapable of expressing any regret over what he'd done to his wife and child, it was obvious there were no hidden depths to him. Nothing else to his make-up. With no control and no power, there was no Aron Crane.

After the search of the Dead Tracks was completed, a smaller forensic team went over the burial site Crane had discovered to recover what was left of the thirteen women Milton Sykes had murdered. They found twelve. The thirteenth grave had animal bones in it, but no human remains. Even before an anthropologist had got close to the bodies, I knew what their conclusions would be. Sykes knew the woods better than anyone: the tiny ravines, the trails, the clearings, the hiding places. He'd lived on its edges all his life. Crane had lucked out by finding the twelve Indian women, but inside those fifty acres, tied to the roots of the place, Jenny Truman would remain hidden. And as long as she lay hidden, maybe there would always be a feel to its paths. A sense that something was trying to get away, to claw its way out of the ground and finally find peace.

The investigation into Russian organized crime continued after Crane was sentenced, and police visited him frequently in prison in the months after, trying to build a case. No one outside the task force knew how much Crane was willing to play ball, or how much he even really knew, but I heard from a couple of people that the prison service had rolled out an unofficial protection detail on the advice of the police - to prevent Crane being got at on the inside - and that they were closer to Akim Gobulev than they'd ever been.

Maybe that was true. But I hoped, most days, the police remembered the sacrifice they'd made to get there. Six dead women, including Leanne. Three more — Megan, Sona and Jill — lucky to be alive. Susan Markham. And then Crane's own wife and child.

Eventually, I went to visit Jill at home. She still had heavy bandaging around the top of her forehead where surgeons had sewn her skin back on to her scalp. But otherwise she looked good. Minimal bruising. little visible damage. She made some coffee while I stood at the kitchen door listening to her description of the night the man she thought was Aron Crane had come for her.