The Dead Tracks

Chapter Twenty-three

When I woke at nine the next morning, the house was cold. I started the fire in the living room and put on some coffee. While I was waiting for it to brew, I padded back through to the bedroom to find my phone. It said I'd missed two calls. The first had been from Jill, as expected, at eight the previous evening. I'd also got a text from her: Hi David. We're meeting in the Lamb in Acton, at 8.30. See you there? Jill. The second missed call was from Ewan Tasker at 7.5 5 a.m.

Tasker was the contact I'd mentioned in passing to Jill. He was working for the Metropolitan Police now, in an advisory role, but previous to that he'd been part of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, before it was assimilated into SOCA. Like the other sources from my paper days, our relationship was built on being mutually beneficial, but over ten years we'd gradually become good friends. The last time I saw him was at his sixtieth birthday almost a year previously. He'd held it in a golf club in Surrey. We sat by the windows, looking out at the course, both of us nursing whiskies. He was mourning the onset of his sixties. I was mourning the death of my wife.

I tried returning the call, but no one answered, and I allowed my thoughts to quickly turn back to Megan, the man in the nightclub — and Milton Sykes.

In the spare bedroom I booted up the computer, logged on to the internet and printed out everything I could find on Sykes. I wanted as much information as I could get on his life, his upbringing, his crimes and his arrest. I wasn't sure how it fitted into what I had, but the obvious physical similarities between Sykes and the man in Tiko's couldn't be ignored — and neither could the idea of a copycat. I noted down the most important information and moved carefully through the rest, making sure nothing was missed. When I was done on the first read-through, I flipped back to the start and reread it. Then a third time. Two hours later, I had sixteen pages of notes.

I turned back to the computer and logged into my Yahoo. There was an email waiting. It was sent from Terry Dooley's home address: no subject line, no message, but a PDF attachment. I dragged it to the desktop and opened it up. It was the missing-person's file Colm Healy had set up for his daughter, and a few miscellaneous pages tagged on to the end covering the subsequent search for her.

I started going through it.

Leanne Healy disappeared three months before Megan, on 3 January. She was older, at twenty, and not nearly as capable at school. She'd left at sixteen with middling results, and gone to college to study Beauty and Holistic Therapies, before dropping out after six months. From there she got a job in a local supermarket, which she stuck for another year and a half, then went back to college, this time to do a National Diploma in Business. She completed the course two years later with decent, if unspectacular, grades, and had spent the time between the end of her course and the date she disappeared struggling to find work. On 2 January she'd finally got something: as a full-time office junior at a recruitment agency. Twenty- four hours later, she was gone.

Physically she wasn't too dissimilar to Megan. Neither of them were overweight, but they definitely weren't skinny girls. They had a nice shape to them, but their height — five-five to five-six - would have prevented them from turning heads in the way they might have done at a few inches taller. Megan was definitely the better-looking of the two. She had a natural warmth, obvious in her pictures, which added to her attractiveness. Leanne looked harder work, and less inclined to make the effort, which came across in the only photograph in the file; she was standing outside a house, straggly blonde hair covering part of her face. In the light, and because of the fuzzy quality of the picture, her smile looked more like a scowl.

Surprisingly, Healy's version of the events leading up to Leanne's disappearance didn't differ all that much from his wife Gemma's. Neither account mentioned him hitting her, although Gemma said he'd become 'angry and aggressive' when he found out she'd been having an affair. Healy himself tried to claim the moral high ground early on in his own statement, talking about the sanctity of marriage, before admitting he 'may have scared' his wife when she told him the truth about her affair. He described 'getting a little closer to her' than he should have done, and 'swearing at her'. At one point, midway through the transcript, Gemma told her interviewer, 'If Colm dedicated as much time to his family as his work, Leanne probably wouldn't have left that night.'

The last person to see Leanne alive was one of her brothers. They'd been home together on the afternoon of

Sunday 3 January, watching a DVD. In the middle of it, Leanne told him she needed to pop out. She left at three- thirty, and never came home again. At eight, her brother called Gemma, who was at a friend's house having dinner, and told her what had happened. Gemma phoned Healy, who was at work. Seven hours later, Healy called in her disappearance, and she was registered as a missing person.

Right at the back of the file was a black-and-white MISSING poster, the same photo of Leanne in the corner. Leanne Healy. Age at disappearance: 20. Leanne has been missing from St Albans, Hertfordshire, since $ January. Her whereabouts remain unknown. There is growing concern for her welfare. Leanne is 5ft 6in tall, has shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes and is of medium build. After that it listed a confidential helpline number and, right at the bottom of the page, a list of places she most often went before her disappearance.

The list of places were mostly pubs and clubs, as well as the address of the college she'd gone to, and the name of a coffee shop just around the corner from her parents' house, where she'd spent most Saturday mornings studying in the run-up to her exams. But then, in among them, I spotted a name and address I recognized: Barton Hill Youth Project, 42 Chestnut Road, Islington, London.

The same youth club Megan had gone to.

And the place she'd met the man who'd got her pregnant.