The Dead Tracks

Chapter Twenty-five

An hour later, I was opening the door to the office and my phone was going. I looked at the display. It was Spike.

'David. Sorry it's taken me a while.'

'No worries. What have you got for me?'

I heard him tapping. 'Okay, the PO box number you asked me to look at…' He paused. More tapping. 'It's for a charity called… uh, the London Conservation Trust.'

Megan had had an email from them. I sat down at my desk and booted up the computer. I'd called them when Spike had first got Megan's telephone records over to me, and all I'd got in return was a short answerphone message. No mention of the charity. No thank you for calling. Just a bored-sounding man in an empty room.

'Anything else?'

'The street address is 150 Piccadilly.'

'One-fifty?'

'Yeah. The building's called Minotaur House.'

I pulled a pad across the desk and started to write down the address. Then stopped, 150 Piccadilly.

That's the Ritz,' I said quietly.

'Huh?'

'150 Piccadilly. That's the address for the Ritz.'

'The hotel?'

'Yeah, the hotel.'

The computer pinged as the desktop appeared. I fired up the internet browser and entered the URL for the Ritz. At the bottom was their street address: 150 Piccadilly. I went to Google and searched for Minotaur House, got nothing, then headed to the Charity Commission website. No mention of the London Conservation Trust there either.

The address was false.

And the charity didn't exist.

I thanked Spike, hung up and went to Megan's Hotmail. The email from the London Conservation Trust was right at the bottom. It had been sent on 27 March. Seven days before Megan disappeared. The design of the newsletter was plain and uninspiring: a green banner across the top with a clean but basic logo, all in a pale green. The 'T' of the Trust was a tree. Beneath the logo was a short message, thanking her for her donation of £10 and telling her the money would be put to protecting parkland. There was no street address or phone number. No links or attachments.

I read the message.

Dear Megan,

Thank you for your donation of £10. We want to protect the city's parkland and make a genuine difference - and that means we don't just want to imagine a world where animals are running free in their natural habitat, we want to see it in action!

At the time of writing, we are engaged in ten different campaigns, and every pound you send to us helps maintain parks and parklands in our capital, and in turn brings flora, animals and people together.

If you want to be on the frontline, join our march to Parliament next Monday where we will be trying to persuade government ministers to make the protection of local wildlife more of a priority in the coming year. See the website for more details or enter your email to sign up to our weekly newsletter and get the most up-to-date info delivered straight to your inbox!

Yours sincerely,

G. A. James

I put the London Conservation Trust, LCT and the name G. A. James into Google. The LCT got no hits, and the name got nothing in relation to the charity. The incongruous nature of the email had stopped me briefly the first time I'd read it earlier in the week, but only because it was totally out of sync with every other message in Megan's inbox. In truth, it sounded enough like a charity newsletter to pass under most people's radar; a little too jokey and vague, but nothing that would immediately stand out. I scanned it again, reading it over for a second time. See the website for more details.

Except there was no website.

Or was there?

The email address the message had been sent from was info@lct.co.uk. I put www.lct.co.uk into another tab on the browser and hit Return. Within seconds, a website was loading. It was a plain site. No real design. No flair. It mirrored the newsletter in its pale green colouring, but the banner at the top, which was presumably where the logo was supposed to be, had corrupted and failed to load. Down the left was a menu with five options: HOME, ABOUT US, OUR PROJECTS, CONTACT, DONATE. The rest of the page had nothing on it except under construction! in big black letters and some random letters and numbers right at the bottom. When I tried the options on the left, they all took me through to 404 Error pages, except for the last one: DONATE. Clicking on that brought up a secure login box, asking for a username and password. What charity asked you to enter a username and password before donating? And where was the option to sign up to the newsletter? I doubted there was one. Everything about the site was off — but it must have been created for a reason, to serve some purpose.

As an experiment, I put in Megan's email address as a username and the password for her Hotmail account below that. The box juddered, flashed up Incorrect username and password, and closed. I clicked on DONATE again. This time, I tried Megan's email prefix, 'megancarveri 7', for the username and the same Hotmail password.

Wrong again.

Think.

The police would have worked Megan's phone records in the same way I had. They would have seen that the street address for the PO box was phoney and the building name false. They would have been led to the email, then to the website. Their technicians would have eventually bypassed the security on the website and found what was beyond. But they still hadn't found Megan. Maybe it meant there was nothing beyond the security box — or at least nothing that led to Megan's whereabouts. So why would someone go to the trouble of creating the website and the email if there was nothing worth finding?

Think.

I looked at the random numbers at the bottom of the webpage: 21112303666859910012512612713213313414214414803206. It wasn't an error message — or, at least if it was, it was unlike any error message I'd ever seen. Grabbing a pen, I rewrote all fifty numbers on to my pad, and then circled an area in the middle that immediately stood out: 125126127 and 132133134. One hundred and twenty- five through to one hundred and twenty-seven, and one hundred and thirty-two through to one hundred and thirty-four.

They were both sequential.

I went back to the start and worked through from the beginning, applying the same logic throughout. If I assumed the list was one long, gradually increasing series of numbers, fifty suddenly became eighteen: 2 11 12 3036 66 85 99 100 125 126 127 132 133 134 142 144 148. Except I'd cheated, because right at the end was 03206, and I didn't know how they fitted in so had left them out. Even taking each number on its own, or every two, there was no obvious pattern.

Tabbing back to Megan's inbox, I read over the newsletter again.

There were no numbers in the message. Nothing to tie the sequence to the site. Not one scrap of evidence to suggest the numbers even meant anything. So why are they there? I looked around the office, trying to pull inspiration out from somewhere. My eyes passed pictures on the walls, photographs, the front pages I'd written and the stories I'd broken. What aren't you seeing? Without a user- name or password, I'd have to enlist the help of Spike to get past the security for me. And that meant time. It meant hours sitting on my hands. It meant wasted days.

I looked down at the numbers written on the pad again, then back to the email in Megan's inbox, then back to the numbers. What the hell aren't you…

Then I saw it.

Copying and pasting the contents of the email into a Word document, I started going through the message again. The first number in the sequence was two. I capitalized and emboldened the second word in the email. The second number was eleven. I capitalized and emboldened the eleventh word. Then I did the same with the twelfth, thirtieth, thirty-sixth, sixty-sixth and the rest.

Two minutes later, everything had changed.