The Dead Tracks

Chapter Twenty-six

I leaned in towards the monitor and took in each line of the email, every bold word suddenly coming alive. Three minutes before it had just been a charity newsletter. Now it was the reason Megan had disappeared.

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 OFF 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

A feeling of dread flared in my chest. Megan, want to imagine running off together next Monday? See the website. Enter your email and the date.

I tabbed back to the LCT website, clicked on DONATE, and put Megan's full email address in as the username. Enter your email and the date. What date? Today's date? The date the email was sent? The date she disappeared? I tried them all and every time the pop-up box juddered and closed. None of them was right.

You're stumbling around in the dark here.

The date. The date. The date. I let my mind work back over the last week, trying to recall anything I'd found that might give me a clue as to what that meant: Megan, her parents, her school, her friends, the youth club, Charlie Bryant, the man at Tiko's, his similarity to Sykes… and then I stopped.

Sykes.

The last five digits of the numbered sequence. 03206. I hadn't been able to see where they fitted in before. But now I did.

03 2 06. 3 February 1906.

I flipped back a couple of pages on my pad, to where I'd made the notes about Sykes. 03 02 06. 3 February 1906.

The day he was hanged.

I entered Megan's email as the username, and 03206 as the password. And I hit Return. The security box disappeared and the website began to load a new page. It took a couple of seconds. When it was done, a small map appeared in the centre, about five square inches in size. It had been drawn by hand with black marker pen and scanned, and looked like an approximation of a car park, vehicles — as if viewed from above — on one side, a long thin line opposite them. On the other side of the line was an X and a typewritten message: Meet here at 2.30 p.m. for a romantic woodland picnic!

It was the Sixth Form car park at Newcross Secondary.

He knew what he was doing. He knew there was no CCTV coverage in that part of the school and he knew what time her lesson finished. He picked her up and he took her away, and no one even noticed.

The ultimate disappearing act.

Except he'd left a trail. Because while the woodland he described could have been anywhere as far as the police were concerned, I'd spotted him in Tiko's, I'd found out who he looked like, and I knew the significance of the website password.

I knew his next move that day.

He'd taken her to Hark's Hill Woods.