The Dead Tracks

Chapter Twenty-eight

Back at the office, I slid in at my desk, started on my steak sandwich and went to Google Maps. Within seconds, I had a top-down satellite view of Hark's Hill Woods. It was a weird slab of land. A square mile of overgrown woodland right in the middle of an incredibly dense swathe of city. North of the woods was a road that looked new, leading to some kind of industrial estate on the north-western corner. A quarter of a mile south was tightly packed housing, unfurling across London all the way down to the curve of the Thames. And immediately surrounding the woods, in the spaces around its edges, were the skeletons of old factories — dyeworks, foundries, munitions plants — some standing but damaged, most collapsed or in a serious state of disrepair. It was obvious that the whole area, save for the redevelopment to the north and the homes to the south, had been completely forgotten about since the end of the Second World War; and the only constant was that the woods had grown bigger and the factories had crumbled further.

After finishing the sandwich, I began filling in some of the background on the area. Putting Hark's Hill Woods into Google got me 98,400 hits, most detailing the Milton Sykes case. I moved through the results. On the third page, a hit halfway down caught my eye. An encyclopedia of serial killers.

I clicked on it.

Heading to S, and then down to Sykes, I found a photograph of him, slightly blurred, and a badly spelt description of what I'd already found: his upbringing, his victims and his connection to the woods. Right at the bottom was what had caught my attention in the two-line description on Google: Sykes was reported to have sometimes used the alias Grant A. James. Grant A. James. The letter sent to Megan from the London Conservation Trust had been from G. A. James. And then I remembered the name in her Book of Life too. The name no one had been able to shed any light on: A. J. Grant.

I leaned back in my chair.

Staring out at me from the computer monitor was a blurry photograph of Milton Sykes and, sitting in the space in between, a succession of unanswered questions. I drummed my fingers on the desk, trying to fit all the pieces together. The man at Tiko's. The Grant alias. The email.

The map.

That's why I'm telling you he buried those women in the woods. Because I went down there, and that place… somethings seriously wrong with it. Dooley's words came back to me as I tabbed back to the satellite photograph of Hark's Hill Woods. From the air it didn't look like much: just a square mile of land built on rumour and folklore. But it had affected people, scared them, and then drawn them into its heart.

And, six months before, one of them had been Megan Carver.