The Dead Tracks

Chapter Thirty-one

Sunday morning, seven-forty. Waiting for me on the floor below the letterbox was the police file Ewan Tasker had promised he'd drop by: everything the Met had on the night Frank White died. It would have to wait for now.

I put some coffee on. Next door, Liz was leaving her house, heading for her car. Friday night came back to me: pulling away from her and then watching her hope go out like a light. For the second it took to make that decision, everything had felt right. It was too soon, too immense, the guilt too much of a weight to bear. But now all that remained was regret. It fizzed in my belly, a dull ache that I couldn't suppress.

I watched her go and then carried the coffee through to the living room, set it down and spread out the photos I'd taken from the youth club on the table. I brought Adrian Carlisle and Daniel Markham to the front. Using the notes I'd logged on my phone the previous night I scribbled down the addresses and numbers for them both. Carlisle lived up near the reservoirs in Seven Sisters. Markham was in Mile End, close to the tube station. There was a landline and a mobile for Carlisle, but only a mobile for Markham.

On the other side of the table, the doll lay on its side. One of its eyes had dropped closed. The lipstick had smeared a little more. I brought it towards me and turned it, studying the hole that had once been its right leg. Then I noticed something inside the body cavity. I grabbed a pair of scissors, made the hole bigger and pulled it out.

My heart sank.

It was a photograph, folded to quarter size: a top-down shot of the shoulders and neck of a female. It had been taken in subdued light. Not darkness exactly, but not far from it. No part of the head or face was visible. No hair creeping into shot. Nothing above the neck. The skin was blotchy, like Whoever was being photographed had just stepped out of a shower. A bruise, starting to yellow, was on the edge of the shot, close to the hardness of the shoulder blade. Shadows cut in from the sides, moving in towards the neck and around the indent at the bottom of the throat. And right in the top corner, someone had carved something into the glossy finish with either a compass point or the tip of a knife blade. It was the number two.

I flipped the picture over. It had no identifying marks on the back. None of the reference numbers or dates that shop-developed pictures were sometimes tagged with. Which meant it had been printed out on a colour photo printer — or developed at home.

But whose home?

Whoever it was had followed me to the youth club and left the doll there. The doll itself had to hold some significance, otherwise why use it? But for the time being, I was more concerned about the fact that someone was tracking my movements, watching from the darkness without me being able to see back in. Because if someone knew I was at the youth club, and this was some kind of message, it meant there was a hole in the case. And if there was a hole in the case, it would only get bigger until I closed it up.

I leaned in closer to the picture, studying the areas surrounding her body, and the background. It looked like she was sitting up. Behind her, despite the lack of light, the room seemed to extend out. It was granite grey close to her body, but - further back - descended into a wall of complete darkness. Maybe the girl in the photograph wasn't even Megan. Or maybe it was. Both possibilities made my blood run cold.

Then I paused.

Brought it in even closer to me.

Right at the edge of the photograph, just above her right shoulder, there was a shape in the dark. I used a finger to trace it.

Cardboard boxes.

They faded off dramatically, but there was a definite L-shape. I could see a thin line, where the horizontal and vertical axes met on the highest box. There was something else too: a small, pale label stuck to its side, half in the shot, half out. The writing on it was obscured by the darkness of the picture. But I could make out a two-line header in thick black letters. Part of it looked like a pi symbol; the rest was Cyrillic.

I grabbed my phone and dialled the number for Spike.

'We must stop meeting like this,' he said, using Caller ID.

'I need your help. Again.'

'Just name the server.'

'It's not computer work.'

'Oh.'

'I've got something here which I need translating. I don't feel comfortable taking it to a high-street service, so I was hoping you might have a look at it for me.'

'What is it?'

'Definitely Cyrillic. I think part of it might be a number.'

'Yeah, okay. Send it over.'

'Thanks, Spike.'

I killed the call and then used my cameraphone to take shots of the photograph, trying to leave out as much of the woman as possible. The fewer questions I got about who she was and what she was doing, the better. Once I had a couple of clear pictures, I messaged them over to Spike. He called me back inside three minutes. When I picked up, the background music he'd previously been playing had been turned off. No sound of tapping keyboards now. No jokes. This was Spike in full-on concentration mode.

He launched straight in: You were right. That symbol, the one that looks a bit like pi, it's the number 80. As for the rest…' He paused. You got a pen?'

'Yeah, shoot.'

The lighting's terrible, but from what I can make out…' He paused for a second time. I could hear movement and then a couple of clicks of a mouse. 'Okay. There's the main header and then another line underneath. The one underneath… Man, I'm not even sure how to pronounce this.' More mouse clicks. 'C-A-R-C-I-N-O-'

'Carcinogen?'

'Yeah. Could be. What Does that mean?'

'It means it'll give you cancer.'

'Shit,' Spike said quietly.

I looked down at the photograph. Spike had translated the easiest, cleanest part. But the header on the top line would be harder to make out.

'Any idea what the other bit says?'

'Difficult to tell. Maybe the name of a company. Looks like an F, maybe an O. An R, an M. Not sure about the fifth or sixth letters. The seventh is definitely an I.'

I wrote that down. F-0-R-M-?-?-I.

'Okay, that's great, Spike. I really appreciate —'

I stopped. Looked at the letters I'd just written down. Scribbled out both the question marks and replaced them with an A and an L. F-O-R-M-A-L-I.

'David?'

I dropped the pen down next to the pad and leaned back in my chair.

'David?'

'It's not the name of a company,' I said.

'No?'

'It's the name of a chemical compound.'

'Form…?'

'Formalin.'

'What's that?'

'Liquid formaldehyde.'

Spike paused. 'That's what they use in embalming, right?'

'Right.' I circled the word a couple of times. 'And preserving remains.'