The Dead Tracks

Chapter Thirty-four

The Frank White file was sitting inside the boot of the BMW, still in the envelope Tasker had mailed it in. I'd brought it with me in case I found the time to skim-read it while chasing leads back to Megan. But now, somehow, Frank White had moved in from the periphery - and he'd tethered himself to her disappearance.

I slid in at the wheel, closed the door and tried to clear my head. The cemetery was quiet. I put the wipers on intermittent, listening to them sweep across the glass. For the moment, there wasn't a direct connection that I could see. There was a line running from Frank's death, to the Russians, to Drayton Imports, to the formalin, and on to the girl in the photograph. But the circle wasn't complete. It felt like something was at work — like on some level the two of them were bound to one another - but even if Megan was the girl in the picture, which wasn't even certain, the only thing that connected her to Frank White was the fact that the formalin in the background of the shot had probably been imported by Drayton - the man who owned the warehouse Frank was shot in.

And yet I didn't like the convenience of it all; the coincidence. Because I didn't believe in coincidences. I believed in structure and meaning. I believed in connections.

People connected. Events connected. Everything tied up.

I started going through the file. It echoed exactly what Tasker had already told me over the phone. The task force was spotted early on by Russian lookouts, and the operation descended into a shoot-out. Three specialist firearms officers had accompanied White's SCD7 team to the scene, and one of them had managed to hit the surgeon's getaway vehicle, a stolen black Lexus. But he still got away. At 11.17 p.m., Frank White was declared dead. Another detective, Kline, was already gone. Two of Akim Gobulev's men made it through the firefight. One died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital; the other refused to talk. There were five separate attempts by detectives to interview him, and the five transcripts included in the file weren't more than a page long.

So all they had was the surgeon.

And they didn't even have him.

Pathology, fingerprint lifts and ballistics confirmed what Tasker had already told me, but the evidence inventory was one of the longest I'd ever seen. The lack of a smoking gun — and the fact that two police officers were lying dead on the floor of the warehouse - had galvanized the forensic teams. It looked like every fibre in the building had been processed. For the people working there, it had become personal the moment White and Kline stopped breathing.

I leafed through the list. Everything bagged at the scene had been catalogued, and it all quickly became a blur: numbers, names and descriptions rolling down one page and on to the next. Hairs. Mud. Dust. Powder. Skin. The eleventh and twelfth pages listed evidence recovered from Gobulev's men - dead and alive — at the scene. More fibres. Fingerprints. Illegal firearms, the serial numbers removed. Below that, there were two entries for the two 9mm bullets that had killed Frank White. Both were hollow point, which meant they'd expanded in his chest and head as soon as they'd made contact. He would have died quickly.

I moved on through the rest of the file — interviews, photographs of the scene, what they knew about the surgeon — and when I got to the end dropped it on to my lap and looked out at the cemetery again. It was still quiet. No people. No cars. Only the gentle wheeze of the wipers.

Picking up my phone, I dialled the Carvers. James answered, but Caroline was there as well. I asked him to put me on speakerphone, so I could talk to them both.

'Very quick question,' I said. 'Do either of you recognize the name Frank White — maybe someone Megan knew, or perhaps the police mentioned the name in passing?'

'Doesn’t ring a bell for me,' Carver replied.

I could feel the tension travel down the line. He was answering for himself, not the two of them now.

'Same here,' Caroline said quietly.

People connected. Events connected. Nothing is coincidence. I said goodbye, then dialled Jill's mobile. She was out somewhere. In the background I could hear people talking.

'I'm not disturbing you, am I?'

'No, not at all,' she said. 'I'm doing some shopping'

'Can I ask you a couple of questions?'

'Of course.'

'Do you ever remember Frank mentioning the name Megan Carver?'

A pause. Wasn't she that girl who went missing?'

'Right.'

'I don't think so.'

'He never mentioned being involved in the search for her?'

'No. Why do you ask?'

I paused. You have to ask her — and there's no easy way to phrase it. 'Mind if I ask why you decided to come to the support group this week?'

'What do you mean?'

I mean I'm already working the Megan Carver case, and then you turn up and I end up looking into your husband's death as well. And now I find out there might be some kind of connection. 'I just wondered about the timing, that was all.'

She hesitated. I rode out the silence. There didn't seem to be a lot of mystery to Jill. The grief she felt for her husband seemed real; the shyness seemed genuine. I couldn't see anything behind her reasons for coming to the group other than to get over the death of someone she'd loved. But, even so, the timing was too perfect. She'd all but asked me to look into Frank's death forty-eight hours after the Carvers had first brought me Megan. London was a city of seven million people, and yet somehow I'd ended up with both cases within two days of each other.

'David, I don't know…' She paused. 'I don't know what you're asking me.'

'Frank's name came up in relation to Megan, and I'm trying to work out why. Because Megan is the case I'm working at the moment. The one I told you about. I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm just trying to find the connection.'

'I swear to you, I didn't know they were connected.'

All I had to go on was her voice. The tiny movements in it; the rise and fall of the words. She was either telling the truth or she was a flawless liar.

'I was struggling to cope,' she said. 'That's why I came to the support group. It's been nearly a year, and it's just not getting any easier. I thought the group might help.'

'Did you know I attended the group?'

'No.'

'Had you heard of me before?'

'Absolutely not.'

I paused for a moment. 'Okay.'

'That's the truth, I swear.'

'I believe you,' I said, but wasn't sure if I was committed to what I was saying. Even if she was telling the truth, something was out of kilter somewhere. 'I just needed to be sure.'

'I understand.'

Now she sounded like she was lying. I'd offended her by suggesting she'd arrived at the group with an ulterior motive. Some hidden agenda.

We said goodbye, her voice quiet and distant, and then I turned to the file again, flipping back to the start. I worked it hard: every line, every entry, every detail. But, after twelve pages, the second read-through was the same as the first. No connections. Not to people, not to events and, most importantly, not to the girl I was trying to find.

Then, on page thirteen, I found something.

Midway down, one of the techs had recovered a series of grey hairs. DNA tests revealed that they didn't belong to anyone present at the scene - because they weren't even human. They were from a dog.

A greyhound.

No one recalled seeing a dog at the scene, and the warehouse was kept locked up so wouldn't have been home to any strays - which meant someone brought the hairs with them. Police would have assumed they'd come from a living room somewhere, or a kitchen. But I knew instantly they didn't come from a house.

They came from the Dead Tracks.