The Dead Tracks

Chapter Fifty-five

I got down on to my hands and knees and crawled through the space, through plaster and dust, glass and chunks of brick. Healy followed.

On the other side, the layout was exactly the same as number twenty-nine. It was sparsely furnished: a tall lamp across from us, currently on and plugged into a timer; a worn sofa; a brand-new TV in the corner on a cabinet, with a DVD player and a very old VCR; VHS tapes underneath that. The kitchen had cutlery on the worktops and food packets half open. The stairs were uncarpeted.

By the front windows were two mannequins. Both were naked, though an arm was missing from one — and something was hanging off its face. It looked like a sheet of thin plastic, part of it glued to the side of the mannequin's head.

I stepped closer and touched a finger to the plastic.

But it wasn't plastic.

It was latex.

One side of it was smooth and creamy, almost polished. The other side had more colour and texture. I pulled it across the face of the mannequin and Healy came around behind me, looking over my shoulder.

'What the hell is that?'

I smoothed it down, over the ridges of the mannequin's head. 'It's a face.'

We stepped back, children's toys scattered along the windowsill behind us, teddy bears and plastic animals poking out between the curtains. Everything was here to create silhouettes. To make people outside think normality existed on the inside.

But it didn't.

In front of us the mannequin looked back, its dead gaze peering through the eyeholes in the thin latex mask. Small, pursed lips were visible through the mouth slit. The mask started to slip away again, the glue not strong enough to hold it any more. But not before both of us had realized who was looking back.

Milton Sykes.

I ripped the mask away from the curved plastic dome of the dummy's head. Healy stood beside me, both of us looking down at the latex approximation of Sykes.

It was a skilled piece of work. Not perfect by any means - some of the colouring had run and there was glue and globules of varnish on parts of the skin — but it was good enough to convince. The mask ran from the top of the forehead to either ear and down to just below the chin. Whoever made it had ensured that the forehead was thicker than the rest of the mask to match up with Sykes's most prominent feature. The depth of the latex at the forehead was almost four times as thick as it was on the rest of the face. If anyone had managed to get close enough they might have been able to tell that something was off. But through the glitchy, staccato black-and-white of the CCTV camera in Tiko's, it had looked perfectly lifelike.

I remembered the man at Markham's flat. The weirdness of his face: how his mouth and eyes had moved, but the rest of him had remained perfectly still.

Now I could see why.

We searched the living room. No clay. No sculpting tools. No liquid latex. No paints. No reference materials or pictures of Sykes. There was nothing to suggest the mask had been created inside the house. With something as complex and time-consuming as moulding and styling a latex mask, there would be evidence. Instead, the house was half empty. So it must have been brought here.

Healy walked across the room and looked up into the darkness of the staircase. He flicked on the torch, waving it up and down the steps to check they weren't in the same state of disrepair as the ones next door. Then he tried the light switches next to him on the wall. None of them did anything. He glanced at me and nodded that he was going to have a look around upstairs. I nodded back. As he disappeared into the shadows, just a cone of light as his guide, I headed to the rear of the house.

Clackclackclack.

Something moved in the darkness of the kitchen. Left to right. I side-stepped and leaned left, trying to get a better view around the counter. But there was nothing now. No movement. No sound other than Healy moving around upstairs, the floorboards creaking under his weight.

I took a step forward.

Clackclackclack.

Then there was a faint squeak, like a rusty hinge moving.

I took out my phone, flipped it open and directed the light from the display into the space on the other side of the worktop. A rat scurried away, its claws making a clack- clackclack noise on the linoleum. It headed through a hole between one of the cupboards and the cooker.

As I went around the worktop I saw a second rat, its fat pink tail visible, the rest of its body hidden by one of the units. It wasn't squeaking and it definitely wasn't moving, but there was still a noise. A different one: moist, wet, like it was chewing on something. To my left I spotted Healy coming down the stairs, the torch in front of him. He looked at me and shook his head. Nothing upstairs. Then a fly buzzed past my face. As I went to swat it away I felt another, dozy and unresponsive. A second later, I could hear more.

They were everywhere.

And then my senses opened up: animals, blood — and decay.

I flipped open my phone again, swinging the blue light around to the space behind the counter. The rat moved this time, following the path of the other one.

Clackclackclack.

Except this one left a trail: a series of tiny red marks.

Footprints.

Lying on the floor, half slumped against the kitchen units, was the body of a man. His arms were at his sides, palms up, fingers curled into claws. His eyes stared off into the night, wide and pale, and his clothes, and the lino around him, were covered in blood. His T-shirt had been torn open about halfway down, and on the skin of his chest I could see a series of knife wounds, probably made with a serrated blade: long and thin, thrust in so deep and pulled out so quickly that flesh, muscle and fat had come with it. His trousers were riding up either leg, and one sock was on the other side of the kitchen, among blood spatters that looked like arterial spray.

'So what the fuck are we supposed to do now?' Healy said from behind me, shining the torch into the face of the man on the floor.

We'd found Daniel Markham.