The Dead Tracks

Chapter Sixty

Gradually — very gradually — Sona began to tell us about how she met Markham. She was a receptionist at St John's Hospital, where Markham had worked, and he'd gone up and started talking to her. He told her he hated the name Daniel, and that most people at the hospital just called him Mark. He wouldn't have been trying to conceal his identity - everybody at the youth club already knew his real name - so it was likely that when he told Sona about his name he was, for once, telling her the truth.

He'd probably never looked at her twice before then, even though they'd worked in the same place — but then Glass had discovered her somehow, perhaps after following Markham's movements in and around the hospital, and he'd told Markham to move in on her. Blonde hair, blue eyes. She fitted his twisted fantasy perfectly.

Sona revealed how Markham had been nervous and shy to start with, almost as if he was inexperienced with women. But, in truth, he wasn't shy - he was just being eaten up by the idea of leading another woman into the hands of a psychopath.

'Do you remember the day he attacked you?' Healy asked.

She frowned, looking off, running her hand through her hair.

'Not much of it,' she said quietly. 'He took me for a picnic because it was my birthday. I think maybe he drugged me or something. I started feeling a bit off when we got there. Like a headache; a pressure between my eyes.'

You don't remember where you went?'

Sona shrugged. 'He blindfolded me. But I didn't feel scared. I know it sounds odd him blindfolding me, but it wasn't like that. Or, at least, it never felt like that. He said he wanted to take me somewhere as a surprise for my birthday. I trusted him completely. We'd been seeing each other for almost six months.'

Almost six months. That meant Glass had moved Markham on to Sona only days after Megan had been taken.

'What about after the blindfold came off?' Healy asked.

She shook her head. 'No. I mean, I remember snatches of stuff: he laid a blanket out for us, and had brought a picnic basket. And I remember…' She paused. A flicker. 'After he attacked me… I remember looking up at him, and I remember what he said.'

'What did he say?'

'He said, "I can't do this any more."'

We both nodded, but didn't say anything.

'The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a hole in the ground.'

Sona paused, her eyes fixed off to our right, trying to pull memories out of the darkness. She'd been found three weeks after she'd been taken, and while forensics took urine samples, seventy-two hours was normally the ceiling for IDing anything suspicious. Because of that, the police only speculated on what caused the amnesia. It could have been flunitrazepam, better known as Rohypnol. It would explain the headache and the periods of amnesia. Or it could have been something else. Glass was a surgeon, after all; he would know which drug did what, and how it would protect his plans.

'Going back to the picnic for a second,' Healy said. 'Do you remember anything about your surroundings? It doesn’t matter if it seems small or unimportant.'

'Most of it… most of it's just a blank.'

'You mentioned a blanket,' I said. 'Were there a lot of trees?'

She looked at me. 'I'm not sure.'

'We think he took you to a place called Hark's Hill Woods. Does that name ring any bells with you? Did Markham ever mention it?'

Silence. Eyes narrowing. Trying to remember.

Finally, she shook her head. 'I'm sorry.'

'It's okay,' I said, holding up a hand. I stopped for a second, to give her time to resettle. 'In your statement, one of the things you did mention was hearing things.'

'Yes. Visually, I've got this black wall I can't see past.' She paused. Touched a finger to her face. 'But I can remember hearing something.'

'What do you think it was?'

She stopped for a moment.

I leaned forward. 'Sona?'

She looked up at me. 'Nothing I can make any sense out of.'

I looked at Healy and shook my head. We'll come back to that. The worst thing we could do was try to force her to remember something. If you tried to force an answer, it either drove them further away or it pressurized them into making something up.

'Can I ask you about him?' I said.

'Mark?'

'No. The man who kept you prisoner.'

She nodded and shifted a little in her seat. I could smell her perfume briefly, and in the bathroom the extractor fan had finally stopped. Complete silence now.

'Did you get a look at him?'

'Never in daylight, but I saw him a couple of times looking down at me from the edge of that hole.'

'What did he look like?'

'Dark hair, dark eyes, kind of… ugly, I guess. He had this big forehead, and this horrible smile that looked like it could never… I don't know, form properly.'

Healy and I glanced at each other. The Milton Sykes mask.

'Did he speak to you at all?'

Yes. But always through this microphone thing. There was always static when he spoke. Feedback. He had a series of speakers hooked up inside the place he kept me, and his voice would always come through those. It was…' She paused. 'It was frightening. Why do you think he did that'

'So he could always communicate,' I said. 'He could talk to you, scare you, tell you whatever he wanted, and he wouldn't even have to be in the same room as you.'

She nodded.

'How did you escape?' Healy asked.

'I woke up,' she said. 'I wasn't meant to. He'd put me under anaesthetic and was…' A pause. Cutting me open. 'But I woke up.' She peered off behind her for a moment, into the bathroom. 'Some days I look at myself in the mirror and wish I hadn't.'

In the file Healy had given me earlier, it said she had hypopigmentation — a complete loss of skin colour - as a result of a chemical peel that had gone too deep. Phenol and small traces of croton oil had been found in her skin, both of which were used in cosmetic surgery as an exfoliant. Removing the outer layers of skin helped revitalize the face, smoothing out wrinkles in the process. But the peel had burned away too much of Sona's face and gone much too deep, eliminating colouring and freckles. He'd been preparing her skin for treatment for weeks, asking her to apply a liquid moisturizer twice daily. But the end result had gone horribly wrong.

And that bothered me.

Glass may have been a surgeon-for-hire but nothing he'd done so far was amateur. He was meticulous. Exact. Covered his tracks. He would know how far to go when performing a face peel, even if the end results weren't as good as you'd find for five figures at a west London clinic. So why go as deep as he did? And why perform the surgery in the first place? Did he just like cutting women up? Somehow I doubted it. A man like this had a plan. He operated on women because it served some wider purpose.

I watched Sona run a finger across her face, over the bridge of her nose and then along the scar at her hairline. Her nose looked horrific but would recover. The scarring at her ears was a blood red, but would do the same. Her file had called the injuries 'the early stages of rhinoplasty and a rhytidectomy': a nose job and facelift. For the nose job, he'd been cutting from the inside and rasping down the hump. It explained the bruising at the bridge. For the facelift, he'd cut in along her hairline, down past the ear and around the ear lobe to the back. The idea was to separate the skin from the tissue and tighten its appearance. Except he'd never got that far because Sona had woken up. She probably knew how lucky she was. A facelift was the most complicated procedure of them all. Hit a nerve, and the next time you open your eyes it looks like you've had a stroke.

'What happened after you escaped?'

She turned back to me. 'I just ran.'

'Can you describe the place he was keeping you?'

'By that time, my face was…' She shook her head. 'It was on fire. And I was scared. I don't think I've ever felt so much pain in my life. One of the doctors at the hospital told me a deep peel like that should be performed under anaesthetic. But I woke up from mine. By the time I found my way out, I didn't feel numb any more. I felt everything. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other.'

She looked between us, then took a moment, holding up her hand to apologize. 'All I remember about the place that he kept me was that it looked like a sewer — except there was nothing running through it. It was all dry. Cleaned out. It looked like it might have been adapted somehow, and he'd built a series of rooms inside it, with big glass windows.'

'Rooms?'

'There was a girl in one of them.'

'Did you get a look at her?' Healy asked, shuffling across the sofa towards her.

'No.'

'Was she alive?'

'Yes.'

'Did you see anyone else?'

She shook her head. 'No. No one else.'

Healy leaned back in his seat, his mind ticking over. I picked up the conversation, trying to keep the momentum going. 'So, you were underground?'

'Yes. I escaped through a manhole cover — almost like some kind of service tunnel - into the kitchen of this old house. The walls were all decayed and cracked. Everything was a mess. There was an upstairs, but there was no floor. It was just one big room. The roof had broken too, and there was graffiti on the walls and glass all over the place.'

'Any sign it was lived in at all?'

'No,' she said. 'No way. It had been abandoned a long time ago.'

'Anything else you remember?'

There were trees overhead - in the space where the roof should have been. They were kind of crawling through the roof and into the house. But apart from that, I don't remember much. I'm sorry, I just got out of there and ran.'

'Ran where?'

'Towards the river.'

'So the house was on the edge of a river?'

'Yes.'

'What did the house look like from the outside?' I asked.

'Concrete. There were trees and vines and stuff all over the roof and the outside walls.'

'What was around it?'

'Not much.' She shook her head, and I could see the emotion was starting to take over. She brushed a finger to her eye. 'I was just running.'

'To the river?'

'Yes. As fast as I could.'

'Anything else close to the river you remember?'

'The river was narrow. Like, seriously narrow. More like a canal, I guess. Maybe only six feet across. On the other side there was just a concrete wall: high, with no path in front of it.' She wiped an eye again, but the memories were starting to flow now. 'On my side, there was a path, but it was uneven; full of holes and mud. But I didn't take in much after that.'

'Why?'

'He came after me.'

'He chased you?'

Yes.'

'But he obviously didn't catch you?'

'No.'

'Because you fell into the river?'

She nodded. 'I was barefoot. But that path… it was so uneven. So dangerous. I was either going to break my ankle or fall into the water - and I fell into the water.' Sona leaned forward. With her fingers, she parted her hair at the crown of her head. A blood-red line wormed its way across her skull, stitching still visible in it. 'I cracked my head open and must have blacked out for a second before I came to again.'

'What happened then?'

There was a current in the water. I remember him watching me as the river took me away. He ran after me at first, then when he saw I was going too fast, he stopped. Everything was fuzzy, like I was looking through gauze. I could make out trees and I remember the path finishing after a while, and there just being more concrete and more trees. Oh, and there must have been a slight bend because -' Sona paused and rubbed at the scar on her scalp '— after a while, he disappeared from sight.'

'Anything else?' Healy asked.

Her eyes narrowed, trying to fish for memories.

'It's okay, Sona,' I said, keeping the expectation out of my voice. 'If that's it, if that's all you can remember, that's really good.'

'There was maybe a warehouse,' she continued softly, 'but I just remember the current being really fast, and — as it took me away — the pain starting to seriously kick in. After that, I must have blacked out again.'

'You were found near the Royal Docks, right?'

She nodded. They reckon the gown he'd dressed me in blew up and acted as a makeshift buoyancy aid. The current carried me out into the Thames.'

Out from a tributary — which narrowed it down to two possible creeks: Barking or Bow. Both opened out on to the Thames, either side of where she was found. Barking would have made for a simpler investigation: it cut through the city, bisecting Creekmouth and Beckton before roughly following the North Circular through to Ilford. Once it got to Barking itself, it moved in one, relatively straight line north. Bow Creek was different: a two-mile tidal estuary that then fed into the River Lea and became miles and miles and miles of waterways. Her vague description wasn't likely to help: the closer to the Thames you got, the more industry started tracing the path of the water. Eventually all it became was the corrugated iron of warehouse walls and brand-new property developments built on the bones of old ones. If the house was abandoned that might help — but the city's river system was a maze. It would take months to walk it all, even if you narrowed down the distance Sona would have travelled given tidal currents.

I turned to Healy. 'Police haven't found the location of the building yet?'

He looked between Sona and me. Shook his head. 'No. They're not close to finding it.' In his face, I could see what he was saying to me: And that's because this is the most she's talked since she was found.

When I turned back to Sona, she looked tired. She covered one side of her face with a hand - then her mobile phone started buzzing. It was on the sofa next to her. She looked down at it. 'It's Jamie Hart.'

'You should probably answer it,' I said.

'I don't think that's a good idea,' Healy replied.

I turned to him. 'Why do you think they're calling her? Because they guessed we'd come and find her. They're probably already on their way. It's too late.' I turned back to her. 'It's fine to answer it, Sona.'

She picked up the phone. 'Hello?'

'Sona, it's Jamie Hart.'

We could hear him. She looked back at me. I smiled and nodded for her to continue. 'Hello,' she said quietly.

'I just wanted to let you know that we're on our way over.'

I looked at Healy, then back to Sona.

Healy got to his feet and went straight to the window that looked out into the courtyard. Inched the curtains across. Leaned in closer to the glass so he could see along the pathway that led from the main road into the courtyard.

'We're about two minutes out,' Hart said to her.

'Fine.'

'We'll see you in a moment.'

The call ended.

'We need to leave,' Healy said. I glanced at Sona: she was starting to wonder what she'd got herself into now, whether she should have trusted us.

'I just need to ask one more question.'

'Raker,' Healy said. We need to go.'

I held up a hand. 'I know. One question.'

She looked between us.

'You said you couldn't make sense of the things you heard after Markham attacked you, after you blacked out. What did you mean by that?'

Healy was looking at his watch.

She frowned. 'I mean, I heard things. Out-of-place things.'

'Like what?'

Silence.

Then: 'After Mark said "I can't do this any more," everything was black. But…' She paused. 'But I swear I could hear something. I swear I could hear whimpering.'