The Dead Tracks

dressed in a skirt and vest. She looked fantastic. Dark, playful eyes; long chocolate-coloured hair; slim, gentle curves. We'd never talked about the relationships she'd had since her daughter was born, but it seemed impossible that there wouldn't have been some. She was beautiful without ever suggesting she knew it, which only made her more attractive.

    She returned a couple of minutes later. In her hands was an envelope. 'Here,' she said, and handed it to me.

    'Are you charging for the coffee?'

    'Ha ha — you're a funny man, Raker. No, one of my old clients just opened a new place. I don't know what it's like, but maybe you can treat a few of the guys at the group one week. Working in law, I have no real friends, so it makes more sense for you to have them.'

    She was smiling.

    I looked inside the envelope. There were eight vouchers with the name of a newly opened Italian restaurant in Acton at the top. Each one got you a free main course.

    'Are you sure?' I asked.

    'Yeah, absolutely.'

    I glanced at her, then down at the vouchers again. Don't think it through. Just do it. I looked up. She was watching me again, that same look on her face.

    'Are you free Friday?'

    She paused. Didn't say anything. 'Don't feel like you need to ask me —'

    'I'm asking you because I want to.'

    She moved back to the sofa, brought her legs up under her so they were crossed, then broke out into another smile. Yes,' she said. 'I'm free.'

    'Then it looks like we're eating Italian.'

Chapter Seven

    Megan's plastic storage box was still on the kitchen counter when I got in. I took it through to the living room and sat down at the table, spreading the contents out in front of me in three separate piles: jewellery, letters and photographs.

    I went through the jewellery first. Some gold chains. A bracelet. A couple of rings. In the middle of them all was a necklace. It was unusual, almost out of place among her other things: a shard of dark glass, possibly obsidian, on a long black cord. I held it up in front of me and, as I watched it turn slowly in my hands, realized Megan's initials were inscribed on the back. I set the necklace down, away from the rest of the jewellery, and turned to the letters.

    Handwritten letters were pretty rare now so I imagined the ones in the box would be at least a couple of years old. But I was out by another two. There were five, all unsent, all to her grandparents in Norfolk, the last written in the week after her thirteenth birthday.

    Next, I headed to the spare room and fired up the computer. Megan's camera used a standard Sony USB lead, the same as mine. I plugged it in and copied the pictures across to my desktop. Most of them mirrored the Megan in the photographs I already had of her, so I turned to the last one at the block of flats.

    Everything was much clearer. Two metal doors, reinforced glass panels in them. Blobs of sunlight shining in the glass, with only the merest hint of anything else: maybe a tree reflected, and perhaps the edge of another building. There were sandy-yellow bricks behind Megan, on the right-hand side, and she was dressed in a dark pair of jeans, a black V-neck sweater, a thick bomber jacket and a red scarf.

    And there was that smile.

    I opened one of the other pictures of her with Leigh at the beach, and positioned them side by side. Different times. Different places. Different smiles. The smile on the beach was warm, but created. A smile for the camera, not for anyone beyond that. This one was different. There was nothing put-on about it. This smile carved across her face, filled up her eyes and brought colour to the surface of her cheeks. I needed to find out where she was in the picture.

    But, more than that, I needed to find out who had taken it.

    Using the password the police had given the Carvers, I accessed Megan's email. There were forty-two messages in her inbox, most of them automatically generated newsletters from companies she must have bought from or visited in the past. Three others caught my eye: two from Kaitlin, and one from Lindsey. All of them had been sent in the aftermath of Megan's disappearance, and — when I opened them up - they were all asking her to come home, or at least call her parents. The police had probably questioned the girls about the emails, and checked their accounts for replies.

    Right at the bottom was a mail from a charity called the London Conservation Trust. It seemed slightly out of sync with the high-street stores, fast-food restaurants and cinema times that made up her other emails, so I clicked on it. It opened on to a bland-looking newsletter detailing the LCT's concern about urban development, and the impact it was having on wildlife in the city's parks. It thanked Megan for her donation of ?10 and said the money would be put to use ensuring wildlife was protected in the face of the continued expansion of the city.

    Suddenly, my phone started ringing.

    'David Raker.'

    'David, it's Spike.'

    Spike was a Russian hacker living in a tiny flat in Camden Town, whom I'd known since my paper days. Back then, I'd used him a lot. He could get you an address, a phone number, a credit card statement, even bank account details — basically anything you wanted. The riskier the job, the more you had to pay him, but back then — when the story was all that mattered - he'd helped me break some big ones. I'd only ever met him once in the flesh: he was painfully thin and pale, as if he barely saw daylight. It was probably something to do with the fact that he was five years past the expiration of his student visa and never ventured outdoors.

    I'd called him earlier in the evening, before I went out to the restaurant, and asked him to get me Megan's mobile phone records for the three months running up to her disappearance, and for the six months since.

    'Spike — thanks for calling me back.'

    'Hey, no problem - sorry it's so late.' I could hear him tapping something into a keyboard. 'So I got what you wanted here. There's a lot of calls.'

    'How many?'

    'Two hundred and seventy-four, plus four hundred and ninety-two texts.'

    'That should be a fun evening in. Any after 3 April this year?'

    'Uh…' He paused. 'No. None. How come?'

    'That's what I'm trying to find out.' I logged out of Megan's email account, and moved to mine. 'Any chance you could email me that information? Can you turn it into a PDF or a JPEG or something?'

    'Yeah. I'll PDF it. It'll be there in a couple of minutes.'

    'Nice one, thanks.'

    'You got my new drop-off details?'

    Spike was a cash-only man, for obvious reasons. He had a locker in a sports centre close to his flat, and he gave his customers the access code, which he changed every day. The locker was his bank.

    'I got it. I might need you for something in a bit, though.'

    'Yeah, no problem. You know I'm not a nine-to-five man.'

    I hung up. By the time I'd put in the username and password for my Yahoo account, the email and PDF were waiting there for me. I dragged off the PDF and opened it up. Thirty entries per page. Twenty-five and a half pages.

    I went back through to the kitchen and turned on the coffee machine.

    Two hours later, at almost two o'clock in the morning, I'd narrowed her list of calls down to eighteen different numbers. A couple I recognized off the bat: her home number; her mum's and dad's mobile phones; a few others from her Book of Life. The rest I'd never seen before.