birthday almost a year previously. He'd held it in a golf club in Surrey. We sat by the windows, looking out at the course, both of us nursing whiskies. He was mourning the onset of his sixties. I was mourning the death of my wife.
I tried returning the call, but no one answered, and I allowed my thoughts to quickly turn back to Megan, the man in the nightclub — and Milton Sykes.
In the spare bedroom I booted up the computer, logged on to the internet and printed out everything I could find on Sykes. I wanted as much information as I could get on his life, his upbringing, his crimes and his arrest. I wasn't sure how it fitted into what I had, but the obvious physical similarities between Sykes and the man in Tiko's couldn't be ignored — and neither could the idea of a copycat. I noted down the most important information and moved carefully through the rest, making sure nothing was missed. When I was done on the first read-through, I flipped back to the start and reread it. Then a third time. Two hours later, I had sixteen pages of notes.
I turned back to the computer and logged into my Yahoo. There was an email waiting. It was sent from Terry Dooley's home address: no subject line, no message, but a PDF attachment. I dragged it to the desktop and opened it up. It was the missing-person's file Colm Healy had set up for his daughter, and a few miscellaneous pages tagged on to the end covering the subsequent search for her.
I started going through it.
Leanne Healy disappeared three months before Megan, on 3 January. She was older, at twenty, and not nearly as capable at school. She'd left at sixteen with middling results, and gone to college to study Beauty and Holistic Therapies, before dropping out after six months. From there she got a job in a local supermarket, which she stuck for another year and a half, then went back to college, this time to do a National Diploma in Business. She completed the course two years later with decent, if unspectacular, grades, and had spent the time between the end of her course and the date she disappeared struggling to find work. On 2 January she'd finally got something: as a full-time office junior at a recruitment agency. Twenty- four hours later, she was gone.
Physically she wasn't too dissimilar to Megan. Neither of them were overweight, but they definitely weren't skinny girls. They had a nice shape to them, but their height — five-five to five-six - would have prevented them from turning heads in the way they might have done at a few inches taller. Megan was definitely the better-looking of the two. She had a natural warmth, obvious in her pictures, which added to her attractiveness. Leanne looked harder work, and less inclined to make the effort, which came across in the only photograph in the file; she was standing outside a house, straggly blonde hair covering part of her face. In the light, and because of the fuzzy quality of the picture, her smile looked more like a scowl.
Surprisingly, Healy's version of the events leading up to Leanne's disappearance didn't differ all that much from his wife Gemma's. Neither account mentioned him hitting her, although Gemma said he'd become 'angry and aggressive' when he found out she'd been having an affair. Healy himself tried to claim the moral high ground early on in his own statement, talking about the sanctity of marriage, before admitting he 'may have scared' his wife when she told him the truth about her affair. He described 'getting a little closer to her' than he should have done, and 'swearing at her'. At one point, midway through the transcript, Gemma told her interviewer, 'If Colm dedicated as much time to his family as his work, Leanne probably wouldn't have left that night.'
The last person to see Leanne alive was one of her brothers. They'd been home together on the afternoon of
Sunday 3 January, watching a DVD. In the middle of it, Leanne told him she needed to pop out. She left at three- thirty, and never came home again. At eight, her brother called Gemma, who was at a friend's house having dinner, and told her what had happened. Gemma phoned Healy, who was at work. Seven hours later, Healy called in her disappearance, and she was registered as a missing person.
Right at the back of the file was a black-and-white MISSING poster, the same photo of Leanne in the corner
The list of places were mostly pubs and clubs, as well as the address of the college she'd gone to, and the name of a coffee shop just around the corner from her parents' house, where she'd spent most Saturday mornings studying in the run-up to her exams. But then, in among them, I spotted a name and address I recognized:
The same youth club Megan had gone to.
And the place she'd met the man who'd got her pregnant.
Sona woke. The first thing she could see was a line of light above her, about an inch wide and maybe six feet in length. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized she was lying on a mattress in some kind of hole. It had a dirt floor and brick walls, water trails running down them. Above her, out of reach, was a trapdoor. The thin line of light was where it didn't fit properly against the mouth of the hole.
The hole must have been eight feet deep. It was cut out of the floor, and through the sliver of light above she could see snatches of a steel cabinet, a sink and a clear bottle of something sitting on a counter.
It looked like some kind of utility room.
'Help me!'
No sound came back. No response. No movement. She got to her feet, using the wall for support, and then stopped for a moment: her head still throbbed, and she could feel bruising around her jaw. She closed her eyes, trying to compose herself, then started circling the hole, angling her head in order to get a better look at what was beyond the trapdoor. All she could see were parts of the same unit: more of the steel sink, more of the same cabinet. Nothing else. No shadows shifting. No sign of life.
'Mark!'
Silence.
'Mark,
More silence.
This time she screamed until her voice gave way, until her heart was racing in her chest — beating a rhythm against her ribcage — and tears were blurring her vision. After she wiped them away, she closed her eyes and saw him there in the darkness: lying next to her in her bed and then leading her into the woods.
Her eyes snapped open.
A noise from above. She reached up, her fingers clawing at the walls, nails dragging through the water trails. 'Help me! I've been kidnapped! Help me!'
Then everything - her voice, the water against her fingers, the gentle buzz from somewhere up above — was drowned out by the sound of feedback. It burst from the walls of the room above the hole, turned up so loud it was distorting whatever speaker it was being piped from. She covered her ears. Even eight feet under the ground, it was like having her face glued to an amp the size of a house.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.
And the trapdoor shifted away from the hole.
Her heart shifted, the noise still ringing in her ears, and a flutter of fear took flight through her chest. When she swallowed it felt like shards of glass were passing into her stomach.
'Hello?'
The trapdoor came away completely and the room appeared. She could see the rest of the steel cabinet extending across the length of an entire wall. A bare wall next to that, a huge crack running down it. Another sink.
A glass-fronted bathroom cabinet, full of pill bottles. A red door, the paint blistered, with a glass panel in it. It was open, but there was only blackness beyond. From the top of the trapdoor cover, a rope snaked off, into the dark of the doorway.
