The Dead Tracks

    'Hello?' Sona said again.

    Out of the darkness of the door came a small, transparent plastic tube. It hit the floor of the room above her, rolled across it and tumbled into the hole. She caught it. The tube was about six inches long and packed with cotton wool. She looked up.

    'Mark?'

    Something else emerged from the black of the doorway. It rolled across the floor, over the lip of the hole and fell towards her. It made a dull whup sound as it landed.

    A plastic bottle.

    She picked it up. Inside was a pale blue liquid, the consistency of water. There were no other labels on the bottle, just a handwritten message: Apply ALL of it to your face, then throw it back up.

    'Mark,' she said, looking up again. 'Mark, this is ridiculous, baby. Why are you doing this?' She wiped one of her eyes. 'Why are you doing this?'

    Silence.

    'Mark, tell me what you want.' She paused. 'This isn't you, baby.' Her voice was starting to break up. 'Mark.' She waited for any sign of movement in the darkness. 'Mark,' she said, tears running down her face now. 'Mark, you bastard! Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing thi—'

    'Put it on your face.'

    She stopped, heart lurching. A whimper passed her lips. Fear moved down her back like a finger tracing the ridge of her spine. She swallowed again.

    'Mark?'

    Something shifted in the blackness of the doorway. She could see a small patch of white now, about the size of a coin.

    A face.

    Then he stepped out of the darkness.

    He moved slowly, looking down at her, his feet stopping right on the lip of the hole. It wasn't Mark. It was another man: black hair in a side parting, pale skin, pinprick black eyes. In his left hand he held something big.

    'Where's Mark?'

    'Put it on your face.'

    She took another step back and bumped against one of the walls.

    'Mark!'

    'Put it on your face.'

    'Mark!'

    'Put in on your fucking face'

    Another surge of fear exploded beneath her ribs, and she shrank into the corner of the hole. His voice. What's wrong with his voice? It was tinny and robotic, and there was a constant wall of static behind it. The confusion pushed her over the edge: tears started running down her cheeks, over her lips, tracing the angle of her neck.

    Mark, she went to say again — but this time she stopped herself.

    Because, above her, the man raised what was in his hand - and dropped it into the hole. It came at her fast, landing hard on the ground about three inches to her right. She shuffled away from it, trying to figure out what it was.

    And then she could see.

    The torso from a mannequin.

    Cream and rigid. Punctured and broken. The middle of the chest had a hole in it, gauze spilling out from the hollow inside.

    'You see that?' he said from the top of the hole, fingers twitching, a smile like a lesion worming its way across his face. 'Do you see that dummy?'

    He paused. The word dummy glitched a little, and then there was a fuzzy noise, like interference. Sona whimpered, sinking all the way down into the corner of the hole.

    'I'm going to sew your fucking head to it.'

Chapter Twenty-four

    I got the number for the youth club, but, after the tenth unanswered ring, killed the call. I then dialled the Carvers' number and asked if I could stop by. James told me they'd be in until midday, but Saturday afternoons were when they took his mother out for a drive. She spent the rest of her week in a nursing home in Brent Cross.

    The journey over took forty minutes. I went via Barton Hill, to get a sense of where it was. It was closed. A brass sign on the front said it was open Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The building was about a quarter of a mile from the Carvers' place - close to King's Cross station, in a thin triangle of land between two main roads — and had all the aesthetic beauty of a shipping container: no windows; corrugated steel panels to about the eight-foot mark, where uniform red brickwork took over; and a big rusting door with an oversized padlock. Maybe all the money had been spent on the inside.

    I got back on to Pentonville Road and headed for the Carvers'. At the house the gate was already open. I walked up the drive and saw James Carver standing in the entrance, filling it with his huge frame, his eyes watching the skies as dark clouds finally began to rupture and rain started to fall. We shook hands and moved inside.

    Caroline was in the kitchen. She looked up and said hello to me. Immediately I could feel an atmosphere between the two of them. Carver obviously still felt betrayed by her. I imagined, in a strange way, he also felt like he didn't know his daughter as well as his wife had; a feeling magnified further now she'd disappeared.

    We sat in the living room while Caroline put some coffee on. Behind us, in the corner of the room, Leigh was playing with a wooden train set.

    'How are things going?' Carver asked.

    'They're progressing. I've got a couple of good leads. One is the reason I'm here today.'

    He held up his hands. 'Whatever it takes.'

    Caroline came through with a tray of coffees and some biscuits. She laid them down on the glass table between us. I thanked her, and took one of the mugs.

    'Is one of the leads Charlie Bryant?' Carver asked.

    Their eyes were both fixed on me now, waiting for the answer. On the drive over, I'd decided I wasn't going to bring up the events of the previous day — even though they'd probably read about it in the morning papers. But now they were looking at me and asking me what they really wanted to know: Is Megan dead as well?

    'At the moment there's nothing to connect this to Megan, other than the fact that she knew him.'

    Deep down, in their darkest moments, they'd probably glimpsed a similar end for their daughter. Her in a field, or in a backstreet. Them standing in the subdued light of a morgue while Megan's body, naked and broken, lay rigid in front of them.

    'Does the name Barton Hill mean anything to you?'

    Carver frowned. Caroline started nodding.

    'Yes,' she said. 'Megan used to go there until she disappeared. It's a youth club, some kind of community project. They help teenagers with cerebral palsy.'

    'Ah, the youth club,' Carver said, trying a little too hard. I'd been right: he definitely felt like he was standing on the wrong side of the glass now; staring in at a daughter, and her mother next to her, wondering what else lay buried at their feet.

    'So can you tell me anything else about it?'

    Caroline shrugged. She was still prickly. Carver flicked a look at her. She picked up on it and turned back to me. 'Only what Megan told me. They laid on activities for kids with cerebral palsy, gave them a chance to do something normal, while giving their parents a break.'

    'So what made her decide to start going?'