The Dead Tracks

    'There was a work placement scheme going on at her school,' Caroline said, glancing at her husband. He looked like he didn't know any of this either. 'She really wanted to do something with disadvantaged kids, and kids with disabilities. So she spoke to her teachers and they came back with a list of places where she could go and get some experience for a fortnight. Barton Hill was where she ended up.'

    'And she kept going after the work placement ended?'

    Caroline nodded. 'She liked it.'

    'Did you ever meet the people who ran it?'

    'Only in passing. Jim usually did his weekly accounts on a Wednesday night, so I ended up being the one that ferried her back and forth. I met a few of the people there, just from taking her and picking her up again.'

    'Anyone you remember?'

    She paused, thought about it. 'The guy who ran it was called Neil Fletcher. There were two or three others, but I never really talked to them much.'

    'Did Megan ever talk about meeting anyone there?'

    They both looked at me, eyes brightening, brains ticking over. Suddenly, James Carver was right back in a conversation he'd been slowly drifting out of.

    'Do you think she went off with someone she met there?' he said.

    'No, I don't think so,' I lied.

    I could have told them the truth: that I had a reason to believe she did. That the youth club, and someone who worked there, may have been linked to her pregnancy and her disappearance. But there were things I needed to find out first. There were questions that needed to be answered. And there was a man, somewhere, who knew the truth about where Megan was - and whether we'd ever find her alive.

Chapter Twenty-five

    An hour later, I was opening the door to the office and my phone was going. I looked at the display. It was Spike.

    'David. Sorry it's taken me a while.'

    'No worries. What have you got for me?'

    I heard him tapping. 'Okay, the PO box number you asked me to look at…' He paused. More tapping. 'It's for a charity called… uh, the London Conservation Trust.'

    Megan had had an email from them. I sat down at my desk and booted up the computer. I'd called them when Spike had first got Megan's telephone records over to me, and all I'd got in return was a short answerphone message. No mention of the charity. No thank you for calling. Just a bored-sounding man in an empty room.

    'Anything else?'

    'The street address is 150 Piccadilly.'

    'One-fifty?'

    'Yeah. The building's called Minotaur House.'

    I pulled a pad across the desk and started to write down the address. Then stopped, 150 Piccadilly.

    That's the Ritz,' I said quietly.

    'Huh?'

    '150 Piccadilly. That's the address for the Ritz.'

    'The hotel?'

    'Yeah, the hotel.'

    The computer pinged as the desktop appeared. I fired up the internet browser and entered the URL for the Ritz. At the bottom was their street address: 150 Piccadilly. I went to Google and searched for Minotaur House, got nothing, then headed to the Charity Commission website. No mention of the London Conservation Trust there either.

    The address was false.

    And the charity didn't exist.

    I thanked Spike, hung up and went to Megan's Hotmail. The email from the London Conservation Trust was right at the bottom. It had been sent on 27 March. Seven days before Megan disappeared. The design of the newsletter was plain and uninspiring: a green banner across the top with a clean but basic logo, all in a pale green. The 'T' of the Trust was a tree. Beneath the logo was a short message, thanking her for her donation of ?10 and telling her the money would be put to protecting parkland. There was no street address or phone number. No links or attachments.

    I read the message.

    Dear Megan,

    Thank you for your donation of ?10. We want to protect the city's parkland and make a genuine difference - and that means we don't just want to imagine a world where animals are running free in their natural habitat, we want to see it in action!

    At the time of writing, we are engaged in ten different campaigns, and every pound you send to us helps maintain parks and parklands in our capital, and in turn brings flora, animals and people together.

    If you want to be on the frontline, join our march to Parliament next Monday where we will be trying to persuade government ministers to make the protection of local wildlife more of a priority in the coming year. See the website for more details or enter your email to sign up to our weekly newsletter and get the most up-to-date info delivered straight to your inbox!

    Yours sincerely,

    G. A. James

    I put the London Conservation Trust, LCT and the name G. A. James into Google. The LCT got no hits, and the name got nothing in relation to the charity. The incongruous nature of the email had stopped me briefly the first time I'd read it earlier in the week, but only because it was totally out of sync with every other message in Megan's inbox. In truth, it sounded enough like a charity newsletter to pass under most people's radar; a little too jokey and vague, but nothing that would immediately stand out. I scanned it again, reading it over for a second time. See the website for more details.

    Except there was no website.

    Or was there?

    The email address the message had been sent from was [email protected]. I put www.lct.co.uk into another tab on the browser and hit Return. Within seconds, a website was loading. It was a plain site. No real design. No flair. It mirrored the newsletter in its pale green colouring, but the banner at the top, which was presumably where the logo was supposed to be, had corrupted and failed to load. Down the left was a menu with five options: HOME, ABOUT US, OUR PROJECTS, CONTACT, DONATE. The rest of the page had nothing on it except under construction! in big black letters and some random letters and numbers right at the bottom. When I tried the options on the left, they all took me through to 404 Error pages, except for the last one: DONATE. Clicking on that brought up a secure login box, asking for a username and password. What charity asked you to enter a username and password before donating? And where was the option to sign up to the newsletter? I doubted there was one. Everything about the site was off — but it must have been created for a reason, to serve some purpose.

    As an experiment, I put in Megan's email address as a username and the password for her Hotmail account below that. The box juddered, flashed up Incorrect username and password, and closed. I clicked on DONATE again. This time, I tried Megan's email prefix, 'megancarveri 7', for the username and the same Hotmail password.

    Wrong again.

    Think.

    The police would have worked Megan's phone records in the same way I had. They would have seen that the street address for the PO box was phoney and the building name false. They would have been led to the email,