'How do you take it?' he asked.
'Black.'
He got out and headed into the shop.
I opened up the folder and pulled out the files. Megan's was on top. I read through it. The investigation added up to very little. They'd identified the email from the London Conservation Trust as a potential line of enquiry, and made mention of the map on the website, but both leads had hit dead ends. As I'd suspected, without pinpointing the guy in Tiko's, they didn't have Sykes, and they didn't have the connection to the woods. Attached were interviews with everyone who had ever worked at the youth club. I searched for Daniel Markham's and read over it. It was bland enough not to raise any alarms, and the answers he gave were solid and believable. Like the file at the youth club, it listed him as single - but this time it said he was divorced from his wife Susan.
There wasn't much space in the car, but I attempted to lay the seven different files out on the dashboard, next to one another. Then I discovered there weren't seven.
There were eight.
The eighth file was thin and different from the others. Inside was a single sheet of A4, all the pertinent details blacked out. No name. No address. No personal information, other than the place of birth and family status. Mother dead. Father still alive. One sister. The only other thing that faced out at me was a photograph. Female. Blonde hair. Blue eyes.
I set the file aside and started to move through the others one by one. Photos of the women looked out at me. None of them had a record, so the pictures were all personal, taken by friends and family members. Megan, at seventeen, was the youngest by a clear three years. The rest fluctuated between twenty and forty-five.
It was unusual for serial crime to cover such a wide age range, but he was picking victims based on appearance, not age. What criteria did blonde, blue-eyed, medium- build women fill for him? And what else tied them together? I read on a little further and discovered that all the women were single or not dating seriously, and most were pursuing careers rather than jobs that just paid the mortgage. They were intelligent, attractive and well educated. Even Megan, still at school, could be put into that bracket. The only one who looked out of sync was Leanne: average at school, plainer than the others.
So where did Daniel Markham fit in? Megan - and presumably Leanne - he'd got to know through the youth club, but the others had no connection to Barton Hill, and judging by the files, no connection to each other. But they weren't random victims. This was an utterly methodical man. One who plotted, planned and scoped out. He was organized and sociable, he was intelligent and he didn't look out of place. Maybe that was Markham. Maybe that was Glass. Maybe it was both of them, and they were working together — or maybe they were one and the same.
For a second, I thought of the families, most of whom were still praying for sightings or — in their darkest hour — perhaps even hoping a body would be found so they could at least get some closure. But the police knew things ran deeper. Phillips, Hart, Davidson, they all knew. Anger worked its way up from my stomach.
Seconds later, Healy emerged from Starbucks, two giant coffee cups in a cardboard tray. I took the files down from the dashboard, collected them together and took the cup he handed me.
'Right,' he said, bouncing the car off the pavement. 'Time to go.'
We moved past Hyde Park to the south, and Regent's Park to the north. But then, two minutes further along Euston Road, we hit traffic. Healy braked gently, leaned over and turned up the heaters. It was cold. Mist had started crawling in across the windscreen, and rain had begun dotting the glass. With his foot on the brake, he peeled the lid off his coffee and looked down at it.
'You find out anything more about Markham?' I asked.
'Maybe. He's not on the National Computer, but - like you said — if he cleared a CRB check, he won't have any kind of record anyway. His home address is listed as the one we already know about at Mile End.'
'No other addresses?'
'No. The guy's Mr Average. You read his interview, right?'
'Yeah, it listed him as a consultant.'
'Over at St John's.'
'The hospital?'
'It's about a mile from his flat.' Healy paused, looked at me. 'I called them to ask about him. He's a psychiatrist.'
'That's not much like a plastic surgeon.'
Healy nodded. 'I don't think he's Glass.'
'I was thinking the same.'
'So where Does he fit in?'
'Were any of the women patients of his?'
'No.'
I drummed my fingers on the dash. 'He was divorced.'
'Yeah.'
'Did anyone try to find his ex-wife?'
'She wasn't too hard to find.'
'How come?'
'She got placed in a psych facility up in Hertfordshire a couple of years back. Markham tried treating her himself, but couldn't work his magic. When he got given the all- clear after the first round of interviews, it was decided she was a line of enquiry not worth pursuing.'
'So have you looked since?'
'I pulled her records after you made bail yesterday. She had some sort of Grade A nervous breakdown after the divorce. Ended up getting fired from her job, got sick, then spent a year trying to kill herself. Markham had to have her committed.'
'Is she still at the hospital?'
'No.'
'Where is she?'
'Looks like she was released in May last year.'
'She might be worth talking to.'
'If you can find her. I called the hospital yesterday to try and get a last known address but she never turned up to any of the post-release support groups, and they never saw her again.'
'At all?'
He shook his head. 'At all.'
We both looked at each other, and I could see we were thinking the same thing: it wasn't coincidence that another woman connected with Markham had disappeared into thin air. 'Did he have an alibi for the day Megan disappeared?'
'He was working.'
'Did you ask the hospital if he was working today?'
'Yeah. They told me that he'd been off ill for two days.'
'Really?'
'Really. Some sort of flu virus.'
'There wasn't much Lemsip at his flat yesterday. In fact, there wasn't much of anything. The place looked like it had been cleared out.'
'Maybe that's why he's been off work.'
Except his flat didn't have the look of somewhere completely abandoned. Items remained in place. Furniture. The heating was still firing up. The lights still worked.
Finally, the traffic started to move. I looked at Healy.
'There's an eighth file,' I said.
He brought the cup up to his lips and swallowed some coffee. When he put it down again, his fingers twitched, just as they had the day before. He'd definitely been a smoker once, but not any more. He didn't carry the smell and neither did the car. There were no cigarette packets inside, and — in over an hour of being on the road — he hadn't expressed the need to smoke once. But it still ate away at him, and his fingers still reacted to having
