The Dead Tracks

    'Charlie, Hotel, Alpha, November, Charlie, Echo. Case number 827-499.'

    There was no reply. Healy looked at his watch and back at me, nodding as if this was how things were supposed to go.

    'Winter.'

    A female voice. So quiet, for a second I wasn't sure if it had come from another house. Healy leaned in again. 'Wintergreen,' he said.

    'Spring,' the voice said again.

    'Springboard,' Healy replied.

    Then everything went quiet again. As we waited, I realized I could hear a TV beyond the door, muffled but audible. Two people were arguing. Healy turned to me, then back to the door. The code confirmed he was part of the task force, even if he wasn't. The responses to her would have been words only known by those intimate to the investigation: the trusted members of the task force Healy had described.

    'What do you want?'

    Her voice. A little louder now, but still small.

    'My name is Detective Sergeant Colm Healy,' he said, adding a softness to his voice that I hadn't heard before. 'I'm part of Operation Gaslight. We haven't met before but I was hoping I might be able to speak to you for a few minutes. We've had some further developments in the case and I'd like to run a couple of things past you.'

    I thought I heard something: paper being leafed through.

    'You're not one of the names on my list.'

    'I know.' He looked at me. There was an expression in his face that suggested this wasn't going according to plan. 'If you come to the window, I will hold up my ID.'

    More pages being turned. Then the sound of footsteps. Healy backed away and stepped towards the window, which was adjacent to the door. He held up his warrant card at the glass. The curtain twitched and opened. In the V-shaped gap, we could see a woman, mostly just silhouette, arms on the curtains either side of her. Her eyes moved from the warrant card to Healy, and then to me. The curtain fell back into place. More footsteps.

    'Who's he?'

    'His name's David Raker. He's a missing persons investigator. He's been trying to trace the whereabouts of Megan Carver.'

    'He's not on the list either.'

    'Megan Carver was taken by the same man who took you.'

    More silence. Even to my ears, even knowing that Healy was basically telling the truth, it sounded suspicious. Two men, neither of whom was on the list of contacts she'd been given by the task force, turning up on her doorstep at ten o'clock at night. Only one with ID. One not even employed by the Met. If she'd refused to let us in, it wouldn't have been a surprise. Instead there was a noise, like a lock sliding across, and the door opened a fraction on a chain.

    In the gap, we could see blonde hair and a sliver of face. An eye. Part of the nose. Some of the cheek. Her eye darted between us and then out into the courtyard.

    'Can I see your ID again, please?' she said.

    Healy nodded. 'Of course.'

    He took out a small black wallet and removed his warrant card, handing it to her through the gap in the door. She took it, disappeared for a moment as she checked it, then gave it back to him. She looked at me. 'And you?'

    I got out my wallet, slid out my driver's licence and a business card, and handed it to her. She studied it, then disappeared out of sight. Somewhere in the background I could hear a gentle tap tap. About a minute later, she reappeared. Eye flicking between the licence and me. Then, finally, she handed it back and pushed the door closed. The sound of the chain being removed. Healy looked at me once again, this time not saying anything, the same message as earlier etched on his face: Don't act surprised.

    The door opened.

    Framed by the doorway, Sona looked between us. She'd been beautiful. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. A sculpted face that swept through a thin nose and high cheekbones. She was dressed in tracksuit trousers and a vest, her arms exposed. Even as forty approached, she was still slender, the skin on her arms a pale pink, her fingers long and graceful, as unblemished and smooth as a twenty-year- olds. In her file, I remembered reading she was once a catalogue model. It was easy to imagine.

    Except, now, imagine was all you could do.

    Glass had been halfway through surgery when she'd woken up. Pale blotches covered much of her face, like dye spreading beneath her skin. Both cheeks were entirely bleached. Even whiter lines had formed in the creases in her forehead and in the gentle cleft of her chin, as if something had run across her face and collected there. And it had spread to her neck too, along the ridges of her throat. A scar followed her hairline on the right side of her face, and a second one in the same position on her left. There was bruising too, where the blotches hadn't formed: at the bridge of her nose it was almost black, like the advanced stages of frostbite; and under both eyes purple-blue smears moved down into her cheeks. Her eyes fell on me, chips of blue stone, narrowing slightly as if waiting for me to react to the sight of her. I nodded once, smiled, but didn't break my gaze. She stepped back from the door, glanced at Healy and invited us both in.

    Immediately inside was a thin hallway that opened out into a living room, three other rooms leading from it. The first was the kitchen. Plates were piled in the sink, one on top of the other. The next was a bedroom with only a bed and a stand-alone wardrobe. The last was the bathroom. The extractor fan was still on as we came in, condensation on the mirrors and her towel lying in the middle of the floor.

    The living room was sparse: two sofas, both of which looked about five years past their sell-by date, and a television on a cardboard box, leads snaking off to a Sky decoder on the floor behind it. There was a small coffee table in the corner. Books were stacked up on it, in two piles: ones that looked as if they'd been read, and ones that looked new. A magazine lay on the floor between one of the sofas and the TV, a crossword puzzle half filled in. There was a laptop as well. It's where the tap tap had come from. On the screen I could see she'd done a Google search for my name. The first hit had taken her to the BBC website, where a news report recounted what had happened on my case before Christmas. There was a photo of me leaving a police station, flanked by Liz.

    She dropped back on to one of the sofas. Next to her was a remote control. She picked it up and turned off the TV.

    We both sat.

    'How are you feeling?' Healy asked, smiling again. It was weird seeing him like this. Smiling didn't seem to come easily to him, but he was a convincing Mr Nice Guy.

    'Okay,' she said quietly.

    She looked between us, waiting for us to react to her face. When no reaction came, she nodded at a sheet of paper on top of the TV. It was the list of names she'd been referring to. From where I was sitting, it looked like there were only about six. At the top were the words Operation Gaslight. At the bottom, in the same handwriting: These people ONLY.

    'Why aren't you on the list?' she said to Healy.

    Healy looked at me, and then back at Sona. He sat forward. 'Okay, truth time. I'm on the task force, but I'm on the outside. Not as far in as I'd like to be.'

    A flash of fear in her face.

    'It's all right,' he said, holding up a hand. He paused, glanced at me. Another pause, as if unsure whether to commit himself. 'Nine months ago, my daughter was taken — just like you.'

    Her expression changed; the embers of the fear fading, replaced by a flicker of surprise. She looked between us but didn't say anything.

    'I know the man who took you, took her. I knew it as soon as we got to you. I knew it was the same prick…' He stopped. 'Sorry.'

    Sona just nodded.