The Dead Tracks

    'What did he say?'

    'He said, 'I can't do this any more.''

    We both nodded, but didn't say anything.

    'The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a hole in the ground.'

    Sona paused, her eyes fixed off to our right, trying to pull memories out of the darkness. She'd been found three weeks after she'd been taken, and while forensics took urine samples, seventy-two hours was normally the ceiling for IDing anything suspicious. Because of that, the police only speculated on what caused the amnesia. It could have been flunitrazepam, better known as Rohypnol. It would explain the headache and the periods of amnesia. Or it could have been something else. Glass was a surgeon, after all; he would know which drug did what, and how it would protect his plans.

    'Going back to the picnic for a second,' Healy said. 'Do you remember anything about your surroundings? It doesn’t matter if it seems small or unimportant.'

    'Most of it… most of it's just a blank.'

    'You mentioned a blanket,' I said. 'Were there a lot of trees?'

    She looked at me. 'I'm not sure.'

    'We think he took you to a place called Hark's Hill Woods. Does that name ring any bells with you? Did Markham ever mention it?'

    Silence. Eyes narrowing. Trying to remember.

    Finally, she shook her head. 'I'm sorry.'

    'It's okay,' I said, holding up a hand. I stopped for a second, to give her time to resettle. 'In your statement, one of the things you did mention was hearing things.'

    'Yes. Visually, I've got this black wall I can't see past.' She paused. Touched a finger to her face. 'But I can remember hearing something.'

    'What do you think it was?'

    She stopped for a moment.

    I leaned forward. 'Sona?'

    She looked up at me. 'Nothing I can make any sense out of.'

    I looked at Healy and shook my head. We'll come back to that. The worst thing we could do was try to force her to remember something. If you tried to force an answer, it either drove them further away or it pressurized them into making something up.

    'Can I ask you about him?' I said.

    'Mark?'

    'No. The man who kept you prisoner.'

    She nodded and shifted a little in her seat. I could smell her perfume briefly, and in the bathroom the extractor fan had finally stopped. Complete silence now.

    'Did you get a look at him?'

    'Never in daylight, but I saw him a couple of times looking down at me from the edge of that hole.'

    'What did he look like?'

    'Dark hair, dark eyes, kind of… ugly, I guess. He had this big forehead, and this horrible smile that looked like it could never… I don't know, form properly.'

    Healy and I glanced at each other. The Milton Sykes mask.

    'Did he speak to you at all?'

    Yes. But always through this microphone thing. There was always static when he spoke. Feedback. He had a series of speakers hooked up inside the place he kept me, and his voice would always come through those. It was…' She paused. 'It was frightening. Why do you think he did that'

    'So he could always communicate,' I said. 'He could talk to you, scare you, tell you whatever he wanted, and he wouldn't even have to be in the same room as you.'

    She nodded.

    'How did you escape?' Healy asked.

    'I woke up,' she said. 'I wasn't meant to. He'd put me under anaesthetic and was…' A pause. Cutting me open. 'But I woke up.' She peered off behind her for a moment, into the bathroom. 'Some days I look at myself in the mirror and wish I hadn't.'

    In the file Healy had given me earlier, it said she had hypopigmentation — a complete loss of skin colour - as a result of a chemical peel that had gone too deep. Phenol and small traces of croton oil had been found in her skin, both of which were used in cosmetic surgery as an exfoliant. Removing the outer layers of skin helped revitalize the face, smoothing out wrinkles in the process. But the peel had burned away too much of Sona's face and gone much too deep, eliminating colouring and freckles. He'd been preparing her skin for treatment for weeks, asking her to apply a liquid moisturizer twice daily. But the end result had gone horribly wrong.

    And that bothered me.

    Glass may have been a surgeon-for-hire but nothing he'd done so far was amateur. He was meticulous. Exact. Covered his tracks. He would know how far to go when performing a face peel, even if the end results weren't as good as you'd find for five figures at a west London clinic. So why go as deep as he did? And why perform the surgery in the first place? Did he just like cutting women up? Somehow I doubted it. A man like this had a plan. He operated on women because it served some wider purpose.

    I watched Sona run a finger across her face, over the bridge of her nose and then along the scar at her hairline. Her nose looked horrific but would recover. The scarring at her ears was a blood red, but would do the same. Her file had called the injuries 'the early stages of rhinoplasty and a rhytidectomy': a nose job and facelift. For the nose job, he'd been cutting from the inside and rasping down the hump. It explained the bruising at the bridge. For the facelift, he'd cut in along her hairline, down past the ear and around the ear lobe to the back. The idea was to separate the skin from the tissue and tighten its appearance. Except he'd never got that far because Sona had woken up. She probably knew how lucky she was. A facelift was the most complicated procedure of them all. Hit a nerve, and the next time you open your eyes it looks like you've had a stroke.

    'What happened after you escaped?'

    She turned back to me. 'I just ran.'

    'Can you describe the place he was keeping you?'

    'By that time, my face was…' She shook her head. 'It was on fire. And I was scared. I don't think I've ever felt so much pain in my life. One of the doctors at the hospital told me a deep peel like that should be performed under anaesthetic. But I woke up from mine. By the time I found my way out, I didn't feel numb any more. I felt everything. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other.'

    She looked between us, then took a moment, holding up her hand to apologize. 'All I remember about the place that he kept me was that it looked like a sewer — except there was nothing running through it. It was all dry. Cleaned out. It looked like it might have been adapted somehow, and he'd built a series of rooms inside it, with big glass windows.'

    'Rooms?'

    'There was a girl in one of them.'

    'Did you get a look at her?' Healy asked, shuffling across the sofa towards her.

    'No.'

    'Was she alive?'

    'Yes.'

    'Did you see anyone else?'

    She shook her head. 'No. No one else.'

    Healy leaned back in his seat, his mind ticking over. I picked up the conversation, trying to keep the momentum going. 'So, you were underground?'

    'Yes. I escaped through a manhole cover — almost like some kind of service tunnel - into the kitchen of this old house. The walls were all decayed and cracked. Everything was a mess. There was an upstairs, but there was no floor. It was just one big room. The roof had broken too, and there was graffiti on the walls and glass all over the place.'

    'Any sign it was lived in at all?'

    'No,' she said. 'No way. It had been abandoned a long time ago.'