The Dead Tracks (18 page)

    'Can
I go now?' Dooley asked.

    'What
about a guy called Healy?'

    
'Colm
Healy?'

    'Yeah
— you know him?'

    'Yeah,
everyone knows Colm. He was a good copper back in the day. Worked murders with
me for a while. Nose like a bloodhound.'

    'He's
not good any more?'

    'He's
had…' He stopped. 'He's had a few personal problems.'

    'Like
what?'

    'His
wife left him, his kids hated his guts. He had this unsolved which pretty much
broke him for a year. He had to take a month off on stress leave, and when he
came back he was about half the cop and twice the man. He looked like the
Goodyear blimp last time I saw him.'

    'Why'd
his wife leave?'

    'Cos
he spent most of his life chained to a desk working murders. She ended up
banging some other guy, and when Colm found out he flipped.'

    '
And did what?'

    'Punched
her lights out and put her into a neck brace for eight weeks. She lost the
hearing in one of her ears for a while. The kids had already turned on him, so
he didn't do himself any favours there. I think he had three - two boys, one
girl. Girl ends up having a massive barney with him; tells him she can't even
stand to be in the same room as him any more. Just ups and leaves a couple of
days later.'

    'Moves
out?'

    'Disappears.'

    'As
in, vanishes?'

    'Into
thin air.'

    'Really?'

    'Yeah,
really.'

    I
stopped for a moment. Healy's daughter was gone, just like Megan.
So that's
why he was so interested.
Maybe he thought there might be a connection
between them. Or maybe he'd already found one.

    'Was
she ever registered as a missing person?'

    'Why,
you hoping to make some money?' Dooley laughed at his joke. Yeah, Healy and his
missus got back together for one last gig and tried to find her. Healy drafted
in a couple of guys from the Met to help him out for a few weeks, but the whole
thing hit the skids. When nothing turned up, the hired help drifted away and
the bosses put them back on other investigations.'

    'Can
you email me the missing-persons file?'

    'Yeah,
if I wanna get sacked.'

    Bluster
and front. This was how Dooley played things, just so he felt like he still had
some control. 'Send it to my Yahoo.'

    I got
silence as a reply this time.

    In
front, brakes lights winked in the night, then disappeared, and I inched the
car forward a few more feet.

    'So
is that it?' Dooley asked.

    'One
more thing.'

    'It's
Friday night.'

    'You won't
be late for the disco, Dools, I promise.'

    He
sighed, his breath crackling down the line.

    'What
can you tell me about Milton Sykes?'

    'Sykes?

    'Yeah.'

    'I
didn't realize you were digging up cold cases now, Davey. Things must be slow. Who
wants to know about him?'

    'I'm
just interested.'

    'Ever
heard of the internet?'

    'Yeah,
I remember someone talking about it once.'

    'Stick
his name into Google. You'll get about a trillion hits.'

    'Anything
that didn't get released to the public?'

    'I
know I might look it,' Dooley said, 'but I ain't
that
old. How the fuck
should I know? They were communicating with smoke signals when Sykes was
running around.'

    'Come
on, Dools. I know how it works. Knowledge passed down through generations of
police officers, like the family secret. You old-timers love to talk about what
you would have done differently.'

    He
paused, then blew more air down the line. 'What do you wanna know?'

    'You
ever had any copycats?'

    He
paused. You got someone running around pretending to be Sykes?'

    'No.
I'm just asking'. 'No.'

    'No
copycats?'

    'No.
He's old school now. Most people under forty probably wouldn't even be able to
tell you who he was. Sykes is the grandparents' story. Once that generation
dies out, no one will even know what he did.'

    'So
tell me about him.'

    'What
do you want to know?'

    'Everything.'

    The
line drifted a little. It sounded like he was moving. When he started talking
again, it was virtually a whisper: 'Okay, you want my theory?'

    'That's
why I phoned.'

    Another
pause. 'He buried them in the woods.'

    I
heard the line drift again. He was moving to a place where absolutely no one would
hear him talking. I reached across to the hands-free and turned the volume all
the way up. 'Just give me the condensed version,' I said.

    'The
condensed version's the same as the long version: he was screwed from day one.
His father pisses off the moment he zips himself up, and his mother pops her
clogs from tuberculosis two months after young Milton is born. Sykes goes to
live with his psychopathic aunty and uncle down the road; she's the bitch from
hell, and he's a violent pisshead. Cue sixteen years of being beaten shitless
and locked in the dark. School was a total write-off as you might have
expected, although he got an A for killing animals and being a weird loner no
one liked or spoke to.'

    'What
happened after he left home?'

    'He
landed a job at a dyeworks near East India Docks. Then women started
disappearing. You think
we're
bad at our jobs; police back then didn't
even notice for six years.'

    'How
come?'

    'All
the women were Indian immigrants working in the textiles factories. Their
families reported them missing, but their English was bad or non-existent.
Police excused themselves after Sykes was arrested by pretending they couldn't
understand what they were being told - but, truth was, they probably didn't
give much of a shit.'

    'So
how'd he get caught?'

    'He
stopped taking Indian girls.'

    'And
took a white one instead.'

    'Right.
Girl called Jenny Truman. Nineteen. Blonde- haired, blue-eyed. Goes to work at
one of the factories in the morning and never comes home again.'

    'Why
change?'

    'He
was clever. He knew the police wouldn't go hard at the Indian disappearances,
so he played things safe. But after a while he couldn't help himself and went
after Truman. That was when the police finally decided to get serious.
Eventually a couple of witnesses told them they'd seen her leaving with someone
matching Sykes's description. So they head down to Sykes's place at Forham
Avenue. You know where that is?'

    'No.'

    'That's
because they've knocked it down now and built an industrial estate where the
road used to be. It was right on the edge of Hark's Hill Woods, this big,
overgrown area full of old factories in east London. When the police fumed up
at Sykes's house, he excused himself and headed to a toilet at the bottom of
his garden - and then made a break for it. Vanished into the woods.'

    'Did
they find him?'

    'No.
They lost him. But they searched his house and found a dress belonging to Jenny
Truman with blood all over it, and a shovel - all hidden in a wall cavity in
his kitchen. Three days later, he hands himself in to a police station in
Camberwell.'

    'Why?'

    'Said
he was tired of running'

    'So
they never found the bodies?'

    'Nah,'
Dooley said. 'After he got the rope in 1906, they did another search of the
woods and came up empty- handed like before. But he
must
have buried
them in there.'

    'Why
d'you say that?'

    'He
knew those woods like I know the way to the bar. He used to escape there as a
kid to get away from his nut- job family. There was this place he talked about
in his interviews with police. Locals used to call it the Hanging Tree; this
weird, T-shaped oak, all gnarly and messed up, that looked like a giant set of
gallows. There are photos of it online. Most people were completely freaked out
by it, but not young Milton. He loved it so much he built a tree house in it.
You ever been there?'

    'Hark's
Hill? No.'

    'It's
a strange place. Got this…' Dooley paused, then dropped his voice even further.
'Got this kind of… atmosphere.'

    I
smiled. You a psychic now?'

    'Laugh
it up. You don't believe me, ask the teams they sent down there in the 1920s to
try and put a train track through there.'

    'What
do you mean?'

    'Back
in 1921, the local authority decided they wanted some track running from the
factories up on Hark's Hill to the mainline on the other side of the woods.
They sent teams in there to clear a path and start laying the foundations for
the train tracks, only…' He paused again. 'Only, they got spooked.'

    'Spooked?'

    'They
kept seeing things and hearing things.'

    'What
sort of things?'

    'No
one was ever sure, but enough to put the shits up them. That little project
lasted four weeks before the entire workforce decided enough was enough.'

    'They
walked?'

    'Like
I said, that place…' Dooley sucked in his breath. 'First time someone told me
that story I laughed my arse off. But you want to try going down there some
time.'

    'Are
you serious?'

    'Go
down there,' he said, no hint of humour in his voice. You know me: the only
thing I believe in is a beer on a Friday night. But you go to enough crime
scenes, you start to get a real sense of life and death. And sometimes…'

    'What?'

    'I've
worked murders for fifteen years, and some of the places you end up… I don't
know, you're standing over bodies in these holes, and you can just
feel
a place is bad.

    That's
the only way I can describe it. You get a sense for places; kind of attuned to
things. That's why I'm telling you he buried those women in the woods. Because
I went down there, and that place… something's seriously wrong with it.'

    When
I got back to the house, I checked for answer phone messages and then switched
on the TV. A reporter was standing near the Royal Docks, the Thames framed
behind her. At the bottom of the screen, a ticker tape was running right to
left: MET POLICE: WOMAN FOUND IN THAMES RETURNED TO FAMILY. FAMILY HAVE
REQUESTED NO NAMES/DETAILS BE RELEASED TO PUBLIC. I remembered the same
reporter covering the same story a couple of days before while I was in the
cafe close to Newcross Secondary. I didn't know much about it, but I did know
that, if it had any legs, it wouldn't have been tucked away right at the end of
the hourly bulletin.

    After
showering, I went through my wardrobe. Laid a shirt out. Trousers. A pair of
shoes I hadn't worn since the funeral. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and
looked at my reflection in the mirror. That same flicker ignited in my stomach,
and I felt all the doubt and the guilt and the fear move through my chest.

    
It's
too soon
,
I thought
.

    And
then I realized, until I did it, it would always be too soon.

    Ten
minutes later, Liz answered her door. She looked beautiful. She was wearing a
black halterneck dress that followed the shape of her body all the way down to
the middle of her calves. Her hair was curled at the ends, falling against her
shoulders in ringlets. She had a little make-up on, but not much, and her eyes
were dark and playful, looking me up and down.