‘How about Stan?’ Kathy nodded at the withered limbs.‘He’s a bit older, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, he lives here too, trying to get back into the game. Fergus is helping him out. Actually he’s over there, pretending to look at my Virgin Birth, but really he’s watching us.’
Kathy saw a tough-looking character with shaved head and faded T-shirt and jeans in the far corner of the room.
‘I’ll introduce you, provided you don’t let on you’re a cop.’
‘Why not?’
‘He had a breakdown a few years back. He was a bit violent with someone who was harassing him and got himself arrested. The cops beat him up and put him into an asylum.’
If only it was that easy, Kathy thought, and followed Poppy.
‘Hi, Stan. This is Kathy. She’s interested in your stuff.’
Stan eyed her suspiciously.
‘Yes,’ Kathy lied. ‘I was wondering how you get all those effects, of the veins and tendons and everything.’
Stan looked at his feet and grunted.
‘He uses sandblasting and stuff, don’t you, Stan?’ Poppy prompted, but Stan remained silent.
‘Where do you get your inspiration?’ Kathy tried.
He slowly looked up to meet her eyes and said,‘Death,’ then turned and walked away.
‘He doesn’t have Gabe’s gift for self-promotion, does he?’ Kathy said, and immediately felt a chill in Poppy’s look, as if any criticism of Gabriel Rudd wasn’t allowed.
‘Stan’s all right,’ Poppy said.‘He’s very serious about his work. It’s very truthful. That’s what we’re all about, truthfulness.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yes. Stan, Gabe, me, we’re all after the same thing, the truth, even when it hurts-especially when it hurts. You’ll see it tomorrow in Gabe’s show. You are coming, aren’t you? We’re setting it up in the morning.’
‘Okay, yes. Although I feel I should learn a bit more about all of this.’
‘There’s lots of books. Fergus commissioned one on us. It’s available at the desk outside.’
‘Fine. Incidentally, is it just a coincidence that those faces on your cherubs look like Tracey?’
‘No, she modelled for me. She has such an innocent face, just what I was after.’
Kathy picked up a copy of Art of The Pie Factory on her way out.
Later that evening, on her way back to Shoreditch station, Kathy noticed posters stuck on walls and taped to lamp posts calling for information about the missing Tracey Rudd, and at the same time advertising the No Trace exhibition. There was an image of Tracey on the posters, a poignant little sketch by her father, and each poster had been individually signed and numbered by Rudd.
Inside the police station the mood was flat, exhausted, and she mentally compared it to the buzz she’d left at Rudd’s studio. Everyone here seemed drained, one officer actually asleep on folded arms on his desk. She asked if Brock was around and was told that he was in a meeting and should be back shortly. Anxious not to miss him, she went to wait in the corner where he had set up his work space. His desk was piled with reports, maps, memos and notes, his computer plastered with handwritten messages stuck to the screen so that he wouldn’t miss them. As she sat down to wait, Kathy noticed a thick report lying next to her elbow. What attracted her attention was the end of a letter stuck between the pages. She recognised Suzanne Chambers’ handwriting. Brock’s friend Suzanne had taken care of her once when Kathy had been recovering from the violent end to a particularly harrowing case, and for this she would always be grateful. Suzanne lived with her two grandchildren fifty miles away in Battle, near the Sussex coast, but Kathy assumed she and Brock spoke regularly on the phone, and she wondered why Suzanne should need to write. Perhaps they’ve gone away somewhere, she thought. She leaned forward and twisted her head to read the address, but saw that it was that of the antique shop Suzanne owned on the high street.
Kathy looked back over her shoulder around the office. There was no sign of Brock and no one was paying any attention to her. She reached over and tugged the letter an inch further out of the report, and read:
Dear David,
I have to put this in writing, because I haven’t been able to find the words…
A chill grew inside her as she re-read the line. ‘Oh no,’ she murmured. ‘They’re splitting up.’ She checked the room again, then tugged the bottom corner of the letter free of the report so that the final line on the page was revealed: my future and ours. Before I had no choices, but now
Kathy took a deep breath, still not understanding. She decided there was nothing for it, and was reaching forward again when she heard Brock’s voice behind her.‘That’s not soon enough. Tell them to try harder,’ he was calling to someone in the corridor. She slipped the letter back into the report and turned to face him.‘Hi,’ she said and he gave a weary smile in return.
He listened to her patiently as she asked for a more active role in the investigation, then scratched at his beard before replying. ‘I know how you feel, Kathy. This is a frustrating time for all of us. The reason I’ve kept you there is that the other two crime scenes are cold, but Northcote Square is different. It’s in the news every day-Rudd’s making sure of that. I’m hoping there may still be something to be got from it.’
He saw Kathy’s puzzled look and went on. ‘The man we’re looking for is watching those broadcasts too. Have you thought that he may be tempted to pay another visit? Enjoy the circus he’s created?’
She hadn’t thought of that, although she realised she should have.
‘We’re monitoring the square with cameras, but that’s not the same as a good pair of eyes on the ground. You may spot something. Stick it out till the end of the week, okay? Then we’ll see. And in the meantime, talk to Bren. See if he’s come up with anything that strikes a chord with you.’
She nodded, chastened, and he added,‘Missing children are the worst thing, Kathy. I know. We mustn’t let it get to us.’ They were silent for a moment, he thinking of the pictures of the girls that Kathy had pinned beside her desk both here at Shoreditch and in her regular office at Queen Anne’s Gate, and she wondering if he was making false assumptions about her vulnerability.
‘I’ll talk to Bren,’ she said, and turned away.
She found him, shoulders bowed, poring over a printed list, highlighting names with a green marker. A steady man, quietly spoken, he usually exuded confidence but now looked defeated.
‘Hi, Bren.’
He lifted his head. ‘Hi, Kathy. Got any goodies for us? We could do with something.’
‘No progress?’
‘Nothing to speak of.’He passed a hand over his eyes and yawned. He had three girls of his own, Kathy knew, and he had thrown himself into this case as if it were a personal quest.‘This is driving me crazy, Kathy. It really is.’He handed her an envelope with her name on it.‘We’ve all had one,’ he said as she unsealed it to find an invitation to the opening of No Trace.‘Load of rubbish.’
‘Brock suggested I sit down with you sometime and go through what you’ve turned up.’
‘Good idea, I could do with a fresh brain. Tomorrow morning? Eightish?’
‘I’ll be here.’
She thought about Brock as she sat in the bright capsule of the underground train on the way back to Finchley Central, and about Gabriel Rudd, both running their teams, keeping them fed with ideas, dogged by the possibility of failure. She reached her station and tramped through the dark streets to her block of flats, where she took the lift to the twelfth floor. She was thankful now for the silence and peace of her flat, although at other times she dreaded the first sense of emptiness, of Leon gone. She microwaved a meal and sat by the window, the curtains open, looking out over the city. Brock’s dilemma was a bit like Gabe’s, she thought, a visual or conceptual one. How to recognise a good idea when a less good one might deflect the whole project and soak up crucial time and resources?
She took the book she’d boug
ht at the gallery out of its paper bag. The cover was perfectly white, with the title spelled out in letters cut from newspapers, as in a ransom note. Inside, Fergus Tait’s introduction to his vision of The Pie Factory read like an overenthusiastic advertisement for a new cosmetic, Kathy thought, but at least it was intelligible. When she reached the main text, written by a professor of media arts, she floundered. The first sentence ran:
In the high art lite world in which the barely mediated procedures of Post-Minimalist convention reprise Modernist discourse in terms of docusoap myth, and what passes for British culture privileges a new ontological realm of narrative trite, the artistic production of The Pie Factory, the latest Britart powerhouse of London’s Shoreditch/Hoxton (ShoHo) district, offers a stunning new avatar of the memorialising tendencies of the avant-garde.
She tried it again, a word at a time, but that didn’t help, so she just looked at the pictures and resolved to try the web. s she walked from the tube to the police station the next morning, Kathy noticed that the posters she’d seen everywhere the previous night had disappeared. She mentioned this to the desk sergeant who said, didn’t she know that those things were valuable? Apparently they were changing hands in the local pubs and market and on the internet for as much as two hundred pounds, some said, especially to foreigners. ‘Well, they’re works of art, aren’t they? Signed original Gabriel Rudds.’
Bren looked as if he’d had little sleep the previous night. His breathing was shallow, his gaze bleary. Kathy had found him in the control room, in front of the big map. Two women working on their computers ignored them as Kathy and Bren sat together with mugs of coffee. The mugs came from a small tea-making alcove outside, and were stained and chipped from continuous use.
‘I’ve been over this ground so often it’s becoming a blur. We haven’t been able to come up with any convincing connection between the profiler’s magic circle and the site of the third abduction, Northcote Square. There’s one little thing I keep coming back to, Kathy,’Bren said wearily.‘But I can’t think straight any more, so maybe you can tell me if I’m just getting fixated or what.’
‘Go on.’
Bren pointed to the red and yellow spots and the black circle. ‘We’ve interviewed every single person inside that circle, some several times. Nothing. Now Aimee and Lee went to school by bus, on different routes, from different stops. Their mums go to different shops and as far as we’ve been able to tell their paths may never have crossed… except there.’ He rose and pressed a fingernail to a small cross.‘This is where Aimee caught her bus, and sometimes, not regularly, if Lee and her friends missed their usual bus home, they would take a different route that comes to this same stop. There’s a row of shops there with a newsagent, where both girls have bought sweets. It’s possible that they even stood together in the same queue at the counter.’ He turned to Kathy with a look almost of appeal. ‘That’s the only place we’ve been able to find where their paths actually crossed.’
‘Sounds significant.’
‘But is it? I thought it might be, but we’ve turned up nothing.’
He looked ashen under the glare of the fluorescent lights. She said,‘Why don’t we go there and you can show me.’
It was at the other end of the borough, and they decided to take a car.
The place was a nondescript section of street, busy with traffic and indistinguishable from any other. The abductor might have been passing, Bren thought, in a car perhaps or on foot, and first spotted the two girls here. At that moment, a red double-decker pulled up at the stop opposite the newsagent and Kathy looked up at several faces on the top deck gazing down at them.
‘Or he might live around here.’Bren gestured to the row of houses across the street, and the windows of flats over the shops. ‘But we’ve checked everyone in the immediate vicinity and found nothing. The shopkeepers haven’t been able to help.’
The bus moved off and they crossed the street. Pictures of Aimee and Lee stared out at them from the window of the newsagent. When they reached the doorway they turned and looked back. Above the roofs of the houses opposite, the top two floors of a tall block of flats several streets away were now visible.
‘What about them?’ Kathy pointed.
Bren frowned. The fresh air had revived him a little.
‘No, I don’t think we’ve been up there.’ He checked the map he’d brought.‘It’s outside the magic circle.’
‘Shall we take a look?’
Kathy directed Bren from the map, and they drew in at the base of a tall building on the Newman housing estate. They got into the lift and pressed the button for the topmost level. It was a graffiti-coated aluminium box, and Kathy made a comment about how Fergus Tait could probably sell it as an artwork. Bren didn’t get it, and she said,‘Come to the gallery tonight. You’ll see what I mean.’
‘It’s cut-up sheep and stuff like that, isn’t it?’
‘That sort of thing. Gabriel Rudd’s famous.’
‘Oh yes, I’d heard of him. He’s the Dead Puppies guy, right? My girls saw him on TV and had nightmares for a week.’
The lift ground to a halt at level three and a woman got in. The lumpy shapes of curlers bulged beneath her headscarf. She looked them over.
‘So what is Dead Puppies?’ Kathy asked when the doors finally slid shut.
The woman spoke before Bren had a chance. ‘Dead Puppies? I can tell you that, love. I saw it on TV. This smartarse cooked up some puppies and put them in tins, with labels and everything, and called them works of art. Some art gallery paid millions of taxpayers’ money for just one.’
‘Yuck,’ Kathy said.
‘Oh, it was much worse than that, love,’ the woman continued, clearly relishing Kathy’s reaction. ‘He brought one of the tins with him on TV, and he had a tin-opener and a fork…’
‘Oh no!’
‘Oh yes. Tucked into it, he did. I was having my dinner at the time, but I couldn’t finish it, I felt so ill.’
‘It’s true,’ Bren confirmed.
‘That’s what they call art these days. Sick, if you ask me. You’re coppers, aren’t you?’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘Yes, love, it is.’
They reached the top level and the woman got out ahead of them. They followed her around a corner and came out onto the access deck. A dozen residents were outside along its length, some chatting, others smoking or reading the paper in the afternoon sun.
‘It’s the Bill,’ the woman called out so that everyone could hear, and they all immediately disappeared, front doors slamming.
‘So much for the element of surprise,’ Bren muttered.
The first door they tried was opened by a suspicious elderly man in shirtsleeves. His forearms looked strong and brown, with a tattoo of an anchor on each. Bren asked him his name, and how many people lived in his flat (‘Just me’) and the names and numbers of people living in the adjoining flats, then showed him pictures of the missing girls. As the man examined them they looked over his shoulder into the living room. Against the far window was a telescope.
‘No, never seen ’em,’ he said and made to close the door.
‘That’s a pretty powerful telescope, isn’t it, sir?’ Bren asked.‘Mind if I have a look?’ He walked straight past the man, who took a moment to recover from his surprise.
‘Oi!’ he protested, and Kathy said quickly, ‘He’s a keen amateur astronomer. What do you look at?’
The man gave her an unpleasant glare.‘Birds.’
Bren looked into the eyepiece without touching the body of the telescope, then strolled slowly back, looking over the room and through the open bedroom door.
‘Come on, get out,’ the old man complained. ‘While you’re ’ere you should check out them next door. Dodgy, they are.’
‘In what way?’
‘All them strange kids.’
As they moved to the next front door, Bren said under his breath,‘That telescope was trained straight down on the bus s
top outside the newsagents. I could see the girls’ pictures in the shop window.’
The next door was opened a couple of inches by a young woman with a thin, pale face, whose eyes widened at the word ‘police’. This time Kathy went through the routine, and at first the woman tried to respond, although her grasp of English obviously wasn’t strong. As she examined the pictures a second woman called to her in a language Kathy didn’t recognise, then a child gave a shriek and began crying.
‘Where are you ladies from, miss?’ Bren asked.
The question seemed to agitate the woman, who was suddenly unable to speak any English at all. More children were howling now.
‘How many children do you have?’ Kathy asked, trying to see past the woman. She caught a brief glimpse of the second woman with a small child under each arm.
‘Babysitters!’ the woman at the door suddenly burst out.‘Babysitters!’ she repeated, and slammed the door shut.
‘Well,’ Kathy said,‘I reckon we’re going to get enough leads up here to keep Shoreditch busy for weeks.’
There was no response to their knocks at the third door or the fourth. The fifth was opened by a young man in need of a shave. An odd smell, rather like that of a hospital, seeped out. Mr Abbott looked at the pictures and nodded.
‘Yeah, I seen these on the telly. Can’t help you though.’ He spoke softly, as if not wanting to be overheard.
‘You live alone, sir?’
‘No, with me mum.’
‘Perhaps she could help us.’
He shook his head. ‘She’s sick in bed. Has been for months. I have to look after her.’
‘These two girls used the bus stop you can see from your window,’ Kathy said.‘Do you mind if we come in and check how much of that street is visible from up here?’ The man seemed keen to help and led them inside and over to the window, walking with a slight limp. He stood with his right leg braced stiff while Kathy and Bren made a show of examining the view. The bedroom was to one side, its curtains closed, the room in darkness. The chemical smell was stronger here.
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