No trace bak-8

by Barry Maitland

  ‘I thought it might have been one of the girls,’ she said.

  ‘Natural assumption,’ he replied, yet she thought she heard a note of reserve. Was it a natural assumption, or had she just wanted to believe it too much? ‘Three months dead…’Brock murmured.‘I wonder how he managed it.’ He straightened up.‘So, why did he panic?’

  ‘He had this startled, guilty look, as if he realised we knew something really bad,’ Kathy said.

  ‘This?’ Brock nodded at the cadaver. ‘Or something else? Let’s take a look.’

  They began searching the flat, Brock in the bedroom, the other two thankful to move out to the other rooms. Bren took the opportunity to ring Deanne’s mobile. When she answered he could hear the shrieks of excited conversation in the background.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Deanne said, and sounded it. ‘I’ve had lots of champagne and bits to eat, and I’ve been talking to these fascinating people. How are you?’

  He told her what had happened.

  ‘Oh that’s terrible.’ The playfulness evaporated from her voice.‘No sign of the girls?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Darling, you can’t carry all this by yourself.’

  ‘Brock’s here, and Kathy, and the others are on their way. Look, I think you’re going to have to get yourself home. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s fine. Come as soon as you can. I love you.’

  Bren ended the call, thinking how very fortunate he was that that was true. hey found nothing in Abbott’s flat before others moved in to take over the search. Now Kathy and Bren became the property of the duty inspector at Shoreditch as the first stage began of an official investigation into a death in connection with a police operation. Under questioning in separate rooms, their assumption of a link between Abbott and the missing girls began to seem increasingly doubtful. Kathy saw it in the sceptical gaze of her interrogators and heard it in her own voice, protesting too much. A man with a limp and a view of a bus stop. So what? She couldn’t honestly say that she’d seen his face in the square.

  Towards midnight there was a lull. Kathy sat drinking a cup of weak tea, expecting the worst. Her mind kept going back to that moment when they had turned the corner onto the access deck and confronted Abbott. Again and again the questioners had returned to that moment, and she had tried to recall and describe it so many times now that she no longer trusted her memory of it. She remembered the rush of excitement, and imagined that her body and face must have shown this, and that it would have been apparent to Abbott. But had he shown guilt before or after reading that signal? And was it really guilt or simply panic at seeing two psyched-up coppers bearing down on him? And what had then possessed him to climb out of his window? After that, her memory became bathed in an unreal light, spiderman toppling, arms windmilling, and the shrivelled little body in the bed. The whole sequence seemed so bizarre, so outlandish, that the steps that had led them there now seemed equally improbable.

  She heard voices outside the door and assumed that new investigators had arrived, more senior and intimidating no doubt, and she braced herself. But when the door opened it was Brock who walked in, looking serious, an envelope in his hand.

  ‘Some news, Kathy.’ He sat opposite her, seeing the strain etched around her eyes.‘How are you?’

  She gave him a tight smile. ‘Okay. Did they find anything in his flat? Something about the girls?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid not. Clean as a whistle-apart from the little matter of dear old dead Mum.’ Kathy felt nausea rise in her throat. ‘However,’ he opened the envelope and drew out some sheets of paper, ‘we did find a memory card in his wallet, one of those little things they use in digital cameras. These are prints of the pictures it contained.’

  She flicked through a series of street scenes-nothing incriminating, surely. She looked more carefully at the first, a pavement viewed from above, the space flattened by a zoom lens, and suddenly realised what it was. ‘That’s the bus stop, isn’t it? And the newsagent. There are no posters of the girls in the window, so this must have been taken before…’ There were children in the doorway, and she looked closer, trying to identify them. ‘Could that be Aimee?’

  Brock nodded. He reached forward and pointed to the second page.‘And that’s Lee, we’re almost certain.’

  Almost certain. Kathy drew in a long breath. ‘I could still be right then.’ Relief began to trickle through her like some marvellous opiate.‘I could be right.’

  ‘Yes. We’ve checked the angles and there’s no doubt that they were taken from Abbott’s window. But there’s no camera in his flat. It’s only a beginning, of course. But there’s something there, I’m sure of it.’

  Kathy thought of all that must follow; retracing Abbott’s movements, tracking down his friends and acquaintances, searching for his hiding places. It would take time, and meanwhile the girls, if any of them were still alive, would be in a desperate state.

  ‘I want to help,’ she said.

  ‘Not tonight. You’re all in, and so is Bren. Get some sleep, then we’ll see.’

  ‘You look exhausted yourself.’

  ‘Oh, I just plod on. One other thing may help you sleep better. One of Abbott’s neighbours remembers him saying that he used to do wall-climbing as a sport, so his attempt to escape out the window wasn’t quite as mad or panic-stricken as it seemed. He may even have tried it before.’

  They got to their feet and Kathy went out to the lobby, where Bren was waiting for her. Before they went their separate ways he said,‘We were lucky, Kathy. Bloody lucky. If he hadn’t had that thing in his wallet, they’d have made mincemeat of us.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, and pushed at the front door. Glancing back over her shoulder she saw Brock talking to two senior uniformed officers. They both nodded their heads and one of them glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was five past one in the morning. Kathy turned to ask Bren if he knew what was going on, but he was already striding away down the street. She looked back into the building but Brock and the others had gone, so she stepped out onto the pavement, pulling the collar of her coat up against the cold night air, and with the gust of chill wind she remembered the very first thing that had come into her head when she’d spotted Abbott. He had been on the point of locking his front door, on his way out, yet his clothing had seemed too light for the cold evening, and she’d thought he couldn’t be going far. It had been the briefest of thoughts, barely formed, because then their eyes had locked and adrenaline had taken over. Kathy stopped dead, then turned and ran back into the station.

  She found Brock in a corridor at the back, pulling on his coat, heading for the door to the rear car park. He looked surprised to see her.

  ‘I thought you’d gone, Kathy.’

  ‘I remembered something. I don’t know why it escaped me. He wasn’t dressed to go far. Suppose he was going to visit another flat in the same building? Suppose he climbed out the window to get to that other flat?’

  Brock beamed at her and she realised that he’d got there ahead of her. He pulled open the door and she saw a car waiting outside, engine idling.‘Want to come?’he asked. She squeezed into the back seat beside two uniformed men who were both talking on their phones. Brock got in the front and the driver put the car into gear.

  No one spoke until they reached the cordon below the block of flats, then Brock exchanged a few words with the two men before leading Kathy past the barrier towards an unmarked white van. She saw the police tapes nearby, marking the place where Abbott had landed. There were no obvious signs of activity or alarm, but Kathy noticed groups of dark figures clustered in areas of shadow, some carrying weapons.

  ‘Let’s say,’ Brock said, gazing up at the face of the building, breath misting,‘that the second flat is below the line of sight of the bus stop, so level twelve or lower. Abbott was heading down and to your right, looking from above, to our left from down here.’ He pointed to an area of the facade.‘So they’re starting there and working outwards. You
and I just stay here and wait.’ He tapped a knuckle on the back door of the van and after a moment it opened and they climbed in. A light came on and Kathy saw two people inside and the apparatus of a mobile command unit. A woman was crouched over a grid diagram on a table, marking names on the squares.

  ‘Everyone’s in position, sir,’ a man with headphones said quietly to Brock.

  ‘Then let’s begin.’

  The man spoke a few words into his mike and they sat back to wait. After four minutes the first report came in, and the woman put a cross through one of the grid squares. Two minutes later she marked a second cross, then a third. It made Kathy think of a game the boys used to play at school, Battleships, except now it was for real. She wondered if Gabriel Rudd could use it for his next banner. Would it become a work of art simply because Rudd, rather than an anonymous police officer, drew it? Kathy rubbed her face with both hands, feeling tired and slightly dizzy. Who cares, she thought, just let them find the girls.

  After fifteen minutes the man with the headphones looked up.‘Something on level nine, sir. Flat 903. IC1 male refusing entry.’

  The woman tapped a grid square. ‘Flat in the name of Mrs Pamela Wylie.’

  Brock and Kathy listened in silence to the low monotone of the reports. ‘Entry gained… Occupant restrained… No sign of other occupants.’ Then a pause and the man raised his eyes to meet Brock’s.‘They’ve found something, sir,’ he said, and Brock was out of the van and running towards the lifts, Kathy at his heels.

  The body was stuffed into the back of a closet, hidden behind a suitcase and covered in a pile of old clothes. They recognised the pinched features of Lee, the second of the girls to disappear, and so pale and slack and still that they assumed she was dead until someone found a faint pulse and began CPR.

  The occupant of the flat, Robert John Wylie according to the driver’s licence in his wallet, was a large, fleshy man with quivering chins, a toad to Abbott’s spider. He refused to say a word, and the detectives had to draw their own conclusions from what they could see. There was no sign of Mrs Wylie having lived there, and the flat looked as if it had become a den in which Wylie and Abbott could live out their obsessions. Unlike Abbott’s flat, which had been neat and clean, this place was a mess of half-consumed tins, cartons, magazines and clothes, and the atmosphere was clammy and claustrophobic, tainted with a smell of burnt plastic that turned the stomach. There was a computer and its printer, still branded with the name of the school from which they had been stolen, and a digital camera. And there were pictures, hundreds of them.

  A detective emerged from the kitchenette, calling for Brock. He was holding a small box in his gloved hand, and the smell of burnt plastic was stronger.

  ‘What’s that?’ Brock asked.

  ‘Found it in the microwave, sir. I think it’s a computer hard drive. Looks like it’s been cooked.’

  The ambulance man laying Lee on the stretcher saw Kathy watching. He paused a moment and drew the blanket off the girl’s left leg to show her. It was black, and Kathy gasped,‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve seen it before,’ he said. ‘With addicts. They use a butterfly syringe to draw the drug from soft capsules, then inject it. It causes blood clots but they keep doing it anyway and gangrene sets in. She’ll lose the leg. At least.’

  At that moment Wylie was being taken out of the flat. As he passed the unconscious girl on the stretcher he stopped and stared down at her, and at the same moment, as if there were some telepathic connection between them, her eyelids flickered open. She stared up, then her face convulsed in fear for a second before she lost consciousness again.

  ‘Get him out of here,’ Kathy snapped. athy didn’t wake until noon the following day. As she surfaced slowly from a deep sleep she became aware of sunlight filtering through the blinds, and immediately her mind began spinning with memories of the previous night: a body falling into the void; the smell of burning plastic; Wylie’s malignant stare; a blackened, gangrenous leg. She sat up abruptly and forced the images away. She might go for a swim, she thought, get her hair done, buy a pair of shoes, get in some food.

  She noticed the trail of her discarded clothes on the floor. She still felt exhausted. The phone rang; she picked it up and heard Brock’s voice.

  ‘Didn’t wake you, did I?’

  ‘Mmm…’ her mouth felt numb, not yet ready for speech.‘Not quite.’

  ‘Sorry. Just wondered if you fancied brunch.’

  Still slightly disoriented, Kathy wondered what kind of invitation this was.

  ‘I’m meeting Bren in an hour,’ he went on, ‘at The Bride.’

  ‘This is work?’

  ‘Afraid so. Can you make it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She rang off and got out of bed, opened the blinds, stretched and yawned at the window. It was a beautiful sunny day, white clouds scudding across a pale blue sky, a complete contrast with the drab grey days of the working week behind them. What did Brock want? Surely it was all but over now. Was it the questioning of Wylie? Or-her heart sank-breaking the news to relatives. Yes, that would be it. She should have realised he’d be needing help with that. She wondered how much sleep he’d had. It had been after three when he’d sent her home, but he’d still been working with the others through the material in the flat.

  The Bride of Denmark was a myth, one of those unlikely accumulations that sometimes occur in the basements of old buildings in old cities. It didn’t exist in the inventories of the assets of the Metropolitan Police because the occupants of the Queen Anne’s Gate annex did their best to hide its existence, and because those few civil servants who had come across it considered it too difficult to deal with and had designated it ‘miscellaneous’. In the years after the Second World War the former occupants of the building, architectural publishers, had gone about the ruined city like magpies, collecting fragments of old bombed-out pubs and reconstructing them in their basement as the eccentric Bride. The small rooms were crammed with salvaged fittings-the polished bar, the back-to-back pew seats, the mahogany shelving-and encrusted with rows of ancient cobwebby bottles, pewter mugs, porcelain spirit kegs, mirrors and animal trophies. A salmon gawped at an antelope’s head, and the antlers of a moose met the unblinking gaze of a stuffed lion, or at least the front half of a lion, crouching among savannah grass in his glass case. The Bride was a refuge hidden beneath the annex, without phones, computers or office machines, a place where Brock retired to think.

  Bren was already there when Kathy arrived, perched on a cane seat at the bar peeling plastic film from a plate of sandwiches. Brock, on the other side, was pouring coffee from a tall pot, and offered her a cup.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, and sank onto a worn leather seat beneath the lion.‘Just what I need.’

  ‘So as soon as I turn my back you two go and wrap the thing up,’ Bren grunted, sounding peeved.

  ‘I thought of something and went back…’ Kathy began to explain, feeling awkward, but Bren waved a big hand.‘Brock explained. Well done, anyway.’He picked up a sandwich and took a bite, handed her the plate.

  Brock came through the flap of the bar with a mug of coffee in his hand and sat beside Kathy. He smelled fresh from a shower and was wearing jeans and a thick knit pullover.‘Yes and no,’ he said.

  They both looked at him.

  ‘The pictures they took tell it all as far as Aimee and Lee are concerned.’ His voice was weary, as if the terrible images were a crushing burden. ‘It’s all there, even a photo of the place they buried Aimee when they’d finished with her. But there’s nothing, not a thing, about Tracey. It doesn’t look as if she was ever there.’

  ‘What does Wylie have to say?’ Bren asked.

  ‘Not a word. Not a single word. He’s been charged and he called a lawyer this morning, but he refuses to open his mouth to us.’

  Kathy said,‘Do we know him?’

  ‘Three convictions for possession and publication of indecent photographs, one involving children.
Two fines and a two-month prison term. We’re digging for more background.’

  ‘The flat was rented in his wife’s name,’ Kathy said.

  ‘Yes. We don’t know where she is. Neighbours say they haven’t seen her in months.’

  He paused to let this sink in, then continued,‘The point is that we have Lee in intensive care and we know that Aimee is dead, but we have no more idea where Tracey is than we did last Monday morning. On the face of it, we have nothing to connect either Abbott or Wylie to her disappearance. And if that’s the case, we’re going to have to start all over again as far as she’s concerned. Right from the beginning.’ He took a deep breath, sat back against the padded seat and closed his eyes.‘So what are the alternatives?’

  ‘But I saw Abbott in Northcote Square,’ Kathy objected.

  ‘You think you saw him. All you can really be sure of is that you remember a limping man.’

  ‘You’re suggesting it’s no more than a coincidence?’ Bren protested.‘That last night was a fluke?’

  ‘I’m saying we should look at all the options.’

  ‘A copycat?’Kathy said. There was silence for a moment, then she went on,‘The Tracey kidnapping is different from the other two in that her father is a celebrity. Maybe it’s aimed at him.’

  ‘Perhaps, but there’s been no ransom, no threat. And why make it look like the other two cases?’

  ‘To distract us from the obvious suspect,’ Bren said.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Tracey’s father,’Bren said immediately.‘Gabriel Rudd.’

  Brock gave him a quizzical look.‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘Last night. Kathy and Deanne and I went to the opening of his exhibition. He and I nearly came to blows.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, one of his so-called artworks had a picture of Kathy and a caption that said she was dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We persuaded him to remove it.’

  Brock’s eyebrows rose further. ‘Rudd removed one of the artworks from his exhibition because you didn’t like it?’