With an almost childlike show of resistance he relented and led her out of the kitchen to the garage. He opened its door and switched on a light to reveal an immaculate workshop. It seemed that Len Nolan’s hobby was fine timber craftsmanship, and in particular the making of exquisite little boxes. He showed her his stock of exotic close-grained timber slabs, his collection of superb Japanese saws and chisels. With hardly any prompting he explained the secrets of the nokogiri saws, with their fine hard teeth shaped to cut on the pull stroke rather than the push, thus allowing precision cuts with a much thinner blade than in Western saws.
‘The blade’s in tension, Kathy,’he said,‘rather than compression. So bloody simple! Now that is true art.’
He allowed her to handle the Dozuki fine-precision saw, the spineless Ryoba saw, the Azebiki plunge-cutting saw, and gaze upon the collection of Shindo Dragon saws.
‘Beautiful,’ Kathy agreed, ‘and so are your boxes, Len.’ She admired the exquisite dovetails, all hand cut, the precise shaping of every part, the lustrous colour of the wood.
‘I aspire to craftsmanship, Kathy,’ he confided, ‘not art. Craftsmanship I can understand. Art leaves me for dead.’
Kathy drove away feeling dissatisfied, as if she’d missed something, or failed to ask the right question.
When she returned she was assigned to work with a joint team that had been set up with officers from the Paedophile Unit of SO5. She and five other detectives, in rotating pairs, were to work through a long list of names supplied by the unit-interviewing, checking and filing reports on the OTIS computer network. After three days she began to feel that the whole city was filled with the faces-bland, glib and sly-that she saw across the table in the interview rooms or staring back at her from her monitor. When she left work at night she saw them in the street and on the underground, and when she turned on the TV news they were there too, posing as politicians, priests and popular entertainers.
On the evening of the third day she was on the point of going home when she saw Brock outside in the corridor. He put his head around the door and, seeing no one else there, came in. The others that Kathy shared the room with had left for the night and the place was strewn with the remains of another fruitless day, the frustration of dead ends and unproductive phone calls evidenced in balled and ripped-up paper and crushed drink cans.
‘I’ve hardly seen you the last few days, Kathy,’ he said, slumping into a chair. He looked exhausted, his eyes slightly unfocused as if from spending too long staring at a screen.‘How are you going?’
She shook her head. ‘Getting nowhere. I’ve seen so many deviant males I’m beginning to believe there isn’t any other kind. And they’re all so bloody smug. They know we’ve got it wrong-this time, they really are innocent. Except that they’re not, not in their minds, not in their imaginations.’
‘Yes…’ He put both hands to his face and rubbed, as if he might massage life back into his brain. ‘That’s really the worst of this, isn’t it? That all this effort, all this pain, is caused by something so miserably dull, so unworthy- a nasty little obsession caused by a hormone imbalance, a brain defect, some emotional damage. A trivial malfunction, really, that’s all we’re dealing with.’ He sighed. ‘I should be used to it by now. So much crime is done for the most tedious of reasons. That’s what’ll finish me in the end, that the villains just aren’t interesting enough.’
Kathy laughed, yet she felt uneasy. She’d never heard Brock talk about the end of his career before, even in jest. ‘Are you packing up now?’
Brock shook his head. ‘Can’t. Look, I’ll show you something.’ She followed him down the corridor and into an empty room, where he waved her over to a monitor. The screen showed a huge crowd completely filling a city square. It took her a moment to recognise some of the surrounding buildings.
‘That’s Northcote Square, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. This is live, from a camera on the corner of Urma Street and East Terrace.’
Kathy looked more closely at the screen. The crowd was motionless. Many of them seemed to have white hair. ‘What on earth is going on?’
‘It’s a flash mob, summoned by internet and SMS. They just appeared this evening, in support of Gabe Rudd. There was music earlier. Now they’re watching their phones for instructions on the next phase. It’s performance art. If it were summer, they’d have their clothes off by now.’
‘Wow.’
‘I need to be here, just in case something happens.’
‘I don’t mind staying, if you like.’ Kathy felt a small prickle of embarrassment as she said it, as if they’d both just confessed that they had no one to go home for.
‘No, it’s late. Go home, get some sleep and come back refreshed for another day of deviant males. Nothing’ll happen tonight.’
15
As usual, Tevfik Akif, second cousin to Yasher Fikret and site manager for the building work on West Terrace, was the first to arrive on site that wet Thursday morning. It was still dark as he unlocked the gate in the chain-link security fence along the back lane, and then the door of the site hut in the compound formed from the cleared backyards of the houses. He didn’t remove his dripping raincoat because, having switched on the lights and heater in the hut, it had become his habit to go over to the basement room in number thirteen where they had formed a kind of recreation room. There was electricity down there and a sink, and they had installed a fridge, a microwave and a water boiler for hot drinks. So he pulled on a pair of rubber boots, took a torch from the shelf and made his way along the path of wooden duckboards that crossed the mud and puddles of the yard to the back door of the old brick building. He cursed as water from the broken gutter high above splashed onto his neck and shoulders as he fumbled for the key of the padlock securing the door, then swore again, louder, when the beam of his torch revealed the hasp ripped out of the door frame. Some bastards had broken in. He hesitated, then returned to the site hut and collected the pickaxe handle he kept there for emergencies of this kind.
Returning to the back door, Akif pushed it open and flashed his torch inside. There was no sound or sign of anyone. From the darkness of the front of the house he heard the old sash windows rattle as a delivery truck rumbled past in the square. There was nothing to steal here except down in the basement room. He went to the head of the stairs and found the light switch that the electrician had rigged up for them from the basement light. He switched it on and his heart leaped in his chest as he saw an unfamiliar shadow extending across the flagstones down there. Someone was waiting for him.
‘I know you’re down there!’ he yelled in his fiercest voice.‘You come out now where I can see you!’
But the shadow of the figure remained motionless. Akif began to wonder if he was mistaken. Perhaps something the men had left propped in the middle of the room was casting that shadow. Holding the pickaxe handle in one hand and the torch in the other, he slowly descended the stairs. At first, the glare of the bare bulb blinded him, and all he could see was an indistinct shape. He froze-there was a man, a black shape against the light! Then his eyes adjusted and he registered the truth in a single shocking moment-it was not a man but a woman, completely naked, hanging by the neck from an iron hook in the ceiling.
Kathy ran through the rain towards the front of number thirteen, where a uniformed man was sheltering in the doorway beneath the scaffolding. Dawn was just beginning to glimmer through the upper branches of the trees in the square. She showed her card and was directed to the front room, there exchanging her raincoat and shoes for a white protective suit and rubber boots. Renovations hadn’t got past the stripping-out stage in this house and the place had a desolate air, faded wallpaper peeling like skin from cracked plaster where shelving had been ripped away. She hurried down the hall to the doorway to the basement, where she could hear voices. A scene of crime officer was coming up the stairs and she stepped aside to let him pass.
‘Not much room below,’ he said.
She nodded and went down. Four people in white overalls were grouped together in the centre of the room, surrounded by an odd assortment of chairs and, over to one side, a packing case on top of which lay an abandoned deck of playing cards. She saw a microwave and a small fridge and an old sink, but it wasn’t until two of the people moved apart that she saw the naked back of the hanging woman, her wrists tied together behind her with insulating tape.
One of the men adjusted the mask covering his nose and mouth. She recognised Brock and wondered how he always seemed to get to the crime scenes ahead of her.
‘Come in, Kathy,’ he said. His voice struck her as dulled, by the mask or something else-anger, perhaps. ‘Recognise her?’
The others, a police doctor, the crime scene manager and a police photographer, made way for her as she walked around the body. There was a blindfold tied over the eyes, obscuring much of the face, but she recognised the thick grey and black hair, the chin. ‘It’s Betty, isn’t it? Betty Zielinski.’ Grey, shrivelled and abandoned, she looked older than in life. Her body seemed contorted by rheumatism, and afflicted by something else, too-covered in brown spots as if she’d contracted some strange form of chickenpox or been attacked by a swarm of bees. Her teeth were bared as if she was confronting an icy gale, or about to scream. Then another image came into Kathy’s mind, of the cast of Abbott’s mother suspended by a chain in Stan Dodworth’s room. She felt outrage and shock. A little time ago this woman had spoken to her, laughed and cried. She remembered her last words:‘Sh! Secrets!’
‘Not suicide?’ Kathy said, trying to hold on to objective fact. Betty’s feet were barely clear of the floor, her toes brushing the stone that was soaking wet beneath her. None of the chairs appeared to be in the right position to have been kicked away, unless something had been moved.
‘No,’ the doctor murmured. ‘I think we can rule that out.’
‘What are those brown spots?’
Brock pointed a gloved finger at a length of electrical lead lying on the floor. One end was plugged into the power board from which cables stretched to the appliances in the room. The other end had been taped to a length of wooden dowel used as a handle, and the insulation had been stripped back to expose the naked wire twisted into a stiff point.
‘They electrocuted her?’
Brock nodded.‘Many times.’
An involuntary spasm of nausea rose in Kathy’s throat. She turned away, tears of rage and pity welling in her eyes. She could hardly hear the doctor’s next words because of the roaring in her ears.
‘I’d say they deliberately wet her feet and the floor to earth her.’
Then the photographer said, ‘Looks like someone’s been here before me.’ He was crouching by a small circular mark on the dirty surface of the old stone flags, and he pointed to two others forming a precise triangle.
‘What’s that?’
‘Looks to me like the feet of a tripod. Could be a surveying instrument, I suppose, or a camera tripod.’
‘You mean they may have taken pictures of her?’
‘It’s the right position, yes.’
There was silence as they took this in.
‘She lived next door,’ Brock said finally to the scene manager. ‘I’d like to take a couple of your people in there with me. And you’ll want to have a good look in the back garden. They seem to have forced an entry through the back door, but it’s not clear how they got through the fence. Maybe over the wall from her yard.’
‘Right.’
‘Come on, Kathy,’ Brock said grimly and led the way up the stairs. In one of the rooms above they found Tevfik Akif sitting on a pile of bricks, and had him repeat his story, then they collected two of the SOCO team and fresh protective gear so as to avoid the risk of cross-contamination with the house next door. They went out the back way, across the duckboard path to the rear lane, and into Betty’s yard. Immediately they saw the broken pane of glass in her back door, which was unlocked.
The house was cold and very still, and a faint smell of fried onions hung in the air. While the two SOCO women went to work in the kitchen, Brock and Kathy moved on into the interior. The furniture was old and heavy and dark, like heirlooms from an earlier generation, and everywhere there were dolls, forlorn and abandoned, staring accusingly at the intruders. Nothing seemed disturbed downstairs, and they continued up to the bedroom floor. They found Betty’s bedroom at the rear, facing onto the lane. The bedclothes were thrown back, an electric underblanket still switched on. There were pieces of a broken china vase in a corner, and a damp stain on a rug beside the bed.
They continued from room to room, but nothing else seemed disturbed. The victim had had a bath, it seemed, brushed her teeth and gone to bed. Then someone had broken into her house.
‘Poor Betty,’Kathy breathed.‘She said she was afraid of a monster, just like Tracey.’
They opened the front door and were about to start searching the well leading down to the basement when they both noticed the looping letters of new graffiti on the footpath outside Betty’s house: ‘this is real’. At the same moment, a belligerent voice barked at them from the neighbouring house.
‘What d’you think you’re up to?’
Reg Gilbey was standing at his open front door, peering at them suspiciously in the grey morning light. His eyes were bleary through the thick lenses of his glasses, his sparse grey hair sticking up in wispy clumps as if he’d only just got out of bed. He was wearing a heavy cardigan with frayed cuffs and his baggy trousers had been darned at the knee with a thread several shades too dark, as had his thick socks. In one hand he was cradling a fat black cat and in the other he held a lighted cigarette.
‘Morning, Mr Gilbey,’ Brock said. ‘Remember us? Metropolitan Police, DCI Brock and DS Kolla.’
‘What’re you doing in Betty’s place?’
‘We’d like a word with you,’ Brock replied.
As they came up Gilbey’s steps Kathy said, ‘That’s Betty’s cat, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, woke me up this morning, mewing at the back door. Greedy tyke. What d’you want?’ He backed reluctantly into his hallway as they followed him in.
‘When did you last see Betty?’ Brock asked.
Gilbey pondered, thought processes apparently sluggish. He cleared his throat with a rasping gurgle and Kathy caught a strong whiff of whisky along with the tar. ‘Yesterday evening. Brought me a pie she’d baked. We ate it together with a glass of vino. Why? What’s the matter?’
This unexpected glimpse of domestic harmony between the two neighbours surprised Kathy. ‘I thought you two didn’t get on,’ she said.
‘There was that big crowd in the square, all those weirdos. Made Betty nervous. Scared her cat. What’s it to you, anyway?’
‘I’m afraid we have bad news about Betty, Mr Gilbey. She’s been found dead.’
Gilbey stared at her, then at Brock, face blank.‘Dead?’ he said slowly, as if the word meant nothing to him. The cat sensed something and leaped abruptly from his arm. ‘Betty?’
‘Let’s sit down in the kitchen,’ Kathy said. She steered him towards the open door at the end of the hall where she could see a pine table and chairs. Along the way the cigarette dropped from his fingers and Brock, following behind, picked it up. He doused it in the kitchen sink, next to the remains of a home-baked cheese and onion pie and an empty bottle of wine, and ran a glass of water for the painter, who had removed his glasses to rub his eyes. The frames were old and worn, Kathy noticed, heavy plastic, like a museum piece from the 1960s. She wondered if Gilbey, presumably a successful and prosperous man, looked so resolutely down at heel by choice or through self-neglect.
‘How did she go?’ Gilbey grunted after taking a swallow of water, hand trembling.‘Was it her heart?’
‘We’re not sure at the moment exactly how she died.’
Gilbey picked up the evasion in Brock’s answer and said sharply,‘She didn’t hurt herself, did she?’
‘No, she…’
But before Kathy could go on, Gilbey interrupted. ‘Who found her then?’
‘A builder. She was found in the basement of one of the houses they’re doing up.’
Gilbey’s brow wrinkled in astonishment.
‘When did she leave you last night?’
‘I don’t know… ten, ten-thirty. When the crowd began to break up. But how…?’
‘Was there anything specific about the crowd that bothered her? Did she mention anything?’
‘Not really. They just made her nervous. When they began to drift away she said she’d go home and run a hot bath. How did she come to be in the building site, for God’s sake? It’s locked up at night, and she didn’t get on with any of those men.’
‘We’re not sure at the moment. Did you hear anything unusual last night, after she left?’
‘Well… yes, I did. Some time after midnight, getting on for one, I’d say, I was getting ready to turn in. Her bedroom is through the wall from mine. I heard a thump from next door, and I wondered about it. She could be a clumsy old cow, knocking things over. In the end I did nothing.’
‘You know the layout of her house then?’
‘Course I do, we’ve been neighbours for thirty-five years.’
Brock’s phone rang and he listened for a moment, then murmured, ‘Right, I’ll be over in a minute.’ He rang off and said,‘I’m going back to the scene, Kathy. You finish up here with Mr Gilbey, will you?’
He left by the back door while the old painter lit another cigarette with an unsteady hand.
‘Do you want to lie down, Reg?’ Kathy asked, wondering if she should get a doctor.
‘No, I’m all right.’
‘Is there anything else you can tell me that might help us?’
‘How did she die then?’ he asked.
‘It seems she was hanged.’
‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’
‘Can you think of anyone who’d want to do that?’
He shook his head distractedly. ‘She could be cantankerous, of course, accusing people of wanting to steal her things, stuff like that, but I never took it seriously.’
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