No trace bak-8

by Barry Maitland

  ‘I think it may be. I’m going to the gallery now just to be sure she isn’t there. Will you let me know if you find her?’

  ‘Of course. I want to speak to Fergus Tait myself. I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.’

  He rang off and watched Bren’s face grow darker as he spoke to someone on the other phone. He rang off and turned to Brock. ‘There’s been a cock-up. The doctors discharged Poppy Wilkes at midday, and her escort brought her here to be interviewed about last night. She said she was hungry and he took her down to the canteen. While he was at the counter she walked out. No one’s seen her since.’

  ‘I want her found, Bren. Check taxis, bus routes, the tube station. I’m going to Northcote Square. Send a squad down there as well.’

  There were crowds in the square. At the north end a small hill of flowers, bunches in cellophane, was growing against the railings of 53 Urma Street, and tourists were taking pictures of the policeman on duty in the doorway. On West Terrace a smaller group clustered around a forlorn posy of violets tied to the railings outside number fourteen, and then the crowd swelled again towards Lazarus Street and The Pie Factory in the south. There were black T-shirts everywhere, emblazoned with a stark white graphic of Gabriel Rudd’s face, curls rampant, which managed to evoke the iconic images of both Jimi Hendrix and Che Guevara. The mood was of subdued excitement, everyone conscious of the significance of this moment, which would undoubtedly figure in every future art history book.

  Kathy eased her way around a TV camera crew unpacking their gear and saw Brock turn the corner into the square, then stop and stare at all the activity. They met up at the gallery entrance, pushing their way through the melee at the door and squeezing into the hall past the crush at the T-shirt counter. They heard Fergus Tait’s voice coming from the side gallery and, looking past the reporters and photographers, saw him presenting a eulogy to Gabriel Rudd, complete with a PowerPoint display projected onto a screen.

  They waited for him to finish, and he finally emerged, face flushed and triumphant. He saw the two police, motionless in the seething crowd.

  ‘Ah, officers, how are you? Can it wait? I’m rather busy at the moment, as you see.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid it can’t,’ Brock said. ‘Maybe it’d be quieter at the station.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Tait said in alarm. ‘I have to be here. I simply must.’

  ‘Let’s talk in your office then, and see where we go from there.’

  Tait led the way, closing the door behind them.

  ‘So how can I help you?’

  Brock began by asking him if he had any information that would help them solve Rudd’s murder.

  ‘Absolutely not. I had no idea about it until I was woken by a phone call from a reporter I know at six this morning, and it’s been absolute bedlam ever since. I haven’t even been able to get away to see poor Poppy in the hospital yet. How is she?’

  ‘She was discharged at midday, and hasn’t been seen since. We were hoping you might be able to help us find her.’

  ‘Disappeared! Dear Lord, not another!’

  ‘There’s no need for alarm at this stage. We just want to speak to her.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t seen her, but let me ask my staff.’ He rang two internal numbers and drew a blank.‘No, no one’s seen her here.’

  ‘We’ll check her room for ourselves, if you don’t mind. What about her family?’

  ‘I do have a number somewhere…’ He flicked through a filofax on his desk. ‘Yes, a brother-home and office numbers. Shall I try them?’

  Brock nodded, but again Tait was unsuccessful; the brother hadn’t heard from Poppy in weeks. ‘That about exhausts my sources, I’m afraid, Chief Inspector, so if I can get on now…’

  ‘I’ve got some other questions for you. Sir Jack Beaufort…’ Brock paused, catching the sudden wariness that came over Tait, who touched his big satin tie -gold today-and cleared his throat. ‘Yes, what about him?’

  ‘You tried to interest him in buying a nude sculpture of Tracey, didn’t you?’

  Tait looked nervous.‘Em, may I ask who told you that?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Ah, well, I do recall showing him one of Poppy’s pieces, but it wasn’t Tracey, as such.’

  ‘He said it was startlingly lifelike. Apparently you described it as pornographic realism, is that right?’

  Tait flushed scarlet.‘Oh now, if I did it would just have been my little joke.’ He laughed uncomfortably.

  ‘What did Dodworth tell you about Sir Jack?’

  ‘Only… thathemightbesusceptibletothatsortofpiece.’

  ‘Susceptible? That sounds like some kind of entrap-ment. What do you mean?’

  ‘Not at all. I’m a businessman, Chief Inspector. I try to match the goods that I have for sale to the customers who come to me.’

  ‘And the goods you had for sale included the little girl herself, yes?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She was there that day. You sent her in to see Beaufort.’

  ‘I most certainly did not,’ Tait said, blustering with indignation.‘If she was there I wasn’t aware of it, and I’m beginning to resent the drift of your questions. I’ll have to ask you to go now.’

  As they were leaving, Brock said, ‘Sir Jack suggested that, with Gabriel Rudd dead, his prices would probably have doubled overnight. Was he right?’

  ‘No, no,’ Tait said, still ruffled. ‘Not doubled- quadrupled. And nobody would have been more pleased than Gabe himself, poor fellow.’

  ‘Where’s that sculpture of his daughter now?’

  ‘It was one of Poppy’s, an early version of her cupids. She destroyed it because the true scale made it too… literal, I think that was her word. It was certainly unnerving.’

  They reached the entrance hall. Through the glass wall to the main gallery they saw Gabe’s banners above the heads of the crowd. The final, sixteenth one was in place, Kathy noticed-blank except for the spray of Gabe’s own blood.

  ‘They let you have that?’ she asked, and Tait gave a grim smile.

  ‘Art takes priority,’ he said. ‘We have to respect Gabe’s intentions. Who knows, he may have given his life for this.’

  ‘What’s the point of that meandering line at the top of each one? What does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s like a little creature crawling from one to the next, leaving a wandering trail. It reminds me of that phrase of Paul Klee’s, “I took my line for a walk”. Gabe wouldn’t explain it to me. He said every work of art had to have its unsolved mystery.’

  Kathy frowned. She didn’t like unsolved mysteries.

  She managed to grab a late lunch of a sandwich and some painkillers in the station canteen before the team assembled for an expert briefing. The first specialist was the forensic psychologist, clearly keyed up. They had gathered in one of the larger meeting rooms, and the whole wall behind the speaker was covered by a huge map of Greater London.

  The fascinating thing about this case, the profiler explained, was the way in which it inverted the usual pattern of serial crimes. The usual pattern was demonstrated by the abduction of the three girls, in which Abbott/Wylie had begun at locations within a safe distance of their home base, their comfort zone. Had they not been caught, they would have gradually worked further out into the surrounding city as their confidence grew, and, using the profiler’s ‘A4 rule’ and its more sophisticated computer derivatives, the psychologist would eventually have been able to infer their starting point and lead the police to the Newman estate.

  But in the case of the Zielinski/Dodworth/Rudd killings, the opposite had happened. The victims all lived in the same immediate area, and there was no way of inferring the killer’s home base from these three deaths. Instead of picking victims at random points within the comfort zone, he was choosing them because of their association with this particular place and its current celebrity. Celebrity was the key. The effect of Gabriel Rudd’s celebrity, enhanced by all the information about
him in the media and on the web, was to draw a violent stalker to him. The traditional pattern was turned inside out. This type of celebrity stalking had been seen before, of course, but here it was taking a very sophisticated form. The murderer had done extensive research into his primary target, Gabriel Rudd, discovered his obsession with Henry Fuseli, and then used Fuseli’s work to create a kind of ongoing drama, culminating in the tableau of Fuseli’s masterwork, which DS Kolla had witnessed. The visual clues which DS Kolla had picked up (he gave her a quick little smile, which embarrassed Kathy) demonstrated just how elaborate was his thinking.

  Kathy wasn’t feeling at all well, her head and shoulder throbbing. She looked away to avoid further eye contact and focused on the London map behind him. It was colour coded-red for development, blue for water, green for open space, black for main roads-and with the preponderance of red it looked like an enormous chaotic bloodstain, as if the room had been the scene of a chainsaw massacre. Through the blood the pale blue ribbons of the Thames and other waterways looked like writhing snakes.

  Kathy dragged her mind back to the briefing. She felt light-headed and wondered if perhaps she had returned to work too soon. The forensic psychologist was suggesting different ways in which the killer might be tracked down. He had probably done this before, perhaps not quite as ambitious or elaborate, but along the same lines-a celebrity group or family, perhaps, or a series of victims connected by some common celebrity activity like sport or the media. And he could have come from anywhere.

  There was an uncomfortable silence, then Brock asked if the killer was likely to strike again in Northcote Square, and in particular whether Poppy Wilkes might be at risk. The psychologist thought not; Rudd had been the focus of the whole thing, he felt sure, and any further killing would be superfluous. Bren asked how they might recognise the perpetrator and the psychologist offered a sketch: craving attention yet shrinking from the spotlight, so an unhappy, neglected childhood relationship with his mother, and perhaps a physical blemish or handicap of some kind of which he is acutely conscious; very intelligent and organised but excited by violence, so perhaps a substantial academic and work history coupled with disruptive incidents.

  Kathy said, ‘You keep saying “he”. Is there any reason to suppose it’s a man?’

  ‘No indeed, nor that there’s only one individual involved. I was just using the singular male pronoun for convenience.’

  There was something wrong with all this, Kathy knew, and it took her a moment to realise that she hadn’t told them what she’d learned at the Soane Museum. Her head felt fuzzy, and before she could speak the psychologist had handed over to the laboratory reporting officer, RO in the jargon, the scientist with overall responsibility for managing the forensic examinations at the laboratory. He was describing progress on the crime-scene analysis, pinning up a series of photographs and computer-generated diagrams plotting bloodstains at the scene. From these he described the sequence of events that had occurred in the studio.

  ‘We believe there was an initial struggle-the noises that DS Kolla and PC McLeod heard-during which Rudd received a blow to the head that probably incapacitated him. We believe that it was only after the assailant attacked PC McLeod that he returned to strike the fatal blow to Rudd’s throat. One of the reasons for this is here…’ He pointed to a photograph of a bloody shoeprint crossed by a splatter of bloodstains. ‘The spray came after the footprint, so Rudd was still alive and pumping arterial blood as the killer made his escape to the door.’

  ‘What about DNA?’ Bren asked.

  ‘Disappointing so far. We’ve only found Rudd’s and Wilkes’s DNA on the cloak, where it came in contact with them presumably, and the blood is all Rudd’s as far as we can tell. The killer was very careful to avoid leaving traces-probably wore gloves and some kind of protective clothing beneath the cloak and mask. There were DNA traces on the abandoned shoes in the bin, but they don’t match anything we have. We haven’t found any discarded hairs or fibres. We had hopes for saliva traces inside the mouth opening of the mask, but there again it turned out to be Rudd’s DNA- we think he must have spat at his assailant during the initial struggle.’

  His words took Kathy back to the moment she had forced her way into the studio. Once again she felt her feet sliding on the bloodstained floor, and herself toppling…

  ‘What happened?’ She looked up in surprise. People were clustered around her, looking concerned, and she seemed to be sitting on the floor.

  ‘You blacked out,’ someone said, and then she heard Brock giving orders to get a doctor. Two men lifted her to her feet and began to move towards the door.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she protested, and heard Brock at her shoulder, ‘I should never have let you come in today, Kathy.’ She stopped objecting and let them lead her away.

  Later that evening Brock received a message to proceed immediately to an urgent meeting with Commander Sharpe at New Scotland Yard. When he reached the office on the sixth floor he thought he detected a spark of interest beneath the chilly glare of Sharpe’s secretary. She knocked on the connecting door and showed him straight in.

  ‘Coffees, please, Lillian,’ Sharpe barked.‘Sit.’

  Brock did so.

  ‘You look worried, Brock.’

  ‘Oh, no. So many things to sort out.’

  ‘Tell me. But you seem to have sorted out Sir Jack Beaufort. He’s thrown in the towel.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Couple of hours ago. Resigned from the review panel on personal grounds. The Beaufort Committee no longer has a chair.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Brock said cautiously, trying to read Sharpe’s mood.

  ‘Interesting? It’s spectacular! The whole building’s buzzing like an upturned wasp’s nest. You had a session with Beaufort this morning, didn’t you? I’ll need a full report; every fact, every suspicion, every innuendo.’

  ‘Innuendo?’

  ‘The man’s a paedophile, isn’t he?’

  ‘I’m not sure that he is. I think Wylie set him up.’

  ‘Come on, Brock, don’t go soft on me now. You must have shaken him this morning. He knows the game’s up. No smoke without fire.’

  ‘In this case, there’s lots of smoke and very little fire.’

  ‘Well, we can hand him over to the tender mercies of the Child Protection Unit if you want him out of your hair. The important thing isn’t him, though, it’s his damned committee. We’ve got to make sure it’s so tainted by this that they’ll never dare to bring its recommendations into the light of day.’

  The door opened and the secretary came in with a tray.

  ‘What’s this?’ Sharpe asked.

  ‘Your coffees, sir.’

  ‘Bugger the coffee. We need a drink. Whisky for me. Brock?’

  Brock nodded.

  ‘Big ones, Lillian. And pour yourself one.’

  While Brock was away, Bren made a last check of his emails for the night, giving a little start to see the letters FBI appear. The message was brief and impersonal. Approval had been given to release to the Metropolitan Police the contents of six hundred and seventy-two messages stored in the accounts of Patrick Abbott and Robert Wylie. A CD containing the material had been despatched by secure express mail. Bren sent an acknowledgement and thanks, knowing that he wouldn’t sleep well that night.

  28

  Kathy blinked awake and realised with relief that she was in her own bed. She’d had a dream about passing out in a team briefing held at a crime scene with enormous bloodstains on the walls. Then she heard a noise in the living room, a tap running, then stopping. Someone was there. A figure appeared in the bedroom doorway. ‘Hi, how are you feeling?’

  ‘Nicole? Is that you?’ She couldn’t remember what her friend from the National Identification Service was doing there.

  ‘Yes. Brock asked me to come over. You’ve had a good sleep. Do you feel any better?’

  Kathy sat up slowly.‘I think so, yes. I feel as if I’ve had a long rest.
What time is it?’

  Nicole checked her watch.‘Ten past ten.’

  ‘I don’t remember how I got here.’

  ‘The doctor checked you out at Shoreditch and gave you a shot of something. They brought you home and Brock gave me a ring. He’d have stayed himself but he had things to do.’

  ‘Have you had dinner?’

  ‘Yes, and breakfast.’

  ‘Breakfast?’

  ‘It’s Thursday morning. You slept for eighteen hours straight. I kipped on your sofa. I’ll make us a cup of tea.’

  As Kathy listened to the comforting sounds of Nicole outside at the kitchen sink she adjusted to what she’d just learned. It was frightening how little control you had when you could be switched on and off like a TV set. In her mind, the bloodstained wall and writhing blue snakes were more vivid and immediate than the smell of toast coming through the door. She closed her eyes and let the images fade.

  Nicole returned with a tray and sat down on the edge of the bed.‘You’ve got a bit more colour in your face,’she said.‘I was worried about you. You looked so white.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Nicole. I seem to be getting you to do me favours all the time.’

  ‘That’s what friends are for.’

  ‘What about your work?’

  ‘There’s nothing urgent. I can stay as long as you need me.’

  ‘Didn’t Lloyd mind?’

  ‘He’s a copper too, remember.’

  Kathy didn’t know Nicole’s latest partner well, but remembered that he was a detective in west London. All in the family.

  ‘Incidentally, he knows someone you met recently. Special Branch, Tom Reeves.’ Nicole raised a questioning eyebrow.

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve bumped into him a few times,’ Kathy said vaguely.

  ‘Interesting?’ Nicole persisted.

  ‘I’m too ill to answer that.’

  Nicole laughed. ‘Only, he rang you this morning on your mobile. I answered it in case it was Brock. I hope that’s okay.’

  Kathy felt a small buzz of pleasure. ‘That’s fine. What did he want?’