No Trace

by Barry Maitland

  Scott screwed up his nose and sniffed suspiciously at his coffee cup before sipping. ‘Don’t see any parallel.’

  ‘No, probably not,’ Kathy said, and waited.

  After a long silence Scott said, ‘D’ you think he’s going to try to make money out of it again?’

  ‘Rudd? Yes, probably. His dealer’s encouraging him in that direction. Fergus Tait?’

  ‘Don’t know him. They mentioned Betty Zielinski. She’s still around?’

  ‘Yes. She knew Jane Rudd?’

  Scott nodded. ‘Neighbour. Off her trolley. Tried to take the kid after Jane died. Claimed it was hers. Completely nuts.’

  ‘She tried to take Tracey?’

  ‘Mmm.’ Scott examined the look on Kathy’s face. ‘She didn’t push Jane into the canal, if that’s what you’re thinking. Her movements were accounted for.’

  ‘Right.What happened when she tried to take Tracey?’

  ‘Got herself worked up. Quite hysterical. The grandparents had to step in. They took Tracey to live with them for a while till things settled down.’

  ‘Was Tracey’s father happy with that arrangement?’

  ‘As far as I could tell. My impression was that he wasn’t much bothered. More interested in his work, if you can call it that.’

  ‘How did he react to his wife’s suicide?’

  Scott shrugged. ‘He drank a lot. How do you know what’s really going on inside someone’s head?’ He looked pointedly at his watch. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Thanks, Bill.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’ Scott got to his feet, then added, ‘I liked her, you know, Betty—mad as she was,’ and marched off before Kathy could change her mind.

  ‘Chief? The car’s here for your evening prayers.’

  Brock looked up at Bren who’d tapped on his door. He checked his watch and swore under his breath. He hadn’t noticed the time and realised he was going to be late. He shoved a handful of papers into his briefcase and hurried out. The last thing he needed was a senior management meeting—dubbed morning or evening prayers, depending on the time of day—and especially this one, called specifically to discuss the report he hadn’t read.

  By the time he reached the conference room at the Yard the meeting was well advanced. Commander Sharpe scowled darkly at him as he took the empty seat next to Superintendent Dick Chivers. ‘Cheery’ Chivers, ever dour, was looking glummer than usual. Brock’s heart sank as he looked around the table and saw that everyone else’s copies of the report were decorated with dozens of place markers and stick-on notes of many colours, signifying the depth of their study. His own copy, entirely free of such embellishments, looked hideously naked apart from the letter tucked in at the end of chapter one. He made a mental note to get Dot to stick lots of things in for the future, and wondered where they all found the time. As he listened to them droning on he told himself that it was good to suffer these things from time to time, to remind himself just why he’d always refused promotion above detective chief inspector. He suffered less of this than any of them, and some no doubt spent their whole working lives in such meetings, pale termites in the ant heap of number ten Broadway.

  By listening quietly, Brock was able to pick up much more from the exchanges around the table than he had from the impenetrable document. It seemed that some sort of power struggle was going on, though whether entirely within the police service or involving also the security services was not clear. The battlefield on this occasion was the ongoing allocation of responsibilities and resources between the centre—Scotland Yard—and the periphery— the thirty-three borough operational command units. The focus of this debate was Special Operations, and in particular the Major Enquiry Teams of SO1, to which they all belonged. In essence, it was the opinion of Sharpe— always, in Brock’s view, susceptible to conspiracy theories where his place in the organisation was concerned—that the Beaufort Committee would recommend that SO1 be shafted, sacrificed on some spurious altar of management theory.

  ‘Did he say Beaufort?’ Brock whispered to Chivers.

  Cheery gave him a baleful look to see if he was joking, then reached to Brock’s copy of the report and turned to the introduction. Listed were the names of the committee of inquiry headed by its chair, Sir John Beaufort. ‘Jugular Jack,’ Chivers snorted.

  ‘Something, Brock?’ Sharpe was leaning forward over his papers, beaming his piercing stare down the length of the conference table.

  ‘Just that I happened to come across Beaufort today. He’s got Special Branch protection, you know. He’s been getting death threats.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope they come to something,’ Sharpe said acidly.‘I suppose we can always consider that as a last resort. Murder is one thing we should be able to do reasonably well. No, Lillian, that’s not to be minuted.’ He allowed time for appreciative chortles around the table before moving to the next item on his long agenda.

  5

  In the following days the initial turbulent activity settled into a pattern. New faces became familiar, actions became routine and the hope of quick results faded into a dull frustration. The weather settled too, into the soggy monochrome of autumn; leaves fell in earnest from the trees and people reached automatically for warm coats as if summer had never been.

  Kathy continued to visit Northcote Square each day, although no one seriously expected Gabriel Rudd to hear from his daughter’s kidnapper. She became part of the background at 53 Urma Street, saying little but watching and listening in the hope of catching some reference that might be useful in the hunt for Tracey. She found that the enigma of Gabriel Rudd became no clearer to her. She attended a number of impassioned interviews he gave to radio, TV and press reporters in his house, in which he spoke agonisingly of his loss and pleaded with heart-wrenching conviction for his daughter’s safe return. She also observed the careful way in which he positioned his interviewers and their photographers so that his studies for The Night-Mare always appeared to good effect in the background. She noticed that he encouraged certain styles of photograph of himself, in close close-up, or in apparent conversation with his work, and she was struck by his change of mood when the interviewers left, becoming brisk and focused on his preparations for the exhibition at The Pie Factory, which seemed to absorb all his attention. It was as if she were watching two quite separate movies spliced together, one of a shocking family tragedy and the other of the artist at work.

  Kathy also learned a good deal about Rudd’s creative process, which she found surprising. She had assumed that artists worked pretty much in isolation, applying their individual skills and inspiration to the material at hand, but it turned out that Rudd’s work was fabricated by other people, a whole army of collaborators or subcontractors acting under his instructions. Some of them worked elsewhere, but many of them moved into 53 Urma Street and could be found in busy groups in the studio, or sprawled at meal breaks in the living room, or asleep in the bedrooms on the ground floor. When Kathy asked Rudd about this (‘You mean you don’t actually make your own works of art?’) he laughed and gave her a rambling explanation of his fundamental challenge to the whole meaning of artistic authentication, which she didn’t follow. ‘I suppose you think this is dead easy, eh?’ he challenged her. ‘Wanking around dreaming up crazy ideas.’

  ‘I was wondering how you know when you’ve got a good one, how you can tell a good idea from a less good one.’

  ‘Interesting question. I just do. That’s why I’m here, doing this. Sometimes it scares me rigid.’

  His mood swung from garrulous to glum, and she was pretty sure that Poppy was bringing him drugs of some kind.

  She liked the crew of assistants, who seemed a more light-hearted version of the police teams, industrious and painstaking and concerned with practical matters of obtaining things and making them work.They joked about Rudd’s conceptual pretensions behind his back and ignored his tantrums when things weren’t to his satisfaction, and it was from them that Kathy began
to glean an idea of what he was preparing for the exhibition. It seemed to be a play on the word ‘trace’—the missing girl Trace, lost without a trace, and the artwork itself in the form of tracings. These would be images and words transferred by various processes onto sheets of plastic tracing film used in draughting offices, with a pale milky texture which would give a shimmering, ghostly effect under certain kinds of light.

  Each day at eleven a.m. Kathy got a phone call from Len Nolan, polite but firm, wanting to know of any progress. She imagined the two grandparents sitting together over their morning coffee, ticking off the points on a list, determined not to be ignored by the authorities. Kathy also did follow-up interviews around the square, and came to recognise the ebb and flow of the people who moved through it, and put faces and characters to some of the names on the list of residents. The first she visited was Betty Zielinski, who was a common sight in the central gardens, feeding the birds with bread scraps she collected from Mahmed’s Café. At Kathy’s suggestion, she was taken into Betty’s home on West Terrace to meet her family, which turned out to be a fat black cat and a large collection of dolls, dozens in every room, each known by name and dressed eccentrically in clothes made by Betty on an old treadle sewing machine. Her sewing room was a chaotic jumble of home-made paper patterns and scraps of cloth. As she talked, Kathy tried to fathom her madness, if that’s what it was; a strange mixture of what seemed like normal memory and sensible observations with disconcerting interpretations, as if Betty stubbornly refused to see the world the same way as everybody else. There was an element of deliberate calculation in some of this, Kathy thought, and one or two of the disjunctions bothered her.

  ‘Tracey liked it here, with my little babies, in their mummy’s house. She helped me choose materials for their dresses. She loved coming to her mummy’s house.’

  ‘Her mummy’s house?’ Kathy queried, wondering if she’d misheard. Betty gave a startled little laugh, absurdly girlish and playful for a sixty-two year old.

  ‘We pretended that this was her mother’s house,’ Betty simpered, and Kathy remembered how she’d talked the previous day to Gabe about ‘my own little girl, my own darling’.

  ‘You knew Tracey’s mother, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve lived here for almost forty years, longer than anyone else. Longer even than . . .’ she cocked her head and whispered, ‘. . . the monster. Poor Jane. Such lovely long blonde hair. I was so jealous of her long blonde hair.’

  ‘What monster, Betty?’

  ‘Shhh! The children will hear you! They’re terrified of him. The one next door, of course.’ She nodded towards the wall to number fifteen, the portrait painter’s house. ‘Stolen!’ she wailed suddenly. ‘So many stolen children!’

  ‘Reg Gilbey steals children?’

  Again a look of surprise came over Betty’s face, as if some unexpected shift had occurred inside her head. ‘Oh dear me, no. My family took such a long time to get to sleep last night after all the excitement with the visitors. They simply wouldn’t settle.’

  ‘Which visitors were those?’

  ‘Why, the policemen and women, looking for Tracey. They searched in every room, but I told them they’d never find her here.’ Her eyes twinkled as if at the memory of a particularly exciting game of hide-and-seek. ‘Thomas became so excited he wet his pants, and Geraldine was sick all over her brand-new dress.’

  Kathy could imagine what the lads from Shoreditch had made of that.

  From Betty’s she went next door to see Reg Gilbey. She heard his old carpet slippers shuffling on the other side of the door before it opened. He peered at her through thick-framed glasses, sparse grey hair sticking in odd tufts from his head, and said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m DS Kathy Kolla from the police, Mr Gilbey . . .’

  ‘Not interested,’ he said grumpily and made to close the door again.

  She put out a hand and said, ‘It won’t take long. I can come back later, if you’re busy.’

  ‘I had two lots of coppers here yesterday.’ He breathed whisky, and a musty smell leaked from the house.‘Can’t tell you anything.’

  ‘I was wondering if you might have noticed anything from that bay window of yours.You must get a good view of the school playground from there. Perhaps you saw . . .’

  ‘If you’re suggesting I spend my time watching the kiddies, you can clear off.’

  He moved to slam the door in her face, and she quickly said, ‘No, no. Look, I’m just doing my job. We all want to find her, don’t we?’

  He relented a little. ‘Have a look if you want,’ he said, then added gruffly, ‘Won’t do you any good.’

  He closed the door behind her and led the way down the corridor and up the stairs, dropping the cat on the way. At the landing he showed her into the big front room with its corner bay window, and the smells changed from musty damp to a rich soup of ripe linseed oil and sharp turpentine. Paintings were stacked several deep all around the walls, mainly portraits and figures, some nude.

  ‘Your work isn’t like the artists of The Pie Factory, then,’ Kathy said, making conversation as she went to the bay and checked the sightlines.

  ‘That rubbish!’ Gilbey scoffed. ‘Those people can’t draw and haven’t got one original thought between them.’

  ‘I suppose they do have original imaginations,’ she suggested, noticing a canvas in the corner depicting the figures of children running in the playground below. So he did spend time watching them, she thought.

  ‘No, no. That’s all froth and show.What they do is steal an image from some famous artist—Goya, Munch, Van Gogh, Bacon, whoever—and recycle it in execrable workmanship and look clever, as if they’re making some profound reference. They’re just scavengers on the body of a great tradition, that’s all they are.’ He’d obviously made this speech many times before, but it still got him heated.

  ‘Who does Gabriel Rudd steal from?’ she asked.

  ‘Henry Fuseli—now he was a painter. Others, too, I suppose.’

  ‘And you’ve never noticed anyone hanging around the corner down there, watching the kids?’

  He shook his head, and after a few more poisonous remarks about the decline of artistic standards he led her downstairs and showed her out.

  The school was next. The headmistress of Pitzhanger Primary School was a confident, brisk woman of definite opinions. She had known a very different Tracey from the happy child Gabriel Rudd had described.

  ‘We were concerned about her. She was withdrawn, found it hard to concentrate and didn’t make friends. Sometimes she would hide rather than join the other children at play or in classes. She had a favourite place in the service yard, an old coal bunker, where we’d usually find her. I spoke to her father about it and he insisted it was our fault, that the other children were bullying her, but that wasn’t so. It’s true that they’d heard about Dead Puppies— their parents told them—and that led to some teasing, but we soon put a stop to that. I believe there was some other problem. She seemed frightened.’

  ‘Did her grandparents speak to you?’

  ‘Yes, several times. They made it plain that they had a quarrel with Mr Rudd about his parenting, but I couldn’t support any suspicions of abuse or mistreatment. She just seemed very insecure and uncommunicative. Her teacher was concerned about some drawings she did of so-called monsters, but Tracey said they were her dreams.’

  ‘Do you still have the drawings?’ Kathy asked, but the woman shook her head.

  ‘I believe we gave them to her father.’

  ‘I suppose the other officers asked you if you’d noticed anything unusual lately.’

  ‘Yes. There’s been nothing really—no break-ins or obvious strangers hanging around. I had words with the landlord of The Daughters of Albion across the street when he put chairs and tables out on the footpath at lunchtime in the fine weather, and some of his customers started calling out to the children in the playground. Builders from West Terrace, mainly.’

 
‘I see. What about other locals? Reg Gilbey on the corner?’

  ‘Oh, we see him up there quite often, staring down at us, waiting for inspiration I suppose. He’s all right. He gave us one of his paintings for our fundraising auction day. Quite extraordinarily generous of him, actually. It was just a little oil sketch of our chimneys . . .’ She pointed up at the elaborate brick chimneys above the slate roof.‘It raised over five thousand.’

  ‘Gosh. And Betty Zielinski?’

  ‘Yes, she is a character. The children make up silly stories about her and call after her.We discourage it, of course, but they are fascinated and a little frightened by her.’

  ‘She told me that Tracey was a particular friend of hers, and used to visit her house.’

  ‘I’m surprised. I’ve seen her run from Betty when she’s approached her on her way home from school. I’d say Betty was a rather unreliable witness. She does tend to fantasise.’

  The Fikrets, the Turkish Cypriots who ran Mahmed’s Café, were clearly a formidable clan, led by Mahmed Fikret and his wife Sonia. Mahmed and his son Yasher were usually to be found drinking coffee at one of the little tables in the shop, reading the Economist or the Financial Times, while the diminutive Sonia worked behind the counter, serving customers and yelling orders back to the kitchen in a piercing voice. The family had connections in several parts of the square, with a grandchild at the primary school, several nephews working on the building site, which, as Poppy had told Kathy, Mahmed owned, and a cousin working as a chef in Fergus Tait’s upmarket restaurant, The Tait Gallery.‘We’re art lovers too, you know,’ Sonia told Kathy, pointing to a lurid print of a belly dancer on the wall.‘Yasher bought that one. He’s got a good eye.’

  On the fourth day of Tracey’s disappearance, Thursday the sixteenth of October, Kathy bought a pitta-bread sandwich and tea in a polystyrene cup from Mahmed’s and took them to the central gardens for her lunch. She found a seat and watched the activity around her. A steady trickle of people passed in front of 53 Urma Street, pausing and pointing to Tracey’s home. Through the rapidly thinning canopy of leaves she caught a glimpse of Reg Gilbey in his corner turret, peering down at four builders walking along West Terrace towards the pub on the corner of Urma Street, followed soon after by a flock of girls from the typing pool of one of the offices on East Terrace, a man with a walking stick, two women with small dogs. Tourists of all ages, from teenage German backpackers to elderly Americans, passed by, drawn to the red neon letters above the gallery at The Pie Factory. She had resisted visiting it so far because she felt she should have more urgent things to do, but now she was at a loose end, marooned in this square while the real work was being done elsewhere. She would definitely speak to Brock about it. She finished her lunch, scattering crumbs for the sparrows, and made her way towards the gallery entrance.