No Trace
Page 6
Inside, in a pale grey foyer, she took a catalogue for Poppy Wilkes’s exhibition, which described the artist as ‘a ferociously gifted young British artist, one of the second wave of yBas following the pioneering generation of such international stars as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin’. The first part of the exhibition was a video installation called Dad’s Car and Other Remote Sightings of Distant Kin, and Kathy went into a square room, onto the ceiling and four walls of which black-and-white video films were being projected. When she reached the centre of the space, rotating to try to follow the different images, Kathy picked up a soft background soundtrack of sighs and moans and mysterious clicks. The films appeared unsynchronised and were difficult to follow, sometimes running in slow motion or frozen in a still or going suddenly blank, but there seemed to be certain recurring images: of an old car, a Jaguar perhaps, viewed from a low angle, door open; of various pieces of women’s underwear in close-up draped across leather upholstery; of a woman’s foot sticking out of a car window, jerking violently; of a cigarette burning in a car’s ashtray. Kathy didn’t stay long.
She moved on to another room containing a number of Poppy’s highly naturalistic sculptures, dominated by half a dozen giant cherubs suspended from the ceiling. These winged figures had the extremely realistic features of a pretty child, disturbingly like Tracey Rudd, but magnified to larger than adult size, and of an unhealthy-looking mottled brown colour. The catalogue explained that the colouring had been made from blood donated by convicted murderers, after whom each cherub was named, as in Cherub Maxwell, Cherub Henry and so on. Another of the sculptures was called Virgin Birth, and the infant, again larger than life and very realistic, lay on the lap of the conventionalised drapery of a Madonna from which the figure itself had mysteriously vanished, leaving a void where the face should have been.
In one corner of the room were a few pieces by another sculptor, Stan Dodworth—presumably, Kathy thought, the Stan whom Poppy Wilkes had mentioned as having a problem with the pigs. According to the catalogue, Stan was a working class lad from the north of England who had burst onto the London scene with his scandalous sculpture ‘Fag Thatcher’, a bust of the former Prime Minister made entirely from urine-stained cigarette butts retrieved from public toilets in northern mining towns. After the storm of controversy this and other similar pieces had provoked, Stan suffered a nervous breakdown and had only recently recovered sufficiently to expose his talent to public view in the exhibition Body Parts, from which these works had been taken. They comprised a series of withered limbs, like burnt driftwood, set up on plinths. Kathy resisted the temptation to spend twelve thousand pounds on a blackened hand.
One wall of the large exhibition area was glass, on the other side of which were the tables of The Tait Gallery restaurant, so that the diners could take in the exhibitions as they ate, while they in turn would appear as living sculptures, part of the show. Kathy could see the last lunch diners finishing their meals, and she and they smiled at each other through the glass.
‘Look pleased with themselves, don’t they?’ a voice murmured in her ear.
She turned to find Poppy Wilkes.
‘You didn’t stay long in my video room,’ Poppy said. ‘Didn’t you like my work?’
‘I found it unsettling,’ Kathy said, and then, seeing the scepticism in Poppy’s eyes,added,‘My dad died in a car crash.’
‘Really? Oh, wow.’
‘He had a big old car like that—a Bentley. He drove it into a motorway bridge support.’
‘Hell. An accident?’
‘Probably not. He’d just gone bankrupt.’
Kathy had no idea why she was making this confession. She hadn’t intended to, and she felt it to be completely out of character. And Poppy wasn’t exactly the sort of person she’d want to confide in. It was almost as if the atmosphere of exhibitionism in this place had infected her.
‘What about you? Was that your dad and his women?’
Poppy smiled. ‘No. I’d like to say I had a tragic childhood but it was just ordinary.’
‘Is that what drives you to do this—to avoid being ordinary?’
‘Ooh, that’s a sharp one. What about you? What happened after your dad died?’
‘Mum died, and I got on with my life.’ Kathy was aware of Poppy appraising her, eyes half closed as if composing a camera shot. She decided she didn’t want to be the subject of one of Poppy’s artworks. ‘You live here, don’t you?’
‘In this building, yes,’ Poppy replied. ‘Behind here there are workshops and a few small flats—bed-sits, really. When Fergus takes you on he gives you a room and workshop facilities and materials and exposure, and in return he owns your work.You get a percentage of anything he sells over an agreed amount. It’s a way of getting started after art school. He’s launched some good talent that way.’
‘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 wit
h 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 bought 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.
6
As 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.’
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.