No Trace

by Barry Maitland

  The woman flinched. ‘Surely not?’ Her voice was a whisper.

  ‘I’m afraid so. Any idea how that could be possible?’

  ‘I can’t imagine. It says here that Gill Brothers collected Mrs Abbott on the morning of the twenty-seventh. We know them well. I can’t believe they could have lost her.’

  ‘Why don’t you give them a ring?’ Brock suggested.

  A couple of minutes later the manager replaced her phone, her face very pale. ‘They checked their records. They say they never took her. There’s no mention of an order on their files. But that’s just impossible . . .’ Her mind was working. ‘Unless . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ Brock prompted.

  ‘Unless he got into our computer and altered our records.’ Her hand strayed to her keyboard and touched it gently, as if comforting a dear friend who had been violated. ‘There will have to be an inquiry.’

  ‘Of course. Meanwhile, do you have anything on a Stanley Dodworth? Did he ever work here, or check in as a patient?’

  More tapping. ‘Umm, not in our staff records . . . We have a patient listed, appendectomy, middle of last year.’ She swung the monitor around to show Brock the details.

  ‘That’s him. I have his picture here. You wouldn’t recognise him, I suppose?’

  She shook her head. ‘But then I wouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s possible he came here more recently. I’d like to show it to people who worked in Patrick Abbott’s area, and circulate it to your security.’

  ‘Do you mind telling me why?’

  ‘He was a friend of Abbott’s, and we want to interview him, only he’s disappeared. We think he used to visit Abbott here at the hospital, and it’s just possible he might return here.’

  ‘I should alert Mrs Siddons. She manages the staff on main desk. There’s not much comes through our front doors that Mrs Siddons isn’t aware of.’

  ‘Would she be here now?’

  She was. She came bustling into the office and immediately recognised the man in the photograph.‘That’s Stan, one of our porters.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Mrs Siddons. He’s not one of ours.’

  ‘He certainly is. I see him around a lot.With Pat Abbott usually.’

  ‘But he doesn’t work here.’

  ‘Well, he wears one of our passes. I’ve seen it.’

  Brock interrupted.‘I’d very much appreciate it if you’d take a copy of this picture for your staff, Mrs Siddons, and tell them to ring security immediately if you see him again. It seems he’s been impersonating a hospital employee.’

  When she left he turned to the manager and said, ‘I think I’d better tell you what we think they were up to, and then I’d like to take a look at Abbott’s work area, if you don’t mind.’

  By accident or design, the geriatric wards were connected directly by large, ponderous lifts to the pathology and mortuary areas beneath them. They found a number of workers in the basement who recognised Dodworth’s photograph and who were convinced that he worked in some other department nearby. Sometimes he appeared in operating-theatre greens, they said, sometimes in overalls, sometimes in jeans and a T-shirt with a slogan, something about cherish the frail.

  They were taken to Abbott’s locker, where Brock signed a release for its contents—a pair of sneakers, several fat Stephen King paperbacks, a pair of glasses, an aluminium walking stick like the one he had in his flat, and, of most interest, a small diary. They spent some time sitting together at a table with a desk light, poring through its pages. It seemed to be a work diary, a record of shifts, overtime and leave. In addition, there were many entries of sequences of numbers and letters. It didn’t take long to establish that the strings of digits were identification numbers for patients.

  ‘I think he was keeping a record of what he was lending Stan,’ Brock murmured.‘Probably didn’t trust him to return the bits.’

  ‘Like a lending library catalogue,’ Kathy said. ‘Maybe the letters refer to parts—‘H’ for head, ‘RL’ right leg . . .’

  Brock was turning to the entries for the days on which the girls had been taken, and shook his head with disappointment. ‘Nothing. Not a thing. I suppose it wasn’t very likely.’ He snapped the book shut and pushed it into his pocket. ‘Come on. Enough of this.’

  They returned to The Pie Factory to check on the progress of the search. Nothing of significance had been discovered and there was still no sign of Stan Dodworth. As they left, Kathy glanced back at the building. At one end, to the left, a tableau of elegant waiters and diners shone through the large plate-glass windows of the restaurant, like a scene from a play dropped absurdly, nakedly into the dark damp square. Between that and the locked gallery entrance was a smaller window with a view into the main gallery space, also lit up. Gabe Rudd’s banners could just be glimpsed beyond a crew of people in there constructing some sort of structure behind the window. Banner number six, perhaps, Kathy thought. He certainly had plenty of material to work with.

  ‘Edward Hopper,’ Brock said. He, too, was looking at the diners mutely gossiping, laughing, raising glasses in a toast. ‘Can I buy you dinner?’

  ‘What, in there?’ Kathy wondered if he’d checked the prices.

  ‘No.’ He chuckled. ‘I was thinking more in terms of a little Greek place I noticed around the corner, not far away.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘I’ll just call Bren and then we’ll walk over. Some fresh air will do us good.’

  They were lucky to get in, the Saturday night crowd boisterous, and were squeezed into a tight little corner at the back, between a stair and the door to the kitchens.

  Brock eased his back against the bentwood chair and gave a long sigh. ‘We’re finished for the night, Kathy. Let’s have a drink.’ He ordered two large Scotches while they scanned the menu. ‘It seems plain enough,’ he said, as if it were spelled out there in the flamboyant handwritten script.‘Dodworth met Abbott when he was a patient at the hospital last year, and persuaded him to obtain body parts for him to make casts from, culminating in the whole corpse of Abbott’s mother. I wonder if Dodworth met Wylie, and how much of Abbott’s and Wylie’s other activities he was aware of?’

  ‘You’d have to assume he knew something. He obviously knew where they lived, and it looks as if he’s trying to hide from us.’

  ‘So one day Abbott visits Dodworth at The Pie Factory and sees the sculpture of a pretty child, and Stan tells him who she is. He and Wylie are on the lookout for victim number three . . .’

  A waiter lit the candle in the centre of the red-and-white checked tablecloth and took their order.

  ‘So Abbott and Wylie did take Tracey.’

  ‘Looks very much that way, doesn’t it? She was part of the series after all. So now it’s down to legwork and manpower and luck, unless Wylie can be persuaded to tell us where she is.’

  ‘Six days. It’s too long. She’s dead, isn’t she?’

  ‘Lee survived three weeks. Anyway, there’s nothing we can do to speed the process, so tomorrow we’ll have a well-earned day of rest, you and I, putting our feet up and reading more scathing reviews of Mr Rudd’s masterpieces.’

  ‘Will you be seeing Suzanne and the kids?’ Kathy asked, feeling a squirm of guilt as she recalled the letter she’d partially read. She felt a sudden urge to scratch her nose.

  Brock hesitated, and Kathy saw a frown pass over his face. ‘Stewart and Miranda aren’t with Suzanne any more, Kathy. I meant to tell you. Their mother came back.’

  ‘What!’ This was extraordinary news, and extraordinary, too, that Brock hadn’t mentioned it. Now Kathy thought she understood the reference to choices in Suzanne’s letter. She had been looking after her two grandchildren for several years now, after her daughter had gone off with a new man who didn’t want to be encumbered by her children. Having been abandoned by their mother, the kids had become extremely possessive of Suzanne, and although Kathy had got on well with them, she knew that they’d seen Brock as a threat and
had given him a hard time.

  ‘Permanently?’ Kathy asked. ‘Their mother’s back for good?’

  ‘Presumably.’

  ‘Well . . . that’s great, isn’t it?’ But Brock looked uneasy, and Kathy remembered her long-held suspicion that he actually found the arrangement convenient.

  ‘Yes. But it’ll take some adjustment for Suzanne.’

  And for you, Kathy thought.

  The waiter brought a mezze platter. Brock asked for another whisky, and poured a glass of wine for Kathy. She said,‘I must give Suzanne a ring. I haven’t spoken to her for ages. How is she?’

  She waited a long time before he replied. ‘Fine. She’s fine.’

  The subject seemed closed, so she said, ‘Can I have a look at that diary?’

  He handed it to her, and she began to study the pages, working forward from the beginning.‘The codes are there right from the start of the year, so he was giving Stan stuff long before the business with the girls, before his mother died.When was that again?’

  ‘July twenty-fifth,’ Brock said absently, reaching for the dolmades.

  She found the day, a Friday. Abbott had marked the place with a crude ballpoint outline of a cross. RIP was written across it. The diary was printed with little symbols to indicate the lunar phases, the twenty-fifth of July bearing the symbol of the new moon. Abbott had arranged his drawing on the page so that the arc of the new moon appeared at the top of the cross, like a symbol on a gravestone.

  ‘And they took Aimee on the twenty-second of August,’ Kathy said, turning to that date. As Brock had said, there was nothing to indicate its significance. But that day also carried the symbol of the new moon. She turned to the date of Lee’s abduction, the nineteenth of September, and there it was again. She felt a tremor of excitement and also of disgust, as if she’d had a sudden glimpse inside Abbott’s mind. Now Tracey’s abduction, the twelfth of October. But there was nothing, no moon sign. Kathy frowned.

  ‘Spot something?’ Brock looked up from contemplation of his whisky glass. He felt the spirit soaking through him like a warm bath.

  ‘I thought I’d found a pattern, but it doesn’t work for Tracey.’ She showed him the dates. ‘The next new moon wasn’t until the seventeenth of October, yesterday. Tracey was taken five days too soon.’

  Brock shrugged, unconvinced. ‘I wish I could think of something we could offer Wylie to get him to start talking.’

  ‘I wonder . . .’ Kathy began, then stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was just wondering if it’s possible Abbott killed his mother, too, in the hospital.’

  Brock thought for a moment, then said, ‘I think we’re getting tired.’

  13

  The next morning Kathy walked down to the shops for some milk and the papers. It was cool but dry, a crisp breeze blowing leaves and wrappers down the empty street. When she got home she did as Brock had recommended, making toast and coffee and lying down on the sofa to read the reviews.

  Was it unworthy to relish a savage review of someone else’s work, especially someone you knew? The reviewer in the first paper she opened seemed to think it was:

  There are those in the art world who have been conducting a whispering campaign to the effect that, at thirty-three, Gabriel Rudd is burnt out and finished as a serious artist. Their schadenfreude was immensely piqued by the prospect of the critical failure of his new exhibition, No Trace, at The Pie Factory, and seemed confirmed by the first hurried review. Furtive cackling could be heard from certain Shoreditch studios as the champagne was uncorked. But they were wrong; the exhibition is a stunning success, the work breathtaking, and Rudd’s reputation reaffirmed in spades.

  His subject is the recent abduction of his daughter Tracey (Trace), which has been so widely publicised in the past week. Rudd has transformed this tragic event into an immensely moving record of the anguish of a father’s loss. Real-life tragedy seems to inspire him to heights of expression far beyond so much contemporary work, which merely apes human suffering with hollow gestures. Twice-bereft, he made a similarly evocative journey five years ago, after the loss of his young wife, in his celebrated exhibition The Night-Mare. No Trace is even better, more mature, more deeply felt.

  The work comprises a series of ethereal hangings, each recording the events of a single day of Tracey’s absence—the shock of discovery, the police hunt, the agony of waiting, the struggle to articulate pain. The ghostly quality of these tormented records is exquisite, like vapour trails of memory, elegant in their minimalism. We stare, we hold our breath, we say, here is Rothko at the dark midnight of the soul.

  Rudd has promised to continue producing these works until Tracey is recovered, and while of course we fervently hope that this will soon occur, we cannot help but yearn for a gallery filled with such poignant expressions of the kind of contemporary tragedy that haunts us all.

  ‘Well, well,’ Kathy thought. She poured herself another cup, opened the second paper, and discovered an even more ecstatic review.

  At his desk in Shoreditch police station, Brock put aside the same newspaper and thought about a more difficult problem. He hadn’t yet answered Suzanne’s letter, and the longer he left it the harder it became. The very idea of writing a letter seemed stiff and old-fashioned, as if they were living in an age before the telephone, when manners were more formal and correct. He wondered if that was her point, that setting things down on paper somehow made them more contractual and irrevocable. Not that there was anything unreasonable in what she had to say. Her life had arrived at a point which she hadn’t expected; she was suddenly free of ties she’d assumed to be permanent and now she needed to reassess things. Everything.

  He picked up the phone, and as he dialled a siren wailed outside like a premonition of winter. She answered on the first ring and he pictured her sitting in her bay window overlooking the high street. As soon as he heard her voice he felt the familiar tug.

  ‘David! I’ve just been reading about Gabriel Rudd. He sounds outrageous.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Missing you.You got my letter?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been thinking a lot about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, it must have been the last thing you needed with your new case starting at the same time.I know how busy you’ve been. I did ring you during the week, but you were in a meeting. I was put through to someone in Shoreditch and they said they’d give you the message. Did you get it?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘It just helped me to put everything down in black and white. I feel I have to sort things out.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘And it’s not as if we haven’t talked about it before.You remember, when you got beaten up in the street?’

  ‘I wasn’t beaten up, exactly.’

  ‘You were attacked while you were making that arrest, and we agreed it was time you reassessed what you were doing, so that you weren’t put in that kind of situation any more.’

  He couldn’t remember agreeing to any such thing, but he didn’t argue.

  ‘Anyway, I just think this has come at the right time,’ she went on firmly. ‘It’s time to start again, for both of us.’

  Brock couldn’t decide whether it sounded more like an invitation or an order. He felt frustrated by the phone, unable to gauge the expression on her face, the set of her body. He sensed that she’d already moved on from the doubts expressed in her letter, and had already arrived at certain conclusions.

  ‘You know things are impossible for us like this, David, hardly ever seeing each other, fitting our lives in around your job and my grandchildren.We put up with it because we had to, but we don’t any more.’

  ‘We need to talk these things through, Suzanne. We should make time, get away for a while, take a holiday,’ he improvised soothingly. ‘Soon, after this case is over.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Her enthusiasm caught him by surprise. ‘You know who rang me the other night? Doug in Sydney—you remember? My
sister Emily’s husband. They’re planning for her sixtieth birthday next month, and he thought how fantastic it would be if I turned up at the party, as a surprise. I haven’t seen her for ten years. It seemed like a sign, coming out of the blue like that. I want us both to go, David.’

  ‘That sounds wonderful,’ he said cautiously. ‘When is this?’

  ‘In about three weeks. I thought we might make a proper trip of it, see the outback, take four or five weeks.’

  ‘In three weeks? Oh.’

  ‘Come on, David. Surely that gives you enough time to organise things at work so you can get away?’

  ‘This is a major inquiry, Suzanne. A big one.’ He knew he was sounding stubborn and obstructive, but he couldn’t help it.

  ‘They’re always big ones.’ Her voice was cool now.‘You work for a big organisation. They can handle it. I want us to do this, David. I think it’s important, for both of us.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I’ll have a look, see if it’s possible.’

  ‘Please. But don’t take too long. The flights are heavily booked. I checked.’

  Kathy felt edgy, unsettled, and went to a movie that afternoon, returning home at dusk. The phone was ringing as she opened the front door. She was surprised to hear the voice of Bren’s wife, Deanne.

  ‘Hi, Kathy.’

  ‘Hi. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes. Bren’s gone back to work, but there was something I thought you might be interested in. You probably already know. Do you lot monitor Gabriel Rudd’s website?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I haven’t seen it.’

  ‘Well, you might find it interesting, and all the other sites about him and his work—there are hundreds of them. They’ve been going crazy lately, of course. But you should check out his official site, www.gaberudd.co. He’s just updated it with a bulletin about his exhibition and his thoughts about everything. The thing I thought you should know is that he’s claiming the police have treated him shamefully, like a criminal instead of a victim, and he’s decided to refuse all further cooperation with them. He’s going into retreat, apparently.’