No Trace Page 13

  ‘Retreat?’

  ‘Yes, into his art. He says he needs to focus on that. And physically, he’s retreating into a glass cube he’s had built inside the main gallery of The Pie Factory, alongside his hangings. He’s there now—there are pictures on his site of people looking in at him through the gallery window, and through the glass wall of the restaurant. He’s the only one with a key and he’s got a camp bed in there, and some kind of toilet, and electricity to run a fan and his computers. He says he’ll only communicate through his computer. He’s currently designing the next banner, and sending the images to his team. Oh . . .’ Deanne hesitated, ‘. . .and he’s got a badger in there with him, too.’

  ‘Did you say badger?’

  ‘Yes, a live badger. He’s called Dave, and he’s currently hiding under a blanket.You know a brock is another word for a badger, don’t you?’

  Kathy groaned. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Joseph Beuys again, like he did to you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘One of Beuys’s art “actions” consisted in locking himself in a loft in New York with a live coyote. Rudd’s quoting again.’

  Kathy gave a sigh. ‘Well, at least we know where he is. We can always go in there and pull him out.’

  ‘Oh no, you couldn’t do that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, Kathy . . . This is sort of what my masters is about: relative values. In fact, I might use this as a case study. Society operates on a hierarchy of value systems, right? Religion was once at the top, but now it’s way down, with royalty, say. Wealth is high up, and celebrity, and heritage and ethnicity, but at the very top is art. Art trumps everything else.You can blaspheme on TV, make jokes about the Queen, be obscene and poke fun at the rich and famous, but you can’t afford to be seen as a philistine. You can’t trash art, not really, not unless you’re an artist yourself, in which case your trashing of art becomes art itself, which is okay. Gabriel Rudd in his glass box in the gallery is a work of art—he’s said so. He’s now part of the No Trace work.You can’t possibly desecrate it. The whole world is watching.’

  ‘So you’re saying that the only way to get him out is to recruit an even bigger artist than him—this Beuys character, for example—into the Met and put him in uniform and give him an artistic sledgehammer.’

  Deanne chuckled. ‘He’s dead, unfortunately. But I don’t see it happening, do you?’

  ‘No. Brock’ll love this.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What about justice? Where does that come on your scale of values? I mean, Stan Dodworth has been stealing corpses to make artworks out of them.’

  ‘Oh, they all poked around in corpses, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Stubbs. That’s all right. Body snatching wouldn’t come close.’

  ‘What about child murder? Suppose Dodworth has killed Tracey so as to make a sculpture out of her? What then?’

  Deanne thought for a while. ‘Mmm. Of course he’d have to face justice, but even then . . . I think the artistic recognition might outweigh the moral revulsion. Yes, it’d be a close call, but I think it would.’

  ‘That’s sick.’

  ‘It’s what you’re up against. Is it possible that Dodworth did take Tracey?’

  ‘It’s possible, Deanne. Right now, anything’s possible.’

  The following morning Kathy went to see the performance in Northcote Square. Many others had had the same idea, lured by reports in the news. Office workers on their way to the City, parents dropping children at school, truck drivers unable to make deliveries to the building site because of the crowd blocking the corner of Lazarus Street and West Terrace, all strained for a glimpse through the window at the artist and, hopefully, his famous badger. In response to all this, the gallery was opening its doors early as Kathy arrived, and the good-humoured crush of spectators was syphoning inside to get a close-up view and maybe a quick photo to take back to friends.

  Kathy joined the group outside the gallery window. She noticed a closed-circuit television camera mounted on the wall overhead, which she was sure hadn’t been there before, and attached to it a small microphone. It seemed they were recording the reactions of the spectators.

  ‘His hair really is very white, isn’t it?’ one young woman said, fingering her own blonde curls.

  ‘But this isn’t original, is it?’ her friend said, and clutched the collar of her coat impatiently against the cold wind.

  ‘What, his hair?’

  ‘Him locking himself in the glass box. There was that other bloke.’

  ‘Two others,’ the first woman corrected.

  ‘Well, what’s the point then? If it’s not original, what’s the point?’

  ‘I suppose the badger’s original.’

  ‘Yes, but you can’t even see it, hiding under the blanket. Maybe there isn’t a badger at all. Maybe they’re just saying there’s a badger.’

  ‘Do you think he’s going to go to the lavatory in front of everyone?’

  ‘That I don’t want to see. Come on, we’re late.’

  As they hurried away Kathy noticed a fresh graffiti message on the pavement, written in the same looping letters as the one on the wall further along. It read,‘this is art’.

  She joined the queue filing into the gallery. The girl at the desk had already run out of handouts for the exhibition and said more were on the way. She looked harassed, her face pink and slightly puffy, as if she’d woken up in the middle of a wild party. Her discomfort wasn’t helped by a man claiming to be from the RSPCA, demanding to speak to someone in charge about the badger, asking where they’d got it and how it was being treated.

  ‘I believe there is a vet on standby,’ she fretted, but he wasn’t to be put off.

  ‘Get me the boss,’ the man insisted stolidly. ‘I can have this place shut down.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you can.’

  Kathy passed through into the crowded gallery. The area around the glass cube was jammed, and she moved to a quieter corner where tables had been set up for three young female computer operators, all dressed identically in white caps and T-shirts with Gabe’s Team written on the back. One of them looked up and gave Kathy a brief smile.

  ‘Can I ask what you’re doing?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘We’re handling Gabe’s website emails, all the messages coming in from around the world, thousands of them.We select interesting ones and publish them hourly.’

  ‘Ah. I thought maybe you were part of the artwork.’

  ‘Oh, but we are!’ the girl said cheerfully. ‘Gabe said so.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him?’

  ‘Not verbally; he’s refusing to speak to anyone. We report to him on our computers.’

  Kathy turned back to the crowd around the glass cube and took advantage of a gap to work her way to the front. There was Gabe, white hair awry, crouched over a keyboard, ignoring the faces staring in at him all around. For a moment the whole scene was motionless, like a very realistic but improbable sculpture, then something caused a stir to one side, a hand pointed to the crumpled blanket at the artist’s feet and someone said,‘I think it moved.’

  On her way out Kathy saw that a new banner had been added. It was titled He fell from a ledge on the thirteenth floor, and showed a spreadeagled figure, wide-eyed with horror like a character from a cartoon strip, superimposed on a grainy photographic image of the block of flats at the Newman estate.

  She hurried up West Terrace on her way to the morning briefing at Shoreditch station but was stopped short by a sharp little cry, ‘Here!’. She turned and saw Betty Zielinski’s face peering up at her through the railings in front of her house. The woman was standing halfway down the steps leading to her basement door, and was clutching the castiron railings as if they were the bars of a cage, her face at pavement level.

  ‘Hello, Betty. How are you?’

  Betty pushed a crooked finger through the bars and wiggled it at Kathy to come closer. Feeling slightly ridiculous, Kathy approached and knelt.r />
  ‘Have you caught him yet?’

  ‘We caught two men, Betty. But we haven’t found Tracey yet.’

  ‘You haven’t arrested him, though, have you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The monster that took her.’

  Kathy leaned closer to the bars. ‘Why do you call him that?’

  ‘That’s what Tracey called him. I saw him that night, shiny black, like a lizard. After the scream.’ She peered fearfully along the footpath to right and left.

  ‘You saw him?’

  Betty lifted her eyes to Kathy, the white globes wild and moist with tears. ‘I watch him, you know, I know his secrets. It’s not the first time he’s taken a child.’

  ‘I know, Betty. There were the other two girls. But what exactly did you see?’

  ‘No! Not them. Another child taken here in the square.’ Her voice was quavering, on the edge of hysteria.

  ‘Here? What do you mean?’

  Kathy’s lack of understanding seemed to confuse and upset Betty more. She began to speak again.‘I know where she is!’ she sobbed, ‘Tra . . .’ but then the words died abruptly in her throat. Staring past Kathy, a look of terror transformed her face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Kathy said, then looked back over her shoulder to see Poppy and Yasher standing together, gazing at them from the other side of the street as if they’d just emerged through the gate in the garden railings.Yasher turned on his heel and started to stride away but Poppy remained, frowning.

  Kathy turned back to speak again to Betty, only to find her gone. She caught a glimpse of her cloak in the dark opening of the basement door, and called out, ‘Betty, hang on, let’s talk.’ But all she got in return was a frightened squawk and the slam of the door.

  ‘What did she say?’

  Kathy straightened to find Poppy at her back. ‘I’m not sure. She was trying to tell me something . . .’ She noticed a bruise on Poppy’s cheek, a raw graze on the cheekbone.

  ‘You don’t want to take any notice of what she says.You think you’re getting somewhere and then she flies off at a tangent. Everything gets mixed up in her head. She remembers someone from long ago and then’s convinced she’s just seen them. For a time she thought I was her daughter.’

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right.’ Kathy looked at the dark figure marching down the street.‘Yasher doesn’t look happy.’

  ‘He’s mad because your lot interviewed him yesterday and practically accused him of being a Turkish drug baron. He thinks someone in the square has been making trouble for him with the cops. I was trying to convince him it wasn’t me.’

  ‘Did he do that to your face?’

  ‘I bumped into something in the workshop.’ She paused, staring at the crowd milling outside the gallery, and her mouth turned down with distaste.

  ‘It’s quite a circus, isn’t it?’ Kathy said.

  ‘Yeah.You were right, Gabe’s got a talent for it.’

  Kathy got the impression that the tribute wasn’t altogether a compliment. Then Poppy abruptly said, ‘Gotta go,’ and hurried away.

  Kathy checked her watch. She was running late for the briefing, but she had to find out what Betty had meant. It had sounded as if she was saying she knew where Tracey was. Kathy climbed the steps to her front door and called through the letterbox. ‘Betty? It’s me. The others have gone. Please come and talk to me.’

  She listened but heard nothing and called out again. Still nothing.

  She was on the point of giving up when the door opened suddenly in front of her. Betty stood there, wild-eyed, hair everywhere. ‘There!’ she said, and thrust something into Kathy’s face. Kathy took a step back and reached for it. It was a small canvas on a wooden stretcher, unframed. The oil paint was thick and crudely applied, and Kathy felt it still slightly soft beneath her thumb. It was a rudimentary portrait of a human face, pink, with yellow hair and bright blue eyes.

  ‘You see?’ Betty laughed. ‘She’s still here with me.’

  ‘Did she do this, Betty?’ Kathy asked, but Betty only lifted an index finger to her lips.

  ‘Sh! Secrets!’ she whispered. She snatched back the picture and slammed the door shut.

  14

  There were several badger jokes at the Monday morning briefing, talk of badgering witnesses and digging someone out of their set, which Brock tolerated. In fact,Kathy had the impression that he rather relished Rudd’s little stunt. But the antics in Northcote Square were a sideshow, with the focus of the investigation fixed on trying to discover the place in which, they had to assume, Abbott and Wylie had hidden Tracey, and to find Stan Dodworth, who might have some idea where it was.

  Bren summarised what was in progress; the visits to wall-climbing associates in Northampton and Southend,the search of letting agents’ records for a rented storeroom, the examination of Rainbow camera footage across London for sightings of Wylie’s white van on the night of Tracey’s disappearance. The forensic reporting officer followed this with a summary of possible leads from the detritus of Wylie’s flat: unmatched fibre samples, unlabelled keys, traces of chalky soil, photographs of unidentified places. An officer from SO5, the Child Protection unit, spoke of information gleaned from the computers of other known paedophiles that pointed to Abbott and Wylie, but the evidence was sketchy since the hard drive in the flat had been cooked and no other computer had been found. The psychologist profiler attempted to interpret the workings of the two men’s minds.

  Dodworth’sdisappearancewasdiscussed.Tyneside police were currently checking his family and friends in the north. Someone suggested that if he knew of Tracey’s hiding place he might have gone there to try to help her, but this seemed implausible. More likely, someone else suggested, he’d been in on it with Abbott and Wylie, and was currently trying to erase his tracks. There was an ominous silence in the room as people considered what this might mean for Tracey.

  The task seemed daunting, and the cost of failure depressingly high, but Brock stirred them to action, loading them with tasks. Kathy’s was to speak once again to Tracey’s grandparents, in the hope that the girl might have said something to them during her weekend visits that had been overlooked.

  She took her car onto the Hammersmith Flyover and steered for the M4. Traffic was heavy, with trucks thundering out to Heathrow and beyond,to Bristol and the West Country,buffeting her little Renault,and she was glad when the signs for the turn-off to West Drayton appeared.She had decided not to ring the Nolans in advance, hoping to catch them unprepared, but when she reached the crescent of shops near their home she came upon them unexpectedly as they emerged from the butcher. Kathy pulled in to the kerb and watched them stop to say a few words to a woman with a pair of fat corgis, wave to a couple loading groceries into their car, then continue past the off-licence, the Taj Mahal restaurant and Shirley’s Hair Affair, to disappear into the newsagent. According to the A–Z their house was close by, and Kathy decided to wait for them there. She drove slowly through narrow suburban streets jammed with parked cars and found a space outside their number, one of a row of semis.Its paintwork was new, its windows sparkling in the weak autumn sunlight, and the little front lawn looked as if it had been groomed with nail scissors around the ornamental sundial centrepiece. Kathy didn’t doubt that it would be aligned with precision.

  After a few minutes she saw the Nolans with their shopping bags turn into the street. She waited until they were near before getting out of the car. They looked surprised, but Kathy had an odd feeling that they were expecting her.

  ‘Is there news?’ Bev asked.

  ‘Nothing new, I’m afraid. I’d just like a few words, if you’ve got the time,’ Kathy said.

  ‘Of course,’ Len said. ‘As long as you’re not hoping to catch us out, find Tracey hidden in the attic.’

  ‘Len!’ his wife scolded.

  ‘Should I be looking there?’ Kathy smiled.

  ‘You wouldn’t have much luck, but I thought our son-in-law might have put some such idea in your
head. He’s the one with the remarkable imagination after all, if the Sunday papers are to be believed.’

  ‘Take no notice, Kathy,’ Bev said. ‘Is it all right to call you Kathy? Sergeant is so, well, military. Come inside and have a cup of coffee and tell us about any progress.’ She stopped suddenly and sighed. ‘Oh Len, we forgot the stamps from the post office.’

  ‘Always forgetting something. Anyway,’ Len said, getting in a last jab, ‘there was no chance you’d catch us unawares. Enid across the street spotted you straight away and phoned us on the mobile to warn us there was a young woman waiting for us outside our house, and was it a relative or one of my mistresses? Nosy old bitch.’

  The interior of the house was as immaculate as the exterior. Len took their coats and Bev showed Kathy through to a small sitting room overlooking the back garden. Through the French windows Kathy saw that the yard had been divided precisely down the middle, a vegetable garden on the left, flower beds on the right. A neat herringbone brick path formed the centre line, a frontier between utility and ornament.

  While Bev made coffee, Kathy studied the framed photos on the mantelpiece—Tracey, Len and Bev, and a young woman, presumably their dead daughter, Jane. No Gabe.

  ‘She looks like her mum, don’t you reckon?’ Len said from behind her. Kathy wasn’t sure if he meant Jane or Tracey, but in fact it was true of them both. The particular twinkle in the eyes, the wide mouth, the fine blonde hair, were carried through the three generations, from Bev to Jane to Tracey, becoming, if anything, clearer and more pronounced.

  ‘Yes.’ Kathy had noticed framed drawings in both the hall and here in the lounge, pastel figure studies of ballet dancers. The signature, a discreet flourish, was Jane Nolan.

  ‘She did those when she was still at school,’ Len said, seeing her looking at them. ‘Brilliant at drawing.’

  ‘She got her talent from Len,’ Bev said, coming in with a tray.

  He took it from her and set it down. ‘Rubbish. There’s nothing artistic about me.’

  ‘You know what I mean. He might show you his work later, if he’s in the mood,’ Bev said to Kathy.‘Sit down, dear.’