No Trace Read online

  ‘You could say that art, or what passes for art these days, has been a curse on our family,’ Len persisted, offering Kathy some home-made shortbread. ‘Try a piece. There’s more artistry in Bev’s shortbread than you’ll find in the whole of Tate Modern.Yes, Jane did some lovely things at school. But then she got a place in that art school, and they soon put a stop to that.You’ve got to be conceptual there, and ugly as you can make it. She tried to join in, but her heart wasn’t in it.’

  ‘Oh now, be fair, Len. She did well at first.’ Bev was like a rudder, Kathy thought, making continual corrections to the wilder swings of Len’s opinions. And because he knew he could rely on this, the two of them bound together, Len probably allowed his opinions to veer about more freely than if he were on his own.

  ‘She wanted to fit in,’ he said. ‘If the teacher said,“Throw paint in the face of the bourgeois art-loving public!” she’d do it, just to fit in. But she knew there’s got to be more to art than that.’

  ‘Well, she couldn’t very well forget, with you carrying on every time she came home.’

  ‘I’m entitled to my opinions. Anyway, then she met Gabriel Rudd, hero of the Sunday supplements, and that was that. But that’s not what you came about, is it, Kathy? I don’t know why I’m rabbiting on. You’ve come about those men on the Newman estate, is that it?’

  Kathy told them what more she could about Abbott’s death and Wylie’s arrest. ‘But there’s still no sign of Tracey, I’m afraid. We’re following every lead we can, and we’re going back over old ground just to make sure we haven’t missed anything. That’s why I’m here. I don’t suppose Tracey ever mentioned those men’s names to you, did she? Pat Abbott and Robert—maybe Rob—Wylie? These are their pictures.’

  They passed them between them, Bev having to force herself to meet the men’s eyes, even in reproduction. They shook their heads.

  ‘There’s an artist called Stan Dodworth who lives in The Pie Factory in Northcote Square. This is his picture.’

  ‘Yes, we know him,’ Len said. ‘He’s a friend of Gabe’s. Why, is he mixed up in this?’

  ‘We’re not sure. Apparently he did know Abbott.’

  The Nolans looked startled. ‘Well! That’s got to be more than a coincidence, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does he have to say for himself then?’

  ‘Unfortunately he’s disappeared, and we can’t find him. His picture is going out to the media this morning.’

  ‘You think he might know where Tracey is?’ They both eased forward to the edge of their seats.

  ‘It’s a possibility that he may know something. That’s why we’re making every effort to find him. It’s possible that Tracey may have visited his workshop in The Pie Factory. Did she ever speak about that?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Dodworth makes sculptures that are rather macabre, of bodies and body parts. Did Tracey mention having seen anything like that, a dead body or a monster?’

  Bev pondered.‘I do remember something she said about a monster. I thought it was something she’d seen on TV.’

  ‘Or a video,’ Len declared. ‘Some of the stuff Gabe let her watch would give anyone nightmares.’

  There were moments in this conversation, Kathy felt, when she thought she saw glimmers of recognition or memory in their eyes, but it came to nothing. After another ten minutes of talk she finished her coffee and asked if she could see Tracey’s room.

  The bedroom was upstairs at the back of the house. From the window she could look out over the fenced backyards and the houses that ringed them tightly around the block. She was reminded of wagons protecting an encampment. There was little colour in the neat little gardens at present, but in the spring they would come alive with plum and apple and cherry blossom, and every new release of annuals that the gardening magazines and TV shows would be plugging.

  Tracey’s room couldn’t have been more different from the one in her father’s house. This one was full of colours and patterns, a perfect little girl’s bedroom from Good Housekeeping, that made the other seem like some kind of experimental laboratory. In a corner was the farmyard Len had made, with flocks of little animals, and above it shelves were filled with dolls and books and frothy ornaments. Kathy could imagine Gabe Rudd’s scorn.

  There seemed nothing here to help Kathy. The childish drawings pinned to the wall showed a girl on a pony, a Christmas tree with a star, a house with a red pitched roof, but no monsters.

  ‘Jane was born in that room,’ Bev Nolan murmured when Kathy returned downstairs. ‘And so was Tracey. Sometimes, when I’m alone in the house I think I hear them up there . . .’

  Len reached across to his wife’s hand and gave a gentle squeeze.

  ‘And I understand that Tracey lived with you here for a while after Jane died,’ Kathy said.

  ‘That’s right, for over a year. Oh, she couldn’t have stayed where she was. Gabriel had no idea how to feed her or change her nappies even. He’d left Jane to do all that. And then there was that mad woman always flying around, causing chaos. No, no, Tracey couldn’t stay there.’

  ‘And did Gabe agree to you taking her?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ Len broke in. ‘He was delighted. Couldn’t get rid of her fast enough.’

  ‘So how did he come to change his mind and want her back?’

  ‘Gradually things got better for him,’ Len explained. ‘He won that prize, got some money and became well known. He enjoyed the limelight, playing the part of the tragic widower. Then one of the colour supplements did a story about Tracey, only they came and photographed her here, with no pictures of Gabriel, and he didn’t like that one bit. Oh no. So he demanded her back, and we had to let her go, poor mite. She was just a publicity accessory, that’s all she was. A bit of bait for the camera.’

  They didn’t know, of course, about the photographs in Wylie’s flat, but the words chilled Kathy. ‘So what’s this you’re going to show me?’ she asked Len, wanting to move on.

  ‘Oh . . .’ he looked uncharacteristically sheepish, and his wife had to prompt him.

  ‘Go on, Len. Show Kathy your shed.’

  With an almost childlike show of resistance he relented and led her out of the kitchen to the garage. He opened its door and switched on a light to reveal an immaculate workshop. It seemed that Len Nolan’s hobby was fine timber craftsmanship, and in particular the making of exquisite little boxes. He showed her his stock of exotic close-grained timber slabs, his collection of superb Japanese saws and chisels. With hardly any prompting he explained the secrets of the nokogiri saws, with their fine hard teeth shaped to cut on the pull stroke rather than the push, thus allowing precision cuts with a much thinner blade than in Western saws.

  ‘The blade’s in tension, Kathy,’ he said, ‘rather than compression. So bloody simple! Now that is true art.’

  He allowed her to handle the Dozuki fine-precision saw, the spineless Ryoba saw, the Azebiki plunge-cutting saw, and gaze upon the collection of Shindo Dragon saws.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Kathy agreed, ‘and so are your boxes, Len.’ She admired the exquisite dovetails, all hand cut, the precise shaping of every part, the lustrous colour of the wood.

  ‘I aspire to craftsmanship, Kathy,’ he confided, ‘not art. Craftsmanship I can understand. Art leaves me for dead.’

  Kathy drove away feeling dissatisfied, as if she’d missed something, or failed to ask the right question.

  When she returned she was assigned to work with a joint team that had been set up with officers from the Paedophile Unit of SO5. She and five other detectives, in rotating pairs, were to work through a long list of names supplied by the unit—interviewing, checking and filing reports on the OTIS computer network. After three days she began to feel that the whole city was filled with the faces—bland, glib and sly—that she saw across the table in the interview rooms or staring back at her from her monitor.When she left work at night she saw them in the street and on the underground,
and when she turned on the TV news they were there too, posing as politicians, priests and popular entertainers.

  On the evening of the third day she was on the point of going home when she saw Brock outside in the corridor. He put his head around the door and, seeing no one else there, came in. The others that Kathy shared the room with had left for the night and the place was strewn with the remains of another fruitless day, the frustration of dead ends and unproductive phone calls evidenced in balled and ripped-up paper and crushed drink cans.

  ‘I’ve hardly seen you the last few days, Kathy,’ he said, slumping into a chair. He looked exhausted, his eyes slightly unfocused as if from spending too long staring at a screen. ‘How are you going?’

  She shook her head. ‘Getting nowhere. I’ve seen so many deviant males I’m beginning to believe there isn’t any other kind. And they’re all so bloody smug. They know we’ve got it wrong—this time, they really are innocent. Except that they’re not, not in their minds, not in their imaginations.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ He put both hands to his face and rubbed, as if he might massage life back into his brain. ‘That’s really the worst of this, isn’t it? That all this effort, all this pain, is caused by something so miserably dull, so unworthy— a nasty little obsession caused by a hormone imbalance, a brain defect, some emotional damage. A trivial malfunction, really, that’s all we’re dealing with.’ He sighed. ‘I should be used to it by now. So much crime is done for the most tedious of reasons. That’s what’ll finish me in the end, that the villains just aren’t interesting enough.’

  Kathy laughed, yet she felt uneasy. She’d never heard Brock talk about the end of his career before, even in jest. ‘Are you packing up now?’

  Brock shook his head. ‘Can’t. Look, I’ll show you something.’ She followed him down the corridor and into an empty room, where he waved her over to a monitor. The screen showed a huge crowd completely filling a city square. It took her a moment to recognise some of the surrounding buildings.

  ‘That’s Northcote Square, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. This is live, from a camera on the corner of Urma Street and East Terrace.’

  Kathy looked more closely at the screen. The crowd was motionless. Many of them seemed to have white hair. ‘What on earth is going on?’

  ‘It’s a flash mob, summoned by internet and SMS. They just appeared this evening, in support of Gabe Rudd. There was music earlier. Now they’re watching their phones for instructions on the next phase. It’s performance art. If it were summer, they’d have their clothes off by now.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘I need to be here, just in case something happens.’

  ‘I don’t mind staying, if you like.’ Kathy felt a small prickle of embarrassment as she said it, as if they’d both just confessed that they had no one to go home for.

  ‘No, it’s late. Go home, get some sleep and come back refreshed for another day of deviant males. Nothing’ll happen tonight.’

  15

  As usual, Tevfik Akif, second cousin to Yasher Fikret and site manager for the building work on West Terrace, was the first to arrive on site that wet Thursday morning. It was still dark as he unlocked the gate in the chain-link security fence along the back lane, and then the door of the site hut in the compound formed from the cleared backyards of the houses. He didn’t remove his dripping raincoat because, having switched on the lights and heater in the hut, it had become his habit to go over to the basement room in number thirteen where they had formed a kind of recreation room. There was electricity down there and a sink, and they had installed a fridge, a microwave and a water boiler for hot drinks. So he pulled on a pair of rubber boots, took a torch from the shelf and made his way along the path of wooden duckboards that crossed the mud and puddles of the yard to the back door of the old brick building. He cursed as water from the broken gutter high above splashed onto his neck and shoulders as he fumbled for the key of the padlock securing the door, then swore again, louder, when the beam of his torch revealed the hasp ripped out of the door frame. Some bastards had broken in. He hesitated, then returned to the site hut and collected the pickaxe handle he kept there for emergencies of this kind.

  Returning to the back door, Akif pushed it open and flashed his torch inside. There was no sound or sign of anyone. From the darkness of the front of the house he heard the old sash windows rattle as a delivery truck rumbled past in the square. There was nothing to steal here except down in the basement room. He went to the head of the stairs and found the light switch that the electrician had rigged up for them from the basement light. He switched it on and his heart leaped in his chest as he saw an unfamiliar shadow extending across the flagstones down there. Someone was waiting for him.

  ‘I know you’re down there!’ he yelled in his fiercest voice. ‘You come out now where I can see you!’

  But the shadow of the figure remained motionless. Akif began to wonder if he was mistaken. Perhaps something the men had left propped in the middle of the room was casting that shadow. Holding the pickaxe handle in one hand and the torch in the other, he slowly descended the stairs. At first, the glare of the bare bulb blinded him, and all he could see was an indistinct shape. He froze—there was a man, a black shape against the light! Then his eyes adjusted and he registered the truth in a single shocking moment—it was not a man but a woman, completely naked, hanging by the neck from an iron hook in the ceiling.

  Kathy ran through the rain towards the front of number thirteen, where a uniformed man was sheltering in the doorway beneath the scaffolding. Dawn was just beginning to glimmer through the upper branches of the trees in the square. She showed her card and was directed to the front room, there exchanging her raincoat and shoes for a white protective suit and rubber boots. Renovations hadn’t got past the stripping-out stage in this house and the place had a desolate air, faded wallpaper peeling like skin from cracked plaster where shelving had been ripped away. She hurried down the hall to the doorway to the basement, where she could hear voices. A scene of crime officer was coming up the stairs and she stepped aside to let him pass.

  ‘Not much room below,’ he said.

  She nodded and went down. Four people in white overalls were grouped together in the centre of the room, surrounded by an odd assortment of chairs and, over to one side, a packing case on top of which lay an abandoned deck of playing cards. She saw a microwave and a small fridge and an old sink, but it wasn’t until two of the people moved apart that she saw the naked back of the hanging woman, her wrists tied together behind her with insulating tape.

  One of the men adjusted the mask covering his nose and mouth. She recognised Brock and wondered how he always seemed to get to the crime scenes ahead of her.

  ‘Come in, Kathy,’ he said. His voice struck her as dulled, by the mask or something else—anger, perhaps. ‘Recognise her?’

  The others, a police doctor, the crime scene manager and a police photographer, made way for her as she walked around the body. There was a blindfold tied over the eyes, obscuring much of the face, but she recognised the thick grey and black hair, the chin. ‘It’s Betty, isn’t it? Betty Zielinski.’ Grey, shrivelled and abandoned, she looked older than in life. Her body seemed contorted by rheumatism, and afflicted by something else, too—covered in brown spots as if she’d contracted some strange form of chickenpox or been attacked by a swarm of bees. Her teeth were bared as if she was confronting an icy gale, or about to scream. Then another image came into Kathy’s mind, of the cast of Abbott’s mother suspended by a chain in Stan Dodworth’s room. She felt outrage and shock. A little time ago this woman had spoken to her, laughed and cried. She remembered her last words: ‘Sh! Secrets!’

  ‘Not suicide?’ Kathy said, trying to hold on to objective fact. Betty’s feet were barely clear of the floor, her toes brushing the stone that was soaking wet beneath her. None of the chairs appeared to be in the right position to have been kicked away, unless something had been moved.

  �
��No,’ the doctor murmured. ‘I think we can rule that out.’

  ‘What are those brown spots?’

  Brock pointed a gloved finger at a length of electrical lead lying on the floor. One end was plugged into the power board from which cables stretched to the appliances in the room. The other end had been taped to a length of wooden dowel used as a handle, and the insulation had been stripped back to expose the naked wire twisted into a stiff point.

  ‘They electrocuted her?’

  Brock nodded. ‘Many times.’

  An involuntary spasm of nausea rose in Kathy’s throat. She turned away, tears of rage and pity welling in her eyes. She could hardly hear the doctor’s next words because of the roaring in her ears.

  ‘I’d say they deliberately wet her feet and the floor to earth her.’

  Then the photographer said, ‘Looks like someone’s been here before me.’ He was crouching by a small circular mark on the dirty surface of the old stone flags, and he pointed to two others forming a precise triangle.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Looks to me like the feet of a tripod. Could be a surveying instrument, I suppose, or a camera tripod.’

  ‘You mean they may have taken pictures of her?’

  ‘It’s the right position, yes.’

  There was silence as they took this in.

  ‘She lived next door,’ Brock said finally to the scene manager. ‘I’d like to take a couple of your people in there with me. And you’ll want to have a good look in the back garden. They seem to have forced an entry through the back door, but it’s not clear how they got through the fence. Maybe over the wall from her yard.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Come on, Kathy,’ Brock said grimly and led the way up the stairs. In one of the rooms above they found Tevfik Akif sitting on a pile of bricks, and had him repeat his story, then they collected two of the SOCO team and fresh protective gear so as to avoid the risk of cross-contamination with the house next door. They went out the back way, across the duckboard path to the rear lane, and into Betty’s yard. Immediately they saw the broken pane of glass in her back door, which was unlocked.