No Trace Read online

  ‘What about them?’ Kathy pointed.

  Bren frowned. The fresh air had revived him a little. ‘No, I don’t think we’ve been up there.’ He checked the map he’d brought. ‘It’s outside the magic circle.’

  ‘Shall we take a look?’

  Kathy directed Bren from the map, and they drew in at the base of a tall building on the Newman housing estate. They got into the lift and pressed the button for the topmost level. It was a graffiti-coated aluminium box, and Kathy made a comment about how Fergus Tait could probably sell it as an artwork. Bren didn’t get it, and she said,‘Come to the gallery tonight.You’ll see what I mean.’

  ‘It’s cut-up sheep and stuff like that, isn’t it?’

  ‘That sort of thing. Gabriel Rudd’s famous.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’d heard of him. He’s the Dead Puppies guy, right? My girls saw him on TV and had nightmares for a week.’

  The lift ground to a halt at level three and a woman got in. The lumpy shapes of curlers bulged beneath her headscarf. She looked them over.

  ‘So what is Dead Puppies?’ Kathy asked when the doors finally slid shut.

  The woman spoke before Bren had a chance. ‘Dead Puppies? I can tell you that, love. I saw it on TV. This smart–arse cooked up some puppies and put them in tins, with labels and everything, and called them works of art. Some art gallery paid millions of taxpayers’ money for just one.’

  ‘Yuck,’ Kathy said.

  ‘Oh, it was much worse than that, love,’ the woman continued, clearly relishing Kathy’s reaction. ‘He brought one of the tins with him on TV, and he had a tin-opener and a fork. . .’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Oh yes. Tucked into it, he did. I was having my dinner at the time, but I couldn’t finish it, I felt so ill.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Bren confirmed.

  ‘That’s what they call art these days. Sick, if you ask me. You’re coppers, aren’t you?’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Yes, love, it is.’

  They reached the top level and the woman got out ahead of them. They followed her around a corner and came out onto the access deck. A dozen residents were outside along its length, some chatting, others smoking or reading the paper in the afternoon sun.

  ‘It’s the Bill,’ the woman called out so that everyone could hear, and they all immediately disappeared, front doors slamming.

  ‘So much for the element of surprise,’ Bren muttered.

  The first door they tried was opened by a suspicious elderly man in shirtsleeves. His forearms looked strong and brown, with a tattoo of an anchor on each. Bren asked him his name, and how many people lived in his flat (‘Just me’) and the names and numbers of people living in the adjoining flats,then showed him pictures of the missing girls.As the man examined them they looked over his shoulder into the living room. Against the far window was a telescope.

  ‘No, never seen ’em,’ he said and made to close the door.

  ‘That’s a pretty powerful telescope, isn’t it, sir?’ Bren asked. ‘Mind if I have a look?’ He walked straight past the man, who took a moment to recover from his surprise.

  ‘Oi!’ he protested, and Kathy said quickly, ‘He’s a keen amateur astronomer.What do you look at?’

  The man gave her an unpleasant glare. ‘Birds.’

  Bren looked into the eyepiece without touching the body of the telescope, then strolled slowly back, looking over the room and through the open bedroom door.

  ‘Come on, get out,’ the old man complained. ‘While you’re ’ere you should check out them next door. Dodgy, they are.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘All them strange kids.’

  As they moved to the next front door, Bren said under his breath,‘That telescope was trained straight down on the bus stop outside the newsagents. I could see the girls’ pictures in the shop window.’

  The next door was opened a couple of inches by a young woman with a thin, pale face, whose eyes widened at the word ‘police’. This time Kathy went through the routine, and at first the woman tried to respond, although her grasp of English obviously wasn’t strong. As she examined the pictures a second woman called to her in a language Kathy didn’t recognise, then a child gave a shriek and began crying.

  ‘Where are you ladies from, miss?’ Bren asked.

  The question seemed to agitate the woman, who was suddenly unable to speak any English at all. More children were howling now.

  ‘How many children do you have?’ Kathy asked, trying to see past the woman. She caught a brief glimpse of the second woman with a small child under each arm.

  ‘Babysitters!’ the woman at the door suddenly burst out.‘Babysitters!’ she repeated, and slammed the door shut.

  ‘Well,’ Kathy said, ‘I reckon we’re going to get enough leads up here to keep Shoreditch busy for weeks.’

  There was no response to their knocks at the third door or the fourth. The fifth was opened by a young man in need of a shave. An odd smell, rather like that of a hospital, seeped out. Mr Abbott looked at the pictures and nodded.

  ‘Yeah, I seen these on the telly. Can’t help you though.’ He spoke softly, as if not wanting to be overheard.

  ‘You live alone, sir?’

  ‘No, with me mum.’

  ‘Perhaps she could help us.’

  He shook his head. ‘She’s sick in bed. Has been for months. I have to look after her.’

  ‘These two girls used the bus stop you can see from your window,’ Kathy said.‘Do you mind if we come in and check how much of that street is visible from up here?’ The man seemed keen to help and led them inside and over to the window, walking with a slight limp. He stood with his right leg braced stiff while Kathy and Bren made a show of examining the view. The bedroom was to one side, its curtains closed, the room in darkness. The chemical smell was stronger here.

  ‘Your mother?’ Kathy asked, whispering now, moving towards the door.

  ‘Yeah, she’s very poorly.’ He followed and Kathy had a glimpse of grey hair against a pillow before he gently closed the door.

  They moved on, flat after flat, each a glimpse of a moment in a life, a collection of short stories. At the end of it they returned to the ground.

  ‘I’ll put someone onto checking these,’ Bren said, looking at his notes.‘Then I’ll go home and get some kip. I’m all in. Thanks, Kathy.’

  It would come to nothing, Kathy thought, but she agreed to look through the photo album of local suspects they’d put together in case she recognised anyone visiting Northcote Square, and Bren looked happier. ‘Don’t forget about tonight,’ Kathy said. ‘Why don’t you bring Deanne? She would be interested. It’s what she’s studying, isn’t it?’

  Later that day, the report of Bren and Kathy’s visit to the flats, together with the follow-up checks, reached Brock’s desk. Of the residents on the top two floors, five had previous convictions—car theft, break and enter, assault. Brock noted further action against their names. There were also several discrepancies between the names that Bren and Kathy had gathered and those on the council rental roll. The flat with the pale-skinned ‘babysitters’ was rented to a Nigerian family, and another, occupied by four students, was in the name of an elderly grandmother. Such was the nature of intelligence. Brock initialled the cover sheet and moved on to the next file.

  7

  Bren’s wife Deanne was very interested in attending the opening of No Trace, as it happened. She had been an art student herself for a while before marrying Bren, and was currently doing a part-time master’s degree in art history. She was also a big fan of Gabriel Rudd. She arranged for her mother to look after the girls and arrived at Northcote Square with her husband just as Kathy joined the crowd converging on the entrance to The Pie Factory. It was a clear, dry night, and there was a party atmosphere in the square. Women in expensive Italian suede rubbed shoulders with young, arty girls in bright colours like parrots, men in suits and celebrity couples.

  ‘That�
��s what’s-his-name and his girlfriend, isn’t it?’ Deanne whispered, pointing at faces familiar from the movies. ‘God, I wish I’d got something more exciting to wear.’

  ‘But how can you like Dead Puppies?’ Kathy asked her.

  ‘Oh, that was just about our hypocrisy towards animals—you know, eating some and idolising others as pets. He was just winding everybody up.’

  ‘You mean it wasn’t really puppy meat?’

  ‘Oh, I think it would have to have been, don’t you? For the point to work, I mean, and knowing Gabriel Rudd. And it was also about labelling and packaging, and about the idiocy of the art market. It was a pastiche of other famous art icons, of course—Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can, and Manzoni’s excrement.’

  ‘Pardon?’ Kathy thought she’d misheard.

  ‘In the sixties, this Italian artist made up cans of his own faeces, each one containing thirty grams, labelled and numbered. Of course we can’t be sure that they do actually contain that, because they’re far too valuable to open— they’re worth tens of thousands each now.’

  ‘So they made him rich?’

  ‘Well, not really. He died soon after, at thirty, of cirrhosis.’

  ‘That’s ironic.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? But Gabriel Rudd certainly did all right out of his cans of puppy meat—after his TV appearance they were worth a bomb.’

  They were almost at the door now, and Kathy pointed at the looping letters of the graffiti on the wall, ‘same old shit’. ‘Appropriate.’

  ‘Very,’ Bren said heavily. Despite some sleep and a shower, he still seemed very ragged.

  ‘It’s a quote,’ Deanne said. ‘A New York artist from the eighties, Jean-Michel Basquiat, started out as a graffiti artist and signed his work “Samo”, short for “same old shit”.’

  ‘So this is intentional, is it?’ Kathy asked. ‘You think Fergus Tait had it done?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be surprised. Basquiat died young too, at twenty-eight, of a drug overdose.’

  ‘You know a lot about this stuff, don’t you?’

  Deanne smiled ruefully. ‘Takes my mind off nappies.’

  ‘We should hire you as a consultant. I’m lost.’

  ‘You’re not the only one,’ Bren murmured.

  They had reached the entrance desk, and exchanged their invitations for catalogues of No Trace. Inside they found that the main gallery had been cleared of Poppy’s cherubs and the other work, and was now the setting for five pearly-grey banners, each about a yard wide, the full height from ceiling to floor. The subdued lighting was supplemented by ultraviolet lamps, making the banners shimmer like ghosts, and the images and text covering them appear at first like spiders’ webs or wrinkles in ancient skin. The catalogue explained that each banner represented one day since the artist’s daughter Tracey had disappeared, and there would be a new banner every day until she was found, even if it meant filling the whole gallery. The dominant image on banner number one was that used on the posters, Gabe’s pencil sketch of Tracey’s face, and looking around Kathy recognised other images, too—the upturned faces of the press in the square photographed by Rudd leaning out of his window, chains of uniformed police searching a piece of waste ground, the face of a TV newscaster reading the evening news. The images seemed mainly to be derived from photographs, but processed and simplified to become grainy, abstract clouds of dots, so that they had to be stared at for some time before their meaning emerged.

  ‘Rudd has a thing about Henry Fuseli, an eighteenth-century English painter,’ Deanne said. ‘His prize-winning picture The Night-Mare was based on a Fuseli painting of the same name. I think some of these scenes may be modelled on Fuseli’s work too.’ She pointed to a figure of Rudd himself crouching on the floor, like some kind of beast, and to an image on the first banner of a dark figure leading a small child by the hand into a dark tunnel.

  ‘This is sick,’ Bren said. He was looking around in disgust at the people chatting, drinking, idly studying the works. ‘Hundreds of coppers are out there tonight busting a gut trying to find Tracey, and her father is in here supping champagne, exploiting the whole bloody thing, trying to make cash out of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kathy said. ‘I think you’re right.’

  Deanne looked at Bren’s face, tense, angry, and said gently, ‘I know what you mean. It looks like that, but it’s the business he’s in. He’s a celebrity. It wouldn’t matter what he did, the papers would be full of him and Tracey. He’s dealing with it in his own way, trying to make sense of it through his art.’

  Kathy noticed that some of the other people in the gallery were looking pointedly at her and smiling and whispering to each other. She was about to ask Deanne what was wrong when she stopped short and stared in shock at the banner in front of her, number four. On it she saw her own face, staring back at her. ‘Oh no.’

  In the picture Gabriel Rudd was standing beside her, with an arm around her shoulder. She remembered the scene from the previous day in his studio, when she’d asked him something about his work, but she didn’t remember anyone taking photographs. She was filled with embarrassment and then dismay, that her image should have been stolen and used in this way without her knowledge.

  Bren and Deanne had seen it now, and were equally startled. Bren moved closer and read the title underneath; Explaining Paintings to a Dead Cop, it said.

  ‘What!’He sounded incensed. ‘What the bloody hell . . .!’

  ‘It’s a quote, Bren,’ his wife said quickly. ‘Joseph Beuys, Explaining Paintings to a Dead Hare . . .’

  Her explanation didn’t pacify him.

  ‘I feel like an idiot,’ Kathy said.

  ‘I feel bloody angry,’Bren replied. ‘Where is this creep?’ He glared around, and people nearby shrank away. Usually calm, almost placid in his manner, he looked formidable now, all the frustration of the past five days concentrated in this outrage. They spotted Gabriel Rudd across the room, looking pale and tragic, wearing a suit that appeared as if it had been tailored from the same polymer material as the banners. He was talking to Fergus Tait and a circle of admirers, his white hair luminous beneath the lights.

  Deanne said, ‘I think you should leave it, Bren.’

  ‘You two stay here,’ he growled, and strode off across the room, the crowd parting before him. They watched him approach the group, saw Rudd’s face turn in surprise as he broke in, then Tait was gesturing, Bren said something in reply, and Tait was abruptly still.

  After several minutes, Gabriel Rudd turned and walked towards Kathy and Deanne, ignoring the congratulations of the people he passed, Bren at his shoulder.

  ‘Kathy,’ he said, ‘your colleague here has explained how offended you are by my use of your image. I want to apologise, I meant no offence.’ He was standing stiff and formal, his face even paler than usual. ‘Artists are terrible magpies of other people’s images, and I didn’t think you’d mind. I know that you and your people are doing everything possible to find Trace, and the last thing I want to do is upset you, okay?’

  Kathy had expected arrogance or defensiveness, but this almost painfully polite apology was disarming.‘Well, I wish you’d asked me.’

  He nodded humbly.‘I’ll fix it,’ he said. Reaching into a pocket, he drew out a folding knife. People nearby strained to see what he was doing, then gasped in alarm as he raised the knife to the banner. With a smooth sweep of his arm he brought the blade scraping down across its surface, erasing part of the printed image. Then he did it again, and again, until Kathy’s face was removed, leaving only a ghostly smudge. He shrugged at Kathy with a weak little smile and walked away. A buzz of excited conversation followed him.

  Bren, Deanne and Kathy left soon after. They paused outside in the sudden cool of the square. A silvery fog had descended, blurring the streetlamps. Bren said, ‘I overreacted, didn’t I?’

  ‘No, I’m grateful,’ Kathy said.

  Deanne slipped her arm through his and said,‘You blew Kathy’s chances of immortality, dar
ling. Now she knows how Mona Lisa felt, or all those nude models down the ages. At least she had her clothes on.’ She shivered and looked at the skeletons of the trees in the central garden silhouetted against the mist, and said, ‘This is a rather sinister place, isn’t it? Not a very cheerful spot for a little girl to grow up.’

  A man was locking the gates of the garden, walking slowly around the railings, limping on a stick, and the sight of him brought a memory into Kathy’s mind. ‘You remember the bloke we spoke to at the flats this morning, Bren? The one with the sick mother? He had a limp, didn’t he. Did you see if he had a walking stick in the flat?’

  Bren thought. ‘Yes, I saw one on the floor beside the arm–chair. An aluminium job, adjustable, with an elbow brace.’

  Kathy visualised it, trying to tickle a memory into life. ‘I’m sure I saw someone with a stick like that, here, in the last couple of days. A young man with a limp, but I didn’t get a good look at him.’

  ‘Well, those sticks aren’t that uncommon. I think hospitals lend them out.Which leg had the limp?’

  Kathy stared into the darkness of the gardens, remembering. ‘The stick was in his right hand, so I suppose that was the bad leg.’

  ‘Like the bloke this morning.’ Bren pondered this, then said, ‘Just a coincidence, I expect.’ All the same, luck often did play its part in these cases—a comment overheard in a pub,a car pulled over for speeding with something suspicious in the back, perhaps a chance sighting of a limping man.

  Then something else occurred to Bren. ‘The bedroom window of the second girl, Lee, was fairly narrow. Forensics found threads of fabric from a pair of jeans snagged on the side of the frame, as if the man had knocked his knee or hip against it, climbing in.’

  ‘The man’s name was Abbott, wasn’t it? Why don’t we check if they’ve found out anything about him?’

  Bren called in and was put through to the Data Manager.

  ‘Abbott? Yes, I’ve got it. He’s not known to us, Bren.’

  Bren made a face, then the voice in his ear added,‘You got a bit mixed up with that one.You know how you said his mother was sick? Well, she’s a lot worse than that.’