No trace bak-8

by Barry Maitland

  Kathy also learned a good deal about Rudd’s creative process, which she found surprising. She had assumed that artists worked pretty much in isolation, applying their individual skills and inspiration to the material at hand, but it turned out that Rudd’s work was fabricated by other people, a whole army of collaborators or subcontractors acting under his instructions. Some of them worked elsewhere, but many of them moved into 53 Urma Street and could be found in busy groups in the studio, or sprawled at meal breaks in the living room, or asleep in the bedrooms on the ground floor. When Kathy asked Rudd about this (‘You mean you don’t actually make your own works of art?’) he laughed and gave her a rambling explanation of his fundamental challenge to the whole meaning of artistic authentication, which she didn’t follow.‘I suppose you think this is dead easy, eh?’ he challenged her. ‘Wanking around dreaming up crazy ideas.’

  ‘I was wondering how you know when you’ve got a good one, how you can tell a good idea from a less good one.’

  ‘Interesting question. I just do. That’s why I’m here, doing this. Sometimes it scares me rigid.’

  His mood swung from garrulous to glum, and she was pretty sure that Poppy was bringing him drugs of some kind.

  She liked the crew of assistants, who seemed a more light-hearted version of the police teams, industrious and painstaking and concerned with practical matters of obtaining things and making them work. They joked about Rudd’s conceptual pretensions behind his back and ignored his tantrums when things weren’t to his satisfaction, and it was from them that Kathy began to glean an idea of what he was preparing for the exhibition. It seemed to be a play on the word ‘trace’-the missing girl Trace, lost without a trace, and the artwork itself in the form of tracings. These would be images and words transferred by various processes onto sheets of plastic tracing film used in draughting offices, with a pale milky texture which would give a shimmering, ghostly effect under certain kinds of light.

  Each day at eleven a.m. Kathy got a phone call from Len Nolan, polite but firm, wanting to know of any progress. She imagined the two grandparents sitting together over their morning coffee, ticking off the points on a list, determined not to be ignored by the authorities. Kathy also did follow-up interviews around the square, and came to recognise the ebb and flow of the people who moved through it, and put faces and characters to some of the names on the list of residents. The first she visited was Betty Zielinski, who was a common sight in the central gardens, feeding the birds with bread scraps she collected from Mahmed’s Cafe. At Kathy’s suggestion, she was taken into Betty’s home on West Terrace to meet her family, which turned out to be a fat black cat and a large collection of dolls, dozens in every room, each known by name and dressed eccentrically in clothes made by Betty on an old treadle sewing machine. Her sewing room was a chaotic jumble of home-made paper patterns and scraps of cloth. As she talked, Kathy tried to fathom her madness, if that’s what it was; a strange mixture of what seemed like normal memory and sensible observations with disconcerting interpretations, as if Betty stubbornly refused to see the world the same way as everybody else. There was an element of deliberate calculation in some of this, Kathy thought, and one or two of the disjunctions bothered her.

  ‘Tracey liked it here, with my little babies, in their mummy’s house. She helped me choose materials for their dresses. She loved coming to her mummy’s house.’

  ‘Her mummy’s house?’ Kathy queried, wondering if she’d misheard. Betty gave a startled little laugh, absurdly girlish and playful for a sixty-two year old.

  ‘We pretended that this was her mother’s house,’ Betty simpered, and Kathy remembered how she’d talked the previous day to Gabe about ‘my own little girl, my own darling’.

  ‘You knew Tracey’s mother, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve lived here for almost forty years, longer than anyone else. Longer even than…’ she cocked her head and whispered, ‘… the monster. Poor Jane. Such lovely long blonde hair. I was so jealous of her long blonde hair.’

  ‘What monster, Betty?’

  ‘Shhh! The children will hear you! They’re terrified of him. The one next door, of course.’ She nodded towards the wall to number fifteen, the portrait painter’s house. ‘Stolen!’ she wailed suddenly.‘So many stolen children!’

  ‘Reg Gilbey steals children?’

  Again a look of surprise came over Betty’s face, as if some unexpected shift had occurred inside her head. ‘Oh dear me, no. My family took such a long time to get to sleep last night after all the excitement with the visitors. They simply wouldn’t settle.’

  ‘Which visitors were those?’

  ‘Why, the policemen and women, looking for Tracey. They searched in every room, but I told them they’d never find her here.’ Her eyes twinkled as if at the memory of a particularly exciting game of hide-and-seek. ‘Thomas became so excited he wet his pants, and Geraldine was sick all over her brand-new dress.’

  Kathy could imagine what the lads from Shoreditch had made of that.

  From Betty’s she went next door to see Reg Gilbey. She heard his old carpet slippers shuffling on the other side of the door before it opened. He peered at her through thick-framed glasses, sparse grey hair sticking in odd tufts from his head, and said,‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m DS Kathy Kolla from the police, Mr Gilbey…’

  ‘Not interested,’ he said grumpily and made to close the door again.

  She put out a hand and said, ‘It won’t take long. I can come back later, if you’re busy.’

  ‘I had two lots of coppers here yesterday.’ He breathed whisky, and a musty smell leaked from the house.‘Can’t tell you anything.’

  ‘I was wondering if you might have noticed anything from that bay window of yours. You must get a good view of the school playground from there. Perhaps you saw…’

  ‘If you’re suggesting I spend my time watching the kiddies, you can clear off.’

  He moved to slam the door in her face, and she quickly said,‘No, no. Look, I’m just doing my job. We all want to find her, don’t we?’

  He relented a little. ‘Have a look if you want,’ he said, then added gruffly,‘Won’t do you any good.’

  He closed the door behind her and led the way down the corridor and up the stairs, dropping the cat on the way. At the landing he showed her into the big front room with its corner bay window, and the smells changed from musty damp to a rich soup of ripe linseed oil and sharp turpentine. Paintings were stacked several deep all around the walls, mainly portraits and figures, some nude.

  ‘Your work isn’t like the artists of The Pie Factory, then,’ Kathy said, making conversation as she went to the bay and checked the sightlines.

  ‘That rubbish!’ Gilbey scoffed. ‘Those people can’t draw and haven’t got one original thought between them.’

  ‘I suppose they do have original imaginations,’ she suggested, noticing a canvas in the corner depicting the figures of children running in the playground below. So he did spend time watching them, she thought.

  ‘No, no. That’s all froth and show. What they do is steal an image from some famous artist-Goya, Munch, Van Gogh, Bacon, whoever-and recycle it in execrable workmanship and look clever, as if they’re making some profound reference. They’re just scavengers on the body of a great tradition, that’s all they are.’ He’d obviously made this speech many times before, but it still got him heated.

  ‘Who does Gabriel Rudd steal from?’ she asked.

  ‘Henry Fuseli-now he was a painter. Others, too, I suppose.’

  ‘And you’ve never noticed anyone hanging around the corner down there, watching the kids?’

  He shook his head, and after a few more poisonous remarks about the decline of artistic standards he led her downstairs and showed her out.

  The school was next. The headmistress of Pitzhanger Primary School was a confident, brisk woman of definite opinions. She had known a very different Tracey from the happy child Gabriel Rudd had described.<
br />
  ‘We were concerned about her. She was withdrawn, found it hard to concentrate and didn’t make friends. Sometimes she would hide rather than join the other children at play or in classes. She had a favourite place in the service yard, an old coal bunker, where we’d usually find her. I spoke to her father about it and he insisted it was our fault, that the other children were bullying her, but that wasn’t so. It’s true that they’d heard about Dead Puppies- their parents told them-and that led to some teasing, but we soon put a stop to that. I believe there was some other problem. She seemed frightened.’

  ‘Did her grandparents speak to you?’

  ‘Yes, several times. They made it plain that they had a quarrel with Mr Rudd about his parenting, but I couldn’t support any suspicions of abuse or mistreatment. She just seemed very insecure and uncommunicative. Her teacher was concerned about some drawings she did of so-called monsters, but Tracey said they were her dreams.’

  ‘Do you still have the drawings?’ Kathy asked, but the woman shook her head.

  ‘I believe we gave them to her father.’

  ‘I suppose the other officers asked you if you’d noticed anything unusual lately.’

  ‘Yes. There’s been nothing really-no break-ins or obvious strangers hanging around. I had words with the landlord of The Daughters of Albion across the street when he put chairs and tables out on the footpath at lunchtime in the fine weather, and some of his customers started calling out to the children in the playground. Builders from West Terrace, mainly.’

  ‘I see. What about other locals? Reg Gilbey on the corner?’

  ‘Oh, we see him up there quite often, staring down at us, waiting for inspiration I suppose. He’s all right. He gave us one of his paintings for our fundraising auction day. Quite extraordinarily generous of him, actually. It was just a little oil sketch of our chimneys…’ She pointed up at the elaborate brick chimneys above the slate roof.‘It raised over five thousand.’

  ‘Gosh. And Betty Zielinski?’

  ‘Yes, she is a character. The children make up silly stories about her and call after her. We discourage it, of course, but they are fascinated and a little frightened by her.’

  ‘She told me that Tracey was a particular friend of hers, and used to visit her house.’

  ‘I’m surprised. I’ve seen her run from Betty when she’s approached her on her way home from school. I’d say Betty was a rather unreliable witness. She does tend to fantasise.’

  The Fikrets, the Turkish Cypriots who ran Mahmed’s Cafe, were clearly a formidable clan, led by Mahmed Fikret and his wife Sonia. Mahmed and his son Yasher were usually to be found drinking coffee at one of the little tables in the shop, reading the Economist or the Financial Times, while the diminutive Sonia worked behind the counter, serving customers and yelling orders back to the kitchen in a piercing voice. The family had connections in several parts of the square, with a grandchild at the primary school, several nephews working on the building site, which, as Poppy had told Kathy, Mahmed owned, and a cousin working as a chef in Fergus Tait’s upmarket restaurant, The Tait Gallery.‘We’re art lovers too, you know,’Sonia told Kathy, pointing to a lurid print of a belly dancer on the wall.‘Yasher bought that one. He’s got a good eye.’

  On the fourth day of Tracey’s disappearance, Thursday the sixteenth of October, Kathy bought a pitta-bread sandwich and tea in a polystyrene cup from Mahmed’s and took them to the central gardens for her lunch. She found a seat and watched the activity around her. A steady trickle of people passed in front of 53 Urma Street, pausing and pointing to Tracey’s home. Through the rapidly thinning canopy of leaves she caught a glimpse of Reg Gilbey in his corner turret, peering down at four builders walking along West Terrace towards the pub on the corner of Urma Street, followed soon after by a flock of girls from the typing pool of one of the offices on East Terrace, a man with a walking stick, two women with small dogs. Tourists of all ages, from teenage German backpackers to elderly Americans, passed by, drawn to the red neon letters above the gallery at The Pie Factory. She had resisted visiting it so far because she felt she should have more urgent things to do, but now she was at a loose end, marooned in this square while the real work was being done elsewhere. She would definitely speak to Brock about it. She finished her lunch, scattering crumbs for the sparrows, and made her way towards the gallery entrance.

  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.’