No trace bak-8

by Barry Maitland

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Hospital. They’re keeping you in overnight.’

  There was a clock on the wall reading three-fifteen. ‘You’re still up?’

  ‘I’m going to get a bit of sleep now. I just called in to see how you were.’

  ‘Have you caught him?’

  Brock shook his head. The assailant had vanished into the night, the dogs unable to pick up a scent from the place where they’d found the bloodstained shoes. ‘He probably had some kind of transport waiting there.’

  ‘What about Colin?’

  ‘He’s out of danger. He has a bad cut to his arm and he broke his leg on the fall down the stairs, but his vest saved him from the worst of it. Poppy’s in here too, but she’s not in any danger. She slept through the whole thing, doped to the eyeballs.’

  ‘She was lucky.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll be interested to hear what she has to say for herself. Anyway, that’s not your problem; you’re on sick leave until the doctor says otherwise-two days’ home rest at least. You took quite a fall.’

  She began to form a protest but let it go. She felt very tired. Tomorrow she would see.

  Among a pile of reports waiting for Brock at Shoreditch the next morning was a phone message from Wylie’s solicitor, requesting an urgent meeting. It had been logged at nine thirty-five the previous evening, but in the turmoil at that time it hadn’t been passed on to him. He put it to one side and concentrated on the various files that had been prepared for the new case; the action book, the policy file, and the preliminary forensic reports. When he’d digested these he went to talk to the action manager who was collating the various activities of the large number of people now involved. Like Brock, Bren Gurney had already returned to duty after a brief sleep and was now at the crime scene, where a new forensic team had taken over.

  The crime scene manager was the same woman who had dealt with Tracey’s disappearance seventeen days before. She met Brock as he arrived. ‘First the child, then the father,’ she said. ‘This is really personal, isn’t it? Obviously we’re looking for connections.’

  They were interrupted by the scream of a power saw. Brock watched as they cut away a section from the frame of the hidden fire-escape door. The door itself had already been removed.

  ‘It’ll be easier to examine the marks in the laboratory,’ she said. ‘We’re removing the window and frame in Tracey’s bedroom as well. We should have done that the first time around, but Mr Rudd objected.’

  The studio had become a laboratory for the reconstruction of the crime, grided, measured and labelled with dozens of numbered plastic tabs marking the locations of key pieces of evidence. They were especially interested in the blood stains, which formed a dynamic record of the action that had occurred and where the players had been at each moment. In one part of the room they were calculating the angle at which a spray of elliptical blood spots had hit a wall so that a computer could calculate where the victim had been standing; in another they were tracking prints from a foot which had picked up blood from an arterial spurt on the floor. A man in goggles was spraying an area of floor with a chemical, fluorescin, and then examining it with a small UV light to find microscopic blood traces, while a second was recording their position with a laser survey instrument. It was rather as if they were deconstructing a Jackson Pollock action painting, Brock thought, rediscovering each gesture of the artist through the splatter marks he had made.

  Bren appeared in the demolished doorway. He had been out on the roof, examining traces of blood left by the assailant’s shoes. He waved to Brock and came over.‘Looks straightforward. The first crash Kathy and McLeod heard was probably him breaking through the door. The room was in darkness, but there was light from the square filtering through the big windows. Rudd wakes up, but he’s been drinking and his reactions are slow. The second crash is when he and the intruder first make contact, and Rudd screams and is thrown to the floor. The intruder hears McLeod running up the stairs. He finds the light switch, waits till McLeod reaches the top, then opens the door and attacks. Then he relocks the door and turns on Rudd, who is probably on his feet again, leaning against that table over there. That’s the source of the first blood spray. Rudd falls, and things get messy, blood goes everywhere. The intruder retraces his steps, dropping his stuff along the way.

  ‘That’s the how,’ Bren said, ‘but why? What had Rudd learned or done to deserve this? And why do it in this bizarre way?’

  ‘It’s almost as if he wanted to frighten Rudd to death,’ Brock said thoughtfully.‘And it makes the theory that Stan Dodworth killed Betty and then hanged himself look even more unlikely. I’m not sure what’s going on, Bren, but we need to keep a close watch on Poppy-she’s about the only one left who might be able to help us get to the bottom of this.’

  ‘Right. Couple of other things, Chief. I don’t know if it’s going to be relevant, but they found this…’ He led Brock to the far corner of the room, carefully skirting the taped-off areas of the floor, and pointed to a block of grey material wrapped in plastic. ‘Modelling clay. There was some on the floor. I’m thinking of that grey putty they found on Dodworth’s shoes.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘The other thing is that photo.’ He pointed to a small colour snap pinned to the wall. They went over to examine it. It showed three people standing behind a seated woman with a child in her arms. The three were wearing paper party hats and silly grins. They were Gabriel Rudd, Stan Dodworth and Betty Zielinski. They all looked much younger, especially Rudd, whose curly hair, spilling out from below his hat, was brown.

  Kathy still couldn’t quite believe that Gabe was dead. She knew this disbelief was a measure of how vivid the other person had seemed in life, and it took her by surprise. Gabe hadn’t really meant anything to her; if she’d been asked to sum him up, her account wouldn’t have been flattering. He was as vain, self-centred and neglectful as his in-laws had claimed, and she thought his work pretentious. But there was a genuinely tragic dimension to Gabe which she hadn’t met before. It didn’t come from his health or his circumstances-that would have been normal and understandable. Instead it seemed to come from some inner sense of fate, as if he knew he was doomed. She’d resisted this idea from the beginning because it seemed such a cliche, the tragic artist. There were so many stories of premature death in modern art that Gabe’s performance had seemed like a pose. But now he really was dead, and, looking back over the sixteen days that she’d known him, she felt that her scepticism had blinded her to what she was really witnessing-a rocket falling to earth in a shower of sparks. It startled her to realise that she felt his death much more keenly than Betty’s or Stan’s, perhaps even (and she felt guilty at this) Tracey’s. She wasn’t quite sure why this was. Perhaps their tragedies had seemed stupid and ugly and unnecessary, whereas his was like a grander and more intense version of everyone’s fate.

  She had visited PC McLeod before she left the hospital. He was sitting up in bed, circling the names of horses in a copy of Sporting Life with his good hand, and seemed quite unperturbed by what had happened. He told her that he’d heard that Poppy had already been discharged into police custody, apparently oblivious to the mayhem that had happened around her. As Kathy sat waiting in the hospital lobby for the taxi her mobile phone rang. She winced to hear Len Nolan’s voice. They had just heard the news report. Was it really true? Was Gabe really dead? Kathy could hardly bring herself to talk about it and asked him to ring Bren’s number.

  She was exhausted by the time she got back to her flat. Taking a couple of the pills the doctor had given her, she lay down on her bed, intending to rest for five minutes, and woke up three hours later. She struggled to sit upright, blinking gummed eyes against the glare of morning light in the uncurtained window. Her brain felt jangled by snatches of claustrophobic dreams, and she got up to make herself a cup of tea and a piece of toast, the only things she seemed to have in the cupboard. She flopped on the sofa, still unable to shake a dream im
age from her mind, something to do with a painting she thought. The art books Deanne had given her were piled beside the bed, and she searched through them for the biography of Henry Fuseli in which she had found the picture of the two hanged figures. She remembered how impressed Gabe had been by her discovery, and she wondered now if he had taken it as some kind of sign of his own fate. After the death of his wife he had been haunted by the image of one Fuseli painting, The Night-Mare, and now here was another. She wondered if it would have been better if she hadn’t shown it to him. Gabe must have felt that Fuseli was speaking to him from the past.

  She turned to the preface to check his dates, 1741 to 1825. So Fuseli himself had not died young. Throughout his life he had been a controversial figure apparently, seeing himself as a unique genius and shocking his contemporaries with images of witchcraft, sexually charged nude figures and melodramatic scenes trembling on the cusp between the sublime and the absurd. According to the introduction, Horace Walpole, author of the first Gothic novel, described one of his paintings as ‘shockingly mad, madder than ever; quite mad’. Kathy could see why Gabe would have been interested in him. The description reminded her of the Fuseli painting she had seen in the Royal Academy, and the memory brought on a sudden feeling of anxiety, unexpectedly strong. She could barely visualise the painting now, and she turned the pages of the book to find it. When she did she realised with a jolt why the scene on the staircase of Gabe’s house the previous night had seemed so familiar, like a half-remembered nightmare. For the figure of Thor, brightly lit and seen from below, weapon raised above his head to strike down upon the Midgard Serpent, was eerily reminiscent of the monstrous figure at the head of Gabe’s staircase in the endless fraction of a second before he brought the sword down upon PC McLeod.

  Kathy found that her heart was racing, her fingers causing the page to tremble. This was just a reaction to shock, she told herself. There were differences between the two images: the Fuseli figure was naked, although there was a cloak flying from his shoulders in the wind; also it was his left arm raised to strike, rather than the right, so that the picture was the mirror image of what she had witnessed in the flesh. And yet the resemblance was overwhelming. She forced herself to concentrate on the commentary in the book. The subject of Fuseli’s painting for his membership of the Royal Academy was a scene from the ancient Icelandic saga The Edda-in which the hero Thor takes revenge upon the monstrous Midgard Serpent-and was intended to show the painter as a master of epic, sublime imagination. She assumed Gabe must have been to the Academy to see the original. He would certainly have known it in reproduction from his book. Had the murderer deliberately intended to use the Fuseli image to terrorise Gabe? The more she thought about it the more certain she was that the reference had been deliberate. She picked up her phone and called Brock’s number.

  He sounded preoccupied, and in her anxiety to explain her notion she felt she was gabbling. He listened in silence, then said,‘That’s an interesting idea, Kathy. I’ll pass it on to the profiler. You’re still in hospital, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m at home.’

  ‘Really?’ He sounded unhappy. ‘Do you feel all right? Do you want someone to come and be with you?’

  ‘No, no. I’m just taking it easy.’

  ‘Yes, you do that. Forget about the case.’

  But she found she couldn’t, and the pain in her leg and shoulder only made her feel more restless. She closed her eyes but couldn’t relax, and picked up the book again. A thought came to her, and she turned to the index at the back, running her eye down the names. And there she found ‘Sterne, L.’, the name on the email address that had sent the pictures of Betty’s body. She turned to the entry and found that it was on the page following the engraving of the hanged figures. The text read:

  In the same year, 1767, a philosophical tract of baffling obscurity entitled Remarks on the Writings and

  Conduct of J.J. Rousseau was published anonymously in

  London. At first it was attributed to Lawrence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, but before long the real author was discovered to be ‘one Fuseli, an Engraver’.

  She lay her head back, trying to understand. It was as if the Fuseli book were a road map to the murders. What else might it contain? Then she had another idea. At the back of the book was an appendix with a comprehensive listing of every painting and drawing Fuseli was known to have done. It ran to thirty-four pages. She turned to the first page and began to work through it.

  Morris Munns had been the acknowledged genius of the laboratory’s Photography Unit for longer than anyone could remember. A stocky, balding cockney with thick-lensed glasses, he had helped Brock many times before, on one occasion conjuring an attacker’s boot print from the deep bruising on a woman’s body three months after the event.

  ‘I made it a priority as soon as I realised what it was, of course,’ he said, spreading the four photographs on the table between them. ‘That little girl… the worst sort of case. Who took these, do we know?’

  ‘They’ve come to us from the solicitor of the chief suspect, Robert Wylie.’

  ‘Who you think also took the photographs we found in the flat, right?’

  ‘That’s right. One of the questions I have is whether they’ve been taken with the same camera.’

  ‘Yes, I thought you’d ask that. These are all digital pictures, as were the ones in the flat. We have that camera, of course, which is lucky, because it has a small scratch on the optical zoom lens, that we’ve been able to relate to a faint distortion in the digital images. We reckon we can prove to a jury’s satisfaction that that camera took the pictures you found in the flat.’

  ‘And these?’

  Morris pointed to the first three, with Tracey in the street and on Beaufort’s knee, and Beaufort touching the naked child.‘I can make out the same effect on these three, yes, but not on the other one. They’re also different in other ways. These three have been enhanced, I’d say, but I’m fairly sure they’re genuine images, integral with their background. The shadows, the reflected light-I couldn’t swear to it in court, but I’d say they’re not fakes. But this one…’ He picked up the remaining picture with disgust.‘Pure phoney, and not very good at that. The faces have been pasted onto a scene taken with another camera altogether. It’s a con.’

  ‘Thank you, Morris, that’s helpful.’

  ‘There’s something else. I don’t know if you’ve been able to identify the location of numbers two and three, have you? The girl on the old bloke’s knee?’

  ‘No, the backgrounds are out of focus.’

  ‘Deliberately made to be, I’d say. Anyway, I’ve had a go at sharpening it up for you.’ He produced new versions, in which the shadowy grid of lines in the background emerged as the frame of a large industrial window. Brock immediately recognised the big windows in the artists’ workshops at The Pie Factory.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Mean something?’

  ‘Yes, I think it does. You’ve been a great help, as always.’ Brock gathered up the pictures.

  ‘So the old bloke’s involved, too, is he?’

  ‘Maybe. But it’s hard to know what’s fake and what’s real these days, isn’t it?’

  ‘Picture number three is the clincher, I reckon, with the girl naked. I’d swear it’s real. Who is he, anyway?’

  ‘I’ll tell you one day, Morris, but at the moment you don’t want to know. Has anyone else seen these?’

  ‘No, I dealt with it myself, like you said in your note.’

  ‘Thanks. Let’s keep it that way.’

  When he got back to his car Brock called the solicitor, Russell Clifford, and made arrangements to meet him and his client. Wylie would be brought under escort to Shoreditch police station where the interview would be recorded and filmed. Then he called Bren.

  Bren stared at the photographs in disbelief, then looked at Brock. There was a question written all over his face, but he wasn’t going to put it into words.

  ‘I
’m sorry, Bren,’ Brock said. ‘I had to do this on my own. There are ramifications…’

  ‘The review of Special Operations, you mean?’

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘I’ve heard rumours. Beaufort is involved.’

  ‘Yes, and I’ve been specifically ordered to leave him alone.’

  ‘But you can’t ignore evidence like this!’

  ‘No, of course not, provided it’s genuine. Morris Munns has had a look, and thinks these three may be genuine, and this one a fabrication. But he can’t swear to it. They could all be fakes. This may just be a ploy byWylie to stop us looking at his emails.’

  ‘That’s what he wants to trade?’

  Brock watched Bren turn this over, visibly uncomfortable as he weighed the options. ‘Maybe… maybe you should cover your back. Get clearance from higher up. Talk to Sharpe.’

  ‘If I do that without firm evidence, he’ll stop me. It’s just too difficult for them at this moment. Look, I’ve got Wylie being brought here for interview in half an hour. I want to get something solid out of him. I wouldn’t mind some help, but I’ll understand if you don’t want to be involved at this stage.’

  ‘Come off it, Brock, you know I’m in. How do you want to play it?’

  They talked it through until the word came that Wylie and his solicitor had arrived. Bren got to his feet and Brock said,‘Let them wait for a while.’

  Twenty minutes later Bren opened the door to the interview room and walked in alone. The two men seated at the table interrupted their argument and looked up at him in surprise.

  ‘Mr Wylie?’Bren said, and gave a yawn.‘I’m DI Gurney, and you are

  …?’

  ‘Russell Clifford, Mr Wylie’s legal representative. Is DCI Brock coming? We’ve been waiting now for…’

  ‘Sorry about that. There’s a lot going on. DCI Brock may not be able to make it.’

  ‘But he called me!’ Clifford complained. ‘He arranged this.’

  ‘Did he? Well, he’s very busy at the moment, another murder in the area. Most of us have been up half the night.’