They heard a heavy thump on the floor above and both turned their eyes up to the ceiling, but heard nothing more.
‘How’s your day been then?’he enquired companionably.
‘Bit frustrating, really.’
‘Yeah, I know the feeling. Like having to make an arrest half an hour before the end of your shift.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Well, you know you’re going to be stuck for another five or six hours doing the processing. Try telling that to the missus.’
Another thump, more like a crash of something hitting the floor and breaking. McLeod rose to his feet.‘I thought I heard them having an argument earlier. I’d better check if everything’s . . .’
A scream, piercing sharp. McLeod ran for the stairs, leaping up two steps at a time, Kathy following. He reached the landing at the top and grabbed the door handle. It didn’t budge.
‘Door’s locked,’ he panted, then loudly, ‘Mr Rudd! You all right? Let us in, please.’
He stepped back a couple of paces and prepared to charge the door, but at that moment it was flung open. For a second, both he and Kathy were transfixed by the sight in front of them. A tall figure in black cloak and hood, a death’s-head mask covering its face, stood before them. In its clenched hands it gripped the handle of a sword. As they began to recover their wits it gave an extraordinary roar and stepped forward, raising the sword high overhead. In front of her, Kathy saw McLeod fumbling for his pistol with one hand, then raising the other to protect his face as the blade began to arc down. For a horrified fraction of a second, she watched it flash through the air and across his body. He stumbled back against her, she put out a foot to brace herself and felt nothing but air, and together they crashed backwards down the length of the stairs.
He was on top of her, motionless. She struggled to push him off and looked back up the stairs. The door was closed again, the apparition gone, and for a moment she wondered if she’d imagined it. But the blood was real enough, lots of it. She hauled his body over onto its back and saw that his protective vest was slashed open, the armoured plates inside exposed. Blood was pumping from his upper left arm, and she grabbed it, feeling for the pressure point and gripping tight until the flow slowed to a seeping trickle. Then, with one hand she reached for the radio on his chest.
‘Urgent assistance,’ she panted, breathless. ‘Urgent assistance. Officer hurt. Armed assailant. Five-three Urma Street. Suspects on.’
PC McLeod’s eyes blinked open. ‘Wha . . . What happened?’
‘You’re hurt, Colin. Can you move your right arm?’
He raised it. ‘Yes.’
‘Grip the pressure point. I’ve called for help. I need your gun. Do you understand?’
He nodded and she felt around his side, easing the pistol out of its holster. She got to her feet, working the Browning’s slide, and pain shot through her left leg and shoulder on which she’d landed. It was as much as she could do to drag herself back up the stairs, holding the handrail with her right hand, gun in her left. At the top, she transferred it to her right hand and tried the door handle. Locked again. She aimed the muzzle at the base of the handle and pulled the trigger. There was a deafening crash, splintered plywood, then she pushed with her shoulder. The door opened and she stumbled inside, slipping on a pool of blood.
Gabe was on his back on the floor, blood all over him, Poppy curled on the bed nearby. A trail of things—the sword, the cloak, the mask—led beneath the overhanging gallery towards a panel of the wall which, inexplicably, was open to the night. Kathy went to Gabe’s side and saw that his throat was cut, possibly with other wounds on his hands and body. There was no pressure to the blood that seeped from his throat wound, and when she felt for a pulse there was none. Kathy turned to Poppy and found that she was breathing normally, as if she were sound asleep. Then she heard the wail of the sirens, coming loud through the opening in the wall, and in a moment the pounding of boots on the stairs, men shouting.
‘I’m fine, really,’ she said, although she couldn’t stop shaking, even after they’d wrapped a thick blanket around her shoulders. She was sitting propped against the wall with Brock and one of the Shoreditch detectives crouching beside her. ‘How’s Colin?’
‘Who?’
‘The bodyguard.’
‘Don’t worry, they’re looking after him.’
‘And Poppy?’
‘They think she’s been drugged. No wounds.’
She told them what had happened, every detail that she could remember. ‘He must have got in through that door over there. I didn’t even know it was there.’
‘It’s a fire escape onto the roof,’ the detective explained to Brock, ‘but he’d covered it with the pinboard that lines the rest of the walls, so you wouldn’t notice it. It gives access onto the neighbouring roof and from there to a fire stair into the lane. There are footprints.We’ve got a dog on the way.’
‘Gabe’s dead, isn’t he?’ Kathy asked.
‘Yes.’
She shuddered. ‘I know it’s what people always say, but it is like waking from a nightmare. The awful thing is, I feel I’ve had it before.’
She stared for a moment at the blank polymer strip of the next banner, which had been suspended against the wall not far from Gabe’s body. At the top was the number sixteen, and beneath it the squiggle of black line that appeared on each of them. Below was a long blank space awaiting Gabe’s inspiration. It was sprayed with his blood.
The detective’s radio crackled. He listened, then said, ‘They’ve found a pair of bloodstained shoes in a bin further down the lane. The dog’s arrived.’
An ambulance officer came up.‘We’ve got transport for you, miss.’
They helped her to her feet. Her head was aching now, and she stumbled.
‘I’ll get a stretcher up here.’
‘No, I’m okay.’
The square was filled with flashing lights once again, and on the way to the hospital they passed several road blocks and foot patrols.
25
She woke with a start. The room was in semidarkness, some light reflected in through an open door. She had no idea where she was, and her mind was confused by an image, a dream or a memory, of a dark figure poised, arms upraised, and ready to strike. She turned her head towards the door and gave a cry as she saw him there, a dark shape rising against the light.
‘It’s all right, it’s only me.’ Brock’s voice, gentle and reassuring. He was reaching to the wall above her head. There was a click and the bed light came on.
She tried to sit up, but a jolt of pain in her shoulder held her back. There was a dull ache in her head.
‘Lie still. You’re probably concussed. Nothing broken, only bruises.’
‘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 w
as 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 cliché, 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 image 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.’
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