‘I’ll talk to Bren,’ she said, and turned away.
She found him, shoulders bowed, poring over a printed list, highlighting names with a green marker. A steady man, quietly spoken, he usually exuded confidence but now looked defeated.
‘Hi, Bren.’
He lifted his head. ‘Hi, Kathy. Got any goodies for us? We could do with something.’
‘No progress?’
‘Nothing to speak of.’He passed a hand over his eyes and yawned. He had three girls of his own, Kathy knew, and he had thrown himself into this case as if it were a personal quest.‘This is driving me crazy, Kathy. It really is.’He handed her an envelope with her name on it.‘We’ve all had one,’ he said as she unsealed it to find an invitation to the opening of No Trace.‘Load of rubbish.’
‘Brock suggested I sit down with you sometime and go through what you’ve turned up.’
‘Good idea, I could do with a fresh brain. Tomorrow morning? Eightish?’
‘I’ll be here.’
She thought about Brock as she sat in the bright capsule of the underground train on the way back to Finchley Central, and about Gabriel Rudd, both running their teams, keeping them fed with ideas, dogged by the possibility of failure. She reached her station and tramped through the dark streets to her block of flats, where she took the lift to the twelfth floor. She was thankful now for the silence and peace of her flat, although at other times she dreaded the first sense of emptiness, of Leon gone. She microwaved a meal and sat by the window, the curtains open, looking out over the city. Brock’s dilemma was a bit like Gabe’s, she thought, a visual or conceptual one. How to recognise a good idea when a less good one might deflect the whole project and soak up crucial time and resources?
She took the book she’d bought at the gallery out of its paper bag. The cover was perfectly white, with the title spelled out in letters cut from newspapers, as in a ransom note. Inside, Fergus Tait’s introduction to his vision of The Pie Factory read like an overenthusiastic advertisement for a new cosmetic, Kathy thought, but at least it was intelligible. When she reached the main text, written by a professor of media arts, she floundered. The first sentence ran:
In the high art lite world in which the barely mediated procedures of Post-Minimalist convention reprise Modernist discourse in terms of docusoap myth, and what passes for British culture privileges a new ontological realm of narrative trite, the artistic production of The Pie Factory, the latest Britart powerhouse of London’s Shoreditch/Hoxton (ShoHo) district, offers a stunning new avatar of the memorialising tendencies of the avant-garde.
She tried it again, a word at a time, but that didn’t help, so she just looked at the pictures and resolved to try the web. s she walked from the tube to the police station the next morning, Kathy noticed that the posters she’d seen everywhere the previous night had disappeared. She mentioned this to the desk sergeant who said, didn’t she know that those things were valuable? Apparently they were changing hands in the local pubs and market and on the internet for as much as two hundred pounds, some said, especially to foreigners. ‘Well, they’re works of art, aren’t they? Signed original Gabriel Rudds.’
Bren looked as if he’d had little sleep the previous night. His breathing was shallow, his gaze bleary. Kathy had found him in the control room, in front of the big map. Two women working on their computers ignored them as Kathy and Bren sat together with mugs of coffee. The mugs came from a small tea-making alcove outside, and were stained and chipped from continuous use.
‘I’ve been over this ground so often it’s becoming a blur. We haven’t been able to come up with any convincing connection between the profiler’s magic circle and the site of the third abduction, Northcote Square. There’s one little thing I keep coming back to, Kathy,’Bren said wearily.‘But I can’t think straight any more, so maybe you can tell me if I’m just getting fixated or what.’
‘Go on.’
Bren pointed to the red and yellow spots and the black circle. ‘We’ve interviewed every single person inside that circle, some several times. Nothing. Now Aimee and Lee went to school by bus, on different routes, from different stops. Their mums go to different shops and as far as we’ve been able to tell their paths may never have crossed… except there.’ He rose and pressed a fingernail to a small cross.‘This is where Aimee caught her bus, and sometimes, not regularly, if Lee and her friends missed their usual bus home, they would take a different route that comes to this same stop. There’s a row of shops there with a newsagent, where both girls have bought sweets. It’s possible that they even stood together in the same queue at the counter.’ He turned to Kathy with a look almost of appeal. ‘That’s the only place we’ve been able to find where their paths actually crossed.’
‘Sounds significant.’
‘But is it? I thought it might be, but we’ve turned up nothing.’
He looked ashen under the glare of the fluorescent lights. She said,‘Why don’t we go there and you can show me.’
It was at the other end of the borough, and they decided to take a car.
The place was a nondescript section of street, busy with traffic and indistinguishable from any other. The abductor might have been passing, Bren thought, in a car perhaps or on foot, and first spotted the two girls here. At that moment, a red double-decker pulled up at the stop opposite the newsagent and Kathy looked up at several faces on the top deck gazing down at them.
‘Or he might live around here.’Bren gestured to the row of houses across the street, and the windows of flats over the shops. ‘But we’ve checked everyone in the immediate vicinity and found nothing. The shopkeepers haven’t been able to help.’
The bus moved off and they crossed the street. Pictures of Aimee and Lee stared out at them from the window of the newsagent. When they reached the doorway they turned and looked back. Above the roofs of the houses opposite, the top two floors of a tall block of flats several streets away were now visible.
‘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 smartarse 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.