The occupant of the flat, Robert John Wylie according to the driver’s licence in his wallet, was a large, fleshy man with quivering chins, a toad to Abbott’s spider. He refused to say a word, and the detectives had to draw their own conclusions from what they could see. There was no sign of Mrs Wylie having lived there, and the flat looked as if it had become a den in which Wylie and Abbott could live out their obsessions. Unlike Abbott’s flat, which had been neat and clean, this place was a mess of half-consumed tins, cartons, magazines and clothes, and the atmosphere was clammy and claustrophobic, tainted with a smell of burnt plastic that turned the stomach. There was a computer and its printer, still branded with the name of the school from which they had been stolen, and a digital camera. And there were pictures, hundreds of them.
A detective emerged from the kitchenette, calling for Brock. He was holding a small box in his gloved hand, and the smell of burnt plastic was stronger.
‘What’s that?’ Brock asked.
‘Found it in the microwave, sir. I think it’s a computer hard drive. Looks like it’s been cooked.’
The ambulance man laying Lee on the stretcher saw Kathy watching. He paused a moment and drew the blanket off the girl’s left leg to show her. It was black, and Kathy gasped,‘What is it?’
‘I’ve seen it before,’ he said. ‘With addicts. They use a butterfly syringe to draw the drug from soft capsules, then inject it. It causes blood clots but they keep doing it anyway and gangrene sets in. She’ll lose the leg. At least.’
At that moment Wylie was being taken out of the flat. As he passed the unconscious girl on the stretcher he stopped and stared down at her, and at the same moment, as if there were some telepathic connection between them, her eyelids flickered open. She stared up, then her face convulsed in fear for a second before she lost consciousness again.
‘Get him out of here,’ Kathy snapped. athy didn’t wake until noon the following day. As she surfaced slowly from a deep sleep she became aware of sunlight filtering through the blinds, and immediately her mind began spinning with memories of the previous night: a body falling into the void; the smell of burning plastic; Wylie’s malignant stare; a blackened, gangrenous leg. She sat up abruptly and forced the images away. She might go for a swim, she thought, get her hair done, buy a pair of shoes, get in some food.
She noticed the trail of her discarded clothes on the floor. She still felt exhausted. The phone rang; she picked it up and heard Brock’s voice.
‘Didn’t wake you, did I?’
‘Mmm…’ her mouth felt numb, not yet ready for speech.‘Not quite.’
‘Sorry. Just wondered if you fancied brunch.’
Still slightly disoriented, Kathy wondered what kind of invitation this was.
‘I’m meeting Bren in an hour,’ he went on, ‘at The Bride.’
‘This is work?’
‘Afraid so. Can you make it?’
‘Of course.’
She rang off and got out of bed, opened the blinds, stretched and yawned at the window. It was a beautiful sunny day, white clouds scudding across a pale blue sky, a complete contrast with the drab grey days of the working week behind them. What did Brock want? Surely it was all but over now. Was it the questioning of Wylie? Or-her heart sank-breaking the news to relatives. Yes, that would be it. She should have realised he’d be needing help with that. She wondered how much sleep he’d had. It had been after three when he’d sent her home, but he’d still been working with the others through the material in the flat.
The Bride of Denmark was a myth, one of those unlikely accumulations that sometimes occur in the basements of old buildings in old cities. It didn’t exist in the inventories of the assets of the Metropolitan Police because the occupants of the Queen Anne’s Gate annex did their best to hide its existence, and because those few civil servants who had come across it considered it too difficult to deal with and had designated it ‘miscellaneous’. In the years after the Second World War the former occupants of the building, architectural publishers, had gone about the ruined city like magpies, collecting fragments of old bombed-out pubs and reconstructing them in their basement as the eccentric Bride. The small rooms were crammed with salvaged fittings-the polished bar, the back-to-back pew seats, the mahogany shelving-and encrusted with rows of ancient cobwebby bottles, pewter mugs, porcelain spirit kegs, mirrors and animal trophies. A salmon gawped at an antelope’s head, and the antlers of a moose met the unblinking gaze of a stuffed lion, or at least the front half of a lion, crouching among savannah grass in his glass case. The Bride was a refuge hidden beneath the annex, without phones, computers or office machines, a place where Brock retired to think.
Bren was already there when Kathy arrived, perched on a cane seat at the bar peeling plastic film from a plate of sandwiches. Brock, on the other side, was pouring coffee from a tall pot, and offered her a cup.
‘Thanks,’ she said, and sank onto a worn leather seat beneath the lion.‘Just what I need.’
‘So as soon as I turn my back you two go and wrap the thing up,’ Bren grunted, sounding peeved.
‘I thought of something and went back…’ Kathy began to explain, feeling awkward, but Bren waved a big hand.‘Brock explained. Well done, anyway.’He picked up a sandwich and took a bite, handed her the plate.
Brock came through the flap of the bar with a mug of coffee in his hand and sat beside Kathy. He smelled fresh from a shower and was wearing jeans and a thick knit pullover.‘Yes and no,’ he said.
They both looked at him.
‘The pictures they took tell it all as far as Aimee and Lee are concerned.’ His voice was weary, as if the terrible images were a crushing burden. ‘It’s all there, even a photo of the place they buried Aimee when they’d finished with her. But there’s nothing, not a thing, about Tracey. It doesn’t look as if she was ever there.’
‘What does Wylie have to say?’ Bren asked.
‘Not a word. Not a single word. He’s been charged and he called a lawyer this morning, but he refuses to open his mouth to us.’
Kathy said,‘Do we know him?’
‘Three convictions for possession and publication of indecent photographs, one involving children. Two fines and a two-month prison term. We’re digging for more background.’
‘The flat was rented in his wife’s name,’ Kathy said.
‘Yes. We don’t know where she is. Neighbours say they haven’t seen her in months.’
He paused to let this sink in, then continued,‘The point is that we have Lee in intensive care and we know that Aimee is dead, but we have no more idea where Tracey is than we did last Monday morning. On the face of it, we have nothing to connect either Abbott or Wylie to her disappearance. And if that’s the case, we’re going to have to start all over again as far as she’s concerned. Right from the beginning.’ He took a deep breath, sat back against the padded seat and closed his eyes.‘So what are the alternatives?’
‘But I saw Abbott in Northcote Square,’ Kathy objected.
‘You think you saw him. All you can really be sure of is that you remember a limping man.’
‘You’re suggesting it’s no more than a coincidence?’ Bren protested.‘That last night was a fluke?’
‘I’m saying we should look at all the options.’
‘A copycat?’Kathy said. There was silence for a moment, then she went on,‘The Tracey kidnapping is different from the other two in that her father is a celebrity. Maybe it’s aimed at him.’
‘Perhaps, but there’s been no ransom, no threat. And why make it look like the other two cases?’
‘To distract us from the obvious suspect,’ Bren said.
‘Who is?’
‘Tracey’s father,’Bren said immediately.‘Gabriel Rudd.’
Brock gave him a quizzical look.‘You’ve met him?’
‘Last night. Kathy and Deanne and I went to the opening of his exhibition. He and I nearly came to blows.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, one of his so-called artworks had a picture of Kathy and a caption that said she was dead.’