Now Kathy was pointing at the pictures on the wall, colour prints of photographs from newspapers and books and the internet showing car crashes, bodies being dug out of mass graves, executions, crime scenes, autopsies, abattoirs and butchers’shops.‘The girls must love getting invited back to this place,’ Kathy said.
Tait gave a little giggle. ‘I don’t think he has any girlfriends right now, to tell the truth. He’s much too taken up with his work.’
There was an old bed sheet hung across one side of the room with drawing pins. All three seemed to focus on it at the same moment. Brock went over and carefully drew it back. Behind, there was a small alcove in which, suspended on a chain, was the figure of an old woman, naked, body wasted and hunched in a foetal curl. Brushed by the sheet, it slowly began to rotate.
‘Oh my,’ Tait said. ‘Now isn’t she something! I haven’t seen her before.’
‘We have,’ Brock said, and looked at Kathy, who was staring in shock at the figure. It was the old woman they’d found in the bed of Patrick Abbott’s flat.
‘These are not sculptures, are they?’ Brock asked Tait.
The gallery owner hesitated.‘Well, I think I would say that they are, but I take it you mean that they’re not carved or shaped in the normal way?’
Brock nodded.‘How does he make them?’
‘They’re made of bronzed plaster and fibreglass. From rubber moulds and casts.’
‘Of real corpses.’
‘Ye-es,’ Tait said carefully. ‘You’d have to ask him, you understand, but I think it would be fair to say that. It’s what gives them their extraordinary truthfulness, their power. You know immediately that this isn’t some prop from a movie or a waxworks show. This is the real thing, death, in all its terrible beauty.’
‘Beauty?’
‘Well, that’s my opinion. I’m not normally a fan of the macabre, Chief Inspector, but I am moved by Stan’s work. He faces unflinchingly what lies in wait for all of us.’
‘And where does he find his subject matter, his body parts?’
‘He has a source, so he tells me. Now he assures me, and I was insistent on this, that it isn’t illegal, what he does. I didn’t enquire too closely, but I gather he knows someone at a hospital with access to dead bodies. I’m sure Stan doesn’t tamper with them, or cut them up or anything like that. I suppose he may, well, arrange them or whatever, like models, but he puts them back the way they were after he takes his cast. No one’s the wiser-or sadder.’
Kathy was peering at some shelves on the wall behind the dangling figure in the alcove. On them there were hands, feet and a head. She reached out to touch one of the hands and felt a throb of revulsion. She touched another. ‘These aren’t plaster,’ she said.‘They’re soft.’
‘They’ll be rubber,’ Tait said.
‘I don’t think so. In fact, I’m sure they’re not.’ She held one aged hand in hers, feeling the bones flex beneath the skin. She suppressed a surge of nausea as she picked up the same chemical smell that had been so strong in Abbott’s mother’s room.
Fergus Tait looked more closely, then gave a little sigh. ‘Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. This is very naughty. I had no idea, none at all.’
‘Where is he now, Mr Tait?’
‘I really don’t know. I haven’t seen him since Gabe’s show last night. But look, let me just say that, irregular as this may be, Stan is not a bad fellow. I want you to understand that. He’s the gentlest of people, soft-spoken, polite, never a harsh word, loves animals and
…’ He hesitated.
‘And children,’ Brock finished the sentence for him.
‘He’s just completely caught up in his work.’
‘Where does this obsession of his come from?’ Kathy said.‘This thing he has about death?’
‘Well, a lot of art is about death. Goya…’
‘No, it’s something personal, isn’t it?’
‘You may be right. I’m not altogether sure. He doesn’t talk about it-not to me, anyway. There was some story of him being brought up by an elderly relative who died when he was a boy, but I’m not sure if that’s the source of it.’
‘He had a breakdown a few years ago, I believe?’
‘About five years ago. He’d come down from the north, nobody knew him, and he produced this amazing stuff- dark, but very powerful. He did a very controversial sculpture of Margaret Thatcher and he was invited to exhibit in a group show with some other up-and-coming young artists. The work he exhibited was called Bye, Bye, Princess-you’ll have heard of it?’
Kathy shook her head.
‘You haven’t? Well, it was a very realistic sculpture, a head and shoulders, presumably of Princess Di. The hair was the same characteristic style, and the lips and nose and one eye-it was definitely her-but the rest of her face was eaten away, it was very realistic, with maggots crawling in and out of the flesh. I mean they were real maggots, alive, breeding on some meat he’d put inside the skull, and they were dropping onto the floor and people were stepping on them-oh yes, it was quite disgusting. And this was just the year after Princess Di was killed, so you can imagine the tremendous fuss. I’m surprised you don’t remember it. The press pursued him, but he wouldn’t speak to them and that just drove them into a bigger frenzy. I mean, most of his contemporaries would have died for that kind of publicity, but he genuinely didn’t want any of it.’
‘When was this?’
‘Let’s see… Princess Di died in the summer of ninety-seven, right? So the exhibition would have been late ninety-eight.’
‘Shortly after Jane Rudd died.’
‘I suppose you’re right. Anyway, he tried to hide from the reporters but they found him in his studio and there was this terrible scene. One of the reporters was hurt. Poor Stan, it was all too much. He was arrested, but the psychiatrists said he wasn’t fit and he was put away in a hospital. He did some marvellous work in there. When I saw it I offered to show it at The Pie Factory and give him a home here till he found his feet. That was a couple of years ago, and he’s been here ever since.’
‘You’re a saint, Fergus,’ Kathy said.
He looked serious. ‘I’m a businessman, Kathy, and I look after my artists, because believe me, they need looking after. I can recognise talent, but I know I have to go gently with Stan. No fuss, next to no publicity, just a growing circle of admiring collectors of his work.’
‘People buy these things?’ Brock looked at the objects on the table in disgust.
‘Oh indeed. Much sought after.’
‘And you take a percentage, do you?’
‘In the case of my artists in residence, I own the work they produce, and pay their board and a salary.’
‘So you keep all of the proceeds of their sales?’
‘At first. When they begin here it’s a good deal for them, because their sales won’t nearly cover my outgoings, but as they become better known the balance swings back, and eventually they become well enough established to fly the nest, as it were.’
‘You pay for their production expenses, do you? Materials and the like?’
‘Yes.’
‘So it’ll be your money he used to bribe his “source” in the hospital to give him, or lend him, his body parts.’
‘Oh now!’ Tait lifted his hands as if to show how clean they were.‘I know nothing about that.’
‘Have you ever had a full-scale audit from the Inland Revenue? Our fraud people can be even more intrusive than that, I’m afraid.’
Tait coloured. ‘That’s a bit rough, Chief Inspector, threatening me like that. I’m trying to be cooperative, you know. I do perhaps recall Stan asking me for cash advances from time to time, for which no receipts were forthcoming. I didn’t quibble. The amounts weren’t large. More recently, as his sales have grown, he’s been getting a share of the proceeds and is free to spend it as he pleases. As you see, he’s a frugal man, dedicated to his work. I really wouldn’t know what he spends his money on.’
Kathy, meanwhile, was looking around the room, thinking. There were no images of children, no sign that Tracey might have been there or had contact with Dodworth. But she imagined a small child visiting Poppy’s room nearby and being intrigued by the attic room at the end of the corridor, climbing the stairway, opening the door, drawing back the curtain… Could that be Tracey’s monster, the thing hanging in the alcove?