She waited a long time before he replied. ‘Fine. She’s fine.’
The subject seemed closed, so she said, ‘Can I have a look at that diary?’
He handed it to her, and she began to study the pages, working forward from the beginning.‘The codes are there right from the start of the year, so he was giving Stan stuff long before the business with the girls, before his mother died. When was that again?’
‘July twenty-fifth,’ Brock said absently, reaching for the dolmades.
She found the day, a Friday. Abbott had marked the place with a crude ballpoint outline of a cross. RIP was written across it. The diary was printed with little symbols to indicate the lunar phases, the twenty-fifth of July bearing the symbol of the new moon. Abbott had arranged his drawing on the page so that the arc of the new moon appeared at the top of the cross, like a symbol on a gravestone.
‘And they took Aimee on the twenty-second of August,’ Kathy said, turning to that date. As Brock had said, there was nothing to indicate its significance. But that day also carried the symbol of the new moon. She turned to the date of Lee’s abduction, the nineteenth of September, and there it was again. She felt a tremor of excitement and also of disgust, as if she’d had a sudden glimpse inside Abbott’s mind. Now Tracey’s abduction, the twelfth of October. But there was nothing, no moon sign. Kathy frowned.
‘Spot something?’ Brock looked up from contemplation of his whisky glass. He felt the spirit soaking through him like a warm bath.
‘I thought I’d found a pattern, but it doesn’t work for Tracey.’ She showed him the dates. ‘The next new moon wasn’t until the seventeenth of October, yesterday. Tracey was taken five days too soon.’
Brock shrugged, unconvinced.‘I wish I could think of something we could offer Wylie to get him to start talking.’
‘I wonder…’ Kathy began, then stopped.
‘What?’
‘I was just wondering if it’s possible Abbott killed his mother, too, in the hospital.’
Brock thought for a moment, then said, ‘I think we’re getting tired.’
13
The next morning Kathy walked down to the shops for some milk and the papers. It was cool but dry, a crisp breeze blowing leaves and wrappers down the empty street. When she got home she did as Brock had recom mended, making toast and coffee and lying down on the sofa to read the reviews. Was it unworthy to relish a savage review of someone else’s work, especially someone you knew? The reviewer in the first paper she opened seemed to think it was:
There are those in the art world who have been conducting a whispering campaign to the effect that, at thirty-three, Gabriel Rudd is burnt out and finished as a serious artist. Their schadenfreude was immensely piqued by the prospect of the critical failure of his new exhibition, No Trace, at The Pie Factory, and seemed confirmed by the first hurried review. Furtive cackling could be heard from certain Shoreditch studios as the champagne was uncorked. But they were wrong; the exhibition is a stunning success, the work breathtaking, and Rudd’s reputation reaffirmed in spades.
His subject is the recent abduction of his daughter Tracey (Trace), which has been so widely publicised in the past week. Rudd has transformed this tragic event into an immensely moving record of the anguish of a father’s loss. Real-life tragedy seems to inspire him to heights of expression far beyond so much contemporary work, which merely apes human suffering with hollow gestures. Twice-bereft, he made a similarly evocative journey five years ago, after the loss of his young wife, in his celebrated exhibition The Night-Mare. No Trace is even better, more mature, more deeply felt.
The work comprises a series of ethereal hangings, each recording the events of a single day of Tracey’s absence-the shock of discovery, the police hunt, the agony of waiting, the struggle to articulate pain. The ghostly quality of these tormented records is exquisite, like vapour trails of memory, elegant in their minimalism. We stare, we hold our breath, we say, here is Rothko at the dark midnight of the soul.
Rudd has promised to continue producing these works until Tracey is recovered, and while of course we fervently hope that this will soon occur, we cannot help but yearn for a gallery filled with such poignant expressions of the kind of contemporary tragedy that haunts us all.
‘Well, well,’ Kathy thought. She poured herself another cup, opened the second paper, and discovered an even more ecstatic review.
At his desk in Shoreditch police station, Brock put aside the same newspaper and thought about a more difficult problem. He hadn’t yet answered Suzanne’s letter, and the longer he left it the harder it became. The very idea of writing a letter seemed stiff and old-fashioned, as if they were living in an age before the telephone, when manners were more formal and correct. He wondered if that was her point, that setting things down on paper somehow made them more contractual and irrevocable. Not that there was anything unreasonable in what she had to say. Her life had arrived at a point which she hadn’t expected; she was suddenly free of ties she’d assumed to be permanent and now she needed to reassess things. Everything.
He picked up the phone, and as he dialled a siren wailed outside like a premonition of winter. She answered on the first ring and he pictured her sitting in her bay window overlooking the high street. As soon as he heard her voice he felt the familiar tug.
‘David! I’ve just been reading about Gabriel Rudd. He sounds outrageous.’
‘How are you?’
‘Missing you. You got my letter?’
‘Yes. I’ve been thinking a lot about it.’
‘I’m sorry, it must have been the last thing you needed with your new case starting at the same time. I know how busy you’ve been. I did ring you during the week, but you were in a meeting. I was put through to someone in Shoreditch and they said they’d give you the message. Did you get it?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘It just helped me to put everything down in black and white. I feel I have to sort things out.’
‘I understand.’
‘And it’s not as if we haven’t talked about it before. You remember, when you got beaten up in the street?’
‘I wasn’t beaten up, exactly.’
‘You were attacked while you were making that arrest, and we agreed it was time you reassessed what you were doing, so that you weren’t put in that kind of situation any more.’
He couldn’t remember agreeing to any such thing, but he didn’t argue.
‘Anyway, I just think this has come at the right time,’ she went on firmly.‘It’s time to start again, for both of us.’
Brock couldn’t decide whether it sounded more like an invitation or an order. He felt frustrated by the phone, unable to gauge the expression on her face, the set of her body. He sensed that she’d already moved on from the doubts expressed in her letter, and had already arrived at certain conclusions.
‘You know things are impossible for us like this, David, hardly ever seeing each other, fitting our lives in around your job and my grandchildren. We put up with it because we had to, but we don’t any more.’
‘We need to talk these things through, Suzanne. We should make time, get away for a while, take a holiday,’ he improvised soothingly.‘Soon, after this case is over.’
‘Exactly!’ Her enthusiasm caught him by surprise. ‘You know who rang me the other night? Doug in Sydney-you remember? My sister Emily’s husband. They’re planning for her sixtieth birthday next month, and he thought how fantastic it would be if I turned up at the party, as a surprise. I haven’t seen her for ten years. It seemed like a sign, coming out of the blue like that. I want us both to go, David.’
‘That sounds wonderful,’ he said cautiously. ‘When is this?’
‘In about three weeks. I thought we might make a proper trip of it, see the outback, take four or five weeks.’