‘You’ve spoken to him?’
‘Not verbally; he’s refusing to speak to anyone. We report to him on our computers.’
Kathy turned back to the crowd around the glass cube and took advantage of a gap to work her way to the front. There was Gabe, white hair awry, crouched over a keyboard, ignoring the faces staring in at him all around. For a moment the whole scene was motionless, like a very realistic but improbable sculpture, then something caused a stir to one side, a hand pointed to the crumpled blanket at the artist’s feet and someone said,‘I think it moved.’
On her way out Kathy saw that a new banner had been added. It was titled He fell from a ledge on the thirteenth floor, and showed a spreadeagled figure, wide-eyed with horror like a character from a cartoon strip, superimposed on a grainy photographic image of the block of flats at the Newman estate.
She hurried up West Terrace on her way to the morning briefing at Shoreditch station but was stopped short by a sharp little cry,‘Here!’. She turned and saw Betty Zielinski’s face peering up at her through the railings in front of her house. The woman was standing halfway down the steps leading to her basement door, and was clutching the cast-iron railings as if they were the bars of a cage, her face at pavement level.
‘Hello, Betty. How are you?’
Betty pushed a crooked finger through the bars and wiggled it at Kathy to come closer. Feeling slightly ridiculous, Kathy approached and knelt.
‘Have you caught him yet?’
‘We caught two men, Betty. But we haven’t found Tracey yet.’
‘You haven’t arrested him, though, have you?’
‘Who?’
‘The monster that took her.’
Kathy leaned closer to the bars.‘Why do you call him that?’
‘That’s what Tracey called him. I saw him that night, shiny black, like a lizard. After the scream.’ She peered fearfully along the footpath to right and left.
‘You saw him?’
Betty lifted her eyes to Kathy, the white globes wild and moist with tears. ‘I watch him, you know, I know his secrets. It’s not the first time he’s taken a child.’
‘I know, Betty. There were the other two girls. But what exactly did you see?’
‘No! Not them. Another child taken here in the square.’ Her voice was quavering, on the edge of hysteria.
‘Here? What do you mean?’
Kathy’s lack of understanding seemed to confuse and upset Betty more. She began to speak again.‘I know where she is!’ she sobbed, ‘Tra
…’ but then the words died abruptly in her throat. Staring past Kathy, a look of terror transformed her face.
‘What’s the matter?’ Kathy said, then looked back over her shoulder to see Poppy and Yasher standing together, gazing at them from the other side of the street as if they’d just emerged through the gate in the garden railings. Yasher turned on his heel and started to stride away but Poppy remained, frowning.
Kathy turned back to speak again to Betty, only to find her gone. She caught a glimpse of her cloak in the dark opening of the basement door, and called out,‘Betty, hang on, let’s talk.’ But all she got in return was a frightened squawk and the slam of the door.
‘What did she say?’
Kathy straightened to find Poppy at her back.‘I’m not sure. She was trying to tell me something…’ She noticed a bruise on Poppy’s cheek, a raw graze on the cheekbone.
‘You don’t want to take any notice of what she says. You think you’re getting somewhere and then she flies off at a tangent. Everything gets mixed up in her head. She remembers someone from long ago and then’s convinced she’s just seen them. For a time she thought I was her daughter.’
‘Yes, you’re probably right.’ Kathy looked at the dark figure marching down the street.‘Yasher doesn’t look happy.’
‘He’s mad because your lot interviewed him yesterday and practically accused him of being a Turkish drug baron. He thinks someone in the square has been making trouble for him with the cops. I was trying to convince him it wasn’t me.’
‘Did he do that to your face?’
‘I bumped into something in the workshop.’ She paused, staring at the crowd milling outside the gallery, and her mouth turned down with distaste.
‘It’s quite a circus, isn’t it?’ Kathy said.
‘Yeah. You were right, Gabe’s got a talent for it.’
Kathy got the impression that the tribute wasn’t altogether a compliment. Then Poppy abruptly said,‘Gotta go,’ and hurried away.
Kathy checked her watch. She was running late for the briefing, but she had to find out what Betty had meant. It had sounded as if she was saying she knew where Tracey was. Kathy climbed the steps to her front door and called through the letterbox. ‘Betty? It’s me. The others have gone. Please come and talk to me.’
She listened but heard nothing and called out again. Still nothing.
She was on the point of giving up when the door opened suddenly in front of her. Betty stood there, wild-eyed, hair everywhere. ‘There!’ she said, and thrust something into Kathy’s face. Kathy took a step back and reached for it. It was a small canvas on a wooden stretcher, unframed. The oil paint was thick and crudely applied, and Kathy felt it still slightly soft beneath her thumb. It was a rudimentary portrait of a human face, pink, with yellow hair and bright blue eyes.
‘You see?’ Betty laughed.‘She’s still here with me.’
‘Did she do this, Betty?’ Kathy asked, but Betty only lifted an index finger to her lips.
‘Sh! Secrets!’ she whispered. She snatched back the picture and slammed the door shut.
14
There were several badger jokes at the Monday morning briefing, talk of badgering witnesses and digging someone out of their set, which Brock tolerated. In fact, Kathy had the impression that he rather relished Rudd’s little stunt. But the antics in Northcote Square were a sideshow, with the focus of the investigation fixed on trying to discover the place in which, they had to assume, Abbott and Wylie had hidden Tracey, and to find Stan Dodworth, who might have some idea where it was.
Bren summarised what was in progress; the visits to wall-climbing associates in Northampton and Southend, the search of letting agents’ records for a rented storeroom, the examination of Rainbow camera footage across London for sightings of Wylie’s white van on the night of Tracey’s disappearance. The forensic reporting officer followed this with a summary of possible leads from the detritus of Wylie’s flat: unmatched fibre samples, unlabelled keys, traces of chalky soil, photographs of unidentified places. An officer from SO5, the Child Protection unit, spoke of information gleaned from the computers of other known paedophiles that pointed to Abbott and Wylie, but the evidence was sketchy since the hard drive in the flat had been cooked and no other computer had been found. The psychologist profiler attempted to interpret the workings of the two men’s minds.
Dodworth’sdisappearancewasdiscussed. Tyneside police were currently checking his family and friends in the north. Someone suggested that if he knew of Tracey’s hiding place he might have gone there to try to help her, but this seemed implausible. More likely, someone else suggested, he’d been in on it with Abbott and Wylie, and was currently trying to
erase his tracks. There was an ominous silence in the room as people considered what this might mean for Tracey.
The task seemed daunting, and the cost of failure depressingly high, but Brock stirred them to action, loading them with tasks. Kathy’s was to speak once again to Tracey’s grandparents, in the hope that the girl might have said something to them during her weekend visits that had been overlooked.
She took her car onto the Hammersmith Flyover and steered for the M4. Traffic was heavy, with trucks thundering out to Heathrow and beyond, to Bristol and the West Country, buffeting her little Renault, and she was glad when the signs for the turn-off to West Drayton appeared. She had decided not to ring the Nolans in advance, hoping to catch them unprepared, but when she reached the crescent of shops near their home she came upon them unexpectedly as they emerged from the butcher. Kathy pulled in to the kerb and watched them stop to say a few words to a woman with a pair of fat corgis, wave to a couple loading groceries into their car, then continue past the off-licence, the Taj Mahal restaurant and Shirley’s Hair Affair, to disappear into the newsagent. According to the A-Z their house was close by, and Kathy decided to wait for them there. She drove slowly through narrow suburban streets jammed with parked cars and found a space outside their number, one of a row of semis. Its paintwork was new, its windows sparkling in the weak autumn sunlight, and the little front lawn looked as if it had been groomed with nail scissors around the ornamental sundial centrepiece. Kathy didn’t doubt that it would be aligned with precision.