‘Jane was born in that room,’ Bev Nolan murmured when Kathy returned downstairs. ‘And so was Tracey. Sometimes, when I’m alone in the house I think I hear them up there…’
Len reached across to his wife’s hand and gave a gentle squeeze.
‘And I understand that Tracey lived with you here for a while after Jane died,’ Kathy said.
‘That’s right, for over a year. Oh, she couldn’t have stayed where she was. Gabriel had no idea how to feed her or change her nappies even. He’d left Jane to do all that. And then there was that mad woman always flying around, causing chaos. No, no, Tracey couldn’t stay there.’
‘And did Gabe agree to you taking her?’
‘Oh yes!’Len broke in.‘He was delighted. Couldn’t get rid of her fast enough.’
‘So how did he come to change his mind and want her back?’
‘Gradually things got better for him,’ Len explained. ‘He won that prize, got some money and became well known. He enjoyed the limelight, playing the part of the tragic widower. Then one of the colour supplements did a story about Tracey, only they came and photographed her here, with no pictures of Gabriel, and he didn’t like that one bit. Oh no. So he demanded her back, and we had to let her go, poor mite. She was just a publicity accessory, that’s all she was. A bit of bait for the camera.’
They didn’t know, of course, about the photographs in Wylie’s flat, but the words chilled Kathy. ‘So what’s this you’re going to show me?’ she asked Len, wanting to move on.
‘Oh…’ he looked uncharacteristically sheepish, and his wife had to prompt him.
‘Go on, Len. Show Kathy your shed.’
With an almost childlike show of resistance he relented and led her out of the kitchen to the garage. He opened its door and switched on a light to reveal an immaculate workshop. It seemed that Len Nolan’s hobby was fine timber craftsmanship, and in particular the making of exquisite little boxes. He showed her his stock of exotic close-grained timber slabs, his collection of superb Japanese saws and chisels. With hardly any prompting he explained the secrets of the nokogiri saws, with their fine hard teeth shaped to cut on the pull stroke rather than the push, thus allowing precision cuts with a much thinner blade than in Western saws.
‘The blade’s in tension, Kathy,’he said,‘rather than compression. So bloody simple! Now that is true art.’
He allowed her to handle the Dozuki fine-precision saw, the spineless Ryoba saw, the Azebiki plunge-cutting saw, and gaze upon the collection of Shindo Dragon saws.
‘Beautiful,’ Kathy agreed, ‘and so are your boxes, Len.’ She admired the exquisite dovetails, all hand cut, the precise shaping of every part, the lustrous colour of the wood.
‘I aspire to craftsmanship, Kathy,’ he confided, ‘not art. Craftsmanship I can understand. Art leaves me for dead.’
Kathy drove away feeling dissatisfied, as if she’d missed something, or failed to ask the right question.
When she returned she was assigned to work with a joint team that had been set up with officers from the Paedophile Unit of SO5. She and five other detectives, in rotating pairs, were to work through a long list of names supplied by the unit-interviewing, checking and filing reports on the OTIS computer network. After three days she began to feel that the whole city was filled with the faces-bland, glib and sly-that she saw across the table in the interview rooms or staring back at her from her monitor. When she left work at night she saw them in the street and on the underground, and when she turned on the TV news they were there too, posing as politicians, priests and popular entertainers.
On the evening of the third day she was on the point of going home when she saw Brock outside in the corridor. He put his head around the door and, seeing no one else there, came in. The others that Kathy shared the room with had left for the night and the place was strewn with the remains of another fruitless day, the frustration of dead ends and unproductive phone calls evidenced in balled and ripped-up paper and crushed drink cans.
‘I’ve hardly seen you the last few days, Kathy,’ he said, slumping into a chair. He looked exhausted, his eyes slightly unfocused as if from spending too long staring at a screen.‘How are you going?’
She shook her head. ‘Getting nowhere. I’ve seen so many deviant males I’m beginning to believe there isn’t any other kind. And they’re all so bloody smug. They know we’ve got it wrong-this time, they really are innocent. Except that they’re not, not in their minds, not in their imaginations.’
‘Yes…’ He put both hands to his face and rubbed, as if he might massage life back into his brain. ‘That’s really the worst of this, isn’t it? That all this effort, all this pain, is caused by something so miserably dull, so unworthy- a nasty little obsession caused by a hormone imbalance, a brain defect, some emotional damage. A trivial malfunction, really, that’s all we’re dealing with.’ He sighed. ‘I should be used to it by now. So much crime is done for the most tedious of reasons. That’s what’ll finish me in the end, that the villains just aren’t interesting enough.’
Kathy laughed, yet she felt uneasy. She’d never heard Brock talk about the end of his career before, even in jest. ‘Are you packing up now?’
Brock shook his head. ‘Can’t. Look, I’ll show you something.’ She followed him down the corridor and into an empty room, where he waved her over to a monitor. The screen showed a huge crowd completely filling a city square. It took her a moment to recognise some of the surrounding buildings.
‘That’s Northcote Square, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. This is live, from a camera on the corner of Urma Street and East Terrace.’
Kathy looked more closely at the screen. The crowd was motionless. Many of them seemed to have white hair. ‘What on earth is going on?’
‘It’s a flash mob, summoned by internet and SMS. They just appeared this evening, in support of Gabe Rudd. There was music earlier. Now they’re watching their phones for instructions on the next phase. It’s performance art. If it were summer, they’d have their clothes off by now.’
‘Wow.’
‘I need to be here, just in case something happens.’
‘I don’t mind staying, if you like.’ Kathy felt a small prickle of embarrassment as she said it, as if they’d both just confessed that they had no one to go home for.
‘No, it’s late. Go home, get some sleep and come back refreshed for another day of deviant males. Nothing’ll happen tonight.’
15
As usual, Tevfik Akif, second cousin to Yasher Fikret and site manager for the building work on West Terrace, was the first to arrive on site that wet Thursday morning. It was still dark as he unlocked the gate in the chain-link security fence along the back lane, and then the door of the site hut in the compound formed from the cleared backyards of the houses. He didn’t remove his dripping raincoat because, having switched on the lights and heater in the hut, it had become his habit to go over to the basement room in number thirteen where they had formed a kind of recreation room. There was electricity down there and a sink, and they had installed a fridge, a microwave and a water boiler for hot drinks. So he pulled on a pair of rubber boots, took a torch from the shelf and made his way along the path of wooden duckboards that crossed the mud and puddles of the yard to the back door of the old brick building. He cursed as water from the broken gutter high above splashed onto his neck and shoulders as he fumbled for the key of the padlock securing the door, then swore again, louder, when the beam of his torch revealed the hasp ripped out of the door frame. Some bastards had broken in. He hesitated, then returned to the site hut and collected the pickaxe handle he kept there for emergencies of this kind.
Returning to the back door, Akif pushed it open and flashed his torch inside. There was no sound or sign of anyone. From the darkness of the front of the house he heard the old sash windows rattle as a delivery truck rumbled past in the square. There was nothing to steal here except down in the basement room. He went to the head of the stairs and found the light switch that the electrician had rigged up for them from the basement light. He switched it on and his heart leaped in his chest as he saw an unfamiliar shadow extending across the flagstones down there. Someone was waiting for him.