Kathy eased her way around a TV camera crew unpacking their gear and saw Brock turn the corner into the square, then stop and stare at all the activity. They met up at the gallery entrance, pushing their way through the melee at the door and squeezing into the hall past the crush at the T-shirt counter. They heard Fergus Tait’s voice coming from the side gallery and, looking past the reporters and photographers, saw him presenting a eulogy to Gabriel Rudd, complete with a PowerPoint display projected onto a screen.
They waited for him to finish, and he finally emerged, face flushed and triumphant. He saw the two police, motionless in the seething crowd.
‘Ah, officers, how are you? Can it wait? I’m rather busy at the moment, as you see.’
‘No, I’m afraid it can’t,’ Brock said. ‘Maybe it’d be quieter at the station.’
‘Oh no!’ Tait said in alarm. ‘I have to be here. I simply must.’
‘Let’s talk in your office then, and see where we go from there.’
Tait led the way, closing the door behind them.
‘So how can I help you?’
Brock began by asking him if he had any information that would help them solve Rudd’s murder.
‘Absolutely not. I had no idea about it until I was woken by a phone call from a reporter I know at six this morning, and it’s been absolute bedlam ever since. I haven’t even been able to get away to see poor Poppy in the hospital yet. How is she?’
‘She was discharged at midday, and hasn’t been seen since. We were hoping you might be able to help us find her.’
‘Disappeared! Dear Lord, not another!’
‘There’s no need for alarm at this stage. We just want to speak to her.’
‘Well, I haven’t seen her, but let me ask my staff.’ He rang two internal numbers and drew a blank.‘No, no one’s seen her here.’
‘We’ll check her room for ourselves, if you don’t mind. What about her family?’
‘I do have a number somewhere…’ He flicked through a filofax on his desk. ‘Yes, a brother-home and office numbers. Shall I try them?’
Brock nodded, but again Tait was unsuccessful; the brother hadn’t heard from Poppy in weeks. ‘That about exhausts my sources, I’m afraid, Chief Inspector, so if I can get on now…’
‘I’ve got some other questions for you. Sir Jack Beaufort…’ Brock paused, catching the sudden wariness that came over Tait, who touched his big satin tie -gold today-and cleared his throat. ‘Yes, what about him?’
‘You tried to interest him in buying a nude sculpture of Tracey, didn’t you?’
Tait looked nervous.‘Em, may I ask who told you that?’
‘He did.’
‘Ah, well, I do recall showing him one of Poppy’s pieces, but it wasn’t Tracey, as such.’
‘He said it was startlingly lifelike. Apparently you described it as pornographic realism, is that right?’
Tait flushed scarlet.‘Oh now, if I did it would just have been my little joke.’ He laughed uncomfortably.
‘What did Dodworth tell you about Sir Jack?’
‘Only… thathemightbesusceptibletothatsortofpiece.’
‘Susceptible? That sounds like some kind of entrap-ment. What do you mean?’
‘Not at all. I’m a businessman, Chief Inspector. I try to match the goods that I have for sale to the customers who come to me.’
‘And the goods you had for sale included the little girl herself, yes?’
‘What?’
‘She was there that day. You sent her in to see Beaufort.’
‘I most certainly did not,’ Tait said, blustering with indignation.‘If she was there I wasn’t aware of it, and I’m beginning to resent the drift of your questions. I’ll have to ask you to go now.’
As they were leaving, Brock said, ‘Sir Jack suggested that, with Gabriel Rudd dead, his prices would probably have doubled overnight. Was he right?’
‘No, no,’ Tait said, still ruffled. ‘Not doubled- quadrupled. And nobody would have been more pleased than Gabe himself, poor fellow.’
‘Where’s that sculpture of his daughter now?’
‘It was one of Poppy’s, an early version of her cupids. She destroyed it because the true scale made it too… literal, I think that was her word. It was certainly unnerving.’
They reached the entrance hall. Through the glass wall to the main gallery they saw Gabe’s banners above the heads of the crowd. The final, sixteenth one was in place, Kathy noticed-blank except for the spray of Gabe’s own blood.
‘They let you have that?’ she asked, and Tait gave a grim smile.
‘Art takes priority,’ he said. ‘We have to respect Gabe’s intentions. Who knows, he may have given his life for this.’
‘What’s the point of that meandering line at the top of each one? What does it mean?’
‘I don’t know. It’s like a little creature crawling from one to the next, leaving a wandering trail. It reminds me of that phrase of Paul Klee’s, “I took my line for a walk”. Gabe wouldn’t explain it to me. He said every work of art had to have its unsolved mystery.’
Kathy frowned. She didn’t like unsolved mysteries.
She managed to grab a late lunch of a sandwich and some painkillers in the station canteen before the team assembled for an expert briefing. The first specialist was the forensic psychologist, clearly keyed up. They had gathered in one of the larger meeting rooms, and the whole wall behind the speaker was covered by a huge map of Greater London.
The fascinating thing about this case, the profiler explained, was the way in which it inverted the usual pattern of serial crimes. The usual pattern was demonstrated by the abduction of the three girls, in which Abbott/Wylie had begun at locations within a safe distance of their home base, their comfort zone. Had they not been caught, they would have gradually worked further out into the surrounding city as their confidence grew, and, using the profiler’s ‘A4 rule’ and its more sophisticated computer derivatives, the psychologist would eventually have been able to infer their starting point and lead the police to the Newman estate.
But in the case of the Zielinski/Dodworth/Rudd killings, the opposite had happened. The victims all lived in the same immediate area, and there was no way of inferring the killer’s home base from these three deaths. Instead of picking victims at random points within the comfort zone, he was choosing them because of their association with this particular place and its current celebrity. Celebrity was the key. The effect of Gabriel Rudd’s celebrity, enhanced by all the information about him in the media and on the web, was to draw a violent stalker to him. The traditional pattern was turned inside out. This type of celebrity stalking had been seen before, of course, but here it was taking a very sophisticated form. The murderer had done extensive research into his primary target, Gabriel Rudd, discovered his obsession with Henry Fuseli, and then used Fuseli’s work to create a kind of ongoing drama, culminating in the tableau of Fuseli’s masterwork, which DS Kolla had witnessed. The visual clues which DS Kolla had picked up (he gave her a quick little smile, which embarrassed Kathy) demonstrated just how elaborate was his thinking.
Kathy wasn’t feeling at all well, her head and shoulder throbbing. She looked away to avoid further eye contact and focused on the London map behind him. It was colour coded-red for development, blue for water, green for open space, black for main roads-and with the preponderance of red it looked like an enormous chaotic bloodstain, as if the room had been the scene of a chainsaw massacre. Through the blood the pale blue ribbons of the Thames and other waterways looked like writhing snakes.
Kathy dragged her mind back to the briefing. She felt light-headed and wondered if perhaps she had returned to work too soon. The forensic psychologist was suggesting different ways in which the killer might be tracked down. He had probably done this before, perhaps not quite as ambitious or elaborate, but along the same lines-a celebrity group or family, perhaps, or a series of victims connected by some common celebrity activity like sport or the media. And he could have come from anywhere.