‘Yeah, in Northcote Square. Not where Rudd lives now. It was a small basement flat on West Terrace.’
‘Next door to Betty Zielinski?’
‘That’s right.’
‘The same basement where her body was found?’
There was a silence.‘I suppose it is. Is that significant?’
‘I don’t know.’ Kathy hung up, wondering.
In a different office at Shoreditch, Bren was signing for the package that had just arrived. After the messenger left, he placed it on the desk in front of him and just stared at it. He remembered the feeling he’d had when the envelope with his O-level exam results had arrived in the post, years ago. You knew that no amount of wishing could change what was written inside and yet you hesitated, feeling that nothing was quite settled until you actually read it yourself. He wanted to get a coffee, but knew he shouldn’t waste time. He ripped open the package, read the short covering letter, and slipped the CD into his computer.
Scrolling through the index of the six hundred and seventy-two messages, he found that the majority had come from Wylie’s account and that most were either junk mail or exchanges with third parties. But there were about twenty messages between Abbott and Wylie. He selected the most recent one, dated a few days before Tracey disappeared.
From pabbott@kwikmail. co
To rjwylie@kwikmail. co
Time
10 October 7.38.23am
Subject no subject
Bob, TOLD YOU! it’s worse this morning, black up to her knee, this ones finished. Pat
Kathy crossed through the gardens to East Terrace on the other side of the square. As she approached the corner she could see that Mahmed’s Cafe was doing a roaring trade. Schoolkids and tourists were queuing out onto the street alongside the office workers who normally bought their lunches here, and who were now looking quite put out. Through the window she saw that Sonia had brought in extra help-two more girls on the counter and several in the kitchen behind. She squeezed through the queue, getting dirty looks as she worked her way forward to the counter and the cash till where Sonia was stationed.
‘Sonia?’
The woman looked up sharply. Maybe she was still annoyed with the police for harassing her son, or maybe it was something else. Kathy leaned close across the counter. ‘Poppy Wilkes, have you seen her?’
If she’d been more sure of what was going on and where her duty lay, Sonia might have made a convincing show of ignorance, but Kathy saw her indecision.
‘Come on, Sonia.’
‘She was in a terrible state after what she’d been through. I felt sorry for her. I said she could stay with us for a few days.’
‘Is she here now?’
‘I’ll go speak to her,’ Sonia muttered, and Kathy said firmly, ‘I’ll come too.’ She lifted the counter flap and followed Sonia through a door at the back of the kitchen into a cramped hall with a staircase. They climbed three floors, and by the time they reached the top the older woman was breathing heavily, one hand on the banister and the other pressing her knee.
‘Wait,’ she panted, and pulled a bunch of keys from a pocket beneath her apron. She tapped on one of the doors and, hearing nothing, fitted a key to the lock and opened it.
‘Poppy…’ she cooed, then stiffened and rushed into the room with a little scream, Kathy at her heels. Poppy was lying on a narrow bed, fully dressed in jeans and jumper and shoes, half a dozen foil capsule holders scattered on the floor beside her. Her pallor was frightening, and Sonia hesitated, but Kathy felt her body warm, and found a faint pulse ticking in her throat. She grabbed her phone and keyed in triple-nine.
29
Brock looked exasperated. ‘Kathy, I told you- I ordered you, to stay at home.’ ‘Just as well she didn’t,’ Bren said, putting down the phone.‘The hospital says Poppy’s been stabilised. They give her fifty-fifty.’
‘I should think the ambulance people must have wondered which one they were supposed to be treating. You look half-dead.’
‘I’m okay,’ Kathy said, though the frantic activity had left her feeling limp.
‘I should send you home now,’ Brock grumbled.
‘You can’t,’ she said.‘Not till we sort this out.’
Brock conceded reluctantly. ‘The forensic people should be here soon. Want something to eat?’
She shook her head. Bren offered her a file.‘This might help,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘Transcripts of email correspondence between Abbott and Wylie. It arrived this morning.’
As she turned the pages she felt herself observing something like an ongoing domestic squabble between a married couple. Wylie was irritated at the way the girls were getting sick; he blamed Abbott for not looking after them properly, and for not stealing a better sedative from the pharmacy of the hospital where he worked. Abbott resented being scolded and complained that he was having to do all the chores. The callous banality was breathtaking and utterly incriminating. She finished the last message and looked bleakly at Brock and Bren. ‘But no mention of Tracey.’
‘No.’
‘Brock…’ Kathy hesitated; the past forty-eight hours was still confused in her mind and she wasn’t sure how much she’d missed while she’d been out of action.‘I’m not convinced the profiler is right, about an outsider stalking the people in the square.’
‘Go on.’
She saw Bren listening to her, ready to challenge what she was about to say. ‘We’ve picked up some interesting leads, Kathy,’he said.‘Some of the messages on the flowers outside Rudd’s house are pretty weird.’
‘Okay, maybe there are stalkers out there, but Poppy was researching artworks about a missing child two days before Tracey disappeared.’She described her discovery at the Soane Museum.‘And now she tries to kill herself after hearing from Gilbey that Betty may have been her mother. Gilbey is convinced that she knows something about Betty’s death.’
Brock nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking the same thing. I’ve also been wondering about the way Poppy used Tracey as a model, and about the fact that both Wylie and the judge knew her work.’
Bren shrugged. ‘Well, let’s see what the evidence says. The others should be here by now.’
The forensic experts took their seats once more around the table in the large meeting room, this time including the pathologist, Dr Mehta. He sat next to Morris Munns, whom he knew and liked, and leaned over to whisper some remark that made Morris’s shoulders shake with laughter. Kathy had hoped to get a seat that didn’t place her facing the large bloodstained map of her nightmares again, but when she arrived she found that it was all that was available. She thought Sundeep Mehta scrutinised her with an almost clinical interest, as if measuring her up for his stainless-steel table, but then he gave her a friendly grin and she decided it was just her imagination.
Brock began. ‘We’ve now found the missing woman, Poppy Wilkes, soon after she’d attempted suicide. She’s currently in intensive care and may not survive. We’ve also learned that she seems to have had knowledge of Tracey Rudd’s disappearance before it happened, and may be implicated in some way with the subsequent deaths of Zielinski, Dodworth and Rudd. We need to re-examine the evidence in the light of this.’
There was a murmur of interest around the table. Brock went on, ‘Let’s start with the first death, Betty Zielinski’s. Before she tried to kill herself today, Wilkes discovered that Zielinski may have been her natural mother. Her reaction to this information was apparently one of extreme distress, possibly indicating a sense of guilt over her death. Could she have been involved?’
The laboratory Reporting Officer cleared his throat, and Kathy sensed his resistance to Brock’s argument.‘We found no fingerprints or traces of Wilkes’s DNA at the scene, either in Zielinski’s house or in the basement of 13 West Terrace. There were many different footprints inside number thirteen, most of them builders’.’ He paused, thumbing through his file. He found the sheet he wanted and said,‘All right, the smallest size recorded was an eight. We should check her footwear, obviously. We can also confirm from their DNA whether Zielinski really was her mother, if that helps.’ From his tone, he plainly didn’t see how it would.