‘His prints aren’t on it,’ Brock mused. ‘And I wonder who was behind the camera?’
Kathy was staring again at the face of Jane Rudd, noticing the cut of the hair, the big eyes. ‘She looks a bit like Princess Di, doesn’t she? It was soon after this that Stan did his shocking sculpture Bye Bye Princess and had his breakdown. I wonder if the “princess” could have been Jane rather than Di. Maybe he was in love with her.’
The face on the pillow looked drained of life, dark hollows around her closed eyes made more stark by the whiteness of her face, but the monitor beside the bed insisted that she was alive. Although there were two other police at hand to avoid losing Poppy for a second time, Kathy stayed on, hour after hour, wanting to be the first person Poppy saw when-if-she opened her eyes. To keep her mind occupied, she studied a sheaf of printouts from the official Gabriel Rudd website and a London A-Z. Several times she fell asleep, and finally, jerking awake in her chair, she decided to have a wash and get a coffee and something to eat.
When she returned twenty minutes later, she saw the armed cop outside Poppy’s room talking with a dark-coated man she didn’t at first recognise. He was holding a bunch of flowers and as she got closer Kathy recognised Reg Gilbey’s voice, arguing with the guard to let him see his daughter and at the same time trying to see past him through the open door. Perhaps the sound of Gilbey’s voice triggered some reaction in Poppy’s brain, for they suddenly heard a plaintive call from inside the room,‘Reg? Reg?’
Kathy nodded to the guard and took Gilbey’s arm, steering him in towards the bed, where a nurse was checking the drip. Poppy was staring up with wild, unfocused eyes.
‘Gabe’s dead, isn’t he?’ she asked hoarsely. ‘It’s not a dream?’
The old man murmured a reply. ‘Yes. I’m sorry, girl, he’s gone.’
Poppy sobbed. ‘It’s all so awful. I didn’t understand. Everything’s ruined.’
Then she stared up at Gilbey and her voice dropped to a whisper.‘I should never have come to the square.’
‘I’m glad you did,’the old man replied.‘I’m very glad you did.’
Poppy’s eyes closed and the life seemed to drain out of her again. The nurse checked her and said,‘She’s all right. I think she’s going to be fine. But you’d best be going now.’
Kathy led Reg away, taking him down to her car to give him a lift home. Along the way he said,‘She was telling the truth, wasn’t she, about not understanding what was happening? She wasn’t involved, was she?’
Kathy kept worrying at that thought after she’d dropped him in Northcote Square, and also at another possibility that was throbbing in her head. As she drove back through the dark streets, she began to wonder if she, too, had been infected by the dark fantasies of Henry Fuseli.
30
The laboratory RO cleared his throat, rather smugly, Kathy thought. ‘We’ve done a thorough reanalysis of the blood patterns,’ he said, ‘and there’s absolutely no possibility that Poppy Wilkes could have cut Rudd’s throat and got herself back to the bed where we found her without getting blood on her shoes and leaving footprints in the bloodstains. Sorry, Brock.’
Brock shrugged.‘Thanks for trying.’
‘We also compared the DNA of Reg Gilbey, Betty Zielinski and Poppy Wilkes, as you requested,’ the RO continued, conciliatory. ‘You were right, they are related. Poppy Wilkes is their daughter.’
He paused to take a sheaf of photographs from his folder and passed them round. ‘One other result. The analysis of the marks left by the tool on the doorjamb. It was a chisel with a half-inch wide blade, and the marks are identical to those left on the door to the basement where Zielinski was found, and on her back door, and also on Tracey’s window.’
Brock examined the pictures, some taken through a stereo microscope. ‘What about Aimee’s and Lee’s windows?’
‘No, those were different. Actually, he didn’t manage to open the studio door. That would have been quite difficult with a chisel. It looks as if he was trying and Rudd heard him and opened the door to see what was going on.’
‘Does anyone else have something new?’ Brock asked.
No one spoke, and after a pregnant silence people began to gather their papers. Kathy felt a knot of anxiety tighten inside her. Although she’d been wrestling with it half the night, she didn’t feel confident about what she had to say in front of this group of highly qualified scientists. She would have preferred to have discussed it first with Brock or Bren, but hadn’t had the chance.
‘There is one thing,’ she said, ‘though I don’t know exactly what it means.’ She took up her file of Rudd’s website images and got to her feet, aware of everyone watching her as she walked to the big map on the wall. Her hand was unsteady as she pinned the sheets in sequence along the base of the map. There were sixteen in all, and she was acutely aware of their silence as she worked her way slowly to the end.
‘These are the sixteen banners that Gabriel Rudd made, the last one incomplete at his death. You’ll see that each one has a thin, irregular line across the top.’ She pointed them out. ‘No one seems to know what they signify. But if you look at the map of London, you’ll see what I think is the answer.’ She pointed at the odd blue line stretching across the map above the sequence of images. Her audience frowned at it, then one by one they made little sounds of surprise and interest.
‘This is the Grand Union Canal, which comes down from the north, from Birmingham, past Watford, and enters the London area here.’ She pointed to the large coloured map.‘On the first of his strips, Rudd begins the line of the canal at West Drayton, where it turns eastward. This happens to be where Tracey’s grandparents live, and where Tracey’s mother Jane was born and grew up. In the following strips he traces its route across north London, around Ealing to Kensal Town, where Jane and Gabriel Rudd shared a flat when they were art students together. The canal goes on to Little Venice and turns into the Regent’s Canal around Regent’s Park, then runs through Camden Lock and Kings Cross. Rudd’s final strip takes the canal as far as Shoreditch, close to us here.’
‘Where Jane died,’ Brock said thoughtfully.
‘Yes, it finishes exactly where she drowned.’
The forensic psychologist was peering keenly at the blue line. ‘Jane’s lifeline,’ he suggested. ‘Her journey through life.’
‘Perhaps,’ Kathy said.‘The thing is, if the line does mean something like that, then Rudd calculated its length.’
They looked puzzled.
‘I mean, he cut it up into sixteen sections, one for each banner, and when he reached the end he died. As if he planned the whole thing. I’m wondering if this is his suicide note.’
Several voices broke out in protest, but not Brock’s, Kathy noticed. He was looking at her thoughtfully, nodding approval.
She let the hubbub die down, then continued, ‘If you took the scenario that Brock suggested yesterday, and substituted Rudd for Poppy, laying the false trail with the bloody shoes, then returning to stage his own murder, would that be feasible?’
The scientist frowned.‘But why?’
‘I’m not sure about motive. But in terms of the evidence, remember that odd DNA trace of Rudd’s on the mask, as well as the blood spray over the top of the footprint, both compatible with what I’ve just described. What about the wounds, Dr Mehta? Could they be self-inflicted?’
The pathologist spread the autopsy photographs on the table and pointed to close-ups of the throat wound. ‘Suicides with a blade usually make a few initial tentative cuts before they summon up confidence for the fatal slash. This is not like that-it’s clean, decisive and, though not very deep, it was certainly effective. But yes, it could have been self-inflicted.’
‘His fingerprints weren’t on the sword hilt,’ someone argued.