The pointed reminder brought colour to Kate’s cheeks. She didn’t say anything as Collins handed the poster to the sergeant, who had been keeping an even lower profile than usual.
The Inspector pushed himself heavily to his feet, wincing slightly as his knee joints cracked. “We’ll take this away and see if we can find anything out from it,” he told her. He didn’t sound hopeful.
Clive waited with her as she locked up that evening, insisting on walking her to the station. She had closed early, almost as soon as the steam cleaners had finished. The atmosphere at the office had been subdued all day. Caroline and Josefina had had to be given some explanation, and although there was a brittle attempt at normality whenever Kate went downstairs, she recognised it as a facade. No one knew quite what to say.
She set the burglar alarm and pulled the door shut, then stepped back and looked at the front of the building. The pavement was littered with scraps of paper left by the cleaners. Water dripped from the walls and pooled on the floor. The door and window had been scoured clean, but tiny flecks of white still clung to the rougher surfaces of the bricks and mortar.
“Not too bad now, is it?” Clive said. He didn’t sound convinced. Kate shook her head, not trusting her voice. She tried to imagine the figure working in the darkness with its brush and paper. She wondered what had been in Ellis’s mind as he went about his business, and realised with a jolt that she was now thinking of him by that name. Ellis. Not Alex. With a subtle tug of loss, she finally understood that Alex Turner was dead. There was only Timothy Ellis now.
Kate turned away. As she did she saw that a scrap of poster had stuck wetly to her shoe. She scraped it off with her other foot and stepped away. “Let’s go,” she said.
She left Clive at King’s Cross and caught a tube to the health club. Although it wasn’t far from her flat, she hadn’t been since finding out she was pregnant; partly because she’d had other things on her mind, partly because she didn’t want to subject the delicate foetus to her usual strenuous workout. But the habit of regular exercise was hard to break. She had packed her swimsuit that morning, intending to start a new regime. Now, though, all she wanted to do was go home and lock herself in her flat. Which was all the more reason not to.
The health-club gymnasium was busy with the usual post-work crowd. Kate changed into her black one-piece costume and looked down at her stomach. She wasn’t showing yet, and she put her bloated feeling down to lack of exercise and imagination. Eager now, she went downstairs into the low basement that housed the club’s swimming pool.
Inside, the air was warm and moist, like a greenhouse. A few other swimmers were already in the pool, performing their laps with disciplined regularity. Obeying the sign not to dive, Kate lowered herself into the water. It was blood warm. She felt it wrap around her, comforting, and on impulse she closed her eyes and lowered her head below the surface.
The external world ceased. She let herself sink, giving herself up to the water. There was a roaring in her ears, like listening to the seashells she had found on beaches as a little girl. Through it came the deep, steady pulse of her heart. Womb music. This is what it’s like inside me. We’re hearing the same sounds.
Lulled by the sensual, sensory deprivation, she floated, suspended, until a message of discomfort intruded. Her lungs pulled for air, and for an instant Kate felt an impulse to draw a breath and let the water engulf her inside as well as out. It was gone almost immediately. Opening her eyes, she kicked through the amniotic warmth for the surface.
She swam thirty laps before climbing out. Her body ached with the afterglow of exertion as she showered, then dressed and dried her hair. Luxuriating in the feeling, she contemplated getting a takeaway on her way home. The exercise had made her hungry, but reduced her inclination to cook. By the time she came out of the changing room she had decided to indulge herself fully and eat out. She was dimly aware that the attendant on the reception desk gave her a strange look as she left, but was too preoccupied over whether to go for Italian or Chinese to pay much attention.
The club took up most of the first two floors, and part of the basement, of a converted warehouse. Its entrance on the ground floor was a doorway set between a fruit shop and a chemist’s. They had been open when she arrived, but both were closed now, with steel security shutters pulled down over their windows. As Kate came out, still considering where to eat, she realised that there was something different about them. It was a second or two before she understood that the grey metal was flecked with specks of white.
She stopped. More aware now, she noticed the scraps of paper specking the pavement in front of the shops. She looked back at the door to the club. The steel sheet that covered it had fresh scratches gouged in its surface, as though something had been scraped off.
Kate looked along the length of the other shops, but there was nothing to indicate that anything had ever been pasted onto them. She became conscious of a pain in her hands. Her nails were digging into the palms of her clenched fists. She opened them, turning away from the mottled shutters that didn’t, after all, prove anything.
Her appetite had vanished. Intending to go home, she went to cross the road. A bus shelter stood on the other side, opposite the entrance to the club. She had passed it on her way in, walked right by without giving it a glance. Now, though, it was directly facing her. The posters almost covered it.
During the next two days, it seemed that Kate saw the poster wherever she went. Her features smiled out from on top of the fat woman’s body all over the city. Sometimes there would be only one, slapped in a prominent position in the middle of a wall or window. At others there would be a cluster. Coming up from Tottenham Court Road tube station she saw a line of them running parallel to the escalators, raggedly pasted between and over the everyday advertisements. Most had been partially ripped off, but on some her face or name still remained. Kate ducked her head and stared at her feet as the escalator carried her past them. At the top she stumbled when she stepped off and saw one stuck to the floor. It was dirty and scuffed from the hundreds of feet that had trampled it, but still recognisable. KATE POWELL IS A MURDER it said, before a missing corner obliterated the rest of the message. Buffeted by the other people coming off the escalator, Kate walked over it.
“How can he do this?” she protested to Collins. “He’s supposed to be wanted for murder! How can he just go around sticking posters wherever he likes?”
Even over the phone the Inspector sounded tired as he answered. “Thousands of illegal posters go up in this city every night. We don’t see any of those being put up, either. And as for Ellis being a murder suspect, so far no one’s made the connection between Alex Turner’s killing and the pornographic posters that have been popping up in odd places. Personally, unless I can see some advantage in changing that, I’d like to keep it quiet. I imagine you would too.”
“But you must be able to do something!”
“We’re doing everything we can. London’s a big place to find one man in, Miss Powell, and there’s no way we can simply predict when or where Ellis is going to surface next. It only takes a matter of seconds to put a poster up. A quick slap of paste, and he’s away.”
A headache was forming in Kate’s temples. She massaged one of them. “Where’s he getting the money from? How’s he paying for all this?”
“Good question. He’s obviously producing the posters himself, putting them together on something like an Applemac and then running them off on a colour copier. Ellis used computers at work, so that wouldn’t be a problem for him. As for money, he was apparently left a bit by his grandmother. Not a fortune, though, and it looks like he’s been drawing on it fairly heavily since he met you. We found his savings book at his bedsit, and the account’s almost empty now. But that isn’t to say he doesn’t have savings we don’t know about. Or he could just have stolen the money. You can buy second-hand hardware cheaply enough, and all he’d need then would be somewhere with a plug socket to hole up in. We’re checking small hotels and boarding houses, but it’s a long business.”