Kathy caught Bren’s look as he rung off. ‘What’s wrong?’
He stared at Kathy. ‘You remember Abbott’s mother?’
‘Yes?’
‘Apparently she died three months ago.’
‘But I saw her . . .’ Kathy replayed the brief glimpse she’d had of pale hair on a pillow in dim light.‘Oh my God.’
Deanne, who hadn’t been listening, was staring enviously through the windows at the diners in The Tait Gallery. ‘I’m hungry,’ she broke in. ‘Where are we going to eat?’ Then she saw her husband’s face. ‘Something’s happened?’ she said with practised resignation. He explained.
‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘they were bringing in finger food when we left. I’ll go back in and wait for you. Maybe I’ll get a chance to talk to Gabriel Rudd.’ She kissed Bren on the cheek. ‘Good luck. Be careful.’
‘Be careful yourself,’ Bren said. ‘You might end up on one of his banners.’
As they approached the block of flats, Kathy looked up and counted the illuminated windows on the top floor. ‘I think his light’s on,’ she said.
The lift seemed to take forever, and they were itching with impatience when they finally arrived. They hurried around the corner onto the access deck and stopped short; there ahead of them, backing out of his open doorway as if about to leave, was Abbott, juggling his walking stick and keys. He turned his head and for a frozen moment they stared at him and he stared back. Then, as they moved forward, he jumped with a strange lopsided skip back through his door and slammed it shut. As they ran towards it they heard the rattle of a chain. Bren hammered on the door, then stooped to the letterbox slot and bellowed, ‘Open up, please, Mr Abbott.We have to talk to you.’ There was no reply. Bren peered in and said, ‘I can’t see, the lights are off.’
‘We have to get inside, Bren,’ Kathy said, and pulled out her mobile.
While she called Shoreditch station, Bren moved back to the other side of the walkway and charged the door with a lowered shoulder. Kathy winced at the crash, but the door held. Bren backed off to try again. He had played for the Metropolitan Police rugby team, and he had the look on his face of someone charging an oncoming pack of forwards. The door burst open, then held on the chain. Bren used his boot to kick it clear.
As he went in, Kathy heard him cry, ‘The window’s open! He’s gone out the bloody window!’ She entered the darkened flat, feeling for the light switch. Ahead she saw the dark shape of Bren standing at an open window. She found the switch and the place flooded with light. At the same moment she became aware again of that hospital smell.
She ran to Bren’s side, past the discarded stick on the floor. ‘He jumped?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Bren was leaning out, peering down into the darkness. ‘I reckon that’s him down there.’ He was pointing to a dark shadow one floor beneath them and two bays along.
The façade of the building had projecting ledges and ribs of concrete, and Kathy could see how it would be possible to climb across it, if you had the nerve. Through the pounding in her own ears, she heard the murmur of traffic from fourteen floors below, and then something else—a grunt, a muffled curse.
Abbott had the nerve, perhaps, but he also had an injured leg. As her eyes adjusted, Kathy made out an arm reaching from the shadowy blob across a panel of pale concrete. Then the blob moved after it, slowly shifting towards the next bay of the wall.
‘Abbott, there’s no point to this,’ Bren was shouting. ‘Stay where you are.’
The warning seemed to galvanise the dark shape, which suddenly scrambled across its narrow ledge like a huge spider, reaching the next column, then crouching as if to lower itself down to the level below. There was another muffled snort, a cry, and suddenly the figure’s legs seemed to fly out from beneath him and he was toppling, limbs flailing, out into the void. It took several seconds for him to scream, as if he couldn’t quite take in what was happening to him. Then they heard a distant, piercing shriek, cut abruptly short.
Bren and Kathy were still for a moment, then he gasped, ‘Ambulance,’ and started working his phone. Kathy turned away, feeling giddy and sick. She wanted just to sit down, but there was something she had to do. She went inside the bedroom and opened the door. Gagging at the sour chemical smell that billowed out, she switched on the light.
There was the grey hair spread over the pillow, the motionless form of a small body beneath the blankets. Kathy stepped towards the bed, gently lifted the bedclothes away from the form. She saw a floral cotton nightdress, pink roses. She reached to the grey hair and stroked it away from the face, feeling cold, hard, wrinkled skin. The features were those of an old woman, sunken eye sockets, flesh shrivelled by illness and death.
Kathy forced herself to turn and walk steadily out, away from the smell, out onto the access deck, where she filled her lungs with the cold foggy air.
Brock arrived with the first patrol car. He met Bren in the car park at the foot of the block, where Abbott’s body lay smashed on the ground. The ambulance arrived as they were searching him, and the driver baulked for a moment at the sight of them, two men like vultures in their black coats crouching over a scarlet mess. They found a wallet with a picture of his mother in the plastic window. Then they peeled off their gloves and took the lift up to level fourteen, where Kathy had remained to secure the scene, standing outside Abbott’s door, talking to agitated neighbours.
The three of them entered the flat, and Bren and Kathy related to Brock exactly what had happened. Then they went through to the bedroom, and compared the face of the figure on the bed with that in Abbott’s wallet.
‘I think it is her, don’t you?’ Brock said, very calm, which Kathy found a comfort, for she was still feeling quite shaky. She watched him stroke the leathery old skin, then examine his fingertips. ‘Make-up.’
‘I thought it might have been one of the girls,’ she said.
‘Natural assumption,’ he replied, yet she thought she heard a note of reserve.Was it a natural assumption, or had she just wanted to believe it too much? ‘Three months dead . . .’ Brock murmured. ‘I wonder how he managed it.’ He straightened up. ‘So, why did he panic?’
‘He had this startled, guilty look, as if he realised we knew something really bad,’ Kathy said.
‘This?’ Brock nodded at the cadaver. ‘Or something else? Let’s take a look.’
They began searching the flat, Brock in the bedroom, the other two thankful to move out to the other rooms. Bren took the opportunity to ring Deanne’s mobile.When she answered he could hear the shrieks of excited conversation in the background.
‘I’m
fine
,’ Deanne said, and sounded it. ‘I’ve had
lots
of champagne and bits to eat, and I’ve been talking to these
fascinating
people. How are
you
?’
He told her what had happened.
‘Oh that’s terrible.’ The playfulness evaporated from her voice. ‘No sign of the girls?’
‘No.’
‘Darling, you can’t carry all this by yourself.’
‘Brock’s here, and Kathy, and the others are on their way. Look, I think you’re going to have to get yourself home. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s fine. Come as soon as you can. I love you.’
Bren ended the call, thinking how very fortunate he was that that was true.
T
hey found nothing in Abbott’s flat before others moved in to take over the search. Now Kathy and Bren became the property of the duty inspector at Shoreditch as the first stage began of an official investigation into a death in connection with a police operation. Under questioning in separate rooms, their assumption of a link between Abbott and the missing girls began to seem increasingly doubtful. Kathy saw it in the sceptical gaze of her interrogators and heard it in her own voice, protesting too much. A man with a limp and a view of a bus stop. So what? She couldn’t honestly say that she’d seen his face in the square.
Towards midnight there was a lull. Kathy sat drinking a cup of weak tea, expecting the worst. Her mind kept going back to that moment when they had turned the corner onto the access deck and confronted Abbott. Again and again the questioners had returned to that moment, and she had tried to recall and describe it so many times now that she no longer trusted her memory of it. She remembered the rush of excitement, and imagined that her body and face must have shown this, and that it would have been apparent to Abbott. But had he shown guilt before or after reading that signal? And was it really guilt or simply panic at seeing two psyched-up coppers bearing down on him? And what had then possessed him to climb out of his window? After that, her memory became bathed in an unreal light, spiderman toppling, arms windmilling, and the shrivelled little body in the bed. The whole sequence seemed so bizarre, so outlandish, that the steps that had led them there now seemed equally improbable.
She heard voices outside the door and assumed that new investigators had arrived, more senior and intimidating no doubt, and she braced herself. But when the door opened it was Brock who walked in, looking serious, an envelope in his hand.
‘Some news, Kathy.’ He sat opposite her, seeing the strain etched around her eyes. ‘How are you?’
She gave him a tight smile. ‘Okay. Did they find anything in his flat? Something about the girls?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid not. Clean as a whistle—apart from the little matter of dear old dead Mum.’ Kathy felt nausea rise in her throat. ‘However,’ he opened the envelope and drew out some sheets of paper, ‘we did find a memory card in his wallet, one of those little things they use in digital cameras. These are prints of the pictures it contained.’
She flicked through a series of street scenes—nothing incriminating, surely. She looked more carefully at the first, a pavement viewed from above, the space flattened by a zoom lens, and suddenly realised what it was. ‘That’s the bus stop, isn’t it? And the newsagent. There are no posters of the girls in the window, so this must have been taken before . . .’ There were children in the doorway, and she looked closer, trying to identify them. ‘Could that be Aimee?’
Brock nodded. He reached forward and pointed to the second page. ‘And that’s Lee, we’re almost certain.’
Almost
certain. Kathy drew in a long breath. ‘I could still be right then.’ Relief began to trickle through her like some marvellous opiate. ‘I could be right.’
‘Yes. We’ve checked the angles and there’s no doubt that they were taken from Abbott’s window. But there’s no camera in his flat. It’s only a beginning, of course. But there’s something there, I’m sure of it.’
Kathy thought of all that must follow; retracing Abbott’s movements, tracking down his friends and acquaintances, searching for his hiding places. It would take time, and meanwhile the girls, if any of them were still alive, would be in a desperate state.
‘I want to help,’ she said.
‘Not tonight. You’re all in, and so is Bren. Get some sleep, then we’ll see.’
‘You look exhausted yourself.’
‘Oh, I just plod on. One other thing may help you sleep better. One of Abbott’s neighbours remembers him saying that he used to do wall-climbing as a sport, so his attempt to escape out the window wasn’t quite as mad or panic-stricken as it seemed. He may even have tried it before.’
They got to their feet and Kathy went out to the lobby, where Bren was waiting for her. Before they went their separate ways he said, ‘We were lucky, Kathy. Bloody lucky. If he hadn’t had that thing in his wallet, they’d have made mincemeat of us.’
‘I know,’ she said, and pushed at the front door. Glancing back over her shoulder she saw Brock talking to two senior uniformed officers. They both nodded their heads and one of them glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was five past one in the morning. Kathy turned to ask Bren if he knew what was going on, but he was already striding away down the street. She looked back into the building but Brock and the others had gone, so she stepped out onto the pavement, pulling the collar of her coat up against the cold night air,and with the gust of chill wind she remembered the very first thing that had come into her head when she’d spotted Abbott. He had been on the point of locking his front door, on his way out, yet his clothing had seemed too light for the cold evening, and she’d thought he couldn’t be going far. It had been the briefest of thoughts, barely formed, because then their eyes had locked and adrenaline had taken over. Kathy stopped dead,then turned and ran back into the station.
She found Brock in a corridor at the back, pulling on his coat, heading for the door to the rear car park. He looked surprised to see her.
‘I thought you’d gone, Kathy.’
‘I remembered something. I don’t know why it escaped me. He wasn’t dressed to go far. Suppose he was going to visit another flat in the same building? Suppose he climbed out the window to get to that other flat?’
Brock beamed at her and she realised that he’d got there ahead of her. He pulled open the door and she saw a car waiting outside,engine idling. ‘Want to come?’ he asked. She squeezed into the back seat beside two uniformed men who were both talking on their phones. Brock got in the front and the driver put the car into gear.
No one spoke until they reached the cordon below the block of flats, then Brock exchanged a few words with the two men before leading Kathy past the barrier towards an unmarked white van. She saw the police tapes nearby, marking the place where Abbott had landed. There were no obvious signs of activity or alarm, but Kathy noticed groups of dark figures clustered in areas of shadow, some carrying weapons.
‘Let’s say,’ Brock said, gazing up at the face of the building, breath misting,‘that the second flat is below the line of sight of the bus stop, so level twelve or lower. Abbott was heading down and to your right, looking from above, to our left from down here.’ He pointed to an area of the façade.‘So they’re starting there and working outwards.You and I just stay here and wait.’ He tapped a knuckle on the back door of the van and after a moment it opened and they climbed in. A light came on and Kathy saw two people inside and the apparatus of a mobile command unit. A woman was crouched over a grid diagram on a table, marking names on the squares.