‘Everyone’s in position, sir,’ a man with headphones said quietly to Brock.
‘Then let’s begin.’
The man spoke a few words into his mike and they sat back to wait. After four minutes the first report came in, and the woman put a cross through one of the grid squares. Two minutes later she marked a second cross, then a third. It made Kathy think of a game the boys used to play at school, Battleships, except now it was for real. She wondered if Gabriel Rudd could use it for his next banner. Would it become a work of art simply because Rudd, rather than an anonymous police officer, drew it? Kathy rubbed her face with both hands, feeling tired and slightly dizzy.Who cares, she thought, just let them find the girls.
After fifteen minutes the man with the headphones looked up. ‘Something on level nine, sir. Flat 903. IC1 male refusing entry.’
The woman tapped a grid square. ‘Flat in the name of Mrs Pamela Wylie.’
Brock and Kathy listened in silence to the low monotone of the reports. ‘Entry gained . . . Occupant restrained . . . No sign of other occupants.’ Then a pause and the man raised his eyes to meet Brock’s. ‘They’ve found something, sir,’ he said, and Brock was out of the van and running towards the lifts, Kathy at his heels.
The body was stuffed into the back of a closet, hidden behind a suitcase and covered in a pile of old clothes. They recognised the pinched features of Lee, the second of the girls to disappear, and so pale and slack and still that they assumed she was dead until someone found a faint pulse and began CPR.
The occupant of the flat, Robert John Wylie according to the driver’s licence in his wallet, was a large, fleshy man with quivering chins, a toad to Abbott’s spider. He refused to say a word, and the detectives had to draw their own conclusions from what they could see. There was no sign of Mrs Wylie having lived there, and the flat looked as if it had become a den in which Wylie and Abbott could live out their obsessions. Unlike Abbott’s flat, which had been neat and clean, this place was a mess of half-consumed tins, cartons, magazines and clothes, and the atmosphere was clammy and claustrophobic, tainted with a smell of burnt plastic that turned the stomach. There was a computer and its printer, still branded with the name of the school from which they had been stolen, and a digital camera. And there were pictures, hundreds of them.
A detective emerged from the kitchenette, calling for Brock. He was holding a small box in his gloved hand, and the smell of burnt plastic was stronger.
‘What’s that?’ Brock asked.
‘Found it in the microwave, sir. I think it’s a computer hard drive. Looks like it’s been cooked.’
The ambulance man laying Lee on the stretcher saw Kathy watching. He paused a moment and drew the blanket off the girl’s left leg to show her. It was black, and Kathy gasped,‘What is it?’
‘I’ve seen it before,’ he said. ‘With addicts. They use a butterfly syringe to draw the drug from soft capsules, then inject it. It causes blood clots but they keep doing it anyway and gangrene sets in. She’ll lose the leg. At least.’
At that moment Wylie was being taken out of the flat. As he passed the unconscious girl on the stretcher he stopped and stared down at her, and at the same moment, as if there were some telepathic connection between them, her eyelids flickered open. She stared up, then her face convulsed in fear for a second before she lost consciousness again.
‘Get him out of here,’ Kathy snapped.
K
athy didn’t wake until noon the following day. As she surfaced slowly from a deep sleep she became aware of sunlight filtering through the blinds, and immediately her mind began spinning with memories of the previous night: a body falling into the void; the smell of burning plastic; Wylie’s malignant stare; a blackened, gangrenous leg. She sat up abruptly and forced the images away. She might go for a swim, she thought, get her hair done, buy a pair of shoes, get in some food.
She noticed the trail of her discarded clothes on the floor. She still felt exhausted. The phone rang; she picked it up and heard Brock’s voice.
‘Didn’t wake you, did I?’
‘Mmm . . .’ her mouth felt numb, not yet ready for speech. ‘Not quite.’
‘Sorry. Just wondered if you fancied brunch.’
Still slightly disoriented, Kathy wondered what kind of invitation this was.
‘I’m meeting Bren in an hour,’ he went on, ‘at The Bride.’
‘This is work?’
‘Afraid so. Can you make it?’
‘Of course.’
She rang off and got out of bed, opened the blinds, stretched and yawned at the window. It was a beautiful sunny day, white clouds scudding across a pale blue sky, a complete contrast with the drab grey days of the working week behind them.What did Brock want? Surely it was all but over now. Was it the questioning of Wylie? Or—her heart sank—breaking the news to relatives. Yes, that would be it. She should have realised he’d be needing help with that. She wondered how much sleep he’d had. It had been after three when he’d sent her home, but he’d still been working with the others through the material in the flat.
The Bride of Denmark was a myth, one of those unlikely accumulations that sometimes occur in the basements of old buildings in old cities. It didn’t exist in the inventories of the assets of the Metropolitan Police because the occupants of the Queen Anne’s Gate annex did their best to hide its existence, and because those few civil servants who had come across it considered it too difficult to deal with and had designated it ‘miscellaneous’. In the years after the Second World War the former occupants of the building, architectural publishers, had gone about the ruined city like magpies, collecting fragments of old bombed-out pubs and reconstructing them in their basement as the eccentric Bride. The small rooms were crammed with salvaged fittings—the polished bar, the back-to-back pew seats, the mahogany shelving—and encrusted with rows of ancient cobwebby bottles, pewter mugs, porcelain spirit kegs, mirrors and animal trophies. A salmon gawped at an antelope’s head, and the antlers of a moose met the unblinking gaze of a stuffed lion, or at least the front half of a lion, crouching among savannah grass in his glass case. The Bride was a refuge hidden beneath the annex, without phones, computers or office machines, a place where Brock retired to think.
Bren was already there when Kathy arrived, perched on a cane seat at the bar peeling plastic film from a plate of sandwiches. Brock, on the other side, was pouring coffee from a tall pot, and offered her a cup.
‘Thanks,’ she said, and sank onto a worn leather seat beneath the lion. ‘Just what I need.’
‘So as soon as I turn my back you two go and wrap the thing up,’ Bren grunted, sounding peeved.
‘I thought of something and went back . . .’ Kathy began to explain, feeling awkward, but Bren waved a big hand. ‘Brock explained. Well done, anyway.’ He picked up a sandwich and took a bite, handed her the plate.
Brock came through the flap of the bar with a mug of coffee in his hand and sat beside Kathy. He smelled fresh from a shower and was wearing jeans and a thick knit pullover. ‘Yes and no,’ he said.
They both looked at him.
‘The pictures they took tell it all as far as Aimee and Lee are concerned.’ His voice was weary, as if the terrible images were a crushing burden. ‘It’s all there, even a photo of the place they buried Aimee when they’d finished with her. But there’s nothing, not a thing, about Tracey. It doesn’t look as if she was ever there.’
‘What does Wylie have to say?’ Bren asked.
‘Not a word. Not a single word. He’s been charged and he called a lawyer this morning, but he refuses to open his mouth to us.’
Kathy said, ‘Do we know him?’
‘Three convictions for possession and publication of indecent photographs, one involving children. Two fines and a two-month prison term. We’re digging for more background.’
‘The flat was rented in his wife’s name,’ Kathy said.
‘Yes.We don’t know where she is. Neighbours say they haven’t seen her in months.’
He paused to let this sink in, then continued,‘The point is that we have Lee in intensive care and we know that Aimee is dead, but we have no more idea where Tracey is than we did last Monday morning. On the face of it, we have nothing to connect either Abbott or Wylie to her disappearance. And if that’s the case, we’re going to have to start all over again as far as she’s concerned. Right from the beginning.’ He took a deep breath, sat back against the padded seat and closed his eyes.‘So what are the alternatives?’
‘But I saw Abbott in Northcote Square,’ Kathy objected.
‘You think you saw him. All you can really be sure of is that you remember a limping man.’
‘You’re suggesting it’s no more than a coincidence?’ Bren protested. ‘That last night was a fluke?’
‘I’m saying we should look at all the options.’
‘A copycat?’ Kathy said. There was silence for a moment, then she went on,‘The Tracey kidnapping is different from the other two in that her father is a celebrity. Maybe it’s aimed at him.’
‘Perhaps, but there’s been no ransom, no threat. And why make it look like the other two cases?’
‘To distract us from the obvious suspect,’ Bren said.
‘Who is?’
‘Tracey’s father,’ Bren said immediately. ‘Gabriel Rudd.’
Brock gave him a quizzical look. ‘You’ve met him?’
‘Last night. Kathy and Deanne and I went to the opening of his exhibition. He and I nearly came to blows.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, one of his so-called artworks had a picture of Kathy and a caption that said she was dead.’
‘What?’
‘We persuaded him to remove it.’
Brock’s eyebrows rose further. ‘Rudd removed one of the artworks from his exhibition because you didn’t like it?’
‘Not exactly. He scraped Kathy’s picture out.’
Brock stared at them both in astonishment. ‘Has Rudd been giving you trouble, Kathy?’
‘No. He apologised. He probably thought I’d be flattered. Perhaps I should have been.’
‘Anyway,’ Bren went on, ‘what really got to me was that he was exploiting Tracey’s disappearance for his own purposes. The whole thing has been turned into a circus for his benefit. It’s been like that all week, his picture in every paper, every news report.’
‘You’re suggesting Rudd arranged his daughter’s abduction to further his own career?’
Bren hesitated. ‘It’s not impossible, Brock. There are precedents.’
Brock shook his head. ‘Some form of Munchausen by proxy, you mean? You know what a can of worms that is.’
‘At least we should find out if he’s ever done anything like this before.’
‘We know he has,’ Kathy said quietly, and Brock nodded and said, ‘
The Night-Mare
.’
Bren looked puzzled and Kathy explained, ‘After his wife Jane committed suicide, five years ago, he held an exhibition called
The Night-Mare
, inspired by her death. The main work won a big prize and he made a lot of money. Jane’s parents, the Nolans, were incensed by it. When I talked to the case officer who looked into the suicide, DS Bill Scott, it sounded like a prequel to what’s happening now, with the same cast of characters—Rudd, Tracey, the Nolans, Betty Zielinski.’
‘There you are then,’ Bren said.
‘I’ve been wondering about it all week. Right from the start his reaction to Tracey’s disappearance seemed ambiguous, and he has gone out of his way to make a public spectacle of it. I’ve also got the impression that his reputation has been fading recently, and he needed a boost like this. But on the other hand, I’ve found him weeping over a pair of Tracey’s shoes when there was no one around to impress.
‘There’s also the fact that the publicity has really been generated by his dealer, Fergus Tait, and it was Tait who pushed Rudd into doing this exhibition. If you were to look at who’s benefiting from all this, you’d logically have to consider Tait, too.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘Well, there’s the grandparents, Len and Bev Nolan. They say they’ve been worried for some time about Tracey’s life with her father, and they explored trying to get custody, without success. They might have decided to take matters into their own hands.’
‘We’ve been to their house in West Drayton, Kathy,’ Brock said, ‘and checked their story with the social services. They seem genuine.’
Bren shook his head doubtfully. ‘And they told you about the custody business, did they? They didn’t try to hide it?’
‘That’s true. I’m not saying you’re wrong to have suspicions about Rudd, but maybe there’s more to it. If Tracey’s kidnapper wasn’t the same as Aimee’s and Lee’s, then making it look as if it was would distract our attention away from Northcote Square, and I wonder if there are other secrets hidden there. For instance, both the grandparents and the headmistress of her school said that Tracey had become withdrawn and depressed in the past year. There may have been something going on in her life that we don’t know about, that was leading up to her abduction.’
‘An abuser?’ Brock asked. ‘Are there any other candidates in the square?’
‘Too many. There’s the painter Gilbey up in his turret, spying on the kids in the playground below; there are the builders who drink in the pub across the way and tease the kids; there’s the mad woman, Betty, who’s obsessed with stolen children; and there’s the artist in Tait’s stable who has a record of mental instability and violent behaviour and makes sculptures of body parts, and another who makes giant cherubs with Tracey’s face and stains them with the blood of murderers.’
‘Hell’s teeth,’ Bren groaned.
Brock sat up and stretched. ‘We’ll run more checks on them all,’ he said, ‘and meanwhile we’ll get to work on Gabriel Rudd. So, where do we begin?’ He took a bite of a sandwich and opened his notebook.
‘Find out what he really did the night Tracey disappeared,’ Kathy suggested. ‘Watching TV alone all evening and going to bed at ten after tucking his daughter up never really struck me as likely. I’ll bet someone knows.’
‘The grandparents say he takes drugs. Have you noticed anything?’
‘Apart from the booze? Yes.When he gets really down, which happens several times a day, he gives Poppy a ring. She comes over and in no time he’s buzzing with energy and optimism. I don’t think it’s because of her sunny personality. Maybe I should talk to her again.’