‘The Rudds used to live in the basement flat where Betty’s body was found?’ Kathy felt a prickle in the back of her neck.
‘That’s right.’
‘How do you mean about Poppy taking Jane’s place?’
‘Well, they reminded me, the three of them. You’d see them together, just like it once was with the first wife. I thought Poppy might have ended up marrying the Rudd feller, to tell the truth.’
As she turned to go, Kathy said, ‘What happened to the portrait of the judge?’
‘Went to the framer this morning. Beaufort insisted. Last chance to get it into the exhibition.’ Reg sounded defeated.
Once outside, Kathy phoned Shoreditch and was put through to Sergeant Scott. ‘When you were investigating Jane Rudd’s suicide, Bill, do you remember where they were living?’
‘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 [email protected]
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 Café 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.
B
rock 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.
‘Check Reg Gilbey from number fifteen, too, would you? He may be the father.’
Kathy watched Dr Mehta, who was obviously intrigued by this, questioning the detective at his side. Her eyes strayed up to the map behind them. She saw that her imagination had exaggerated its menace; the red was more the colour of brick than of blood and, apart from the writhing Thames itself, the blue ribbons of waterways were nothing like snakes, but more like fine capillaries spreading out from it. There was one odd one that ran horizontally across the map, from somewhere above Heathrow in the west to meet the Thames at Limehouse in the east, not far from where they were sitting.
‘Kathy,’ Brock was saying, ‘what about Dodworth? Do you have any insight into the relationship between him and Wilkes?’
‘They lived near one another in The Pie Factory and they were both sculptors, using similar materials, so I suppose they spent time together in the workshops. She seemed protective when she found us searching Dodworth’s room after he disappeared. I think there may have been quite a close bond there, although not as close as that between Wilkes and Rudd. Reg Gilbey told me that they were together a lot, the three of them, much as Dodworth, Rudd and his wife Jane had been when she was alive.’
‘
Jules et Jim
,’ Dr Mehta said, and then, realising he’d given himself away, added, ‘I believe it was a popular movie, years ago, about two men and a girl—not that I was around then.’ People were giving him quizzical looks, so he quickly went on, ‘Wilkes surely couldn’t have hanged Dodworth against his will. Are you suggesting that she may have persuaded him to kill himself?’
‘Would that be consistent with what you found, Sundeep?’
‘Well . . . I suppose it might. There were no signs of a struggle, but also no evidence that he had handled the rope.’
‘And she had access to the building.’
‘We have got one new result for Dodworth,’ the RO said. ‘We’ve traced the clay that was found in the grooves of his shoes. It was a modelling clay, and we had assumed that we’d find a match somewhere in the workshops of The Pie Factory, only we didn’t. Instead we found it in Rudd’s studio, as DI Gurney suspected. The deposits hadn’t completely dried, and we estimate that Dodworth picked them up some time during the forty-eight hours before he was hanged.’
‘Interesting.’
Brock glanced at Bren, who said,‘We did check Rudd’s place on the Thursday that Betty was found, and there was no sign of Dodworth then. He must have gone there later.’
‘But there’s still no positive evidence that Wilkes was involved in his death,’ the RO objected.
‘No. But she was present at the third death, Gabriel Rudd’s. Is it possible that she was the hooded figure that attacked DS Kolla and PC McLeod?’
‘No,’ the RO said firmly.‘There were no bloodstains on her at all. It would have been impossible for her to have killed Rudd without getting blood on her shoes . . .’
‘Hang on,’ Brock said. ‘I didn’t ask if she could have killed Rudd—that was going to be my next question. I asked if she could have been the hooded figure who appeared at the top of the stairs before Rudd was murdered.’
There was silence as they digested this. Kathy said, ‘I thought the figure was taller than Poppy.’
‘Could you have been mistaken?’
She saw the image in her mind, but she knew from experience how distorted witnesses’ memories could be. ‘We were looking from below, which exaggerated the perspective. Yes, I suppose it’s possible I’m mistaken.’
‘You’re suggesting Wilkes was cooperating with the third person, the killer?’ The Reporting Officer was openly sceptical.
‘I’m just trying to establish what possibilities are compatible with the forensic evidence. Is this a possibility?’
Reluctantly they agreed that it might be.
‘All right,’ Brock continued, ‘let’s consider another possibility, that there was no third person. Could Wilkes have killed Rudd, then dumped the bloodstained shoes while Kathy and PC McLeod were recovering at the foot of the stairs, then returned in a pair of fresh shoes, taken sedatives and feigned unconsciousness. Is this compatible with the evidence?’
‘No, Brock,’ Bren spoke up. ‘There wasn’t enough time for her to do all that before Kathy broke in. We did test runs for each of the stages of the action. It just doesn’t work that way.’
‘All right,’ Brock persisted. ‘Suppose she dumped the shoes
before
she attacked PC McLeod and killed Rudd.’
‘But the shoes were bloodstained.’
‘Rudd had a cut on his arm, didn’t he, Sundeep?’
Mehta was looking keenly at Brock. ‘Indeed.’
‘Could Poppy have incapacitated Rudd—he had drunk a lot remember, and he had a bruise to the head—and made that cut first, staining the shoes, and laying a false trail out into the lane. Then she returned, went through the charade with the disguise and made the noises to attract Kathy and McLeod up the stairs to witness the intruder before killing Rudd.’
There was silence as the others considered this. From their expressions, they were more impressed by its ingenuity than its probability.
‘It would explain the blood splash that we found overlapping the footprint,’ the RO conceded, ‘but it would mean that Wilkes carried out the final assault on Rudd without getting a drop of blood on her second pair of shoes. I just don’t think that’s possible.’