No Trace (40 page)
‘All the same,’ Brock insisted, ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d have another look at the bloodstain evidence, just to be sure.’
Reluctantly he agreed.
‘Thank you.’ Brock turned to the forensic psychologist, who had said nothing so far. ‘What about motive?’
The man scratched his ear. ‘Well, I’m having some trouble with this line of thinking, I must confess. It isn’t the direction I was pursuing at all, as you know. But the idea of the killings being “within the family”, so to speak—if we can think of the community of Northcote Square as a family—has appeal. And the close relationship between the three artists is intriguing. You’re thinking of jealousy, perhaps? But what has it got to do with the disappearance of Tracey Rudd?’
‘I was thinking along the lines of Poppy punishing the others for neglecting Tracey, or even conniving in her abduction.’ Even as she put the ideas into words Kathy realised how bizarre they sounded.
‘One step at a time,’ Brock said. ‘Let’s establish the forensic options, and hope that Poppy regains consciousness.’
As the meeting broke up, Dr Mehta came over to speak to Kathy. ‘How’s my favourite lady detective?’ he murmured, with a jokey leer. ‘I was watching you, you know. You’re not well. If you don’t look after yourself, you’ll end up on my table, and you wouldn’t like that.’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she said, managing a smile despite his apparent enthusiasm for the idea. She was preoccupied. She’d been looking at that odd blue line on the map again, and was convinced that she’d seen it somewhere before. Then Brock interrupted her thoughts.
‘I wanted to show you something, Kathy,’ he said, and produced a copy of the photograph they’d found in Rudd’s studio. ‘Have you seen this before?’
She took in the faces, especially that of the pale woman holding the baby. She looked ill, a strained smile forced onto her face, very different from the buoyant young woman whose pictures Kathy had seen at West Drayton. ‘That’s Jane Rudd,’ she said. ‘Must be Tracey’s birthday, just before she died. She doesn’t look well, does she? No, I haven’t seen it before.Where did you get it?’
‘It was pinned to the wall of Rudd’s studio.’
Kathy was puzzled. ‘Whereabouts?’
Brock described the place, not far from the hidden exit door and in plain view.
‘I’m positive it wasn’t there before the attack,’ Kathy said. ‘I spoke to Gabe in his studio on Tuesday afternoon before we went to see Wylie’s lawyer, and I’m sure it wasn’t there then. Gabe must have pinned it up after I left.’
‘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.
T
he 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.
‘But there was a handkerchief lying on the floor,’ Kathy said. ‘He could have used that.’
‘What about the chisel? It wasn’t found in the studio.’
‘The marks on the door could have been made earlier,’ Brock suggested. ‘I think the crucial test would be the bloodstains on the cloak. If there were a third person he would have been wearing the cloak when Rudd was struck, whereas if Rudd killed himself he probably would have already composed the scene, laying out the cloak on the floor, before he made the final cut.’
The RO was examining his file, turning over computer diagrams of the blood traces. ‘It’s true that there was almost no blood on the floor beneath the cloak,’ he said. ‘I don’t know, we’d have to look at these again.’
‘There’s one other thing,’ Kathy went on. ‘Jane wasn’t the only one born in West Drayton. Her parents told me that Tracey was born there, too. So this might be Tracey’s lifeline as much as Jane’s. I’m wondering . . .’ Kathy hesitated before saying the thing that most troubled her, ‘I’m wondering if he’s telling us where Tracey is.’
‘Oh no.’ Bren groaned as he understood what Kathy was saying. ‘In the canal, following her mother?’
Kathy stood at the parapet of the bridge from which Jane Rudd had jumped, watching the divers working in the dark waters below. It was all conjecture, she told herself, for she really didn’t want to believe that Gabriel Rudd was capable of this, but the sight of the shiny black-rubber figures bursting to the surface reminded her of Fuseli’s image of the Midgard Serpent. The symbolism seemed all too appropriate. After a while, the men reported that they could find no trace of a child’s body in the area of the bridge, and proposed to extend their search to the east. They warned that after nineteen days it could have been moved by slow currents, or been caught up by a passing houseboat and carried miles away.
At midday on that Friday they were called from the canalside search by a message from the hospital, where Poppy’s doctor had pronounced her sufficiently recovered to undertake a first short interview with the police. Clutching the bedcover tightly with the hand that didn’t have the drip, she told them that she had no recollection of the evening of Gabe’s murder after the pizza was delivered, and that she had no new information at all about the deaths of Stan Dodworth or Betty Zielinski. When Kathy began to probe her about whether she knew that Stan had visited Gabe’s studio while he was on the run, she became emotional and began to cry, and the doctor insisted on her being left alone. He would be keeping her in hospital for at least another night, he said.
As they were leaving, Brock had a call from Morris Munns. He had something interesting to show them, he said. Dave the badger had blown Gabriel Rudd’s story.
It was the poetic justice of the thing that especially appealed to Morris—Gabriel Rudd undone by his own joke at Brock’s expense. Munns’ section had previously scanned the twenty-four-hour camera coverage of Rudd in his glass cube which had been broadcast on the web, especially for the periods during his fourth and eighth nights, when Betty Zielinski and Stan Dodworth had died, and had found nothing suspicious. But after listening to Kathy’s bizarre theory at the morning meeting, Morris had taken another look. During the periods of darkness, the lighting level was too low to make out much detail, but it would certainly have been possible to see if Rudd had got out of bed and left his cube. Also, the distinctive white stripes on the face of the badger were clearly visible.
During the eight nights he had been in the cube with Rudd, Dave had adopted a routine. The first night he had had some difficulty coming to terms with the glass walls which prevented him from going out into the gallery, and he had made a frustrated attempt to dig through the timber flooring. But once he’d recognised his boundaries he seemed to settle down, and in the succeeding nights he followed a regular pattern—emerging from his hide an hour or so after the lights went out, roaming around the cube, eating the food left for him, drinking and defecating, exploring some more, and then retiring again well before dawn. Of course there were variations in his movements from night to night, but by careful plotting of Dave’s white stripes on a grid, and precise timing of each shift of position, Morris Munns had been able to establish that for certain periods during nights four, five, seven and eight, Dave’s movements were precisely the same as during periods from earlier nights.