Barry Maitland - No trace

From Betty’s she went next door to see Reg Gilbey. She heard his old carpet slippers shuffling on the other side of the door before it opened. He peered at her through thick-framed glasses, sparse grey hair sticking in odd tufts from his head, and said,‘Yes?’

‘I’m DS Kathy Kolla from the police, Mr Gilbey…’

‘Not interested,’ he said grumpily and made to close the door again.

She put out a hand and said, ‘It won’t take long. I can come back later, if you’re busy.’

‘I had two lots of coppers here yesterday.’ He breathed whisky, and a musty smell leaked from the house.‘Can’t tell you anything.’

‘I was wondering if you might have noticed anything from that bay window of yours. You must get a good view of the school playground from there. Perhaps you saw…’

‘If you’re suggesting I spend my time watching the kiddies, you can clear off.’

He moved to slam the door in her face, and she quickly said,‘No, no. Look, I’m just doing my job. We all want to find her, don’t we?’

He relented a little. ‘Have a look if you want,’ he said, then added gruffly,‘Won’t do you any good.’

He closed the door behind her and led the way down the corridor and up the stairs, dropping the cat on the way. At the landing he showed her into the big front room with its corner bay window, and the smells changed from musty damp to a rich soup of ripe linseed oil and sharp turpentine. Paintings were stacked several deep all around the walls, mainly portraits and figures, some nude.

‘Your work isn’t like the artists of The Pie Factory, then,’ Kathy said, making conversation as she went to the bay and checked the sightlines.

‘That rubbish!’ Gilbey scoffed. ‘Those people can’t draw and haven’t got one original thought between them.’

‘I suppose they do have original imaginations,’ she suggested, noticing a canvas in the corner depicting the figures of children running in the playground below. So he did spend time watching them, she thought.

‘No, no. That’s all froth and show. What they do is steal an image from some famous artist-Goya, Munch, Van Gogh, Bacon, whoever-and recycle it in execrable workmanship and look clever, as if they’re making some profound reference. They’re just scavengers on the body of a great tradition, that’s all they are.’ He’d obviously made this speech many times before, but it still got him heated.

‘Who does Gabriel Rudd steal from?’ she asked.

‘Henry Fuseli-now he was a painter. Others, too, I suppose.’

‘And you’ve never noticed anyone hanging around the corner down there, watching the kids?’

He shook his head, and after a few more poisonous remarks about the decline of artistic standards he led her downstairs and showed her out.

The school was next. The headmistress of Pitzhanger Primary School was a confident, brisk woman of definite opinions. She had known a very different Tracey from the happy child Gabriel Rudd had described.

‘We were concerned about her. She was withdrawn, found it hard to concentrate and didn’t make friends. Sometimes she would hide rather than join the other children at play or in classes. She had a favourite place in the service yard, an old coal bunker, where we’d usually find her. I spoke to her father about it and he insisted it was our fault, that the other children were bullying her, but that wasn’t so. It’s true that they’d heard about Dead Puppies- their parents told them-and that led to some teasing, but we soon put a stop to that. I believe there was some other problem. She seemed frightened.’

‘Did her grandparents speak to you?’

‘Yes, several times. They made it plain that they had a quarrel with Mr Rudd about his parenting, but I couldn’t support any suspicions of abuse or mistreatment. She just seemed very insecure and uncommunicative. Her teacher was concerned about some drawings she did of so-called monsters, but Tracey said they were her dreams.’

‘Do you still have the drawings?’ Kathy asked, but the woman shook her head.

‘I believe we gave them to her father.’

‘I suppose the other officers asked you if you’d noticed anything unusual lately.’

‘Yes. There’s been nothing really-no break-ins or obvious strangers hanging around. I had words with the landlord of The Daughters of Albion across the street when he put chairs and tables out on the footpath at lunchtime in the fine weather, and some of his customers started calling out to the children in the playground. Builders from West Terrace, mainly.’

‘I see. What about other locals? Reg Gilbey on the corner?’

‘Oh, we see him up there quite often, staring down at us, waiting for inspiration I suppose. He’s all right. He gave us one of his paintings for our fundraising auction day. Quite extraordinarily generous of him, actually. It was just a little oil sketch of our chimneys…’ She pointed up at the elaborate brick chimneys above the slate roof.‘It raised over five thousand.’

‘Gosh. And Betty Zielinski?’

‘Yes, she is a character. The children make up silly stories about her and call after her. We discourage it, of course, but they are fascinated and a little frightened by her.’

‘She told me that Tracey was a particular friend of hers, and used to visit her house.’

‘I’m surprised. I’ve seen her run from Betty when she’s approached her on her way home from school. I’d say Betty was a rather unreliable witness. She does tend to fantasise.’

The Fikrets, the Turkish Cypriots who ran Mahmed’s Cafe, were clearly a formidable clan, led by Mahmed Fikret and his wife Sonia. Mahmed and his son Yasher were usually to be found drinking coffee at one of the little tables in the shop, reading the Economist or the Financial Times, while the diminutive Sonia worked behind the counter, serving customers and yelling orders back to the kitchen in a piercing voice. The family had connections in several parts of the square, with a grandchild at the primary school, several nephews working on the building site, which, as Poppy had told Kathy, Mahmed owned, and a cousin working as a chef in Fergus Tait’s upmarket restaurant, The Tait Gallery.‘We’re art lovers too, you know,’Sonia told Kathy, pointing to a lurid print of a belly dancer on the wall.‘Yasher bought that one. He’s got a good eye.’

On the fourth day of Tracey’s disappearance, Thursday the sixteenth of October, Kathy bought a pitta-bread sandwich and tea in a polystyrene cup from Mahmed’s and took them to the central gardens for her lunch. She found a seat and watched the activity around her. A steady trickle of people passed in front of 53 Urma Street, pausing and pointing to Tracey’s home. Through the rapidly thinning canopy of leaves she caught a glimpse of Reg Gilbey in his corner turret, peering down at four builders walking along West Terrace towards the pub on the corner of Urma Street, followed soon after by a flock of girls from the typing pool of one of the offices on East Terrace, a man with a walking stick, two women with small dogs. Tourists of all ages, from teenage German backpackers to elderly Americans, passed by, drawn to the red neon letters above the gallery at The Pie Factory. She had resisted visiting it so far because she felt she should have more urgent things to do, but now she was at a loose end, marooned in this square while the real work was being done elsewhere. She would definitely speak to Brock about it. She finished her lunch, scattering crumbs for the sparrows, and made her way towards the gallery entrance.

Inside, in a pale grey foyer, she took a catalogue for Poppy Wilkes’s exhibition, which described the artist as ‘a ferociously gifted young British artist, one of the second wave of yBas following the pioneering generation of such international stars as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin’. The first part of the exhibition was a video installation called Dad’s Car and Other Remote Sightings of Distant Kin, and Kathy went into a square room, onto the ceiling and four walls of which black-and-white video films were being projected. When she reached the centre of the space, rotating to try to follow the different images, Kathy picked up a soft background soundtrack of sighs and moans and mysterious clicks. The films appeared unsynchronised and were difficult to follow, sometimes running in slow motion or frozen in a still or going suddenly blank, but there seemed to be certain recurring images: of an old car, a Jaguar perhaps, viewed from a low angle, door open; of various pieces of women’s underwear in close-up draped across leather upholstery; of a woman’s foot sticking out of a car window, jerking violently; of a cigarette burning in a car’s ashtray. Kathy didn’t stay long.