Barry Maitland - No trace

Kathy looked back over her shoulder around the office. There was no sign of Brock and no one was paying any attention to her. She reached over and tugged the letter an inch further out of the report, and read:

Dear David,

I have to put this in writing, because I haven’t been able to find the words…

A chill grew inside her as she re-read the line. ‘Oh no,’ she murmured. ‘They’re splitting up.’ She checked the room again, then tugged the bottom corner of the letter free of the report so that the final line on the page was revealed: my future and ours. Before I had no choices, but now

Kathy took a deep breath, still not understanding. She decided there was nothing for it, and was reaching forward again when she heard Brock’s voice behind her.‘That’s not soon enough. Tell them to try harder,’ he was calling to someone in the corridor. She slipped the letter back into the report and turned to face him.‘Hi,’ she said and he gave a weary smile in return.

He listened to her patiently as she asked for a more active role in the investigation, then scratched at his beard before replying. ‘I know how you feel, Kathy. This is a frustrating time for all of us. The reason I’ve kept you there is that the other two crime scenes are cold, but Northcote Square is different. It’s in the news every day-Rudd’s making sure of that. I’m hoping there may still be something to be got from it.’

He saw Kathy’s puzzled look and went on. ‘The man we’re looking for is watching those broadcasts too. Have you thought that he may be tempted to pay another visit? Enjoy the circus he’s created?’

She hadn’t thought of that, although she realised she should have.

‘We’re monitoring the square with cameras, but that’s not the same as a good pair of eyes on the ground. You may spot something. Stick it out till the end of the week, okay? Then we’ll see. And in the meantime, talk to Bren. See if he’s come up with anything that strikes a chord with you.’

She nodded, chastened, and he added,‘Missing children are the worst thing, Kathy. I know. We mustn’t let it get to us.’ They were silent for a moment, he thinking of the pictures of the girls that Kathy had pinned beside her desk both here at Shoreditch and in her regular office at Queen Anne’s Gate, and she wondering if he was making false assumptions about her vulnerability.

‘I’ll talk to Bren,’ she said, and turned away.

She found him, shoulders bowed, poring over a printed list, highlighting names with a green marker. A steady man, quietly spoken, he usually exuded confidence but now looked defeated.

‘Hi, Bren.’

He lifted his head. ‘Hi, Kathy. Got any goodies for us? We could do with something.’

‘No progress?’

‘Nothing to speak of.’He passed a hand over his eyes and yawned. He had three girls of his own, Kathy knew, and he had thrown himself into this case as if it were a personal quest.‘This is driving me crazy, Kathy. It really is.’He handed her an envelope with her name on it.‘We’ve all had one,’ he said as she unsealed it to find an invitation to the opening of No Trace.‘Load of rubbish.’

‘Brock suggested I sit down with you sometime and go through what you’ve turned up.’

‘Good idea, I could do with a fresh brain. Tomorrow morning? Eightish?’

‘I’ll be here.’

She thought about Brock as she sat in the bright capsule of the underground train on the way back to Finchley Central, and about Gabriel Rudd, both running their teams, keeping them fed with ideas, dogged by the possibility of failure. She reached her station and tramped through the dark streets to her block of flats, where she took the lift to the twelfth floor. She was thankful now for the silence and peace of her flat, although at other times she dreaded the first sense of emptiness, of Leon gone. She microwaved a meal and sat by the window, the curtains open, looking out over the city. Brock’s dilemma was a bit like Gabe’s, she thought, a visual or conceptual one. How to recognise a good idea when a less good one might deflect the whole project and soak up crucial time and resources?

She took the book she’d bought at the gallery out of its paper bag. The cover was perfectly white, with the title spelled out in letters cut from newspapers, as in a ransom note. Inside, Fergus Tait’s introduction to his vision of The Pie Factory read like an overenthusiastic advertisement for a new cosmetic, Kathy thought, but at least it was intelligible. When she reached the main text, written by a professor of media arts, she floundered. The first sentence ran:

In the high art lite world in which the barely mediated procedures of Post-Minimalist convention reprise Modernist discourse in terms of docusoap myth, and what passes for British culture privileges a new ontological realm of narrative trite, the artistic production of The Pie Factory, the latest Britart powerhouse of London’s Shoreditch/Hoxton (ShoHo) district, offers a stunning new avatar of the memorialising tendencies of the avant-garde.

She tried it again, a word at a time, but that didn’t help, so she just looked at the pictures and resolved to try the web. s she walked from the tube to the police station the next morning, Kathy noticed that the posters she’d seen everywhere the previous night had disappeared. She mentioned this to the desk sergeant who said, didn’t she know that those things were valuable? Apparently they were changing hands in the local pubs and market and on the internet for as much as two hundred pounds, some said, especially to foreigners. ‘Well, they’re works of art, aren’t they? Signed original Gabriel Rudds.’

Bren looked as if he’d had little sleep the previous night. His breathing was shallow, his gaze bleary. Kathy had found him in the control room, in front of the big map. Two women working on their computers ignored them as Kathy and Bren sat together with mugs of coffee. The mugs came from a small tea-making alcove outside, and were stained and chipped from continuous use.

‘I’ve been over this ground so often it’s becoming a blur. We haven’t been able to come up with any convincing connection between the profiler’s magic circle and the site of the third abduction, Northcote Square. There’s one little thing I keep coming back to, Kathy,’Bren said wearily.‘But I can’t think straight any more, so maybe you can tell me if I’m just getting fixated or what.’

‘Go on.’

Bren pointed to the red and yellow spots and the black circle. ‘We’ve interviewed every single person inside that circle, some several times. Nothing. Now Aimee and Lee went to school by bus, on different routes, from different stops. Their mums go to different shops and as far as we’ve been able to tell their paths may never have crossed… except there.’ He rose and pressed a fingernail to a small cross.‘This is where Aimee caught her bus, and sometimes, not regularly, if Lee and her friends missed their usual bus home, they would take a different route that comes to this same stop. There’s a row of shops there with a newsagent, where both girls have bought sweets. It’s possible that they even stood together in the same queue at the counter.’ He turned to Kathy with a look almost of appeal. ‘That’s the only place we’ve been able to find where their paths actually crossed.’

‘Sounds significant.’

‘But is it? I thought it might be, but we’ve turned up nothing.’

He looked ashen under the glare of the fluorescent lights. She said,‘Why don’t we go there and you can show me.’

It was at the other end of the borough, and they decided to take a car.

The place was a nondescript section of street, busy with traffic and indistinguishable from any other. The abductor might have been passing, Bren thought, in a car perhaps or on foot, and first spotted the two girls here. At that moment, a red double-decker pulled up at the stop opposite the newsagent and Kathy looked up at several faces on the top deck gazing down at them.