Barry Maitland: No trace

‘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.

‘They’re fakes,’ he told Brock gleefully. ‘They’re recordings of earlier scenes that’ve been patched into the live transmission.’

‘Could Rudd have done that from inside his cube?’ Brock asked.

‘Absolutely. He had all he needed in there with him. His computer controlled the camera, and he could have switched the film on and off while he was still in his bed. So we don’t know where he was at the times Zielinski and Dodworth died, nor on a couple of nights in between.’

‘I think we can make a fair guess,’ Brock said.

Later that afternoon, Kathy’s mobile rang. It was Tom

Reeves.

‘Hi,’ he said.‘How are you now?’

‘I’m feeling a bit better, thanks.’

‘Good. You’ve heard about Beaufort stepping down, I suppose?’

‘Yes.’

‘And I’ve been taken off his detail, which means there’s no more risk of a conflict of interest.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Between your job and mine. So that leaves me free to ask you if you’d like to go out for a drink or something.’

Kathy smiled to herself. ‘Oh, well… thanks, Tom. Though I did go out with a Special Branch man once, and it didn’t work.’

‘What happened?’

‘They changed his identity and he disappeared without a word.’

He laughed.‘Still, you don’t sound too resistant to the idea of one date, by way of a preliminary investigation.’

‘You can tell that, can you?’

‘I think so. How about tomorrow night, Saturday?’

She hesitated.‘I’m still tied up in this case. Maybe next week, I’m not sure. Can I call you?’

‘That’s a brush-off, isn’t it?’

‘No, really.’

‘Well, can I ask you for a favour anyway? It’s about the judge’s wife, Maisie.’

‘Is she really called Lady Maisie?’

‘That’s right. She’s okay, a bit vague when she takes too many of her little pills. She asked me to help her. She wants to have a private word with your boss, Brock, but not at the station. I thought you might be able to arrange it for her.’

‘And my reward is a date with you?’

‘No, no.’ He sounded embarrassed.

‘When does she want to do this?’

‘Soon. Right now, if you can fix it. I can bring her straight over.’

‘Hang on.’

She saw Brock in the corridor, talking to Bren, and she went and spoke to him. He raised an eyebrow then said, ‘Make it the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in half an hour.’ Then he added under his breath,‘As long as she’s not armed.’

Half an hour later he was standing in front of Reg Gilbey’s portrait of Sir Jack Beaufort, described in the exhibition catalogue as a leading figure of the British legal establishment and a noted collector of twentieth-century British art. The painting had a powerful presence, and Brock was struck by the contrast between the frailty of the artist, whom people might dismiss as a boozy old codger, and the strength of the work, as if the discipline of a lifetime had a momentum of its own, carrying him through.

He became aware of someone at his side and, turning, recognised Lady Beaufort. Her hat and silk scarf gave her an almost jaunty air, offset by slightly sinister tinted glasses. She gazed vaguely at the portrait as if uncertain whether she knew who it was, then murmured, ‘Thank you so much for agreeing to see me, Chief Inspector. Jack hasn’t told me much of what’s been going on, but I think I can interpret him quite well by now. He announced the other day that he was getting tired of his work commitments and wanted to take me on a cruise, and I realised right away that things must be very bad, very bad indeed. Jack has never willingly taken a holiday in his life, and detests cruises. Of course, he refused to elaborate, but fortunately he keeps a personal diary, which he doesn’t know I read. From that I gathered that he has been going through a form of purgatory recently, in which you appear to have been the principal tormentor.’