Barry Maitland: No trace

‘Too corny,’ Gabe said immediately. ‘How about, No Trace?’

‘Brilliant! That’s it!’ Fergus cried. ‘I’ll get the designer working on the invitations and posters right away.’

‘But Poppy’s right,’ Gabe protested, though without much conviction, Kathy thought. ‘Let’s make it a month, three weeks at least. We’ll know then…’ he stopped, before adding in a whisper,‘… about Trace.’

‘That’s exactly the point, Gabe, don’t you see? We have to do this now, while it’s front page news. And it can only help the police, with the publicity and all.’

‘I’m not sure about that,’Kathy said.‘You’d better hold off any firm plans until I’ve got clearance.’

‘You go ahead, Sergeant,’ Fergus waved airily as he got to his feet. ‘I have to go. Have you been to The Pie Fac tory yet?’

Kathy said no.

‘Well, you must come over and see us. Poppy here has a fabulous show on at the moment, The Loss of Many Little Things-you’ll love it. Are you coming, my dear?’

Poppy said she’d stay with Gabe for a while.

‘Good idea,’ Fergus said, heading for the stairs. ‘Get a few ideas flowing for No Trace.’

Kathy started to protest, but he was already gone.

Poppy moved closer to Gabe and began talking to him in a low, insistent monotone. It was to do with his work, Kathy realised, picking up phrases, ‘… a narrative of pain… absence and loss

…’ but the tone was private, almost intimate, like a trainer psyching up a fighter for the ring. Gabe listened, stuffing food into his mouth. Kathy left them to it and went over to the window to ring Brock.

Brock was in the control centre that the borough operational command unit had established in the Shoreditch police station, the focus of a storm of activity. He listened to Kathy’s report of Tait’s plans to exploit, as she saw it, Tracey’s disappearance.

‘Publicity can only help at this stage,’ he told her, and said he’d get the media unit to agree on some guidelines with the art dealer. ‘Get over here for a team briefing at four, will you, Kathy? I’ll send someone to sit with Rudd.’ He sounded preoccupied.

All over London the mobilisation was in full swing, detectives tracking down previous offenders, uniforms knocking on doors, volunteers searching parks and wasteland, new technology cranked into action. Brock stared at the large plastic-covered street map of east London on the wall, on which coloured marks were constantly being added and erased to track progress on the ground. To one side, as if to encourage the searchers, were pinned the pictures of the three missing girls, Aimee, Lee and Tracey. They depended on him now. The machine was in his hands. He was filled with a sudden overwhelming sense of inadequacy.

One of the computer operators said something and the supervising inspector replied, then turned to Brock as if expecting his comment.

‘Sorry,’ he said.‘What did you say?’

‘Oh, just about the new data, sir-so much of it.’

They were all looking at him now, expectant, waiting for some word of insight or inspiration from the boss, and he felt at a loss, for he had nothing for them, not yet.‘This is how it goes,’ he said, making his voice steady, confident. ‘Until we get a finger on the pulse. We’ll know when that happens.’

They seemed satisfied, nodding and turning back to their screens. The metaphor was wrong though, he thought, too gentle. He searched for something more visceral; until I have something to get my teeth into. His instinct was that the place to find it wasn’t here, for all the Mission Control paraphernalia of computer screens and headsets and data charts; it was out there, on the street. He fought to suppress his frustration, picking up the latest copy of the log and forcing himself to read.

Gabriel Rudd was pacing up and down in agitation, muttering to himself. Having worked him up to this state, Poppy had left.

‘You okay?’ Kathy asked.

He stopped in his tracks and blinked at her.‘What? Oh, yeah.’He took a deep breath, trying to calm down.‘This is how it goes,’ he said, flapping his hands in despair. ‘Until something comes. An idea, something to get my teeth into.’

‘Maybe this really isn’t the best time, while you’re worrying about Tracey.’

He frowned, as if he couldn’t for the moment follow what she meant.‘Oh, Trace, yeah. No, Ferg’s right. This is exactly the time to do it, while the pain’s fresh.’

‘Is it? I didn’t really understand what he was saying about pain. Isn’t art about, I don’t know, beauty and making people feel good?’

He shook his head impatiently, as if he didn’t want to get into some kind of childish debate.‘Science reassures, art is meant to disturb,’ he muttered distractedly.‘A painter said that-Braque. I’m going upstairs to the studio, okay?’

Kathy went back to the window, wishing she’d been given something else to do. She didn’t believe that there would be a ransom phone call, and she didn’t think anyone else did either. Rudd needed a nursemaid rather than a detective in his house. Discounting their anger, Kathy suspected that the Nolans had pretty much summed Gabriel Rudd up-self-absorbed and neglectful. She checked her watch. The ‘golden hour’, that first chaotic period when the most important information was likely to be gathered, was long past. She felt a deceptive calm enveloping the house and the square, as if nothing had really happened. Maybe there would be news at the briefing. he local Head of Operations called the meeting to order. The room was packed, people squeezing into corners against filing cabinets and computer workstations. He gave a brisk history of the Critical Incident Procedures that had been followed since the disappearance of Aimee Prentice on the twenty-second of August, followed by that of Lee Hammond on the nineteenth of September, and now Tracey Rudd on the night of the twelfth of October. Then he introduced DCI Brock as head of the Major Enquiry Team that had assumed overall control. Brock thanked him and called for briefings from the leaders of the various teams.

The first was a uniformed inspector who had been coordinating the search teams. On a grid map he outlined the areas that had been covered by ground searches and house-to-house enquiries for each of the three abductions. In the case of Tracey Rudd, a number of premises in and around Northcote Square had been searched, including the house of Betty Zielinski, the neighbouring building site, and the grounds of both Pitzhanger Primary School and the complex of old buildings known as The Pie Factory. From there the search had expanded out towards the Regent’s Canal to the north and Liverpool Street rail station to the south. Two detectives had also been out to the home of Tracey’s grandparents in west London.

There had been some promising finds, but so far these had led nowhere. A plastic bag of children’s clothing had been discovered beneath a hedge just two streets away from Northcote Square, but didn’t match the description of clothes missing from Tracey’s wardrobe. There were several reports of a young girl seen walking hand in hand with a man late on Sunday night, but before the time when Rudd had last checked on Tracey in her bedroom.

The next report came from the Rainbow Coordinator. When Kathy had first heard this term she’d imagined some benign social services program, but of course it was nothing of the kind. Operation Rainbow was the vast network of public and private security cameras that covered the city and were monitored by the Met. The local Rainbow Coordinator and her team had been searching this source for weeks, looking for vehicles and faces that might have been common to both of the first two crime scenes. Now they had a third area to trawl. So far they had come up with only one lead in the Northcote Square vicinity, a tantalising two-second clip of a pale child’s face pressed against the front passenger window of a car crossing an intersection on Kingsland Road at two twenty-five a.m. The car resembled an early model Volvo saloon, possibly red or brown, its number indecipherable, and the team was searching for it now in the earlier tapes. The Rainbow team had also been working closely with SO5, the Child Protection unit, with their data on known offenders and their vehicles, and one of their officers reported next.