No trace

25

She woke with a start. The room was in semidarkness, some light reflected in through an open door. She had no idea where she was, and her mind was confused by an image, a dream or a memory, of a dark figure poised, arms upraised, and ready to strike. She turned her head towards the door and gave a cry as she saw him there, a dark shape rising against the light.

‘It’s all right, it’s only me.’ Brock’s voice, gentle and reassuring. He was reaching to the wall above her head. There was a click and the bed light came on.

She tried to sit up, but a jolt of pain in her shoulder held her back. There was a dull ache in her head.

‘Lie still. You’re probably concussed. Nothing broken, only bruises.’

‘Where am I?’

‘Hospital. They’re keeping you in overnight.’

There was a clock on the wall reading three-fifteen. ‘You’re still up?’

‘I’m going to get a bit of sleep now. I just called in to see how you were.’

‘Have you caught him?’

Brock shook his head. The assailant had vanished into the night, the dogs unable to pick up a scent from the place where they’d found the bloodstained shoes. ‘He probably had some kind of transport waiting there.’

‘What about Colin?’

‘He’s out of danger. He has a bad cut to his arm and he broke his leg on the fall down the stairs, but his vest saved him from the worst of it. Poppy’s in here too, but she’s not in any danger. She slept through the whole thing, doped to the eyeballs.’

‘She was lucky.’

‘Yes, I’ll be interested to hear what she has to say for herself. Anyway, that’s not your problem; you’re on sick leave until the doctor says otherwise-two days’ home rest at least. You took quite a fall.’

She began to form a protest but let it go. She felt very tired. Tomorrow she would see.

Among a pile of reports waiting for Brock at Shoreditch the next morning was a phone message from Wylie’s solicitor, requesting an urgent meeting. It had been logged at nine thirty-five the previous evening, but in the turmoil at that time it hadn’t been passed on to him. He put it to one side and concentrated on the various files that had been prepared for the new case; the action book, the policy file, and the preliminary forensic reports. When he’d digested these he went to talk to the action manager who was collating the various activities of the large number of people now involved. Like Brock, Bren Gurney had already returned to duty after a brief sleep and was now at the crime scene, where a new forensic team had taken over.

The crime scene manager was the same woman who had dealt with Tracey’s disappearance seventeen days before. She met Brock as he arrived. ‘First the child, then the father,’ she said. ‘This is really personal, isn’t it? Obviously we’re looking for connections.’

They were interrupted by the scream of a power saw. Brock watched as they cut away a section from the frame of the hidden fire-escape door. The door itself had already been removed.

‘It’ll be easier to examine the marks in the laboratory,’ she said. ‘We’re removing the window and frame in Tracey’s bedroom as well. We should have done that the first time around, but Mr Rudd objected.’

The studio had become a laboratory for the reconstruction of the crime, grided, measured and labelled with dozens of numbered plastic tabs marking the locations of key pieces of evidence. They were especially interested in the blood stains, which formed a dynamic record of the action that had occurred and where the players had been at each moment. In one part of the room they were calculating the angle at which a spray of elliptical blood spots had hit a wall so that a computer could calculate where the victim had been standing; in another they were tracking prints from a foot which had picked up blood from an arterial spurt on the floor. A man in goggles was spraying an area of floor with a chemical, fluorescin, and then examining it with a small UV light to find microscopic blood traces, while a second was recording their position with a laser survey instrument. It was rather as if they were deconstructing a Jackson Pollock action painting, Brock thought, rediscovering each gesture of the artist through the splatter marks he had made.

Bren appeared in the demolished doorway. He had been out on the roof, examining traces of blood left by the assailant’s shoes. He waved to Brock and came over.‘Looks straightforward. The first crash Kathy and McLeod heard was probably him breaking through the door. The room was in darkness, but there was light from the square filtering through the big windows. Rudd wakes up, but he’s been drinking and his reactions are slow. The second crash is when he and the intruder first make contact, and Rudd screams and is thrown to the floor. The intruder hears McLeod running up the stairs. He finds the light switch, waits till McLeod reaches the top, then opens the door and attacks. Then he relocks the door and turns on Rudd, who is probably on his feet again, leaning against that table over there. That’s the source of the first blood spray. Rudd falls, and things get messy, blood goes everywhere. The intruder retraces his steps, dropping his stuff along the way.

‘That’s the how,’ Bren said, ‘but why? What had Rudd learned or done to deserve this? And why do it in this bizarre way?’

‘It’s almost as if he wanted to frighten Rudd to death,’ Brock said thoughtfully.‘And it makes the theory that Stan Dodworth killed Betty and then hanged himself look even more unlikely. I’m not sure what’s going on, Bren, but we need to keep a close watch on Poppy-she’s about the only one left who might be able to help us get to the bottom of this.’

‘Right. Couple of other things, Chief. I don’t know if it’s going to be relevant, but they found this…’ He led Brock to the far corner of the room, carefully skirting the taped-off areas of the floor, and pointed to a block of grey material wrapped in plastic. ‘Modelling clay. There was some on the floor. I’m thinking of that grey putty they found on Dodworth’s shoes.’

‘Could be.’

‘The other thing is that photo.’ He pointed to a small colour snap pinned to the wall. They went over to examine it. It showed three people standing behind a seated woman with a child in her arms. The three were wearing paper party hats and silly grins. They were Gabriel Rudd, Stan Dodworth and Betty Zielinski. They all looked much younger, especially Rudd, whose curly hair, spilling out from below his hat, was brown.

Kathy still couldn’t quite believe that Gabe was dead. She knew this disbelief was a measure of how vivid the other person had seemed in life, and it took her by surprise. Gabe hadn’t really meant anything to her; if she’d been asked to sum him up, her account wouldn’t have been flattering. He was as vain, self-centred and neglectful as his in-laws had claimed, and she thought his work pretentious. But there was a genuinely tragic dimension to Gabe which she hadn’t met before. It didn’t come from his health or his circumstances-that would have been normal and understandable. Instead it seemed to come from some inner sense of fate, as if he knew he was doomed. She’d resisted this idea from the beginning because it seemed such a cliche, the tragic artist. There were so many stories of premature death in modern art that Gabe’s performance had seemed like a pose. But now he really was dead, and, looking back over the sixteen days that she’d known him, she felt that her scepticism had blinded her to what she was really witnessing-a rocket falling to earth in a shower of sparks. It startled her to realise that she felt his death much more keenly than Betty’s or Stan’s, perhaps even (and she felt guilty at this) Tracey’s. She wasn’t quite sure why this was. Perhaps their tragedies had seemed stupid and ugly and unnecessary, whereas his was like a grander and more intense version of everyone’s fate.

She had visited PC McLeod before she left the hospital. He was sitting up in bed, circling the names of horses in a copy of Sporting Life with his good hand, and seemed quite unperturbed by what had happened. He told her that he’d heard that Poppy had already been discharged into police custody, apparently oblivious to the mayhem that had happened around her. As Kathy sat waiting in the hospital lobby for the taxi her mobile phone rang. She winced to hear Len Nolan’s voice. They had just heard the news report. Was it really true? Was Gabe really dead? Kathy could hardly bring herself to talk about it and asked him to ring Bren’s number.

She was exhausted by the time she got back to her flat. Taking a couple of the pills the doctor had given her, she lay down on her bed, intending to rest for five minutes, and woke up three hours later. She struggled to sit upright, blinking gummed eyes against the glare of morning light in the uncurtained window. Her brain felt jangled by snatches of claustrophobic dreams, and she got up to make herself a cup of tea and a piece of toast, the only things she seemed to have in the cupboard. She flopped on the sofa, still unable to shake a dream image from her mind, something to do with a painting she thought. The art books Deanne had given her were piled beside the bed, and she searched through them for the biography of Henry Fuseli in which she had found the picture of the two hanged figures. She remembered how impressed Gabe had been by her discovery, and she wondered now if he had taken it as some kind of sign of his own fate. After the death of his wife he had been haunted by the image of one Fuseli painting, The Night-Mare, and now here was another. She wondered if it would have been better if she hadn’t shown it to him. Gabe must have felt that Fuseli was speaking to him from the past.

She turned to the preface to check his dates, 1741 to 1825. So Fuseli himself had not died young. Throughout his life he had been a controversial figure apparently, seeing himself as a unique genius and shocking his contemporaries with images of witchcraft, sexually charged nude figures and melodramatic scenes trembling on the cusp between the sublime and the absurd. According to the introduction, Horace Walpole, author of the first Gothic novel, described one of his paintings as ‘shockingly mad, madder than ever; quite mad’. Kathy could see why Gabe would have been interested in him. The description reminded her of the Fuseli painting she had seen in the Royal Academy, and the memory brought on a sudden feeling of anxiety, unexpectedly strong. She could barely visualise the painting now, and she turned the pages of the book to find it. When she did she realised with a jolt why the scene on the staircase of Gabe’s house the previous night had seemed so familiar, like a half-remembered nightmare. For the figure of Thor, brightly lit and seen from below, weapon raised above his head to strike down upon the Midgard Serpent, was eerily reminiscent of the monstrous figure at the head of Gabe’s staircase in the endless fraction of a second before he brought the sword down upon PC McLeod.

Kathy found that her heart was racing, her fingers causing the page to tremble. This was just a reaction to shock, she told herself. There were differences between the two images: the Fuseli figure was naked, although there was a cloak flying from his shoulders in the wind; also it was his left arm raised to strike, rather than the right, so that the picture was the mirror image of what she had witnessed in the flesh. And yet the resemblance was overwhelming. She forced herself to concentrate on the commentary in the book. The subject of Fuseli’s painting for his membership of the Royal Academy was a scene from the ancient Icelandic saga The Edda-in which the hero Thor takes revenge upon the monstrous Midgard Serpent-and was intended to show the painter as a master of epic, sublime imagination. She assumed Gabe must have been to the Academy to see the original. He would certainly have known it in reproduction from his book. Had the murderer deliberately intended to use the Fuseli image to terrorise Gabe? The more she thought about it the more certain she was that the reference had been deliberate. She picked up her phone and called Brock’s number.

He sounded preoccupied, and in her anxiety to explain her notion she felt she was gabbling. He listened in silence, then said,‘That’s an interesting idea, Kathy. I’ll pass it on to the profiler. You’re still in hospital, are you?’

‘No, I’m at home.’

‘Really?’ He sounded unhappy. ‘Do you feel all right? Do you want someone to come and be with you?’

‘No, no. I’m just taking it easy.’

‘Yes, you do that. Forget about the case.’

But she found she couldn’t, and the pain in her leg and shoulder only made her feel more restless. She closed her eyes but couldn’t relax, and picked up the book again. A thought came to her, and she turned to the index at the back, running her eye down the names. And there she found ‘Sterne, L.’, the name on the email address that had sent the pictures of Betty’s body. She turned to the entry and found that it was on the page following the engraving of the hanged figures. The text read:

In the same year, 1767, a philosophical tract of baffling obscurity entitled Remarks on the Writings and

Conduct of J.J. Rousseau was published anonymously in

London. At first it was attributed to Lawrence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, but before long the real author was discovered to be ‘one Fuseli, an Engraver’.

She lay her head back, trying to understand. It was as if the Fuseli book were a road map to the murders. What else might it contain? Then she had another idea. At the back of the book was an appendix with a comprehensive listing of every painting and drawing Fuseli was known to have done. It ran to thirty-four pages. She turned to the first page and began to work through it.

Morris Munns had been the acknowledged genius of the laboratory’s Photography Unit for longer than anyone could remember. A stocky, balding cockney with thick-lensed glasses, he had helped Brock many times before, on one occasion conjuring an attacker’s boot print from the deep bruising on a woman’s body three months after the event.

‘I made it a priority as soon as I realised what it was, of course,’ he said, spreading the four photographs on the table between them. ‘That little girl… the worst sort of case. Who took these, do we know?’

‘They’ve come to us from the solicitor of the chief suspect, Robert Wylie.’

‘Who you think also took the photographs we found in the flat, right?’

‘That’s right. One of the questions I have is whether they’ve been taken with the same camera.’

‘Yes, I thought you’d ask that. These are all digital pictures, as were the ones in the flat. We have that camera, of course, which is lucky, because it has a small scratch on the optical zoom lens, that we’ve been able to relate to a faint distortion in the digital images. We reckon we can prove to a jury’s satisfaction that that camera took the pictures you found in the flat.’

‘And these?’

Morris pointed to the first three, with Tracey in the street and on Beaufort’s knee, and Beaufort touching the naked child.‘I can make out the same effect on these three, yes, but not on the other one. They’re also different in other ways. These three have been enhanced, I’d say, but I’m fairly sure they’re genuine images, integral with their background. The shadows, the reflected light-I couldn’t swear to it in court, but I’d say they’re not fakes. But this one…’ He picked up the remaining picture with disgust.‘Pure phoney, and not very good at that. The faces have been pasted onto a scene taken with another camera altogether. It’s a con.’

‘Thank you, Morris, that’s helpful.’

‘There’s something else. I don’t know if you’ve been able to identify the location of numbers two and three, have you? The girl on the old bloke’s knee?’

‘No, the backgrounds are out of focus.’

‘Deliberately made to be, I’d say. Anyway, I’ve had a go at sharpening it up for you.’ He produced new versions, in which the shadowy grid of lines in the background emerged as the frame of a large industrial window. Brock immediately recognised the big windows in the artists’ workshops at The Pie Factory.

‘Ah.’

‘Mean something?’

‘Yes, I think it does. You’ve been a great help, as always.’ Brock gathered up the pictures.

‘So the old bloke’s involved, too, is he?’

‘Maybe. But it’s hard to know what’s fake and what’s real these days, isn’t it?’

‘Picture number three is the clincher, I reckon, with the girl naked. I’d swear it’s real. Who is he, anyway?’

‘I’ll tell you one day, Morris, but at the moment you don’t want to know. Has anyone else seen these?’

‘No, I dealt with it myself, like you said in your note.’

‘Thanks. Let’s keep it that way.’

When he got back to his car Brock called the solicitor, Russell Clifford, and made arrangements to meet him and his client. Wylie would be brought under escort to Shoreditch police station where the interview would be recorded and filmed. Then he called Bren.

Bren stared at the photographs in disbelief, then looked at Brock. There was a question written all over his face, but he wasn’t going to put it into words.

‘I’m sorry, Bren,’ Brock said. ‘I had to do this on my own. There are ramifications…’

‘The review of Special Operations, you mean?’

‘You know about that?’

‘I’ve heard rumours. Beaufort is involved.’

‘Yes, and I’ve been specifically ordered to leave him alone.’

‘But you can’t ignore evidence like this!’

‘No, of course not, provided it’s genuine. Morris Munns has had a look, and thinks these three may be genuine, and this one a fabrication. But he can’t swear to it. They could all be fakes. This may just be a ploy byWylie to stop us looking at his emails.’

‘That’s what he wants to trade?’

Brock watched Bren turn this over, visibly uncomfortable as he weighed the options. ‘Maybe… maybe you should cover your back. Get clearance from higher up. Talk to Sharpe.’

‘If I do that without firm evidence, he’ll stop me. It’s just too difficult for them at this moment. Look, I’ve got Wylie being brought here for interview in half an hour. I want to get something solid out of him. I wouldn’t mind some help, but I’ll understand if you don’t want to be involved at this stage.’

‘Come off it, Brock, you know I’m in. How do you want to play it?’

They talked it through until the word came that Wylie and his solicitor had arrived. Bren got to his feet and Brock said,‘Let them wait for a while.’

Twenty minutes later Bren opened the door to the interview room and walked in alone. The two men seated at the table interrupted their argument and looked up at him in surprise.

‘Mr Wylie?’Bren said, and gave a yawn.‘I’m DI Gurney, and you are

…?’

‘Russell Clifford, Mr Wylie’s legal representative. Is DCI Brock coming? We’ve been waiting now for…’

‘Sorry about that. There’s a lot going on. DCI Brock may not be able to make it.’

‘But he called me!’ Clifford complained. ‘He arranged this.’

‘Did he? Well, he’s very busy at the moment, another murder in the area. Most of us have been up half the night.’

‘That’s all very well…’

Wylie interrupted his solicitor.‘What murder?’

‘In Northcote Square, another one of the artists there.’ Bren paused, noting the alarm on Wylie’s face. ‘Anyway, I understand you want to give us some information, is that right?’ He opened the file and scanned it as if he’d never seen it before, oblivious to the whispered conversation across the table. ‘Oh, you’re the gentleman with the lost emails. I heard about that.’ Bren beamed happily at him. ‘Shouldn’t have much longer to wait now, sir. We’re expecting them any day, you’ll be glad to know.’

Wylie and Clifford stared at Bren as if at an imbecile. The solicitor recovered first. ‘Look, we want to speak to DCI Brock, no one else. Please get him on his phone and tell him we’re here.’

The amiable smile vanished from Bren’s face and his voice took on an icy menace.‘You’re not trying to tell me how to do my job, are you, sir? It so happens that it’s quite likely that DCI Brock won’t be dealing with you any more. I may be taking over his caseload, and I’ve got plenty more important things to do than sit around listening to your helpful suggestions. If you’ve got something to tell me then say it, otherwise get lost.’

The two appeared stunned, Wylie itching with the onset of panic. ‘Has DCI Brock not briefed you about the evidence I gave him?’

‘What evidence?’

‘Photographs.’ Wylie wheezed. He seemed to have trouble speaking.

Bren carelessly thumbed through the file. ‘No photographs here. What were they of?’

Wylie dabbed his face with a handkerchief and Clifford broke in quickly.‘They were of a confidential nature, and…’

‘Confidential?’ Bren loaded the word with such scorn that the solicitor’s mouth snapped shut. Then Bren leaned forward across the table and said suspiciously, ‘He wasn’t offering you some kind of deal, was he? He’s ruffled a few feathers around here. Don’t expect any favours from me.’

It was at that moment that Brock burst into the room. He appeared harassed and out of breath. ‘Ah, DI Gurney…’ He and Bren eyed each other mistrustfully. ‘I didn’t realise they were with you.’

‘I thought you were otherwise engaged, sir.’ He put unnecessary stress on the last word.

Wylie and Clifford looked from one to the other as if catching a glimpse of some chaotic office feud in which they had no bearings.

‘No, no. I’ve got time for this.’ Brock paused, then added unhappily,‘Ah, I see you’ve got the file. Well, I’ll take over now.’

‘I’d like to stay, sir.’

‘You haven’t been fully briefed.’

‘All the more reason,’ Bren insisted stolidly.

Brock took a deep breath as if summoning his last remaining strength. ‘I’d like a few words with Mr Wylie alone first, Inspector. I’ll call you when I’m ready to begin the formal interview.’

Bren looked angry, but got to his feet and slowly walked out of the room. Brock sat down in his place and leaned forward across the table to switch off the microphone.‘He can watch us,’he said quietly,‘but he can’t hear us.’

‘What the hell’s going on?’Wylie said.

‘There’s nothing I can do for you. I can’t stall the application for your emails, and they’ll probably take you back to prison tonight.’

‘Jesus.’ Wylie went even paler. ‘What about the pictures?’

‘Useless. They’re digital, aren’t they? I’ve had one of our top experts look at them and he says they’d be useless in court. They’re probably all fakes.’

‘No! I…I know they’re not.’

‘The last one, with the two of them in bed, he says that’s definitely a fake, not a very good one. The others he couldn’t be so sure about, but if one’s bad…’

‘All right, that one maybe.’Wylie was talking very fast now, the words tumbling out.‘I can’t rightly vouch for that one, but the others, I swear-I was there.’

‘Where, exactly?’

‘In the square, and in the gallery.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘I was giving Pat Abbott a lift one day and he asked me to drop him off at the gallery to meet this sculptor friend he was doing business with. Beaufort was there-I recognised him. The sculptor and the owner were trying to get him to buy some of their stuff. Pat and I hung around in the back, waiting for them to finish, then Beaufort came into the next room. I could see him through the blind. Then the girl came in, and I took those pictures. They’re real, believe me.’

Wylie was giving off an unpleasant odour as a sweat stain spread across his prison T-shirt. Brock eased his chair back into fresher air, brow furrowed as if struggling for a solution.

‘So you knew Beaufort, did you?’

Wylie nodded, a sly look in his eyes.‘We go way back. He was a customer of mine, years ago.’

‘A customer?’

‘When I had the shop. Adult material, pictures of little girls, imported stuff.’

Brock said, ‘People will find that hard to believe. Between you and him, whose word will they accept?’

‘I can prove it.’ He turned to his lawyer, who, looking unhappy, reached for his briefcase and drew out a yellow envelope which he handed to his client. Wylie glanced up at the camera watching them from the corner of the room and gestured to Brock to lean in closer. He drew two sheets from the envelope and slid them across. One was a photograph of two men on either side of a shop counter. They were viewed from a high angle and the quality was not good, like a grainy still from a security camera, but it was still possible to identify Wylie handing something, a magazine, to Beaufort. It was also possible to make out a title on the magazine, Tiny Tots. The second document was a photocopy of an eight-year-old credit card slip made out for ‘goods’to the value of eight hundred pounds. The customer was John R. Beaufort, and the vendor Cupid’s Arrow Adult Shop.

‘That’s a lot of dirty books.’

‘Oh yes,’ Wylie gave a nasty little smile. ‘They were special.’

‘Does Beaufort know you have this?’

‘I sent him a copy a couple of years later, when I needed a favour.’

‘And did he oblige?’

‘Yes, a bit of bother with the law. He sorted it out. But now.. . now he knows I could be a problem for him, don’t you see? That’s why I’m helping you.’

‘You’re not serious about Beaufort killing the sculptor, Dodworth?’

‘He wouldn’t do it himself, but he had it done.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Dodworth set it up for him, with the little girl. He knew too much, just like I do.’

‘What about the old woman?’

‘She was there in the square that day, feeding the birds, when I took that picture of Beaufort and the girl. She saw them too, and she charged over and told him to leave her alone. She was crazy. I reckon she’d seen him at it before. And now there’s another killing. Who was it this time?’

‘The girl’s father.’ Brock watched Wylie’s reaction carefully. He seemed genuinely shocked. ‘He was attacked at home. It was very violent, I understand. DI Gurney’s in charge.’

‘But he’s only an inspector. You’re senior to him. You’ve got rank.’

‘He’s got friends, the support of people higher up. He’s on the fast track, making a name for himself. I don’t fancy your chances with him, Wylie. I don’t think he’ll lift a finger to help you.’

‘You’ve got to save me.’

‘Then you’ve got to give me the means. By themselves these bits of paper prove nothing and the photographs would be dismissed. What I need is you, on record, telling the story that goes with them. I need you to make a state-ment, to me and DI Gurney, on camera confirming that you took those photographs, describing the circumstances, just as you’ve told it to me.’

‘It’d be my death warrant.’

‘I’ll look after you. Gurney and his friends won’t be able to sweep it under the carpet if you go on the record with me present. Then I’ll have something to work with.’

Wylie bit his lip, glanced at his solicitor. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

‘Don’t take too long. Gurney won’t wait.’

‘And the emails? You’ll stop them?’

‘I can’t promise. That’s a chance you’ll have to take.’ Brock got to his feet. ‘Five minutes, that’s all you’ve got.’ He turned and walked out.

He went to the monitoring room where Bren was watching Wylie and his lawyer on a screen.‘We should go on the stage,’ Bren said.‘Do you think he’ll agree?’

‘That depends on how genuine he is about being afraid of the judge.’

‘He looked pretty genuine to me.’

‘Maybe, but he’s still not telling us the whole story. He just happened to be at the gallery with a camera and caught Beaufort red-handed? I don’t think so. If the pictures are genuine, then Beaufort was set up. The question is why, and who else was involved. But for the moment, all I want is for him to admit that he took those pictures, then I can tie him to the camera in his flat that he says he’s never seen before.’

‘Not to mention going for the judge,’ Bren said. ‘If Wylie goes on the record, you’ll have no option but to act.’

‘Yes, that too.’

On the screen they seemed to have reached a decision. They watched Clifford get to his feet and go over to the door, asking the guard outside for DCI Brock. When Brock arrived he said, ‘My client agrees to do as you ask. He has to rely on your good faith to keep the other side of the bargain.’ Good faith the phrase made Brock uncomfortable. There was no good faith on either side of this bargain. He said,‘I’ll get DI Gurney.’

They resumed their double act, Brock coaxing, Bren feigning disbelief, but stopping short of anything that could be interpreted as outright deception on camera, and Wylie repeated the story he’d told Brock, complete with dates and times.

Kathy found what she’d been looking for on the twelfth page of the appendix, with the following entry:

Death Steals the Child at Midnight, 1792, oil on canvas,

47.6 x 35.4 cm, Soane Museum, London. Engraved by William Bromley (1769-1842). Imprint: Published 5th December 1802, by F.J. Du Roveray, London. Inscription (bottom left) Painted by H. Fuseli R.A. / (bottom right) Engraved by W. Bromley.

There was no illustration or description of the painting or the engraving copied from it, but the title was very evocative. Was this the picture that had inspired the image on Gabe’s first banner?

Kathy closed the book and then her eyes. Perhaps she was becoming obsessive too, haunted by ghosts as Gabe had been.