No trace

30

The laboratory RO cleared his throat, rather smugly, Kathy thought. ‘We’ve done a thorough reanalysis of the blood patterns,’ he said, ‘and there’s absolutely no possibility that Poppy Wilkes could have cut Rudd’s throat and got herself back to the bed where we found her without getting blood on her shoes and leaving footprints in the bloodstains. Sorry, Brock.’

Brock shrugged.‘Thanks for trying.’

‘We also compared the DNA of Reg Gilbey, Betty Zielinski and Poppy Wilkes, as you requested,’ the RO continued, conciliatory. ‘You were right, they are related. Poppy Wilkes is their daughter.’

He paused to take a sheaf of photographs from his folder and passed them round. ‘One other result. The analysis of the marks left by the tool on the doorjamb. It was a chisel with a half-inch wide blade, and the marks are identical to those left on the door to the basement where Zielinski was found, and on her back door, and also on Tracey’s window.’

Brock examined the pictures, some taken through a stereo microscope. ‘What about Aimee’s and Lee’s windows?’

‘No, those were different. Actually, he didn’t manage to open the studio door. That would have been quite difficult with a chisel. It looks as if he was trying and Rudd heard him and opened the door to see what was going on.’

‘Does anyone else have something new?’ Brock asked.

No one spoke, and after a pregnant silence people began to gather their papers. Kathy felt a knot of anxiety tighten inside her. Although she’d been wrestling with it half the night, she didn’t feel confident about what she had to say in front of this group of highly qualified scientists. She would have preferred to have discussed it first with Brock or Bren, but hadn’t had the chance.

‘There is one thing,’ she said, ‘though I don’t know exactly what it means.’ She took up her file of Rudd’s website images and got to her feet, aware of everyone watching her as she walked to the big map on the wall. Her hand was unsteady as she pinned the sheets in sequence along the base of the map. There were sixteen in all, and she was acutely aware of their silence as she worked her way slowly to the end.

‘These are the sixteen banners that Gabriel Rudd made, the last one incomplete at his death. You’ll see that each one has a thin, irregular line across the top.’ She pointed them out. ‘No one seems to know what they signify. But if you look at the map of London, you’ll see what I think is the answer.’ She pointed at the odd blue line stretching across the map above the sequence of images. Her audience frowned at it, then one by one they made little sounds of surprise and interest.

‘This is the Grand Union Canal, which comes down from the north, from Birmingham, past Watford, and enters the London area here.’ She pointed to the large coloured map.‘On the first of his strips, Rudd begins the line of the canal at West Drayton, where it turns eastward. This happens to be where Tracey’s grandparents live, and where Tracey’s mother Jane was born and grew up. In the following strips he traces its route across north London, around Ealing to Kensal Town, where Jane and Gabriel Rudd shared a flat when they were art students together. The canal goes on to Little Venice and turns into the Regent’s Canal around Regent’s Park, then runs through Camden Lock and Kings Cross. Rudd’s final strip takes the canal as far as Shoreditch, close to us here.’

‘Where Jane died,’ Brock said thoughtfully.

‘Yes, it finishes exactly where she drowned.’

The forensic psychologist was peering keenly at the blue line. ‘Jane’s lifeline,’ he suggested. ‘Her journey through life.’

‘Perhaps,’ Kathy said.‘The thing is, if the line does mean something like that, then Rudd calculated its length.’

They looked puzzled.

‘I mean, he cut it up into sixteen sections, one for each banner, and when he reached the end he died. As if he planned the whole thing. I’m wondering if this is his suicide note.’

Several voices broke out in protest, but not Brock’s, Kathy noticed. He was looking at her thoughtfully, nodding approval.

She let the hubbub die down, then continued, ‘If you took the scenario that Brock suggested yesterday, and substituted Rudd for Poppy, laying the false trail with the bloody shoes, then returning to stage his own murder, would that be feasible?’

The scientist frowned.‘But why?’

‘I’m not sure about motive. But in terms of the evidence, remember that odd DNA trace of Rudd’s on the mask, as well as the blood spray over the top of the footprint, both compatible with what I’ve just described. What about the wounds, Dr Mehta? Could they be self-inflicted?’

The pathologist spread the autopsy photographs on the table and pointed to close-ups of the throat wound. ‘Suicides with a blade usually make a few initial tentative cuts before they summon up confidence for the fatal slash. This is not like that-it’s clean, decisive and, though not very deep, it was certainly effective. But yes, it could have been self-inflicted.’

‘His fingerprints weren’t on the sword hilt,’ someone argued.

‘But there was a handkerchief lying on the floor,’ Kathy said.‘He could have used that.’

‘What about the chisel? It wasn’t found in the studio.’

‘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.’

She paused and looked around the gallery room, which at that moment was empty apart from themselves.‘Is it little girls?’she asked, gazing steadily up into Brock’s face.‘Is that the problem?’

‘Yes.’

‘I assumed so. It’s something that’s always troubled him. I remember not long after we were married confronting him with some pictures which I’d found in his study. He was mortified, literally sick with shame. I must confess I’ve often found it difficult to fathom what goes on in men’s minds, but I am absolutely certain that that is where Jack has kept this particular demon of his-in his mind. He would never, never do anything shameful in that way.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I know him, Chief Inspector. I know him better than you or anyone else does. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I realise that it may not be a very satisfactory thing for you, a wife’s endorsement of her husband, but in this case it’s the most dependable thing you can have.’

She turned back to consider her husband’s portrait.‘It’s caught him rather well, hasn’t it? His weaknesses as well as his strengths, Moloch as well as Solomon.’

‘Didn’t Moloch demand children as sacrifices?’ Brock said.

Lady Beaufort gave an embarrassed flutter of her hand. ‘Oh, well I’ve probably mixed him up with somebody else.’

‘Your husband told me that he became involved with a man called Robert Wylie in order to help a friend whom Wylie was trying to blackmail. Have you any idea who the friend might be? It might help your husband if the friend could confirm the story.’

‘Didn’t Jack tell you? Well, well, how gallant of him.’ Brock caught the stress on the word “gallant”. A group came into the room, and Brock and Lady Maisie drew back into a corner as the people clustered in front of Beaufort’s portrait.

‘It’s a Gilbey, isn’t it?’ one said, peering at the title panel. ‘Yes. I’ve always loved this guy. Do you remember his Mick Jagger? He hasn’t really lost it, has he? A bit more blurry, like Monet in his old age, his eyesight going.’

‘I don’t think Jack would be altogether happy that they call it a Gilbey, rather than a Beaufort, as if he’s coincidental, like a bunch of flowers or a bowl of fruit.’ Lady Maisie allowed herself a little smile. ‘The friend was my sister-my younger sister. When Jack and I first went out she was a sweet, spoilt little girl of ten. Jack adored her, like everyone else. Well, perhaps not quite like everyone else. Anyway, later she became bored with being spoilt all the time and took to drink in a big way, and got into various kinds of trouble. Jack pulled strings for her a couple of times. She’s a reformed character now, so one is led to believe, married to a lovely man in the City. I’m not sure if she’d confirm Jack’s story or not. It might be an interesting test.’

There had been an edge to her voice throughout this account, and while he believed her, Brock wondered what else there might be to the story. Did the little sister know something about Beaufort that he wouldn’t want her to bring up?

Lady Maisie glanced at her watch. ‘I really must go now. There are so many last-minute arrangements to be made. I’m so glad we’ve had this little chat, Chief Inspector. I feel I shall be able to relax now, while we’re away.’

She pursed her lips into a smile. They were orange, not quite right with the crimson scarf, and Brock wondered if she was colour-blind.