No trace

14

There were several badger jokes at the Monday morning briefing, talk of badgering witnesses and digging someone out of their set, which Brock tolerated. In fact, Kathy had the impression that he rather relished Rudd’s little stunt. But the antics in Northcote Square were a sideshow, with the focus of the investigation fixed on trying to discover the place in which, they had to assume, Abbott and Wylie had hidden Tracey, and to find Stan Dodworth, who might have some idea where it was.

Bren summarised what was in progress; the visits to wall-climbing associates in Northampton and Southend, the search of letting agents’ records for a rented storeroom, the examination of Rainbow camera footage across London for sightings of Wylie’s white van on the night of Tracey’s disappearance. The forensic reporting officer followed this with a summary of possible leads from the detritus of Wylie’s flat: unmatched fibre samples, unlabelled keys, traces of chalky soil, photographs of unidentified places. An officer from SO5, the Child Protection unit, spoke of information gleaned from the computers of other known paedophiles that pointed to Abbott and Wylie, but the evidence was sketchy since the hard drive in the flat had been cooked and no other computer had been found. The psychologist profiler attempted to interpret the workings of the two men’s minds.

Dodworth’sdisappearancewasdiscussed. Tyneside police were currently checking his family and friends in the north. Someone suggested that if he knew of Tracey’s hiding place he might have gone there to try to help her, but this seemed implausible. More likely, someone else suggested, he’d been in on it with Abbott and Wylie, and was currently trying to

erase his tracks. There was an ominous silence in the room as people considered what this might mean for Tracey.

The task seemed daunting, and the cost of failure depressingly high, but Brock stirred them to action, loading them with tasks. Kathy’s was to speak once again to Tracey’s grandparents, in the hope that the girl might have said something to them during her weekend visits that had been overlooked.

She took her car onto the Hammersmith Flyover and steered for the M4. Traffic was heavy, with trucks thundering out to Heathrow and beyond, to Bristol and the West Country, buffeting her little Renault, and she was glad when the signs for the turn-off to West Drayton appeared. She had decided not to ring the Nolans in advance, hoping to catch them unprepared, but when she reached the crescent of shops near their home she came upon them unexpectedly as they emerged from the butcher. Kathy pulled in to the kerb and watched them stop to say a few words to a woman with a pair of fat corgis, wave to a couple loading groceries into their car, then continue past the off-licence, the Taj Mahal restaurant and Shirley’s Hair Affair, to disappear into the newsagent. According to the A-Z their house was close by, and Kathy decided to wait for them there. She drove slowly through narrow suburban streets jammed with parked cars and found a space outside their number, one of a row of semis. Its paintwork was new, its windows sparkling in the weak autumn sunlight, and the little front lawn looked as if it had been groomed with nail scissors around the ornamental sundial centrepiece. Kathy didn’t doubt that it would be aligned with precision.

After a few minutes she saw the Nolans with their shopping bags turn into the street. She waited until they were near before getting out of the car. They looked surprised, but Kathy had an odd feeling that they were expecting her.

‘Is there news?’ Bev asked.

‘Nothing new, I’m afraid. I’d just like a few words, if you’ve got the time,’ Kathy said.

‘Of course,’ Len said. ‘As long as you’re not hoping to catch us out, find Tracey hidden in the attic.’

‘Len!’ his wife scolded.

‘Should I be looking there?’ Kathy smiled.

‘You wouldn’t have much luck, but I thought our sonin-law might have put some such idea in your head. He’s the one with the remarkable imagination after all, if the Sunday papers are to be believed.’

‘Take no notice, Kathy,’Bev said.‘Is it all right to call you Kathy? Sergeant is so, well, military. Come inside and have a cup of coffee and tell us about any progress.’ She stopped suddenly and sighed. ‘Oh Len, we forgot the stamps from the post office.’

‘Always forgetting something. Anyway,’ Len said, getting in a last jab, ‘there was no chance you’d catch us unawares. Enid across the street spotted you straight away and phoned us on the mobile to warn us there was a young woman waiting for us outside our house, and was it a relative or one of my mistresses? Nosy old bitch.’

The interior of the house was as immaculate as the exterior. Len took their coats and Bev showed Kathy through to a small sitting room overlooking the back garden. Through the French windows Kathy saw that the yard had been divided precisely down the middle, a vegetable garden on the left, flower beds on the right. A neat herringbone brick path formed the centre line, a frontier between utility and ornament.

While Bev made coffee, Kathy studied the framed photos on the mantelpiece-Tracey, Len and Bev, and a young woman, presumably their dead daughter, Jane. No Gabe.

‘She looks like her mum, don’t you reckon?’ Len said from behind her. Kathy wasn’t sure if he meant Jane or Tracey, but in fact it was true of them both. The particular twinkle in the eyes, the wide mouth, the fine blonde hair, were carried through the three generations, from Bev to Jane to Tracey, becoming, if anything, clearer and more pronounced.

‘Yes.’ Kathy had noticed framed drawings in both the hall and here in the lounge, pastel figure studies of ballet dancers. The signature, a discreet flourish, was Jane Nolan.

‘She did those when she was still at school,’ Len said, seeing her looking at them.‘Brilliant at drawing.’

‘She got her talent from Len,’ Bev said, coming in with a tray.

He took it from her and set it down.‘Rubbish. There’s nothing artistic about me.’

‘You know what I mean. He might show you his work later, if he’s in the mood,’ Bev said to Kathy.‘Sit down, dear.’

‘You could say that art, or what passes for art these days, has been a curse on our family,’ Len persisted, offering Kathy some home-made shortbread. ‘Try a piece. There’s more artistry in Bev’s shortbread than you’ll find in the whole of Tate Modern. Yes, Jane did some lovely things at school. But then she got a place in that art school, and they soon put a stop to that. You’ve got to be conceptual there, and ugly as you can make it. She tried to join in, but her heart wasn’t in it.’

‘Oh now, be fair, Len. She did well at first.’ Bev was like a rudder, Kathy thought, making continual corrections to the wilder swings of Len’s opinions. And because he knew he could rely on this, the two of them bound together, Len probably allowed his opinions to veer about more freely than if he were on his own.

‘She wanted to fit in,’he said.‘If the teacher said,“Throw paint in the face of the bourgeois art-loving public!” she’d do it, just to fit in. But she knew there’s got to be more to art than that.’

‘Well, she couldn’t very well forget, with you carrying on every time she came home.’

‘I’m entitled to my opinions. Anyway, then she met Gabriel Rudd, hero of the Sunday supplements, and that was that. But that’s not what you came about, is it, Kathy? I don’t know why I’m rabbiting on. You’ve come about those men on the Newman estate, is that it?’

Kathy told them what more she could about Abbott’s death and Wylie’s arrest.‘But there’s still no sign of Tracey, I’m afraid. We’re following every lead we can, and we’re going back over old ground just to make sure we haven’t missed anything. That’s why I’m here. I don’t suppose Tracey ever mentioned those men’s names to you, did she? Pat Abbott and Robert-maybe Rob-Wylie? These are their pictures.’

They passed them between them, Bev having to force herself to meet the men’s eyes, even in reproduction. They shook their heads.

‘There’s an artist called Stan Dodworth who lives in The Pie Factory in Northcote Square. This is his picture.’

‘Yes, we know him,’ Len said. ‘He’s a friend of Gabe’s. Why, is he mixed up in this?’

‘We’re not sure. Apparently he did know Abbott.’

The Nolans looked startled. ‘Well! That’s got to be more than a coincidence, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does he have to say for himself then?’

‘Unfortunately he’s disappeared, and we can’t find him. His picture is going out to the media this morning.’

‘You think he might know where Tracey is?’ They both eased forward to the edge of their seats.

‘It’s a possibility that he may know something. That’s why we’re making every effort to find him. It’s possible that Tracey may have visited his workshop in The Pie Factory. Did she ever speak about that?’

They shook their heads.

‘Dodworth makes sculptures that are rather macabre, of bodies and body parts. Did Tracey mention having seen anything like that, a dead body or a monster?’

Bev pondered.‘I do remember something she said about a monster. I thought it was something she’d seen on TV.’

‘Or a video,’ Len declared. ‘Some of the stuff Gabe let her watch would give anyone nightmares.’

There were moments in this conversation, Kathy felt, when she thought she saw glimmers of recognition or memory in their eyes, but it came to nothing. After another ten minutes of talk she finished her coffee and asked if she could see Tracey’s room.

The bedroom was upstairs at the back of the house. From the window she could look out over the fenced backyards and the houses that ringed them tightly around the block. She was reminded of wagons protecting an encampment. There was little colour in the neat little gardens at present, but in the spring they would come alive with plum and apple and cherry blossom, and every new release of annuals that the gardening magazines and TV shows would be plugging.

Tracey’s room couldn’t have been more different from the one in her father’s house. This one was full of colours and patterns, a perfect little girl’s bedroom from Good Housekeeping, that made the other seem like some kind of experimental laboratory. In a corner was the farmyard Len had made, with flocks of little animals, and above it shelves were filled with dolls and books and frothy ornaments. Kathy could imagine Gabe Rudd’s scorn.

There seemed nothing here to help Kathy. The childish drawings pinned to the wall showed a girl on a pony, a Christmas tree with a star, a house with a red pitched roof, but no monsters.

‘Jane was born in that room,’ Bev Nolan murmured when Kathy returned downstairs. ‘And so was Tracey. Sometimes, when I’m alone in the house I think I hear them up there…’

Len reached across to his wife’s hand and gave a gentle squeeze.

‘And I understand that Tracey lived with you here for a while after Jane died,’ Kathy said.

‘That’s right, for over a year. Oh, she couldn’t have stayed where she was. Gabriel had no idea how to feed her or change her nappies even. He’d left Jane to do all that. And then there was that mad woman always flying around, causing chaos. No, no, Tracey couldn’t stay there.’

‘And did Gabe agree to you taking her?’

‘Oh yes!’Len broke in.‘He was delighted. Couldn’t get rid of her fast enough.’

‘So how did he come to change his mind and want her back?’

‘Gradually things got better for him,’ Len explained. ‘He won that prize, got some money and became well known. He enjoyed the limelight, playing the part of the tragic widower. Then one of the colour supplements did a story about Tracey, only they came and photographed her here, with no pictures of Gabriel, and he didn’t like that one bit. Oh no. So he demanded her back, and we had to let her go, poor mite. She was just a publicity accessory, that’s all she was. A bit of bait for the camera.’

They didn’t know, of course, about the photographs in Wylie’s flat, but the words chilled Kathy. ‘So what’s this you’re going to show me?’ she asked Len, wanting to move on.

‘Oh…’ he looked uncharacteristically sheepish, and his wife had to prompt him.

‘Go on, Len. Show Kathy your shed.’

With an almost childlike show of resistance he relented and led her out of the kitchen to the garage. He opened its door and switched on a light to reveal an immaculate workshop. It seemed that Len Nolan’s hobby was fine timber craftsmanship, and in particular the making of exquisite little boxes. He showed her his stock of exotic close-grained timber slabs, his collection of superb Japanese saws and chisels. With hardly any prompting he explained the secrets of the nokogiri saws, with their fine hard teeth shaped to cut on the pull stroke rather than the push, thus allowing precision cuts with a much thinner blade than in Western saws.

‘The blade’s in tension, Kathy,’he said,‘rather than compression. So bloody simple! Now that is true art.’

He allowed her to handle the Dozuki fine-precision saw, the spineless Ryoba saw, the Azebiki plunge-cutting saw, and gaze upon the collection of Shindo Dragon saws.

‘Beautiful,’ Kathy agreed, ‘and so are your boxes, Len.’ She admired the exquisite dovetails, all hand cut, the precise shaping of every part, the lustrous colour of the wood.

‘I aspire to craftsmanship, Kathy,’ he confided, ‘not art. Craftsmanship I can understand. Art leaves me for dead.’

Kathy drove away feeling dissatisfied, as if she’d missed something, or failed to ask the right question.

When she returned she was assigned to work with a joint team that had been set up with officers from the Paedophile Unit of SO5. She and five other detectives, in rotating pairs, were to work through a long list of names supplied by the unit-interviewing, checking and filing reports on the OTIS computer network. After three days she began to feel that the whole city was filled with the faces-bland, glib and sly-that she saw across the table in the interview rooms or staring back at her from her monitor. When she left work at night she saw them in the street and on the underground, and when she turned on the TV news they were there too, posing as politicians, priests and popular entertainers.

On the evening of the third day she was on the point of going home when she saw Brock outside in the corridor. He put his head around the door and, seeing no one else there, came in. The others that Kathy shared the room with had left for the night and the place was strewn with the remains of another fruitless day, the frustration of dead ends and unproductive phone calls evidenced in balled and ripped-up paper and crushed drink cans.

‘I’ve hardly seen you the last few days, Kathy,’ he said, slumping into a chair. He looked exhausted, his eyes slightly unfocused as if from spending too long staring at a screen.‘How are you going?’

She shook her head. ‘Getting nowhere. I’ve seen so many deviant males I’m beginning to believe there isn’t any other kind. And they’re all so bloody smug. They know we’ve got it wrong-this time, they really are innocent. Except that they’re not, not in their minds, not in their imaginations.’

‘Yes…’ He put both hands to his face and rubbed, as if he might massage life back into his brain. ‘That’s really the worst of this, isn’t it? That all this effort, all this pain, is caused by something so miserably dull, so unworthy- a nasty little obsession caused by a hormone imbalance, a brain defect, some emotional damage. A trivial malfunction, really, that’s all we’re dealing with.’ He sighed. ‘I should be used to it by now. So much crime is done for the most tedious of reasons. That’s what’ll finish me in the end, that the villains just aren’t interesting enough.’

Kathy laughed, yet she felt uneasy. She’d never heard Brock talk about the end of his career before, even in jest. ‘Are you packing up now?’

Brock shook his head. ‘Can’t. Look, I’ll show you something.’ She followed him down the corridor and into an empty room, where he waved her over to a monitor. The screen showed a huge crowd completely filling a city square. It took her a moment to recognise some of the surrounding buildings.

‘That’s Northcote Square, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. This is live, from a camera on the corner of Urma Street and East Terrace.’

Kathy looked more closely at the screen. The crowd was motionless. Many of them seemed to have white hair. ‘What on earth is going on?’

‘It’s a flash mob, summoned by internet and SMS. They just appeared this evening, in support of Gabe Rudd. There was music earlier. Now they’re watching their phones for instructions on the next phase. It’s performance art. If it were summer, they’d have their clothes off by now.’

‘Wow.’

‘I need to be here, just in case something happens.’

‘I don’t mind staying, if you like.’ Kathy felt a small prickle of embarrassment as she said it, as if they’d both just confessed that they had no one to go home for.

‘No, it’s late. Go home, get some sleep and come back refreshed for another day of deviant males. Nothing’ll happen tonight.’