No trace

17

Kathy joined Brock and Bren for their first formal interview regarding the murder of Betty Zielinski at Shoreditch, beginning with Yasher Fikret, as representative of the family companies that both owned the house in which Betty’s body had been found and were carrying out the building renovations.

‘What can I say,’Yasher said, making an expansive gesture with his hands, heavy gold rings glinting.‘I’m devastated, as a neighbour, as a friend, as a local businessman. My whole family is devastated. I speak for them all. When’s the funeral, incidentally? We will want to show our respect with floral tributes etcetera etcetera. My mother is offering to cater, no charge.’

Yasher was smartly turned out in dark suit and thick silk tie, but his gestures and way of speaking suggested that the style of businessman he modelled himself on owed less to the Financial Times than to Hollywood, The Godfather, perhaps. But the suggestion of menace beneath the swagger was real enough, Kathy thought. She eyed the big gold rings and wondered if one of them had torn Poppy’s cheek.

‘That’s very generous, I’m sure,’ Bren said dryly. ‘At present we’re still trying to trace Ms Zielinski’s next of kin. Do you know if she had a solicitor?’

‘No idea.’

‘You didn’t have dealings with her, as an adjoining owner to your development?’

‘Our lawyers may know. You want me to check?’

‘Please.’ Bren pushed the phone across the table, but Yasher ignored it, slipping an impressive little silver machine out of an inside pocket, unfolding it and pressing a few buttons.

‘Allo, Tony?’Yasher drawled.‘You remember the owner of number fourteen West Terrace, next to the end of our block, Betty Zielinski?

… Yeah, well she’s been done in, mate, last night… I’m not kidding. I’m with the cops now. Listen…’

Bren and Brock waited impassively while the exchange continued. Yasher finally folded away his phone and said, ‘Sorry, no. Never dealt with a solicitor, just Betty in person.’ A slight pause, then,‘So you don’t know the next of kin?’

‘Not yet.’

Yasher looked thoughtful.‘Bad business.’

‘Where were you last night, Mr Fikret?’

‘Me? I was at home with my wife and little boy. After dinner I watched football on the sports channel till eleven, then I went to bed. My wife will confirm that.’

‘How many people know about that cellar room in your property, where the men play cards?’

‘Well… all the regular building gang, of course, plus most of the subcontractors-plumbers, electricians…’

‘We’d like all their names. Anyone else?’

‘You know about me taking some friends there, the night poor little Tracey disappeared. My artist friends.’ He smiled as at a private joke.

‘To sell them drugs, yes.’

Yasher held up his hands in protest. ‘If you’re going down that road, Mr Gurney, I’m saying nothing. I’m here to help…’

‘The point is that whoever took Ms Zielinski down there knew it very well. They knew exactly what was down there-a live power supply, for instance.’

‘They broke in; they didn’t have a key,’ Yasher said defensively.

‘That doesn’t necessarily follow. They knew how easy it was to break in with just a screwdriver through the hasp. No alarms, no guard dogs. Very poor security for a building site in that area, Mr Fikret.’

‘That’s the site manager’s business, not mine.’

‘The site manager tells us that you had your own arrangements for a dog and a security guard right up until last week.’

Yasher scowled truculently. ‘As it happens, I’m in dispute with that company over a commercial matter. And I completely deny your allegations about drugs. If there were any there they had nothing to do with me. I resent your insulting…’ He began to rise.

Brock broke in, voice mild,‘Please sit down, Mr Fikret. Tell us about your relationship with these artist friends. If it wasn’t to sell them drugs, why did you go there the night Tracey disappeared?’

‘It was their idea. They wanted to see what we were doing to the old building. I thought Gabe might be thinking of buying one of the flats for an investment. They’re just neighbours, people I meet in the square. I don’t pretend to understand what they’re on about all the time, but I like their company, okay? That’s the nice thing about living in this part of London-the culture you brush up against every day.’ He gave a broad grin.

‘But you’re a bit of a collector yourself, aren’t you?’ Kathy said.

‘Me?’Yasher looked astonished.

‘That painting in the shop, your mother said you bought it.’

‘Ah, that! Yes, I bought it down the market. That’s real skill, that is. That’s my taste, all right.’

‘What do you think of your friends’ work, Gabe and Stan and Poppy?’

‘You want an honest answer? Don’t tell them, please, but I can sum it up in two well-chosen words-total crap.’ He saw the little smile cross Bren’s face. ‘Aha! You agree with me, Mr Gurney! Am I right?’

‘When was the last time you saw Stan Dodworth?’

‘Stan? That would be the night we went to the cellar that I told you about. Not since then. Why?’

‘He’s missing, Mr Fikret. Any idea where he might be?’

‘No. I really don’t know him that well.’

‘And when was the last time you were in that basement?’

‘Oh, I don’t know… a couple of days ago. I seem to remember calling down there for some reason.’ He gave another big toothy grin.‘Mr Brock, sir, let’s be frank. If I was going to bump off the old lady, do you think I’d have left her for you to find on my own premises? The idea’s crazy. If this has anything to do with me at all, it’d have to be someone wanting to embarrass me and my family, right?’

After he’d gone, Bren said reluctantly, ‘He’s right, Brock. He’s not that stupid.’

‘Actually, I think he’s devious enough to do it this way just to put us off. But I don’t think he’s got the artistic talent.’

‘Artistic talent?’

‘Yes. The thing was staged, Bren. Artificial and composed, as if it was a commentary on something. I just wish I knew what.’

Listening to this, Kathy recalled Reg Gilbey’s sneer that the young artists in the square didn’t have an original thought between them, that everything was a reference to something else, and she wondered if Betty’s killer might have been deliberately using some recognisable artistic image of death or suffering. The more she thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. What had been done to Betty surely had meaning, a message of some kind. If they could find the reference, perhaps they could find the killer. What images might inspire Stan Dodworth, for instance?

Bren looked sceptically at his boss. ‘You don’t think you’ve been seeing too much of this contemporary art lately, chief? It can get to you after a while.’

‘Very true, Bren. And I’ve got a feeling there’ll be more.’

Fergus Tait sat in the interview room at Shoreditch station, full of apologies.‘I feel mortified, Chief Inspector, but what can I do? I’ve pleaded with him, told him it’s in his own best interests, but he’ll have none of it. He simply refuses to come out of the cube.’

‘It’s his privilege to refuse to talk to us, Mr Tait, but it could compromise his position in the future. I do think he should be persuaded to get legal advice, at least.’

‘Oh, he’s had that all right.’ Tait gave a coy smile.‘Advice from my lawyers is one of the services I provide my little stable of artists. Gabe spoke to them before he went into his retreat, and he was in touch with them by email again this morning. I believe he’s quite clear about his situation, but if you wish, the lawyer will speak to you. And indeed, it’s not as if Gabe’s refusing to answer any questions you may have. It’s just that he’ll only do it by email. Can I also just say on his behalf that he has absolutely no information about this terrible event. He was in his cube all night, of course, and he saw and heard nothing. He’s devastated, absolutely devastated, as we all are. I’m going to offer the gallery as a venue for the wake for the poor, dear soul. That way Gabe can be there, too. But of course it’ll depend on her family. Do you know who they are?’

‘We haven’t been able to trace them yet.’

‘No trace, eh? Well, I’d be obliged if you’d let me know when you do. I seem to recall that the lady had one or two pictures I might be able to help them dispose of.’

‘Just for the record, Mr Tait, is there any way we can verify that Mr Rudd remained in his cube all night? He’s on camera, isn’t he?’

‘That’s right. The eyes of the world were on him all night long. He’s broadcast live on the internet.’

‘What about you? What were your movements last night?’

‘I ate with friends in our restaurant. My goodness, what a spectacle that was in the square. Did you see it? All those people. Anyway, I was there till we closed down, towards midnight. Then I went to bed in my flat at the back of The Pie Factory. I was there till eight this morning, but I’m afraid there were no cameras to back that up!’ He chuckled.

‘What about Stan Dodworth? Have you heard from him?’

‘I’m afraid not. I did promise to let you know if I did, but there’s been no word.’

Brock looked hard at him. ‘I find that hard to believe. You were the one who rescued him from that institution, who brought him back down to London and gave him shelter and security, who protects him from unwanted publicity. Of course he’d get in touch with you.’

‘Well, I assure you…’

Brock reached across to some papers that Bren had placed in front of him.‘At nine-oh-three p.m. on Saturday last you had a call to your private number in your flat. It lasted three seconds. It came from a public phone in a pub in Islington. Over the next ten minutes it was repeated five times, all for just a second or two. That would have been to your answering machine, I take it, no message left. Then at eleven-seventeen p.m. on the same night you got another call from a public phone, this time at St Pancras rail station. It lasted six minutes.’

Tait sat back as if he’d been slapped. ‘You have my phone records?’

‘This is a serious case. Anyone who obstructs our inquiries is going to find themselves in very deep water. Well?’

A faint glisten of sweat had appeared on Tait’s forehead. ‘It could have been anyone making that call.’

‘Really?’ Brock and Tait stared at each other for a moment, then Tait looked away.

‘I get a lot of calls…’

‘There are cameras in the concourse at St Pancras, Mr Tait.’

‘Oh…’ Tait swallowed, wiped his forehead.‘All right, I did speak to him, yes, that one time. That’s all, I swear. It was that same evening you went through his room. He was agitated. He was telling me that he thought he would go away for a while, see his folks up north. I tried to persuade him to come back to the Factory, to have a talk with me first. He didn’t seem to be listening, so I made a mistake… I told him you’d been into his room, and found the cast of the old lady and the other stuff. That really made him panic. He became hysterical, abusing me for letting you in. I begged him to calm down and come back, but he just hung up. I haven’t heard from him since. I swear that’s the truth.’

‘Why did you lie to me?’ Brock said softly.

‘Like you said, Chief Inspector, I was trying to protect him. He’s not a bad fellow, I’m sure of it. He couldn’t have done this thing to Betty. I think he must have taken a train up north.’

‘The camera shows him leaving the station. We don’t think he ever caught that train.’

At that moment Tait’s mobile phone sounded in his pocket, a cheerful rendering of ‘Danny Boy’, and for a second Tait seemed uncertain what to do. Then he snatched it out.‘Hello?… Not now, Trudy, I’m… What?’ He listened in silence for a while, a look of consternation growing on his face, then he said,‘Hold on,’and looked up at Brock.‘That’s one of the girls on Gabe’s support team at the gallery. She says they’ve been going through his messages for the past twenty-four hours and there’s one they want me to look at. It seems it contains pictures… terrible pictures, she says… of an old woman, naked, hanging by the neck, being tortured…’

One of the people inside the gallery unlocked the glass door as their car drew up and let them in. They had the impression of suspended animation, as if everyone there had been waiting motionless for them to arrive. Gabriel Rudd was standing against the wall of his cube, hands pressed to the glass, face as white as his hair. He still wasn’t coming out, and there was something both bizarre and pathetic about his figure as he watched what was going on around him. People began to move, indicating the monitor that had opened up the attachments on the email message. The three police and Tait crowded behind the operator’s chair as she clicked in the instructions. The screen went blank, then burst into motion, a movie clip lasting just a few lurid seconds, showing a figure wearing a full-length black cape, the face obscured, and holding an electric cable against the thigh of Betty’s hanging figure, as she jerked violently on the end of the rope like a helpless puppet. There was no sound.

‘Oh, dear God…’ Fergus Tait breathed.

Three more brief clips followed, in each case with the exposed wires of the cable applied to a different part of the body.

Silence.

‘That’s the lot?’ Brock asked.

The girl, pale, nodded.

‘What about the email it was attached to?’

She showed him. A sender address, LSterne@kwikmail. co, no message, received at four-oh-three a.m.

‘Who’s L. Sterne?’ Brock asked.

‘We don’t know who it is. We haven’t had a message from that address before.’

Bren pulled out his phone and began to make a call while Brock turned to Tait.‘Where can we talk?’

He led Brock and Kathy through a doorway into the small gallery office, the walls lined with shelves of catalogues and books.

‘This isn’t very roomy…’ Tait muttered, closing the door, looking distracted.

‘Never mind,’Brock growled.‘Sit down. Now, what do you have to say?’

‘It’s him, isn’t it? Stan.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well… she looks like the figure in his room, suspended from the chain.’

‘Anything else?’

Tait blinked rapidly.‘I… I don’t know.’

‘What does it mean, Fergus?’ Brock insisted, leaning over the desk and glaring at him as if he wanted to tear the answer out of his throat. ‘The hanging, the electrocution, what does it signify?’

‘Perhaps… to make the body convulse, distort, like his sculptures.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Christ, I don’t know.’

Brock stared at him, pondering, then came to a decision. From his pocket he took a photograph of the scene they had found in the basement, and handed it to Tait.‘When we found her this morning she was wearing a blindfold. What does that mean?’

‘But there was no blindfold in the film.’

‘Exactly. When he was finished he posed her for us to find, with a blindfold. Why? What does a blindfold mean to you?’

‘I don’t know, blind man’s bluff, three blind mice, blind justice, love is blind, blind leading the blind…’

‘What about in the world of art? Can you recall a blindfolded figure?’

‘No… no, I can’t.’

Brock straightened, his mouth tight with frustration. ‘And you’ve no idea where he might be now?’

‘None at all.’

Out in the gallery, Bren confirmed that a search was under way for the source of the email.‘And they’ve got the other artist, Poppy Wilkes, waiting for us at the station.’

Brock nodded.‘You finish up here, Bren. Kathy and I’ll talk to her.’

Poppy said she hadn’t heard the news about Betty. She had woken late after a restless, dream-filled night, seen the drizzle falling outside her window and stayed in her room, trying to work up an idea for a new version of the cherub sculpture. Then a woman police officer came knocking on her door, asking if she’d attend another interview, and she’d been taken directly to Shoreditch police station, where she’d been provided with a cup of tea while she waited. She seemed to sense their subdued mood as soon as Brock and Kathy walked in.

‘Is it bad news?’ she said, clutching her cardigan tightly at the front.‘You’ve found Tracey, haven’t you?’

‘No,’ Kathy said, taking the lead while Brock sat off to one side.‘It’s not Tracey, Poppy. Can you tell us when you last saw Betty?’

‘Betty? I saw her in the square yesterday afternoon, I think. Yes. She seemed okay. Why, is something wrong?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Betty was found dead this morning. We believe she was murdered some time during the night.’

Both Yasher and Tait had described themselves as being ‘devastated’, meaning sympathetically upset, but in Poppy’s case it didn’t seem like an exaggeration. Her eyes, wide with shock, stared down unseeing at the table in front of her, and she seemed to withdraw into a state of paralysis.

‘Poppy? Poppy?’

She finally registered Kathy’s voice. ‘Tell me,’ she whispered.‘Tell me what happened.’

As Kathy told her everything, little shocks registered in her eyes with each new dreadful detail; the basement room, the hanging, the abuse of the body.

‘Oh,’ she said finally, then closed her eyes, gave a little gasp as if she herself were giving up the last breath in her lungs, and seemed about to pass out.

Kathy reached forward and touched her hand.‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised, taking a sip of water. ‘I haven’t been eating lately.’

That seemed true, Kathy thought. Even in the few days since she’d last seen her in the square, Poppy seemed to have lost weight and taken on an anaemic pallor. ‘Would you like something now? I could get food sent up, a sandwich, or something hot…’

But Poppy shook her head, the thought of food making her gag.‘Do you know who did it?’ she gasped.

‘We’re not certain. I’d like to show you a picture, Poppy. It’s disturbing, so maybe we should wait for a bit.’

‘It’s all right. Show me.’

Kathy passed her the picture of Betty hanging in the basement room. She regarded it unblinking, for a full minute, then said flatly,‘You think Stan did it, don’t you?’

‘What do you think?’

‘No, he didn’t.’

Then an odd change came over Poppy. She suddenly seemed to notice the recording machine on the side table, its red light glowing, and then the eye of the camera suspended in the far corner of the room. She became agitated.

‘Why do you say that?’ Kathy asked.

‘What? I don’t know, maybe he did. I don’t know anything.’ She wiped the cold sweat on her face. ‘I don’t feel good. I want to go now. I think I may be sick.’

‘I’ll take you to the loo.’ Kathy got to her feet and took hold of Poppy’s arm, while Brock spoke to the machine again, halting the interview.

The toilets were empty, and Kathy was intrigued to see that Poppy checked this before she went to a washbasin and splashed water over her face.

Kathy moved close to her shoulder and spoke quietly. ‘You had a reason for saying that Stan didn’t do it, Poppy. What was it?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I don’t want to talk to you. I want someone else to see me out.’

‘I want to help you, Poppy. You believe that, don’t you?’

‘But what if you can’t?’ She saw the disbelief on Kathy’s face and blurted out, ‘Betty knew something. Stan told me… the people who took Tracey, he told me, they have a friend, in the square. Someone who looks after them.’ Then her body froze as the door to the toilets swung open and a uniformed woman came in. Poppy rushed abruptly past her and out into the corridor, Kathy on her heels. The main stairs lay ahead, and Poppy was down them and out into the front lobby before she caught up with her.

‘Poppy!’

But Poppy didn’t stop until they were out on the street and Kathy had hold of her arm.

‘Let me go!’ she yelled in a real state of panic, and a passer-by stared at the two of them.‘Leave me alone or I’ll fucking scream!’

‘Poppy, for God’s sake, talk to me!’

She glared wild-eyed at Kathy. ‘Don’t you see? It’s a warning to Stan, not by Stan!’ Then she turned and ran off through the rain.