bedrooms on the ground floor. When Kathy asked Rudd about this (‘You mean you don’t actually make your own works of art?’) he laughed and gave her a rambling explanation of his fundamental challenge to the whole meaning of artistic authentication, which she didn’t follow.‘I suppose you think this is dead easy, eh?’ he challenged her. ‘Wanking around dreaming up crazy ideas.’
‘I was wondering how you know when you’ve got a good one, how you can tell a good idea from a less good one.’
‘Interesting question. I just do. That’s why I’m here, doing this. Sometimes it scares me rigid.’
His mood swung from garrulous to glum, and she was pretty sure that Poppy was bringing him drugs of some kind.
She liked the crew of assistants, who seemed a more light-hearted version of the police teams, industrious and painstaking and concerned with practical matters of obtaining things and making them work. They joked about Rudd’s conceptual pretensions behind his back and ignored his tantrums when things weren’t to his satisfaction, and it was from them that Kathy began to glean an idea of what he was preparing for the exhibition. It seemed to be a play on the word ‘trace’-the missing girl Trace, lost without a trace, and the artwork itself in the form of tracings. These would be images and words transferred by various processes onto sheets of plastic tracing film used in draughting offices, with a pale milky texture which would give a shimmering, ghostly effect under certain kinds of light.
Each day at eleven a.m. Kathy got a phone call from Len Nolan, polite but firm, wanting to know of any progress. She imagined the two grandparents sitting together over their morning coffee, ticking off the points on a list, determined not to be ignored by the authorities. Kathy also did follow-up interviews around the square, and came to recognise the ebb and flow of the people who moved through it, and put faces and characters to some of the names on the list of residents. The first she visited was Betty Zielinski, who was a common sight in the central gardens, feeding the birds with bread scraps she collected from Mahmed’s Cafe. At Kathy’s suggestion, she was taken into Betty’s home on West Terrace to meet her family, which turned out to be a fat black cat and a large collection of dolls, dozens in every room, each known by name and dressed eccentrically in clothes made by Betty on an old treadle sewing machine. Her sewing room was a chaotic jumble of home-made paper patterns and scraps of cloth. As she talked, Kathy tried to fathom her madness, if that’s what it was; a strange mixture of what seemed like normal memory and sensible observations with disconcerting interpretations, as if Betty stubbornly refused to see the world the same way as everybody else. There was an element of deliberate calculation in some of this, Kathy thought, and one or two of the disjunctions bothered her.
‘Tracey liked it here, with my little babies, in their mummy’s house. She helped me choose materials for their dresses. She loved coming to her mummy’s house.’
‘Her mummy’s house?’ Kathy queried, wondering if she’d misheard. Betty gave a startled little laugh, absurdly girlish and playful for a sixty-two year old.
‘We pretended that this was her mother’s house,’ Betty simpered, and Kathy remembered how she’d talked the previous day to Gabe about ‘my own little girl, my own darling’.
‘You knew Tracey’s mother, didn’t you?’
‘Of course. I’ve lived here for almost forty years, longer than anyone else. Longer even than…’ she cocked her head and whispered, ‘… the monster. Poor Jane. Such lovely long blonde hair. I was so jealous of her long blonde hair.’
‘What monster, Betty?’
‘Shhh! The children will hear you! They’re terrified of him. The one next door, of course.’ She nodded towards the wall to number fifteen, the portrait painter’s house. ‘Stolen!’ she wailed suddenly.‘So many stolen children!’
‘Reg Gilbey steals children?’
Again a look of surprise came over Betty’s face, as if some unexpected shift had occurred inside her head. ‘Oh dear me, no. My family took such a long time to get to sleep last night after all the excitement with the visitors. They simply wouldn’t settle.’
‘Which visitors were those?’
‘Why, the policemen and women, looking for Tracey. They searched in every room, but I told them they’d never find her here.’ Her eyes twinkled as if at the memory of a particularly exciting game of hide-and-seek. ‘Thomas became so excited he wet his pants, and Geraldine was sick all over her brand-new dress.’
Kathy could imagine what the lads from Shoreditch had made of that.
From Betty’s she went next door to see Reg Gilbey. She heard his old carpet slippers shuffling on the other side of the door before it opened. He peered at her through thick-framed glasses, sparse grey hair sticking in odd tufts from his head, and said,‘Yes?’
‘I’m DS Kathy Kolla from the police, Mr Gilbey…’
‘Not interested,’ he said grumpily and made to close the door again.
She put out a hand and said, ‘It won’t take long. I can come back later, if you’re busy.’
‘I had two lots of coppers here yesterday.’ He breathed whisky, and a musty smell leaked from the house.‘Can’t tell you anything.’
‘I was wondering if you might have noticed anything from that bay window of yours. You must get a good view of the school playground from there. Perhaps you saw…’
‘If you’re suggesting I spend my time watching the kiddies, you can clear off.’
He moved to slam the door in her face, and she quickly said,‘No, no. Look, I’m just doing my job. We all want to find her, don’t we?’
He relented a little. ‘Have a look if you want,’ he said, then added gruffly,‘Won’t do you any good.’
He closed the door behind her and led the way down the corridor and up the stairs, dropping the cat on the way. At the landing he showed her into the big front room with its corner bay window, and the smells changed from musty damp to a rich soup of ripe linseed oil and sharp turpentine. Paintings were stacked several deep all around the walls, mainly portraits and figures, some nude.
‘Your work isn’t like the artists of The Pie Factory, then,’ Kathy said, making conversation as she went to the bay and checked the sightlines.
‘That rubbish!’ Gilbey scoffed. ‘Those people can’t draw and haven’t got one original thought between them.’
‘I suppose they do have original imaginations,’ she suggested, noticing a canvas in the corner depicting the figures of children running in the playground below. So he did spend time watching them, she thought.
‘No, no. That’s all froth and show. What they do is steal an image from some famous artist-Goya, Munch, Van Gogh, Bacon, whoever-and recycle it in execrable workmanship and look clever, as if they’re making some profound reference. They’re just scavengers on the body of a great tradition, that’s all they are.’ He’d obviously made this speech many times before, but it still got him heated.
‘Who does Gabriel Rudd steal from?’ she asked.
‘Henry Fuseli-now he was a painter. Others, too, I suppose.’
‘And you’ve never noticed anyone hanging around the corner down there, watching the kids?’
He shook his head, and after a few more poisonous remarks about the decline of artistic standards he led her downstairs and showed her out.
The school was next. The headmistress of Pitzhanger Primary School was a confident, brisk woman of definite opinions. She had known a very different Tracey from the happy child Gabriel Rudd had described.
‘We were concerned about her. She was withdrawn, found it hard to concentrate and didn’t make friends. Sometimes she would hide rather than join the other children at play or in classes. She had a favourite place in the service yard, an old coal bunker, where we’d usually find her. I spoke to her father about it and he insisted it was our fault, that the other children were bullying her, but that wasn’t so. It’s true that they’d heard about Dead Puppies- their parents told them-and that led to some teasing, but we soon put a stop to that. I believe there was some other problem. She seemed frightened.’
‘Did her grandparents speak to you?’
‘Yes, several times. They made it plain that they had a quarrel with Mr Rudd about his parenting, but I couldn’t support any suspicions of abuse or mistreatment. She just seemed very insecure and uncommunicative. Her teacher was concerned about some drawings she did of so-called monsters, but Tracey said they were her dreams.’
