‘Do you still have the drawings?’ Kathy asked, but the woman shook her head.
‘I believe we gave them to her father.’
‘I suppose the other officers asked you if you’d noticed anything unusual lately.’
‘Yes. There’s been nothing really-no break-ins or obvious strangers hanging around. I had words with the landlord of The Daughters of Albion across the street when he put chairs and tables out on the footpath at lunchtime in the fine weather, and some of his customers started calling out to the children in the playground. Builders from West Terrace, mainly.’
‘I see. What about other locals? Reg Gilbey on the corner?’
‘Oh, we see him up there quite often, staring down at us, waiting for inspiration I suppose. He’s all right. He gave us one of his paintings for our fundraising auction day. Quite extraordinarily generous of him, actually. It was just a little oil sketch of our chimneys…’ She pointed up at the elaborate brick chimneys above the slate roof.‘It raised over five thousand.’
‘Gosh. And Betty Zielinski?’
‘Yes, she is a character. The children make up silly stories about her and call after her. We discourage it, of course, but they are fascinated and a little frightened by her.’
‘She told me that Tracey was a particular friend of hers, and used to visit her house.’
‘I’m surprised. I’ve seen her run from Betty when she’s approached her on her way home from school. I’d say Betty was a rather unreliable witness. She does tend to fantasise.’
The Fikrets, the Turkish Cypriots who ran Mahmed’s Cafe, were clearly a formidable clan, led by Mahmed Fikret and his wife Sonia. Mahmed and his son Yasher were usually to be found drinking coffee at one of the little tables in the shop, reading the Economist or the Financial Times, while the diminutive Sonia worked behind the counter, serving customers and yelling orders back to the kitchen in a piercing voice. The family had connections in several parts of the square, with a grandchild at the primary school, several nephews working on the building site, which, as Poppy had told Kathy, Mahmed owned, and a cousin working as a chef in Fergus Tait’s upmarket restaurant, The Tait Gallery.‘We’re art lovers too, you know,’Sonia told Kathy, pointing to a lurid print of a belly dancer on the wall.‘Yasher bought that one. He’s got a good eye.’
On the fourth day of Tracey’s disappearance, Thursday the sixteenth of October, Kathy bought a pitta-bread sandwich and tea in a polystyrene cup from Mahmed’s and took them to the central gardens for her lunch. She found a seat and watched the activity around her. A steady trickle of people passed in front of 53 Urma Street, pausing and pointing to Tracey’s home. Through the rapidly thinning canopy of leaves she caught a glimpse of Reg Gilbey in his corner turret, peering down at four builders walking along West Terrace towards the pub on the corner of Urma Street, followed soon after by a flock of girls from the typing pool of one of the offices on East Terrace, a man with a walking stick, two women with small dogs. Tourists of all ages, from teenage German backpackers to elderly Americans, passed by, drawn to the red neon letters above the gallery at The Pie Factory. She had resisted visiting it so far because she felt she should have more urgent things to do, but now she was at a loose end, marooned in this square while the real work was being done elsewhere. She would definitely speak to Brock about it. She finished her lunch, scattering crumbs for the sparrows, and made her way towards the gallery entrance.
Inside, in a pale grey foyer, she took a catalogue for Poppy Wilkes’s exhibition, which described the artist as ‘a ferociously gifted young British artist, one of the second wave of yBas following the pioneering generation of such international stars as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin’. The first part of the exhibition was a video installation called Dad’s Car and Other Remote Sightings of Distant Kin, and Kathy went into a square room, onto the ceiling and four walls of which black-and-white video films were being projected. When she reached the centre of the space, rotating to try to follow the different images, Kathy picked up a soft background soundtrack of sighs and moans and mysterious clicks. The films appeared unsynchronised and were difficult to follow, sometimes running in slow motion or frozen in a still or going suddenly blank, but there seemed to be certain recurring images: of an old car, a Jaguar perhaps, viewed from a low angle, door open; of various pieces of women’s underwear in close-up draped across leather upholstery; of a woman’s foot sticking out of a car window, jerking violently; of a cigarette burning in a car’s ashtray. Kathy didn’t stay long.
She moved on to another room containing a number of Poppy’s highly naturalistic sculptures, dominated by half a dozen giant cherubs suspended from the ceiling. These winged figures had the extremely realistic features of a pretty child, disturbingly like Tracey Rudd, but magnified to larger than adult size, and of an unhealthy-looking mottled brown colour. The catalogue explained that the colouring had been made from blood donated by convicted murderers, after whom each cherub was named, as in Cherub Maxwell, Cherub Henry and so on. Another of the sculptures was called Virgin Birth, and the infant, again larger than life and very realistic, lay on the lap of the conventionalised drapery of a Madonna from which the figure itself had mysteriously vanished, leaving a void where the face should have been.
In one corner of the room were a few pieces by another sculptor, Stan Dodworth-presumably, Kathy thought, the Stan whom Poppy Wilkes had mentioned as having a problem with the pigs. According to the catalogue, Stan was a working class lad from the north of England who had burst onto the London scene with his scandalous sculpture ‘Fag Thatcher’, a bust of the former Prime Minister made entirely from urine-stained cigarette butts retrieved from public toilets in northern mining towns. After the storm of controversy this and other similar pieces had provoked, Stan suffered a nervous breakdown and had only recently recovered sufficiently to expose his talent to public view in the exhibition Body Parts, from which these works had been taken. They comprised a series of withered limbs, like burnt driftwood, set up on plinths. Kathy resisted the temptation to spend twelve thousand pounds on a blackened hand.
One wall of the large exhibition area was glass, on the other side of which were the tables of The Tait Gallery restaurant, so that the diners could take in the exhibitions as they ate, while they in turn would appear as living sculptures, part of the show. Kathy could see the last lunch diners finishing their meals, and she and they smiled at each other through the glass.
‘Look pleased with themselves, don’t they?’ a voice murmured in her ear.
She turned to find Poppy Wilkes.
‘You didn’t stay long in my video room,’ Poppy said. ‘Didn’t you like my work?’
‘I found it unsettling,’ Kathy said, and then, seeing the scepticism in Poppy’s eyes, added,‘My dad died in a car crash.’
‘Really? Oh, wow.’
‘He had a big old car like that-a Bentley. He drove it into a motorway bridge support.’
‘Hell. An accident?’
‘Probably not. He’d just gone bankrupt.’
Kathy had no idea why she was making this confession. She hadn’t intended to, and she felt it to be completely out of character. And Poppy wasn’t exactly the sort of person she’d want to confide in. It was almost as if the atmosphere of exhibitionism in this place had infected her.
‘What about you? Was that your dad and his women?’
Poppy smiled. ‘No. I’d like to say I had a tragic childhood but it was just ordinary.’
‘Is that what drives you to do this-to avoid being ordinary?’
‘Ooh, that’s a sharp one. What about you? What happened after your dad died?’
‘Mum died, and I got on with my life.’ Kathy was aware of Poppy appraising her, eyes half closed as if composing a camera shot. She decided she didn’t want to be the subject of one of Poppy’s artworks.‘You live here, don’t you?’
‘In this building, yes,’Poppy replied.‘Behind here there are workshops and a few small flats-bed-sits, really. When Fergus takes you on he gives you a room and workshop facilities and materials and exposure, and in return he owns your work. You get a percentage of anything he sells over an agreed amount. It’s a way of getting started after art school. He’s launched some good talent that way.’
‘How about Stan?’ Kathy nodded at the withered limbs.‘He’s a bit older, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, he lives here too, trying to get back into the game. Fergus is helping him out. Actually he’s over there, pretending to look at my Virgin Birth, but really he’s watching us.’
Kathy saw a tough-looking character with shaved head and faded T-shirt and jeans in the far corner of the room.
‘I’ll introduce you, provided you don’t let on you’re a cop.’
‘Why not?’
