the internet for as much as two hundred pounds, some said, especially to foreigners. ‘Well, they’re works of art, aren’t they? Signed original Gabriel Rudds.’
Bren looked as if he’d had little sleep the previous night. His breathing was shallow, his gaze bleary. Kathy had found him in the control room, in front of the big map. Two women working on their computers ignored them as Kathy and Bren sat together with mugs of coffee. The mugs came from a small tea-making alcove outside, and were stained and chipped from continuous use.
‘I’ve been over this ground so often it’s becoming a blur. We haven’t been able to come up with any convincing connection between the profiler’s magic circle and the site of the third abduction, Northcote Square. There’s one little thing I keep coming back to, Kathy,’Bren said wearily.‘But I can’t think straight any more, so maybe you can tell me if I’m just getting fixated or what.’
‘Go on.’
Bren pointed to the red and yellow spots and the black circle. ‘We’ve interviewed every single person inside that circle, some several times. Nothing. Now Aimee and Lee went to school by bus, on different routes, from different stops. Their mums go to different shops and as far as we’ve been able to tell their paths may never have crossed… except there.’ He rose and pressed a fingernail to a small cross.‘This is where Aimee caught her bus, and sometimes, not regularly, if Lee and her friends missed their usual bus home, they would take a different route that comes to this same stop. There’s a row of shops there with a newsagent, where both girls have bought sweets. It’s possible that they even stood together in the same queue at the counter.’ He turned to Kathy with a look almost of appeal. ‘That’s the only place we’ve been able to find where their paths actually crossed.’
‘Sounds significant.’
‘But is it? I thought it might be, but we’ve turned up nothing.’
He looked ashen under the glare of the fluorescent lights. She said,‘Why don’t we go there and you can show me.’
It was at the other end of the borough, and they decided to take a car.
The place was a nondescript section of street, busy with traffic and indistinguishable from any other. The abductor might have been passing, Bren thought, in a car perhaps or on foot, and first spotted the two girls here. At that moment, a red double-decker pulled up at the stop opposite the newsagent and Kathy looked up at several faces on the top deck gazing down at them.
‘Or he might live around here.’Bren gestured to the row of houses across the street, and the windows of flats over the shops. ‘But we’ve checked everyone in the immediate vicinity and found nothing. The shopkeepers haven’t been able to help.’
The bus moved off and they crossed the street. Pictures of Aimee and Lee stared out at them from the window of the newsagent. When they reached the doorway they turned and looked back. Above the roofs of the houses opposite, the top two floors of a tall block of flats several streets away were now visible.
‘What about them?’ Kathy pointed.
Bren frowned. The fresh air had revived him a little.
‘No, I don’t think we’ve been up there.’ He checked the map he’d brought.‘It’s outside the magic circle.’
‘Shall we take a look?’
Kathy directed Bren from the map, and they drew in at the base of a tall building on the Newman housing estate. They got into the lift and pressed the button for the topmost level. It was a graffiti-coated aluminium box, and Kathy made a comment about how Fergus Tait could probably sell it as an artwork. Bren didn’t get it, and she said,‘Come to the gallery tonight. You’ll see what I mean.’
‘It’s cut-up sheep and stuff like that, isn’t it?’
‘That sort of thing. Gabriel Rudd’s famous.’
‘Oh yes, I’d heard of him. He’s the Dead Puppies guy, right? My girls saw him on TV and had nightmares for a week.’
The lift ground to a halt at level three and a woman got in. The lumpy shapes of curlers bulged beneath her headscarf. She looked them over.
‘So what is Dead Puppies?’ Kathy asked when the doors finally slid shut.
The woman spoke before Bren had a chance. ‘Dead Puppies? I can tell you that, love. I saw it on TV. This smartarse cooked up some puppies and put them in tins, with labels and everything, and called them works of art. Some art gallery paid millions of taxpayers’ money for just one.’
‘Yuck,’ Kathy said.
‘Oh, it was much worse than that, love,’ the woman continued, clearly relishing Kathy’s reaction. ‘He brought one of the tins with him on TV, and he had a tin-opener and a fork…’
‘Oh no!’
‘Oh yes. Tucked into it, he did. I was having my dinner at the time, but I couldn’t finish it, I felt so ill.’
‘It’s true,’ Bren confirmed.
‘That’s what they call art these days. Sick, if you ask me. You’re coppers, aren’t you?’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘Yes, love, it is.’
They reached the top level and the woman got out ahead of them. They followed her around a corner and came out onto the access deck. A dozen residents were outside along its length, some chatting, others smoking or reading the paper in the afternoon sun.
‘It’s the Bill,’ the woman called out so that everyone could hear, and they all immediately disappeared, front doors slamming.
‘So much for the element of surprise,’ Bren muttered.
The first door they tried was opened by a suspicious elderly man in shirtsleeves. His forearms looked strong and brown, with a tattoo of an anchor on each. Bren asked him his name, and how many people lived in his flat (‘Just me’) and the names and numbers of people living in the adjoining flats, then showed him pictures of the missing girls. As the man examined them they looked over his shoulder into the living room. Against the far window was a telescope.
‘No, never seen ’em,’ he said and made to close the door.
‘That’s a pretty powerful telescope, isn’t it, sir?’ Bren asked.‘Mind if I have a look?’ He walked straight past the man, who took a moment to recover from his surprise.
‘Oi!’ he protested, and Kathy said quickly, ‘He’s a keen amateur astronomer. What do you look at?’
The man gave her an unpleasant glare.‘Birds.’
Bren looked into the eyepiece without touching the body of the telescope, then strolled slowly back, looking over the room and through the open bedroom door.
‘Come on, get out,’ the old man complained. ‘While you’re ’ere you should check out them next door. Dodgy, they are.’
‘In what way?’
‘All them strange kids.’
As they moved to the next front door, Bren said under his breath,‘That telescope was trained straight down on the bus stop outside the newsagents. I could see the girls’ pictures in the shop window.’
The next door was opened a couple of inches by a young woman with a thin, pale face, whose eyes widened at the word ‘police’. This time Kathy went through the routine, and at first the woman tried to respond, although her grasp of English obviously wasn’t strong. As she examined the pictures a second woman called to her in a language Kathy didn’t recognise, then a child gave a shriek and began crying.
‘Where are you ladies from, miss?’ Bren asked.
The question seemed to agitate the woman, who was suddenly unable to speak any English at all. More children were howling now.
‘How many children do you have?’ Kathy asked, trying to see past the woman. She caught a brief glimpse of the second woman with a small child under each arm.
‘Babysitters!’ the woman at the door suddenly burst out.‘Babysitters!’ she repeated, and slammed the door shut.
‘Well,’ Kathy said,‘I reckon we’re going to get enough leads up here to keep Shoreditch busy for weeks.’
There was no response to their knocks at the third door or the fourth. The fifth was opened by a young man in need of a shave. An odd smell, rather like that of a hospital, seeped out. Mr Abbott looked at the pictures and
