nodded.
‘Yeah, I seen these on the telly. Can’t help you though.’ He spoke softly, as if not wanting to be overheard.
‘You live alone, sir?’
‘No, with me mum.’
‘Perhaps she could help us.’
He shook his head. ‘She’s sick in bed. Has been for months. I have to look after her.’
‘These two girls used the bus stop you can see from your window,’ Kathy said.‘Do you mind if we come in and check how much of that street is visible from up here?’ The man seemed keen to help and led them inside and over to the window, walking with a slight limp. He stood with his right leg braced stiff while Kathy and Bren made a show of examining the view. The bedroom was to one side, its curtains closed, the room in darkness. The chemical smell was stronger here.
‘Your mother?’ Kathy asked, whispering now, moving towards the door.
‘Yeah, she’s very poorly.’ He followed and Kathy had a glimpse of grey hair against a pillow before he gently closed the door.
They moved on, flat after flat, each a glimpse of a moment in a life, a collection of short stories. At the end of it they returned to the ground.
‘I’ll put someone onto checking these,’ Bren said, looking at his notes.‘Then I’ll go home and get some kip. I’m all in. Thanks, Kathy.’
It would come to nothing, Kathy thought, but she agreed to look through the photo album of local suspects they’d put together in case she recognised anyone visiting Northcote Square, and Bren looked happier.‘Don’t forget about tonight,’ Kathy said.‘Why don’t you bring Deanne? She would be interested. It’s what she’s studying, isn’t it?’
Later that day, the report of Bren and Kathy’s visit to the flats, together with the follow-up checks, reached Brock’s desk. Of the residents on the top two floors, five had previous convictions-car theft, break and enter, assault. Brock noted further action against their names. There were also several discrepancies between the names that Bren and Kathy had gathered and those on the council rental roll. The flat with the pale-skinned ‘babysitters’ was rented to a Nigerian family, and another, occupied by four students, was in the name of an elderly grandmother. Such was the nature of intelligence. Brock initialled the cover sheet and moved on to the next file. ren’s wife Deanne was very interested in attending the opening of No Trace, as it happened. She had been an art student herself for a while before marrying Bren, and was currently doing a part-time master’s degree in art history. She was also a big fan of Gabriel Rudd. She arranged for her mother to look after the girls and arrived at Northcote Square with her husband just as Kathy joined the crowd converging on the entrance to The Pie Factory. It was a clear, dry night, and there was a party atmosphere in the square. Women in expensive Italian suede rubbed shoulders with young, arty girls in bright colours like parrots, men in suits and celebrity couples.
‘That’s what’s-his-name and his girlfriend, isn’t it?’ Deanne whispered, pointing at faces familiar from the movies. ‘God, I wish I’d got something more exciting to wear.’
‘But how can you like Dead Puppies?’ Kathy asked her.
‘Oh, that was just about our hypocrisy towards animals-you know, eating some and idolising others as pets. He was just winding everybody up.’
‘You mean it wasn’t really puppy meat?’
‘Oh, I think it would have to have been, don’t you? For the point to work, I mean, and knowing Gabriel Rudd. And it was also about labelling and packaging, and about the idiocy of the art market. It was a pastiche of other famous art icons, of course-Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can, and Manzoni’s excrement.’
‘Pardon?’ Kathy thought she’d misheard.
‘In the sixties, this Italian artist made up cans of his own faeces, each one containing thirty grams, labelled and numbered. Of course we can’t be sure that they do actually contain that, because they’re far too valuable to open- they’re worth tens of thousands each now.’
‘So they made him rich?’
‘Well, not really. He died soon after, at thirty, of cirrhosis.’
‘That’s ironic.’
‘Yes, isn’t it? But Gabriel Rudd certainly did all right out of his cans of puppy meat-after his TV appearance they were worth a bomb.’
They were almost at the door now, and Kathy pointed at the looping letters of the graffiti on the wall, ‘same old shit’.‘Appropriate.’
‘Very,’ Bren said heavily. Despite some sleep and a shower, he still seemed very ragged.
‘It’s a quote,’Deanne said.‘A New York artist from the eighties, Jean-Michel Basquiat, started out as a graffiti artist and signed his work “Samo”, short for “same old shit”.’
‘So this is intentional, is it?’ Kathy asked. ‘You think Fergus Tait had it done?’
‘Wouldn’t be surprised. Basquiat died young too, at twenty-eight, of a drug overdose.’
‘You know a lot about this stuff, don’t you?’
Deanne smiled ruefully.‘Takes my mind off nappies.’
‘We should hire you as a consultant. I’m lost.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ Bren murmured.
They had reached the entrance desk, and exchanged their invitations for catalogues of No Trace. Inside they found that the main gallery had been cleared of Poppy’s cherubs and the other work, and was now the setting for five pearly-grey banners, each about a yard wide, the full height from ceiling to floor. The subdued lighting was supplemented by ultraviolet lamps, making the banners shimmer like ghosts, and the images and text covering them appear at first like spiders’ webs or wrinkles in ancient skin. The catalogue explained that each banner represented one day since the artist’s daughter Tracey had disappeared, and there would be a new banner every day until she was found, even if it meant filling the whole gallery. The dominant image on banner number one was that used on the posters, Gabe’s pencil sketch of Tracey’s face, and looking around Kathy recognised other images, too-the upturned faces of the press in the square photographed by Rudd leaning out of his window, chains of uniformed police searching a piece of waste ground, the face of a TV newscaster reading the evening news. The images seemed mainly to be derived from photographs, but processed and simplified to become grainy, abstract clouds of dots, so that they had to be stared at for some time before their meaning emerged.
‘Rudd has a thing about Henry Fuseli, an eighteenth-century English painter,’ Deanne said. ‘His prize-winning picture The Night-Mare was based on a Fuseli painting of the same name. I think some of these scenes may be modelled on Fuseli’s work too.’ She pointed to a figure of Rudd himself crouching on the floor, like some kind of beast, and to an image on the first banner of a dark figure leading a small child by the hand into a dark tunnel.
‘This is sick,’ Bren said. He was looking around in disgust at the people chatting, drinking, idly studying the works.‘Hundreds of coppers are out there tonight busting a gut trying to find Tracey, and her father is in here supping champagne, exploiting the whole bloody thing, trying to make cash out of it.’
‘Yes,’ Kathy said.‘I think you’re right.’
Deanne looked at Bren’s face, tense, angry, and said gently, ‘I know what you mean. It looks like that, but it’s the business he’s in. He’s a celebrity. It wouldn’t matter what he did, the papers would be full of him and Tracey. He’s dealing with it in his own way, trying to make sense of it through his art.’
Kathy noticed that some of the other people in the gallery were looking pointedly at her and smiling and whispering to each other. She was about to ask Deanne what was wrong when she stopped short and stared in shock at the banner in front of her, number four. On it she saw her own face, staring back at her.‘Oh no.’
In the picture Gabriel Rudd was standing beside her, with an arm around her shoulder. She remembered the scene from the previous day in his studio, when she’d asked him something about his work, but she didn’t remember anyone taking photographs. She was filled with embarrassment and then dismay, that her image should have been stolen and used in this way without her knowledge.
Bren and Deanne had seen it now, and were equally startled. Bren moved closer and read the title underneath; Explaining Paintings to a Dead Cop, it said.
‘What!’He sounded incensed.‘What the bloody hell…!’
‘It’s a quote, Bren,’ his wife said quickly.‘Joseph Beuys, Explaining Paintings to a Dead Hare…’
Her explanation didn’t pacify him.
