‘I’ve certainly seen her here with Poppy a number of times. And without her, too, now you come to mention it. I do recall speaking to someone-was it Poppy? I don’t remember-anyway, someone, about how a little girl like that shouldn’t be wandering around the workshops with those machines.’
The stair dog-legged upward towards a skylight, then reached a landing giving onto another corridor.
‘This way,’ he puffed. ‘We’ve had a bit of trouble with the fire authorities over the years, as you can imagine. Hence the emergency lights and fire doors and extinguishers and so on.’
‘And fire-escape stairs?’ Brock asked.
‘Oh my, yes, several new escape stairs.’
‘So there are plenty of ways for people to enter and leave the building unchecked?’
‘Well, there’s a measure of security, of course, but with the kitchen staff and the artists coming and going, and the whole place interconnected, it’s sometimes difficult to be sure just who is here at any one time. At night we lock up, and the residents have their own keys to their separate entrance.’
‘How many residents are there?’
‘There are five bed-sits, with shared kitchen and bathrooms, though only four are occupied at present. Our semipermanent artists in residence are Poppy and Stan, and we also have two young artists who graduated from college this year and have a twelve-month tenancy while we see how they develop. The fifth room I like to keep free for visiting artists. Last month we had a lovely German boy, a vinyl fetishist. He did marvellous work, it made the hair stand up on the back of your neck.’
‘Is that so.’
They turned into a broader corridor and Tait pointed out utility rooms and a row of numbered doors bearing Yale locks. With a show of reluctance he knocked on them in turn and, getting no reply, opened each for a pair of officers to move in.
‘There are only four doors here,’ Brock said.
‘Ah well, Stan’s room is the fifth. It’s up there.’ He pointed to a steep little stair that closed the end of the corridor, leading up to the door of an attic room. ‘He’s the oldest, and has the most stuff, and his room’s a bit bigger than the others. He has a lovely view from up there.’
‘Let’s take a look.’
Tait led the way up the stairs, knocked, cocked his head listening, then put his key in the lock. He swung the door open and reached inside for the light, then rocked back.
‘Phoo, bit foetid in here. He needs some ventilation. Shall I open the window?’
‘We’ll do it, thanks.’ Brock pulled on plastic gloves and crossed the room, opening the dormer window on the far side, while Kathy moved in behind him. The space was an irregular shape, jammed up into the pitch of the roof. Through one of the side walls they could hear the cooing of pigeons and the hiss of a water tank refilling. There was an open rack with clothes on hangers, books on the floor, and postcards and cuttings stuck haphazardly on every surface.
‘He does have a good view,’ Brock said, looking out over a panorama of the square.
Behind him, Kathy said,‘What are these?’
Brock turned and saw her standing beside a table pushed into the angle of the sloping ceiling. It was piled high with what looked like withered human limbs.
‘Oh, those!’Fergus Tait’s voice sounded unnaturally loud and jocular. He joined Kathy and picked up a leg. ‘These would be from his last exhibition, Body Parts. Caused quite a stir.’
Now Kathy was pointing at the pictures on the wall, colour prints of photographs from newspapers and books and the internet showing car crashes, bodies being dug out of mass graves, executions, crime scenes, autopsies, abattoirs and butchers’shops.‘The girls must love getting invited back to this place,’ Kathy said.
Tait gave a little giggle. ‘I don’t think he has any girlfriends right now, to tell the truth. He’s much too taken up with his work.’
There was an old bed sheet hung across one side of the room with drawing pins. All three seemed to focus on it at the same moment. Brock went over and carefully drew it back. Behind, there was a small alcove in which, suspended on a chain, was the figure of an old woman, naked, body wasted and hunched in a foetal curl. Brushed by the sheet, it slowly began to rotate.
‘Oh my,’ Tait said. ‘Now isn’t she something! I haven’t seen her before.’
‘We have,’ Brock said, and looked at Kathy, who was staring in shock at the figure. It was the old woman they’d found in the bed of Patrick Abbott’s flat.
‘These are not sculptures, are they?’ Brock asked Tait.
The gallery owner hesitated.‘Well, I think I would say that they are, but I take it you mean that they’re not carved or shaped in the normal way?’
Brock nodded.‘How does he make them?’
‘They’re made of bronzed plaster and fibreglass. From rubber moulds and casts.’
‘Of real corpses.’
‘Ye-es,’ Tait said carefully. ‘You’d have to ask him, you understand, but I think it would be fair to say that. It’s what gives them their extraordinary truthfulness, their power. You know immediately that this isn’t some prop from a movie or a waxworks show. This is the real thing, death, in all its terrible beauty.’
‘Beauty?’
‘Well, that’s my opinion. I’m not normally a fan of the macabre, Chief Inspector, but I am moved by Stan’s work. He faces unflinchingly what lies in wait for all of us.’
‘And where does he find his subject matter, his body parts?’
‘He has a source, so he tells me. Now he assures me, and I was insistent on this, that it isn’t illegal, what he does. I didn’t enquire too closely, but I gather he knows someone at a hospital with access to dead bodies. I’m sure Stan doesn’t tamper with them, or cut them up or anything like that. I suppose he may, well, arrange them or whatever, like models, but he puts them back the way they were after he takes his cast. No one’s the wiser-or sadder.’
Kathy was peering at some shelves on the wall behind the dangling figure in the alcove. On them there were hands, feet and a head. She reached out to touch one of the hands and felt a throb of revulsion. She touched another. ‘These aren’t plaster,’ she said.‘They’re soft.’
‘They’ll be rubber,’ Tait said.
‘I don’t think so. In fact, I’m sure they’re not.’ She held one aged hand in hers, feeling the bones flex beneath the skin. She suppressed a surge of nausea as she picked up the same chemical smell that had been so strong in Abbott’s mother’s room.
Fergus Tait looked more closely, then gave a little sigh. ‘Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. This is very naughty. I had no idea, none at all.’
‘Where is he now, Mr Tait?’
‘I really don’t know. I haven’t seen him since Gabe’s show last night. But look, let me just say that, irregular as this may be, Stan is not a bad fellow. I want you to understand that. He’s the gentlest of people, soft-spoken, polite, never a harsh word, loves animals and
…’ He hesitated.
‘And children,’ Brock finished the sentence for him.
‘He’s just completely caught up in his work.’
‘Where does this obsession of his come from?’ Kathy said.‘This thing he has about death?’
‘Well, a lot of art is about death. Goya…’
‘No, it’s something personal, isn’t it?’
‘You may be right. I’m not altogether sure. He doesn’t talk about it-not to me, anyway. There was some story of him being brought up by an elderly relative who died when he was a boy, but I’m not sure if that’s the source of it.’
‘He had a breakdown a few years ago, I believe?’
‘About five years ago. He’d come down from the north, nobody knew him, and he produced this amazing stuff- dark, but very powerful. He did a very controversial sculpture of Margaret Thatcher and he was invited to exhibit in a group show with some other up-and-coming young artists. The work he exhibited was called Bye, Bye, Princess-you’ll have heard of it?’
Kathy shook her head.
