They returned to The Pie Factory to check on the progress of the search. Nothing of significance had been discovered and there was still no sign of Stan Dodworth. As they left, Kathy glanced back at the building. At one end, to the left, a tableau of elegant waiters and diners shone through the large plate-glass windows of the restaurant, like a scene from a play dropped absurdly, nakedly into the dark damp square. Between that and the locked gallery entrance was a smaller window with a view into the main gallery space, also lit up. Gabe Rudd’s banners could just be glimpsed beyond a crew of people in there constructing some sort of structure behind the window. Banner number six, perhaps, Kathy thought. He certainly had plenty of material to work with.
‘Edward Hopper,’ Brock said. He, too, was looking at the diners mutely gossiping, laughing, raising glasses in a toast.‘Can I buy you dinner?’
‘What, in there?’ Kathy wondered if he’d checked the prices.
‘No.’ He chuckled. ‘I was thinking more in terms of a little Greek place I noticed around the corner, not far away.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘I’ll just call Bren and then we’ll walk over. Some fresh air will do us good.’
They were lucky to get in, the Saturday night crowd boisterous, and were squeezed into a tight little corner at the back, between a stair and the door to the kitchens.
Brock eased his back against the bentwood chair and gave a long sigh. ‘We’re finished for the night, Kathy. Let’s have a drink.’ He ordered two large Scotches while they scanned the menu. ‘It seems plain enough,’ he said, as if it were spelled out there in the flamboyant handwritten script.‘Dodworth met Abbott when he was a patient at the hospital last year, and persuaded him to obtain body parts for him to make casts from, culminating in the whole corpse of Abbott’s mother. I wonder if Dodworth met Wylie, and how much of Abbott’s and Wylie’s other activities he was aware of?’
‘You’d have to assume he knew something. He obviously knew where they lived, and it looks as if he’s trying to hide from us.’
‘So one day Abbott visits Dodworth at The Pie Factory and sees the sculpture of a pretty child, and Stan tells him who she is. He and Wylie are on the lookout for victim number three…’
A waiter lit the candle in the centre of the red-andwhite checked tablecloth and took their order.
‘So Abbott and Wylie did take Tracey.’
‘Looks very much that way, doesn’t it? She was part of the series after all. So now it’s down to legwork and manpower and luck, unless Wylie can be persuaded to tell us where she is.’
‘Six days. It’s too long. She’s dead, isn’t she?’
‘Lee survived three weeks. Anyway, there’s nothing we can do to speed the process, so tomorrow we’ll have a well-earned day of rest, you and I, putting our feet up and reading more scathing reviews of Mr Rudd’s masterpieces.’
‘Will you be seeing Suzanne and the kids?’ Kathy asked, feeling a squirm of guilt as she recalled the letter she’d partially read. She felt a sudden urge to scratch her nose.
Brock hesitated, and Kathy saw a frown pass over his face.‘Stewart and Miranda aren’t with Suzanne any more, Kathy. I meant to tell you. Their mother came back.’
‘What!’ This was extraordinary news, and extraordinary, too, that Brock hadn’t mentioned it. Now Kathy thought she understood the reference to choices in Suzanne’s letter. She had been looking after her two grandchildren for several years now, after her daughter had gone off with a new man who didn’t want to be encumbered by her children. Having been abandoned by their mother, the kids had become extremely possessive of Suzanne, and although Kathy had got on well with them, she knew that they’d seen Brock as a threat and had given him a hard time.
‘Permanently?’ Kathy asked. ‘Their mother’s back for good?’
‘Presumably.’
‘Well… that’s great, isn’t it?’ But Brock looked uneasy, and Kathy remembered her long-held suspicion that he actually found the arrangement convenient.
‘Yes. But it’ll take some adjustment for Suzanne.’
And for you, Kathy thought.
The waiter brought a mezze platter. Brock asked for another whisky, and poured a glass of wine for Kathy. She said,‘I must give Suzanne a ring. I haven’t spoken to her for ages. How is she?’
She waited a long time before he replied. ‘Fine. She’s fine.’
The subject seemed closed, so she said, ‘Can I have a look at that diary?’
He handed it to her, and she began to study the pages, working forward from the beginning.‘The codes are there right from the start of the year, so he was giving Stan stuff long before the business with the girls, before his mother died. When was that again?’
‘July twenty-fifth,’ Brock said absently, reaching for the dolmades.
She found the day, a Friday. Abbott had marked the place with a crude ballpoint outline of a cross. RIP was written across it. The diary was printed with little symbols to indicate the lunar phases, the twenty-fifth of July bearing the symbol of the new moon. Abbott had arranged his drawing on the page so that the arc of the new moon appeared at the top of the cross, like a symbol on a gravestone.
‘And they took Aimee on the twenty-second of August,’ Kathy said, turning to that date. As Brock had said, there was nothing to indicate its significance. But that day also carried the symbol of the new moon. She turned to the date of Lee’s abduction, the nineteenth of September, and there it was again. She felt a tremor of excitement and also of disgust, as if she’d had a sudden glimpse inside Abbott’s mind. Now Tracey’s abduction, the twelfth of October. But there was nothing, no moon sign. Kathy frowned.
‘Spot something?’ Brock looked up from contemplation of his whisky glass. He felt the spirit soaking through him like a warm bath.
‘I thought I’d found a pattern, but it doesn’t work for Tracey.’ She showed him the dates. ‘The next new moon wasn’t until the seventeenth of October, yesterday. Tracey was taken five days too soon.’
Brock shrugged, unconvinced.‘I wish I could think of something we could offer Wylie to get him to start talking.’
‘I wonder…’ Kathy began, then stopped.
‘What?’
‘I was just wondering if it’s possible Abbott killed his mother, too, in the hospital.’
Brock thought for a moment, then said, ‘I think we’re getting tired.’
13
The next morning Kathy walked down to the shops for some milk and the papers. It was cool but dry, a crisp breeze blowing leaves and wrappers down the empty street. When she got home she did as Brock had recom mended, making toast and coffee and lying down on the sofa to read the reviews. Was it unworthy to relish a savage review of someone else’s work, especially someone you knew? The reviewer in the first paper she opened seemed to think it was:
There are those in the art world who have been conducting a whispering campaign to the effect that, at thirty-three, Gabriel Rudd is burnt out and finished as a serious artist. Their schadenfreude was immensely piqued by the prospect of the critical failure of his new exhibition, No Trace, at The Pie Factory, and seemed confirmed by the first hurried review. Furtive cackling could be heard from certain Shoreditch studios as the champagne was uncorked. But they were wrong; the exhibition is a stunning success, the work breathtaking, and Rudd’s reputation reaffirmed in spades.
His subject is the recent abduction of his daughter Tracey (Trace), which has been so widely publicised in the past week. Rudd has transformed this tragic event into an immensely moving record of the anguish of a father’s loss. Real-life tragedy seems to inspire him to heights of expression far beyond so much contemporary work, which merely apes human suffering with hollow gestures. Twice-bereft, he made a similarly evocative journey five years ago, after the loss of his young wife, in his celebrated exhibition The Night-Mare. No Trace is even better, more mature, more deeply felt.
