Deanne chuckled.‘He’s dead, unfortunately. But I don’t see it happening, do you?’
‘No. Brock’ll love this.’
‘I know.’
‘What about justice? Where does that come on your scale of values? I mean, Stan Dodworth has been stealing corpses to make artworks out of them.’
‘Oh, they all poked around in corpses, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Stubbs. That’s all right. Body snatching wouldn’t come close.’
‘What about child murder? Suppose Dodworth has killed Tracey so as to make a sculpture out of her? What then?’
Deanne thought for a while. ‘Mmm. Of course he’d have to face justice, but even then… I think the artistic recognition might outweigh the moral revulsion. Yes, it’d be a close call, but I think it would.’
‘That’s sick.’
‘It’s what you’re up against. Is it possible that Dodworth did take Tracey?’
‘It’s possible, Deanne. Right now, anything’s possible.’
The following morning Kathy went to see the performance in Northcote Square. Many others had had the same idea, lured by reports in the news. Office workers on their way to the City, parents dropping children at school, truck drivers unable to make deliveries to the building site because of the crowd blocking the corner of Lazarus Street and West Terrace, all strained for a glimpse through the window at the artist and, hopefully, his famous badger. In response to all this, the gallery was opening its doors early as Kathy arrived, and the good- humoured crush of spectators was syphoning inside to get a close-up view and maybe a quick photo to take back to friends.
Kathy joined the group outside the gallery window. She noticed a closed-circuit television camera mounted on the wall overhead, which she was sure hadn’t been there before, and attached to it a small microphone. It seemed they were recording the reactions of the spectators.
‘His hair really is very white, isn’t it?’ one young woman said, fingering her own blonde curls.
‘But this isn’t original, is it?’ her friend said, and clutched the collar of her coat impatiently against the cold wind.
‘What, his hair?’
‘Him locking himself in the glass box. There was that other bloke.’
‘Two others,’ the first woman corrected.
‘Well, what’s the point then? If it’s not original, what’s the point?’
‘I suppose the badger’s original.’
‘Yes, but you can’t even see it, hiding under the blanket. Maybe there isn’t a badger at all. Maybe they’re just saying there’s a badger.’
‘Do you think he’s going to go to the lavatory in front of everyone?’
‘That I don’t want to see. Come on, we’re late.’
As they hurried away Kathy noticed a fresh graffiti message on the pavement, written in the same looping letters as the one on the wall further along. It read,‘this is art’.
She joined the queue filing into the gallery. The girl at the desk had already run out of handouts for the exhibition and said more were on the way. She looked harassed, her face pink and slightly puffy, as if she’d woken up in the middle of a wild party. Her discomfort wasn’t helped by a man claiming to be from the RSPCA, demanding to speak to someone in charge about the badger, asking where they’d got it and how it was being treated.
‘I believe there is a vet on standby,’ she fretted, but he wasn’t to be put off.
‘Get me the boss,’ the man insisted stolidly.‘I can have this place shut down.’
‘Oh, I don’t think you can.’
Kathy passed through into the crowded gallery. The area around the glass cube was jammed, and she moved to a quieter corner where tables had been set up for three young female computer operators, all dressed identically in white caps and T-shirts with Gabe’s Team written on the back. One of them looked up and gave Kathy a brief smile.
‘Can I ask what you’re doing?’ Kathy asked.
‘We’re handling Gabe’s website emails, all the messages coming in from around the world, thousands of them. We select interesting ones and publish them hourly.’
‘Ah. I thought maybe you were part of the artwork.’
‘Oh, but we are!’ the girl said cheerfully.‘Gabe said so.’
‘You’ve spoken to him?’
‘Not verbally; he’s refusing to speak to anyone. We report to him on our computers.’
Kathy turned back to the crowd around the glass cube and took advantage of a gap to work her way to the front. There was Gabe, white hair awry, crouched over a keyboard, ignoring the faces staring in at him all around. For a moment the whole scene was motionless, like a very realistic but improbable sculpture, then something caused a stir to one side, a hand pointed to the crumpled blanket at the artist’s feet and someone said,‘I think it moved.’
On her way out Kathy saw that a new banner had been added. It was titled He fell from a ledge on the thirteenth floor, and showed a spreadeagled figure, wide-eyed with horror like a character from a cartoon strip, superimposed on a grainy photographic image of the block of flats at the Newman estate.
She hurried up West Terrace on her way to the morning briefing at Shoreditch station but was stopped short by a sharp little cry,‘Here!’. She turned and saw Betty Zielinski’s face peering up at her through the railings in front of her house. The woman was standing halfway down the steps leading to her basement door, and was clutching the cast-iron railings as if they were the bars of a cage, her face at pavement level.
‘Hello, Betty. How are you?’
Betty pushed a crooked finger through the bars and wiggled it at Kathy to come closer. Feeling slightly ridiculous, Kathy approached and knelt.
‘Have you caught him yet?’
‘We caught two men, Betty. But we haven’t found Tracey yet.’
‘You haven’t arrested him, though, have you?’
‘Who?’
‘The monster that took her.’
Kathy leaned closer to the bars.‘Why do you call him that?’
‘That’s what Tracey called him. I saw him that night, shiny black, like a lizard. After the scream.’ She peered fearfully along the footpath to right and left.
‘You saw him?’
Betty lifted her eyes to Kathy, the white globes wild and moist with tears. ‘I watch him, you know, I know his secrets. It’s not the first time he’s taken a child.’
‘I know, Betty. There were the other two girls. But what exactly did you see?’
‘No! Not them. Another child taken here in the square.’ Her voice was quavering, on the edge of hysteria.
‘Here? What do you mean?’
Kathy’s lack of understanding seemed to confuse and upset Betty more. She began to speak again.‘I know where she is!’ she sobbed, ‘Tra
…’ but then the words died abruptly in her throat. Staring past Kathy, a look of terror transformed her face.
‘What’s the matter?’ Kathy said, then looked back over her shoulder to see Poppy and Yasher standing together, gazing at them from the other side of the street as if they’d just emerged through the gate in the garden railings. Yasher turned on his heel and started to stride away but Poppy remained, frowning.
Kathy turned back to speak again to Betty, only to find her gone. She caught a glimpse of her cloak in the dark opening of the basement door, and called out,‘Betty, hang on, let’s talk.’ But all she got in return was a frightened squawk and the slam of the door.
‘What did she say?’
Kathy straightened to find Poppy at her back.‘I’m not sure. She was trying to tell me something…’ She noticed a bruise on Poppy’s cheek, a raw graze on the cheekbone.
