‘You could say that art, or what passes for art these days, has been a curse on our family,’ Len persisted, offering Kathy some home-made shortbread. ‘Try a piece. There’s more artistry in Bev’s shortbread than you’ll find in the whole of Tate Modern. Yes, Jane did some lovely things at school. But then she got a place in that art school, and they soon put a stop to that. You’ve got to be conceptual there, and ugly as you can make it. She tried to join in, but her heart wasn’t in it.’
‘Oh now, be fair, Len. She did well at first.’ Bev was like a rudder, Kathy thought, making continual corrections to the wilder swings of Len’s opinions. And because he knew he could rely on this, the two of them bound together, Len probably allowed his opinions to veer about more freely than if he were on his own.
‘She wanted to fit in,’he said.‘If the teacher said,“Throw paint in the face of the bourgeois art-loving public!” she’d do it, just to fit in. But she knew there’s got to be more to art than that.’
‘Well, she couldn’t very well forget, with you carrying on every time she came home.’
‘I’m entitled to my opinions. Anyway, then she met Gabriel Rudd, hero of the Sunday supplements, and that was that. But that’s not what you came about, is it, Kathy? I don’t know why I’m rabbiting on. You’ve come about those men on the Newman estate, is that it?’
Kathy told them what more she could about Abbott’s death and Wylie’s arrest.‘But there’s still no sign of Tracey, I’m afraid. We’re following every lead we can, and we’re going back over old ground just to make sure we haven’t missed anything. That’s why I’m here. I don’t suppose Tracey ever mentioned those men’s names to you, did she? Pat Abbott and Robert-maybe Rob-Wylie? These are their pictures.’
They passed them between them, Bev having to force herself to meet the men’s eyes, even in reproduction. They shook their heads.
‘There’s an artist called Stan Dodworth who lives in The Pie Factory in Northcote Square. This is his picture.’
‘Yes, we know him,’ Len said. ‘He’s a friend of Gabe’s. Why, is he mixed up in this?’
‘We’re not sure. Apparently he did know Abbott.’
The Nolans looked startled. ‘Well! That’s got to be more than a coincidence, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does he have to say for himself then?’
‘Unfortunately he’s disappeared, and we can’t find him. His picture is going out to the media this morning.’
‘You think he might know where Tracey is?’ They both eased forward to the edge of their seats.
‘It’s a possibility that he may know something. That’s why we’re making every effort to find him. It’s possible that Tracey may have visited his workshop in The Pie Factory. Did she ever speak about that?’
They shook their heads.
‘Dodworth makes sculptures that are rather macabre, of bodies and body parts. Did Tracey mention having seen anything like that, a dead body or a monster?’
Bev pondered.‘I do remember something she said about a monster. I thought it was something she’d seen on TV.’
‘Or a video,’ Len declared. ‘Some of the stuff Gabe let her watch would give anyone nightmares.’
There were moments in this conversation, Kathy felt, when she thought she saw glimmers of recognition or memory in their eyes, but it came to nothing. After another ten minutes of talk she finished her coffee and asked if she could see Tracey’s room.
The bedroom was upstairs at the back of the house. From the window she could look out over the fenced backyards and the houses that ringed them tightly around the block. She was reminded of wagons protecting an encampment. There was little colour in the neat little gardens at present, but in the spring they would come alive with plum and apple and cherry blossom, and every new release of annuals that the gardening magazines and TV shows would be plugging.
Tracey’s room couldn’t have been more different from the one in her father’s house. This one was full of colours and patterns, a perfect little girl’s bedroom from Good Housekeeping, that made the other seem like some kind of experimental laboratory. In a corner was the farmyard Len had made, with flocks of little animals, and above it shelves were filled with dolls and books and frothy ornaments. Kathy could imagine Gabe Rudd’s scorn.
There seemed nothing here to help Kathy. The childish drawings pinned to the wall showed a girl on a pony, a Christmas tree with a star, a house with a red pitched roof, but no monsters.
‘Jane was born in that room,’ Bev Nolan murmured when Kathy returned downstairs. ‘And so was Tracey. Sometimes, when I’m alone in the house I think I hear them up there…’
Len reached across to his wife’s hand and gave a gentle squeeze.
‘And I understand that Tracey lived with you here for a while after Jane died,’ Kathy said.
‘That’s right, for over a year. Oh, she couldn’t have stayed where she was. Gabriel had no idea how to feed her or change her nappies even. He’d left Jane to do all that. And then there was that mad woman always flying around, causing chaos. No, no, Tracey couldn’t stay there.’
‘And did Gabe agree to you taking her?’
‘Oh yes!’Len broke in.‘He was delighted. Couldn’t get rid of her fast enough.’
‘So how did he come to change his mind and want her back?’
‘Gradually things got better for him,’ Len explained. ‘He won that prize, got some money and became well known. He enjoyed the limelight, playing the part of the tragic widower. Then one of the colour supplements did a story about Tracey, only they came and photographed her here, with no pictures of Gabriel, and he didn’t like that one bit. Oh no. So he demanded her back, and we had to let her go, poor mite. She was just a publicity accessory, that’s all she was. A bit of bait for the camera.’
They didn’t know, of course, about the photographs in Wylie’s flat, but the words chilled Kathy. ‘So what’s this you’re going to show me?’ she asked Len, wanting to move on.
‘Oh…’ he looked uncharacteristically sheepish, and his wife had to prompt him.
‘Go on, Len. Show Kathy your shed.’
With an almost childlike show of resistance he relented and led her out of the kitchen to the garage. He opened its door and switched on a light to reveal an immaculate workshop. It seemed that Len Nolan’s hobby was fine timber craftsmanship, and in particular the making of exquisite little boxes. He showed her his stock of exotic close-grained timber slabs, his collection of superb Japanese saws and chisels. With hardly any prompting he explained the secrets of the nokogiri saws, with their fine hard teeth shaped to cut on the pull stroke rather than the push, thus allowing precision cuts with a much thinner blade than in Western saws.
‘The blade’s in tension, Kathy,’he said,‘rather than compression. So bloody simple! Now that is true art.’
He allowed her to handle the Dozuki fine-precision saw, the spineless Ryoba saw, the Azebiki plunge-cutting saw, and gaze upon the collection of Shindo Dragon saws.
‘Beautiful,’ Kathy agreed, ‘and so are your boxes, Len.’ She admired the exquisite dovetails, all hand cut, the precise shaping of every part, the lustrous colour of the wood.
‘I aspire to craftsmanship, Kathy,’ he confided, ‘not art. Craftsmanship I can understand. Art leaves me for dead.’
Kathy drove away feeling dissatisfied, as if she’d missed something, or failed to ask the right question.
When she returned she was assigned to work with a joint team that had been set up with officers from the Paedophile Unit of SO5. She and five other detectives, in rotating pairs, were to work through a long list of names supplied by the unit-interviewing, checking and filing reports on the OTIS computer network. After three days she began to feel that the whole city was filled with the faces-bland, glib and sly-that she saw across the table in the interview rooms or staring back at her from her monitor. When she left work at night she saw them in the street and on the underground, and when she turned on the TV news they were there too, posing as politicians, priests and popular entertainers.
On the evening of the third day she was on the point of going home when she saw Brock outside in the corridor. He put his head around the door and, seeing no one else there, came in. The others that Kathy shared the room with had left for the night and the place was strewn with the remains of another fruitless day, the frustration of dead ends and unproductive phone calls evidenced in balled and ripped-up paper and crushed drink cans.
‘I’ve hardly seen you the last few days, Kathy,’ he said, slumping into a chair. He looked exhausted, his eyes slightly unfocused as if from spending too long staring at a screen.‘How are you going?’
She shook her head. ‘Getting nowhere. I’ve seen so many deviant males I’m beginning to believe there isn’t
