‘The chief inspector!’ she cried, looking wildly about. ‘I must see him!’
Brock stepped forward, waving back the copper who had followed her.
‘The scream!’ she gasped.‘I heard the scream!’
Brock tried to calm her, but this only made her more agitated.
‘You must listen!’ she cried. ‘I heard her, the missing child, last night!’
Then she noticed Gabriel Rudd for the first time and flew at him. He flinched, standing rigid as she grasped him, babbling,‘Poor boy! Poor boy! But I understand, you know I understand. My little girl, my own darling.’
Seeing the look of disgust on Rudd’s face, Kathy stepped forward and, putting a firm arm around the woman’s shoulders, drew her away.‘Let’s sit down,’she said,‘and tell me everything. First your name.’
‘Betty Zielinski, and I have vital information.’
She was a neighbour, she said, a long-time resident of Northcote Square, living at 14 West Terrace. She leaped to her feet and made them follow her to the window, where she showed them her place, a narrow brick- fronted terrace house almost at this end of the block and barely fifty yards away. They could see the builders working on the roofs of the buildings beyond. The jam of people and vehicles hadn’t cleared from the square below, and faces turned up to look at them as they stood at the window.
‘At five minutes past two last night I was woken by a scream,’ the woman went on, her voice now dropping to a dramatic hush.‘A piercing scream. The scream of a female child.’
‘I see. Where’s your bedroom, Ms Zielinski?’
‘At the back, on the first floor.’
‘At the back?’ Brock sounded doubtful.
‘Yes… don’t you see? He must have taken her away down the lane that runs behind our terrace. That way he wouldn’t be seen in the square.’
‘Are you quite certain about the time?’
‘Yes, yes. I checked the alarm clock beside my bed. Five minutes past two.’
Kathy steered her back to a seat and asked her if she lived alone.
‘I live with my family.’
‘Did they hear anything?’
‘I’m sure they must have.’
‘What are their names?’
Betty Zielinski looked doubtfully at Kathy’s hand poised over her notebook.‘You want all of their names?’
‘How many are there?’
‘Oh, hundreds and hundreds.’
Kathy looked into the big, wondering eyes and said, ‘Maybe it would be best if I call and talk to them myself.’
‘That would be a very good idea.’
They thanked her and she seemed satisfied as Kathy led her back towards the stairs. At the top she turned back to Gabriel Rudd and said, ‘She knew, my dear. She told me. She was so brave.’
Rudd looked incredulous.‘Eh?’
‘What did she tell you?’ Brock said.
The woman turned her wild eyes to him. ‘Secrets. Special children have the second sight, you know. And Tracey was a very special child.’ Then she took to the stairs, her cloak flapping in her wake.
‘Batty Betty,’Rudd said, shaking his head. He slumped in a chair, seeming unnerved by the visit.‘That’s what they call her in the square. What she told you was rubbish. She has no family, she lives alone. The school kids in the playground call names after her and she complains to the teachers. Mad as a hatter.’
Kathy could imagine it, the children squealing with excitement at the mad lady in the black cloak, looking like a bat.
‘You don’t believe she heard something?’ Brock asked.
‘She probably dreamed it,’ he said dismissively, and Brock, remembering his own awakening that morning, was inclined to agree. All the same, he had noticed how closely Rudd had listened to the woman, especially when she mentioned the scream.
‘Did Tracey ever visit Ms Zielinski’s house?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘You didn’t mention that before. You said she goes to the cafe on the corner, but you didn’t mention Zielinski. I think we’ll check her house, just to be on the safe side.’
As Brock pulled out his phone Rudd got to his feet and wandered over to the window overlooking the square. He gazed down, then took something from his pocket and, opening the window latch, leaned out-too far out. Alarmed, Kathy hurried across to him. ‘What are you doing?’
He stepped back and closed the window again. In his hand he held a small silver camera, and he was smiling. ‘Taking pictures of them taking pictures of me taking pictures of them… Don’t worry, I wasn’t doing an Yves Klein.’
‘Who?’
‘The artist of the void,’ Rudd said carelessly, and strolled away. he window wasn’t locked.’ Brock and Kathy had left Rudd to drink his coffee and watch TV while they went downstairs to check the progress of the SOCO team in Tracey’s room. The crime scene manager, a middle-aged woman with a cheerful smile, gave them a verbal report. As with the other two abductions, there were signs of forced entry to the girl’s bedroom window. However, in this case, unlike the other two where force had been quite crudely applied, these traces were minimal. Scratches on the window latch suggested a tool with a sharp edge had been used to unfasten it from the outside, but a separate security lock was untouched, and appeared not to have been engaged.
‘Not locked?’ Brock said.
‘That’s right. It was latched but not locked.’
She’d noticed other differences between this and the earlier cases. With them, the girls’ bedrooms had been visible from adjoining streets and there was some evidence that the abductor, having targeted his victim, had watched her house to identify her room. In this case, though, the window looked onto a back courtyard which was screened from the rear laneway by a garage and wall, so it would have been much more difficult for the intruder to have observed the window. The woman also pointed out that the other two cases were much closer to each other than to Northcote Square, and the girls were both older than Tracey by several years.
‘So he’s spreading his territory and becoming more organised,’ Brock suggested. She conceded this possibility, but obviously remained unconvinced.
‘Your profiler will have his own ideas,’ she said. ‘But I attended both the previous scenes and this one is noticeably neater and free of visible traces. There’s no sign of disturbance in the room and no marks on the window surrounds.’
‘How about the rest of the house?’ Brock asked.
‘Clean, very clean. Mr Rudd said he has a cleaner who comes on Friday mornings, and it doesn’t look as if the place has had much use since then. You’re aware that he put the washing machine on before we arrived?’
‘What was in it? A dress of Tracey’s? He mentioned her dress being muddy.’
‘Yes, a red and yellow dress of hers, and her socks and pants. Also a complete set of his clothes-jeans, shirt, underwear, sweater and jacket.’
‘A jacket?’
‘Like a windcheater, washable.’
Clean seemed to be the operative word, Kathy thought, looking round Tracey’s bedroom. It was as neat and Spartan as a motel room. There were no pictures on the wall, no toys on display, and the fabrics were plain and unpatterned.
‘Anything else?’ Brock asked the crime scene manager.
‘No controlled drugs, but lots of medication-antidepressants, anti-inflammatories, beta-blockers, sleeping pills, vitamins. We haven’t touched his computers at this stage. He has four of them in the house. Are you going to access his emails?’
‘Yes, though I imagine Tracey was a bit young to be talking to predators on the web.’
‘Don’t be too sure. Oh, one little thing. His alarm clock was set for six-fifteen, yet he didn’t ring us till seven- ohsix.’
