He sounded shaken, unlike Rudd, who had shifted his attention back to the corpse, narrowing his eyes, leaning his head from side to side as if mentally composing the image on a banner.
‘How did you reach up to the throat?’ Brock asked Tait.
‘I stood on the chair. It was lying on its side beside his feet. I’m sorry, perhaps I shouldn’t have touched it, but…’
‘That’s all right. Did either of you disturb anything else?’
They shook their heads.
‘What about the cord around his wrists?’
‘I don’t think I touched it,’ Rudd said, and Tait said, ‘Oh, I probably did when I was looking for a pulse. That’s what really shook me up-I mean, it couldn’t have been suicide, could it?’
‘And you have absolutely no recollection of any noise during the night?’
They shook their heads.
‘One other thing before I let you get dressed,’ Brock said.‘Who’s spraying these messages on your building?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Tait said. ‘But he’s a bloody pest. It’s not just this building, several others in the square have been done over the past three or four months. “Property is theft” on the building site, adolescent stuff like that.’
Suddenly Rudd exclaimed and made a move towards the cube, but the SOCO put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Where’s Dave?’ Rudd said, and pointed at the tartan blanket lying flat on the floor.‘Where’s my badger?’
Brock nodded to the officer to have a look. He made a quick search and shook his head. Dave, it seemed, had done a bunk.
Soon the photographers were finished and Dr Mehta arrived. The body was lowered onto a plastic sheet on the ground and the doctors conferred on body and air temperatures and the state of rigor. Mehta finally offered Brock a preliminary estimate of time of death-between two and five in the morning. ‘I won’t be sure until I get him on the table,’ he added, ‘but there’s something odd about that cord on his wrists. It’s quite loosely tied and I can’t see any bruising underneath. It almost looks as if it was applied post-mortem.’
‘Like Betty Zielinski’s blindfold,’Brock said.‘And make sure they take care with his clothing and shoes, Sundeep. I’m very interested in where he’s been for the past week.’
The body was removed along with everyone else except the SOCO team, which continued its painstaking search of the gallery and hallway outside. Elsewhere in The Pie Factory detectives were working from room to room, establishing who was present, and taking statements and swabs for aerosol paint traces on hands and clothes.
On the way back to the station, Kathy mentioned the engraving in the book Deanne had given her. ‘I barely noticed it just before I fell asleep, but I registered the two hanging figures. Then I arrive here this morning and find a second hanging. It made me think.’
‘Fuseli, you say?’
‘Yes. You remember he was Rudd’s inspiration for The Night-Mare after Rudd’s wife died.’
‘Mm, but still, it seems a bit obscure.’
‘I wouldn’t have made much of it if it hadn’t been that one of the figures in the book was blindfolded-“Justice”, I suppose-and they both had their hands tied behind their backs, as if they’d been executed.’
‘Meaning?’
‘If Rudd studied Fuseli’s work, he might be expected to recognise the allusion. Poppy said that Betty’s murder was a warning to Stan Dodworth, and maybe it was. Now Stan’s death may be a warning to Gabriel Rudd. It’s almost as if they’re being stalked in turn, the artists in Northcote Square.’
‘Betty wasn’t an artist,’ Brock objected, ‘and we don’t know that Stan was murdered.’
‘Betty was an artist’s model and someone tied Stan’s wrists,’ Kathy countered.
Brock obviously wasn’t convinced, but he said, ‘All right, why don’t you discuss the two hanged figures with Rudd, see what he makes of it… Justice,’ he pondered. ‘Any word from your friend Nicole?’
‘Not yet. She said it might take a few days if she couldn’t do it openly.’
They reached the room at Shoreditch station where the team was assembling, and whiteboards and display panels were being cleaned off to make space for information on the new case. As the meeting progressed, Kathy began to understand Brock’s reluctance to make much of the Fuseli illustration, for it soon became apparent that he had ideas of his own-ideas which, Kathy had to admit, made a lot more practical sense.
One thing that the hunt for Tracey had revealed was that Robert Wylie had a wide network of acquaintances, many of whom proved extremely reluctant to provide information about his business affairs to the police. He had an office in a run-down building on an industrial estate, and in it they had found a notebook of telephone numbers, some with a private four-letter code identifying their owners. It didn’t take long to work out that this comprised the first four letters of their names written in reverse. Thus MMOS turned out to be disgraced vice squad detective Richard Sommersby, and OXID was an Inland Revenue tax inspector by the name of Jeffery Dixon, both of whom denied any knowledge of Wylie.
Several phone numbers were believed to belong to serious criminals, members of crime syndicates, while many other names and numbers hadn’t yet been deciphered.
As Brock and his detectives went over the recent events, it was clear that Brock saw this circle of Wylie’s contacts as being related to his refusal to talk to the police. ‘It’s as if he knows he can expect help,’ he said.
‘He’d need divine intervention to get him out of the hole he’s in,’ someone suggested, but Bren had seen where Brock was going.
‘You think they’re getting rid of witnesses?’
‘It’s possible. Suppose Betty saw something. And suppose Stan Dodworth, through his association with Abbott, knew something.’
There was a sudden hush as they thought about that.
‘If that was the way of it, it’s just possible that Betty or Stan might have told someone else what they knew. Who would they be likely to tell, Kathy?’
Kathy thought.‘Betty knew Reg Gilbey well, and Stan was dependent on Fergus Tait, but I don’t know if they were the sort of people they would confide a secret to. They were both pretty friendly with Poppy Wilkes.’
‘Right. We’ll speak to them all again. Of course, the same thing will have occurred to the killers. Maybe they persuaded Betty or Stan to tell them who else knew whatever they did.’
The team meeting was almost over, Brock giving a dutiful warning to make every effort to avoid antagonising Sir Jack Beaufort should he be encountered, when Kathy was asked to take an urgent phone call. It came from Poppy Wilkes.
‘Can I see you?’ the artist asked, her voice anxious.
‘Yes. I’m at Shoreditch police station. Do you want to come here?’
‘I’m with Gabe, at his house, and I don’t want to leave him alone. Could you come to us?’
‘He’s left the gallery then, has he?’
‘Yeah, it’s not safe for him there now. Please, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’
‘That’s all right, I’ll come over straight away.’
‘Thanks, thanks…’ There was a muffled thump, as if she’d dropped the phone.
It was only a ten-minute walk, but a patrol car was leaving as she stepped outside so she asked them to drop her off at Northcote Square. Traffic was heavy and as they crawled along the two officers chatted to her about the case.
‘That Wylie bloke’s a slippery customer,’ the driver said. ‘I pulled him over once, years ago, for going through a red light. I could tell something wasn’t right about him, the way he was sweating. I got him to open his boot and it was full of dirty magazines, kiddie porn, you wouldn’t believe. But he managed to wriggle out of it. Claimed he didn’t know it was there. There was something else in the boot, too-a pair of handcuffs.’
‘Straight up!’ the other cop said.‘My missus has a friend whose cousin lives in that block in the Newman estate. She says everyone knew Abbott was weird. Is it right he worked in a mortuary?’
Kathy said yes.
‘Only she said there was a rumour that he kept his mum’s body in his flat after she died.’
‘Don’t quote me,’Kathy said,‘but yes, he did. We found it up there.’
