appeared on each of them. Below was a long blank space awaiting Gabe’s inspiration. It was sprayed with his blood.
The detective’s radio crackled. He listened, then said, ‘They’ve found a pair of bloodstained shoes in a bin further down the lane. The dog’s arrived.’
An ambulance officer came up.‘We’ve got transport for you, miss.’
They helped her to her feet. Her head was aching now, and she stumbled.
‘I’ll get a stretcher up here.’
‘No, I’m okay.’
The square was filled with flashing lights once again, and on the way to the hospital they passed several road blocks and foot patrols.
25
She woke with a start. The room was in semidarkness, some light reflected in through an open door. She had no idea where she was, and her mind was confused by an image, a dream or a memory, of a dark figure poised, arms upraised, and ready to strike. She turned her head towards the door and gave a cry as she saw him there, a dark shape rising against the light.
‘It’s all right, it’s only me.’ Brock’s voice, gentle and reassuring. He was reaching to the wall above her head. There was a click and the bed light came on.
She tried to sit up, but a jolt of pain in her shoulder held her back. There was a dull ache in her head.
‘Lie still. You’re probably concussed. Nothing broken, only bruises.’
‘Where am I?’
‘Hospital. They’re keeping you in overnight.’
There was a clock on the wall reading three-fifteen. ‘You’re still up?’
‘I’m going to get a bit of sleep now. I just called in to see how you were.’
‘Have you caught him?’
Brock shook his head. The assailant had vanished into the night, the dogs unable to pick up a scent from the place where they’d found the bloodstained shoes. ‘He probably had some kind of transport waiting there.’
‘What about Colin?’
‘He’s out of danger. He has a bad cut to his arm and he broke his leg on the fall down the stairs, but his vest saved him from the worst of it. Poppy’s in here too, but she’s not in any danger. She slept through the whole thing, doped to the eyeballs.’
‘She was lucky.’
‘Yes, I’ll be interested to hear what she has to say for herself. Anyway, that’s not your problem; you’re on sick leave until the doctor says otherwise-two days’ home rest at least. You took quite a fall.’
She began to form a protest but let it go. She felt very tired. Tomorrow she would see.
Among a pile of reports waiting for Brock at Shoreditch the next morning was a phone message from Wylie’s solicitor, requesting an urgent meeting. It had been logged at nine thirty-five the previous evening, but in the turmoil at that time it hadn’t been passed on to him. He put it to one side and concentrated on the various files that had been prepared for the new case; the action book, the policy file, and the preliminary forensic reports. When he’d digested these he went to talk to the action manager who was collating the various activities of the large number of people now involved. Like Brock, Bren Gurney had already returned to duty after a brief sleep and was now at the crime scene, where a new forensic team had taken over.
The crime scene manager was the same woman who had dealt with Tracey’s disappearance seventeen days before. She met Brock as he arrived. ‘First the child, then the father,’ she said. ‘This is really personal, isn’t it? Obviously we’re looking for connections.’
They were interrupted by the scream of a power saw. Brock watched as they cut away a section from the frame of the hidden fire-escape door. The door itself had already been removed.
‘It’ll be easier to examine the marks in the laboratory,’ she said. ‘We’re removing the window and frame in Tracey’s bedroom as well. We should have done that the first time around, but Mr Rudd objected.’
The studio had become a laboratory for the reconstruction of the crime, grided, measured and labelled with dozens of numbered plastic tabs marking the locations of key pieces of evidence. They were especially interested in the blood stains, which formed a dynamic record of the action that had occurred and where the players had been at each moment. In one part of the room they were calculating the angle at which a spray of elliptical blood spots had hit a wall so that a computer could calculate where the victim had been standing; in another they were tracking prints from a foot which had picked up blood from an arterial spurt on the floor. A man in goggles was spraying an area of floor with a chemical, fluorescin, and then examining it with a small UV light to find microscopic blood traces, while a second was recording their position with a laser survey instrument. It was rather as if they were deconstructing a Jackson Pollock action painting, Brock thought, rediscovering each gesture of the artist through the splatter marks he had made.
Bren appeared in the demolished doorway. He had been out on the roof, examining traces of blood left by the assailant’s shoes. He waved to Brock and came over.‘Looks straightforward. The first crash Kathy and McLeod heard was probably him breaking through the door. The room was in darkness, but there was light from the square filtering through the big windows. Rudd wakes up, but he’s been drinking and his reactions are slow. The second crash is when he and the intruder first make contact, and Rudd screams and is thrown to the floor. The intruder hears McLeod running up the stairs. He finds the light switch, waits till McLeod reaches the top, then opens the door and attacks. Then he relocks the door and turns on Rudd, who is probably on his feet again, leaning against that table over there. That’s the source of the first blood spray. Rudd falls, and things get messy, blood goes everywhere. The intruder retraces his steps, dropping his stuff along the way.
‘That’s the how,’ Bren said, ‘but why? What had Rudd learned or done to deserve this? And why do it in this bizarre way?’
‘It’s almost as if he wanted to frighten Rudd to death,’ Brock said thoughtfully.‘And it makes the theory that Stan Dodworth killed Betty and then hanged himself look even more unlikely. I’m not sure what’s going on, Bren, but we need to keep a close watch on Poppy-she’s about the only one left who might be able to help us get to the bottom of this.’
‘Right. Couple of other things, Chief. I don’t know if it’s going to be relevant, but they found this…’ He led Brock to the far corner of the room, carefully skirting the taped-off areas of the floor, and pointed to a block of grey material wrapped in plastic. ‘Modelling clay. There was some on the floor. I’m thinking of that grey putty they found on Dodworth’s shoes.’
‘Could be.’
‘The other thing is that photo.’ He pointed to a small colour snap pinned to the wall. They went over to examine it. It showed three people standing behind a seated woman with a child in her arms. The three were wearing paper party hats and silly grins. They were Gabriel Rudd, Stan Dodworth and Betty Zielinski. They all looked much younger, especially Rudd, whose curly hair, spilling out from below his hat, was brown.
Kathy still couldn’t quite believe that Gabe was dead. She knew this disbelief was a measure of how vivid the other person had seemed in life, and it took her by surprise. Gabe hadn’t really meant anything to her; if she’d been asked to sum him up, her account wouldn’t have been flattering. He was as vain, self-centred and neglectful as his in-laws had claimed, and she thought his work pretentious. But there was a genuinely tragic dimension to Gabe which she hadn’t met before. It didn’t come from his health or his circumstances-that would have been normal and understandable. Instead it seemed to come from some inner sense of fate, as if he knew he was doomed. She’d resisted this idea from the beginning because it seemed such a cliche, the tragic artist. There were so many stories of premature death in modern art that Gabe’s performance had seemed like a pose. But now he really was dead, and, looking back over the sixteen days that she’d known him, she felt that her scepticism had blinded her to what she was really witnessing-a rocket falling to earth in a shower of sparks. It startled her to realise that she felt his death much more keenly than Betty’s or Stan’s, perhaps even (and she felt guilty at this) Tracey’s. She wasn’t quite sure why this was. Perhaps their tragedies had seemed stupid and ugly and unnecessary, whereas his was like a grander and more intense version of everyone’s fate.
