She had visited PC McLeod before she left the hospital. He was sitting up in bed, circling the names of horses in a copy of Sporting Life with his good hand, and seemed quite unperturbed by what had happened. He told her that he’d heard that Poppy had already been discharged into police custody, apparently oblivious to the mayhem that had happened around her. As Kathy sat waiting in the hospital lobby for the taxi her mobile phone rang. She winced to hear Len Nolan’s voice. They had just heard the news report. Was it really true? Was Gabe really dead? Kathy could hardly bring herself to talk about it and asked him to ring Bren’s number.
She was exhausted by the time she got back to her flat. Taking a couple of the pills the doctor had given her, she lay down on her bed, intending to rest for five minutes, and woke up three hours later. She struggled to sit upright, blinking gummed eyes against the glare of morning light in the uncurtained window. Her brain felt jangled by snatches of claustrophobic dreams, and she got up to make herself a cup of tea and a piece of toast, the only things she seemed to have in the cupboard. She flopped on the sofa, still unable to shake a dream image from her mind, something to do with a painting she thought. The art books Deanne had given her were piled beside the bed, and she searched through them for the biography of Henry Fuseli in which she had found the picture of the two hanged figures. She remembered how impressed Gabe had been by her discovery, and she wondered now if he had taken it as some kind of sign of his own fate. After the death of his wife he had been haunted by the image of one Fuseli painting, The Night-Mare, and now here was another. She wondered if it would have been better if she hadn’t shown it to him. Gabe must have felt that Fuseli was speaking to him from the past.
She turned to the preface to check his dates, 1741 to 1825. So Fuseli himself had not died young. Throughout his life he had been a controversial figure apparently, seeing himself as a unique genius and shocking his contemporaries with images of witchcraft, sexually charged nude figures and melodramatic scenes trembling on the cusp between the sublime and the absurd. According to the introduction, Horace Walpole, author of the first Gothic novel, described one of his paintings as ‘shockingly mad, madder than ever; quite mad’. Kathy could see why Gabe would have been interested in him. The description reminded her of the Fuseli painting she had seen in the Royal Academy, and the memory brought on a sudden feeling of anxiety, unexpectedly strong. She could barely visualise the painting now, and she turned the pages of the book to find it. When she did she realised with a jolt why the scene on the staircase of Gabe’s house the previous night had seemed so familiar, like a half-remembered nightmare. For the figure of Thor, brightly lit and seen from below, weapon raised above his head to strike down upon the Midgard Serpent, was eerily reminiscent of the monstrous figure at the head of Gabe’s staircase in the endless fraction of a second before he brought the sword down upon PC McLeod.
Kathy found that her heart was racing, her fingers causing the page to tremble. This was just a reaction to shock, she told herself. There were differences between the two images: the Fuseli figure was naked, although there was a cloak flying from his shoulders in the wind; also it was his left arm raised to strike, rather than the right, so that the picture was the mirror image of what she had witnessed in the flesh. And yet the resemblance was overwhelming. She forced herself to concentrate on the commentary in the book. The subject of Fuseli’s painting for his membership of the Royal Academy was a scene from the ancient Icelandic saga The Edda-in which the hero Thor takes revenge upon the monstrous Midgard Serpent-and was intended to show the painter as a master of epic, sublime imagination. She assumed Gabe must have been to the Academy to see the original. He would certainly have known it in reproduction from his book. Had the murderer deliberately intended to use the Fuseli image to terrorise Gabe? The more she thought about it the more certain she was that the reference had been deliberate. She picked up her phone and called Brock’s number.
He sounded preoccupied, and in her anxiety to explain her notion she felt she was gabbling. He listened in silence, then said,‘That’s an interesting idea, Kathy. I’ll pass it on to the profiler. You’re still in hospital, are you?’
‘No, I’m at home.’
‘Really?’ He sounded unhappy. ‘Do you feel all right? Do you want someone to come and be with you?’
‘No, no. I’m just taking it easy.’
‘Yes, you do that. Forget about the case.’
But she found she couldn’t, and the pain in her leg and shoulder only made her feel more restless. She closed her eyes but couldn’t relax, and picked up the book again. A thought came to her, and she turned to the index at the back, running her eye down the names. And there she found ‘Sterne, L.’, the name on the email address that had sent the pictures of Betty’s body. She turned to the entry and found that it was on the page following the engraving of the hanged figures. The text read:
In the same year, 1767, a philosophical tract of baffling obscurity entitled Remarks on the Writings and
Conduct of J.J. Rousseau was published anonymously in
London. At first it was attributed to Lawrence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, but before long the real author was discovered to be ‘one Fuseli, an Engraver’.
She lay her head back, trying to understand. It was as if the Fuseli book were a road map to the murders. What else might it contain? Then she had another idea. At the back of the book was an appendix with a comprehensive listing of every painting and drawing Fuseli was known to have done. It ran to thirty-four pages. She turned to the first page and began to work through it.
Morris Munns had been the acknowledged genius of the laboratory’s Photography Unit for longer than anyone could remember. A stocky, balding cockney with thick-lensed glasses, he had helped Brock many times before, on one occasion conjuring an attacker’s boot print from the deep bruising on a woman’s body three months after the event.
‘I made it a priority as soon as I realised what it was, of course,’ he said, spreading the four photographs on the table between them. ‘That little girl… the worst sort of case. Who took these, do we know?’
‘They’ve come to us from the solicitor of the chief suspect, Robert Wylie.’
‘Who you think also took the photographs we found in the flat, right?’
‘That’s right. One of the questions I have is whether they’ve been taken with the same camera.’
‘Yes, I thought you’d ask that. These are all digital pictures, as were the ones in the flat. We have that camera, of course, which is lucky, because it has a small scratch on the optical zoom lens, that we’ve been able to relate to a faint distortion in the digital images. We reckon we can prove to a jury’s satisfaction that that camera took the pictures you found in the flat.’
‘And these?’
Morris pointed to the first three, with Tracey in the street and on Beaufort’s knee, and Beaufort touching the naked child.‘I can make out the same effect on these three, yes, but not on the other one. They’re also different in other ways. These three have been enhanced, I’d say, but I’m fairly sure they’re genuine images, integral with their background. The shadows, the reflected light-I couldn’t swear to it in court, but I’d say they’re not fakes. But this one…’ He picked up the remaining picture with disgust.‘Pure phoney, and not very good at that. The faces have been pasted onto a scene taken with another camera altogether. It’s a con.’
‘Thank you, Morris, that’s helpful.’
‘There’s something else. I don’t know if you’ve been able to identify the location of numbers two and three, have you? The girl on the old bloke’s knee?’
‘No, the backgrounds are out of focus.’
‘Deliberately made to be, I’d say. Anyway, I’ve had a go at sharpening it up for you.’ He produced new versions, in which the shadowy grid of lines in the background emerged as the frame of a large industrial window. Brock immediately recognised the big windows in the artists’ workshops at The Pie Factory.
‘Ah.’
‘Mean something?’
‘Yes, I think it does. You’ve been a great help, as always.’ Brock gathered up the pictures.
‘So the old bloke’s involved, too, is he?’
‘Maybe. But it’s hard to know what’s fake and what’s real these days, isn’t it?’
‘Picture number three is the clincher, I reckon, with the girl naked. I’d swear it’s real. Who is he, anyway?’
‘I’ll tell you one day, Morris, but at the moment you don’t want to know. Has anyone else seen these?’
‘No, I dealt with it myself, like you said in your note.’
‘Thanks. Let’s keep it that way.’
When he got back to his car Brock called the solicitor, Russell Clifford, and made arrangements to meet him and his client. Wylie would be brought under escort to Shoreditch police station where the interview would be
