Free No Trace by Barry Maitland

there may still be something to be got from it.’
    He saw Kathy’s puzzled look and went on. ‘The man we’re looking for is watching those broadcasts too. Have you thought that he may be tempted to pay another visit? Enjoy the circus he’s created?’
    She hadn’t thought of that, although she realised she should have.
    ‘We’re monitoring the square with cameras, but that’s not the same as a good pair of eyes on the ground.You may spot something. Stick it out till the end of the week, okay? Then we’ll see. And in the meantime, talk to Bren. See if he’s come up with anything that strikes a chord with you.’
    She nodded, chastened, and he added, ‘Missing children are the worst thing, Kathy. I know. We mustn’t let it get to us.’ They were silent for a moment, he thinking of the pictures of the girls that Kathy had pinned beside her desk both here at Shoreditch and in her regular office at Queen Anne’s Gate, and she wondering if he was making false assumptions about her vulnerability.
    ‘I’ll talk to Bren,’ she said, and turned away.
    She found him, shoulders bowed, poring over a printed list, highlighting names with a green marker. A steady man, quietly spoken, he usually exuded confidence but now looked defeated.
    ‘Hi, Bren.’
    He lifted his head. ‘Hi, Kathy. Got any goodies for us? We could do with something.’
    ‘No progress?’
    ‘Nothing to speak of.’ He passed a hand over his eyes and yawned. He had three girls of his own, Kathy knew, and he had thrown himself into this case as if it were a personal quest. ‘This is driving me crazy, Kathy. It really is.’ He handed her an envelope with her name on it. ‘We’ve all had one,’ he said as she unsealed it to find an invitation to the opening of No Trace .‘Load of rubbish.’
    ‘Brock suggested I sit down with you sometime and go through what you’ve turned up.’
    ‘Good idea, I could do with a fresh brain. Tomorrow morning? Eightish?’
    ‘I’ll be here.’
    She thought about Brock as she sat in the bright capsule of the underground train on the way back to Finchley Central, and about Gabriel Rudd, both running their teams, keeping them fed with ideas, dogged by the possibility of failure. She reached her station and tramped through the dark streets to her block of flats, where she took the lift to the twelfth floor. She was thankful now for the silence and peace of her flat, although at other times she dreaded the first sense of emptiness, of Leon gone. She microwaved a meal and sat by the window, the curtains open, looking out over the city. Brock’s dilemma was a bit like Gabe’s, she thought, a visual or conceptual one. How to recognise a good idea when a less good one might deflect the whole project and soak up crucial time and resources?
    She took the book she’d bought at the gallery out of its paper bag. The cover was perfectly white, with the title spelled out in letters cut from newspapers, as in a ransom note. Inside, Fergus Tait’s introduction to his vision of The Pie Factory read like an overenthusiastic advertisement for a new cosmetic, Kathy thought, but at least it was intelligible. When she reached the main text, written by a professor of media arts, she floundered. The first sentence ran:
    In the high art lite world in which the barely mediated procedures of Post-Minimalist convention reprise Modernist discourse in terms of docusoap myth, and what passes for British culture privileges a new ontological realm of narrative trite, the artistic production of The Pie Factory, the latest Britart powerhouse of London’s Shoreditch/Hoxton (ShoHo) district, offers a stunning new avatar of the memorialising tendencies of the avant-garde.
    She tried it again, a word at a time, but that didn’t help, so she just looked at the pictures and resolved to try the web.

6
    A s she walked from the tube to the police station the next morning, Kathy noticed that the posters she’d seen everywhere the previous night had