He wasn’t sure I’d turn up, she thought. And he’s nervous, nervous as hell. He could’ve stayed in his office, had someone send me up to him when he was ready - but he didn’t. He came down here, all the way down from the top, and he waited for me.
He shifted position; pulled himself to standing, slow as an iceberg despite his excitement.
No, she corrected herself, feeling the low-level guilt she’d lived with since leaving London wrap tighter around her guts. Not excitement. Hope.
“Who told him?” Karen had demanded back at Ruby’s new flat in West Hampstead, when El and Rose had laid out Soames’ plan and the dirt he had on all of them - the hold he had over them. “If he knows about what happened with Marchant, who fucking told him?”
Ruby, who’d sat stock-still and uncharacteristically silent through El’s enumeration of the trip to Herne Bay - what she and Rose had found there, the trap that Soames had laid for them - broke into dry, hollow laughter.
“You ain’t figured it out?” she said. “All them brains of yours, and you’re telling me you ain’t got even an inkling?”
Hannah, El thought - forcing herself to think the name, even if she wasn’t quite ready to say it aloud. She thinks Hannah’s the one feeding Soames his information.
“Her?” said Karen, apparently drawing the same inference but sharing El’s reluctance to give voice to it.
“Makes sense, don’t it?” Ruby replied. She sounded… not beaten, exactly, but pensive: a tired boxer with a haematoma and a bloody lip, weighing up a strategy for the seventh round. “We knew she’d come out of the woodwork eventually.”
“Say that’s true,” said Rose. “How would she know to reach out to Soames? She’d have been a teenager when he was sentenced. And they’re hardly obvious bedfellows.”
Ruby shrugged.
“I don’t know, do I?” she answered. “Could be they had someone in common - a mate in Hendon, or what have you. Could be he heard she were sniffing around for something on us, and he reached out to her.”
“‘People talk,’” El said, remembering Soames hunched over in his chair, the gleeful clasping of his hands. “That was what he kept saying. ‘People talk.’”
“Bleedin’ right they do,” said Ruby. “‘Specially in the nick. It’s wall-to-wall gossip in them cells.”
“Fuck all else to do inside, is there?” Karen added. “My Uncle Perce did eighteen months in Gartree. Said his ears never stopped ringing from people trying to tell him shit he didn’t want to hear.”
“Regardless of how he knows,” said Sita, the brittle edge to her tone suggesting that her normally elastic patience was stretching to its limits, “we can be sure that he does know, and that he’s intent on using what he knows. Which leaves us, I’m afraid, in rather a difficult position. Because I can’t, from all that El has told us, conceive of a single way forward beyond our doing exactly what he asks of us.”
Wainwright took her, not to his office, but to an empty conference room on the ground floor - a sparse, impersonal space decorated with posters of young adults, male and female, modelling bootcut jeans, vest tops, denim shirts and polka dot blouses in a range of wholesome Alpine settings for which, in her opinion, not one item of the clothing would be practical.
“They’re from the summer catalogue,” Wainwright said, catching her staring. “Can’t say much of it’s to my tastes, but the girls in Merchandising seem to know what they’re doing, so I let them get on with it, mostly.”
He pulled out a chair for her from the conference table, and another for himself directly across from hers. She took his lead and sat, unzipped the laptop case and placed the computer on top of it - gently, reverently.
“Your program on there, is it?” he asked, gesturing to the laptop. There was sweat on his upper lip, she noticed; three small beads of it, nestled in the dense grey hair of his moustaches.
“Do you want me to run you through the demo?” she offered. “I’ve got it down to a fine art now, with all the meetings I’ve had this week.”
“If you don’t mind?” he said.
She shrugged, diffidently - this other Angela Di Salvo still a little confused, or so the shrug said, by what interest a man who ran a chain of clothes shops could possibly have in age-progression software, especially when it was still technically at the testing stage, but willing to go along with that interest if it might lead, somewhere down the line, to a sale. Then opened the laptop, beaming blue light onto the white wall behind her.
“Give me a second to load it up,” she said. Her screen shielded from him, at least temporarily, she double-clicked the program file on the desktop, exactly as Karen had instructed her to before she’d left the house in Presidio Heights that morning: a tiny, innocuous-looking digital square marked DORIANGRAY.EXE. It opened, filling the screen with a single image: a close-up, high-resolution shot of a blonde, blue-eyed child, perhaps ten years old, smiling happily at whoever had taken her picture.
(“Who is she?” El had asked Karen, when she’d first seen the program in action.
“Fergus’ sister Becky, about twenty years ago,” Karen had answered with a grin. “I robbed it out of one of his photo albums before we left. It was her or a kid off an advert, and I thought Becky might be a bit more, you know… inconspicuous”).
“Ready?” El asked Wainwright.
He nodded.
She turned the laptop around so that the screen faced him and pressed the Enter key. A scattering of green dots materialised on the child’s digitised face - her cheeks, her chin and forehead, the bridge of her nose.
“Who is she?” Wainwright said, squinting at the image.
“My cousin Lila, when she was little,” El lied. “I need permission to share the photographs of anyone I show to potential investors, and I knew she wouldn’t sue me if I shared hers, so I’ve been using her as a guinea pig.”
A connecting line appeared between two of the dots, then another line between two more, and another, until the girl’s face was a mesh of intersecting stria.
“What’s it doing?” asked Wainwright.
“Collecting information,” El replied. “It analyses the position of specific facial features in relation to others, then calculates how those features are likely to change as the subject ages. Keep watching.”
The lines vanished, then the dots, until the girl’s face was perfectly clear again. Then it began to change - the jaw and chin narrowing, the ears appearing to grow very slightly, the forehead enlarging and the lips thinning.
“This is how the program thinks Lila would have looked at fourteen,” El said.
On the screen the pixels blurred, and the face began to change for a second time - the cheeks filling back out, the hairline ebbing and flowing to a widow’s peak, the tip of the nose sharpening.
“And this is how it thinks she’d look at eighteen,” she continued.
The image shifted again, this time more subtly. Now the girl was well into adulthood – twenty-four or -five, her features still sharp but the smallest of lines beginning to develop around her eyes and mouth.
“And in her mid-twenties,” El said.
The girl’s nose began to thicken once again at the base as her hairline rose an eighth of an inch higher on her head and the earliest beginnings of a wrinkle darkened between her brows.
“And this is its best guess at how she’d look at thirty,” she concluded, pressing the Space bar and freezing the girl in the least youthful of her iterations.
“Bloody incredible, that is,” Wainwright said, his eyes glued to the screen. “And it’s accurate? She really does look like this now, this Lila?”
“Oh, yeah,” said El, a note of stage magician triumph creeping into Angela Di Salvo’s voice. She’d sawn the girl in the box in half, it said, but don’t worry – she knew just how to put her back together.
She pressed the Escape key, and the girl’s face disappeared, replaced by the laptop’s almost empty desktop. With a flick of the touchpad, she moved
the cursor across the screen to hover over an image file, this one labelled LILA.JPEG.
She double-clicked, and another image took over the screen - a conventionally pretty thirtysomething woman in a wedding dress and veil, clutching a bouquet and beaming at the camera.
Her face was, undeniably, the face of the woman the program had created for them a moment before - the adult evolution of the blue-eyed, blonde-haired child.
“I don’t believe it,” said Wainwright breathlessly. “I don’t bloody believe it.”
(“She spent nearly a grand on that dress,” Karen had said, tapping a finger on the digitised version of the other photo of Becky she’d stolen from Fergus’s album. “You gotta feel bad for her. Turns out he was shagging half the wedding party - the marriage only lasted six weeks”).
“It’s not bad, is it?” said El, Angela Di Salvo’s pride in her work shining through.
Wainwright was awestruck, still seemingly unable to tear himself away from the second image - a dazed supplicant gazing up into the face of God.
“It’s incredible,” he said, in what was almost a whisper. “Absolutely bloody incredible.”
“It won’t be easy,” El had said to the rest of them, that night in West Hampstead, when the decision was made and they’d started, very tacitly, to make a plan. “Wainwright’s not in London. He’s not even in this country anymore. He’s got a US passport and half his business is in the States - he was on licence for a bit when he was first released, but as soon as he could he hopped a flight to San Francisco and he hasn’t been back since. He’s not a big fan of the British press after what happened - Soames thinks getting away from them was part of what made him want to leave.”
“San Francisco?” Sita had said, head cocked in a way that had strongly suggested to El that the seed of another idea had been planted, one that might very soon begin to germinate.
“Yeah,” she’d replied.
“Silicon Valley?”
“Not that far out, I don’t think,” El had answered - not understanding where Sita was heading, not yet. “I can check. But the Fine Cloth HQ is right in the middle of the city, so he’ll probably be near there, somewhere?”
“Still,” Sita had said quietly, lost in thought, “close enough. Certainly close enough.”
She’d turned her attention to Karen.
“How long,” she’d asked, “would it take you, hypothetically, to write us one of those computer programs you’re so good with?”
“Does it work on anyone?” Wainwright said. “I mean, could it do this on any photo you give it?”
El appeared to give this some consideration.
“Not any photo,” she told him, showing every indication of wanting to hedge her bets - of not wanting to oversell her creation, however revolutionary she might privately believe that creation to be. “You’d need a head shot, face-on, and reasonably close up ideally. There’d have to be enough identifying features for the algorithm to scan and build out from. And the lighting would have to be decent, too. You couldn’t just upload, I don’t know… a polaroid of someone dancing in a nightclub with their head down.”
“Makes sense,” Wainwright agreed.
“That’s not a huge limitation, obviously, if you licensed it to, say, the police or the Marshals Service - people looking to catch criminals who were known to them already. Something like a mugshot would give you more than enough to work with. And of course,” she added, almost as an afterthought, as if the point were barely worth making, “it’d have to be a digital file. Any photo you used, it’d have to be in a format the program would actually recognise.”
(“You tell him that,” Karen had said, back at the house, “and things’ll go one of two ways. Either he’s got no fucking clue what a digital file is, and we’re looking at a bit of a delay while he works out how to scan an old photo or take it to a print shop that can do it for him. Or he’s a bit more on the ball, and he’ll have whatever photo he wants to give you burned to CD or ready to go on a memory card. He’s old, so that last one’s less likely. But then, if he’s been sending emails out to private detectives left, right and centre and he knows his way around the internet… well, you never know. You might get lucky”).
Wainwright drew the knuckle of one finger across his moustaches, wiping away the sweat that had gathered there.
“If I had a picture,” he asked, “and it were already on, say, a compact disc you could shove straight in the computer… would that do? Would that software of yours be able to do the business with it?”
“I don’t see why not,” El said - Angela Di Salvo still humouring him, still bemused but playing along. “What’s the picture?”
He held up a hand to ward off further questions.
“Wait here,” he said. “I won’t be two minutes. There’s something I need to get from upstairs.”
He leapt up from his chair and out of the door faster than she thought his bowed legs could carry him. And he really was two minutes, bursting back into the room so soon after he’d departed it that she’d only half-finished loading up the software that she’d need for the convincer - the river of fresh sweat rolling down his collar and the heart attack-red of his complexion telling her he’d taken the stairs to his office at an Olympic sprint.
He thrust a damp hand out towards her. Around the middle finger, suspended in the air like a spinning plate, was an unmarked silver disc.
“This,” he started breathlessly. “There’s a photo on it. Only one. But it should be alright for what you’re after. Can you do it? Make it change - make her change? Make her older?”
“Like Australia,” said Ruby, when Sita had finished explaining the idea she’d begun to cultivate. “Perth, in ’69 - the old bastard with the iron mine and the son he chucked out for getting hitched to that Greek girl. That’s it, ain’t it? That’s what you’re proposin’.”
El had bitten her tongue, resigned by now to these conversational ellipses.
“After a fashion,” Sita had replied. “Something a touch more modern than that one, of course. But a similar premise.”
Ruby had thought this over.
“Wouldn’t work,” she’d said after a while. “You couldn’t have El play the inside, not for that.”
“What are you saying?” El had countered, annoyed by the dismissal even in the absence of the appropriate information. “You think I’m not up to it?”
“I think,” Ruby had told her, “that Wainwright’s about as pale as milk. You not seen him in the papers? And if it’s the ‘50s we’re talking when that little girl got took, then chances are his missus was an’ all. I don’t know what the hell she’d look like these days, if she were still with us, but she wouldn’t have your colouring, I know that much. Besides,” she’d added, “that kid’d be forty-odd now. And good as you might be, and convincing as you are in your corporate get-up, I happen to know you still have to get your passport out to buy a pack of them fags you never stop smoking.”
El had begun to formulate a reply, still unsure of which part of Ruby’s premise she ought to find the most offensive when Sita had spoken up - at first, El had thought, to defend her honour.
“I can’t disagree,” she’d said, to El’s displeasure. “But rather fortunately, it wasn’t El I had in mind…”
The digital photograph that filled the screen was older by far than the one of Fergus’ luckless, only briefly married sister - a black and white portrait, creased at the edges by time and handling. The subject was an infant: a baby girl, perhaps a year old, light curls falling down onto her chubby cheeks.
“Who’s this?” El asked.
“My daughter,” Wainwright answered.
The same green dots as before appeared on the screen, swirling around the child’s face before settling on her eyes, chin, nose and cheekbones - then the lines, connecting eyes to cheeks, nose to chin in the same, seemingly random geometric pattern.
The dots vanished, as before, and the face began to change - cycling through child
hood and early adolescence, the contours of the girl’s features moving and reshaping as she aged.
Wainwright’s breathing kept apace with the changes, every pixellated shift and slide of the image inciting a new intake of air, and then a longer pause as the breath was held.
“How old do you want to go?” El asked, pausing the image at, she judged, somewhere around twenty two.
“Forty four,” Wainwright said, the words tumbling out of him. “Go to forty four.”
El raised an eyebrow that conveyed - she hoped - at least some of Angela Di Salvo’s perplexity, then nodded, and pressed the Enter key again.
On the face cycled, taking the girl on the screen further into her twenties, then her thirties - faint dark circles growing underneath her eyes, and small creases beginning to develop in the triangle between nose and mouth.
“Nearly there,” El said, her hand hovering over the Enter key.
The face shifted again, propelling the girl - now firmly a woman - out of her thirties, and into her early forties.
El pressed the Enter key. The image stalled again.
And there, on the screen, her features frozen in black and white, was Rose.
Chapter 16
West Hampstead, London
July 1997
“Rose?” Ruby had replied, as surprised as El had been by Sita’s suggestion. “She ain’t a grifter. Nothing personal, love,” she’d added to Rose herself, “but a job like this... it needs a bit of experience. A bit of finesse, know what I mean? It ain’t straightforward.”
Rose, who’d worn a look of wide-eyed terror from the moment her playing the inside had been mooted, had nodded in vigorous agreement.
“It goes without saying that I’ll do whatever I can to help, of course,” she’d said. “But I really don’t think I’m right for this. Could we call in Kat, perhaps? She’s not so far off my age, and I don’t doubt she could pull it off.”
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 14