by Dick Francis
Kinship positively beamed and tucked his pictures back into the envelope. “Two more sets,” he said. “Right?”
“Right.”
He nodded and walked away, and before he’d gone ten paces he was pulling the pictures out again to show them to someone else.
“He’ll get you a lot of work if you don’t look out,” Jeremy said, watching.
I didn’t know whether or not I wanted to believe him, and in any case my attention was caught by something much more extraordinary. I stood very still and stared.
“Do you see,” I said to Jeremy, “those two men over there, talking?”
“Of course I see them.”
“One of them is Bart Underfield, who trains in Lambourn. And the other is one of the men in that photograph of the French cafe. That’s Elgin Yaxley . . . come home from Hong Kong.”
Three weeks after George’s death, two weeks after the burning of his house; and Elgin Yaxley was back on the scene.
I had jumped to conclusions before, but surely this time it was reasonable to suppose that Elgin Yaxley believed the incriminating photograph had safely gone up in smoke. Reasonable to suppose, watching him standing there expansively smiling and full of confidence, that he felt freed and secure. When a blackmailer and all his possessions were cremated, his victims rejoiced.
Jeremy said, “It can’t be coincidence.”
“No.”
“He looks pretty smug.”
“He’s a creep.”
Jeremy glanced at me. “You’ve still got that photo?”
“I sure have.”
We stood for a while looking on while Elgin Yaxley clapped Bart Underfield on the back and smiled like a crocodile and Bart Underfield looked happier than he had since the trial.
“What will you do with it?”
“Just wait, I suppose,” I said, “to see what happens.”
“I think I was wrong,” Jeremy said thoughtfully, “to say you should burn all those things in the box.”
“Mm,” I smiled faintly. “Tomorrow I’ll have a go at the blue oblongs.”
“So you’ve worked out how?”
“Well, I hope so. Have to see.”
“How, then?”
He looked genuinely interested, his eyes switching from their customary scanning of the neighborhood to a steady ten seconds in my direction.
“Um . . . do you want a lecture on the nature of light, or just the proposed order of events?”
“No lecture.”
“OK. Then I think if I enlarge the orange negatives through blue light onto high-contrast black-and-white paper I might get a picture.”
He blinked. “In black and white?”
“With luck.”
“How do you get blue light?”
“That’s rather where the lecture comes in,” I said. “Do you want to watch the last race?”
We had a slight return of angular elbow movements and of standing on one leg, all on account, I guessed, of squaring the solicitorial conscience with the condoning of gambling.
I had done him an injustice, however. When we were watching on the stands for the race to start he said, “I did . . . ah . . . in point of fact. . .er. . .watch you ride . . . this afternoon.”
“Did you?”
“I thought . . . it, ah, might be instructive.”
“And how did it grab you?”
“To be honest,” he said, “rather you than me.”
He told me, as we drove towards St. Albans, about his researches into the television company.
“I got them to show me the credits, as you suggested, and I asked if they could put me in touch with anyone who worked on the play at Pine Woods Lodge. It was only a single play, by the way. The unit was there for only about six weeks.”
“Not very promising,” I said.
“No. Anyway, they told me where to find the director. Still working in television. Very dour and depressing man, all grunts and heavy moustache. He was sitting on the side of a road in Streatham watching some electricians holding a union meeting before they went on strike and refused to light the scene he wanted to shoot in a church porch. His mood, in a word, was vile.”
“I can imagine.”
“I’m afraid,” Jeremy said regretfully, “that he wasn’t much help. Thirteen years ago? How the hell did I expect him to remember one crummy six weeks thirteen years ago? How the hell did I expect him to remember some crummy girl with a crummy brat? And much more to that effect. The only positive thing he said was that if he’d been directing there would have been no crummy hangers on anywhere near Pine Woods Lodge. He couldn’t stand outsiders hanging about when he was working, and would I, too, please get the hell out.”
“Pity.”
“After that I tracked down one of the main actors in the play, who is temporarily working in an art gallery, and got much the same answer. Thirteen years? Girl with small child? Not a chance.”
I sighed. “I had great hopes of the television lot.”
“I could carry on,” Jeremy said. “They aren’t difficult to find. I just rang up a few agents to get the actor.”
“It’s up to you, really.”
“I think I might.”
“How long were the musicians there?” I said.
Jeremy fished out a by now rather worn-looking piece of paper, and consulted it.
“Three months, give or take a week.”
“And after them?”
“The religious fanatics.” He grimaced. “I don’t suppose your mother was religious?”
“Heathen.”
“It’s all so long ago.”
“Mm.” I said. “Why don’t we try something else? Why not publish Amanda’s photograph in the Horse and Hound, and ask specifically for an identification of the stable. Those buildings are probably still standing, and looking just the same.”
“Wouldn’t a big enough picture cost a lot?”
“Not compared with private detectives.” I reflected. “I think the Horse and Hound charges for space, not for what you put in it. Photographs cost no more than words. So I could make a good sharp black-and-white print of Amanda . . . and we could at least see.”
He sighed. “OK, then. But I can see the final expenses of this search costing more than the inheritance.”
I glanced at him. “Just how rich is she . . . my grandmother?”
“She may be broke, for all I know. She’s incredibly secretive. I dare say her accountant has some idea, but he makes a clam look sloppy.”
We reached St. Albans and detoured around to the nursing home; and, while Jeremy read old copies of The Lady in the waiting room, I talked upstairs with the dying old woman.
Sitting up, supported by pillows, she watched me walk into her room. The strong harsh face was still full of stubborn life, the eyes as unrelentingly fierce. She said not something gentle like “Hallo” or “Good evening,” but merely “Have you found her?”
“No.”
She compressed her mouth. “Are you trying?”
“Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’ve used some of my spare time looking for her but not my whole life.”
She stared at me with narrowed eyes, and presently I sat in the visitor’s armchair and continued to stare back.
“I went to see your son,” I said.
Her face melted for a passing moment into an unguarded and revealing mixture of rage and disgust, and with a sense of surprise I saw the passion of her disappointment. I had already understood that a non-marrying non-child-producing son had essentially robbed her not of daughter-in-law and grandchildren as such, to whom on known form she might anyway have behaved tyranically, but of continuation itself; but I certainly hadn’t realized that her search for Amanda sprang from obsession and not pique.
“Your genes to go on,” I said slowly. “Is that what you want?”
“Death is pointless otherwise.”
I thought that life itself was pretty poin
tless, but I didn’t say so. One woke up alive, and did what one could, and died. Perhaps she was in fact right . . . that the point of life was for genes to go on. Genes surviving, through generations of bodies.
“Whether you like it or not,” I said, “your genes may go on through me.”
The idea still displeased her. The muscles tightened along her jaw, and it was in a hard unfriendly voice that at length she said, “That young solicitor thinks I should tell you who your father was.”
I stood up at once, unable to stay calm. Although I had come to find out, I now didn’t want to. I wanted to escape. To leave the room. Not to hear. I felt nervous in a way I hadn’t done for years, and my mouth was sticky and dry.
“Don’t you want to know?” she demanded.
“No.”
“Are you afraid?” She was scornful. Sneering.
I simply stood there, not answering, wanting to know and not wanting, afraid and not afraid: in an absolute muddle.
“I have hated your father since before you were born,” she said bitterly. “I can hardly bear even now to look at you, because you’re like him . . . like he was at your age. Thin . . . and physical . . . and with the same eyes.”
I swallowed, and waited, and felt numb.
“I loved him,” she said, spitting the words out as if they themselves offended her. “I doted on him. He was thirty and I was forty-four. I’d been a widow for five years . . . I was lonely. Then he came. He lived with me . . . and we were going to marry. I adored him. I was stupid.”
She stopped. There really was no need to go on. I knew all the rest. All the hatred she had felt for me all those years was finally explained. So simply explained . . . and understood . . . and forgiven. Against all expectations what I suddenly felt for my grandmother was pity.
I took a deep breath. I said, “Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him or heard of him since.”
“And what . . . was his name?”
She stared at me straightly, nothing in her own persistent hatred being changed a scrap. “I’m not going to tell you. I don’t want you seeking him out. He ruined my life. He bedded my seventeen-year-old daughter under my own roof and he was after my money. That’s the sort of man your father was. The only favor I’ll do you is not to tell you his name. So be satisfied.”
I nodded. I made a vague gesture with one hand and said awkwardly, “I’m sorry.”
Her scowl if anything deepened.
“Now find Amanda for me,” she said. “That solicitor said you would, if I told you. So go away and do it.” She closed her eyes and looked immediately more ill, more vulnerable. “I don’t like you,” she said. “So go away.”
“Well?” Jeremy said, downstairs.
“She told me.”
“The milkman?”
“Near enough.” I relayed to him the gist of it, and his reaction was the same as mine.
“Poor old woman.”
“I could do with a drink,” I said.
13
In printing color photographs one’s aim was usually to produce a result that looked natural, and this was nowhere near as easy as it sounded. Apart from trifles like sharp focus and the best length and brightness of exposure, there was the matter of color itself, which came out differently on each make of film, and on each type of photographic printing paper, and even on paper from two boxes of the same type from the same manufacturer: the reason for this being that the four ultra-thin layers of emulsion laid onto color printing paper varied slightly from batch to batch. In the same way that it was almost impossible to dye two pieces of cloth in different dye baths and produce an identical result, so it was with light-sensitive emulsions.
To even this out and persuade all colors to look natural, one used color filters—pieces of colored glass inserted between the bright light on the enlarger and the negative. Get the mixture of filters right, and in the finished print blue eyes came out blue and cherry lips, cherry.
In my enlarger, as on the majority, the three filters were the same colors as the colors of negatives, yellow, magenta and cyan. Using all three filters together produced gray, so one used only two at once, and those two, as far as my sort of photographs were concerned, were always yellow and magenta. Used in delicate balance they could produce skin colors that were neither too yellow nor too pink for human faces, and it was to a natural looking skin color that one normally geared one’s prints.
However, if one put a square of magenta-colored glass on a square of yellow-colored glass and shone a light through both together, one saw the result as red.
Shine a light through yellow and cyan, and you got green. And through magenta and cyan . . . a pure royal blue.
I had been confused when Charlie had first shown me, because mixing colored light produced dramatically different results from mixing colored paints. Even the primary colors were different. Forget paint, Charlie had said. This is light. You can’t make blue by mixing other colored paints, but you can with light.
“Cyan?” I’d said. “Like cyanide?”
“Cyanide turns you blue,” he said. “Cyan is a Greek word for blue. Kyanos. Don’t forget. Cyan is greeny blue, and not surprisingly you get it by mixing blue light with green.”
“You do?” I’d said doubtfully, and he had shown me the six colors of light, and mixed them for me before my eyes until I got their relationship fixed in my head forever, until they were as basic in my brain as the shape of letters.
In the beginning were red, green, and blue. I went into my darkroom on that fateful Sunday morning and adjusted the filters in the head of the enlarger so that the light which shone through the negatives would be that unheard-of combination for normal printing: full cyan and full magenta filtration, producing a deep clear blue.
I was going to print George’s blank color negatives onto black-and-white paper, which would certainly rid me of the blue of the oblongs: but all I might get instead were gray oblongs.
Black-and-white printing paper was sensitive only to blue light (which was why one could print in black and white in red safe-light). I thought that if I printed the blank-looking negatives through heavy pure blue filtration I might get a greater contrast between the yellow dye image on the negative and the orange mask covering it. Make the image, in fact, emerge from its surroundings.
I had a feeling that whatever was hidden by the mask would not itself be sharply black and white anyway . . . because if it had been it would have been visible through and in spite of the blue. What I was looking for would in itself be some sort of gray.
I set out the trays of developer and stop bath and fixer, and put all of the first thirty-six unblotched negatives into a contact-printing frame. In this way the negative was held directly against the printing paper when the light was passed through it, so that the print, when finished, was exactly the same size as the negative. The frame merely held all the negatives conveniently so that all thirty-six could be printed at once onto one eight-by-ten-inch sheet of paper.
Getting the exposure time right was the biggest difficulty, chiefly because the heavy blue filtration meant that the light getting to the negatives was far dimmer than I was used to. I wasted about six shots in tests, getting useless results from gray to black, all the little oblongs still stubbornly looking as if there was nothing on them to see, whatever I did.
Finally in irritation I cut down the exposure time to far below what it was reasonable to think right, and came up with a print that was almost entirely white. I stood in the dim red light watching the white sheet lie in the developer with practically nothing happening except that the frame numbers of the negatives very palely appeared, followed by faint lines showing where the edges of the negatives had been.
Sighing with frustration I left it in the developer until nothing else emerged, and then feeling depressed dipped it in the stop bath and then fixed it and washed it, and switched on the bright lights.
Five of the oblongs were not entirely whit
e. Five of the little oblongs, scattered at random through the thirty-six, bore very pale gray geometric shapes.
I had found them.
I could feel myself smiling with ridiculous joy. George had left a puzzle, and I had almost solved it. If I was going to take his place, it was right that I should.
If I . . . My God, I thought. Where did thoughts come from? I had no intention of taking his place. No conscious intention. That thought had come straight from the subconscious, unbidden, unwanted.
I shivered slightly and felt vaguely alarmed, and without any smile at all wrote down the frame numbers of the five gray-patterned prints. Then I wandered around the house for a while doing mindless jobs like tidying the bedroom and shaking out the beanbags and stacking a few things in the dishwasher. Made a cup of coffee and sat down in the kitchen to drink it. Considered walking down to the village to fetch a Sunday paper, and instead went compulsively back to the darkroom.
It made all the difference knowing which negatives to look at, and roughly what to look for.
I took the first one numerically, which happened to be number seven, and enlarged it to the full size of the ten-by-eight-inch paper. A couple more bad guesses at exposure times left me with unclear dark gray prints, but in the end I came up with one which developed into mid-gray on white; I took it out of the developer as soon as it had reached its peak of contrast, and stopped it and fixed it and washed it, and carried it out to the daylight in the kitchen.
Although the print was still wet, one could see exactly what it was. One could read it without difficulty. A typewritten letter starting, “Dear Mr. Morton” and ending “Yours sincerely, George Millace.”
A letter typed onto white paper with an old grayish ribbon, so that the typing itself looked pale gray. Pale gray, but distinct.
The letter said:
Dear Mr. Morton,
I am sure you will be interested in the enclosed two photographs. As you will see, the first one is a picture of your horse Amber Globe running poorly in your colors in the two-thirty race at Southwell on Monday, May 12th.
As you will also see, the second picture is of your horse Amber Globe winning the four o’clock race at Fontwell on Wednesday, August 27th.