by Sam Baker
A body, believed to be that of British journalist Arthur Huntingdon, 46, has been found after a fire destroyed the building in which he lived in an exclusive Paris square. Huntingdon, who was last seen over two weeks ago, was estranged from the photographer Helen Lawrence. Police also seek Ms Lawrence to eliminate her from their enquiries.
19
‘I thought you might be here …’
She turned at the voice and saw Gil stopped at the stile behind her, holding one of the posts with one hand and bent forward as if catching his breath. ‘Climbed the hill a bit too fast.’
‘Were you looking for me?’ She slid her camera into her backpack, trying to conceal her irritation. She’d hoped, by letting him know she knew his interest wasn’t purely neighbourly, she’d be able to stall him a while longer.
He hesitated, just a fraction too long, and obviously knew it because he said, ‘I was hoping to run into you, yes.’
‘Why? Other than that you clearly enjoy my company.’
Gil blinked, and flushed a little more.
He looked around him, forgetting her question and his embarrassment, simply seeing the view; long stretches of rolling dale and gorse and the smudge of another world in the far distance. Helen was impressed. She liked people who could see. So many people couldn’t. Most of those who could were like her and looked at the world through a lens of some kind.
‘Just the retired journalist in me, I guess,’ said Gil, calling her bluff.
Helen felt her face flicker, saw him clock it.
‘You don’t like journalists?’
She shrugged. ‘I can take them or leave them.’
‘But you’ve met some.’
When she didn’t reply, he smiled. ‘I thought so. Most people haven’t. They think what they see on the TV is the truth. We’re either scumbags or truth-seeking saints.’
Helen raised her eyebrows. ‘And which are you?’
‘Neither. For most of us this is—’
‘Just a job?’
‘You really have met some, haven’t you? Do you know what they say about you in the village?’
‘No, but I don’t doubt you’ll tell me.’ He was driving at something. Helen wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know what.
‘Half of them think you’re a rock star.’
Helen contemplated pointing out that rock stars were an endangered species, about as common as snow tigers and white rhinos. A dozen still in captivity, maybe two. These days you might just about be a pop star but you were more likely to be a celeb, famous for five minutes, if you were lucky.
‘Not taken with the rock-star idea?’
‘And what do the other half think?’
‘You’re a rich bohemian. A painter or sculptor. But then you’d be up here with your oils and easel, or down at the house with a chisel or a chainsaw attacking some block of wood. Instead you’re up here with your Leica.’
They looked at each other.
‘It’s a good model,’ he said. ‘Old, but good. Serious.’
‘I used to be serious about photography,’ Helen found herself saying. ‘A fixed focal length like that means you have to think.’
Once he found his feet, Gil went on. ‘And it’s discreet. If you didn’t know better you’d think it was a toy. Our staff photographer was always after one of those. The editor wouldn’t sign off on one and he couldn’t afford his own. Then it all went digital.’
‘This one is digital.’
Gil raised his eyebrows. It looked theatrical, intentionally so. ‘That’s the other thing they say about you. That you’re a reclusive millionaire. Those don’t come cheap, so perhaps they’re right.’
‘And how do they think I got my money?’
‘Oh, various ways.’
‘I bet.’ Helen grinned.
At least he had the grace to blush, and even shuffled his shoes a little on the heather in a small boy kind of way. It hadn’t passed Helen by that he still hadn’t told her why he was looking for her.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Are you going to tell me why you’re here?’
He seemed to be right on the edge of one thing, and then he paused and said something else, and she got the feeling, from the sudden hunching of his shoulders, that the words coming out of his mouth surprised him too. ‘I’m avoiding telephoning my daughter.’
‘Why don’t you want to call her?’
He shrugged, and she could see he was tempted to leave it at that; but they were up on a windswept moor and this was a place for truth. She was putting what she felt on to her surroundings, Helen knew that. She even knew the name for it, pathetic fallacy, but it was true. Never trust someone who doesn’t read, never trust someone who’s not impressed by the mountains and the sea. She’d learnt that the hard way.
‘I never know what to say,’ he said at last.
‘Hello,’ Helen suggested. She wasn’t being facetious. ‘How are you …?’
‘Oh, we can do that bit. It’s everything else. Sometimes I write myself a list as if I’m about to go into conference, and I can hear myself working my way down it, ignoring her replies in my hurry to reach the next question.’
‘When did you last see her?’ she asked. He looked so uncomfortable, she almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
‘It’s been a while. She’s busy and her house isn’t very big and it’s a huge inconvenience to them having me there …’ Gil was gabbling now.
‘And you don’t want to go anyway?’
His eyes widened. ‘You don’t mince your words, do you?’
‘Sorry.’ She said it instantly and truthfully. He was right. Not that she’d ever felt the need to apologise for it before. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’
He shook off her apology with a shrug. ‘How about you?’ he said. ‘Do you have children?’
‘No,’ she said shortly.
He pretended to study a witch tree that looked so picturesque that someone could have lopped off its limbs and twisted it intentionally. Without thinking, Helen reached into her backpack for her Leica, moving slightly downhill to find a better angle.
‘I’m sorry …’
She stopped, her finger on the shutter button. ‘For what?’
‘That you never …’
‘Oh.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t think about it. Really. Well, hardly ever. What about you? Have they brought you happiness?’
He waited while she took the shot, fidgeting from foot to foot.
‘I’d better leave you in peace,’ he said, when she lowered the camera.
Far from helping him muster the courage to call his daughter, she’d upset him. I wonder, Helen thought, cross with herself, what it would have been like to have a daughter to call. Would it have been something to look forward to, or just another chore? She was selfish, driven, focused – call it what you wanted – enough to suspect it might have been a chore. Not that she was ever likely to find out.
‘I was pregnant once.’ The words were out of her mouth before she had a chance to think better of it.
He turned back towards her. ‘The timing was wrong?’
‘I lost it. Two months after we married. We never tried for another.’
‘Was that your decision? Or Art’s …?’
Helen stopped, took a deep breath.
So, he’d done it. That was why he’d come.
She was surprised to find that she wasn’t. It was the photograph of the boy that had done it. Deep down, once he’d seen it, she’d known from the way he reacted that it was only a matter of time. What difference did it make anyway? If it wasn’t him it would be someone else. If anything, it was almost a relief.
They faced each other and suddenly a twisted tree and the long line of the Dales seemed a lot less important.
All she wanted was to be away from there.
She was moving almost before she was aware of it, walking calmly but swiftly down the hill.
‘Helen, wait—’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘If you
don’t tell me you’ll only end up having to tell someone else,’ he raised his voice, so she could hear him over the wind. ‘Another journalist, the police. Don’t you want to put your side of the story? Why don’t you tell me what happened? You know I can’t just let this go …’
Afraid he was going to come after her, she walked faster, her body bent forward, fury and fear carrying her downwards.
Away, she had to get away.
As soon as she hit the shade of the copse that bordered Wildfell, she started running, vaulting the lychgate in two moves. She rarely used this way in, there was something sinister about the trees, they spooked her, but today the threat was behind her. She ran up the path and fumbled to get the key in the lock, slamming the door and locking it again behind her. In the kitchen, Ghost took one look at her and decided that if he was hungry he’d be better off feeding himself.
She looked around wildly. Coffee cups in the sink, breadboard on the side, Roberts radio chortling to itself. It was starting to look something like home. Well, so what? She didn’t need any of it. She had moved before, many times, and fast. She could do it again. She didn’t need anything she hadn’t come with. Only her laptop and her cameras.
Slamming the lid on the laptop, she scooped it off the table and ran upstairs, taking them two at a time. Grabbing her rucksack from the bedroom floor she stuffed her clothes into the bottom, dirty mixed with clean, running kit on top, and then went in search of her charger. She needed to be somewhere else. But where? She’d come almost to like Wildfell, she realised with a shock. Even with its noises and shadows. Got used to it, at least. Liked having the Dales behind her. This had become about more than hiding.
Here, for the first time, she felt strangely as if she belonged.
Not the people, not even the ramshackle wreck of a house, certainly not her … It was the silence, she realised. The silence and the space and the fact Wildfell’s ruin was nature’s revenge for building a pile on the edge of such a windswept wilderness. The holes in the roof were storm damage. Wind had ripped the biggest branch from the rotting oak tree. The wall below the terrace was broken by subsidence. She’d had enough of buildings split by mortar-fire and cars torn apart and overturned. She never wanted to see a burnt-out office block again.
Since the boy, that was all she’d photographed.
All she’d been able to photograph.
Broken buildings standing in for broken people. It was easier to look at damaged buildings, to look at them and see their damage. Marvel at the ruin; the firestorms and rain of shells that brought Beirut, Fallujah, Tripoli, Damascus to that state. You couldn’t do that with people. It was easier to look away. What was it T. S. Eliot said? ‘Humankind couldn’t bear too much reality?’ Something like that.
Below, Gil’s feet crunched the gravel and Helen stood back from the mullioned drawing-room window where she was stuffing her laptop charger into her rucksack. Gil looked around as if genuinely interested in the forecourt, and then looked behind him, as if suspecting he might be followed, then she saw him straighten his shoulders and take a deep breath before disappearing under the portico to lean on the bell. Somewhere deep inside the house the old bell clattered and clattered again, the flat sound suggesting the bell was cracked.
She stayed frozen two steps away from the window, grateful for her obsession with keeping everything locked.
He pushed again, harder this time, and the notes sounded below, flat and dull. He would have to go away eventually. He couldn’t stand there pushing the bell forever. He must know she wouldn’t answer.
When she next looked down he was staring up and she stepped smartly into the shadows, while he kept staring, uncertain whether he saw movement.
Just go, she willed him. Please. Let me go.
If her thoughts were enough, he’d be gone. Instead, he rummaged in his pocket for a pen, then searched for paper. What kind of journalist doesn’t carry a notebook, she wanted to shout at him. The useless kind. Except he’d found her, when she was trying so hard not to be found, so he couldn’t be that useless after all.
In disgust, he pulled a receipt from his wallet and ripped off part of it, dropping to a crouch and began to write. A note, she presumed. He halted halfway through, his head tipped to one side as if debating what to say. Then he put it on the mat, or she assumed he did, because he vanished briefly, but the letterbox didn’t clang, and then she heard his too-big feet crunching away down the gravel. That same slow, solemn pace.
She stood there for what seemed like hours to see if he came back. If he was waiting just around the corner to catch her when she came down. When fifteen minutes had passed without a sign, she cracked.
The note was simple, to the point.
I won’t tell anyone anything before we’ve talked. But we must talk. Call me …
A promise, and what might or might not be a threat, depending on how you read it. There was a mobile number too. Below that an email address.
Why did he think she would talk to him?
How could she think she wouldn’t?
Ghost padded up the gravel while she was crouched by the mat reading Gil’s scrawl. He shot her a glance to check her mood had improved, and decided to brave it, slipping in through the open door to spare himself the effort of entering via the water butt and broken pantry window. She glanced at her rucksack lying in the doorway, and then at the cat, who was glaring at it with contempt, and sighed.
Where did she think she’d run to?
What was to stop him going to the papers? He didn’t seem entirely happy with his just-retired status, maybe he still had something to prove. This would give him a story. Even if he didn’t, there was nothing to stop him going to the police. Her only option was to talk to him. That was how the press worked. Or that was how they wanted you to think it worked. Confide in them and you could control the story. Was that what Gil’s ungainly friendship had always been about?
She dropped the rucksack back inside with enough of a bang to send Ghost halfway up the first flight of stairs and then slumped on to the floor.
PART TWO
The Boy
‘Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction and death, and trying to bear witness. It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda …’
Marie Colvin (1956–2012)
20
The pub was already brightly lit and she could hear the noise from a suddenly opened door as two men tumbled out, talking loudly. Their conversation stilled as she passed and restarted, but quieter. She knew that if she turned they’d be looking at her, so she didn’t. She pushed the door open and the chatter inside dipped, then resolutely kept going.
Gil was at a table in the corner, staring forlornly at the murky amber of a half-empty pint, a crime novel lying face down, spine broken, beside it. Taking a deep breath of her own, she slid between two men in golf jumpers and pushed her way towards him. If he wanted her to talk, then talk she would.
‘I can’t do this here,’ she said when Gil looked up.
He opened his mouth and shut it again.
‘We’ll have to go back to the house. Wildfell, I mean. But you can’t come with me. Obviously.’ She inclined her head over her shoulder as if he wouldn’t know what she meant. ‘Give me ten minutes, then follow me.’
‘No.’ Gil drained his pint in one mouthful, propelling his seat backwards with his feet. ‘I’ll walk you.
‘It’s not for your sake,’ he added, seeing her expression. ‘Just don’t want you changing your mind.’
Helen shot a sidelong glance at those clustered round a big table to one side, empty pint pots herded into the middle. The ones looking at her, and that was practically all of them, glanced away. ‘What will they say?’
‘Does it matter?’
She surprised herself by nodding.
Gil shrugged. ‘You can understand my reluctance to let you out of my sight, surely?’
‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘I suppose I can.’
/> The entire pub watched them leave.
‘Where do you want me to start?’ Helen placed the cafetiere on the floor between them in the upstairs sitting room, before sliding her precious bottle of vodka from its perch under her arm.
She’d need it, even if Gil didn’t.
He watched her pour coffee into a mug, nodding first when she waved the milk carton at him, and again before she sloshed in a hefty slug of vodka. ‘At the beginning?’ he suggested, when she handed him his mug.
She didn’t return his smile. ‘You say that like I should know where it is.’
From the way he looked at her, she could tell he was trying to decide whether she was playing games. ‘Not me,’ she wanted to say. ‘One game-player is enough in any relationship.’
‘What I mean,’ Helen said instead, ‘is whose beginning? Mine or Art’s?’
For a second, he seemed to understand, but she recognised it for the old journalist’s trick it was. He would sit and he would be quiet and he would be sympathetic and if she stalled he would prod just enough to get her talking again.
‘D’you mind?’ he asked, waving his pack of B&H at her. Helen pushed a saucer towards him with her toe, shook her head when he offered her the packet.
‘Start,’ he said when he’d had time to light up and inhale, ‘with the Admiral Duncan.’
Helen swallowed hard and sloshed vodka into her own coffee, leaving it black. He wasn’t bluffing after all. How much did he already know?
London 1999
It was my first day. I was late. I was always late. It was congenital. Actually, congenital was the last thing it was. Nobody in my family is ever late except me. I was late because I’d taught myself to be. Once learnt, I found it impossible to unlearn.
So I was late on my first day as junior photographer. Still not on contract; but, even so, a big leap up for a freelance who’d done nothing since college but assisting and the jobs no one else would take. All the obligation, none of the rights. I didn’t know that then, though. Wouldn’t have cared if I had.