The Girl Behind the Lens: A dark psychological thriller with a brilliant twist

by Tanya Farrelly

  As soon as he was outside, he took one of the books from the bag, The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. That didn’t surprise him, but Mercedes couldn’t have ordered the books only two weeks before. There had to be a glitch in the computer system. It was odd, the girl had seemed so sure when she’d told him. He imagined Mercedes browsing the shelves, her fingers trailing along the spines of the books. She would falter at the letter ‘R’, and then, not finding what she was looking for, would continue her search until the letter ‘Z’ confirmed the absence of the coveted writer.

  He considered returning to the shop, asking her to check again, but the assistant already seemed curious and he didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention, so he pushed on. It was beginning to rain. People hurried along, raising their umbrellas as they walked. He made his way down Grafton Street and decided to cut through St Stephen’s Green Park in order to get back to the car.

  He was walking fast, swinging the paper bag with Mercedes’s books, when he saw her. He faltered. Her back was to him, and she was throwing bits of bread from her bag to the waiting ducks at the edge of the pond. Her name caught in his throat and he wondered whether he should turn and go as fast as he could in the other direction, but then it was too late. Feeling his eyes on her, she turned, and he saw that it was not, of course, Mercedes but Carmen. She was wearing the clothes belonging to Mercedes that he’d given her the night she’d got caught in the rain. He tried to recover himself, hoping that she hadn’t seen the look of shock on his face just as she’d turned. He’d never thought that he would confuse Carmen with Mercedes despite their similarities. He guessed that it was the fading light that had tricked him. That and the fact that he’d not anticipated coming upon her so unexpectedly.

  ‘I didn’t know you were back,’ he said.

  Carmen eyed the bag in his hand, and then continued to feed the ducks with the last of the bread. They gathered round her as she shook the crumbs to them. ‘I got back this morning. I was going to call you.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The silence hung between them. He was aware of Carmen’s eyes studying his face. He searched for the right words to say, but she was first to break the silence.

  ‘You look surprised.’

  ‘Well, Belfast is a big place. How did you manage to find her?’

  ‘It wasn’t so hard. I checked out the hotels in the city, decided which ones she was likely to stay at and then phoned them. I found her at only the fourth one.’ Carmen knelt and clicked her fingers. The ducks gathered round scrabbling for the bread that they thought she was about to feed them. When they realized she didn’t have any they dispersed. She straightened and met his eye. ‘So, aren’t you even going to ask me what she said?’

  Oliver kicked at the ground. He wasn’t sure what it was that Carmen was playing at but instinct told him to go along with it. ‘Did you tell her I was sorry?’ he said.

  ‘She wasn’t interested, said she’s moved on, that she doesn’t need you.’ Carmen tossed her head as if they were her own words. She’d put a colour in her hair, a burgundy hue in the black waves making it more like Mercedes’s.

  ‘Is that so?’

  Oliver took a step closer to gauge her reaction. He leaned in, removed an imaginary leaf from her hair and flicked it aside. Carmen ignored his proximity. He couldn’t help admire this new coolness. It was studied, planned, and she was getting the reaction that she wanted without realizing that she too was being lured. She had probably spent time alone in her hotel room devising this new strategy. That was if she had been alone. He wasn’t sure why, but he had a fleeting memory of the guy in the leather jacket that he’d seen leaving Carmen’s flat that day, and it caused him a moment of doubt. Still, he didn’t believe that Carmen was indifferent towards him. He knew her too well, and would confirm it before the night had ended.

  Carmen stamped her feet and blew on her hands. ‘Let’s walk,’ she said. ‘I’m freezing.’

  They began to follow the path towards the exit. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in the park, and he hoped that the gatekeeper had not, unwittingly, locked them in. He quickened his step, and Carmen matched his stride. The rain was starting to get heavier; large drops fell in the pond sending ripples round the ducks, making them bob on the water.

  ‘So what else did Mercedes have to say?’ he asked.

  ‘She said she doesn’t want anything from you. All that she wants is whatever belongs to her.’

  Oliver nodded. ‘She took most of her things when she left, but the rest I’ll pack and send them on.’

  Carmen shook her head. ‘She doesn’t have a long-term address, and you can’t send them to the hotel. She hasn’t decided what she’s going to do yet. Maybe she’ll stay here; maybe she’ll go back to Spain. She wants you to withdraw the money from your joint account and send her what’s hers.’

  He hadn’t been expecting that. ‘That’s fine. I’ll write her a cheque,’ he said.

  ‘No, she wants cash.’

  ‘Cash? How can I give her cash when she won’t agree to meet me?’ he said.

  ‘She wants me to meet her with the money next week.’

  Oliver laughed. ‘What? So she’ll meet you, but not me? The last time I checked we were in this together. Why has she suddenly forgiven you?’

  Carmen shrugged. ‘We’re sisters.’

  The gates were open. They paused outside, and Carmen told him that her bus was in the opposite direction.

  ‘It’s dark. I’ll drive you home,’ he said.

  She didn’t object, so he put his hand beneath her elbow and guided her in the direction of the car. He wondered when she’d decided to concoct this story. Had she really gone to Belfast and, if so, how much time had she spent searching for Mercedes? He didn’t care about the money. Carmen could have it if she wanted, but was that her motive for telling him that Mercedes never wanted to see him again, or had she decided that Mercedes’s absence yielded more benefits than her return? Whatever her reasons, Carmen’s lies could serve as a worthy alibi if anyone started to question him about Mercedes’s sudden disappearance.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  When Joanna arrived home, she took advantage of her mother’s absence. If she’d been getting the train somewhere, then chances were she wouldn’t be home for another hour, not even if she’d simply got off at the next station. Joanna dropped her things in the living room, took off her coat and went upstairs.

  Her mother’s room was immaculate as always. She went in, sat on the bed and wondered what it was she was looking for, and where she might be likely to find it. She began with one of the bedside tables where she knew her mother kept some old photo albums. She used to love looking through those photos when she was younger, but she hadn’t looked at them in years and she wondered if she might have missed something – some pictures of Vince Arnold secreted among her mother’s things. She turned the pages. There were family snaps. Her mother pictured with a baby in her arms, Joanna’s grandmother in the background. Her grandfather had taken that shot only days after Angela had taken Joanna home from the hospital. They’d been very supportive, her mother had told her, not once suggesting that she give the baby up. Joanna looked at those pictures of her grandparents now and wondered how much they knew about her conception. Had her mother confided in them about Vince Arnold? She doubted it. Doubted that her grandfather would have let him away with it if he’d known who he was.

  There were other pictures. Joanna’s mother as a teenager, arm looped through a friend’s, hair backcombed, lips ice pink. More of them making faces in a photo booth. Joanna had always loved these shots – the seventies hairstyles, big collar blouses and flares. She knew who most of the people were. Her mother had often told her about her friends and the antics they got up to. It was just a pity she hadn’t told her the most important thing: that she’d felt she had to cover it up, bury it in the past. Several minutes and many photos later, Joanna had reached the end of her mother’s alb
ums. No pictures of him, no mementos hidden away, at least not there. She piled the albums back into the drawer where she’d found them.

  Next she opened the wardrobe. There was a shoebox there where her mother kept important documents. She knew because when she’d asked her mother for her birth certificate a few years before, when she was applying for a passport, she’d gone to the wardrobe and taken it down. Joanna felt like a snoop searching among her mother’s private things. She still didn’t know what it was that she hoped to find – nothing, perhaps. Assurance that there were no more surprises waiting to ambush her. She looked through the papers in the box, her grandparents’ birth and death certificates, her mother’s and her own birth certificates, cards congratulating her mother on the birth of her baby girl, none from Vince, of course, and the deeds to the house they lived in: the house her mother had inherited from her parents, that she would inherit from her mother. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, tickets to concerts … nothing that told her anything she didn’t know about her family.

  An hour passed. She didn’t want her mother to find her rummaging in her room. The real question was not something that was going to be solved by looking through memorabilia. She took the box and climbed on the stool again to put it back on the shelf, but her foot caught on the rung as she did so and she tripped, the contents of the box spilling onto the floor. Shit. She got down to retrieve the papers scattered at her feet. She gathered the certificates, the documents. She hadn’t looked through it all and her hand alighted now on a picture – her mother at a beach wearing a striped swimsuit. Joanna looked closer, Portmarnock was it? Sand dunes in the background, or maybe Brittas Bay. A natural shot, the girl, laughing, leaning to the side, hands supporting her in the sand. She turned it over – ‘Angie, 1983’. Joanna gathered and straightened more papers, saw another picture and turned it over. It had been taken on the same day, only in this one a boy lolled on the beach next to her mother. Joanna peered at the shot. The boy was an adolescent – no more than fifteen. A cousin maybe? They were smiling like they’d just shared a joke, except he was looking straight into the camera. Green eyes, short hair, fringe sticking up, pushed to the side. Joanna gripped the photo as realization slowly set in. She turned over the shot – more writing in pencil – her mother’s hand. ‘With P.A. Brittas Bay. 1983.’ Christ. She turned it over, stared at it again. Patrick Arnold. 1983. Old friends, why hadn’t her mother said? And the photographer, the eye behind the lens, Vince? These were shots that wouldn’t be found among the albums at Rachel Arnold’s. Joanna searched for more, but there were none. She placed everything back in the box and, carefully this time, put it back in the wardrobe.

  This changed everything. Her mother’s association with Patrick was not something that had materialized on the death of Vince. Their meeting might have nothing to do with that, could simply be a revival of an old friendship, or could it? Joanna thought about the young Patrick Arnold in the photograph. Where did he fit in the grand picture? Had he been a willing accomplice to his brother’s deceit – a decoy maybe? He was younger than her mother. He’d studied with Oliver – so that would make him what – forty-two? Not such a gap now. Had his sudden appearance awakened in her mother the feelings she’d felt for Vince? It wouldn’t be uncommon to transfer these emotions to the brother she’d known since her youth.

  Joanna was still puzzling over the situation when she heard her mother come in.

  ‘Jo, are you here?’

  ‘Yep.’

  She came out of her room to see her mother coming up the stairs, gym bag in hand. She looked ruffled, face pink from exertion. Maybe she’d just power-walked from the bus stop. She dropped the bag in her bedroom, and stretched.

  ‘I’m just going to hit the shower,’ she said. ‘Did you get much work done?’

  ‘Not really, I had to go into town to pick some stuff up.’

  No reaction.

  ‘Well, never mind, you have the rest of the evening, haven’t you? I picked up something nice for dinner by the way.’ She sounded cheerful.

  Whatever the reason she’d met Patrick Arnold, it had obviously gone well. Her mother went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. A few minutes later, Joanna heard the shower. Quickly, she went into her mother’s room. The gym bag was where Angela had left it. Joanna hunkered down, unzipped it and looked inside. There were clothes in the bag, not gym clothes, but good clothes, clothes she might wear going to meet someone, although she’d still been in her sportswear when Joanna had seen her with Patrick. Maybe she hadn’t had time to change. She rummaged beneath the clothes, searching for anything strange, anything that might suggest why her mother had met Patrick Arnold. Deodorant, change of underwear, nothing she wouldn’t have expected to find in a gym bag. Sometimes her mother showered there before she came home. She unzipped a small pocket inside the bag. Now there was something strange; her mother’s old mobile phone, and what’s more it was switched on and appeared to be working. Just then Joanna realized that the shower had stopped. She put the phone back in her mother’s bag, zipped it up and sneaked out of the room just before the door opened and her mother emerged wrapped in a towel.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Oliver sat on the edge of the bed and watched Carmen sleeping. She looked different when she was sleeping. Her face lost some of its fierceness and, bereft of make-up, she looked almost innocent. He stood up and eased his clothes on. He heard her breathing change and, for a moment, he thought she might wake, but she settled again, and he stole quietly from the room.

  They hadn’t pulled the curtains in the living room, and the greyness of the winter sky seeped through the net curtain and emphasized the starkness of the flat. He stood looking out the window at the jackdaws that picked at the fast-food wrappers in the street, and he wondered how long Carmen would stay in this place.

  In the kitchen he made coffee and thought about Carmen’s motive for having said she’d met Mercedes. What could she want the money for – and wasn’t she taking a risk stealing her sister’s money? But maybe it wasn’t about the money; maybe her revelation had been intended to shock him into some kind of confession, to catch him unaware. How would she have reacted if he had just blurted it out, if he’d told her that she couldn’t have seen Mercedes, that it was impossible? He had been close to it. He’d had to will himself not to speak. It struck him that Carmen might not be shocked. She was a woman capable of unscrupulous acts, but none as horrifying as murder. There were times when the weight of what he’d done became so intolerable that he thought he couldn’t continue. He told himself over and again that it had been an accident. He repeated it until his instinct for self-preservation kicked in and propelled him forward, and he knew that he had no choice but to go on.

  ‘I didn’t hear you get up.’

  Oliver jumped at the sound of Carmen’s voice in the doorway. ‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ he said.

  She was in her dressing gown, hair tousled, her face clean of make-up. It occurred to him again how young she looked, so different from the dark-eyed, red-lipped temptress she liked to paint herself as.

  ‘Go on, sit down and I’ll get you a coffee,’ he said.

  She smiled and sauntered back to the living room. When he entered with the coffee she was sitting at the table by the window, and she’d taken one of the books from the paper bag that he’d left there without thinking.

  ‘You picked up my books,’ she said.

  He placed the coffee carefully before her. ‘The book shop phoned; they said they were for Mercedes.’

  She nodded. ‘I ordered them. When they asked me my name they found Hernandez on the system and asked me if I were Mercedes. It was easier to say yes; she had an account set up already. I hate all that red tape.’

  Oliver had often ordered books from that store. He knew that you didn’t have to set up any account. You simply supplied them with your name and telephone number, and they called you when the books came in, but he said nothing. Maybe masquerading as Mercedes gave Car
men some sense of worth, of satisfaction. Mercedes had always claimed that Carmen had been envious of her. He eyed her across the table. She had already opened the book on the first page and was reading. She closed it a minute later and held it up so that he could see the cover.

  ‘I love this writer,’ she said. ‘He’s so passionate. His words are like music.’

  He thought of Mercedes, the nights that she had sat up late in bed reading and he’d complained about the lamp keeping him from getting to sleep. He’d bought her a reading torch, but she didn’t use it. She said she didn’t want to strain her eyes by reading in the dull light.

  Carmen put the book on the table. ‘Would you like some toast?’ she said.

  ‘Sure. I thought maybe you hadn’t had time to get anything in since you came back.’

  ‘I hadn’t, just bread.’

  She got up. He watched her move across the room. Her legs were bare beneath her short dressing gown. On her feet she wore pink furry slippers, the kind that Mercedes used to wear. He listened to her move about the tiny kitchen, and he wondered if this was what she had wanted – the two of them having breakfast like any couple.

  She emerged a few minutes later with a tray of toast with jam and butter. The smell filled the room and reminded him of other winter mornings. Carmen sat opposite him. He looked at her and wondered: if he’d met Carmen rather than Mercedes on the train that day, would he have asked for her number instead? Something told him that he would have, but she would still have led him to Mercedes. The link between them could not be severed. The choices that he made would still have been the same, but perhaps it would have ended differently.

  He looked at Carmen buttering toast opposite him. He ought to hate her. If it hadn’t been for her, none of it would have happened. Mercedes would still be alive and they would be living as they had been, but as that thought crossed his mind, so too did the reality of what things had been like between he and Mercedes in the months leading up to that night. He remembered her coldness. How she’d moved away from him when he’d attempted to touch her. He’d given up out of pride. They were like strangers, only they lacked the chemistry that could exist between strangers – the curiosity about the unknown. No, if it hadn’t been Carmen, it would have been someone else. Mercedes didn’t deserve what had happened, but she wasn’t blameless either.