“What are the first three photographs on the memory card?” Jackson asked.
“Are you testing me?”
“No, no, I’m intrigued. I have no idea what they are.”
“They’re of you,” Julia said, “they’re of you, Jackson.”
“But-”
“I have to dash, sorry, sweetie.”
No wonder identity fraud was such a fast-growing crime. The chemist was as lax as the police, Jackson had no receipt, no proof that the photographs were his, yet they were handed over promptly to him when he said that “Julia Land” had dropped them off this morning. The chemist (a man) smiled at him in a knowing way and said, “Yes, of course,” so Jackson presumed that Julia had used the full force of her orange-selling charms on him. If you were a man, you could be eighty with a Zimmer and Julia would flirt with you while she helped you across the road-because, and this was one of the reasons he loved her, she was the kind of person who walked old people across the roads, helped blind people in supermarkets, scooped up lost cats and injured birds.
She couldn’t help the flirting, it came automatically to her as if it were embedded in her personality. Julia flirted with dogs, for heaven’s sake. He had even seen her flirt with inanimate objects, cajoling a kettle into boiling faster, a car to start, a plant to flower.
“Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it.”
Perhaps he should look on it as a social service rather than as a threat, send her out to old people’s homes to give old guys the illusion of virility, make them feel good about themselves again. Vi-agra for the mind. There was something pathetic about old men. Guys who had fought in wars, witnessed empires topple, strode around boardrooms and factory floors like kings, won the bread, paid the dues, walked the walk, talked the talk, and now they couldn’t even piss without help. Whereas old women, no matter how frail, never seemed as pitiful. Of course there weren’t as many old men around as there were old women. Dry and brittle as old kindling maybe, but they were built to last.
He took the photos into Toast and settled into a booth. He felt an emotion similar to that of unwrapping a gift, the same anticipa-tion, the same surge of excitement, only on the dark side-the ob-verse, that was the fancy word for it, the word Julia would have used. The photograph would be welcome proof that he hadn’t hallucinated his experience in the Forth, unfortunately it would also be unwelcome proof that someone, somewhere, was dead.
A waitress brought over his coffee, and when she was safely back behind the counter he opened the packet of glossy six-by-fours. They were printed in the order they had been in on the memory card-the first three were indeed of Jackson, taken in the snow in France on Christmas Day, Julia trying out her new camera. He looked much the same in all three, striking awkward poses, managing a half-smile in the last one after much coaxing on Julia’s part. “Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it.” He hated having his photograph taken.
Then there were a couple more of France and then nothing until Venice because Julia had accidentally left the camera behind when she returned to London after New Year’s. She had packed in haste, typical Julia, and they had made love, a last-minute farewell thing, when she should already have been on the road to the air-port, let alone packing.
He dialed Louise’s mobile number. The phone rang for a long time.
Venice still looked beautiful, but now rather than simply being holiday photographs, the little Canalettos looked like poignant images of halcyon days, a record of their golden age together as a couple. Just before the cracks appeared. “A couple? Is that how you think of us?”
When Louise Monroe called him “Jackson” yesterday (“Let’s face it, Jackson, on paper you just don’t look good”), it felt like a switch had been thrown, just that little buzz of an electrical current kicking in. Bad dog, Jackson. He had thought better of himself than that.
She was, let’s face it, his type. Julia was so much not his type that she was off the radar. Louise. This was what happened when you went over to the dark side. When you became bad Jackson, you started to lust after other women. “Watch out for Pisceans,” Julia had said. Was Louise Monroe a Piscean? She would be a new path. Not necessarily a good path or a better one, just a new one.
After several rings a male voice (posh Edinburgh) answered, “The Monroe residence, can I help you?” Jackson was caught off guard, he hadn’t expected a man to answer, much less a pretentious-sounding wanker. He had expected better of Inspector Monroe. Before he could say anything, she came on the phone with a snappish, “Yes?”
“It’s Jackson, Jackson Brodie,” he said.
He had reached the last photograph of Venice. It was the view from their hotel window, over the lagoon, taken at the last moment by Julia (“Wait-we’ll forget this view”) before they boarded the Cipriani’s launch to St. Mark’s Square for the last time. She was right, he would have forgotten the view if there had been no record of it. But at the end of the day, no matter how beautiful, it was just a view. He could see what she meant about having people in pho-tographs, if she had been standing at the window with the lagoon behind her, it would have been a completely different photograph.
Then there was the photograph of him next to the One O’Clock Gun with the Japanese, then the photograph of the Na-tional War Memorial. There was only one more photograph after that. It was black, entirely black. Puzzled, Jackson rifled through the pictures again. Same result-nothing. No sign of the dead girl at all. Only the black photograph. He was reminded of the black square that Julia gazed into every night, the raging Arctic storm. He was wondering if the photograph of the dead girl had been erased, perhaps accidentally. He knew that you could never erase anything completely, it wasn’t deleting a file that destroyed it, it was writing new data over it. There were programs designed for retrieving images. It would be easy enough for a camera shop to do. Or police forensics.
“Did you want something,” Louise asked, “or did you just ring to annoy me?”
“You’re not really a morning person, are you?” he said. He suddenly realized what had happened. In his hurry to take the pho-tograph-dead body, rising tide, and so on-he had left the lens cap on. Oh shit. He banged his head on the table. The other pa-trons of Toast looked at him in alarm.
“Hello? Calling Jackson.”
“Nothing, I don’t want anything. You’re right, I was just ringing to annoy you.” He remembered something, something the crazy Russian girl said to him last night, and he asked Louise what she knew about “Real Homes for Real People.”
“Squirrels are eating my house,” Louise Monroe said unexpect-edly.
“Okay,” Jackson said slowly, unable to think of any kind of response to that statement. He wondered if they were particularly big squirrels.
38
Louise was struck by an odd kind of terror, some vague memory of a documentary or a film-fact or fiction, she didn’t know-a man waking up in a stupor and finding that his entire family had been butchered while he slept, stumbling from room to room and finding their bodies.
She woke up suddenly, too suddenly, tachycardiac and sweating, and it took several seconds before she was convinced it was a dream. That was when she heard the scrabbling. In the walls? Or above her head? Above her head. Claws or nails on wood, scratching, something running. It stopped. Started again, stopped again. She tried to imagine what was making the noise. Rodent Olympics in the attic. A couple of years ago she would have been able to put Jellybean up there, the feline terminator. Asleep on the bed, he shifted against her foot. She would have liked his professional opinion on the scratching, scrabbling things, but she didn’t want to disturb him. He slept nearly the whole day and night now. She had begun to think in terms of last days, that this might be his last breakfast, his last wash, his last walk outside. She no longer bought him cat food, instead she went to Marks and Spencer’s Food Hall and chose organic smoked salmon, slices of cooked chicken breast, and cartons of fresh custard, none of which he was able to take more than a few halfhearted mouthfuls of, more to please her, Louise suspected, than out of any real hunger. The last supper. Archie complained that he didn’t get fed as well as the cat, and he was right.