“You can have water instead if that’s what you want,” he said. “But I thought you might like one of these. They’re straight from the fridge.”
“No, this is great,” Kip said. “Thanks.” He popped the seal on the can and poured the frothing liquid into the glass. He thought how typical it was of Croft, that he would drink Coke from a glass instead of straight from the can. It went with his old Minolta, his Oxfam clothes… and the thought that he could still predict Croft this way, that he could read him, made Kip feel calmer. He had come here of his own free will, after all. If he wanted to he could just get up and leave.
“Well?” Croft said. He took a sip of his Coke then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Did you bring anything to show me?”
“You can have a look at these if you want. They’re my most recent.” Kip hesitated. “I didn’t print them out. I don’t think they’re good enough.” He handed Croft the Nikon. He had cleared its memory of everything except the pictures he had taken on the Saturday night, the mock scene-of-crime photos of his own living room. He wondered if Croft would have any difficulty operating the camera but he handled it as if he had been using digital cameras for years, and Kip supposed he probably had. He wondered if all the spouting about film was just guff, a pose that Croft had affected to impress him.
Croft scrolled quickly through the series of images and then worked his way backwards more slowly, taking time to examine each frame.
“These are good,” he said. “Interesting. Did you take them at home?”
Kip nodded. “I was trying to look at the room in a different way, as if there’d been a murder there or something. It made me wonder what things might be important, you know, if you were photographing a real crime scene. I never thought about working for the police before but I think I might like it. It’s interesting.”
“Do you think you’d be able to handle seeing the bad stuff?”
Kip looked down at his hands. “It’d be my job to handle it, wouldn’t it? I’d have to get used to it.”
“Well, that’s something you’d have to find out for yourself.” Croft put his glass down on the floor and stood up. He leaned over, resting a hand briefly on Kip’s shoulder and reaching behind the sofa. He drew out a large portfolio, black leather with a long brass zip. The zip gleamed in the black like a row of bared teeth. “I’ve got some shots here you can look at. Some of them are quite strong. I’d probably get into trouble actually, if anyone knew I’d been showing you these without your parents’ permission.” He caught Kip’s eye and winked, though whether to show he was joking or trying to implicate Kip in his guilt Kip didn’t know. Croft retook his seat on the couch, so close beside him now that Kip could feel his warmth through his jeans, Croft’s leg resting against his own with a slight outward pressure. Croft smelled of the house, as if his clothes were not quite fresh. Kip unzipped the portfolio. It was crammed with images, photographic prints mainly though there were some newspaper clippings and photocopies, everything jumbled together like an insane montage. On top of the pile lay an enlarged shot of what had once been someone’s living room, only now it was mostly reduced to a heap of ash. On the picture’s right-hand margin stood a humped black thing about the size of a wheelie bin which Kip guessed had probably been an armchair. In front of this object was a single plate-sized patch of carpet that had somehow escaped being burned. Its colours were still bright, an interlocking pattern of blue and red diamonds. Kip thought there was something naked about the colours, something horrible. Underneath the photo of the burned-out living room there was a picture of a bicycle wheel, bent almost in half by the force of some impact. Its spokes jutted in all directions like shattered ribs.
“The lad on that bike was fifteen,” Croft said. “He died at the scene.” He pulled another picture from the stack, seeming to do it at random though Kip found time to wonder later if it had all been planned. The photograph, an enlarged detail, showed a pair of hands bound at the wrists with a coil of barbed wire. The thumbnails were caked with blood, so thick in places that Kip thought at first it was mud. There were long vertical gashes around the wrist bones, showing clearly how the wire had been dragged into place before it was tied.
Kip could not tell if the hands belonged to a man or a woman though the crooked, rather ugly shape of the top thumb joint gave him the feeling it was probably a man. The photograph was horrible, yet it was also beautiful, immortal somehow, like a still from a documentary about the First World War. It was clear as life, with the kind of singing exactitude people meant when they talked about photographic clarity even when most photographs taken by ordinary people, Kip knew, were not clear at all. Most amateur shots were blurred or badly composed, off kilter in some way. The photograph of the bound hands was so true to life it leaked its atmosphere all over the room, the drizzle-grey of a cold morning in November when a man had died in pain with his face in the mud.
“This guy turned up on a building site in Charlton,” Croft said. “He was dead when they found him. I took these pictures while we were waiting for the ambulance.”
“Did they catch the killers?”
Croft nodded. “It was a gang crime. Seven men were arrested. Two of them got long prison sentences.”
“And your photos helped to get them put away?”
“Maybe. Probably. But that’s never the thing you think about, at least not until later. At the time all you care about is the picture, about getting it right. I hardly gave that poor guy a thought while I was taking these shots, he was just a subject. I despise myself for that, but it doesn’t change anything. But you already know all this, Kip, you’re an intelligent boy. If what you wanted was to help catch murderers you’d become a detective inspector, not a photographer.”
Kip stared down at the photograph. He knew that what Croft said was true, truer even than Croft realized. If Kip’s interest lay in solving crimes he would have reported Croft to the police a fortnight ago. Instead he had taken pictures of him, and now he was here in Croft’s house, talking with him about photography. He did not care if Croft was the monster, only that he was here to have this conversation. He was glad the police had arrested Steven Jepsom instead of him. He wondered if Croft would help him with his college application.
“Can I use your loo?” Kip said suddenly. It was not just that he needed the toilet, although the can of Coke had filled his bladder to bursting. Mostly it was that he wanted to get away from Croft for a couple of minutes. Being with him was exhausting. He was also curious to see the upstairs of Croft’s house.
“It’s the first door upstairs, to your right,” Croft said. “We could go for a curry later, if you like.”
“That’d be good,” Kip said. He got up from the couch. He tried to smile at Croft, but the smile seemed to slide from his face at the last moment.
He made his way back down the hall. He noticed that the door to the understairs cupboard had a bolt on it, wondered briefly why that was and then supposed that the basement floor was where Croft kept his darkroom. He went upstairs, stepping over the bin bags, which looked to be full of old clothes. There were four doors on the upper landing. Kip opened one at random and found Croft’s bedroom, the bed unmade, a crumpled T-shirt strewn across the floor. The room next door was piled high with old furniture.
The bathroom, when he found it, was at least clean. The window was open, letting in the outside air. There was a faint smell of disinfectant.
He used the toilet and then washed his hands. He thought he would tell Croft that he had decided against the curry, that he should go home, that he had schoolwork to do, something or anything, he did not know why. He turned to go back downstairs, glancing as he did so into the one room he had not yet entered, a narrow room at the back, a spare bedroom most likely, or the bedroom that had belonged to Croft’s dead father. There was a wooden bedstead, the mattress stripped to its striped cover, stained with age, the shallow depression towards the centre where the old man had lain. Kip wondered if he had died there. He felt instinctively for the Nikon, then realized he had left it downstairs. He pulled the door to, wondering if Croft might give him permission to photograph the room anyway, whether it would be rude or strange to ask.