“I’m calling the police,” I told him.
“I’m not blackmailing you!” He stuck his foot in the door before I could slam it in his face. “Ask Jonathan, I spoke to him last night!”
At that moment, right on cue, the phone rings. And it’s Jonno.
“Listen, Tom, “ he says, “I have no idea what this kid’s been smoking, but he sounds harmless. Probably he just wants a job. Hear him out and look at his photos and send him on his way home. There’s a train at noon.”
Well, as you know, Jonno has a heart as big as the national debt. So I sigh and ring off with him and tell the boy he has five minutes to say his piece before I throw him out and get back to juggling the books.
“We use professional photographers here for anything having to do with the bands, and graphic designers,” I told him. I’d already spoken to Hipgnosis, hoping they could do the album cover art. Since it was seeming like there wouldn’t be any album, this was turning into a moot point.
“Just look,” he said.
He clears off a desk and lays out ten photos like a deck of tarot cards. Very, very carefully, like he’s putting them in a special order. When he’s finished, he points to me and says, “Look.”
They were the pictures he’d taken in the garden at Wylding Hall. Informal photos — everyone at their mike stands, singing or playing in the sunlight. A few photos of them messing around, tossing roses at each other.
The last three just showed them all looking up at the sky. Ashton was to the left of the frame. Jonno stood in front of his drum kit. Will and Les were side by side, both shading their eyes. Julian was slightly off by himself to the right, neck craned as he stared up.
The light was clearly different in these pictures — very bright, low-slanting sunlight. It made the grass look golden and all the other colors stand out more brightly. They weren’t terrible photos, but they weren’t anything approaching professional quality. Just amateur snapshots.
I turned to the boy and said, “Yes, these are very nice. But as I told you, we—”
“You have to look at them. These three.” He indicated the photos where everyone stared at the sky. “Tell me what you see.”
It was a minute before I saw it. Inside the walled garden with the others was a sixth person. While the band were all looking at the sky, someone else stood to the right and gazed straight ahead, into the camera. In the first picture, the figure was perhaps twenty feet from Julian. In the next photo, it was closer. In the last of the three, it stood directly behind him, and I could see it was a girl, wearing a sleeveless white dress.
“What the hell is this?” I looked at Billy Thomas.
“You tell me.”
I glanced at the photos again — all of them, in order. I shook my head. “Did you doctor these? Is this some kind of joke?”
“I swear to you on the Holy Bible, this is how they came out.”
I stood and stared at the pictures. I tried to recall everything I could about that afternoon. I’d been inside the mobile unit, but the back doors of the lorry had been open the whole time, so I could watch whatever was going on as I worked the boards. I hadn’t moved from there except once, to take a piss.
I remembered exactly when these photos had been taken — I’d yelled at Billy not to trip on the cables as he scampered around. I remembered the sunlight, which had been so beautiful that day. There were only ten shots, so it can’t have taken him more than twenty or thirty minutes, if that.
And there had been no one at Wylding Hall that afternoon, except for the members of the band, and Billy and me.
I looked over at Billy. “That afternoon, when you took these — did you see anyone?”
He shook his head. “There was no one.”
“Pick those up and follow me,” I ordered him. “Back here.”
Moonthunder’s art department was a storeroom where we had a mimeograph machine, some light boxes, a filing cabinet, and a table covered with photos and design sheets and layouts for album art. I swept these aside, pointed to where Billy should put the photos, and found a loupe and a magnifying lens. I kept the loupe, gave him the magnifying glass, and turned on the table lamp, which was very bright. We couldn’t afford a proper light table, but these pictures were so small, it would hardly have made much difference.
I spent the next hour scrutinizing those photos — the only reason I stopped was that I could feel a migraine coming on. With the loupe, it was crystal clear that the person was indeed a teenage girl, fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. Billy’s age. There was nothing fuzzy about her image — it wasn’t in any way blurred or hazy or transparent. She looked as solid and real to life as everyone else.
“Do you know her?” I glanced at Billy. “From school, or the pub? Is she a relative of yours?”
“A relative?” He laughed. “No girl in my family would be allowed to run around like that. Besides, all my cousins live in Farnham.”
“And you don’t recognize her from school?”
“It’s a small school. I’ve known everyone since we were kids.” He hesitated, then said, “She looks like the girl they talked about. The one from the Wren. The girl who went off with Julian Blake.”
I felt like my head was going to explode. “This is crazy. Someone must have doctored these. Or, I don’t know, swapped them out for some other photos. Where’d you get them developed?”
“Snappy Snaps. I already called them. They have a machine they run the film through, it’s all done automatically. The only thing a person does is stick them in the envelope and hand it to you. And take your money.”
We stared at each other across the table and for a long time said nothing. Billy was the one finally spoke.
“Do you think I should bring them to the police?”
“Why the hell would you do that?”
“Because it might help them find him. And her — both of them.”
I thought about that, then said, “No. There’d be too many questions. None of which we could answer,” I added, gazing at the pictures. “Look, can I keep these? Just overnight? I promise I won’t do anything to them — I won’t destroy them or anything like that.”
Billy nodded. “Yeah, sure. I have the negatives at home.”
“Smart lad. You have my word. Any objection to me blowing these up? Enlarging them so I can look at them more closely?”
“I guess not.”
He looked a little put out, so I said, “How’s this — if I can make use of these, I’ll pay you a professional’s fee and give you photo credit. If I can’t make use of them, you let me keep these and give me the negatives, and I’ll pay you a hundred pounds.”
His eyes got big, but he made a show of thinking it over before he nodded. “Okay.”
We shook on it, and I told him I’d ring him up after I had a chance to look over the enlargements. I thought I’d flatter him by suggesting he’d be a pro — I had no intention of doing anything with those photos, except destroy them.
Jon
Tom called me, demanding to know what the hell was going on with Billy Thomas and these photos. As I hadn’t seen the photos, I told him I had no effing clue. Billy hadn’t told me anything about them, other than the fact that they weren’t what he’d expected, and he thought someone from the group should see them. I was the only one whose telephone number he had. I didn’t want to be bothered, so I told him to ring Tom. After leaving Wylding Hall, I’d had to move back in with my parents in Muswell Hill, and I wasn’t too happy about anything right then.
About a week later, Tom rings me up again and tells me to come by the Larkspur office next morning. He wanted to see everyone, he said. It was very important.