Authors: Sam Baker
‘I know you didn’t. I was joking. And thank you, I really didn’t mean for you to pay. I asked you out, after all. I’d have picked somewhere cheaper if …’
‘We’ve been through this already. I won’t hear of it.’
‘My treat next time?’
There it was again. Next time.
Gil nodded slowly. ‘OK.’ He’d done it now. ‘Your treat next time.’
Seeming satisfied, Liza put a hand on the door handle, then paused. ‘I don’t suppose you’d fancy a coffee?’
The offer took Gil by surprise. Especially after that comment about company. ‘No, but thanks,’ he said, seeing her face fall. ‘That cappuccino’s all the caffeine I can take at this time of night. Plus, you’ve work tomorrow.’
Life’s all-purpose get-out clause. Until you didn’t have it to fall back on any more.
He knew he’d said the wrong thing. Her face was a picture: part disappointment, part hurt. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see the windscreen freeze up. Then she cut through the ice to lean across the gear stick and give him a stiff, dry-lipped peck on the cheek, before bolting up the drive and indoors with the tiniest wave over her shoulder, not even a half-turn. Front door shut, lights springing on all over the house, before he even started the ignition.
‘Nice work,’ he muttered. ‘That’s got to be a personal best.’
The roads were quiet, a bright half-moon lighting his way through a cloudless sky. The first cloudless sky the moors had seen in quite some time. Once he cleared the dual carriageway and hit the country roads, he turned off the Stones CD mid-‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and drove in silence. It was a good night for driving, clear and bright, hardly another car about. So quiet and clear he was tempted to kill the lights and drive on with only the moon and a kaleidoscope of stars to light his way as he skirted the Dales. He didn’t, of course. Too old and sensible and sober.
He’d have done it when he was younger.
Gil hadn’t drunk that much, a third of a bottle, maybe a little more, but he’d been careful to keep Liza’s glass topped up at the expense of his own.
Next time
, how had he got himself into that one?
He liked her well enough. Perhaps better than well enough. She was good company. Real company. Not, inverted commas, company. He’d had a great evening. If not one he could afford too often at those prices. The wine was good, the food better than anything he’d eaten in years. But it had all gone wrong back there. All because he fancied waiting for the second date. Or, more honestly, because he didn’t want her enough not to wait.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so bloody depressing.
There were ex-colleagues at the paper who’d say he was a bloody idiot. Not blokes he had much time for … But all the same. Shadows swooped around him as he took a left on to the road that led to the Dales. Not the most direct route back, he wasn’t in the mood to be tucked up in bed just yet, and if he went home before he reached his exhaustion tipping point he’d only end up spending half the night on his laptop looking for the invisible woman, and the other half counting sheep or whatever animal taunted him from inside his head. Probably also a few minutes in the company of his faithful right hand.
Wouldn’t that be ironic?
He didn’t consciously take the road up past Wildfell. So he told himself. But that was where he’d ended up, anyway. He’d done stake-outs, stayed up all night, hoping to doorstop someone as they came home from somewhere they shouldn’t have been, or left somewhere they should be. That was in the early days. There were more rules around that sort of stuff now. Just as well, he hadn’t felt clean doing half the things he’d had to do to make his mark. Such as it was.
Well, such as it had been.
His car slowed, almost without Gil telling it to. He expected to see light seeping from between not quite closed curtains. It was late, but not that late. Anyway, she’d said herself, she didn’t sleep that much. Not that he was planning to knock or anything. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, Gil slowed to a crawl before killing the lights and pulling in, easing on to the verge just before the gate so he could see up the drive.
There was no sign of life.
He didn’t get out, what was the point? Instead he put the window down, lit a cigarette, tip flaring in the darkness, and sat in silence, staring at the ruined house. Curtains pulled across the upstairs windows rendered them blind. The glass above the top of the side door stared blackly at him like a dilated pupil reflecting the half-moon. He smoked and he waited … for what, Gil wasn’t sure. A hint of movement maybe. A flicker of light. When none came, he lit another cigarette from the butt of the last before stubbing the old one into his car ashtray, like a proper addict.
Who lived in such a place anyway? Someone poor, or someone very rich. Someone able to make the choice, someone who had no choice at all. Gil knew he had a lead but couldn’t tell which of those she was; and where that photograph of the child in ruins fitted in. He’d seen the picture before. He’d tried putting child and ruins into Google, and been swamped by the results. A thousand children. A thousand more ruins. More than he could bear to see. He was on the right track though; and there was something else about that photograph, something he’d forgotten or been not quite quick enough to notice. He’d remember it, though. And things would become clearer when he did.
There was a story here. He knew it. And so did she.
It was 6.03 when Gil awoke, with a crick in his neck and breath that tasted of one last B&H. Unfolding himself, he wiped mist from the windscreen with the sleeve of his jacket and started the engine, hoping she wasn’t awake to hear him pull away. Bad enough that one of the twitchers would inevitably see him draw up.
He knew how it would look. A night spent in a cold car watching a darkened house. Great. Better they thought he’d spent the night with Liza.
He made himself wait a couple of days before he went anywhere near the old house again. Two days during which he googled every permutation of Helen Graham’s name he could conceive of, and looked through more pictures of children in war zones than he could stomach. At one point, he wondered if he was obsessing so strongly because Karen still hadn’t accepted his Facebook request, and anything was better than thinking too deeply about that.
Such moments of self-awareness were rare and Gil reminded himself not to have another too soon. The morning after, he drove out to Wildfell in daylight, having promised himself he’d simply knock at the door.
The milk he took wasn’t a peace offering. More a practicality. Helen hadn’t been seen in the General Stores for three days. That meant she’d probably need milk. Even if she didn’t, he did. He couldn’t drink coffee black; and he was hoping she’d let him stay long enough to drink at least one cup. It was the coffee he also took that was the peace offering. A decent medium-ground Columbian he’d driven into Keighley to buy. He’d been looking forward to drinking it for days. He just hoped she appreciated the gesture.
She was wearing running kit when she opened the door, her hair plastered to her head in damp tendrils, a towel in her hand.
‘I’m sorry, I …’ Gil said. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt.’
She smiled, sort of. Well, her mouth twisted in an upward direction. For a second Gil wasn’t sure she was going to let him in.
‘Yes, you did,’ she said, wrapping the towel around her head and stepping back to let him pass. ‘Or you wouldn’t be here. Come in anyway.’
Taken aback, Gil bowed his head and shuffled past. He felt every bit the foolish old man he was apparently destined to become. What was he thinking, dropping in like this, behaving precisely like the nosy neighbours she’d moved here to avoid? ‘I brought this,’ he said, when she’d bolted the door behind him.
‘Milk!’ Taking the carton and ignoring the coffee, she headed for the kitchen. ‘You must be a mind reader. It’s just what we need, isn’t it, Ghost?’
Ghost?
Seeing no one, Gil turned to a rotting leather armchair.
‘Not there!’ she yelled.
He leapt up, but not before a filthy black tom had yowled crossly and leapt from the chair, lacing himself around Helen’s legs. Holding the towel on top of her head, Helen unscrewed the lid from the milk with her other hand, took a saucer from the cupboard and poured milk into it.
‘I don’t suppose you brought cat food too, did you?’
Gil shook his head.
‘Joke. Fancy a cup of your coffee?’
‘Please. Where did the cat come from?’ Gil asked when a cafetiere sat between them on the table.
‘He’s a ghost,’ she said.
It had to be another joke. The ghost was lapping loudly at his saucer.
‘You were a journalist, weren’t you?’ she said suddenly.
Gil looked up, startled. He nodded and she smiled at him.
‘Newly retired, I gather. Most of your life spent on the best of the local papers? Some time in Fleet Street before that? A couple of awards? Took early retirement following the arrival of a new editor?’
Gil tried not to look nonplussed.
‘I did some googling,’ she said in answer to his unspoken question. ‘It must be boring being retired.’
‘It is,’ said Gil, almost scalding himself in his hurry to finish his coffee.
‘Silly old sod,’ Gil thought, as he slammed the car into fourth and screeched past a pair of cyclists riding two abreast on the dale road, narrowly missing a delivery van coming in the opposite direction. ‘Let her make a right fool of you. That’ll teach you to stick to women your own age.’
But it wasn’t that, and Gil knew it. He knew that was how it looked, that people in the village were starting to talk. Well, if they wanted to talk, let them. There was more to that woman than she let on. And anyway, he muttered, braking as he approached the centre of the village and then changing his mind and accelerating out the other side. He didn’t care what they said, but he’d still give the General Stores a wide berth for a few days. What with fixing him up with Liza and noticing his ‘fascination’ with the widow, as she’d taken to calling Mademoiselle Graham, Margaret Millward was getting a bit too interested in his business for Gil’s liking. Instead, he drove to the garage on the bypass to top up on B&H – two packs, to be on the safe side – a four-pack of Tetley’s and a couple of pasties. He had work to do.
Back home, Gil went up to the spare room, pushing aside three coffee cups and two empty cans to make room for the new supplies, and turned on his laptop.
This time he didn’t start with the woman but with the picture. That was where the answer lay, he knew it. He just had to go about it in a more methodical pattern. He began by searching for picture agencies, Getty, Rex, Icon, and started to explore their sites one by one, as he’d seen picture researchers do on the
Post
. There was no point searching by photographer, he already knew that would be futile; and he’d already tried guessing the war zone and approaching it that way to little avail. Instead he scrolled through reportage, global assignments and photojournalism, poring as image after striking image of human misery and its aftermath filled his screen. What could possibly make someone want to stand there and watch all this suffering, he wondered. Knowing, even as he thought it, his question invited the retort: What could possibly make someone want to become a journalist? The suffering was the same. Only the means of recording it differed.
He’d cleared five or six internationally renowned agencies and started on a smaller, edgier agency based in somewhere called Belleville when he saw it, or something like it: two small boys flicking skateboards with their heels in front of a burnt-out office block. The image wasn’t identical, but it had to be the same photographer, he knew it. Even he could tell it was taken with the same eye. Ten, fifteen more photos, nothing.
Then he spotted the tabs at the top. He clicked Iraq and started again.
Three photos later he’d found it.
The boy was small and dark, skinny legs sticking out of too big shorts, a toothy grin and an outstretched hand holding a red Power Ranger. And staring out, over all of it, a pair of button brown eyes that Gil could have sworn he’d seen gazing from the back of a small silver car a fortnight earlier as it receded into the distance.
Gil stopped, took a swig of his beer, choked and slammed his hand down hard on the desk. Dammit, there it was, there was the picture. But he couldn’t have seen the kid. Hadn’t she said the kid was dead?
Impatiently, he flicked down the page to find the credits. When he found them, he frowned. Copyright H. Lawrence. Who the hell was H. Lawrence? Sod this. His eyes ached from the screen and his brain was swimming, but he was hardly any further forward. He’d been so sure that picture would provide his answer.
This was doing his head in, as Lyn would have said. Taking a cigarette from the packet – his fifth or sixth since he’d sat down, but who was counting? – Gil picked up his lighter and half-empty beer can and went down into the garden. Sat on the bench under the kitchen window in the fading light, he tried not to notice how long overdue the grass was for a mowing.
H. Lawrence, he muttered between drags. Who the hell was H Lawrence?
Scuffing the filter underfoot, he headed back upstairs.
As he suspected, H. Lawrence, photographer, turned out to be female.
According to Wikipedia, Helen Lawrence was a prolific photographer, specialising in tough stuff. Only, she seemed to spend so much time behind her Leica he couldn’t find a sodding picture of her anywhere. She was the right age, according to her wiki; not that you could rely on wiki. (How many times had he told the features desk that?) Her work seemed to date back to roughly the right time. But she definitely wasn’t French. Her first picture, thirteen years earlier, was a gut-churning image of a victim of the Admiral Duncan bombing in Soho. Six months or so later, an archive story from January 2000 listed her as one of the cultural movers and shakers under thirty who would shape the next century. Even that didn’t have a picture of her. It used the Admiral Duncan to illustrate her section.
Around 2007, Gil noticed, halfway down the fourth page of Google images, the pictures stopped being of people, women and children mainly, and started including buildings. Make that rubble. Odd, he thought, reaching out to unwrap a pasty and noticing as he did so that it was dark outside, how she got the same emotion into both. Impressive as they were, the woman’s pictures were getting him nowhere. Flicking back to the main page, Gil resumed reading.