The Lucifer Network (16 page)

Amongst the shops along the front stood a small tourist information office. He went inside, not sure what he was looking for. There was nobody in attendance but an array of brochures on the shelves. He browsed one cursorily.

‘Can I help you at all?'

Sam looked up. A stocky, middle-aged woman had emerged from a small back office.

‘I was on the phone,' she told him. ‘Didn't see you come in.'

‘No matter.' He hesitated, doubting she would be able to do anything for him. ‘I suppose it's historical information I'm after, really.'

‘Oh well, then it's the castle and the museum you'll be wanting,' she told him helpfully. ‘And we've some magnificent Victorian toilets down by the ferry terminal.
Maybe you've seen them already. The restoration's been done brilliantly.'

‘That's not quite what I had in mind.'

‘Oh?' She cocked her head like a blackbird listening for a worm.

‘I'm trying to retrace the steps of a couple who came over on the ferry twenty-seven years ago for a day or two's break. D'you have any idea what they might have done with their time?'

The woman's brows arched like hoops. ‘Och, what sort of question is that? What are you? A private detective?'

‘No. A relative.'

‘Well, now . . . A couple, you said? I suppose it would depend on their inclinations.' She smiled coquettishly. ‘You know, a lot of visitors simply used to hang around the town looking at the boats during the day. There's the promenade outside this very door, the putting green opposite, and in the olden times there was a tram taking people to the beaches.'

‘And where would they have stayed?'

‘There's no end of hotels and guest houses, mostly along the front. You've got the brochure in your hands. If they were keen on walking or riding, they'd have found somewhere out in the wilds. There's a section on that.'

The door to the street opened. A man poked his head round and asked about caravan sites.

‘Come on in,' the woman told him. ‘I'll soon sort you out.' She turned back to Sam. ‘But you know, to be honest, a lot of the time people simply walked up and down the promenade eating ice creams and looking at the view. Life was less complicated twenty-seven years ago. A holiday meant doing
nothing.
' She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, still trying to guess what it was he was really after. ‘I'm not being much help, am I?'

‘Oh, you are,' he assured her. ‘To be honest I don't really know what it is I'm looking for.'

‘I'll tell you something,' she said, seeing the chance of a sales pitch, ‘if this couple of yours were people looking for a wee bit of peace and quiet just to find themselves, there's no better place to come than Bute. And that's still true today.'

Sam thanked her for her wisdom and left her to deal with the caravanner's more routine enquiry. He crossed the road towards the promenade gardens, which were ablaze with dahlias. A signpost pointed to the Victorian toilets. He saw the family in shorts emerging from the grim-looking block, the parents smiling and the children bored.

Was he wrong to think his father had been here with a woman? Might the second ferry ticket have been for his Soviet intelligence contact – a quiet outing to discuss the terms under which his father would spy for the Kremlin? Sam shivered. The whole idea of betrayal still wasn't conceivable to him.

He began to stroll along the front, passing a prettily painted pavilion housing a cinema and a café. Windblown palms and neatly trimmed shrubs surrounded a green-baize putting green being manicured by a man with a mower. Out across the water, shafts of sun dappled the foam-flecked sea and daubed gold onto the purple mountains to the north.

Queuing at a white-painted kiosk for a round with the putters was an Asian family, the women's saris exploding with vivid colour, the men in white shirts and dark trousers. Grandparents, adults and grandchildren, about a dozen in all, they carried their clubs and balls to the green, chattering and laughing as if at some country club at Simla.

Suddenly they were confronted by a photographer, a
down-at-heel creature in grey, whose trouser bottoms spread like bells over his dusty shoes and whose jacket pockets ballooned with films and order pads. Aged sixty at least, his bald scalp was covered by a thin flap of greasy hair, which miraculously or because of glue lay undisturbed by the blustery breeze. The man launched into his spiel, pointing to an old plate camera standing on a heavy tripod at the edge of the green. Intrigued at being snapped by an apparatus they thought had died with the Raj, the Indian family marshalled themselves into a pose. After much business with a black cloth, the photographer took three shots, then got them to spell out their family name on his pad.

‘Any time after ten tomorrow morning.'

He gave them a ticket. Laughing, the family got on with their game as the old man re-primed his equipment. All of a sudden Sam realised the significance of what he'd been watching.

‘Good season?' he asked, walking up to the photographer.

‘Terrible. Te-rrible.' The man spoke with funereal sorrow, instantly sizing Sam up as a non-customer with whom he could speak freely. ‘It's video that's done it. Killed the trade stone dead.' He glanced round to see they weren't being overheard. ‘That's why I dug out the old plate camera – to inject a little novelty into the process.'

‘Clever idea. Been taking pictures long?'

The old man raised his chin and narrowed his eyes. ‘Therrty-two years. Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce three times. Oh yes . . .' He looked set to launch into his life history.

‘Always pictures of tourists?' Sam asked, cutting him short.

‘Och no. Not only the visitors.
Anyt
hing. Anything
anybody wants captured in a photograph, I'll do it for them. Weddings, christenings, twenty-firsts . . . Even did a
berrth
for someone once.'

‘You must've taken thousands of pictures over the years . . .'

‘Oh aye. Mind you, it'd take me the rest of my life to count them.' He dug a hand into one of the voluminous jacket pockets and came out with a pack of cigarettes. ‘And if I go on using these things, that life may not be so very long.' He chuckled, a sound like chains being dragged over gravel, then offered the packet to Sam, who shook his head.

‘Could you do it?' Sam asked.

‘Do what? Count up the pictures ah've taken?' The photographer eyed Sam as if he were a mental defective.

‘What I meant was, do you have a record of them?' Sam explained. ‘Names, dates, that sort of thing.'

The man scoffed. ‘More than that, laddie. I have the negs. Every last one.'

For one short moment Sam felt as if a hand had gripped his shoulder and given it an affectionate squeeze. A touch he'd not felt since he was eleven years old.

‘Thirty-two years' worth?' he whispered.

‘Absolutely. It's an archive, ye see. Worth a lot of money. My cameras have recorded the passing of history. Fer instance – this is a wee example – in my possession I have an unbeatable record of fashion trends in the west of Scotland over the past thirty years.'

Sam raised an eyebrow.

‘Och yes. Clothes, hair styles. All the fashions have come to us here in Bute. On the backs of the visitors, y'see. I've offered it to Scottish TV. They showed a lot of interest. Sent a wee lassie over to take a look. They're still thinking about it, mind.'

‘And you've got all your pictures indexed?' Sam hardly dared believe what he was hearing.

‘Oh aye. I live in a big hoose. No wife or family to clutter it up. I have three rooms full of filing cabinets.'

‘So if I gave you a date from twenty-seven years ago, you could produce the pictures you took that day?'

The man's eyes began to calculate.

‘I shouldn't be surprised,' he answered. ‘It'd take a bit of time, mind. And of course . . . it'd need to be worth my while.'

‘Of course.'

‘I'm expecting four figures from Scottish TV,' he added cannily.

Sam made a clucking noise to show how impressed he was by the wealth the dowdy old man was sitting on. ‘Can I put you to the test?' he suggested.

‘How d'you mean?'

‘Oh, I don't know.' He screwed up his face as if changing his mind. ‘No. It's a waste of time. It's too unlikely.'

‘What is?'

‘It's only a personal thing. Nothing of any great significance. To do with my family.'

‘Go on. You've got me interested now.'

‘Well . . . On the twenty-first of May 1971 my mother and father came here on a day trip – or maybe it was to stay a night or two, I don't know. My dad was a submariner just back from a patrol, so I guess they were after some time on their own without us kids getting in the way. Then, a few days later, when they were driving back home to Portsmouth they had a car crash. Both of them killed. Instantly.'

‘Och that's terrible.' The man looked genuinely shocked. ‘You'd have been a wee bairn.'

‘Eleven. With a sister of fifteen. Yes it was tough for us. We were brought up by grandparents after that.' Sam bit his lip, worried he was over-egging it. ‘Now, I've no idea, but I suppose it's possible you took their photograph when they were here.'

‘Aye. It certainly is.' The old photographer drew heavily on his cigarette and blew the smoke out of the side of his mouth.

‘Care to have a look for me?' Sam asked.

The man's eyes narrowed again. ‘It's the time it takes is the problem,' he wheedled.

‘Packer was the name,' Sam told him. ‘Trevor Packer.'

‘There's always so many other things to do . . .'

‘How about a tenner as a search fee?'

The lips pursed round the cigarette. ‘Och, I don't know. It could take me a wee while. I couldn't be putting my finger on it straight away.'

‘Tell you what. Twenty quid for the search, if you can do it today,' Sam pressed. It was mid-afternoon already. ‘And I'll up it to fifty if you find a neg with his name on and do me a print.'

‘Done.' The photographer slammed his hand into Sam's and shook it firmly. ‘Craigie's the name. Tom Craigie.' He pulled out an order pad. ‘It'll make a change, doing something like this. Give me that date again? You're sure of it, are you?'

‘Best check the days immediately after as well. As I said, they might have stayed a while.' Sam wrote the date down for him, together with the name.

‘Guid.' Craigie stuffed the pad back into his pocket, the corner of which had been torn and stitched. He handed Sam his business card. ‘Now if you'd care to put the twenty pounds in my hand right this minute, I'll call it a day here and get on with your commission.'

Sam extracted a note from his wallet. ‘Okay if I ring you in a couple of hours?'

‘Make it around seven o'clock.' The photographer capped his lens, hoisted the tripod onto his shoulder and set off with a rolling, arthritic gait.

Sam watched him go, suspecting he was wasting his money. No sensible sailor playing away from home would have risked having his picture taken with a girlfriend.

He decided to find a bed for the night and drove along the front until he hit a small hotel which looked cleaner than most and had a vacancy sign in the window. A rosy-cheeked couple in their thirties ran it. Sam paid in advance and the husband showed him to a pleasant room with a view of the sea.

‘Which newspaper would you like in the morning?'

Sam shuddered.

‘Do you get any of the English ones?' he asked cautiously.

‘
Times
or
Chronicle
?'

He hesitated.

‘I'd better have both, please.'

‘No problem. Breakfast's from 7.30 to 9.30. And if you're wanting to be late out this evening the second key on that key-ring opens the front door.'

Sam thanked the man. When he'd gone, he glanced into the small, clean bathroom, finding it generously supplied with shampoos and soaps. There was even a disposable razor in a cellophane wrapper.

He sat on the candlewick bedspread, fantasising that it might have been here in this very room that his father and his companion had stayed. Would they have kept a register from 1971? He kicked himself. It was nonsense to expect anything like that. Probably nonsense for him to have come here in the first place.

He suddenly felt desperately tired. His normal sleep pattern had been shot to pieces in the past few days. His life was in limbo. Waiting. Waiting for old Craigie to do his stuff. And waiting for a clutch of London scandal-mongers to wield their axe on him. Powerless to influence any of it. He felt increasingly bitter towards Julie Jackman. Whether or not the newspaper had cajoled her into springing the trap for him, it had been her decision. Her action that would wreck his career.

He felt an overwhelming need to shut it out for a few hours. There was a small TV in the corner which he switched on and tuned to Sky News. Then he took his shoes off and lay back on the bed. The stories about a missing child in Essex and the love lives of footballers washed over him like Mogadon. He let his eyelids droop, but the headlines on the half-hour prodded him awake again. Some little known white-supremacy group had posted an Internet message claiming responsibility for the Southall bomb. The police were treating it with caution, the newscaster said, and asking for more witnesses to come forward.

Sam was on the point of turning the television off again, but the report that followed stopped him. It was from the Balkans, a follow-up on the Albanian Kosovar family seeking asylum in Europe. Sam leaned on one elbow, watching angry scenes at a port in Italy as the family – one small part of a boatload of refugees – was confronted by protesters demanding they be sent back where they came from. Only after police fired teargas at the demonstrators were the refugees able to land.