Reflex (4 page)

The room which had been George Millace's darkroom would have been far and away the most interesting had there been anything there; but the original burglary there had been the most thorough. All that was left was a wide bench down one side, two large deep sinks down the other and rows of empty shelves across the end. Countless grubby outlines and smudges on the walls showed where the loads of equipment had stood, and stains on the floor marked where he'd stored his chemicals.

He had, I knew, done a lot of his own color developing and printing, which most professional photographers did not. The development of color slides and negatives was difficult and exacting, and it was safer, for consistent results, to entrust the process to commercial large-scale labs. Duncan and Charlie had sent all their color developing out; it was only the printing from negatives, much easier, that they had done themselves.

George Millace had been a craftsman of the first order. Pity about his unkind nature.

From the looks of things he had had two enlargers, one big and one smaller, enlargers being machines which held the negatives in what was basically a box up a stick, so that a bright light could shine through the negative onto a baseboard beneath.

The head of the enlarger, holding the light and the negative, could be wound up and down the stick. The higher one wound the head above the baseboard, the larger one saw the picture. The lower the head, the smaller the picture. An enlarger was in fact a projector, and the baseboard was the screen.

Besides the enlargers, George would have had an electric box of tricks for regulating the length of exposures, a mass of developing equipment and a drier for drying the finished prints. He would have had dozens of sheets of various types of photographic paper in different sizes,
and light-tight dispensers to store them in. He would have had rows of files holding all his past work in reference order, and safelights and measuring jugs and paper-trimmers and filters.

The whole lot, every scrap, had been stolen.

Like most serious photographers he had kept his unexposed films in the refrigerator. They too had gone, Steve had said, and were presumably at the root of the vandalism in the kitchen.

I went aimlessly into the sitting room and switched on the lights, wondering how soon I could decently wake Steve and say I was going. The half-tidied room looked cold and dreary, a miserable sight for poor Mrs. Millace when she got home. From habit and from having nothing else to do I slowly carried on from where I'd stopped the night before, picking up broken scraps of vases and ornaments and retrieving reels of cotton and bits of sewing from under the chairs.

Half under the sofa itself lay a large black light-proof envelope, an unremarkable object in a photographer's house. I looked inside, but all it seemed to contain was a piece of clear thickish plastic about eight inches square, straight cut on three sides but wavy along the fourth. More rubbish. I put it back in the envelope and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

George Millace's rubbish box lay open and empty on the table. For no reason in particular, and certainly impelled by nothing more than photographic curiosity, I picked up the wastepaper basket and emptied it again on the carpet. Then I put all of George's worst mistakes back in the box where he'd kept them, and returned the broken bits of glass and china to the wastebasket.

Why, I wondered, looking at the spoiled prints and pieces of film, had George ever bothered to keep them? Photographers, like doctors, tended to be quick to bury their mistakes, and didn't usually leave them hanging around in magazine racks as permanent mementos of
disaster. I had always been fond of puzzles. I thought it would be quite interesting to find out why such an expert as George should have found these particular things interesting.

Steve came downstairs in his pyjamas looking frail and hugging his injured arm, wanly contemplating the day.

“Good Lord,” he said. “You've tidied the lot.”

“Might as well.”

“Thanks, then.” He saw the rubbish box on the table, with all its contents back inside. “He used to keep that lot in the freezer,” he said. “Mum told me there was a terrible fuss one day when the freezer broke down and all the peas and stuff unfroze. Dad didn't care a damn about the chickens and things and all the pies she'd made which had spoiled. All he went on and on about, she said, was that some ice-cream had melted all over his rubbish.” Steve's tired face lit into a remembering smile. “It must have been quite a scene. She thought it was terribly funny, and when she laughed he got crosser and crosser . . .” He broke off, the smile dying. “I can't believe he isn't coming back.”

“Did your father often keep things in the freezer?”

“Oh sure. Masses of stuff. You know what photographers are like. Always having fits about color dyes not being permanent. He was always raving on about his work deteriorating after twenty years. He said the only way to posterity was through the deep freeze, and even that wasn't certain.”

“Well . . .” I said. “Did the burglars also empty the freezer?”

“Good Lord.” He looked startled. “I don't know. I never thought of that. But why should they want his films?”

“They stole the ones that were in the darkroom.”

“But the policeman said that that was just spite. What they really wanted was the equipment, which they could sell.”

“Um,” I said. “Your father took a lot of pictures which people didn't like.”

“Yes, but only as a joke.” He was defending George, the same as ever.

“We might look in the freezer,” I suggested.

“Yes. All right. It's out at the back, in a sort of shed.”

He picked a key out of the pocket of an apron hanging in the kitchen and led the way through the back door into a small covered yard, where there were garbage cans and stacks of logs and a lot of parsley growing in a tub.

“In there,” Steve said, giving me the key and nodding to a green-painted door set into a bordering wall; I went in and found a huge chest freezer standing between the motor lawnmover and about six pairs of rubber boots.

I lifted the lid. Inside, filling one end and nestling next to joints of lamb and boxes of beefburgers, was a stack of three large gray metal cashboxes, each one closely wrapped in transparent plastic sheeting. Taped to the top was a terse message:

 

DO NOT STORE ICE CREAM
NEAR THESE BOXES

 

I laughed.

Steve looked at the boxes and the message and said, “There you are. Mum said he went berserk when it all melted, but in the end nothing of his was really damaged. The food was all spoiled, but his best transparencies were OK. It was after that that he started storing them in these boxes.”

I shut the lid, and we locked the shed and went back into the house.

“You don't really think,” Steve said doubtfully, “that the burglars were after Dad's pictures? I mean, they stole all sorts of things. Mum's rings, and his cufflinks, and her fur coat, and everything.”

“Yes . . . so they did.”

“Do you think I should mention to the police that all that stuff's in the freezer? I'm sure Mum's forgotten it's there. We never gave it a thought.”

“You could talk it over with her,” I said. “See what she says.”

“Yes, that's best.” He looked a shade more cheerful. “One good thing, she may have lost all the indexes and the dates and places saying where all the pictures were taken, but she has at least still got some of his best work. It hasn't all gone. Not all of it.”

I helped him to get dressed and left soon afterwards, as he said he felt better, and looked it; and I took with me George Millace's box of disasters, which Steve had said to throw in the garbage.

“But you don't mind if I take it?” I said.

“Of course not. I know you like messing about with films, the same as he does . . . same as he did. He liked that old rubbish. Don't know why. Take it, if you want, by all means.”

He came out into the drive and watched me stow the box in the trunk, alongside my two camera bags.

“You never go anywhere without a camera, do you?” he said. “Just like Dad.”

“I suppose not.”

“Dad said he felt naked without one.”

“It gets to be part of you.” I shut the trunk and locked it from long habit. “It's your shield. Keeps you a step away from the world. Makes you an observer. Gives you an excuse not to feel.”

He looked extremely surprised that I should think such things, and so was I surprised, not that I'd thought them, but that I should have said them to him. I smiled to take the serious truth away and leave only an impression of satire, and Steve, photographer's son, looked relieved.

 

I drove the hour from Ascot to Lambourn at a Sunday morning pace and found a large dark car standing outside my front door.

The cottage was one of a terrace of seven built in the Edwardian era for the not-so-rich and currently inhabited, apart from me, by a schoolteacher, a horsebox driver, a curate, a vet's assistant, sundry wives and children, and two hostels-ful of stable lads. I was the only person living alone. It seemed almost indecent, among such a crowd, to have so much space to myself.

My house was in the center: two rooms upstairs, two down, with a modern kitchen stuck on at the back. A white-painted brick front, nothing fancy, facing straight out onto the road, with no room for a garden. A black door, needing paint. New aluminum window frames replacing the original wood, which had rotted away. Not impressive, but home.

I drove slowly past the visiting car and turned into the muddy drive at the end of the row, continuing around to the back and parking under the corrugated plastic roof of the carport next to the kitchen. As I went I caught a glimpse of a man getting hastily out of the car, and knew he had seen me; for my part I thought only that he had no business to be pursuing me on a Sunday.

I went through the house from the back and opened the front door. Jeremy Folk stood there, tall, thin, physically awkward, using earnest diffidence as a lever, as before.

“Don't solicitors sleep on Sundays?” I said.

“Well, I say, I'm awfully sorry . . .”

“Yeah,” I said. “Come on in, then. How long have you been waiting?”

“Nothing to . . . ah . . . worry about.”

He stepped through the door with a hint of expectancy and took the immediate disappointment with a blink. I had rearranged the interior of the cottage so that what had once been the front parlor was now divided into an entrance hall and darkroom, and in the hall section there were only a filing cabinet and the window, which looked
out to the street. White walls, white floor tiles; uninformative.

“This way,” I said, amused, and led him past the darkroom to what had once been the back kitchen but was now mostly bathroom and in part a continuation of the hall. Beyond lay the new kitchen, and to the left, the narrow stairs.

“Which do you want,” I said. “Coffee or talk?”

“Er . . . talk.”

“Up here, then.”

I went up the stairs, and he followed. I used one of the two original bedrooms as the sitting room, because it was the largest room in the house and had the best view of the Downs; the smaller room next to it was where I slept.

The sitting room had white walls, brown carpet, blue curtains, track lighting, bookshelves, sofa, low table and floor cushions. My guest looked around with small flickering glances, making assessments.

“Well?” I said neutrally.

“Er . . . that's a nice picture.” He walked over to take a closer look at the only thing hanging on the wall, a view of pale yellow sunshine falling through some leafless silver birches onto snow. “It's . . . er . . . a print?”

“It's a photograph,” I said.

“Oh! Is it really? It looks like a painting.” He turned away and said, “Where would you live if you had a hundred thousand pounds?”

“I told her I didn't want it.” I looked at the angular helpless way he was standing there, dressed that day not in working charcoal flannel but in a tweed jacket with decorative leather patches on the elbows. The brain under the silly ass act couldn't be totally disguised, and I wondered vaguely whether he had developed that surface because he was embarrassed by his own acuteness.

“Sit down,” I said, gesturing to the sofa, and he folded his long legs as if I'd given him a gift. I sat on a beanbag
floor cushion and said, “Why didn't you mention the money when I saw you at Sandown?”

He seemed almost to wriggle. “I just . . . ah . . . thought I'd try you first on blood-stronger-than-water, don't you know?”

“And if that failed, you'd try greed?”

“Sort of.”

“So that you would know what you were dealing with?”

He blinked.

“Look,” I sighed. “I do understand thoughts of one syllable, so why don't you just . . . drop the act?”

His body relaxed for the first time into approximate naturalness and he gave me a small smile that was mostly in the eyes.

“It gets to be a habit,” he said.

“So I gathered.”

He cast a fresh look around the room, and I said, “All right, say what you're thinking.”

He did so, without squirming and without apology. “You like to be alone. You're emotionally cold. You don't need props. And unless you took that photograph, you've no vanity.”

“I took it.”

“Tut tut.”

“Yes,” I said. “So what did you come for?”

“Well, obviously, to persuade you to do what you don't want to.”

“To try to find the half-sister I didn't know I had?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

After a very short pause into which I could imagine him packing a lot of pros and cons he said, “Mrs. Nore is insisting on leaving a fortune to someone who can't be found. It is . . . unsatisfactory.”