Now – 13th March
I haven’t slept.
Not even a brief nap last night and now I’m having palpitations at my desk while I bury myself in denial, working through the last couple of weeks’ photographs, deciding which ones are good enough to put up on the image banks that keep me in pappy white bread and instant coffee and these dodgy Marlboro I buy under the counter, dirt cheap and tax free.
Ella knew him.
OK, she told me that – her tepid one-night stand; she was entitled to lie about it, I suppose – but she said she hadn’t seen him at the party. Why lie about that?
I get up from my desk and pace around the living room, taking deep, sandpapery drags, blowing the smoke out slowly. Back and forth, ash flaking on to the garish carpet I’d always meant to get rid of but gradually came to love for its clashing colours and the pattern so hideous it was almost beautiful.
Doesn’t Ella trust me?
Is that it?
Once again I switch to the tab where the incriminating photograph is blown up as large as its resolution will allow. Ella’s back is to the camera, her shoulders straight with tension, but this is a millisecond captured and frozen and I know better than to read her entire mood into what might have been a quick shrug.
He’s leaning towards her in the photo. Most of his face infuriatingly hidden from the lens. I have enough to know it’s definitely him but not enough to judge his mood or behaviour. This is the only image I can find and it tells me nothing.
I get rid of the picture, bring up something sedate to work on for a while. A Georgian front door, weathered and scuffed, its paint faded, ironwork rusted. These photos sell well. Doorways and alleyways, old staircases and stone steps. People can’t resist them, the allure of secrets hidden and opportunities waiting.
People get killed in alleyways, that’s what I know. Beaten or raped. Nothing good ever happened to anyone behind a door that looks like that.
And Ella doesn’t trust me.
It’s a physical pain like my ribs are closing in around my heart and lungs. She made me her accomplice, knowing I’d help her even at the risk of my own freedom. She knows how deep my loyalty runs. This isn’t the first time I’ve shown her that.
I want things to be as they were a week ago, when we were sisters in arms, fighting the good fight. Ella accomplishing things I don’t have the youth or energy to get done, taking my advice, learning from my mistakes. Half the contacts she’s built her reputation on are mine. I’ve vouched for her to people who wouldn’t have trusted her with their surnames, let alone anything more. A copper’s daughter. An assistant chief constable’s daughter, for Christ’s sake.
Is she keeping things from me because she’s planning on going to him for help?
The less I know the more difficult for me to contradict whatever story he cooks up to get her off the hook. . .
But I can’t see that happening. Not knowing what I know about their relationship. Going to her father now would confirm every bad thing he believes about her. It would put her at his mercy. She’s run this far from his iron grip, betraying everything he stands for along the way, dragging his profession through the dirt; I can’t see her running back to him.
I take a deep breath, my hand pressed to my heart, feeling every beat hit my palm. Try to calm down, try to think.
My eye catches on the ugly steel rat trap Callum brought up yesterday evening. It’s behind the sofa, laid along the skirting board. That’s where you catch them, Callum says. They burrow into the upholstery, tear clumps out to take back to their nests, and they run along the wall, straight into the traps.
Rats are smarter than that, though, I’m sure.
He’s baited it with half a chocolate Pop-Tart but it’s still a trap and rats haven’t survived this long with the whole of human ingenuity railed against them by falling for such cheap tricks.
I grab my mobile and call Ella.
It goes straight through to voicemail but I don’t leave a message. Her Twitter account shows no activity beyond a few links to news items and petitions she’s encouraging her followers to sign; one to boycott the raising of a statue dedicated to an Edwardian philanthropist and espouser of eugenics, another calling for the support of a local library being threatened with closure.
I send her a text. Telling her I need her opinion on the latest batch of photos for her book.
She’ll realise it’s a lie, but you never know who else will see these messages.
I check on the other traps Callum has laid, one behind the fridge and another behind the toilet, the last hidden in the airing cupboard, where the rats have been rootling around, leaving scratch marks on the chipboard and gnawing at the lagging on the pipes. That’s where he’ll catch one if he’s going to.
Thinking of snapped bones and sprayed blood, I remove the clothes hanging from the lowest shelf, a lambswool jumper I bought from Help the Aged and a vintage silk blouse I’ve had since the seventies, printed with tiny tulips, and put them on the radiator. Two generations I’ve owned that blouse and I can still remember the song that was playing in the changing room when I tried it on – Roxy Music, ‘Both Ends Burning’.
Time isn’t supposed to move this fast.
I go back to my desk, stick my earphones in and turn the volume up on an instrumental playlist heavy on the Afro-Cuban funk, forcing myself to concentrate on the photographs that still need editing.
At my back the photographs I took in my prime watch over me, and when I’m doing this kind of work I feel judged by them. Protestors and club kids, gangsters and rent boys and musicians long gone to obscurity. People whose personalities burned so hot through the lens they could have singed my eyelashes.
I keep going.
A Victorian soap advert painted high on the gable wall of a condemned mansion block. I’d noticed it across a building site, hidden there since its neighbour went up in the sixties and only revealed now because an office block has been demolished. A bulldozer was pulling on-site as I walked away, ready to obliterate that building too. This might be the only photograph of the sign in existence.
I pause for a bite of the sandwich I made hours ago and forgot. Bread and jam, just like when I was a kid and we didn’t have anything else in the house to eat because payday wasn’t until Friday. Jam or salt-and-pepper sandwiches, that was your choice. When I got out, got money, I’d think it was a total nostalgia trip to sprinkle cracked black pepper and kosher salt on a slice of fresh-cut sourdough bread, spread thick with white butter. Like I was reclaiming those years of poverty.
But here I am again, the snotty-nosed girl with the falling-down socks and the darned jumpers, living on nothing.
I start on the next picture, select the best shot, crop and tweak and save, and then there’s another in front of me and another and my back is aching in the swivel chair and my eyes are furring over, flakes of the mascara I didn’t take off last night gritty under my lower lids. The playlist has been running on repeat and I’ve lost track of time, grown cold and stiff-fingered.
My phone rings but I don’t hear it, only feel the vibration shake the desk.
Ella.
I whip out my earbuds and snatch up the phone.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asks, before I can say a word. ‘Is this it?’
‘No, Ella. Calm down.’
Through the sliding door I see how late it has got. Dark out now and the room reflected over the glass is small and messy, so stuffy I can almost see the staleness on the air. I switch the light off and open the door, letting the night breeze in.
‘Can’t you talk right now?’ Ella asks.
‘I can talk.’ I brace my hand against the door’s metal frame. ‘Ella, there’s a picture of you with him on Twitter.’
‘Who?’
‘Who do you think?’
‘There can’t be,’ she says. ‘I didn’t see him. Are you sure that’s who it is? You’re always saying everyone looks alike to you now.’
‘I’m not likely to forget his face, am I?’
I shudder as I remember his dead eyes staring up at me, staring right through me as we carried him along the corridor towards the lift shaft.
‘I’m sure I didn’t see him.’ She sounds genuinely perplexed. ‘I’d remember. Wouldn’t I? No, this is stupid. I didn’t see him at the party, Molly.’
I stay silent.
‘You and Carol kept giving me drink,’ Ella says, her voice dropping. ‘That’s the problem, I can hardly remember anything after I sat down with you two. That weed she was smoking – she kept blowing it into my face. You know how sensitive I am to it.’ A growl. ‘God. I didn’t think I was that out of it.’
Ella had been drunk, more than I’d ever seen her. I remember how she stumbled as she climbed on to the platform we built for her from milk crates. She got through her speech well enough but, now I think about it, it wasn’t the usual polished Ella talking; she’d rambled a little and beaten her chest, showing a more raw and inspiring version of herself. Until her foot slipped and we caught her to cheers from the partygoers, raised her up like Jesus.
‘Send me the picture,’ she says.
‘It’s probably best you just look at it.’ I tell her the username of the person who posted it and wait for her to find the image, knowing she has by the way she swears, softly, almost regretfully.
‘Molly, I honestly don’t remember this. Please, believe me.’
It sounds like the truth. I close my eyes, listening to the sound of her breathing, the traffic noise and music floating up from a bar on the river, the inevitable sirens, very close. Too close. I step out on to the balcony and see blue lights flashing across the front of the building as a patrol car pulls up. Derek and Callum are down there already, waiting.
Ella has heard the sirens too.
‘What’s happening?’ The panic is tight in her voice.
I want to shout down to Callum but it’s too late; the police are out of their car and Derek is moving towards them. He looks shaken and Callum is tense, holding back, arms wrapped around his middle. As if he feels my eyes on him, he looks up to the balcony and looks away again.
Did he see me?
Does he know?
Callum leads the PCs inside and I know where they’re going, which floor they will stop climbing at, exactly what they are going to see. My stomach lurches and I bolt through the living room to the bathroom, where I drop to my knees so heavily I set off the rat trap behind the toilet. I throw up bile and coffee, my eyes stinging.
I spit out what little is left in me and sit back against the bath, hearing Ella’s voice, a dim and distant version of her which, for a second, I think I’m hallucinating, until I realise my phone is still in my hand, the call live.
‘Molly?’ she asks desperately, almost shouting. ‘Are you okay?’
‘They’re here,’ I say. ‘The police. They’ve found him.’