Simon Beckett - Owning Jacob - SA

“I bet.”

“—so what I suggest is that you wait until your next contact is due, and I’m sure that all these... these problems will be resolved amicably.”

The man genuinely believed there was nothing to worry about, Ben saw. As far as the social worker was concerned, the happy ending had already happened.

“And what if Kale drops a lump of metal on Jacob’s head before then?”

Carlisle looked as though he had made a tasteless joke. “We will look into your complaint, obviously. We take everything like this seriously, but you have to understand that we can’t act on an uncorroborated allegation.”

“In other words you think I’m making it up.”

“It isn’t that I think you’re making it up.” The implication in his voice was that he didn’t think Ben was telling the whole truth, either. “We just can’t do anything without evidence.”

“So that’s it, then?”

The social worker spread his hands. “I’m sorry, Mr Murray. I can assure you that—”

Ben walked out. His head seemed to hum with the force of his frustration.

I’ll get you fucking evidence, he thought.

He bought the lens from his usual supplier. He already had zoom lenses for detailed and portrait work, but nothing that was up to the kind of specifications he had in mind now.

It was a 600mm telephoto, a more-than-half-metre-long beast that still wasn’t as powerful as some of the long lenses press photographers used, but with muscle enough for his needs.

When he fitted it to his Nikon and looked through it he felt as though he had an artillery gun strapped to his head.

On the afternoon he collected it he told Zoe not to expect him back and set off for Tunford. A thin and insincere afternoon sun broke through the clouds as he left the motorway.

Bypassing the town altogether, he headed directly for the hill.

He parked by the same overgrown gate as before, shouldered his camera bag and set off through the wood. This time when he hit the track he knew exactly where to go. He caught glimpses of the houses through the trees. When he thought he had gone far enough, he left the track and cut straight downhill.

He was a little too high, but he backtracked until he was directly above the house. There was no sign of anyone, but he’d expected that. Jacob would be at school, Kale at the scrapyard and Sandra at the pub where she worked as a barmaid.

He looked around. Not far from where he had stood the previous Sunday was a cluster of bushy young oaks, their lowest branches almost sweeping the ground in places. Ben cautiously pushed his way through them. They clutched and scratched at him but once he was inside there was a relatively clear area where he would be hidden. He set his camera bag and lens case down and snapped off one or two small branches that were in the way. After he had broken off the overhanging twigs in front of him, he had an uninterrupted view down into Kale’s back garden.

He took out the telephoto lens and fitted it on to his Nikon. The weight made the familiar camera feel unbalanced. It would have been unmanageable without a tripod. When it was fully supported he put his eye to the viewfinder, and suddenly the back garden was in his face. He drew back, startled, then looked through the camera again. “Wow,” he murmured, adjusting the focus.

Compared to this the zoom lenses he was used to were like bifocals. The rear of the house leaped into close-up; the grainy texture of the bricks, the flaking paintwork, even the brand-name of a box of matches on the windowsill above the sink, all were as clear as if he were only a few feet from them. He panned around the garden, which he now saw was contained by a high wire fence. In the centre of the bare, compressed earth was the car seat where Jacob had sat while Kale performed his lunatic exercises. Embedded in the ground next to it was the weight he had used, a finned metal cylinder which looked like part of an engine. He couldn’t tell if it had been moved again or not. The scene had a flat, slightly unreal quality as the compression of distance made the perspective lose its depth.

In the foreground the mounds of scrap became individual metal shapes, precariously stacked and pockmarked with corrosion.

Ben felt his anger mount at this further proof of Kale’s irresponsibility. Ragged and razor-sharp edges protruded like traps, waiting to stab, crush and slash. He couldn’t believe anyone could entrust a child to such a lethal playground, and wondered again how Kale had got away with it. Surely somebody, for Christ’s sake, should have made him clear the garden before Jacob was all owed to live with him.

Unless it hadn’t been there then.

Ben began taking photographs of the junk, making sure that at least part of the house was also clearly in view in each frame. He shot three rolls of film before he felt he’d done enough for a dry run. He took his eye from the viewfinder.

It was odd returning to an unmagnified perspective, like coming out of a cinema into a mundane world. The Kales’ house looked shrunken and insignificant. There was still no sign of life. Ben felt disappointed, but only mildly. As he looked down the hill, it was another feeling altogether that gripped him. It was a moment or two before he recognised it as anticipation.

Not sure why that made him uncomfortable, he packed his gear away and went home.

He’d planned to finish work early and go the woods again the next afternoon, but by lunchtime the rain had started coming down with the steady determination of a long-distance runner.

It continued over the next few days, a sullen downpour from a dour sky that didn’t permit a glimmer of sun. If it left him frustrated, he could at least console himself that Kale and Jacob were unlikely to be out in it either.

The bad weather was doubly annoying because he had a location shoot scheduled for the end of the week. It should have been carried out during the summer, but penny-pinching by the fashion designer meant that now they had to try and juggle it into what sunny days the autumn grudgingly provided.

The designer, spurning the idea of going abroad, had booked Ben for two days on the basis of the long-range weather forecast. Ben, Zoe, the make-up woman and two models had huddled around the cars on a deserted and windswept beach since first light, waiting for the low cloud to lift while the designer fretted and snapped at his assistant, chain-smoked black cigarettes and got on everybody’s nerves. After lunch the sun had begun to break through. They had hurriedly set up and Ben had gone as far as taking final light readings when the first fat spots of rain splattered down.

They waited it out for another hour before Ben announced that he’d had enough. To the accompaniment of the designer’s tantrum, they packed everything away, helped by the male model, who had obviously taken a shine to Zoe. As Ben was sitting with his feet out of the car, kicking the sand off his boots, she came over to him.

“Do you need me for anything else?” she asked, overly casual. “Daniel’s asked me out for a drink, so I’ll go back with him if that’s okay.”

“No problem.” He winked at her. “See you tomorrow.”

She smiled, blushing, and went over to the model’s black 1960s BMW. Ben watched her slim hips push from side to side as she waded across a patch of soft sand, self-consciously aware of being observed. But not by him, he realised. The studied insouciance was for the hunk waiting in the car, and Ben was wryly amused to find that his ego was pricking him. It was one thing to turn someone down. It was another to see how quickly they’d recovered from it.

The other model, a girl, had travelled down with the designer, and Ben felt obliged to offer her a lift rather than abandon her to the man’s spleen. She was young, twenty or twenty-one, with short, curly auburn hair and a long upper lip that could look either sulky or sensuous.