Peter Temple - Black Tide

‘An explorer’s name,’ I said. ‘First man up the South-West Passage.’

She laughed, moved her head from side to side. ‘That’s right. I don’t know about the south-west. But show Bucky a passage, he’d attempt to explore it. I was the darkroom assistant. All the customers were people making a big quid out of London real estate. Did you ever see those Snowdon pictures of the Royals? Misty, airbrushed to buggery.’

‘I have them in a scrapbook,’ I said.

‘That’s what Bucky’s customers wanted. Misty pictures, all imperfections gone. The women used to ask: “Can you make my neck look longer?” or, “I say, any chance of getting more space between Julian’s eyes?”, that sort of thing. Bucky was good at it. Randy little snake, real name Colin Biggs. From Liverpool. You had to beat him off with a stick two or three times a day. It was very tiring, but I’d worked in Aussie pubs, I could handle that. The good part was that he hated the darkroom, except for groping, so he wanted me to do that, taught me the trade. And he knew his stuff, he’d had a real arse-kicking apprenticeship.’

She added some wine to the glasses. ‘That’s the long answer to a short question,’ she said. ‘Less about me. Tell me about why you shoot ex-policemen.’

‘No. More about you.’

‘Well, the awful thing about my career,’ she said, ‘is that it begins in a dramatic way. I could process film, so I started taking pictures. Then I went on holiday with a boyfriend. We were in a little place in Belgium near the German border. Pretty fountain, people around it. I was taking pictures when a car pulled up on the other side, outside the bank. Then two men came out of the bank and two men got out of the car with machine pistols and shot them both. I got, oh, seven or eight pictures. Full sequence. IRA revenge killing. British Army officers, the dead men. The guy I was with, he was an operator. On the phone to a photo agency in London, they ran a quick auction of my pictures. After commissions and giving the guy his cut, I ended up with what looked like an enormous sum then. Still looks pretty big, actually.’

‘And you had a new career?’

‘I hadn’t even been paid for the IRA pictures when the agency rang, did I want to go to Beirut? Well, yes. I was so astoundingly green and naive. They didn’t tell me that my predecessor had been kidnapped and murdered and no-one else would go near the place.’

She ate and drank. ‘Anyway, I survived Beirut, utterly terrified at times. You get used to it. Get used to anything. Took some not bad pictures. And it went on from there. For a long time I kept saying: just one more job, then it’s back to painting.’

‘Not any more?’

‘No. I think the painting’s gone. Makes me feel sad sometimes.’ She looked at me. ‘But not for the past twenty-four hours, my learned friend. I’ve been feeling pretty chipper. Post-orgasmically chipper.’

I finished my scrambled egg. ‘What happened to post- orgasmic tristesse?’

‘Only the French,’ she said. ‘The French can’t enjoy anything without it making them sad. They cry over food.’

‘On the subject of crying, married ever?’

Lyall sat back, put her feet in my lap. ‘Very definitely. For five years. To a photographer, a French photographer. That’s how I know about the crying. He’s dead. Shot in the back in Bosnia three years ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I took her hand.

She nodded. ‘We’d been divorced a long time. I hadn’t thought about him in years, to tell the truth. We broke up in a very loud and messy way. Then I find out I’m still down as his next-of-kin and he’s left everything to me. In a will he made after the break-up.’ She turned her head away. ‘Only a Frenchman would do that.’

A moment of silence. Then Lyall said, ‘And that is more than enough of me. Tell me about the Irish women.’

I released her hand. ‘My first wife left me for a man who performed minor surgery on her. Irresistibly attracted to the scalpel. Took our daughter with her. We’d only been married about eighteen months. I got over that. A former client of mine murdered my second wife. In a carpark.’

‘Oh,’ she said and bit her lower lip. ‘My turn for sorry.’

More silence. We sat for a moment, not looking at each other. The survivors. We who are left behind. Then I picked up her hand and kissed her long fingers. ‘That’s enough sorries. I need to ask you some more things about Stuart.’

‘Shit,’ Lyall said. ‘I meant to tell you last night. Before the passion swept me away. I found the phone logbook we recorded messages in. I haven’t needed it since Bradley left. I’d forgotten but I went away first, East Timor for the London Sunday Times colour supp. Bradley and Stuart both took messages for me and each other from the thirtieth of June. Then Bradley must have left because Stuart took messages for both of us from the fourth of July. Here’s the last one he put in the book.’

She handed it to me. ‘Seventh of July,’ she said.

A neat hand had written the date and the message: Brad: Ring James Margo (Margaux?). You know number.

‘He flew to Sydney on the morning of the tenth?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

I looked at the entries before the seventh. The house had a busy phone. On the sixth of July, Stuart had made six entries: four calls for Bradley, two for Lyall. On the fifth, he’d recorded seven; on the fourth, five calls for Lyall and four for Bradley.

I went further back. I couldn’t see a day when fewer than five messages were noted.

‘Part-time job just taking messages,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘That’s nothing. Blissfully quiet time. Bradley could get twenty calls a day. Easily. Drive you mad if he wasn’t here. Making movies. What a business. Please give Brad an urgent message, please get him to ring back. Five or six projects on the go, dozens of people involved, all on the phone, everything’s urgent.’

Lyall finished her glass. ‘Of course, it’s only urgent today, tomorrow there’s a new dream. Hardly anything ever gets made but they don’t give up hope. Nothing is ever dead.’

‘The two days,’ I said, ‘eight and nine July. No calls recorded. Why would that be?’

Lyall shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

‘So when you came back, you found calls dating back to when?’

‘Tenth of July.’

‘Date’s certain?’

‘The answering machine puts a day and a time on messages. When I got back, its awful voice said Thursday for the first message. Thursday was the tenth.’

‘So Stuart must have wiped Tuesday and Wednesday without recording the calls.’

‘Be a first for Stuart. Punctilious recorder of calls. Listen, I just thought of something else. It all seems so long ago, it went right out of my mind. Stuart’s new video camera was also gone. Tripod’s here.’

‘What did he use it for?’

‘Interviewing someone. He bought it before I went to East Timor, at least a week before. I think. He had me sit in a chair in the sitting room, camera on the tripod. Wanted to make sure he had the focus right, the sound level, that sort of thing.’

‘Interviewing who? Do you know?’

‘No. Stuart wouldn’t tell you that. But he was pleased with himself. I remember he went away for a couple of days, took the camera. Came back and he was behind the computer for days, headphones on.’

‘Headphones?’

‘He had a dictaphone, tape recorder thing. It’s up there. No tape in it.’

She got up and came around the table, stood behind me, leaned over me. I felt her breasts against my head. ‘I’m feeling wonderfully tired,’ she said. ‘Must be the squash. Might have a little lie down. Interested?’

‘Only if you promise to keep your hands off me.’