Anne Billson - Suckers

Most of the people in the pictures were smiling, and some appeared to be laughing out loud. This was the bit I didn't like. The worst photos were those in which I could see their teeth, because they forced me, finally, to face up to the truth. We were not dealing with a single vampire here. We were dealing with a pack of them.

I was shocked into silence. This put a whole new slant on things. It might not have been Violet who had dropped in on Patricia after all — it could have been any one of the people here.

'Look,' said Duncan, jabbing at the pictures with his finger. 'Here, here, and here . Just look at them, will you. Look at this fat guy — what's this in his mouth?'

'Maybe it's a Twiglet,' I suggested.

Duncan jabbed again. 'And what about the shape on the sofa?'

'What about it?' He pointed, and I looked. In the background of some of the prints was a couch with two women on it. They could have been twins, each with the same blank face and slicked-back hair, each clutching a wineglass, and perched stiffly, head cocked as if listening to her master's voice. I'd seen both of them, before — behind the reception desk at Multiglom Tower.

There was space between them, and in that space a blur. 'Yes, well, that's definitely someone moving,' I said, shuffling through the blow-ups. In each of the pictures in which the couch was visible, the space between the blank-faced women was occupied by that same blur. You could see there was someone there, but you couldn't make out arms, or legs, or facial features.

'Try this one,' Duncan said, handing me another print — an enlargement of the blur on the couch, blown up so it almost filled the paper. The image was nearly lost in the grain, but you could see it was a woman, and that she had long dark hair.

Duncan helped himself to one of my cigarettes and lit up. He ran his free hand through his hair, leaving it sticking out at odd angles. His spectacles were perched halfway down his nose and he looked completely mad. 'She never did like having her picture taken,' he said.

'Who?' Now I was deliberately being dense. Duncan rolled his eyeballs. He pulled open one of the drawers in his filing cabinet, extracted a folder, and handed it to me. The photographs inside were printed on bromide, not on the modern resin-coated stuff, and the edges had never quite lost their curl. I recognized the locations: Kensal Rise, Highgate, Abney Park. The old cemetery circuit. All night-time views, all taken after dark, with flash.

'You did these at college?' Duncan nodded. There were stone angels, and Grecian urns, and Latin inscriptions, and crumbling dogs, and weeping women, and egg-timers with wings. And in each of the pictures, sometimes flitting through the trees in the background, but occasionally to one side at the front of the frame, I saw the blurred shape of someone who had shifted at the precise instant the shutter had been pressed.

'I could never catch her off-guard. She always moved, every bloody time. She always knew — even with a wide-angle lens, even at 1/125th of a second. She never, ever let me take her picture.'

I felt a sharp pang in my chest, like the bite of a scalpel. He had taken photos of all of them, of Lulu and Alicia and all the ex-girlfriends whose names I didn't know, Jesus, he had even tried to take photos of Violet. But he had never taken photos of me. In his files, I didn't exist.

'Oh boy,' I said. 'You really want me to say she's come back for you, don't you? You're not going to rest until you've got me to say it.'

'I just want you to confirm it's not all in my head.'

I'd had enough. 'OK, she's back. She's definitely back, Duncan. No question about it, she's back. And she's going to rip your head off . Happy now?'

He smiled and nodded courteously. 'Thank you.' He pulled the darkroom door open and slipped into the shadows on the far side, and I could hear him throwing up in the sink. I wondered if there were any prints in the wash there. If so, he would have to rewash them.

I didn't feel too good myself. Into my head floated a picture I'd been trying to suppress for so long — small, fetid packages wrapped in leaking black plastic. I tried to distract myself by going through Dino's photos again. I hadn't recognized Andreas Grauman at first. He looked strange in a tuxedo, with his hair tied back, but the sight of him still gave me the creeps. In fact, it was making me feel ill. My skin went hot, then cold, then hot again, and there was a roaring like motorbikes in my ears, and a faint chirruping noise as well. I put my head down between my knees, until the chirruping noise had died away and been replaced by the sound of a tinkling mountain stream. After a while, I realized the water wasn't some New Vague soundtrack in my head, but was coming from the dark-room next door. I sat up as Duncan came back, blowing his nose on a paper towel.

I made small talk, trying to hide my discomfort. 'Rotten photographer, Dino. Did you find out when these were taken?'

'Six weeks ago.' He was explaining about the filing code scratched into the emulsion when the chirruping started up again. Duncan tensed and swore and hurled himself through the door. Belatedly, I recognized the sound of the telephone, and followed. He was too late; the answering machine had already clicked on, and the caller hung up without leaving a message.

'Shit,' he said, looking devastated. Both of us had the same thought — that it could have been Lulu. 'Shit, shit, shit.'

'Maybe it was her who rang before. While you were throwing up.'

Duncan pressed the replay button. There was a whirring, and a pause, then the familiar little-girl voice. 'Duncan, are you there? Dunc? I guess not… Well, I'm having a great time earning pots of money. And don't worry, I'm not doing anything you wouldn't want me to do. I'll call you tomorrow. Take care. Bye now.'

'What the fuck does she mean by that?' asked Duncan.

We listened to the tape again. I was disappointed and relieved at the same time. 'You heard her,' I said to him. 'She's not doing anything you wouldn't want her to do.' It was an odd thing for her to say, but I wasn't going to lose any sleep over it, especially since she had given no indication of wanting to come home.

We inspected the photographs again and then, over another drink, discussed what to do. I thought we should take them to the Sunday Times or the Observer . Duncan thought we should give them to Jack, whose magazine was small but ideologically sound. We eventually decided that Duncan should print up as many as he could, and we would send them to all the publications we could think of. I wasn't sure what good it would do, but people needed to be made aware of what was going on. There was bound to be an outcry. Someone, somewhere, would settle Murasaki's hash.

Duncan went back into the darkroom to churn out some more prints while he still had the chemicals mixed. While he did that, I went through the Yellow Pages and made lists. Then, just to be on the safe side, I went round the flat leaving cloves of garlic on window-ledges and around door-frames, in the bed and on the dressing-table. After all this and a nightcap, I was too tired to walk home. Duncan offered to call me a cab, but I said I preferred not to go out in the dark at all, and not after the photographs. I told him I was too scared to sleep on my own, so we ended up in the same bed. He was drunk, but not as drunk as he'd been after our night on the town. It wasn't a very good erection, but it was better than nothing and I exploited it to the hilt.

I woke with the smell of bacon fat in my nostrils. Duncan was already up and beavering away in the kitchen. I stumbled in, searching for Paracetamol, and before I knew what was happening he'd got me sitting in front of a plate of fried food. He'd already polished off one of his own. Lulu would have hit the roof; she kept a close watch on his cholesterol intake. Breakfast, for Lulu, was muesli or nothing. He was really living it up behind her back.