Naomi's Room (8 page)

‘I told you . . .’

‘No, in the church, I mean. Whereabouts in the church?’ For some reason I could not explain, it was important to know.

He looked at me oddly, as though my question had revealed a perspicacity he had not suspected.

‘In the crypt,’ he said. ‘They might not have been found for years, but something went wrong with the boiler. When the caretaker went down to take a look, he came across the coat. It had been left on top of one of the tombs. Whoever left it there must have broken in. Or had a key. It’s given us a line of inquiry at least. We needed one after all this time.’

I invited him in for tea, but he shook his head. He was dressed in a raincoat and a dented grey hat, almost the stereotype of a policeman, except for his eyes. I can still remember them, their blueness, their acuity, their hoodedness. He kept something buried beneath them, buried very deep yet at times visible if you knew what you were looking for. I knew. I understood. I had it buried inside me as well.

‘How is your wife?’ he asked, preparing to leave.

You are meant to say, ‘Bearing up’, but I did not.

‘She suffers a lot,’ I said. ‘She’ll never get over it.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t. People think you can, but it isn’t possible, it scars your life.’

He meant his daughter, of course, though I did not know at the time. The verb he used was curious but apt. Death leaves wounds that never heal properly. And yet . . . even then I thought he meant something else by it.

‘If there’s any news . . .’ I said.

‘Don’t worry. You’ll be the first to know.’

The following day, Lewis’s letter arrived. It was just a short note really, accompanying two photographs taped between a couple of sheets of thin cardboard.

‘Please get in touch,’ he wrote. ‘I took these the day I visited you, before I came in. The first was taken with an ordinary lens, the second with the zoom. I believe you are both in danger. We need to talk.’

I cut the tape and slipped the photographs from their makeshift wallet. The first was another contact print showing the front elevation of the house. I looked at it closely, knowing where to look now, guessing what I might find, but not quite suspecting the truth of it. A chill crossed my heart as I made out the unmistakable image of a face in the attic window. The shuttered window, the one I had opened only two days before.

I picked up the close-up. It makes my blood go cold even now to think of what it revealed. Not the pale, grey woman, not one of the little girls, not Naomi. But Laura’s face, white and cold, staring down as though from a great height.

That night the hauntings began again. I think of what took place that night as a loss of innocence. Each stage in those events represented some form of loss: a loss of love or faith or self-respect. But innocence is like trust: once gone, it can never be restored.

What do I mean by innocence? I was, after all, a grown man by then, a grieving father. I had experienced disappointment, disillusionment, hard knocks – all the paths by which we come to worldly wisdom. Or, if not wisdom, a sort of understanding. But, for all that, I was innocent enough at heart. I mean that I harboured a belief in an essential current of goodness running through things, I saw a shape, a pattern to the whole, even if life in its particulars seemed at times shapeless or inchoate, even if children died in pain. It was, I suppose, a religious sense of the world, though I did not formulate it in theological terms. A sterner theology, a dogma, might have seen me through what happened. But my innocence was not made of such iron stuff, nor so well defended. It was half-formulated, lax, too much in tune with the times and too little with the experience of generations.

I was wakened from an uneasy sleep a little before three. Laura was asleep beside me. On this occasion, it was not a scream that woke me, but something far more insidious. As I woke, I felt as though there were some great pressure forcing me down. I found it hard to breathe. My thoughts were confused, I could feel panic welling up inside me for no apparent reason. As I lay struggling to pull myself upright, I heard what sounded like breathing. Not Laura’s breathing, but quieter than that and further away. I thought it was coming from the foot of the bed.

With an effort, I heaved myself up against the pillow.

‘Who’s there?’ I whispered. I was certain that someone was standing at the foot of the bed, watching me intently. Beside me, Laura stirred uneasily in her sleep. There was no reply. The sound of breathing continued. I strained to see, but there was only darkness, plain and impenetrable.

‘Who are you?’ I asked again. ‘What do you want?’ Shaking, I reached out my hand to switch on the bedside lamp. Nothing happened. Again and again I flicked the switch, but the light would not go on.

And now I became conscious of something terrible. The sense of menace I had felt before in the attic had returned, this time much stronger. The awful thing was that I experienced it in two different ways at once: I felt that I was the object of a dreadful hatred, of an unappeased anger that was reaching out for me with all its force. And simultaneously I felt it in myself, I felt hate, anger, malice, a gamut of raw emotions that all but choked me. I still found it hard to breathe. The darkness pressed in on me, relentless, tight as a sack, smothering me.

Suddenly, I heard Laura’s voice on my left.

‘What’s happening, Charles? What’s going on?’

I struggled to answer, but words would not form. I felt as though I were drowning in air.

‘What’s wrong, Charles? What’s wrong? Where are you?’

Her voice seemed to come from a long way away. It was so faint I could hardly hear it. I tried to speak, but nothing happened. I could hear another sound now, a faint rustling like silk.

Suddenly, a bright light exploded in my eyes. I blinked hard, then opened them again. For an instant, I thought I saw someone standing in front of me, someone tall and dressed in grey. Then I was breathing again and I could feel Laura’s hand on my arm and hear her voice clearly.

‘Charles, are you all right?’

I nodded, gulping in air.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I . . . I must have been dreaming. It was as if I was being smothered. But it’s all right now. I’m fine.’

But I wasn’t fine. Something had lodged itself deep inside me, something unspeakable. It was not a memory, but a sensation, a lingering awareness of the menace I had felt and a dark knowledge of something else already there, something that had been quiescent until then. The feelings of rage and hatred had not come from outside but had been in me all the time. I felt unclean, as though something filthy had touched me or entered me. When Laura reached out a hand to calm me, I pulled away from her. I had never done that before. She said nothing, but I knew my gesture had hurt her. It didn’t matter.

In the morning, I rang Lewis. He had been waiting for my call.

‘Have you heard?’ he asked.

‘Heard? Heard what?’

‘It was on the news this morning,’ he said. ‘Ruthven has been found dead. Murdered. In the church where they discovered Naomi’s coat.’

‘What happened?’

Lewis and I were sitting in the study, facing one another across a low table on which I had placed a small folder.

‘His throat was cut. Savage, according to the report we had at the office. Nobody at Old Jewry knows why he went down to the church. They’d finished there, done all their forensic business, and given up. Seems they haven’t found anything yet. They think the coat got there by chance, nothing more. A vagrant may have come across it, taken it to the church.’

‘But why leave it in the crypt? What would be the point?’

‘The caretaker says vagrants go down there sometimes, the clever ones that know there’s a boiler. They don’t last long, though. The place spooks them. Nobody’s ever spent a night there, as far as he knows.’

‘Could they be related?’

‘Who?’

‘No, not who: I mean the murders. Naomi’s and Ruthven’s. Could there be a link? Could Ruthven have been on to something? Panicked the murderer into attacking him, perhaps?’

Lewis shrugged.

‘It’s too early to say. There’s no record of a lead. They only shut down their operation at the church yesterday.’

‘When was he found?’

‘Early this morning. The caretaker went in to check the police had left things tidy. He got a bad fright. There was blood spilled all over one of the tombs. An old French tomb. A funny name: Petitoeil.’

I corrected his pronunciation as though he were a student. ‘Petitoeil,’ I said. ‘It means “Little eye”. It will be a Huguenot name. Spitalfields was a major centre for Huguenot refugees at one time.’

It was mid-morning. Lewis had come straight from London. I watched him coming up the path towards the house, nervous, glancing around him, and looking up from time to time. I knew what he was looking at, looking for. He had his camera with him this time, in one of those large bags photographers carry.

‘Did you get the photographs?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘Is that why you rang?’

‘No. Something else . . . Something else has happened.’ I told him of the incidents, keeping my narrative as plain and unemotional as possible. But I could see his eyes widen as the force of my words sank in. When I had finished, I picked up the folder.

‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘Something related to your photographs.’

‘I kind of thought it might be that,’ he said. He had an instinct, Lewis, a sixth sense. They say the Celts are a bit like that, a little fey, attuned to other dimensions. Sons of Arthur. Well, perhaps. Lewis had it at least. And lived to regret it.

Out of the folder I took two sets of photographs. I laid them down side by side on the table.

‘I was disturbed,’ I said. ‘By the little girls. The ones in your photographs. Something about them kept nagging at me. They seemed familiar, as though I’d seen them before. Does that make sense to you?’

He nodded.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Well, I couldn’t place them at first, no matter how much I thought about them. And then . . . Just after I went up to the attic, the time Laura heard footsteps, I remembered.’

I took a photograph from the first of the two small piles. In the foreground was Laura, several years younger, her arm resting on the stone balustrade of a low bridge. It could, perhaps, have been Cambridge, but it was not. The photograph had been taken on our honeymoon in Venice. A couple of months after we bought the house.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Look behind her.’

Lewis picked up the photograph and looked carefully. Standing on the bridge, a few paces behind Laura, were two small girls, hand in hand, smiling at the camera.

‘Were they visible when you took the photograph?’ Lewis asked. ‘I mean, can you remember if you actually saw them on the bridge?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s impossible to remember now. I do recall being a bit puzzled when the shots were developed. I was sure I’d posed Laura on an empty bridge. I didn’t much like shots that had other people in. The bridge was somewhere behind St Mark’s, I’m sure of that. But people are everywhere in Venice, it’s hard to shake them off, to be on your own. So I thought the girls must have appeared just as I pressed the shutter.’ I paused. ‘Now, look at this.’

Another photograph of Venice, this time a shot of us together, taken by a waiter in a little restaurant off the Strada Nuova.

‘Look closely,’ I said.

At a table to our left, a family was sitting eating. A man in black, a woman in grey, two little girls in long skirts. All were looking at the camera. There was something about the man’s face that I did not like.

‘And here,’ I said, pushing another photograph across the table.

Laura in St Mark’s square feeding pigeons. Barely visible in the crowd, unnoticed until a day ago, two small girls staring, not at the camera this time, but at Laura.

‘There are others,’ I said. ‘You have to look hard, but they’re there. Sometimes the children on their own, sometimes the woman, sometimes all three.’

‘What about the man?’

‘He only appears in the restaurant photograph.’

Lewis nodded, scrutinizing the photographs carefully one by one. He used one of those odd magnifying devices photographers carry, a small stand raised above the surface by about an inch.

‘And these?’ he asked, tapping his finger on the second pile.

‘I had these developed yesterday,’ I said. ‘They’re photographs we took in the week or two before Christmas, up until . . . Up until Naomi’s disappearance.’

He began to leaf through them. His movements were curiously fine, curiously particular, like those of an antiquarian handling a rare folio or a grower of orchids planting a new specimen. There was such disparity between his appearance and his grace of movement. It made me feel strangely comfortable, this particularity of his, the delicate way his hands held and sorted the photographs. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps he will understand how this has happened, perhaps he will know what to do.

When he looked up at last, his face was ashen.

‘Dear God,’ he whispered. That was all. They were not so pretty in those photographs, the little girls. Not so . . . well arranged.

When he had recomposed himself, he put the photographs back in the folder. His hands were not so careful now, his movements had grown coarse.

‘Your wife,’ he said. ‘Have you shown these to her?’

I shook my head.

‘Good,’ he murmured. ‘It’s best you don’t.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

‘Tell me,’ I continued. ‘Do you have any idea why these images should have formed like this? Why they appear on film but not to the naked eye?’

He shook his head slowly.

‘Not really,’ he answered. ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought, of course, but I haven’t been able to come up with any answers. Not good answers. I suppose it has something to do with the way the light falls through the lens. Perhaps they’re visible if you catch them in the right light, at the right angle. I wouldn’t know. It’s not my line of country.’

‘I could feel them,’ I said. I felt my flesh creep as I said it, remembering. ‘Sense them. In the attic. I’m sure that’s who it was.’