She reappraises her first reaction, getting the same sense as seeing a piece of art for the second time and beginning to understand it.
She thinks about the Benny she knew: the man who would never flinch from an important shot. And of the Benny she has discovered through the archive and these stolen photos of her. Benny the obsessive, the compulsive, the disordered. Benny the man who thought he could possess people through images. All these negatives kept for all these years. Every single damn frame, like a substitute for memory or conscience.
She looks at the picture of the door, the sense she has seen it before now scratching at the back of her mind. It could be in London, the only place Benny was likely to have gone between leaving Norfolk and developing the film.
But it’s the fact he went anywhere at all that twists in her mind. Why make a detour? Why shoot a final frame at all? And the sense of something familiar grows. Familiar and recent. Something in the archive.
She goes first through the scanned images already on the computer. It’s quick, swipe-swipe, across the screen.
As she searches, there is another sequence of questions going through her head about Yvey. Who was it who attacked the girl? Why take her phone? What were they looking for?
Amber refocuses on the images in front of her, but still there’s nothing in them she can find. She looks in all the backgrounds, behind the main tableaus of action Benny has captured. Still nothing. But the idea of background sticks, and a sick feeling hits her.
She gets up and goes swiftly through the door at the back and up to the archive. She knows now the box she is looking for, and she knows the photo. It is that solitary shot that peeled back a little the lie about the depth of a relationship.
She feels sick again when she pulls the print from the envelope. The match between this photo and the last on the roll of Benny’s film are clear to see: the Art Deco knocker on that door. Green in this colour print, a woman leaning against it with her sardonic half-smile and cigarette.
Amber hears a sound from downstairs in the editing suite. The hum of the sliding door, and footsteps on the polished floor.
56
Benny
Sunday, 11 November 2001
I took Gen to Tim’s cottage in the last weekend of September. It was a couple of weeks after that evening in the bar, and just before the time I spent in Afghanistan. I carried to the cottage the feeling I always get before I go into a war zone. This time I might not come back. It focuses the mind. It made for one of our better weekends. Finally we were away from the farmhouse and all that racket. I felt free again in the space of the sea and the sky. Sure, I thought about the words my friend and I had said to each other. But they felt distant and grimly comic in the bright sun and strong breeze. They were silent in the hours of careless sex.
In the weeks that followed, in the chaos of war, I didn’t think once of that evening with my friend. The notion faded into absurdity. I’d not even heard from her, and I’d not made contact myself, either. I was still chewing on my mistake, my lack of discipline.
Then came the November trip to the cottage with Amber, and the man who came to change it all.
Those last moments of his life played in my head as I drove away from the coast on the morning after. What else was there to think about? I tried to consider the events leading up to his death, watching it all as if from his point of view. I could see him following us, thinking I was with my wife. I could imagine him tracking us throughout the weekend, trying to find the right moment. Did he run out of opportunities? Was he getting reckless when he broke into the cottage, desperate to finish the job?
The feeling about who he was felt implausible and unavoidable at the same time. I could tell myself he was a junkie or a drifter. I could construct a comforting lie that it was nothing to do with me: that someone from Tim’s past had tried to catch up with him. I could tell myself it was coincidence that I had half-conspired to kill my wife. I tried to cling to that idea. I wondered how long I could. I wondered if I could just go home and never speak about it.
But I couldn’t get away from how the man had behaved: getting me out of the way, warning me with the point of his knife to stay down, then going for Amber.
If I had any doubts left about who had sent that man, they vanished the moment my friend opened the door to me. Her eyes, fogged with sleep, almost lit up for a moment. But the sight of Kay Hamilton held no pleasure for me anymore.
‘Benny,’ she said, her voice rising hopefully.
I pushed straight on into her flat. It was nearly lunchtime, but she still had a dressing gown wrapped around her, a cigarette in a lightly trembling hand. I kept going through the flat, looking in the rooms, checking for signs of anyone else. The hallway was strewn with old papers, and the kitchen was piled high with unwashed dishes. I didn’t know how to begin. The first thing that fell out of my mouth was disgust:
‘You live like this?’
She was silent, for once the sharp casual riposte missing from her throat.
‘Did you… did he…?’
Then my rage exploded, shooting out from me like a thousand flashguns firing. ‘You stupid bitch! You stupid, stupid bitch.’
She fell backwards onto a chair, her dressing gown unfurling. I felt a great wave of disgust wash over me, and there was a seething silence between us. I was standing over her, my fists bunched. Then I backed away, pressing myself against the kitchen wall.
‘Is your wife…?’
‘I wasn’t there with my wife, you idiot. So, no, Gen is not dead. And neither is…’
‘Who?’
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s none of your business who I’m sleeping with.’
‘Then why do you always take such delight in telling me all about them? You think because you don’t tell me their names, I think they don’t exist?’
I didn’t want to move towards where she was trying to drag the conversation.
‘The only person who’s dead is that amateur you hired.’ I shook my head, grasping at a lost possibility. ‘Tell me you didn’t, Kay, please.’
But she didn’t utter a word.
‘Who the hell was he?’ I bellowed the question, trying to focus on some solid fact.
‘He’s dead?’ She looked pale. ‘Did you call the police?’
‘Of course I bloody well didn’t. Tell me who he was.’
I thought Kay was going to throw up, but then a defiance came back into her face. ‘He was someone who understood something about loyalty. More than you ever will.’
‘Jesus Christ, I didn’t think you’d actually do it. And frankly, if you did, I thought you of all people would find someone who knew what they were doing.’
‘So you did want me to do it.’
I couldn’t speak. I just shook my head.
‘You said. You said it. You wanted me to, Benny. I didn’t force you to say it.’
‘No, I…’
‘All those girls, Benny, again and again and again. They last a few weeks, a few months, then they’re gone. All of them a waste of time.’ She had hauled herself up from her chair, hugging her dressing gown around her like a pathetic armour. ‘And then you marry that stupid cow, and you knew it was a mistake. You’d trapped yourself and you wanted to escape. You were finally telling me that. I was helping you escape. Escape to me, Benny. That’s what you wanted, really. I felt it. I felt it that night when you gave yourself to me.’
‘It was just a fuck,’ I said, but I could feel my blindness falling away.
‘Tell me you didn’t mean what you said. Tell me you didn’t want me to act on it. I knew you did. I could see it.’
Then I could see too. I saw all of it. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. My intention wasn’t the important thing. Yes, I meant those things for the seconds I said them. I just didn’t know how much they meant to Kay. I was giving form to something she had imagined for years. The desire had grown with every girl I slept with that wasn’t her, and it had twisted into a new shape when I married G
enevieve. My words had been a permission. A blessing. An instruction that only Kay could fully understand.
And I hadn’t seen it, all this time. A blind spot, right in front of my face. Her reliability, which I never saw as devotion. Those eyes that fixed me when I spoke, in which I never saw longing or love. Her hard exterior, which I never saw as a defence. Even the sex — three times in a decade — had a casual indifference. And nothing I could say would change that.
I sat in my car for a long time after I left. I was parked right outside, looking up the white steps towards the green communal door of the big townhouse her flat was in. I was torn between going back in and driving as far away as I could.
There had been little else we could say to each other. Our asymmetrical guilt sat between us in the silence. I wanted her to speak, even if I couldn’t. I wanted her to describe her feelings for me, to tell me how long she had entertained this idea, how she had planned it, the sequence of events she had thought would follow it. I felt it would absolve me for my part in it all. But she was never one for long monologues. She’s always been about the sharp line, the quick response. Her response now was simple.
‘We’re never going to tell. Not anyone.’ It wasn’t a question. There was no doubt in it.
‘No.’
And I left. I meant that ‘no’, at the time, almost entirely. I couldn’t undo what I had done, and I couldn’t ever forget it. Whether I ever told anyone else about it felt almost like a detail.
I looked across at my camera bag in the footwell of the empty passenger seat. I thought of Amber, her sleeping curves, the sheets down across her thighs. Her body became briefly a corpse again in my mind, then that corpse became Genevieve’s.
I reached across, pulled the bag onto my lap and took out my camera. The counter said 36. One more picture left. It was an automatic act to photograph that door. Yes, the habit of finishing a film so I could preserve Amber in celluloid, but also to remind myself who was responsible for finally taking her away from me. And to remind me of my own stupidity.
I used my London studio to develop the film a few days later. I locked myself in the darkroom: that confessional where the only sin is to let the light in.
I got over my impulses to destroy the photographs. I knew the shots were incriminating. All of them, in different ways. But so many of my photographs are. So much of what is in that box is. I’m happy for someone to find it once I’m gone. Perhaps before I go. I don’t regret for a moment keeping any of those negatives. I sometimes regret taking them, that’s true. But I don’t regret keeping them.
Record the truth; never let it go. Once, forever.
57
Amber
For a moment Amber feels in a state of suspended animation. She is looking at Kay and sees someone different from the woman she has known all these years. But it is a difference she does not completely understand. She cannot see the full shape of her friend’s secret.
Amber has Benny’s old photo of Kay in her hand. Like that last shot on the roll of Kay’s door, it is proof of nothing, but she knows together they point towards the woman standing in front of her.
Kay breaks the silence. ‘Sorry, sweetie, didn’t mean to startle you.’ Her voice is even but without light. Amber turns the photograph to face her body, and lowers it to her side. ‘I didn’t get a reply to my text. I was getting worried, thought I should come and see you were all good.’
‘Yeah, all fine.’ Amber goes for her phone in her back pocket, but it’s not there. She looks over and sees it sitting next to the scanner.
‘You must be tired.’ Kay’s voice is now in that register she uses for giving Amber advice. ‘Let me run you home.’
Kay hasn’t moved far from the sliding door. Now she twists and glances out through it, but there is only darkness beyond. As Kay turns, Amber sees she has a small backpack on her shoulders and is wearing different clothes to the ones she had on when she gave Amber a lift. The smart, dark trousers have been exchanged for a pair of old jeans, and her shirt and jumper for a threadbare fleece. They look like clothes for getting your hands dirty, and they exaggerate Kay’s slim but solid athleticism.
Amber tries to imagine her in a bike helmet, wondering if that would have been enough to disguise or confuse her gender, at least from Yvey, in the chaos of an assault. And she remembers the last message she sent, her declaration that she would tell everything, that she was not afraid anymore. Did Yvey read that? Or only Kay?
‘Okay,’ Amber says, trying to smile evenly, as if everything is fine, as if only hours ago she hadn’t been talking to Kay about Benny’s murder. She is aware of her own breathing. The studio feels very small around them, and the house very far away. ‘I need to go back inside anyway, talk to Genevieve. I assume you’re parked up at the house.’
‘Genevieve? Oh, I saw her drive off.’
Amber nearly says out loud that she has probably gone off looking for Yvey, but stops herself. Something about Kay’s shape has changed, as if all the pretence between them is falling away.
‘I’m surprised you let Genevieve go,’ Amber says, jumping with both feet into her suspicions. ‘Don’t you have unfinished business?’
‘That’s not how this is.’
‘How is it, then? I told Genevieve everything, you know. About my affair with Benny, about how a man called Finn Gallagher attacked us at the cottage, and how I killed him.’ Amber looks for a reaction in Kay, and its absence tells its story. There is no shock of revelation. ‘I especially should have told you, shouldn’t I? I should have said something a long time ago. And I really am going to tell everyone now. I’ve had enough of hiding in my own life.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘Why not? What does it matter to you if this has nothing to do with you?’
Kay’s face cracks a little. ‘What is it you want me to say, Amber?’
‘The truth would be nice. Because I think it’s going to come out once I go to the police.’
‘Amber, don’t be silly.’
‘Silly? Is that what you think I am? Do you still think I was a silly young thing who got fucked by Benny Raine? Were you? Is that what all this was about?’
‘Amber, please, I don’t want to fight. Let’s just talk. That’s all I’ve ever wanted from you. Someone to talk to.’ There is a plaintive note in her voice, as if her mood is flying around all over the place behind her steady exterior.
‘Let’s talk, then. Let’s hear it. Tell me you don’t know anything about what happened in that cottage. Tell me you’ve never heard the name Finn Gallagher. Tell me you’ve never wished Genevieve harm, that you don’t know anything about Benny’s death. Go on, I’m listening. Talk.’
Kay shakes her head, the knowledge that denial is pointless now written all over her face.
‘It was what Benny wanted,’ she says, gritting her teeth. ‘He pretended afterwards he didn’t mean it, but he did. I thought I knew that man better than any of you, better than his wife. She was in the way, Amber, can’t you see that? You know that, don’t you. Tell me you wouldn’t have got her out of the way if you could, when you were with Benny. You know how he made you feel when he was with you.’
Amber is shaking her head, but she can still hear the distant echo of how she sometimes felt when she was with Benny.
‘It was bullshit, though, wasn’t it?’ Amber says. ‘It wasn’t real. Not for him.’
‘I loved him,’ Kay says, her voice defiant, but then it falls. ‘I thought I did. I thought he was the only man I ever loved. But I was wrong. He didn’t care. He went through life pleasing himself, being careless with other people’s lives.’
‘How can you stand there and talk about being careless with life? You sent Finn to kill Genevieve, didn’t you? I know about Finn’s father too. Did you kill him? Was that the price you had to pay? Was that the exchange? Did you have a nice little alibi ready the night Finn came to the cottage?’
Kay smiles, looking for a moment impressed. ‘I
should have expected you to do your research, sweetie.’ Her face pinches in. ‘Look, Finn owed me. He was a small-time crook, but he was a good source. I always had plenty on him, but I looked after him too. I helped him keep his nose clean. He knew to be cooperative. And it was a good deal. His father was a bastard. The things he did to the boy, you don’t want to know about. Finn deserved every bit of money he would have inherited. And I’ve always hated bullies. Genevieve is a bully, you know. She was one to Benny from the moment they met.’
‘And Benny? What was he? You wanted to be with a man who would kill his own wife?’
‘He said he wanted it.’ Her voice sounds desperate, as if she is still convincing herself of something years later. And she starts to tell Amber a story about a drink they had together, about a night of sex in a hotel, about how he had given her a signal, how she was only acting as an agent of his will. As she talks, it is as if she is back in time, still feeling for Benny all the things she did. But even before she has finished, Amber knows that the story ends with Kay cast out of Benny’s life.
When she does finish talking, Amber moves a little closer. ‘And you killed him, didn’t you? Because he was going to tell.’
She shakes her head. ‘No, I didn’t kill him, not really. He was dying anyway. I was just helping him on his way before he ruined everything. You of all people shouldn’t mourn him. Think about what he did to you for all these years, making you carry a secret for all this time. He pretended he wanted to make it better for you at the end, but it was only ever about himself. I wasn’t going to let him ruin my life. Not what’s left of it.’
Her gaze hardens, and she flexes her shoulders. ‘And I’m not going to let you, either.’
All Your Lies: A gripping psychological thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end Page 21
