All the time in the world, she thought. ‘I cleared the afternoon,’ she replied.
‘Paul, this is Kurtiz. Kurtiz, Paul’s our technician for this session.’
They were seating themselves in a chilly, air-conditioned studio about half the size of a one-car garage. A room with no windows and no natural light. In front of them and to their left was a complex wall of machinery and editing hardware, consisting of computers, a bank of screens, fitted shelving neatly stacked with hard drives, CDs, DVDs. The three of them were alongside one another. Alex was in the centre and to his left was Paul, a young man in horn-rimmed spectacles with dark hair tied in a knot on top of his head.
‘Let’s roll it from the top, the opening credits, and keep rolling till I say stop, okay?’
Paul began to flick at dozens of switches. Rewinding. A million images rushed before their eyes at a speed beyond recognition until they were back at the top of the film. The opening image was of Place de la République in Paris. It was jam-packed with people. The image was now frozen.
‘Kurtiz, we have no credits laid on yet. This is just pictures and some commentary I recorded myself as a form of signposting. You with me?’ She nodded, confused as to what all this was about.
‘Occasionally I’ll speak a few lines to give some time frame to the story.’
She nodded again, puzzled but lulled into a false sense of serenity at being back in his company. She forced herself not to lean her shoulder into him, close to him, longing to make physical contact with him. Instead she inched forward, elbows resting on the wooden deck.
‘Je suis Charlie.’ Alex spoke the words with a poor French accent. ‘January six, 2015. Earlier this year in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris …’
Kurtiz watched the unfolding of the drama that had shaken Paris nine months earlier, swept through France and brought hundreds of thousands of French citizens out onto the streets to leave flowers, candles, messages of love and support, to stand in silence as a mark of respect for the artists, the cartoonists, the publishing team and the police officer who had lost their lives in the attack. In the aftermath, said Alex, there were many demonstrations, many rallies of subjects from all walks of life brought together to honour those who had died and, as importantly, to stand up for two of the cornerstones of French philosophy: freedom of opinion and freedom of speech.
‘Who are these people who call themselves a state, who claim they speak for a religious faith? Who is funding them? Who is or are the intelligence behind them?’
The pictures on screen had moved from France and crossed from Europe to Syria.
Alex laid a hand on Kurtiz’s left arm, which broke her concentration. ‘Paul, you can fast forward through this, please. Take us to somewhere around nine minutes into the material, please, nine forty-three, somewhere there. Back to Paris to the demonstrations, the aftermath. And then I want you, please, to freeze the frame and zoom in. I’ll tell you when.’
Paul pressed a button and the film began to roll forward.
‘Watch carefully,’ Alex whispered to Kurtiz, who had no idea what this exercise was all about. The screen returned to the crowded Place de la République. People squeezed together, like sardines in cans. In anguish, in peace. Tightly packed against each other, holding aloft French flags, candles, banners. The camera was roving over faces, some painted blue, white and red, the colours of the French flag. It hovered by groups. Faces blown full and large. Faces streaked with tears, contorted by shock and grief.
‘Paul, hold it there, please, and now take the image in slow motion. One frame at a time.’ The zoom was moving tighter, creeping towards a group of students, adolescents, teenagers. ‘Stop. Hold it there.’
Seven faces on the screen with blurs of other figures encircling them and deeper in the shot. Young folk in duffel coats, clutching high above their heads the national flag. One or two in woollen hats. Paris in full winter. Paris in shock. Paris speaking out.
‘Start to zoom the image in, please, Paul. No, to your left a tad. See the girl on the far left of the image?’ Alex was pointing towards the bank of screens all transmitting the same image. ‘There, with the short dark hair. Inch towards her, please. Stop. Yes, and now a millimetre above her head. Hold it. Continue to move the film forward like that as a tight shot. Frame by frame, nice and slow. Yeah, hold it there. See the young woman in the background there? Lifting her profiled head, turning her face towards the lens. Got it. Hold it. Freeze the frame, please, Paul, and go in a little tighter if you can. It’ll get grainy, but …’
Alex held his hand over Kurtiz’s bunched fist.
Kurtiz stared at the over-exposed image of a girl, a young woman with sandy hair turning her face from profile towards the camera, in slow motion. The girl’s eyes on the screen were closed. It seemed to take a while for her to open them. Her large hazel eyes, full of pain, looked out directly towards where the camera was shooting.
Kurtiz stared at the screen. If she had not been leaning on the deck with one hand firmly held by Alex she might have fallen from her chair. She swung in her seat, tearing herself free, and staggered to her feet, trying to reach into the monitor. Paul the technician was confused, concerned for his expensive equipment. ‘Would you mind, can I ask you not to put your fingers on the screens, please?’
‘Paul, can you give us a moment, please?’
Paul rose, uncertain whether to stay or go.
‘Two minutes, Paul, please. Just wait outside and I’ll give you a shout.’
The young operator slouched from the room, leaving Kurtiz leaning over the deck, heaving, tears flooding down her cheeks.
Alex stood slowly, and hesitantly wrapped his arms around her. ‘There are one or two close-ups, far better images of the same girl. Another day, a different demonstration. Always in Paris. I was alerted to the fact that it could be your daughter when I caught her in a less crowded sequence. We shot her, this same young woman, a day or two after the events, placing a biro in the hand of one of the figures on a frieze at the base of the monument. I recognized her from the photographs in the newspaper cuttings I kept after Lizzie went missing. I went back through all my rushes, the stock for this film, spent days looking for shots of her. I wanted to see whether any of it led me closer, to an address in Paris, a shot of her exiting an apartment, or … before I contacted you. Can you handle watching these moments?’
She nodded, eyes closed tight, blind.
‘It’s Lizzie, right? I wished to God I’d noticed it was her when we were in situ shooting. We could have asked her to give us an interview. Played for time while I called you over.’
Kurtiz let out a sound. A strangled cry. Yes, she was certain of it. No, no, she couldn’t be sure. The girl had grown, matured, was not little Lizzie. No longer little Lizzie. She had to call Oliver. But not yet. Not yet.
‘You want a coffee, a break first, or shall I call Paul back in?’
Four years. She slumped back into the chair and let her head fall into her arms resting on the deck. More emotions than she would ever have been able to identify rushed through her. A floodgate. Immense relief that Lizzie was alive. Fear that it wasn’t Lizzie. Just another twenty-year-old who resembled her daughter. A doppelgänger. A picture that told a lie. That promised false hope. Yet another fickle trail. How many times had she rushed full-on at some unsuspecting young woman, mistakenly believing it was Lizzie? Anger that her daughter could have lived on while she and Oliver had died inside, withered through loss, given up on so many areas of their lives, grieved and blamed and grown embittered, and had murdered whatever might have been saved of their marriage. Oliver’s drinking and despair …
‘I never accepted that she was dead,’ she mumbled to herself. She had clutched to that sliver of hope against all odds. ‘Prove it to me, prove she is dead,’ she had screamed then at poor destroyed Oliver, at the DI who had informed them in their living room that the investigation was being closed, that they were calling off the search for Eliza Ross. ‘There is no bo
dy. You have failed to find her. Nothing to say she is not still alive.’
And now here was Lizzie. In Paris. How old was this footage? Eight months?
‘I want to see everything, Alex. Every frame of footage, all that has been edited out, anything that might include her.’
‘The rushes, the full stock, are in Paris at my post-production base.’
‘I have to go to Paris. We have to find her.’
‘I’ll take you back with me.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Show me what you have in the cut film first.’
Oliver was foul when she broke the news to him that evening, raging with tears and hot blame. ‘You have to stop this, KZ. Why do you torment us both with these imaginary sightings of her? It’s not the first time. Let it be, for God’s sake.’ He had not touched a drop of alcohol for more than a year. Kurtiz had taken him to AA; after several attempts he had enlisted, and this time had not fallen off the wagon. His career was still in tatters but he hoped to be employed again at some point. He lived alone, hermit-like, in the downstairs rooms of their Tufnell Park family home, which had recently been put on the market. It was for sale because Kurtiz had moved out and because neither of them could bear to climb the stairs. Part of Kurtiz could not abide the reality of selling it, of letting it go, to strip it and tear herself away from the last vestiges of Lizzie and her overcrowded but now tidied room.
Alex was returning to Paris. He invited Kurtiz to stay that night with him at the Groucho Club, but she refused him even though it pained her to do so. Seeing him in the flesh again had revitalized love and longing. She was starved of love. Starved of her daughter’s affection, starved of the caress of a man. Even so, her place was with Oliver, in spite of his ill-tempered reception of the news. Their challenge now – all over again – was to find Lizzie.
She spent that night in Tufnell Park in the spare room upstairs. The room Oliver had slept in during the later stages of their marriage. It had been closed for a couple of years and smelt mouldy. The sheets, the bedding had a dampness about them that seemed to seep into her organs. She lay awake listening to Oliver downstairs, shuffling to and fro from the living area, through the sliding doors, down two steps to the kitchen at the back of the house, rattling cups and saucers, with the television turned up too loud. Was he going deaf or was he trying to send a message upstairs to her?
She stayed because she feared this information might set him back, send him to the off-licence. Tears fell in slow drops. Could those pictures from Paris really be Lizzie? Their vanished child? When, how, why had she gone to Paris? She had possessed her own passport, but it hadn’t been found in her room. Hadn’t it been handed to the police? Obviously not. It was all such a fractured jumble of memories she could no longer be sure of anything except that, for a decade and a half, Lizzie had been their joy and then she was no more.
The following morning Kurtiz took the tube with Oliver into town to the editing suites where Alex had left a copy of the unfinished film with Paul. She glanced at her watch. Alex would be boarding the Eurostar by now. She chose the same seat as the day before, and she and Oliver watched the film side by side in silence. Afterwards they thanked Paul for his time and left the building without a word. They chose a coffee bar in Old Compton Street. Over cups of frothy cappuccino decorated with hearts, Oliver apologized to his wife, which took her aback.
‘What do you think?’ she asked him.
He nodded. ‘It’s Lizzie. Yes. I think so. She’s grown. Lovely, eh?’
‘Lizzie in Paris. I wonder since when.’
Lizzie and Alex both in Paris.
‘Of course,’ continued Oliver, ‘there’s nothing to say she’s still there now. Perhaps she travelled over in January with a group of demonstrators.’
‘Why would she?’
‘Why not?’
‘Should we be talking to Interpol?’
‘I’m going to Paris,’ he said. Kurtiz hadn’t seen that steely determination in his features for several years. ‘You’ll have to lend me the money, though.’
She more or less supported him as it was. He received unemployment benefit and a small amount of disability aid. How to explain the trauma he had suffered over the loss of his only child? Mental issues had been recorded on his medical file.
‘Then we should both go.’
He was adamant. It was an opportunity for him to –
‘To what?’
To make good. Prove himself. Find his daughter, reunite the family. Explain to his girl that there was a future for the three of them if she agreed to come home. They’d make it up to her.
Kurtiz listened, feeling choked, as though her Adam’s apple had turned to stone. Then she wrapped her hands gently over Oliver’s, enveloping them, recalling how Alex had made the same gesture with her only the day before. ‘Oliver,’ she whispered, struggling against the roar of the espresso machine at the bar behind them. Like the rumbling of a steam engine, it promised to drown her words. Vital words. ‘Oliver, even if we find Lizzie …’
‘When. I will find her, KZ, if it’s the last thing I do …’
She waited, dreading her own words. Softly she must step. ‘It won’t heal our marriage, Oliver. You cannot promise that to Lizzie.’
He broke his hands away from under hers, an explosion of raised fingers as his spoon went spinning to the tiled floor. He spread his hands wide, palms down, clutching at the table’s edge. His face in profile now, eyes looking from right to left, fighting back tears. His pain knifed her in the gut, eviscerating her. This was her Oliver. Grey-haired, features striated by grief and booze and disappointment. ‘Give me another chance,’ he mumbled, through trembling lips, incapable of looking at her full on. ‘I’m getting it back together, Kurtiz, you can see that I am. I’ll be back at work before you know it, stepping into Oliver Reed’s shoes …’
She smiled, lowered her eyes, frowned. What could she say?
‘One brief affair. If you hadn’t gone away …’
‘Oliver. It’s not about Jenny Fox.’
‘Then what? What?’
She loved someone else. But even that was not it, for she had denied herself that love. Oliver and she … their time had been and gone. Circumstances had burned it out, trodden their love, the passion, into the ground, strangled the joy out of it.
‘Don’t just discard me, Kurtiz. I’m doing all I can.’ He turned back to her. Bloodshot eyes from sleeplessness and hopelessness were pleading to her. Maps drawn with red-coloured crayons. His cri de coeur.
She felt a shot of anger. She had to defend herself or she would be sucked back into his self-pity. Why could he not accept the reality? Their marriage was over. Over.
He tightened, hardening, sensing that this was not going his way. They read each other intimately, every gesture, every flicker of the eye. ‘Well, then, will you buy the ticket and fund me a hotel? Any fucking little hole will do – I don’t give a shit. You think I like asking? Begging you? But I will look for her. I won’t stop till I find her. I’ll walk every street, knock at every door. Ask your director friend to print me up some of those stills. They’ll be the most recent pictures we have.’
Director friend? Did Oliver know? Impossible. There was nothing to know, except a profound sense of loss for a choice that had never been made, a direction not taken.
Cautiously she opened her mouth, measuring her words, stumbling, attempting not to tread on his volatility, his fragility. ‘Oliver, it’s a terrific idea …’
‘But?’
‘I think … it probably needs a professional team, a –’
‘They never fucking found her the first time, remember? Two years dragging us through the papers, dredging our guts up along with shit from the riverbeds. Do you want to go through all that again? Remember it, KZ, remember? Journalists like hyenas at the gate. You couldn’t piss without them flashing their cameras.’
She raised an index finger to her lips and bit at her nail, chewing deeper, touching skin, close
to blood. Yes, she remembered. How could anyone bury that hell?
‘I need you to let me do this, Kurtiz. On my own.’ He buried his forefinger and thumb into the sockets of his eyes, as though attempting to gouge out the memories.
She was reluctant, hesitating, oscillating. Was Oliver sufficiently responsible for this? Was he up to such a tremendous responsibility? No, no. Of course he wasn’t, but she couldn’t drop everything and go. She was the financial pillar. One of them had to stay, work. But were they going to allow even a slim possibility of reconnecting with Lizzie slip like water through their fingers? If she rejigged her working programme she could spend weekends with him, or visit for short bursts of time. Might that work? ‘What say we put it in the hands of the French police?’
‘Oh, yeah?’ He was tugging at a stray strand of cotton on the cuff of his shirtsleeve.
She wanted to tell him to leave it alone, to snip it with a pair of scissors later or he’d unravel it into a hole, but she forced herself not to mother him. Not to know best. ‘Oliver, realistically, you don’t speak more than a smattering of French. And who do you know in Paris? Who could you call on?’
‘And who do you know?’
Alex, she thought silently.
‘You have a career. Get back to work, KZ. Be the breadwinner, as you never stop reminding me. Bankroll me and leave me to find Lizzie. Buy me a ticket on a train for tomorrow and I’ll be ready to go.’
Did she have the right to refuse him this chance of winning back his dignity, of restoration? Of a shot at success? If nothing came of it, what was the worst that could happen? She’d be poorer and Oliver, though disheartened, could be proud that he had given it his best shot.
And if he failed and, through despondency or loneliness in a foreign city, took to the bottle again? She blue-pencilled this immediately from her thoughts. Give the poor guy some credit, cut him some slack, a yard of freeway, she warned herself. You’re too tough on him.
That afternoon Kurtiz requested Paul to blow up and print every still from the film that contained even a distant outline, a poor quality, rough-grain facsimile of Lizzie. These she slid into a large envelope. She then located an English-speaking Alcoholics Anonymous meeting house in Paris near the small hotel she had booked for Oliver, guaranteeing it for a month with a credit card. She drew out cash and changed it into euros, sufficient to keep him fed and accommodated for a month. Then she booked him on a late-morning Eurostar. They ate a light evening meal together at their erstwhile family home, during which she made him promise that if he found even the slightest trace or clue he would be in touch. ‘Don’t go silent on me, Oliver. Give me your word on that.’
The Lost Girl Page 30
