Maximum Exposure: The Heartlands Series

by Harper, Jenny

  ‘I know, I know,’ she sighed. A battered teddy bear looked back at her, one eye lower than the other, but said nothing. ‘I’ll start next week. But today’s the big man’s funeral so I can’t really be expected to think about lettuce, can I?’

  Her gaze moved along the line to Minty, the now grubby polar bear her mother had bought for her sixth birthday, too rich with smells and stains and memories to consider cleaning him. She could remember the day perfectly. The parcel lay by her place at the breakfast table, enticingly mysterious with its crisp, crinkly silver wrapping paper and ice-blue ribbons. She’d been excited. It was a special day and if she was good maybe Daddy wouldn’t shout at her. Mummy helped her to unwrap the parcel. The knots were too tight for her small fingers and she couldn’t wait to see inside. As soon as a corner of the silvery paper was open, she put in her little hand and felt soft fur and gave a squeal of anticipation. The fur was silky and comforting. She pulled out the toy and fell instantly in love with the round, snuggly bear with its soppily contented expression. She cradled it close to her skinny chest and thought the day was going to be as perfect as she’d dreamed it would be.

  Then her father said, ‘I do wish you wouldn’t buy her these wretched animals, Janet. She’s much too old for that nonsense,’ and she put it down, slowly, her lips trembling just the tiniest bit. Why did Daddy always manage to spoil things? Later, she found it when she went to bed, snuggled against her pillow, under the blanket. Mummy must have hidden it there for her. She kissed it one hundred times to make up for having abandoned it all day.

  She couldn’t remember what her father’s gift had been. Some educational book or other, long since abandoned, she imagined, designed to fashion her into something she wasn’t while Minty the bear lived on in her heart and on her mantelpiece.

  ‘He’s really gone, Minty,’ she breathed softly to her captive audience while thinking of Angus MacMorrow. ‘Definitely deceased.’

  She’d never managed to rid herself of the habit of talking to her menagerie. The companionship of her furry animals had always been important to her. When her father had shouted at her, she would run to them for comfort, picking one at random and hugging it close fiercely. Her animals didn’t think she was spineless. They didn’t tell her to ‘buck up and get on with it’ or bawl at her when she failed to get a good grade. When her mother, as soft and ineffectual as a waterlogged sponge, failed to comfort her, it was to her animals that she’d reveal her insecurities, trust her innermost thoughts and share her anger.

  ‘Why?’ she addressed her menagerie in a tone of deep despair, inviting their views on life in general. When there was no response, she gave a small sniff and put her hand in her pocket to find the comforting presence of Tiny Ted – TT – the smallest of the bears and her constant companion.

  ‘They’re not real, Daisy,’ a voice came from her bedroom door, but gently.

  Daisy took a last look at the sheep, the lion, the bears, and the rest of the tattered toys and raised a sceptical eyebrow before swinging round and saying indignantly to the tall figure lounging against her door-post, ‘I know that, Lizzie.’

  Lizzie Little, lazy-limbed and heavy-lidded, possessed a languorous beauty that she was quite unaware of (which was an important part of her attractiveness). In the cottage that Daisy had shared with her since Jack had left her homeless, Lizzie had the largest room, where she surrounded herself with rich velvets, sumptuous silks, soft woollens in every colour and hue imaginable, the tools of her trade. They lay draped over chairs, hung from tailors’ dummies, swathed round the curtain poles, stacked in shimmering layers, skimmed across the radiators, formed pillows and covers on the bed.

  Lizzie sat on the bed next to Daisy and wound her long legs into a lotus position. Still in thick brushed cotton pyjamas in a glorious deep purple and a luxurious Carmen red velour wrap, she put her arms around Daisy’s shoulders and asked tenderly, ‘You OK?’

  Daisy nodded, tears coming unanticipated to her eyes. She’d thought she was OK until Lizzie’s sympathy caught her out. She pulled a tissue from out of her sleeve and blew her nose loudly.

  ‘’Course. It’s only a funeral. I’ve done loads before.’

  ‘But not Angus’s. Not a friend’s.’

  Had Angus MacMorrow been her friend? Daisy considered the word. She’d always thought of Angus simply as her boss. When she’d gone to the Herald, he’d been the scariest person on the planet. The huge mass of him, bulging and straining above his trousers, the barking intolerance of bad spelling or the misuse of apostrophes, the constant urging to ‘Use your brain girl, if you have one,’ had been overwhelming. At first she’d thought he was just like her father – ordering, criticising, vetting her every move so that she couldn’t talk, think, or breathe for herself. But soon she’d seen his humour and his kindness and had come to understand that his carping was driven by a passion for high standards, that Angus would defend his staff to the death, while at the same time shouting at them for their failure to get a story before The East Stoneyford Echo.

  Fourteen years old. Another birthday – and, for the first time in her life, a gift from her father that she actually liked. A gift that was to change her life.

  ‘Here.’ Her father shoved a bag at her. His hands were big and clumsy, strong but lacking in any kind of finesse. They were hands designed to catch a struggling criminal and handcuff him, but never to touch skin and thrill to its human warmth. She could still see the hairs on the fingers, darkly sprouting and could almost smell the rough maleness of him.

  ‘For me?’

  He looked around the kitchen before saying sarcastically, ‘Is there someone else in here who has a birthday? I don’t see anyone, do you, Janet?’

  The bag read ‘Tibbett’s – for all your photographic needs’. She could see the blue and red lettering as clearly now as she had then. Inside, there was a box.

  ‘SLR,’ Daisy read, curiously.

  ‘Single Lens Reflex,’ her father filled in before turning back to his newspaper. It was the end, apparently, of his interest.

  Why a camera? Daisy had never shown the slightest interest in photography. She fingered the box tentatively, turning it round to view the image of the contents. Was this yet another attempt by her father to direct her life? Daisy pushed the box away at the thought. She didn’t want it. She couldn’t bear to have him looking over her shoulder, criticising every picture she took.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said dully, expecting him to demand that she open it. He’d pull out the instruction book himself, take charge, force her to sit and watch while he read through the notes, worked out what to do.

  ‘There’s a couple of films to start you off.’

  He got up and patted her on the head, then turned and left the room.

  She sat staring at her mother. Janet, her eyes grey and wide and so like her daughter’s, stared back silently, her small mouth hanging slack. Daisy didn’t know who was the more surprised.

  Had Eric Irvine been bizarrely struck by prescience? Uncharacteristically infused with insight? Or had he simply been passing Tibbett’s and been drawn by a sale sign? Daisy never knew the answer. A week or two after that birthday, she’d finally opened the camera box and lifted out the gleaming black and chrome apparatus inside. From the second she’d touched it, she knew that this was her destiny. She found freedom behind the camera. She cherished the feel of it in her hands, trusty and true. It did her bidding, responded as she demanded, produced results that she could control and that she felt proud of.

  Three years later, when she decided on photography as a vocation, she inevitably incurred her father’s disapproval – ‘Really Daisy, you’ll never make any money’. When her mother had diffidently pointed out that it was he who had started her passion for photography in the first place, it silenced him on the matter for long enough to allow her to enrol in college.

  Her confidence battered by constant criticism, she discovered (to her astonishment), that people thought her photographs were goo
d – people like Angus MacMorrow who had, in his own inimitable way, encouraged her and helped her to realise her potential. Now he was dead and she had to take pictures at his funeral.

  A friend? A better one than she’d ever understood.

  ‘I’ll be fine. Thanks Lizzie. Just another job,’ Daisy said, moving out of Lizzie’s kind embrace and reaching for her camera bag. Never let your feelings come between you and an assignment. Angus’s words. Be professional at all times. Thanks Angus, she smiled palely at the ghost of the big man, I will be.

  She checked her appearance in the mirror – black trouser suit, safety pin at the waist to give her another inch of slack, touch of smoky shadow at her eyes to enhance her best feature – and turned to leave. The funeral was in less than an hour and all Hailesbank would be there. Her job was to capture it on camera. The Herald had to give its editor a resounding send-off and her role in that was crucial.

  ‘Bye, Dais,’ Lizzie unwound her legs and stood to give Daisy a hug. ‘I’ll be there for you.’

  Daisy noted the anxiety in the hooded hazel eyes and was touched.

  ‘Thanks, sweetie. I’ll be fine,’ she said, and held Lizzie close for a second before heading for her battered Suzuki. Thank heaven for friends, she thought as she climbed in. And teddy bears.

  She fingered Tiny Ted in her pocket for a second, drew a breath, and turned on the ignition.

  Just another job.

  Chapter Three

  The church at Hailesbank was huge. Although the town was relatively small – at least, the old, largely eighteenth-century, heart of the town – its parish church was disproportionately large. A group of monks, finding the loop of the river a convivial place to live and to worship their Lord, had founded a monastery on this site in the twelfth century. This had once been a magnificent complex of buildings, whose crowning glory was the massive, high-vaulted church. Then it had been sacked and ransacked, rebuilt again, desecrated, the stones carried away for other local building projects, the roof stripped of its protective and valuable lead until, by the middle of the twentieth century, all that remained was the nave, a couple of Victorian windows, and the satisfyingly worn stone-flagged floor.

  The efforts of Lady Astoria Fleming (who lent her name) and Mrs Doris Worthington-Hitchcock (who gave copious quantities of her deceased husband’s hard-earned cash), led to the restoration and opening up of the plundered apse in the 1970s, putting St Andrew’s into the guide books as a tourist attraction and putting Hailesbank back on the map.

  Daisy set herself up half way between the gateway into the church’s grounds and the large, heavy wooden door into the building. As mourners wound their way through the churchyard, they all had to pass this spot, where the light filtering through the massive old sycamores lent a pleasingly dappled effect to her compositions. She knew what the arrangements inside the church would be. Angus’s wife and family would sit in the front couple of rows. He’d habitually spent such long hours at the paper that Daisy had almost forgotten he had a family. Local bigwigs, bechained and beribboned, would claim the row just behind them. Daisy dutifully caught them on camera as they went into the church, looking suitably serious and sad.

  There was the self-important Provost Archie Porter and his fat little wife Doris, her bunions squashed painfully into a pair of drab courts in honour of the occasion.

  Here came a bevy of councillors of all political hues.

  There was bald Jimmy Johnston, president of the local Rotary Club and implacable political enemy of Provost Porter, hanging back to avoid sitting near him.

  Sir Cosmo Fleming arrived, pushing his mother, Lady Fleming, in her wheelchair. She was still very much in command of all her faculties, though, even in her eighties.

  Cosmo gave Daisy a rueful grin as he passed her. ‘Didn’t predict this, did I?’ he said.

  The cuffs of his tweed jacket were frayed. Daisy thought that what he needed wasn’t a trip to the little alteration shop on the High Street, but a woman – and she wasn’t thinking of his mother. Cosmo was a mildly eccentric bachelor, but he was also the largest landowner in the district, which allowed him the luxury of pursuing his hobby, astrology. He penned the weekly horoscopes for the Herald in return for not very much. It was an activity to which his mother, Presbyterian to the core, was implacably opposed.

  ‘Hold it there … thanks,’ said Daisy, flashing off a few shots of the Flemings. She liked Cosmo, even if he always smelled of dog and the state of his car was unspeakable, full of doggie hairs and slaver and possibly worse. ‘No one could have predicted it.’

  ‘Get on with it, Cosmo, it’s bloody freezing out here,’ piped up a voice from the wheelchair. The bundle of blankets moved and a pair of faded brown eyes peered upwards impatiently from below a mauve felt hat that would not have been out of place in a fifties drama.

  Cosmo, unseen by his mother, rolled his own brown eyes to the skies before trundling off.

  The Herald’s staff were all there, that went without saying – her colleagues, so familiar and frequently so irritating. Daisy loved them and loathed them in almost equal degrees.

  The chief reporter, Sharon Eddy, was blonde, pretty, pert, and very bossy. ‘Dishy’ Dave Collins, the junior reporter, was unkempt as a pop icon, and fashionably cool. Murdoch Darling, feature writer, took the role of cynic supreme. And Ruby Spence, of course – ‘Ma’ Ruby – the receptionist, who had been at the paper for ever and knew absolutely everyone in town. Ma was the biggest gossip of all, the best source of information, nosier than any journalist.

  Poor Ruby, she looked devastated. For years they’d all fabricated stories of a long-lasting affair between her and Angus, fuelled by the long hours the two of them spent in the Herald’s offices. Daisy had thought it was all just a bit of fun, made up to amuse the staff and handed down through generations of reporters – but looking at Ruby’s ravaged face, the chins wobbling as the lip quivered, the bosom heaving, she wondered if there had been some truth in it after all.

  Then, among the throng of townspeople, there was someone else.

  Daisy probably wouldn’t have recognised Ben Gillies if he hadn’t been with his parents. It was years since she’d seen him. She’d been – what, sixteen? – when the Gillies family had moved down south. And although they’d moved back to Hailesbank a couple of years ago when Martin Gillies had retired, Ben had stayed in London.

  They’d been such friends, the Gillies and Irvine families. Her father, so often a bully in private, turned all charm when gentle Kath Gillies was around. She remembered splashing in the sea at St Andrews, bolting down the ‘shivery bite’ afterwards. At other times they picnicked in Perthshire. She and Ben had dammed the burn, up to their knees in freezing water. The sense of freedom generally only lasted so long before her father, noticing, would raise his voice. ‘Daisy, I thought I told you to stay on the bank? Take hold of her, Ben, and get her out here at once.’

  Had Ben obeyed her father’s orders? Probably. But he would have winked at her as he did so, sympathising. He’d been an ally, despite the three-year difference in their ages. That hadn’t seemed to matter when they were with their families, but at school it felt like a chasm. When the Gillies family moved to London, they’d simply lost touch.

  It must be Ben Gillies. Looking at him through the lens of her camera, Daisy was able to study him for a minute in private. She pressed the shutter. Yup, it was Ben all right, but not the Ben she remembered. Stockier – he’d filled out. He certainly wasn’t fat, he was more solid. Strong-looking. But he still had the same brownish red hair, the amazing golden amber eyes and the exact way of holding his head that she remembered. Now, though, he had stubbly hair on the chin, brownish red just like the head.

  She clicked again.

  ‘Diz?’ It was his old name for her. Daisy – Dizzy – Diz – on account of her general disorganisation.

  ‘Hi Ben.’ There was no more hiding. She lowered the camera and took his outstretched hand.

  ‘Sorry about your b
oss.’

  ‘Yeah. Me too. Thanks.’

  And then he was gone, along with his parents, to search for a seat in the rapidly filling church.

  Daisy didn’t see Ben again for a few days and she didn’t really think about him much, because when she got home that night and changed out of the trouser suit into something more comfortable, she pulled on the jeans she’d been wearing on the day Angus died and felt something crackle in the pocket.

  She had no recollection of taking the letter from Angus MacMorrow’s hand when he collapsed, so the paper held no meaning for her. She felt no sense of importance or impending doom and merely tossed it onto the kitchen table, intent on pouring a glass of wine and joining Lizzie to grab some support for her harrowed emotions.

  ‘Didn’t you lurve Provost Porter’s wife’s hat,’ said Lizzie, already into her second glass of red.

  Lizzie, who loved to mix vintage and casual, was wearing a floppy cotton tea dress in navy with a tiny white flower pattern, pulled over a long-sleeved white T-shirt and navy leggings. Her feet were encased in shaggy sheepskin boots. Daisy had long envied the ease with which Lizzie created a ‘look’. She felt boring in her jeans and chalk-blue baggy sweater. If she wore shaggy boots she’d look like a woolly sheep, not a trendy fashionista. Still, at least her jumper was comfy and hid the bulges.

  She grabbed the bottle and slurped a generous measure of wine into her glass, then made herself comfortable on the carver, curling round and pulling her knees up to her chin. ‘She should’ve bought one of yours,’ she giggled, remembering the absurd black construction the Lady Provost had been wearing. She took a couple of quick gulps of the wine and began to relax.

  ‘And what d’you think about Ma Ruby?’

  ‘She was devastated. She looked far more upset than old MacMorrow’s wife.’ They’d had countless animated discussions about the rumoured relationship between Ma and Big Angus around this table. Now there would be no more. Daisy felt the sadness at his death return and with it the doubts that had nagged her for the last week. Could she have saved him? If she’d given him the kiss of life maybe she could have revived him.