Exposure

by Aga Lesiewicz

  I go to the office area and open a big black filing cabinet. I rummage through the files and folders until I find what I’ve been looking for: my forensic notebook. I always carried it with me and made meticulous notes, from the first call from the ops room describing the nature and location of the job, through a detailed description of the crime scene, to the final notes for the photo album I made by the duplication unit at the back of my van. And here it is, looking worn and faded, but still full of vital information. I flip through it and find the pages about the Violinist’s crime scenes. It turns out I only photographed two of them, the second body found in a black hard-shell case left by the entrance to one of the towers at the Barbican Estate and the Southbank undercroft one, which was his third.

  I sit down on the floor by the filing cabinet and read through my notes. It’s the usual dry description of the location and the crime, with a detailed list of all the shots I took. There is nothing in it that makes me jump up and scream eureka. But one thing is clear: I was the only forensic photographer at the scene and no one else in the team took pictures. What the hell . . . ?

  I put the notebook down and switch on my Mac. I scan through the long list of unread emails and find ‘Exposure 1’. There are, in fact, three emails titled ‘Exposure 1’ and they are all identical. I click on the picture and it fills the screen with stunning clarity. The first thing I notice is that it’s not as grainy as I would have expected a night shot to be. The scene was of course well lit, but still . . . It was probably shot in a RAW format that captures uncompressed data and gives the highest image quality, and probably from a tripod, to avoid the blurry picture so common at slower shutter speeds. It’s not the work of an amateur. There is a nice little touch, a starburst effect on the lights in the background, usually achieved by using a narrow aperture, which also gives you a deeper depth of field. It was definitely taken by a professional. There were no other forensic photographers at the scene, so who could have snapped it? A paparazzo? I’m pretty sure there were no photojournalists at the scene. My journo-radar usually spots them a mile away. Could this be the work of an accidental shutterbug, a passing photo-tourist? No, it looks too well prepared and executed. Who took it then? And why is it popping up on my screen now, so many years later? What is it supposed to mean? And, most importantly, why is it freaking me out? It’s just a picture after all.

  I get up from the floor, go to the kitchen counter and pour myself a glass of wine from an open bottle. I move to the window and take a sip. The lit-up high-rises clustered around the Gherkin look almost ornamental against the purple-black sky. Long gone are the days when no building taller than a fireman’s ladder was allowed to be constructed in the City. The newest architectural additions have a strange culinary flavour, with the Can of Ham being built between the Gherkin and the Cheesegrater. But I love the view, the elegant multitude of lights that make the city look clean and benevolent. Nothing bad can possibly happen in a world that looks like this.

  My gaze wanders down to the building opposite. It’s similar to the one I’m in, a Victorian workshop converted by a developer into a ‘unique and quirky collection of live/work units’. All the large windows are dark, except for one on the top floor, almost level with mine. It’s a big space, sparsely furnished, with high ceilings, exposed brickwork and stripped-wood flooring. Backlit by dim lighting, there is a man standing motionlessly by the window. He is looking at me.

  I instinctively step back away from the window to hide in the shadows of my studio. I have never noticed the man before. Was he really staring at me? I move forward until I catch a glimpse of him again. He hasn’t moved, his face in the shade, his silhouette looking almost two-dimensional. Impulsively I pull down the blackout blind that covers the whole window. There. He’s gone.

  I pour myself another glass and take it to bed. I feel wired, exhausted but wide awake, and I hope the wine will slow me down. I check my phone and there are still no messages from Anton. I text him –

  Where are you? I want you back

  – and put the phone down. Almost immediately my phone pings with a new message. I pick it up, expecting something short from Anton. But the message is not from him.

  Great to see you today. Must catch up soon. Xx

  It’s from Jason. Jason? I know we’ve had a long day, but texting me at 3 a.m.? I delete the message, putting its sentiment down to a mild case of midlife crisis.

  3

  I drag myself out of bed at 10 a.m., knowing that there is a stack of toys on my studio floor waiting to be photographed. Being the master, or mistress, of one’s time is a curse and a blessing of freelance life. It’s a blessing to be able to stay in bed till noon because no one is breathing down your neck and you’ll be fine as long as you work till midnight. But it’s a curse to have to be your own slave driver, to crack the whip over your own shoulders. This bit is acquired knowledge: if you don’t work, you don’t get paid and your accountant will be disappointed in you.

  I make a pact with myself to start the shoot at 11 a.m. and stumble to Curious Yellow Kafé down the road for a chai latte and a croissant. My phone pings as soon as I sit down at a table outside. This time it is Anton.

  Back soon. Hang on in there.

  Succinct and unsentimental, that’s my Anton. Or Savage, as he calls himself. His surname is, in fact, Sauvage, which in a funny way suits him. The untamed but gentle giant who swept me off my feet, or to be precise, chatted me up at a late-night movie show at the Queen of Hoxton’s rooftop cinema. I don’t remember the film, it might have been Trainspotting or Pulp Fiction, I’m not sure. What I remember is sitting in a director’s chair, wrapped in a blanket, with wireless headphones round my neck, because I wasn’t listening to the soundtrack. I was listening to a rugged-looking French guy who was telling me that his name was an aptronym.

  ‘Carl Jung was convinced there was a connection between a surname and the man himself.’ Anton shifted in his chair to murmur straight into my ear. ‘A grotesque coincidence, he called it. I mean, it goes back to the old days when a butcher would be called Mr Butcher and a baker – Mr Baker. Take my name, Sauvage. My dad was a rude bastard, my granddad a brute . . .’

  ‘And you, what are you?’ I murmured back, aware of an undercurrent of heavy flirting going on between us.

  ‘Me?’ He looked straight at me with his innocent, blue-eyed stare and I knew I was falling for him. ‘I am a gentle barbarian. And your name must be . . .’ He paused for effect. ‘Ocean Dream – just like your blue-green eyes . . .’

  I made a face.

  ‘Flattery won’t get you far.’

  ‘You don’t know what the Ocean Dream is, do you?’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘It’s the only natural deep blue-green diamond in the world.’

  And that was it.

  We left the show early, stopped for a drink at the Electricity Showrooms and ended up at mine after midnight. It was seven years ago, when I still thought I was the chosen one, a bona fide artist.

  A lot has happened in those seven years. Our fortunes have ebbed and flowed, but we’ve stuck together. We travelled from the east to the west coast of the US, spent months in Argentina, half a year in Brazil, visited Australia, island hopped in Thailand and whizzed around Eastern Europe. No, Anton is not a travel agent. He is a street artist on a mission to paste the whole world up with his art. He’s getting there – his work is beginning to appear in street-art anthologies and his prints are selling quite well in a couple of galleries in Paris and London. His fame hasn’t quite reached its peak yet, but I reckon in a few years’ time he’ll be up there with Banksy, ROA and JR. In the meantime he has to take on paid assignments from city councils and art foundations all over the world and I stick to my packshots. Which reminds me . . . I pay for my chai and croissant and head back home.

  As I stop at the lights, a voice behind me says, ‘You have to be careful.’

  I turn round and see an older woman berating two small kids, a boy and
a girl.

  ‘If you run out in front of a bus, it’ll hit you and you’ll die,’ she says drily.

  ‘Oh no,’ corrects the little boy. ‘You don’t always die when you’re hit by a bus. My mum’s friend was hit by a bus and she didn’t die. You just – you just –’ he searches for the right expression – ‘you just have to spend a long time in hospital.’

  The light changes to green and we all cross cautiously, safe in the knowledge that nothing bad will happen to us right now.

  I get back home and wave Voxel’s snake catnip toy in front of him for a few minutes. Pixel is watching us from his vantage point on the bookshelf, pretending he’s not interested. Playtime over, I reluctantly begin setting up the lighting for the shoot. I’m supposed to photograph a selection of early learning wooden toys for a catalogue. I take them out of their boxes and marvel at the ingenuity of the puzzles, workbenches and activity cubes. Things have moved on since I was a child. I decide to start with alphabet blocks and set about building a tower out of them, careful not to create any rude words accidentally. You can’t be too careful in the commercial graphics trade. I remember a designer friend of mine inadvertently creating a logo for ‘Minge Pies’, all because of the flowery font he chose. The pies flew off the shelves at Christmas.

  By the afternoon coffee break I’m done with a toddler truck, a push-along pram and a train. All that’s left is a rocking horse, a set of ducks on wheels and a Noah’s ark, complete with twelve pairs of animals and Mr & Mrs Noah themselves. I hope if I keep the rhythm up I should be done by the end of the day. But as I get into the groove of arranging the sets, lighting and snapping them, my mind drifts back to ‘Exposure 1’. I leave Mr Noah to his ark and wake my computer up.

  The screen lights up with the image of the Southbank undercroft. I close my eyes and try to recreate the crime scene in my head. We were never allowed to hold on to any of the forensic photographs, so all I have left to rely on is my old notebook and my memory. It all begins to come back to me now. The smell of damp mixed with a lingering whiff of hot dogs. Almost complete silence, interrupted by the hushed voices of the forensic team. The quiet sound of the river lapping at the bank. The low rumble of an MSU patrol boat. Someone whistling. Whistling? I open my eyes. Was there really someone whistling in the undercroft or is my mind fabricating a new, distorted reality? I simply can’t remember. I look at the photo again. If it is genuine, where was it taken from? A passing boat? Impossible, the water level is far too low. Waterloo Bridge? The angle is wrong. The Savoy? It would have to be one hell of a telephoto lens. Festival Pier? It is just possible that someone was hiding in the shadows of the ugly glass and blue steel construction. But wouldn’t it be shut at night? Something on a pillar above the case containing the mutilated body catches my attention. I blow up the picture and take a closer look. It’s blood-red, chunky graffiti: big bold letters with huge drops of red paint dripping off all the ‘O’s dramatically. ‘OFF TO VIOLIN-LAND’. I don’t remember seeing it. I would’ve noticed it for sure if it had been there when I was processing the scene. I grab my notebook and go through the list of photographs again. There is no mention of the graffiti. Is it possible I’d missed it? If I had, I may have omitted a vital piece of evidence. No, it simply wasn’t there. I get up from the desk and go to the window. I need a cigarette.

  You quit smoking ages ago, I tell myself, and go back to Mr Noah and his ark. Setting up the wooden toys calms me down. For all I know the picture is a fake. A good one, I must admit, but nothing that someone with a working knowledge of Photoshop wouldn’t be able to do. I should know better. How many times has Photoshop saved my skin when something has gone wrong during a shoot and the only way to fix it is to fake it? The problem with Photoshop reality is that it can be so perfect no one can tell the difference between it and the real thing. Well, almost no one. Cubic Zirconia, I think, and it makes me smile even now. ‘Fake diamond’, the name of a collaborative duo I started at college with my best friend, Erin. We saw ourselves as the female version of Gilbert and George, destined to conquer the world of visual art. We had it all worked out, from our anti-elitist manifesto to the vision of creating a modified reality that would become the ultimate work of art. We had the talent, we had the skill and we had the looks – slim, tall and dark-haired. We both dressed in cheap Vivienne Westwood knock-offs and looked so alike people often mistook us for each other. Encouraged by our tutor at the digital art faculty, we lived the Augmented Reality dream before it became a buzzword. Our first installation was a massive six-foot-tall glass test-tube combined with an interactive optical projection system. Inside the tube was a digitally manipulable 3D holographic projection of fetal development, from conception to birth. Thanks to video-tracking, the spectators could interfere with the development cycle by simply flapping their arms in front of the tube. They could create a hybrid, a monster or bring on a miscarriage. Needless to say the installation caused a stir. The windows of the gallery got smashed, there were raving and scathing reviews, there were death threats. Fame was knocking on our door. A controversial exhibition under our belt, a few feet away from making a splash in New York’s art world, on the verge of becoming a household name, and all this before we even turned twenty-five. We were Cubic Zirconia.

  And then real life intervened and we realized there were things that could not be augmented. Bank accounts, debts, responsibilities, other people’s expectations, the boring stuff. And, above all, the pressure of the budding celebrity status. Nothing had prepared us for the brutality of fame, the cut-throat competitiveness of the art world. I was the weaker part of our duo and it was me who began to crumble under the weight of it all. It was then I met Anton and fell in love with his anti-establishment stance, his earthiness, his sense of freedom. Not to mention his knowledge of natural diamonds . . . I bailed out of Cubic Zirconia, dropped my ‘arty’ friends, immersed myself in Anton’s world. Erin fought for a while longer but she had no chance on her own. Part of me thinks she has never forgiven me for shattering our beautiful dream and for talking her into swapping the life of an artist for the daily grind of a forensic photographer. I reasoned that if the job was there we should take it. And so we did. We couldn’t have ended up further away from the fantasy of Cubic Zirconia. Lucky for Erin, the crime-scene gig didn’t last long, and before I knew it, she got catapulted into the glamorous world of portrait photography. She’s the one with a forty-thousand-dollar Hasselblad round her neck and an entourage of assistants. She spends most of her life in airport executive lounges and on first-class flights, travelling between London, New York, Los Angeles and occasionally some exotic location. Everyone who is anyone wants to have their essence captured by Erin Perdue.

  Would Erin be able to shed some light on ‘Exposure 1’? If I remember correctly, she was the photographer who got called out to the Violinist’s first crime scene, the one at the Albert Hall. Should I ask her about it? But what could she tell me? She’s probably too busy to even answer my call anyway. She’s moved on and you haven’t, I think, and the familiar feeling of inadequacy kicks in. It’s funny, I’m normally quite content with my life, proud even of what I’ve managed to achieve. But when it comes to comparing myself with Erin, everything I’ve worked so hard for fades to pitiful insignificance.

  My phone rings and I twitch, knocking down the carefully arranged animal queue to Noah’s ark. It’s from a long number beginning with +54.

  ‘Anton!’

  ‘Hi, babe. Missed me?’

  ‘Like a hole in the head. When are you back?’

  ‘Soon, babe. Maybe even next week. Wrapping some stuff up, not sure how much longer it’ll take.’

  ‘You better get your arse back here toot sweet.’

  ‘That bad, eh?’ He laughs. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, it’s silly . . .’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ He knows my ‘in-distress’ tone by now.

  ‘I’ve been getting these emails, an email actually, with a photo of a crime scene, you
know, from the time when I used to work for the Met.’

  ‘Who is it from?’