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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
1899, Glasgow. A man is stabbed to death in a tenement courtyard, and Juan Camarón, photographer-cum-sleuth, is enlisted to assist the police investigation. His innovative photographic method can bring to light what the eye may have overlooked. Yet Juan has problems of his own: his late father's legacy - a monumental photographic record of the architecture of colonial Cuba - is threatened by a charge of plagiarism from a mysterious señora. Meanwhile, Juan's hoped-for happiness with his fiancée, Jane, might be over before it's even begun - even more so when a visiting professor is murdered and Jane is witnessed fleeing the scene. Juan is torn between finding the killer and finding his fiancée - but are they one and the same? The truth may be hidden in the photographs.
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THE ART OF THE ASSASSIN
KEVIN SULLIVAN
For Marija and Katarina with all my love
Clyde Yards Compete for Orders from Black Sea
… The tense state of relations among the principalities on the Black Sea coast has produced considerable disquiet in Constantinople and Saint Petersburg. The Sultan is determined to prevent further erosion of influence in parts of Rumelia, while the Tsar and the more energetic of his ministers have cultivated a restive spirit among radical factions in the Wallachian gentry. Prince Danilo’s acquisition of a torpedo boat (financed indirectly by Vienna, if the reports are true) has added fuel to the Balkan furnace. The Russians and Turks are as one in believing that violence must be their exclusive prerogative, undisturbed by the ambitions of Teutonic incomers.
It has been noted that Archibald Auchinleck, whose yard at Anderston is among the most profitable as well as the most aggressive on Clydeside, has obliged Prince Danilo with the manufacture of his warship in record time. More orders will come if the Black Sea arms race proceeds at a clip.
The Prince will be feted during his two days in the city. Following the launch of The Sceptre, he will attend a gala performance at the Theatre Royal. The Balkan visitors are to be guests at Auchinleck House in Milngavie. They will travel to Balmoral by special train on Friday 1st September and continue thereafter by Royal Navy frigate from Leith to the continent.
From the Glasgow Herald, 25th August 1899
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Tristan MacKenzie was taller than I had expected, and thinner too. I had imagined he would be short and round and elderly, like Señor da Costa, my lawyer in Santiago. The Glasgow solicitor was in his early forties; his build was athletic, and he had the sort of face that can only be rendered less intimidating if its owner allows it to break into a smile, which MacKenzie did not deign to do during our interview.
‘This could have been settled while I was away, Mr Cameron.’ MacKenzie made no effort to pronounce ‘Camarón’ in the Spanish way. As he spoke, he looked down at the document in front of him. When he had finished speaking, he looked up and across the table. He waited for me to explain.
‘I was told by your office that it must wait until your return.’
His expression changed microscopically – a slight narrowing of the eyes that stretched the pale skin over his 10cheekbones even more tightly. ‘It is a simple transaction.’
‘I had no idea that my father owned property in Scotland,’ I said. ‘No idea, at least until I discovered these documents.’
This observation was too inconsequential, in delivery and substance, to be of interest to MacKenzie, who was conspicuously disinclined to engage in small talk. I added quickly, ‘I would like to see the property and then I would like to sell it.’
He shook his head. It was not immediately clear to me whether he intended by this to indicate that I could not proceed in the manner I had described, or that what I had said was so obviously my intention that it hardly needed to be stated.
After my father was killed in the American siege of Santiago de Cuba, I found among his papers the deed to a property on the Isle of Bute on the west coast of Scotland. My mother was Scottish. I spent time there when I was very small – so small that I can remember almost nothing about it. I do not remember my mother at all.
‘All that you have to do is to sign this Deed of Succession, which we will countersign and notarise. This, together with your mother’s death certificate, will be sufficient for you to come into your property, Mr Cameron. After that you may live in it or sell it … or demolish it if you like. That is not a matter for this firm.’
His indifference was exasperating, but exasperation was not uppermost in my mind. I had a more practical preoccupation.
‘I don’t have my mother’s death certificate,’ I said. ‘I have had no connection with my mother since I was a child.’
‘No connection?’ He spoke as if I had acknowledged some sort of inexcusable dereliction of duty.11
‘That is why your clerk advised me to wait for your return.’ I had waited more than two months for MacKenzie to conclude a visit to his family in Cape Town.
He was unwilling to concede that his initial remark – to the effect that the business could have been dispatched easily without his involvement – was misplaced. ‘Well, it’s only a matter of finding a record of your mother’s death,’ he said.
‘I don’t know if she’s dead.’
His expression was transformed by a curling of the thin lips. ‘You don’t know if she’s dead?’
I shook my head.
‘Then she may be entitled to a third of this estate.’
‘Which is why I was advised to wait until your return.’ I cannot say I invested this statement with the sort of sonority that indicates the conclusive settlement of an argument. All I had done was transfer an important piece of information – with difficulty – to the mind of an indifferent and rather rude solicitor.
‘You will have to establish whether or not your mother is dead,’ he said.
‘I had hoped that you would be able to do that on my behalf. I have only been in this country for a short period. I am not a citizen. I do not have any legal standing—’
He waved his hand. ‘Yes, yes, we can do this, but it may take time.’
The delay, it seemed to me, could only be viewed as an irritant from the point of view of the heir to the property, yet MacKenzie spoke as though this additional imposition were a personal affront.
‘I do not intend to live in the property,’ I said. ‘I will sell it.’12
He stared at me. I paused before I obliged him by explaining why I repeated my intention to put the house on the market. He was the sort of individual, I had gathered by now, who strives to maintain a certain advantage by requiring others to assume a position of harassed defence.
‘It is not clear to me how much it may be worth.’ I said. ‘If my mother is alive, I have no objection to her receiving whatever she is entitled to.’
‘These things are a matter of law,’ he said, as though I had suggested otherwise.
I waited for him to continue.
He chose not to.
‘How much is the property worth?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘You cannot know that until you sell it.’ He glanced down at one of the documents in front of him. ‘A modern villa built on the waterfront near the new pier at Rothesay, eight rooms, extensive grounds … an orchard … outbuildings.’ He looked up at me. ‘Assuming it’s in good repair, and there is nothing here to indicate that it isn’t, you would stand to make a tidy sum, Mr Cameron.’
As I walked away from MacKenzie’s office I experienced a succession of emotions. The lawyer had offered no apology, not even the formulaic one that would have been a matter of courtesy on the part of one professional gentleman whose prolonged absence had caused inconvenience to another professional gentleman. On the contrary, he had spoken to me as though the complications in the case of my inheritance were in some way my own fault and represented an onerous and unwelcome obstacle to the speedy completion of a transaction in which he had not even the remotest interest.13
I crossed the river and moved through an area of tenements beside the new railway line. In a bar there, I ordered a whisky, lit a pipe and considered the indignity of my interview with MacKenzie. He had spoken to me with an indifference that bordered on insolence. As I sipped, I looked around in the gloom and picked out shadows; noses and lips and eyes were configured and reconfigured; patterns shifted so that a variety of disparate emotions were conveyed; however, the dominant emotion in this room, I thought, was a kind of watchful resignation. There was a murmur that sometimes rose, when the punchline of a story was reached or when a statement was contradicted, but these were no more than undulations in a sea of stoicism.
The lawyer’s deportment had not bordered on insolence. It had been insolent. The speed with which I slipped from speculation into certainty should not have surprised me. Nor should it have surprised me that from the conviction that an offence had been committed against my dignity I began to develop a corresponding conviction that an offence was being planned against my interest. This man, who had shown no inclination to indulge me as a client and a gentleman, was now entrusted with establishing whether or not my mother was dead. I should have taken my business elsewhere. I should not have been so acquiescent. I should have been forthright in terminating my association with him. He had been cagey about the value of the property. That was, no doubt, because he had already begun to think of ways in which he could swindle me out of it.
How quickly arbitrary images and sequences of thought can be transmuted into nightmares. Released from the strictures of reality, the mind creates patterns that mirror truth but magnify it so that it assumes preposterous and frightening forms. I 14should not have been surprised at the way my thoughts about MacKenzie unfolded, but I should have been astonished by the fact that when I left the public bar I saw this same MacKenzie walking on the other side of the road, from the river towards the south side of the city. I should have been surprised too that I chose, without giving this a moment’s thought, to follow him.
Coal dust from a million fires and factory furnaces had formed that acidic mist that turns to fog in wintertime. MacKenzie made an even more imposing figure now, his long raincoat picked out by lamplight. His black bowler cut into the white cloud. He walked with the swagger of a man accustomed to dominate, accustomed to intimidate others with a manner that is hectoring and abrupt. Our steps were muffled by the mist. Muffled too were the sounds of horses’ hooves and steel wheels on cobblestones. A tram passed; its klaxon sounded as though it were three blocks away and then in a moment it clattered next to us, as if emerging from a curtain of fog, like one of those heavy curtains in the theatre designed to contain everything combustible within the confines of the stage. I hurried to keep up with MacKenzie and felt the mist on my cheeks.
We passed a public house and then the figure in front of me entered an opening in the tenement that was broad enough to accommodate a carriage. I darted forward so as not to lose sight of him, and I entered the passageway. For a moment I saw nothing, not the raincoat, not the bowler, so dark was the carriage entrance. Then I made out his silhouette at the end of the passage. In the distance there was a dim gas jet and MacKenzie’s form was picked out and transformed by its light.
We were in a back court laid out in a rectangle and enclosed by four tenement terraces. The oblong was criss-crossed by 15washing lines, some of them sagging beneath the weight of laundry. Shirts and sheets floated in the breeze like phantoms. Radiating from brick sheds that housed dustbins were low iron fences separating the areas allocated to each of the tenement entrances. MacKenzie walked beside one of the sheds towards a wall that led along the middle of the quadrangle. Another wall, which had once been the side of a shed but now stood bereft of any obvious purpose, created a kind of cul-de-sac, a small area obscured from the view of the surrounding windows. This was where MacKenzie stopped and turned.
It was dark, so dark, the darkness of death. It was the darkness that descended on Santiago when the Americans bombarded the city and at night not a candle or a lamp was lit. I heard the scuttle and scratch of rats and the sound of an argument in one of the tenement flats. In Santiago, the night was punctured by the screams of those who were wounded and those who were afraid.
When you have witnessed the aftermath of a murderous assault your thoughts move in particular ways. My thoughts moved towards horror.
Limbs that have been amputated with clinical precision leave a wound that is quite distinct from wounds created by demented fury. Great quantities of blood, of course, but the nature of the injury differs according to the mind that caused it. I have seen the cleanly chopped spaghetti of severed veins and ligaments when the work was done carefully. I have seen the gruesome mélange that is the legacy of a maniacal attack.
The maniacal attack is caused by a misalignment, a miscalculation as old as humanity itself. It is caused by the futile attempt to assuage the pain and imperfection of our mortality through violence. The greater the imperfection, the greater the 16violence. Whatever the momentary release, the consequence must ever be the same – a new and wretched addition to the sum of human misery.
The man who seeks to right a wrong, to respond to injustice, perceived or real, through violence does not think in a measured way, however. He acts on impulse. He responds to his elemental dissatisfaction by raising a hand to strike at the source of his injury.
When my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I could see MacKenzie’s raincoat. It was splayed out on either side of his body like a blanket in the mud and ash between the shed and the two walls, and his bowler hat lay a little way away. Great quantities of blood. He had been felled not by one blow but by twenty, the rhythmic, vicious, bone-shattering application of a blade to his neck, his shoulders, his torso, even his arms and legs once he lay on the ground.
The results of this animal violence jolted me as though I had been in a trance, as though I were waking from a dream so vivid as to be confused with reality. This dream was woven into my reality. I could not dismiss it, as though my thoughts, my impulses, were unaffected by the violence I had witnessed since the shelling of Santiago.
CHAPTER TWO
The nature of the sound that wakens a person is defined by the dominant feelings when the brain drifted into sleep. A clear knock on the bedroom door might be taken as a bright invitation to begin the day, if the feelings on going to sleep were bright. The same sound might be abrasive and unwelcome, if those feelings were infected by anger or by fear.
Confused by the transition from sleep, I could not at first define the meaning of the sound – a knock that was clear and consistent. As I pulled the covers back and swung my legs over the side of the bed, I detected a note of authority and a note of detachment, too. It is quite absurd to suggest that I could derive such a detailed impression from an everyday sound, but I did. Even before I opened the door, I knew that the person on the other side was not an acquaintance or an employee of the hotel.18
I looked at the man who had wakened me. I looked up: he was very tall. He was well dressed, in a grey, three-piece suit, and he was perhaps a decade older than me. When I glanced down, I saw that his brown shoes were polished to a military sheen. He was clean-shaven, with a broad chin and his cropped hair was beginning to thin at the front. The expression in his pale blue eyes put me on my guard.
As I considered all these things, I considered, too, that I did not know what time it was; I was standing in my pyjamas; I was not yet fully conscious; I was being addressed by name.
‘Señor Camarón?’
‘Soy Camarón,’ I said, and then, as the stranger, even though he pronounced my name in the Spanish way had indicated with a slight mis-inflection that he was not a native speaker, I added, ‘I am Juan Camarón.’
‘My name is Smith,’ he said. ‘You have been referred to me by the City of Glasgow police.’
I noted the absence of any apology for waking me. The man watched me with disagreeable frankness, as though he were making an assessment and didn’t care if I noticed or not.
He presented his card. In addition to his name, it bore the designation Captain, Special Branch, and a London address. In one corner was a neat circular stamp with the words ‘Metropolitan Police’.
I looked up from the card. ‘What is it you wish to speak to me about?’
‘I need you to come with me.’
‘You need me to come with you?’ His peremptory manner had a certain absurdity to it.19
‘You recently assisted the police,’ he said, ‘in a murder investigation.’
This was true, and rather well known. My assistance had been crucial in identifying the killer.
‘There has been another murder,’ he said. He waited for a moment – to assess my reaction, I thought – and then he added, ‘There is a view that your particular photographs may be of use.’
It was shortly after eight o’clock when Captain Smith and I stepped down from the brougham outside a tenement south of the river.
A police constable stood at the entrance to the close. He was an imposing figure: middle-aged, with a thick black moustache, the tip of his helmet obscuring a large part of his pock-marked face, shoulders back, chest bulging over the top of his belt. The sight of him depressed me. I had not wanted to be here, but Smith had overcome my objections. He was the sort of man who gets his way. Apparently, I was the sort of man who gives in.
It wasn’t my intention to continue with serial photography the technique I had invented to identify patterns of activity in a particular space – a street or a square, for example – by making photographs from the same vantage point at fixed intervals throughout the day. I didn’t see it as the panacea that Smith had been told about. It had worked, quite inadvertently, the first time I used it, and a killer was caught. But I didn’t believe it could be relied upon to work again and in any case, I was without the necessary equipment: the timing device on which the method depended had been sent away for repair.20
Yet, I was here, and I was holding my camera. Smith was an overbearing sort of fellow and I had already formed a profound dislike for him, but beyond his importunate insistence, I was obliged to acknowledge that I wanted to see what that scene looked like. I wanted to see if it was familiar, if it prompted some sort of recognition.
Experience of evil can cast a long shadow and there are people who return again and again to that violence that wounds the soul.
I looked at the constable as I waited for Smith to pay the driver. I was impatient to know what lay beyond the entrance to the tenement.
Although it was early, a small posse of bystanders had gathered. There was no physical barrier, yet the men and women and children who looked on as Smith and I entered the building were careful not to cross an invisible line that had been marked by the constable, first through a spoken instruction and thereafter by a glance here and a cautionary growl there. We were in a district where a man in uniform exercised authority: it might be resented and surreptitiously flouted, but it would not be openly challenged.
The constable saluted and escorted us into the darkness. The close smelled of tobacco and cabbage and damp. The darkness deepened at first, and then we were able to see a little better in the weak but serviceable light from a cupola, high above, at the top of the central stairs. There were doors to the ground-floor apartments on either side of the first flight of stairs. The corridor continued after this, becoming brighter as we moved along it because the rough wooden door that led onto the back court had been left open.
It is absurd to speak of ‘a premonition’ of evil. Memory 21is misleading and it is impossible to disremember things that we later learn about an event but did not know at the time. Knowledge of evil consequences, for example, will permeate the memory so that these consequences appear always to have been in view. The mind stores random details that can bring us instantly to a place of long-ago terror.
As I followed Smith through the close to the back court and the shape of the buildings came into view, I was gripped by a feeling of the deepest unease. My skin crawled. I gripped the camera and the tripod tightly, as though they might be wrested from me by an invisible hand. When we emerged into the back court, I stumbled, as though I were drunk. Another policeman was guarding the entrance here. I felt his hand reach out to steady me.
‘Shall I take that?’ Smith asked, turning to see me being momentarily propped up by the policeman. He indicated the wooden camera case.
I regained my balance and shook my head.
The back court was the size of a football field, and the same shape. In front of us stood a line of four-storey tenements. At this hour, with the sun yet to rise high enough to shine directly into the closed quadrangle, the lines of windows appeared silver and black. If there were onlookers behind the glass – as surely there were – they were invisible. Many of the windows had been drawn up, however, and at these people looked out in the uninhibited way that comes from knowing you are perfectly at liberty to watch whatever you choose. Children peered down, their hands on the windowsills to steady themselves. There were men in shirtsleeves: some stood with their hands spread out in front of them like shopkeepers or barmen waiting for custom. 22Women, in various states of indoor dress, leaned on the sills with their elbows. One woman had placed a pillow under her arms so as to lean more comfortably.
To our right, the tenements were the same as those in the main block, but there were fewer entrances. A carriageway provided a direct exit from the back court to the street. The building on the fourth side of the rectangle was not a tenement. It had a grey, plaster facade.
Smith saw me looking. ‘It’s a brewery,’ he said.
A faint aroma of rotten eggs – fermenting hops – had descended on us when we entered the back court. There were no windows on the brewery facade, but a row of small vents along the top.
I had brought the Eastman camera and the Kessler tripod. Although there was no question of serial photography as such, because of the absence of the timer, I proposed to photograph the murder scene and then analyse the images in the detailed and systematic way that I had developed for that system. The camera sees more than the naked eye: it records everything. The camera does not distinguish; it does not judge; it does not jump to conclusions. Details missed by the brain are preserved by the machine and studied carefully, these details can be used to assemble a new understanding of events.
I had explained my method to Smith when we travelled here in the brougham, and I had explained my reservations. He did nothing to indicate that he did not share these reservations. I sensed that he had been instructed to enlist my help and was doing so only with reluctance.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing to the right, where a low annexe protruded from the tenement facade. It had windows 23looking onto the back court and a wooden door. The gingham curtains were closed.
‘Shirt makers,’ Smith said. ‘Working men’s club.’
As if he felt that the narrow confines of my role as a photographer did not merit further discussion, he increased his pace and led the way to the place we had come to see. It wasn’t difficult to identify the precise location. Along the middle of the back court there were sheds. From the malodorous emanation, I gathered that the privies for perhaps a hundred households were in some of these sheds. Between the privies there were larger structures with tin chimneys above them. Milling around one of these, near the middle of the back court were at least ten constables. They stood in the way that policemen do when their very presence, rather than any useful activity, is their principal function.
A sergeant was stationed near the door of the shed, speaking to three constables. When he saw Smith, he stepped away from them and advanced towards us. He tipped his helmet in a manner that I sensed was slightly reluctant and I wondered if Smith had been foisted on the sergeant in the same way I had been foisted on Smith.
‘This is Mr Cameron,’ Smith said, pronouncing my name in the Scottish way. ‘He’s here for the pictures.’
The sergeant gave me a frank, almost contemptuous look.
‘We huvnae taken the boady tae the mortuary till ye came fur the phoaties,’ he said.
Smith stared at the man with an expression of exasperation. In that moment, I realised something that might have been glaringly obvious to me if I had not been preoccupied by my growing dislike for Smith. Like me, he was an alien here. I 24should have noted his accent – English, possibly from the very south. He did not fully understand what the sergeant had said.
I had spent several months in Glasgow. I was practically fluent.
‘I won’t take very long,’ I said, ignoring Smith’s temporary embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry I’ve held up the proceedings.’
The sergeant softened. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Dinnae worry aboot that. Thon body’ll keep.’
Death announces itself in different ways. Its smell is among the less tolerable. It is an unholy combination of excreta and boiled vegetables, together with something faintly chemical. This was, no doubt, why the constables had elected to remain outside. Apart from the sergeant, none of them followed us into the shed. Smith put a hand over his nose. The sergeant, who had been at the scene for several hours, had a handkerchief ready. He watched me over the top of his makeshift mask.
I stepped forward into the dingy room and my gaze moved instinctively to the far corner, in the direction of something that was not at first very noteworthy. It was a collection of clothing that had been bundled on the floor at the foot of an iron bed.
But it wasn’t just a bundle. There was a body inside it.
It seemed that the corpse called out to us. I did not have to check where Smith and the sergeant were looking. They were looking in the same direction as me.
I took another step forward. If they did the same, I didn’t notice. I thought only about the bundle in the corner.
Death announces itself with a bad smell and then it breaks cover in other ways. It isn’t a purely physical phenomenon. It cannot be. Life in its essence is not physical. The body is 25animated by an invisible force, and when this force departs, there is a space. I stared into this space.
The dead man’s eyes were still open. His expression was one of surprise. He was middle-aged, with a black moustache and pronounced cheekbones that made him look tubercular. Protruding cheekbones, of course, are common in the dead, if – as this man was – they are facing upward. Gravity draws the skin towards the floor, giving the cadaver an emaciated appearance. The skin was white – not pale, but white, as though it had been bleached. And in a certain sense, it had: the colour had been removed by a chemical process that occurs when blood is entirely drained from the body.
This man’s blood lay all about him. Someone might have spilled a tureen of it onto the floor. And the unevenness of the surface had caused the liquid to collect in a pool, so that the body seemed to be floating.
I looked down, and the dead man looked up. The eyes of the corpse were in a position corresponding to my chin, and its chin was in a position corresponding to my eyes. The body stretched away from me towards the wall. In order to step round and view it from a more satisfactory angle I would have to stand in the blood. I did not wish to do this. I say the body ‘stretched’, but this is not quite the right word. It was spread-eagled, on its back. One leg extended towards the wall; the other leg, the left one, was bent; the knee had come up and then fallen over the thigh of the right leg. The left arm stretched away from the body, but not completely; its trajectory had been arrested by the frame of the bed, the elbow resting on the bloody floor and the hand raised languidly as though holding an invisible cigarette. The right arm had fallen over the stomach.26
It was from the chest that the great fountain of blood had come. And the cause of that fountain, the implement of violent carnage, remained in situ. A kitchen knife had been inserted, to the handle, between the victim’s ribs. Between the third and fourth rib, I guessed, straight through the heart.
‘Can you photograph this?’
I became aware that Smith was speaking to me.
I turned, but only partially. I did not want to draw myself entirely away from the corpse almost as if, in the normal manner of conversation, it would be impolite to turn one’s back on one of the participants.
Smith seemed to me to be less assured now, less certain of his own position in the scheme of things.
‘Of course,’ I said.
He still had his hand over his nose and the sergeant still had his handkerchief deployed.
‘How long will ye be?’ the sergeant asked.
I glanced around the room – a view from four directions, a view at floor level. I looked into the corner behind me, where there was a sideboard on which I guessed I would be able to stand, giving me a view from above.
‘Half an hour,’ I said. ‘Maybe forty minutes.’
The sergeant walked quickly out of the room. We heard him issuing instructions. The mortuary van was to be sent for. He also directed that the sheets hanging on the washing lines should be gathered and made into a kind of screen to prevent the gawkers at the tenement windows from viewing the corpse when it was removed.
I stood with my back to the open door. The thin mattress on the iron bed was covered with a threadbare sheet and 27there was a blanket, carelessly folded, beside the striped pillow. The calendar above the bed was for last year. Above the bedhead, the plaster was discoloured where a picture had once been hung. The nail was still fixed in the wall. Three of the walls had been papered with an oriental bamboo motif. To my right, the paper was peeling badly at the top where dampness had come in through the roof. On my left, next to the bed, there was a steel stove. There was a circular vent in the stovepipe close to the roof; a wire clothes line stretched from the wall a little below the vent all the way across the room to the opposite wall.
‘How will you set up your camera?’
It was as though there were some sort of delay in my thoughts. I realised that I was looking at Smith only after I had absorbed what he had said. I realised, too, that he was asking for the second time. I had not responded the first time round.
‘Set up?’
‘You need to photograph the body from above.’
I considered this for several moments. Then I said, ‘Why?’ He was right. I intended to make an image from an elevated position in the room, but – and this may have come, I am obliged to acknowledge, from a certain pettiness – I did not want to give Smith the satisfaction of directing me.
He seemed irritated. ‘That’s how these photographs are taken, isn’t it?’
‘What photographs?’
‘These photographs. Photographs of murder scenes.’
I shrugged. ‘I have my own method.’
‘You need to photograph the body from above,’ he repeated.
‘Captain Smith, if you will allow me, I know my business.’ 28I noticed that he was no longer holding his hand to his nose.
I put the camera case on the chipped linoleum that partially covered the floor. The strips were curling up at the edges, and the case wobbled on the uneven surface. I assembled the tripod and placed it at the entrance, then stood behind it and crouched down a little, framing the room with my hands. Smith stepped out of my way – as though my hands were going to take the photograph. I walked round the tripod and picked up the case. The Eastman, with its refined lens, has the advantage of picking out detail in a landscape image. It is not ideal for portrait photography. I was glad I had brought it instead of the Eclipse. I cannot say that this was a consequence of foresight: I had been reluctant to come in the first place, and I had only selected the Eastman because it was lighter and easier to carry.
I placed the camera on the tripod and tightened the screw. Then I took the magnesium strip from my satchel and attached it to the elevation rod.
‘Captain Smith,’ I said, ‘I’d be grateful if you would step outside. You can observe the process from behind me if you like.’
He looked for a moment as though he might not oblige me – he disliked being directed, I could see. At last, he nodded and moved out of the room and stood behind me.
I looked through the viewfinder and adjusted the lens. Fifteen or twenty seconds elapsed before I was sure that the view was as broad as possible and that each object was in focus. When I was satisfied, I removed a safety match from my pocket and struck it. The flame flickered in the putrid air and when the strip ignited, I pressed the shutter button.
The picture was made.
I carefully removed the plate and placed it in the satchel. I 29took another plate, inserted it in the camera and stepped into the room.
I heard Smith and some of the constables coughing. Smith was waving his hand in front of his face to disperse the cloud of incinerated magnesium. These were the same men who had been standing for some time in the infinitely more toxic miasma emanating from the cadaver.
I carried the tripod across the room and stood with my back to the wall between the sideboard and the stove. From here I repeated the process. I framed the end of the bed, the upper torso and head of the corpse, the kitchen table, which had an armchair in front of it, the bare wall and a portion of the ceiling where the wallpaper was peeling, and the empty corner next to the door. I struck another match, lit the magnesium strip, waited for the flash and pressed the shutter button.
Taking the tripod and camera to the other corner I stood with the body to my right and the door to my left. I had a view of the bedhead and the discoloured section of paper with the nail still in the wall where the picture had been, the stove, the sideboard, the corner next to the door and part of the door, where Smith stood watching me. I might have advised him to step back so as not to be in the picture of a murder scene as some people are superstitious about such things. I did not imagine, though, that Smith was the superstitious sort. And in any case, it might offer a useful perspective when I came to examine the images to have a living human figure in at least one of the compositions. It might represent the departed soul – or the killer. Smith’s silhouette cast a faint shadow into the room.
When I had taken the photograph, I moved to the middle of the floor, careful not to step on the blood.30
‘I’m going to stand on the bed,’ I said.
‘What?’
Smith came back into the room. His sense of smell had adjusted to the air outside, even when it was clouded with magnesium. His hand moved instinctively to cover his nostrils.
‘I’m going to stand on the bed,’ I repeated.
He seemed to consider this for a moment and then he shrugged. I placed the camera next to the bed and then, inspecting the soles of my shoes in case they had mud or blood on them – decorum is oddly persistent even in macabre of circumstances – I climbed onto the iron frame first and then, more gingerly, onto the mattress.
There is something altogether unnatural about standing on a bed with your shoes on. This was compounded by the fact that a blood-soaked corpse lay partially in view. I lifted the tripod and camera and placed them in front of me.
When I looked through the viewfinder, any reservations I may have had about the propriety of standing on the bed were dispelled. The higher angle offered clarity. The body, on my left, and the stove, on my right, were not in the frame but everything else was.
‘You may wish to stand off-camera,’ I said. Smith’s silhouette had little utility from this angle. He stepped quickly outside and out of view. The constable who had been loitering a little way beyond Smith followed the captain’s example and moved out of sight. In front of me, through the door and across the courtyard I could see the kitchen window of the nearest apartment. The window was open and the two brass taps above the sink were visible. A woman stood in the kitchen watching me, an infant wrapped in a shawl around her neck.31
I struck a match, lit the strip and let the shutter fall.
I jumped down from the bed, crossed the room and climbed onto the sideboard. It was a solid piece of furniture, like the iron bed. But while the bed looked entirely at one with its surroundings, the sideboard was out of place. It was rather ornate, and it may have been recently varnished. At twice the elevation afforded by the bed, it offered a panoramic view. I lit the strip and pressed the shutter, lowered the camera and tripod, and jumped down onto the floor.
The linoleum caused me to misjudge the height of the sideboard and the proximity of the floor: my left foot hit the surface with greater velocity than I had anticipated, and in order to break my fall I allowed myself to tumble forward. I had, I suppose, intended to steady my forward progress by bringing up my right foot, but the tip of my shoe caught one of the upturned edges of linoleum. I careered towards the opposite wall, landing on my stomach. From here, I had the disconcerting experience of seeing the room from the vantage point of the corpse.
I felt myself being lifted – with more ease than suited my sense of dignity. Smith returned me to a standing position as if I were a rather unwieldy rag doll. But indignity wasn’t uppermost in my mind.
‘There’s something under the bed,’ I said.
He knelt down and inclined his head sideways to see beneath the iron frame. Smith got up on one leg and moved forward, kneeling again and reaching beneath the bed. He pulled out an envelope. Without comment he folded it and put it in the pocket of his jacket.
‘I’m going to make another picture,’ I said, ‘from this height.’ 32I indicated the level of the floor. ‘It would be consistent with my method if everything is where it was, as much as possible …’
‘I will remember where this was,’ he said, tapping the envelope in his pocket.
‘You are in the way,’ I said.
I separated the camera from the tripod and placed it on the linoleum. Then I lay down behind it and framed the picture. Smith walked round me and took up a position at the doorway. I adjusted the viewfinder.
The smell in the room was marginally less unpleasant at floor level. Cool air circulated. There was an odour principally from the dusty linoleum and the distant scent of hops. Through the viewfinder I could see the legs of the two chairs, the bed, the table, the black belly of the stove and the handle of the kitchen knife where it protruded from the dead man’s chest. The thinning hair of the victim revealed the beginning of a bald patch, a little oval of pale skin that winked at me now as though the deceased had a third eye on the top of his lifeless head.
I lit the strip and when the magnesium flashed, I dropped the shutter.
Just as Smith had surprised me by pocketing the envelope without comment, there was, I thought, something surreptitious that jarred with his otherwise officious manner. He surprised me again by not returning to the subject of a photograph of the cadaver from above. I had not wanted to make a picture from this angle because the Eastman would not deliver an entirely satisfactory one; the Eclipse would have been more appropriate. But there was more than this. I would study the patterns in the room. In some respects, the body wasn’t the principal object of interest – rather, it was the things around the body.33
And I disliked being told what to do.
As we left the shed, two men from the mortuary van walked towards us carrying a folded canvas stretcher. The constables had draped sheets strategically over the washing lines, as instructed, creating a makeshift screen.
‘How long will it take you to make the photographs?’ Smith asked as we entered the close.
‘This afternoon,’ I said. ‘I will be able to develop them then.’
‘I will come and look at them around six.’
‘No!’ I was suddenly exasperated. ‘The pictures will serve no purpose until I have examined them.’
‘I will examine them.’
‘No!’ My voice reverberated along the plaster walls of the corridor. I sounded petulant, but I spoke in this way because Smith, like so many others, misunderstood the process. The pictures had to be studied in a disciplined way. ‘I must apply my own method,’ I said. ‘It requires detailed inspection, quadrant by quadrant, image by image, otherwise the photographs will reveal very little.’
He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Is this what you did in Crown Street?’
In the case of Crown Street, I had taken serial photographs for three days. A systematic comparison of these images revealed a figure who – through timing and proximity – could be tied to the murders committed in the area.
‘It is similar. I don’t have the mechanism for serial photography. In Crown Street I made a very large number of photographs and it took many hours to compare them. I will try to do something similar with the images I have just made, but I will need two or three hours.’ He was about to speak so 34I added quickly, ‘I have engagements throughout the day. I will endeavour to have the pictures and notes ready for you in the morning.’
We emerged onto the street, where the sergeant was speaking to the constable on guard. The crowd had grown larger; the arrival of the mortuary van had revived interest.
‘I will come to your hotel in the morning,’ Smith said. He nodded in the direction of the sergeant. ‘Now, I must attend to things here.’
I disliked being dismissed in this perfunctory way, and I resented the fact that Smith had not taken me into his confidence in regard to the likely contents of the envelope that I had drawn attention to under the bed. I said, ‘May I ask if you know the identity of the victim?’
He looked at me as though the question were somehow impertinent, but then he said sourly, ‘Yes, we know who he was. He was a policeman, an associate of mine.’
He began to move away. ‘Until tomorrow then.’
CHAPTER THREE
I took the camera and tripod back to the hotel and then caught a cab to the office of the Raeburn steamship company, located by the wharves on the Govan side of the river. The cab dropped me at Finnieston and I crossed on the ferry. I had ordered the new Lumière Cinematographe from Paris, but when I provided my details to the woman in the Raeburn office, she was solicitous. ‘It hasn’t arrived yet, Mr Cameron. Trouble in the Channel. A storm has prevented all movement out of Le Havre.’
The Raeburn office faced the Simpson-Burley paint factory on the other side of the river. A sleek and unusual vessel was moored at the wharf near the factory. It was less than eighty feet long, with a recessed prow; the deck had not yet been fitted out with the usual accoutrements and there was a single funnel. Vessels in various states of construction lined both banks, so the unfinished 36deck was common, but in this case the grey hull was armour plated and that was why it was low in the water. There were no portholes. I guessed that the expanse in front of the funnel would be fitted with a gun, and there would be mechanisms to lower torpedoes into the water. I had seen American ships like this were anchored in Santiago after the siege.
The sounds that emanated from the torpedo boat were no more bellicose or strident than anywhere else by the waterside, where sailors and workers exchanged greetings and instructions. Crewmen moved to and fro on the unfinished deck. Stray voices floated in the early morning. I heard a language I didn’t recognise, Russian, perhaps. Small vessels moved back and forth between the gunboat and me.
I left the Raeburn office and stepped onto the ferry just as it was about to depart. As soon as I was seated, I savoured the familiar tang of tar, oil, sea salt and decay that rose up from the choppy black surface of the river.
My father was shot outside the cathedral in Santiago on the 27th June 1898. He died at the very moment he completed his pictorial record of Spanish architecture in Cuba. The work had been commissioned by William Collins, Sons & Co of Glasgow, London, Bombay and Toronto. It was now to be published in a splendid edition that would be my father’s testament.
My father was a fine photographer. He made images with skill and with insight, and they were all the more important because the country he photographed had changed utterly. My father’s pictures were an intimate and accurate record of a vanished world.
These things could not begin to compensate for the injustice 37of his death at the hands of a marksman who picked him out and shot him when he was in the very act of making his final photograph. Yet I had come to understand a little about life and death. We are an idea, an essence; we are reflected in what we do and in what we have done.
As the last person who had boarded the little ferry, I was the last person to disembark. I climbed carefully the four slippery black steps that led to the high-tide mark, after which the granite slabs were a lighter colour. At the top of the stairway I stepped onto the long, busy thoroughfare of the Broomielaw. I waited for three heavily laden carts carrying barrels of Jamaican syrup to pass before I could cross to a narrow street that led first between the gable ends of two warehouse sheds and then between black tenements and finally to the main road.
