Owning Jacob - SA

Chapter eleven

Ben could tell the social worker didn’t believe him.

“Look, he could have been killed! If Kale had dropped that thing it would’ve staved his head in!”

Carlisle’s face was studiedly neutral. “But you didn’t try to stop him.”

“I’ve told you, I was too far away.”

“So you just left without doing anything or letting him know you were there.”

“I knew it wouldn’t have done any good! He’s already made it clear what’s going to happen if I go there again. Christ, what more do you want?” He tried to calm himself down, knowing that losing his temper wasn’t going to help. But the thought that those macho repetitions — and God knew what else — could be going on regularly made him break into a sweat. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that the testosterone-driven bastard wasn’t just an unreasonable man.

He was insane.

Carlisle pulled on the lobe of one ear. “What made you go around the back of the house in the first place?”

“I don’t know. Curiosity I suppose.” Ben could feel his face growing red. The fact that he felt guilty made him angrier than ever. “I’m not making this up. If you don’t believe me go and see for yourself! The place is like a... a scrapyard! God knows how you could let Jacob go somewhere like that!”

The last remark came out before he could stop it.

A flush darkened the social worker’s neck. “Contrary to popular belief, we aren’t complete idiots. We visited the house and satisfied ourselves that it was a safe environment.”

“It might have been then, but it isn’t any more! Did anyone actually look in the back garden?”

Ben knew he was moving the meeting towards a confrontation but was unable to stop himself. Carlisle’s cheeks had now reddened.

“We know our job, Mr Murray.”

“Well, then, do it! Jacob isn’t safe there! That madman’s going to end up killing him!”

“I don’t think histrionics are going to get us anywhere.”

“It isn’t histrionics! I saw what he was doing!”

“So you say.”

Ben clenched his fists, fighting for restraint. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The social worker too seemed to be trying to bring things back to a more controlled level. “Mr Murray, I explained last time that this sort of situation, when a child has been taken from one parent, or step-parent, and placed in the care of another, is always difficult. Okay, I appreciate that it can’t be easy to accept that Jacob no longer lives with you, but I’ve got to remind you that, as you know, you didn’t contest Mr Kale’s residence application. Now I know that there was a misunderstanding over your first contact day — no, please, hear me out.” He held up a hand as Ben tried to interrupt. “But there quite often are disputes to begin with, until both sets of parents have come to terms with the new situation. I have stressed to Mrs Kale that you are entitled to your contact days, and she had no objection to that—”

“I bet.”

“—so what I suggest is that you wait until your next contact is due, and I’m sure that all these... these problems will be resolved amicably.”

The man genuinely believed there was nothing to worry about, Ben saw. As far as the social worker was concerned, the happy ending had already happened.

“And what if Kale drops a lump of metal on Jacob’s head before then?”

Carlisle looked as though he had made a tasteless joke. “We will look into your complaint, obviously. We take everything like this seriously, but you have to understand that we can’t act on an uncorroborated allegation.”

“In other words you think I’m making it up.”

“It isn’t that I think you’re making it up.” The implication in his voice was that he didn’t think Ben was telling the whole truth, either. “We just can’t do anything without evidence.”

“So that’s it, then?”

The social worker spread his hands. “I’m sorry, Mr Murray. I can assure you that—”

Ben walked out. His head seemed to hum with the force of his frustration.

I’ll get you fucking evidence, he thought.

He bought the lens from his usual supplier. He already had zoom lenses for detailed and portrait work, but nothing that was up to the kind of specifications he had in mind now.

It was a 600mm telephoto, a more-than-half-metre-long beast that still wasn’t as powerful as some of the long lenses press photographers used, but with muscle enough for his needs.

When he fitted it to his Nikon and looked through it he felt as though he had an artillery gun strapped to his head.

On the afternoon he collected it he told Zoe not to expect him back and set off for Tunford. A thin and insincere afternoon sun broke through the clouds as he left the motorway.

Bypassing the town altogether, he headed directly for the hill.

He parked by the same overgrown gate as before, shouldered his camera bag and set off through the wood. This time when he hit the track he knew exactly where to go. He caught glimpses of the houses through the trees. When he thought he had gone far enough, he left the track and cut straight downhill.

He was a little too high, but he backtracked until he was directly above the house. There was no sign of anyone, but he’d expected that. Jacob would be at school, Kale at the scrapyard and Sandra at the pub where she worked as a barmaid.

He looked around. Not far from where he had stood the previous Sunday was a cluster of bushy young oaks, their lowest branches almost sweeping the ground in places. Ben cautiously pushed his way through them. They clutched and scratched at him but once he was inside there was a relatively clear area where he would be hidden. He set his camera bag and lens case down and snapped off one or two small branches that were in the way. After he had broken off the overhanging twigs in front of him, he had an uninterrupted view down into Kale’s back garden.

He took out the telephoto lens and fitted it on to his Nikon. The weight made the familiar camera feel unbalanced. It would have been unmanageable without a tripod. When it was fully supported he put his eye to the viewfinder, and suddenly the back garden was in his face. He drew back, startled, then looked through the camera again. “Wow,” he murmured, adjusting the focus.

Compared to this the zoom lenses he was used to were like bifocals. The rear of the house leaped into close-up; the grainy texture of the bricks, the flaking paintwork, even the brand-name of a box of matches on the windowsill above the sink, all were as clear as if he were only a few feet from them. He panned around the garden, which he now saw was contained by a high wire fence. In the centre of the bare, compressed earth was the car seat where Jacob had sat while Kale performed his lunatic exercises. Embedded in the ground next to it was the weight he had used, a finned metal cylinder which looked like part of an engine. He couldn’t tell if it had been moved again or not. The scene had a flat, slightly unreal quality as the compression of distance made the perspective lose its depth.

In the foreground the mounds of scrap became individual metal shapes, precariously stacked and pockmarked with corrosion.

Ben felt his anger mount at this further proof of Kale’s irresponsibility. Ragged and razor-sharp edges protruded like traps, waiting to stab, crush and slash. He couldn’t believe anyone could entrust a child to such a lethal playground, and wondered again how Kale had got away with it. Surely somebody, for Christ’s sake, should have made him clear the garden before Jacob was all owed to live with him.

Unless it hadn’t been there then.

Ben began taking photographs of the junk, making sure that at least part of the house was also clearly in view in each frame. He shot three rolls of film before he felt he’d done enough for a dry run. He took his eye from the viewfinder.

It was odd returning to an unmagnified perspective, like coming out of a cinema into a mundane world. The Kales’ house looked shrunken and insignificant. There was still no sign of life. Ben felt disappointed, but only mildly. As he looked down the hill, it was another feeling altogether that gripped him. It was a moment or two before he recognised it as anticipation.

Not sure why that made him uncomfortable, he packed his gear away and went home.

He’d planned to finish work early and go the woods again the next afternoon, but by lunchtime the rain had started coming down with the steady determination of a long-distance runner.

It continued over the next few days, a sullen downpour from a dour sky that didn’t permit a glimmer of sun. If it left him frustrated, he could at least console himself that Kale and Jacob were unlikely to be out in it either.

The bad weather was doubly annoying because he had a location shoot scheduled for the end of the week. It should have been carried out during the summer, but penny-pinching by the fashion designer meant that now they had to try and juggle it into what sunny days the autumn grudgingly provided.

The designer, spurning the idea of going abroad, had booked Ben for two days on the basis of the long-range weather forecast. Ben, Zoe, the make-up woman and two models had huddled around the cars on a deserted and windswept beach since first light, waiting for the low cloud to lift while the designer fretted and snapped at his assistant, chain-smoked black cigarettes and got on everybody’s nerves. After lunch the sun had begun to break through. They had hurriedly set up and Ben had gone as far as taking final light readings when the first fat spots of rain splattered down.

They waited it out for another hour before Ben announced that he’d had enough. To the accompaniment of the designer’s tantrum, they packed everything away, helped by the male model, who had obviously taken a shine to Zoe. As Ben was sitting with his feet out of the car, kicking the sand off his boots, she came over to him.

“Do you need me for anything else?” she asked, overly casual. “Daniel’s asked me out for a drink, so I’ll go back with him if that’s okay.”

“No problem.” He winked at her. “See you tomorrow.”

She smiled, blushing, and went over to the model’s black 1960s BMW. Ben watched her slim hips push from side to side as she waded across a patch of soft sand, self-consciously aware of being observed. But not by him, he realised. The studied insouciance was for the hunk waiting in the car, and Ben was wryly amused to find that his ego was pricking him. It was one thing to turn someone down. It was another to see how quickly they’d recovered from it.

The other model, a girl, had travelled down with the designer, and Ben felt obliged to offer her a lift rather than abandon her to the man’s spleen. She was young, twenty or twenty-one, with short, curly auburn hair and a long upper lip that could look either sulky or sensuous.

“Thank God for that,” she said, as they set off. “I thought I’d have to listen to that wanker whining all the way home. Mind if I smoke?”

Ben did, not liking even the smell of stale joints in his car, but he always felt picky saying so. He told her to go ahead.

She lit up a St Moritz, offering him one which he declined. She put her head back on the seat as she inhaled, gratefully. “He doesn’t like models smoking when they’re in his ‘creations’,” she told him, making a parody of the last word. “Says he won’t have them smelling of ashtrays. I mean, I know he’s the designer, but come on! God, what a tosser.”

Ben smiled noncommittally. He had learned never to engage in slanging sessions with people he worked with. Particularly not when the subject was the one paying his fees.

The girl took another languorous drag of her cigarette, turning her head to look at him.

“A friend of mine worked with you last year,” she said. “You shot a piece on young British designers for Vogue. She was one of the models. Black. Tall, looks sort of Egyptian.”

Ben blanked, then recalled the shoot she was talking about. It had run over several pages in the magazine, and involved several models. It disturbed him that he couldn’t remember one of them. A year ago, that was all. It seemed an age. Back in prehistory, when Sarah had been alive, and Jacob had been their son. A year ago he’d had a family. He felt his stomach drop. “Oh, yeah. Right.”

“She said you were pretty good.” The girl took a final drag of the cigarette, wound the window down an inch and slid it out. It was whipped away in a flare of sparks by their slipstream.

She closed the window and moved around in her seat, so that she was half leaning against the door, facing him.

“I saw about you in the news,” she said.

Ben felt his stomach drop some more.

“They warned us at the agency not to say anything. They didn’t want anybody putting their foot in it and annoying you, but it seems like a lie, sort of, to pretend I don’t know, doesn’t it?”

Ben didn’t want any part in this conversation. He gave a shrug, hoping she would take the hint. She interpreted it as agreement. She nestled down in the seat, settling herself into the topic.

“You must have been really upset. Some of the things they said. I mean, I thought they were really horrible.”

“That’s the press for you.”

“I know but, you know... it seemed so unfair. I don’t know how you could stand it.”

I didn’t have any fucking choice. And when he had he’d made the wrong one. “It’s past now.”

Her hand shot to her mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” She put her other hand up with her first, so it looked as if she were praying with clenched fists. “Shit, I shouldn’t have said anything, should I?”

“It’s okay.”

“I just thought... well, I don’t know what I thought. I just wanted to let you know that I knew about it, and... shit, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Look, I’m really, really sorry. Just ignore me, okay?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No, but you must think I’m really callous, or stupid, or something...”

The assured pose had left her now. She looked so contrite and young that Ben felt old and shopworn, which didn’t help.

He sighed. “It’s all right. Forget about it.”

She subsided for a while, then asked, “What made you want to be a photographer?”

Christ. He stifled his impatience, knowing she was only trying to be sociable. “I was studying fine art, and started experimenting with film. It went on from there.”

“I didn’t want to be a model. I wanted to be a dancer. But I was too tall and couldn’t dance.”

Ben smiled dutifully. She took it as encouragement, and for the rest of the journey chatted about herself, telling him about her background, her childhood and her favourite foods.

Practising for all the interviews when she was rich and famous, he thought. But at least it didn’t require much input from him. He switched off, nodding occasionally to give the impression he was listening while his mind went off on its own track.

He dropped her outside the house she shared with two other girls, parts of whose life histories he had also been treated to en route.

“Do you want to come in for a drink?” she asked, stooping slightly to talk to him through the open passenger door. “Or there’s a good pub on the corner. Irish. Serves great Guinness.”

“No, thanks, I’ve got a lot to do.”

She said that was fine, she would see him tomorrow.

It was only when he was almost back at his own house that it suddenly struck him that the girl wasn’t just being friendly, that there had been, if not a come-on, then a shy offer behind the invitation. His first reaction was surprise, not so much that it had been made, but that he should have missed it.

His second was dismay that he wasn’t interested anyway.

For a time he’d been able to convince himself that the utter lack of arousal he’d felt since Sarah had died was only normal.

Or, if not normal, then at least understandable. It had only been five months, and it wasn’t as if he wanted to go to bed with anyone else. He still missed her too keenly. By the same token, he didn’t like to think that he might be permanently dead from the waist down.

He could excuse the episode with Zoe as a drunken fiasco.

The guilt and disloyalty he felt for even thinking about such things no doubt added their own contribution. Even so, he knew his own body, and if five months was short in terms of grief, it was still a hell of a long time to go without a hard-on.

On a couple of occasions he’d deliberately tried to provoke a response, but they’d seemed seedy and furtive. The faces and bodies of models and past partners he’d pictured all blurred and became Sarah, and he would feel that he was somehow desecrating her. When he tried remembering the two of them making love, the sense of loss would overwhelm him.

Even the purely physiological reflex, the morning glories, the hangover erections that would pulse in time to the painful throb in his head, seemed to have deserted him. It was as though the sexual side of his nature had been cauterised. If he didn’t even notice any more when an attractive girl more than ten years younger came on to him, he thought, sourly, as he unlocked the studio, it must have been burnt out altogether.

He was planning to make an early start the next morning, but one look at the way the rain was sheeting down told him there was little point. The fashion designer shouted and swore when he called and suggested delaying the shoot until the afternoon, but finally agreed after convincing himself it was his own idea.

Ben phoned Zoe to tell her the new arrangements, then made a flask of coffee and some sandwiches. He couldn’t say if the idea of going to Tunford had presented itself to him before or after he’d decided to postpone the session. He wasn’t even sure why he wanted to go, since it was a weekday and they would probably all be out. But it was better than sitting in the house by himself.

The rain cleared before he reached the town, although it was still overcast. Ben parked in the usual place and headed for the oaks where he’d hidden the previous time. As he neared them he saw two men walking a dog up ahead. He cut deeper into the woods, letting them get well past before dropping down to his hiding place.

The wind and rain had stripped some of the leaves from it, but enough remained to conceal him. He looked down towards the Kales’ house as he gave the branches a shake, dislodging the rain in a silver shower. The garden was empty, but someone was apparently home because the back door was open. He pushed into the trees and sat on the low, collapsible fisherman’s chair he’d brought with him this time.

He was setting up the tripod when Sandra Kale came out. She wore what looked like a long white T-shirt. Even at that distance, unmagnified, he could see that her legs were bare. She went to the bottom corner of the garden, where the junk was lowest. She stepped over it, and Ben noticed for the first time that there was a gate made from the same wire mesh as the fence. She opened it and glanced quickly up and down the track that ran along the backs of the houses, then turned to the house and beckoned. A man appeared and ran down the garden in a low crouch. He reached the fence and said something to her. She nodded, hurriedly pushing him through the gate, and it was only then that Ben realised he was gaping like an idiot.

“Shit!” He grabbed for his camera, fumbling to attach the telephoto lens. A film was already loaded, but there wasn’t time to waste with the tripod. The man was already moving down the track as Ben hefted the Nikon, struggling to support the huge lens while he focused. He only managed to fire off a couple of shots before the man cut up a path between two of the houses.

Swearing, he shifted his attention back to the Kales’ garden. Sandra had shut the gate and was almost at the door. Before she went in she took a last look around. Under the magnification she seemed to be standing right in front of him.

Her face was without make-up, the bleached hair uncombed and ruffled. Its dark roots contrasted with the artificial yellow of the rest. One cheek was marked by an angry-looking red spot, and her lips were puffy and bare of lipstick except for a smudge at one corner. Her nipples pushed at the T-shirt, and the bounce of her breasts as she moved suggested that she wore nothing under it. As she stepped into the house the T-shirt rode up fractionally, giving him a glimpse of a bare buttock. The door closed behind her.

There was a shadowy glimpse of her walking past the kitchen window, heading into the house. Ben automatically raised the camera. One of the upstairs windows was frosted, obviously the bathroom or toilet. He shifted his attention to the other. It was the one where he’d seen Sandra the first time he was there. The telephoto lens didn’t have a zoom capacity, but by sharpening the focus he could make out some of the details of the dark interior through the glare on the glass.

There was the pale square of a double bed, the bright sliver of a dressing-table mirror. Then a door opened and Sandra Kale appeared. Only her white T-shirt and yellow hair stood out in the room’s shadows, but she became more visible as she moved nearer the window. Ben took several shots as she changed the sheets on the bed, then bundled the dirty linen in her arms and left the room.

The ache in his arms made him lower the camera. The house was again reduced to an innocent part of the row. He stared down at it with a hollow feeling of excitement.

“You randy bitch,” he said, wonderingly.

He began setting up the tripod.