Skinner's Mission

54

Tom Whatling’s warning had been well placed. Many of his salvaged negatives bore an FA heading, and even in negative form, many of them were harrowing to see.

There was a two-car pile-up outside the Cramond Brig Hotel, in which Skinner and Masters counted eight bodies, before the DCC ripped the negative from the viewer. There were shots of pedestrian accidents, most of them involving children, but one of a man, his head and upper body protruding from beneath the double front wheels of a heavy vehicle. Not all the deaths had been road casualties. There were scenes of a family of three burned to death in a house fire, bodies shining white in the negative image. There was film from another incident on a railway line, in which they could make out a woman’s severed torso beside the track.

Three times, Skinner asked Pamela to leave him to the grim task, and three times she refused, saying that if he wanted her to leave he would have to order her. Each time, smiling at her tenacity, he had pulled out another rack of negatives.

They had been surveying the grim scenes for almost three hours when they found the negatives which they were beginning to fear had been lost after all. There were four strips each bearing file number FA 4782. As soon as Skinner fed the first image into the viewer and switched on the back-lit screen, he knew. They had learned to read colours in negative, and when the DCC saw the light-brown shape of a tree, he stiffened and recoiled slightly.

It was a long shot, taken from the other side of the road, but the shapes of the car against the tree, and of the figure inside were clearly visible. All of the photographs on the strip had been taken from a distance, recording the crash from all around the vehicle, most of them showing the direction in which the Cooper S had been travelling.

Skinner withdrew the strip and fed in the next. The first frame, the second, the third and the fourth showed, from different distances and angles, deep tyre tracks in a patch of mud on the road. He pulled the strip through to the fifth photograph.

Pamela Masters cried out in horror as it appeared. It had been taken through the shattered windscreen and showed a close-up of Myra’s body in the car, the steering column through her chest, her eyes staring wide at the sheer surprise of her last second of life.

Bob Skinner sucked in his breath and looked away. Suddenly he was back in his dream, thrust back into the depths of his recovered memory, seeing everything, hearing everything, smelling everything.

‘Come on,’ he said, thickly, to Pamela. ‘This is what we came for.’ He forced himself to look back at the screen, ripping images through quickly, one by one, looking for the right angle, hoping against hope that it was there.

It was the eighth shot on the fourth strip. The attending officer had taken the photograph from the exact point at which Skinner had looked into the car. The field of vision of the lens seemed to replicate his memory exactly.

He picked up a small magnifying glass which he had found in the studio, and held it close to the bottom right-hand corner of the negative image, searching, millimetre by millimetre. Suddenly, he stopped. His left hand shot out and grabbed Pamela’s arm. ‘There, Pam, there. Look.’ He leaned back, holding the glass steady to allow her to see the spot upon which it was trained.

‘I can’t make out detail from this, but I’ll swear that’s the brake fluid pipe. You can see, it’s been broken.

‘When Tam gets back, I’ll have him make me a print of this section, big as he can. Then, pray God, I . . . we’ll . . . have what we need.’