The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

WILKOLAK by Nina Allan

KIP KNEW THE man was the monster as soon as he saw him. He was coming out of the convenience store attached to the garage at the bottom end of Lee High Road, his shopping in an old Tesco bag. Kip uncapped the Nikon and took his picture; the click of the shutter release sounded loud to him, even above the noise of the passing traffic. Kip lowered the camera, suddenly afraid the man might turn and see him, but that didn’t happen. Instead, the man crossed the garage forecourt, ignoring the cars parked at the pumps and heading off up the road in the direction of Lewisham. He was of medium height, but skinny, with gangling limbs and a jutting Adam’s apple, and reminded Kip of Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. He wore tatty old Levis, and an army surplus jacket that was too big for him around the shoulders. He seemed lost in thought, cocooned in it, shut off from his surroundings, from Kip, from everything.

Kip raised the Nikon again and took half a dozen more shots in quick succession. Later, at home in his room, he downloaded the images to his hard drive, storing them in a file he tagged as monster. A fortnight ago an eight-year-old girl from Marischal Road had gone missing on her way home from school. The girl’s name was Rebecca Riding. Her body was discovered a week later in a disused mobile home on the Isle of Sheppey. She had been raped and then suffocated. The police issued a photo fit of a man they wanted to question, a man with thinning hair and a scrawny build, and teachery little wire-framed glasses. The police said he was probably in his early forties, and living in the Lewisham area. Kip thought the man in the photo fit looked like a school nerd gone bad. He also looked exactly like the bloke he had seen coming out of the garage on Lee High Road. Kip remembered the man’s walk, slightly knock-kneed, the Tesco bag bumping against his thigh as he moved along.

The tabloids had already dubbed him the Manor Park Monster.

Kip selected one of the photos and printed it out, the best one, showing the man’s face in profile like the double agent in a spy movie. It was the kind of photo you could imagine flashing up on the TV news, or on the front page of the next day’s papers. Rebecca Riding had been all over the news, always the same photo, a blonde kid with a demon smile and one of her top front teeth missing. Rebecca Riding had gone missing just before the start of the holidays and at school her name quickly became that summer’s catchphrase: What do you get if you cross Rebecca Riding with a rubber glove? What did Rebecca Riding’s dad say when the cops asked him why his trousers were at the cleaner’s? The jokes were disgusting but you couldn’t help laughing at them. One dork had laughed so hard Kip thought he was going to piss himself. Kip didn’t want to think about the murder. It was the photograph of the murderer that interested him, some loser with a plastic carrier bag crossing the street. The image might seem ordinary but Kip knew it wasn’t, that the very act of framing the man in his viewfinder and then choosing to release the shutter made the picture significant. The main point of a photograph was to invite you to look, to concentrate on the world around you a little harder. The photographer recreated the world in the way he saw it, and in this, Kip supposed, he was the master of his universe. A guy who worked for the Star and who had once come to the school to give a talk on photojournalism said that all photographers were grubby-handed alchemists, pier-end magicians – words that stuck in Kip’s mind like splinters of glass. Now that he had the photograph in front of him Kip found he didn’t really care whether the man was the monster or not. The point seemed to be that he could be. He could just as easily be a hero. If you mounted a photo on a nice ground and gave it an interesting title then anybody could be anything.

He shut down his computer and went downstairs. The television was on in the back room, his mother slumped at the end of the sofa watching The Weakest Link. She was folding and unfolding a tea towel, one of the souvenirs she had brought back from their holiday in Tenby three years before. It had the Welsh dragon on it, in red.

“Your father won’t be home for supper,” she said. “He has work to finish.”

“OK,” Kip said. He sat down beside her, his eyes on the screen, careful not to look at her directly. This was a game they played together all the time now. She would tell him his father was working late at the site, and he would pretend to believe her and not care less. He would ignore the bunched, grasping look of her hands, her puffy eyes, and concentrate on Anne Robinson torturing a bank clerk from Cleethorpes over the identity of the currency of Argentina.

The thing he was not supposed to know but had known for six months was that his father was having an affair; that on at least three evenings a week Andrzej Kiplas would knock off work early and drive over to Streatham, where he would spend an unspecified number of hours with a woman named Grace Hemingway. Kip didn’t know who she was or how his father had met her. Sometimes he imagined her as one of the peroxide Pirelli blondes on the calendar in the site Portakabin; at other times he saw her as a mousy little librarian with a flat full of dusty books, like the women in films by Wajda or Kieslowski.

Andy Kiplas sometimes didn’t return until ten, eleven o’clock. On the nights when this happened, Kip would slope off to his room as soon as he heard his father’s key in the lock. There would be a short interval without much happening, then his mother would start crying or his father shouting or both. This usually went on for about an hour. Then everything would go quiet, and later he would hear the headboard banging against the wall in his parents’ bedroom.

Andy Kiplas was almost fifty, but his body was still lean and hard from his work on the site. Kip’s mother Lynn was like an overblown rose. When she smiled and if the lighting was right she could still be beautiful, her heaviness transformed into a pink softness that put him in mind of strawberries, candyfloss, September sunsets. But when she was unhappy she turned pallid as lard.

Kip itched to photograph her. With her inflamed eyelids and the ragged cloth in her hands she looked like a war victim, one of the refugee women in the immigrant camps outside Calais. Sometimes on evenings like this Kip would stay downstairs and play cards with her, or backgammon. At some point during the game Lynn would get up from her seat and pour them both a vodka, a double Zubrowka straight from the freezer. The fumes rose up in a smoky cloud as she unscrewed the cap.

“One little nip can’t hurt you,” she would say. She had been saying that since he was thirteen. “Don’t you go telling your teachers.” She would laugh then, a raucous, ribald sound, the same laugh she used with her friends on the phone and that Kip loved to hear. She would knock back her vodka in one, and two bright tears would appear, squeezing like liquid crystal from the corners of her eyes.

They sparkled there, jewel-bright, on the rims of her cheeks. Kip wondered what he would do if she cried for real. No matter how much he loved her he still hated her need of him, the way her fingers twisted together when she told him the pointless lies about his father.

The only thing to do was pretend not to notice. Once the truth was out in the open it would be impossible for either of them to put it back.

They ate supper off a tray, watching the news.

“I’m going out later,” Kip said.

“Where to?” Lynn said. She glanced up from her plate. Her food was still mostly untouched. “I don’t want you roaming the streets half the night, not with that man on the loose.”

“I’m only going to Sonia’s. I won’t be late.”

“Well, make sure you catch the bus coming home.” She took her plate through to the kitchen and Kip heard her scraping her supper into the waste bin. It was the first time she had mentioned the monster, at least to him. He thought it was probably her way of trying to stop him from going out and leaving her by herself.

“I don’t know,” Sonia said. “It could be him, I suppose.” She held the photograph in both hands, tilting it against the light. “They all look the same though, those photo fits. Just think how awful it would be for this man if you got it wrong.”

They were sitting on the grass behind the garage in Sonia’s garden. Sonia’s hair was drawn back off her face in a ponytail. Loose strands glimmered at the nape of her neck like copper wire.

“I suppose,” Kip said. There was a number you could ring, a police hotline. On the way over to Sonia’s he had tried to imagine what would happen if he called it and told the cop at the other end that he had seen the monster. They would ask for his name and address, that would be the first thing, and later on they would make him hand over the photograph. He supposed it was evidence of a kind, evidence that linked him with the monster. The idea was disturbing, not so much because the link existed as because it might become known. Sonia’s uncertainty about the photograph was a relief because it seemed to free him from the obligation of having to do anything.

He leaned in over her shoulder, pretending to look at the photo but in reality just wanting to get closer to her. She smelled of the coarse-grained pine soap the Vardens had in their upstairs bathroom. He imagined her at the sink, her bare feet on the coconut matting. The Vardens’ house was like that, all polished wood and cream-coloured walls. Sonia went to Forest Hill Girls’ School. Sonia’s father Timothy had a good job in the City.

“I really like this photo though,” Sonia was saying. “Can I keep it?”

“’Course you can,” Kip said. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Nothing.” She laughed. “I just like it, that’s all. He looks lonely, don’t you think? The kind of man who’s always alone.” She was still studying the picture, as if she had come upon it by chance in a magazine and was trying to decide whether she should cut it out or not. The way she looked at the photograph made him feel strange, weightless, as in the moments before an orgasm. There was part of himself that wished he had not shown it to her, that felt convinced it was dangerous. And yet the idea that she would want to keep something he had made, that she could like it that much, made his insides hurt.

He began to count the freckles on the back of her neck, concentrating hard to stop himself getting an erection. The freckles were red, like her hair, the glinting vermilion of the jagged patches of rust on the disused water tank around the back of the school toilets.

He’d had sex with Sonia twice, once up in Oxleas Woods, and once in her bedroom, when her parents were out for the day at some barbecue or other. The thought of being with her in her parents’ house had made him almost sick with excitement, but it turned out not to be such a good idea. Every time a car went by on the street outside he thought it was the Vardens, returning home early. The time in the woods had been better. Sonia held his cock, clasping it in her fist and moving her hand cautiously up and down, as if she was afraid she might hurt him. He came too soon of course, but at least he managed to get inside her. He thought it would be embarrassing afterwards, trying to think of things to say, but it had been fine. Better than fine, in fact. They put their clothes back on and lay in the grass, watching planes soar in low overhead on their approach to Heathrow and talking about TV shows they had liked when they were younger. By the end of the afternoon he felt comfortable around Sonia in a way that went far beyond just wanting to fuck her.

He couldn’t imagine what had driven the monster to fuck an eight-year-old. Almost the best part of sex with Sonia was knowing that she wanted it too, and that she liked him enough to want to spend time with him afterwards.

The rape of Rebecca Riding was something he was ashamed to think about, as if thinking about it somehow made him a part of what had happened. Had the monster killed the girl in the end because he wanted to cover his tracks, or because he could no longer stand the sound of her screaming? To erase what he had done, like pulling the wings off a fly and then crushing it beneath your thumb to put it out of its misery.

A crime like the monster’s was so bad it had its own thumbprint, its own identity. If Kip thought about it hard enough he could feel it beginning to infect his imagination, cell by cell, like mildew creeping and spreading on a damp wall.

His stomach turned over at the thought, the same way it did when you went to pour milk in your tea and found it had gone off. He remembered seeing some kids once, larking around on a building site, using a broken-off branch to fish a dead rat out of a rain puddle. They had flicked the rat up in the air, then run away screaming as it plopped down again in the water. The memories repelled him and yet they persisted. You couldn’t not watch them playing with the rat, couldn’t not smell the curdled milk in its plastic container, even though it would make your guts heave and you knew that perfectly well before you started.

So long as you weren’t forced to drink the milk or pick up the rat in your bare hands, it was okay. It was interesting even. The rat he remembered especially, because he had been back to the building site later to photograph it.

He leaned forward and kissed Sonia’s neck. A strand of her loose hair tickled his lips, and a wisp of his own breath came back at him, rebounding off her skin in a puff of warm air.

She turned in his arms and kissed him. Her saliva tasted faintly of orange juice.

“I’ll have to go in, in a minute. I’m supposed to be writing an essay on nuclear power.”

“That’s OK,” Kip said. “I’ll text you later.” He stood up from the grass. He wondered when he would next get to have sex with her, then wondered if that was how it was for his father with Grace Hemingway. The idea of his father thinking about sex unsettled him even more than the thought of the rat.

“Thanks for the photo,” said Sonia. “I’ll buy a clip frame for it tomorrow.”

“Be careful,” Kip said, and then wondered what the hell he was on about. It was just a stupid photograph, nothing to be careful of there. He hurried away, leaving via the side gate without turning back, not wanting her to see that he was blushing.

He caught the bus from outside the old Capitol cinema on the London Road. He climbed up to the top deck, where he sat alone apart from a gaunt and elderly black man reading a Metro. It was just about beginning to get dark. Kip looked out at the amethyst sky, the latticework of interlinked streets, shop fronts and garage forecourts, the chequered fabric of gardens and railway lines. He saw London as a labyrinth, with no way out. Even if you fled to the edge, to the boundary posts at Morden or Edgware, there would still be more roads, more alleyways, more cemeteries. It was the kingdom of the Manor Park Monster. Kip wondered where in his kingdom the monster was hiding at that moment.

The streetlights were coming on all over town, and soon it would be dark for real. He got off the bus opposite the garage. Lee High Road smelled of diesel fumes and dying hydrangeas. When he got home he discovered his father had arrived there before him. The back door was standing open into the garden. Lynn and Andy Kiplas sat together at the kitchen table with their elbows touching. Lynn was laughing, small creases at the corners of her eyes. Kip looked at his father, not speaking. Andy Kiplas glanced quickly away, then asked Kip if he would like a beer.

Kip saw the monster again three days later in Manor Park Gardens. Some people thought that this was where Rebecca Riding had gone missing, but it wasn’t so. Manor Park Gardens was a landscaped park with a lake and ornamental waterfowl, popular with families and joggers. As a kidnapping site it was close to useless. Kip reckoned the only time you could get yourself kidnapped from the gardens would be first thing in the morning before it got busy, but even then there were the groundsmen and the dog walkers, commuters using the park as a cut-through to Lee station.

Rebecca Riding had been abducted at around 3.30 in the afternoon, not from Manor Park Gardens but from Manor Park itself. Manor Park was a rough triangle of land sandwiched between Weardale Road and Manor Lane, hemmed in on one side by a swampy and narrow section of the River Quaggy. Sometimes you would see rubbish floating in the water and once there had been a child’s tricycle but Kip liked Manor Park because it was quiet, the tall terraces of Manor Lane backing directly on to the tussocky grass and stands of nettles like the last, abandoned houses in a zombie movie. Kip liked to photograph these houses, even though someone in one of the flats there had once leaned out of the window and called him a Peeping Tom.

This was the first time he had been back to Manor Park since Rebecca Riding’s abduction. He had wondered if the place were still being treated as a crime scene but if there had ever been police tape or anything else of that kind it was gone now. To Kip the park seemed unnaturally quiet, expectant, but he knew he was probably imagining it. He took some photos of the park railings and the children’s play area, hoping that no one would see him doing it and wishing he knew exactly where the abduction had taken place. He knew his interest in the monster was growing. He disliked this feeling, distrusted it, but was unable to let it go. He would have liked to discuss it with Sonia but was afraid she might start to think he was weird, one of the lonely serial-killer types who bought true-crime magazines and hung around Cromwell Road and the corner of the modern housing estate that had once been Rillington Place. The day after he gave her the photograph of the monster, Sonia told him an obscure theory some crime writer had concocted about how a famous English painter was really Jack the Ripper. The theory was connected with art, though, so it seemed it was all right to talk about it.

The monster was not connected with anything. He was just a monster.

Kip came out on to Manor Lane and crossed quickly into Manor Park Gardens. The sky was a high, dense blue, the sun dripped white light on the water. People sprawled on their backs in the grass, reading paperback thrillers. Kip knew he was invisible here. It was even OK to take pictures. He took a few shots of the fountain, a Dalmatian dog, some kid on a skateboard, but he knew already that the photos would not be much good. The park was not his thing. He preferred the tatty shop fronts and crumbling façades of the terraces on Lee High Road. He turned to go, walking across the grass in the direction of the park exit on Old Road. Then he saw the monster, sitting on one of the benches facing the lake.

He stopped where he was, raising the Nikon cautiously as if afraid the man might take flight, then fired off seven, eight shots, using the zoom lens to capture him in profile. As he lined up the final frame the man turned his head slightly, giving Kip a better view of his face. Seeing him again, Kip thought he looked less like the photo fit, less like a cornered rat and more like a ruined accountant who had just been fired. It was definitely him, though. Kip recognized him by his jacket. He appeared to be watching the ducks, plump mallards, a male and three females, dipping in and out of their limber reflections in a way that made the real ducks look blockish and unnatural as decoys. Kip wandered slowly in his direction, pretending to look at the lake. There were three children on the wooden landing stage, throwing bread crusts from a plastic bag. A horde of ducks surged towards them across the water. Kip slipped the Nikon back into its case and sat down on the bench. He watched the children, who had started to argue over who was in charge of the bread, and smoothed the leather case of the Nikon with the tips of his fingers. The park was full of people – onlookers, witnesses – and yet he could not escape the thought that he had put himself at risk somehow by coming here.

He turned to glance at the man beside him. He tried to make the glance seem casual, but was aware even as he did so that the movement was too rigid, too snatched, to appear anything but unnatural, the inept glance of a spy who was new on the job. The monster was staring right at him. His eyes were grey, the colour of tap water with a single drop of black ink dispersed in it. His expression was perfectly calm.

“Hello,” he said. “I’ve seen you before, I’m sure. You’re the boy with the camera.”

Kip seemed to feel two worlds colliding, the world he saw through the lens of the Nikon spinning and crashing through the wall of reality like a wrecking ball through the shell of a condemned tower block. He noted the monster’s clean, almost polished-looking nails, the small scar at the corner of his mouth that made it look as if someone had cut him there once with a razor blade. The idea that he was the watched instead of the watcher was enormous and fundamental and somehow awful.

He felt the air go out of his lungs, as if the world had expanded outwards, crushing his chest. Oddly enough it was the same feeling he’d had the first time he saw Sonia’s naked breasts.

“I’m going to be a photographer,” he said at last. “That’s why I have the camera.”

He saw the man’s lips twitch, and Kip waited for him to laugh at him, or else demand to see the photographs he had taken. That was what people did, if they were interested at all that was, and then Kip would either have to refuse or hand over the Nikon, let the man see the multiple images of himself that were now locked inside the camera’s memory, that final close-up, the sunlight flashing off his glasses and into the water.

Instead of asking to look at the pictures the monster smiled, his ridged and slightly yellowed incisors clearly visible.

“I thought as much,” he said. “I recognized the signs, you see.” He leaned back on the bench, his arms locked across his chest, his skinny wrists snaking out from the sleeves of his army jacket. Kip could not tell if the man was trying to patronize him in some way or if they were having a proper conversation.

“What do you mean?” he said. “The signs?”

“I mean I was the same at your age. Things were different then of course, none of this digital rubbish. I had a Minolta SR-7 and it weighed a ton. I didn’t give a damn about that though. I took it everywhere with me. I got so used to the weight of it around my neck I felt wrong without it. Have you ever used film? A film camera I mean, rather than digital?”

Kip shook his head. It was a subject that embarrassed him, because his reactions were based on feelings and not experience. He knew that some people were obsessed with film, some of the younger photographers even were obsessed with it, and with something they called the tangibility of the image. Kip thought it was a load of crap. He liked to think of the Nikon as an extension of the eye, an optical application, the closest thing to actual seeing that there was. He loved the cleanness of digital, its lack of pretension. The idea of film, with its cumbersome processes, the unnecessary delay between the act of taking and the act of seeing, was something he hated.

He might have known the monster would be a film user. Everything about him suggested it, even his clothes.

“Are you a photographer then?” Kip said. “Do you work for the magazines?”

“I used to be. Not for the magazines though. I did other stuff.”

“What kind of stuff? Would I know your work?”

“You wouldn’t know my work at all. I worked for the police, as a forensic photographer. My work, as you like to call it, has the curious distinction of never having been seen outside a courtroom.”

“You mean, you used to go and photograph crime scenes, things like that?”

The monster nodded. “It’s not as glamorous as it sounds though, believe me. You see these American cop shows and think it’s all about being rushed to the scene of some murder or other. Actually it’s about having to get out of bed at two in the morning to take pictures of a sales rep who’s managed to get his legs crushed in a motorway collision. It wasn’t exactly the career I imagined for myself. Actually I got into it by mistake.”

“By mistake?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Why did you give it up?”

“That’s a long story, too. But my dad died last year, left me a bit of money. Not a fortune, but enough to give me some breathing space. You never know, I might even treat myself to a new camera.” He sighed and stretched out his arms, cracking his knuckles in a way Kip found nauseating. “You should keep at it,” he said. He got up from the bench. “You might even have what it takes.”

Kip stared up at him, not moving. He hated the way most adults had of making you feel like a moron, almost as if they resented you for their own failures. It occurred to him that it might all be bullshit anyway, that the monster was trying to lure him with the talk of his defunct Minolta the way he had lured Rebecca Riding with sweets or Jackie magazine. Even here he was out of date; most perverts these days used the internet. He wondered why he hadn’t used some of his father’s money to update his wardrobe.

There was a restlessness that hung from him, baggy and shapeless as his ill-fitting jacket. Kip felt certain he was the killer, as he had felt certain when he first saw the man coming out of the garage. Instead of being afraid he felt a tense, nervous pleasure, knowing that he was ahead of him again, the watcher now instead of the watched.

“I’m Edwin Kiplas,” he said suddenly. “Everybody calls me Kip.”

“Dennis Croft,” said the monster. “I’m sure we’ll see each other around.”

Croft held out his hand and Kip took it. Croft’s hand was dry and rather small, but he had a strong grip, the wiry fingers grasping his own as if he meant to try and stop him getting away. Kip thought of Rebecca Riding and felt a tremor go through him. Then Croft was gone, striding along the tarmac path that skirted the lake then cutting across the grass towards the Manor Park library. Kip watched him merge with the other walkers, become one of them. In less than a minute he was out of sight.

Kip waited ten minutes and then followed him. As he came out of Old Road on to Lee High Road he looked both ways along the street, half convinced that Croft would be lying in wait for him, but there was no sign of him. He wondered what Croft had meant when he said he was sure they would see each other again. His words seemed to hang in the air, like a threat or a curse.

After supper he went to his room and browsed the internet for information about forensic photography. There was a careers website that told him most forensic photographers were nonprofessionals, police officers with only the most rudimentary training in the use of a camera. Of the others, those who had actually set out to become photographers in the first place, most worked for specialist agencies. Kip supposed that Croft had been employed by one of these agencies; he couldn’t imagine him as a cop, of any description. He was too evasive, too much of a loner. You could say he had loner written all over him, that he was a loner archetype.

The agency guys were pretty well paid, because like doctors they were always on call. The careers website listed this as one of the job’s main disadvantages, but Kip found he liked the idea. He thought a job that was that unpredictable would be difficult to become bored with. One of the agencies, a firm called Trulite Legal, had posted a series of photos of an office block gutted by fire. The photographer was named as Andrew Watson and the crime was a suspected arson. Kip liked the light in the photos, the strange dead whiteness that made the burned out windows look like portholes into outer space. Most of all he liked the way the pictures showed what was there and didn’t tamper with it.

When he Googled Dennis Croft there were no relevant finds.

At a little after 11.30 he heard his mother coming upstairs. It was only then that he realized his father had still not come home. His computer whirred, fanning itself in the darkness. He could sense Lynn outside his door, listening to see if he was still awake. After a moment she sighed and moved away. A floorboard creaked. Kip jumped off his bed and went to open the door. His mother was standing right outside. She gazed at him stolidly, her expression caught midway between surprise and despair.

“You should be in bed,” she said. “I thought you were asleep already.”

“Where’s Dad?” said Kip. The question hovered in the air between them, bobbing weakly like a deflating balloon. The hall light glowed a dull orange, reminding Kip of the light in the Midwestern motel rooms Stephen Shore liked to photograph. Kip stared at Lynn Kiplas in her quilted dressing gown and felt envious of Shore’s talent, the way he had of making the most casual Polaroid snapshot look like the opening of a murder mystery. Kip had always hated Lynn’s dressing gown, which was made of horrible fake mauve satin and reminded him of some naff sitcom set in an old people’s home.

She had clearly been crying. Kip didn’t know what he wanted most: to hug her or to slap her face. He became suddenly aware that he was dressed only in his underpants, that he was more or less naked in front of her.

“He’s at Toke’s,” Lynn said. Lyonel Toklin was his father’s business partner. “They’ve been playing cards and drinking, you know what those two are like once they get started. Anyway, he’s not fit to drive.” Her words sounded stilted, a speech she had prepared beforehand. Kip couldn’t decide whether her lying was a sign of courage or idiocy. He took a step towards her, meaning to put his arms around her, but she flinched away as if afraid he might hit her.

“Go to bed now,” she said. “And make sure that computer’s switched off.” She moved away towards the end of the landing. Kip watched her go into the bedroom then closed his own door with a bang. He picked his jeans off the floor and fished his mobile out of the pocket then brought up his father’s number and depressed the call button. The call went straight to voicemail, which Kip knew meant precisely nothing. Andy Kiplas didn’t like mobiles. He kept his phone on during work hours because it would hurt the business not to but as soon as he was finished for the day he switched it off. For the first time Kip saw this behaviour as thoughtless and selfish.

Andy’s pet name for Lynn was the Gipsy Moth.

Kip realized he hadn’t called Sonia that day or even messaged her. He supposed that made him as bad as his father. He felt a sudden, almost urgent need to speak to her, not about his father or monster but about Andrew Watson’s photos of the burned-out office block, how the pictures looked to him like stills from a documentary about hell.

Still, it was too late to call. He sent a text message instead, sleep well and the letter K and then an x. He did not expect a reply, but a moment later his phone buzzed and there was a text from Sonia, the word goodnight accompanied by the little red heart graphic she sometimes used to sign off her messages.

The thought that she was awake and thinking of him made him start to get hard. Right after the second time they had sex he had jokingly asked Sonia what she wore in bed at night, and she had laughed, and said that when the nights were muggy like this she didn’t normally wear anything except a pair of knickers.

He put his phone on to charge. He thought of the picture he had given Sonia, the photograph of the monster that she said she was going to mount in a clip frame. The idea of Croft on Sonia’s writing desk or bookshelf looking down at Sonia’s naked body made him feel queasy, and once again he found himself wishing he had never given her the photograph in the first place.

Two days later Rebecca Riding was on Crimewatch. They showed the same photo again, Rebecca Riding in her red school jumper and with the gap between her teeth, and then they staged a reconstruction of what they called her last known movements. A small girl wearing a red cardigan came out of the school gates on Manor Lane and trotted along Northbrook Road towards Manor Park. Just before she crossed to the park side she stopped to talk to another girl, a child actress playing the part of Rebecca Riding’s friend Tanya Baker. The actress playing Tanya said she had to go home and change out of her school clothes but that she’d meet Rebecca in the park by the swings in ten minutes’ time.

Then there was an interview with the parents of the real Tanya Baker. They looked dazed and spoke slowly, like people who had narrowly avoided being involved in a major road accident. After the interview with Tanya’s parents they showed the photo fit of the monster again and repeated the number of the police hotline. Any information at all, they said, might turn out to be of vital import-ance in the search for the killer. Kip thought the word killer sounded worse even than the word murderer. Murder always sounded rather grand, something planned out in advance and with at least the semblance of reason to back it up. Killing was just an action, simple as that. A killer was brutal and thoughtless and probably stupid.

With Dennis Croft it was hard to tell where the murderer left off and the killer began.

“Just think of it,” said Lynn Kiplas. “Those poor people.”

“I’m going out,” Kip said. He left the room quickly, before his mother had a chance to ask where he was going. As he unlatched the front gate he saw his father walking towards him up the road.

“Where are you off to, then?” said Andy Kiplas. “Anywhere exciting?”

“Just out.” His father looked clean and smelled fresh, as if he had recently stepped out of the shower. His plaid shirt had been recently ironed. He spoke jauntily, with a kind of mock casualness, and Kip thought of the Toklins’ dog, which always expected to be made a fuss of even when it had stolen the Sunday joint right off the table. He tried to imagine how it would be if his father left home, meeting him at the site and going off for supper somewhere, to Pashka’s Kitchen in Brockley perhaps, where they would eat potato latkes with apple sauce and his father would tell him in blow-by-blow detail about his latest building project.

He thought he could cope with that. It was going to end up like that anyway when he went to college. But the thought of his mother alone at home made him feel trapped and scared.

He thought of packing his bags and leaving, just him and the Nikon, then realized he would never escape this shit, not even if he went to Australia.

For Christ’s sake, Dad, he thought. It’s your problem. Leave me out of it.

“Fancy a couple of rounds of Harris later?” his father said. Harris was a variant of rummy, something he and Toke had invented. The game was named after Bomber Harris, though the reasons for this had vanished into the past.

“OK, Dad, maybe. I’m not sure what time I’ll be back though.” He stepped carefully around his father and went off up the street.

“I’ll save you a beer, then,” Andy Kiplas called after him. Kip didn’t answer. He felt for the Nikon around his neck then realized he had come out without it. Not that it mattered much. It was now almost dark, with just a narrow strand of pink chafing the horizon. Kip did not know where he was going exactly, only that he had needed to get out of the house. He decided to walk as far as the Lewisham clock tower and then turn back. Lee High Road was quieter now. The traffic was always lighter after the rush hour, and there were occasional moments of complete hiatus. Kip loved the houses on Lee High Road because they were always interesting to photograph. Most of them were pretty rundown, tottering decrepit terraces constructed from the dirty-looking yellowish brick his father said was called London stock. They reminded him of the Polish war widows in Pashka’s, with their camphor-smelling clothes and their vanished hero husbands, their double rows of pearls hidden beneath their moth-eaten cardigans. There were still bomb sites along Lee High Road but not as many now as there had been. Mostly they had been built on. The Lewisham end of Lee High Road had suffered most but even that was being done up. It was all hairdressers and cafés now. Kip fingered the loose change in his pocket, wondering if he had enough for a burger or a sausage sandwich. Men and girls slid by in loud gaggles, pushing aside the darkness with their laughter, the glare from the bars and the street-lamps pooling in orange light slicks on their garish clothes. Kip liked being on the streets at night. There was a restlessness in people, the sense that anything might happen at any time. He wished he had brought the Nikon.

He stopped outside a kebab shop, drawn by the scents of sweet garlic and coriander. The yellow glow from the lighted window spilled out across the grubby pavement in a radiant trapezium, a distorted yellow shadow of the window glass. There were three men up at the counter. They all had their backs to him but one of them seemed vaguely familiar, and as Kip studied his worn-out jacket and tatty Levis he realized with a sudden start that it was Dennis Croft. His gut twisted in a mild spasm, and sweat broke out on his palms.

Distantly, as if it were something he was watching on a movie screen, he saw Croft turn towards the window and beckon him inside.

“Can I stand you a kebab?” Croft said. “They’re always good here.”

What the heck? Kip thought. I was about to buy one anyway. He found it difficult to explain to himself why he had obeyed Croft’s summons, only that he was hungry, and that he wanted to see what would happen. Also, he resented the idea that Croft could make him afraid, that he might start avoiding places just because Croft happened to be there. He stood at the man’s side at the counter, leaning against the angled glass and staring up at the television mounted on the wall behind. The reception was bad, and the sizzling of meat on the grill made the soundtrack all but inaudible. Kip gazed without much interest at the striking tube workers, the visiting president he had seen already on the early news.

When the picture of the monster appeared it seemed to come out of the blue, although if he had thought about it more carefully he would have realized it was coming. It had been on the early news also, only he had forgotten. If he had remembered he could have done something, turned away from the screen at the crucial moment. He could have watched the traffic outside until the news had finished. It would have been easy.

Now that Croft was there to compare it with, he realized the photo fit was not all that good. The glasses were the wrong shape, and they made the monster’s face look squarer than it actually was. Also the real Croft’s cheekbones were more pronounced, the eyebrows thinner and less unkempt-looking. He saw that Croft too was staring at the picture. He experienced a sinking feeling, the kind of sick resignation he remembered from all the times he had been handed the results of an exam he already knew he had failed, the dismal knowledge of having been found out. The silence between them seemed to deepen and increase, spreading through the air like some poisonous gas. After what seemed like a long time Croft turned to him, smiling the ratty little half-smile Kip remembered from when he had asked him about the Nikon.

“Weird likeness, isn’t it?” he said. “I keep expecting them to come and arrest me.”

The fry cook was wrapping their kebabs in greaseproof paper, folding it quickly and expertly, the finished parcels like tiny papooses. Croft tore the paper aside almost immediately and bit straight into the middle of his kebab. Kip watched, amazed, wondering how he was able to do that without burning himself. Croft nodded briskly as if in approval and started towards the door. His mouth was smeared with grease, the thin lips glistening. The shop was full now, there were half a dozen people in the queue behind them. The darkness of the street outside seemed deeper and more complete, though Kip knew it was most likely just the contrast with the bright lights inside the kebab shop.

“Your food okay?” Croft said.

Kip nodded. They were walking side by side in the direction of the clock tower. The seconds were passing quickly, and Kip knew he had to say something, that to say nothing would be dangerous, almost as revealing as coming right out and accusing Croft of being the killer. He took a small bite of his kebab. The meat was charred on the outside, pink and tender within. It tasted as delicious as it smelled.

“They all look the same, though, these photo fits, don’t they? They could be anyone.”

“I know you’ve been following me,” Croft said suddenly. The tone of his voice had changed. There was something mean in it, a glistening menace that made Kip think of tensile steel: tripwires, garrottes. He turned to face Kip, forcing him back against one of the shop fronts. “You were taking pictures of me in the park the other day.” He spoke in a harsh whisper, leaning in close, and Kip could smell the garlic on his breath. He stared at Kip fixedly, as if he would have liked to grab hold of him, strike him maybe, as if the effort of not doing so was placing him under a strain. Kip supposed he did not want to draw attention to himself, although no one passing by on the pavement was taking any notice of them and Kip realized they probably thought the monster was his father.

“I take photographs of people all the time. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His words came out in a rush, slipping over each other like coins spilling from a beggar’s torn pocket. Kip replayed them in his mind more slowly, looking for loopholes. So far as he could tell there weren’t any. He decided that so long as he stuck to his story he would be safe.

“Those pictures don’t look like you anyway,” he added. “It’s the glasses, that’s all.” He looked Croft straight in the eye and thought about his father – the way he would come in from seeing Grace Hemingway and ask what was for supper, and his mother would tell him goulash and Kip would play along with her because he knew his world would explode into pieces if he didn’t.

The point was to stick to your story. The murderers in the cop films all knew that and so did his father. It was more a matter of nerve than a matter of fact.

Croft took a step backwards, his face relaxing. Kip laughed to signal that everything was all right between them, and after a couple of seconds Croft laughed too. Kip took more bites from his kebab, still seeing in his mind’s eye Croft as he had been moments earlier: the hard line of his mouth, the hollow cheeks, pale in the lamplight, the agitated posture, like that of a beast of prey about to spring.

He had seemed for those few minutes to become something else. At first it was rats Kip thought of, the way a cornered rat could kill a dog if it was desperate enough, or so he had heard. But then he found himself thinking of his Polish grandmother Dasha, and a story she used to tell him when he was younger that she called The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. The story was about a monster that could change its shape at will to blend in with its surroundings. There was a special word she had for it too: wilkolek, or maybe wilkolak, the Polish word for werewolf. He had forgotten all about it until now.

It came to him that murderers, perhaps child murderers especially, were the ultimate shape-shifters. You could bump against one in the crowd, on the station platform, in a supermarket, and never suspect for a moment that what you were seeing was not an ordinary person but a wilkolak. It was only at certain moments that they revealed themselves for what they were. On a darkened street outside a kebab shop, for example. In the nylon-curtained back bedroom of a caravan on the Isle of Sheppey.

He did not believe in werewolves of course, not any more. But he knew the creature he had glimpsed in Croft’s eyes was capable of anything.

It was important not to let Croft see that he knew that. It was his certainty over this – a cold feeling, but steady and clear, like the knowledge of his father’s affair with Grace Hemingway – that kept him from panic, from simply dropping his kebab on the pavement and running away. He asked himself what he would do, what he would say to Croft now if Croft were not a monster but a human being.

I would talk to him about the murder, he thought. I would want to find out what he thought. This answer, the right answer, seemed to light up his mind like one of the illuminated boxes on The Weakest Link. He knew also that it had to be now, right away, while the subject still lay open between them. If he returned to the matter later it would just look weird.

“It makes you think though, doesn’t it?” he said. “That guy really is still out there somewhere.”

Croft swallowed the last of his kebab then used the greaseproof paper to wipe his fingers. “There are always men like that,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how many you catch, there will always be more.” He crushed the paper between his hands and dumped it into a waste bin at the side of the road. “Do you suppose he’s really all that different from you?”

Kip shuddered inside his skin, the kind of quick involuntary movement he sometimes experienced just before falling asleep. It was as if Croft had read his mind, yet the way he had twisted his thoughts, turning them back on themselves so they pointed at him instead of Croft, filled him with outrage.

“You can’t tell me that a guy who does stuff like that is normal?”

“What’s normal?” Croft said, smiling. “Everyone has a side of themself they don’t want other people to see.”

“But this is different. This sicko killed someone. He murdered a little girl.”

“Soldiers kill little girls every day. You don’t see many of them getting arrested for murder.”

Croft was staring at him intently, in a way that made Kip feel uncomfortable. The look was back, the fixed, crazy wilkolak look, not as bad as before but enough to remind Kip of what it had been like to glimpse that side of him, the side he didn’t want other people to see. It occurred to him suddenly that it was his job that had made him that way, his work as a forensic photographer, that the sight of the dead and dying had unhinged him somehow, the way it had with soldiers in Vietnam. Kip had gone through a phase of watching ’Nam films, although he had grown tired of them in the end because they only ever seemed to show one side of the story. Nonetheless they might help explain Croft. For people like the ’Nam vets, killing was just another fact of life; they stopped being able to tell what was normal and what was not.

“Did you ever have to photograph a murder? A proper murder, I mean, with blood and everything?” Kip’s heart pounded with a strange excitement. He was surprised and ashamed at how much he wanted to know the answer to his question. Perhaps he’s right, Kip thought. There’s a monster in all of us.

“Plenty of times,” Croft said. “Do you want to see the pictures?” He moved a step closer, so close that Kip imagined he could feel the heat from his body, even though he knew it was just the night air he could feel, the warm night air mingled with the sharp scent of diesel. For the first time he felt really afraid. He knew there was nothing innocent about Croft’s question, that it was indecent somehow, as if he were asking Kip if he wanted to go to a porn film with him, and the worst thing about it was that he wanted Kip to know this, he wanted to make him complicit.

Kip realized he hated Croft, that he loathed him in the way he loathed dog turds, or butter beans, with a vertiginous, sliding repulsion that grew out of instinct and not out of reason. Yet still he could not look away. It was the same as with the dead rat, the spoiled milk. It was not just because Croft knew how to use a camera that Kip felt drawn to him; he was drawn to Croft because Croft had seen terrible things.

“That would be great,” he said. “I’ve been looking at some forensic stuff online actually. I was thinking I might want to get into it. Once I’ve finished college, I mean.”

“Are you sure about that?” Croft said. “Most of it’s pretty dull.”

Kip shook his head. “Not for me. I like the idea of it. I like the idea of never knowing what’s coming next.”

Croft laughed. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Mind your back.” He drew a ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket, and a small scrap of paper. When Kip examined the paper later he discovered it was a receipt from the DIY store at the bottom end of Lee High Road, that Croft had bought two tins of white emulsion and a bottle of turps. Croft placed a hand on Kip’s shoulder, bending him forward and resting the paper on his back just below the left shoulder blade. Kip could feel the Biro moving over the paper, the pressure of Croft’s hand firm and even and slyly insistent. Kip fixed his eyes on the pavement. The flagstones were filthy. The whole of Lee High Road was like that, but it couldn’t help it. Most of the dirt was caused by traffic fumes.

“All done,” Croft said, and Kip straightened up. Croft handed him the paper, which Kip saw now had an address written on it, and a mobile telephone number. “I’m busy over the weekend, but you can come on Tuesday afternoon if you like. We can have a chat and I can show you some photos. Don’t forget to bring your camera.” He slipped the Biro back in his pocket. “See you, then.”

He walked off without looking round, heading back the way they had come. Kip took a few steps after him, thinking that he could trail Croft, see where he went, then realized he didn’t need to because he had Croft’s address already on the scrap of paper. It occurred to him that he could go to the police now, that he could tell them everything. He could have Dennis Croft arrested within the hour.

He knew almost at once that he wouldn’t do it. If he went to the police he would be forced to explain himself, to tell them why he had Croft’s address, why he suspected Croft of being the killer in the first place. He would also have to tell them who else knew, and that meant Sonia. He imagined a cop car drawing up outside the Vardens’ house, Timothy Varden demanding to know what the hell Kip thought he was doing getting his daughter mixed up with a paedophile. It would be like telling his father he knew about Grace Hemingway, tearing his world apart in all the wrong places.

He also had the feeling that when the police went to arrest him, Croft would no longer be there. It was a feeling he couldn’t explain but that he trusted completely, a deep itch, the same feeling he had sometimes during a game of Harris, when he knew the person sitting opposite had the ace of spades.

Still further back in his mind he was nagged by the sense that none of these things explained his refusal to act, that the real truth was that he didn’t want Croft arrested just yet, because he was keen to get a look at his photographs.

All he knew for certain was that he wanted to talk to Sonia. He turned left into Brandram Road, walking until he was out of earshot of the main traffic. He keyed Sonia’s number, convinced that she would not answer, that she was out with friends, or that she had left her phone in her bag and wouldn’t hear it ringing. She answered on the third ring.

“Hey,” she said. She sounded happy, and he seemed to catch a trace of her scent, the fresh, tangy scent of the pine soap she used with something else running beneath it, the dense musky smell that came from her armpits and between her legs. He wondered what she had been doing when he called.

“Hey, Son,” he said. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. What’s the matter, Eddie? You sound weird.”

His dad called him Ed, his friends called him Kip, his teachers all called him Kiplas. Only his mother and Sonia called him Eddie. He had hoped that hearing Sonia’s voice would make things better somehow, would get rid of all his crazy thoughts about werewolves and Dennis Croft being a murderer, but instead it was just making things worse. He couldn’t get rid of the idea that she was in danger. He wished there were a way of keeping her safe without having to tell her anything. If he told her she might think he was going nuts.

“Have you still got that photo?” he said. His mouth felt dry and he swallowed. There was a back-taste of onion and charcoal.

“What photo? The one of the guy outside the garage.”

He nodded, forgetting for a moment that she couldn’t see him. “Yes,” he said. “Did you keep it?”

“What do you think? You know I love your stuff. What’s going on?”

He felt a surge of happiness, that she should treat him like a real artist, then fought to suppress it. “It’s just that, well, I think I saw the guy again, that’s all.”

“What d’you mean, you saw him again? How long ago?”

“The other day, in Manor Park Gardens. And then this evening, up by the clock tower. I think it was him, anyway. He was too far away for me to see him properly.”

The line went quiet, and for long awful seconds Kip felt certain she knew he was lying, that he was telling her only a small part of the truth. He pressed the phone hard to his ear, but all he could hear was his own breathing. When Sonia spoke again the sound was unnaturally loud.

“Can I tell you something, Eddie? Promise you won’t laugh?”

“’Course I won’t, Son. Just tell me, all right?” He wondered if she was about to dump him, although it didn’t sound like that from her voice. If you touch her I’ll kill you, he thought. You rat-faced bastard.

“He reminds me of someone. The guy.”

“Someone you know, you mean?”

“Not really.” She hesitated. “I think I saw him in a dream once. Only he wasn’t really a man, he was some kind of monster. He could kill people, just by looking at them. I had problems sleeping after that, for a while. My mum thought it was all to do with my periods starting.” She giggled, a light, tight sound that was not really like her. “It was ages ago now. I’d forgotten all about it until I saw the photo.”

“A monster?” He could hear his voice rising in pitch, and he knew he sounded as if he was about to explode with laughter, only it wasn’t that, it was the opposite. He felt like breaking down and telling her everything.

“Yes. You promised you wouldn’t laugh.”

“I’m not. So you reckon the guy in the photo is the guy from your dream?”

“Of course not. How could he be? They look the same, that’s all. Something about the cheekbones. And those glasses.”

“Like a rat.”

“That’s a strange way of describing it but I know what you mean.” She paused. “I put the photo away in a drawer. Do you mind?”

“Of course I don’t mind. I wish you’d chuck it out, though, get rid of it.”

“I’m not binning your work over a stupid dream I had five years ago! The guy in the picture is just some guy anyway, he’s no one. I was just a bit freaked, that’s all.”

“You’ll keep the photo in the drawer, though, won’t you?”

“If that’s what you want. Are you sure everything’s okay?”

“Everything’s fine. Do you want me to come over tomorrow?”

Tomorrow was Saturday. Croft had said he would be busy over the weekend. Busy with what exactly? Kip found he didn’t want to think about it.

“You’d better, or I might kill you. We can go to the woods, if you want.”

Kip guessed what she meant, and felt himself blushing. “I’ll bring my camera,” he said absently. He remembered how she had looked the last time, afterwards, the yellow leaves in her red hair. If you could capture a moment like that then you were some kind of genius.

“Go home now,” said Sonia. “It’s getting late.”

“How did you know I was out?”

“I can hear the road, silly.”

“You’re magic, Son,” he said, and ended the call. On Lee High Road the buses sailed by like pirate ships, and from the gardens in Brandram Road there came a faint scent of honeysuckle. He realized it was night, real night, the bottomless tract of hours between dusk and morning. In his grandmother’s stories this had always been the time of the wilkolak.

He met Sonia off the 122 bus at the bottom end of Lee High Road, then they walked up Lee Park to Blackheath Village, where they caught the number 89 to Shooter’s Hill. Sonia had made a picnic: cheese sandwiches and flapjacks and orange juice. She had also brought a canvas holdall with a blanket in it. They spread the blanket under some trees and had sex again. It was better than the last time, different somehow, as if both of them had grown older overnight.

Neither of them mentioned the monster. Sonia talked about what might happen when they went away to college, and Kip supposed her need to make plans for them might have scared some people but it didn’t worry him. He found he liked it. He closed his eyes and drifted. A sweet breeze played with the leaves, and Kip found himself thinking that they were safe here, that Croft wouldn’t come to the forest, he was a city rat.

He was awakened by Sonia kissing him. She kissed him full on the mouth, pressing her lips carefully against his as if she meant to leave an imprint there, the way girls did with soldiers’ handkerchiefs in the old war movies.

“I want you to know that whatever happens, today was real,” she said. “That all of this really happened.” Her top half was still naked. Her hair trailed in the grass, like runners of flame about to start a brush fire.

“What do you mean?” Kip said. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

“Nothing,” Sonia said. “I’m just saying.”

He took some photos of her, just head shots. Her eyes were closed, her eyelashes cast spider-leg shadows on the curves of her cheeks.

Kip knew that someone would have had to photograph Rebecca Riding; that if he were serious about forensic photography he might soon be having to photograph dead girls all the time.

When he arrived home that evening he found his parents were going to dinner at the Toklins’. His mother had put on a dress Kip knew his father liked to see her in: cream-coloured silk cut low at the front and covered in large pink roses. She seemed nervously excited, as if she and Andy had only just met, and her nervousness made her beautiful. She was perched on the edge of the sofa, painting her nails with gold varnish and watching the news.

“Where’s Dad?” Kip said.

“At the off-licence, I hope. He’s supposed to be buying a bottle of that Bulgarian Merlot Toke likes. Be quiet for a moment, Eddie, I want to listen.”

“What’s the big deal?”

“It looks like they’ve caught that maniac.”

Kip stared at the television. The photo fit of the monster was filling the screen. A man had been arrested and charged with the rape and murder of Rebecca Riding. The man’s name was Steven Jepsom and he was from Brownhill Road, Catford.

“Thank God for that,” Lynn said. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“We don’t know it’s him yet,” said Kip. “Not until he’s been convicted.”

He wished they would show a picture of Jepsom but Kip guessed it was illegal to put someone’s photo all over the news while there was still a chance they were innocent. He knew he should feel relieved but he somehow didn’t. He wanted to know if Jepsom looked like Croft. It occurred to him that Steven Jepsom might be Dennis Croft’s real name.

His mother glanced at him, her lips tightening.

“Aren’t you pleased? At least it’s some comfort for the family, knowing he’s behind bars at last.”

“I’m just saying,” Kip said. “I hope they got the right bloke, that’s all.”

Lynn frowned, and looked as if she were about to say something else, but at that moment Andy Kiplas returned from the off-licence. He had the bottle of wine under one arm, wrapped in a sheet of green tissue paper. The ends of the paper had been twisted into a fan shape.

“Hurry up,” Andy said. “I’ve got us a taxi.”

Lynn’s cheeks coloured to match the roses on her dress. “A taxi? What’s all this in aid of?”

Kip’s father was standing holding the door open like a butler in a television murder mystery. As Lynn got up from the sofa he bowed and began humming a tune from one of the opera CDs he sometimes listened to in the car. His mother laughed, and a look passed between her and his father that made Kip feel stupid and in the way, as if all his worrying about her had been for nothing. He wished they would keep their business to themselves.

He waited for them to leave, then turned off the television. He fetched the Nikon from his room and began to photograph the back room and the hallway, pretending that the house was the scene of a crime. He did a series of close-ups of the glass tumbler his mother had been drinking from. The tumbler was still half full of tonic water, and there was a fingerprint clearly visible near the brim. Lynn had changed her mind about her shoes at the last minute, and one of the discarded ones, a high-heeled pink sandal, lay on its side in the doorway. If you looked at things a certain way the dirty glass and the fallen shoe looked suspicious, as if someone had left the room in a terrible hurry.

He became so absorbed in the details that there were moments when he forgot he was in his own home. Eventually he laid the camera aside on the sofa and went through to the kitchen. There was potato salad in the fridge, some Polish salami, the remains of his parents’ lunch. He piled it into a bowl and was about to put it all in the microwave when his phone rang. It was Sonia. He picked up at once.

“Did you hear?” she said. “They got him.”

“Yes,” Kip said. “I saw it on the news earlier.”

“Do you reckon it’s him? The guy in the photo, I mean?”

“I doubt it. I’d forgotten all about him, really.” He was caught off guard by a memory of her, leaning against a tree as she pulled on her jeans. Her back was long, with a very slight curvature of the spine. There were exercises she was meant to do to stop it getting stiff but she was always forgetting. The skin over her vertebrae was taut and pearly white, the row of smooth bumps reminding him always of a saying of his mother’s: rare as hens’ teeth, they are. Quite suddenly the last thing he wanted to talk about was Dennis Croft.

“Can you call me back on the landline?” Sonia said. “They’re showing Donnie Darko on Channel 4 in a moment. We could sit and watch it together, if you like?”

“What about your parents?” Kip said.

“They’re out. With some people from Deutsche Bank. They won’t be back for hours.”

He finished microwaving the food then took the hall phone upstairs to his room. He dialled Sonia’s home number and she picked up almost before it had a chance to ring. Halfway through the film Kip got undressed and lay down on his bed, clutching the phone between his neck and his shoulder to stop it slipping.

“You’re taking your clothes off,” said Sonia. “I can hear you doing it.”

“I am not.”

“Liar!”

“Shut up, I’m missing the film.”

He closed his eyes and thought of Sonia lying on top of him. The fact that she was both far away and close made him feel breathless with excitement. He began to rub himself, focusing on the sound of her breathing and trying not to make any noise.

“Kip?” she said some time later. “You okay?”

“You’re rare as hens’ teeth, you are.” A single tear ran diagonally across his face. “Watch the film.”

When the film was over they said goodnight and ended the call. Kip pulled up the duvet and lay in the dark, watching the television with the sound turned down. Eventually he fell asleep. He woke briefly just after two. There was a light on downstairs and the sound of voices. For a moment Kip felt frightened. He remembered the dirty tumbler and the discarded shoe and thought something awful had happened. Then he realized it was just his parents coming home from the Toklins’. They spoke in loud whispers like miscreant school kids. He could tell from the way they were moving that they were both drunk.

He began to drift off again almost at once. His father was humming the Toreador Song out of Carmen. His mother stumbled against the box of newspapers in the hall, swore loudly and then stifled a laugh.

The box shouldn’t even have been there. His father was supposed to take it out on Fridays for recycling.

Just before he fell asleep, Kip decided he would not go to Croft’s house on the Tuesday, after all.

Croft’s house was on Belmont Hill, the Lewisham end, one of a long Victorian terrace, the tall, gabled houses running away down the steep gradient like toppling dominoes. Kip photographed the house from both sides of the road, wondering if Croft were watching him from behind the curtains. He doubted it. He had already made up his mind on the way over that Croft would not be in when he called, that the address on the piece of paper was not even his. He told himself the only reason he was going there was to prove the whole thing was a fake. He pressed the bell, trying to work out what he would say if the door were opened by a complete stranger, a large woman in a flowered bathrobe say, or an old man in a saggy green cardigan with the elbows worn through.

Excuse me, but does Mr Gaumont live here? I promised my uncle I’d change his library books for him.

Kip liked the sound of Mr Gaumont. The idea of him was so convincing that when the door opened and Croft appeared, Kip had to think who he was. It seemed for a moment that Croft was the fantasy, not Gaumont, old Gaumont who was so harmless and so plausible. It crossed his mind that Croft had done away with Gaumont, just as he had done away with Rebecca Riding.

“Hi there,” Croft said. “Come in.”

He took a step back from the door. As Kip entered the house it occurred to him that nobody in the world knew where he was. He found himself wishing he had left a note in his room, or that he had texted Sonia. He wondered how often bad things happened to people because they were afraid of looking stupid, and supposed it was often, more often than you might think anyway.

“Excuse the mess,” Croft said. “This was my dad’s place. He left it in a bit of a state. It’s taking me a while to get things straight.”

There were some black bin bags at the foot of the stairs but other than that there was no mess that Kip could see. The hallway of the house was dark, made darker by the varnished wood panelling and dull red carpet. There was a smell of mothballs and furniture polish, reminding him of the Toklins’ house, which was owned by Lyonel Toklin’s ninety-year-old mother, Violet. Lynn Kiplas always joked that Violet Toklin was so stingy she hadn’t had the place decorated since VE Day, and Kip felt half-inclined to believe her. Croft led the way through to a room at the back, home to an enormous buttonback sofa and a boiler on a tiled hearth protected by a square metal cage. There were piles of books everywhere. Kip noticed a stack of Photography Now and some issues of another magazine that he knew you could only get on subscription from America.

“Can I get you anything?” Croft said. “A drink maybe?”

Kip shook his head, then asked for a glass of water. It seemed safer to ask for something than nothing at all. He perched himself on the edge of the sofa and fiddled with the strap of the Nikon. He was desperate to photograph this room, with its stacks of old magazines and blacked floorboards, the sofa itself, leathery and vast as a beached whale. Leviathan, he thought, savouring the sound of it, a word that seemed to open its jaws and admit the world.

Croft disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with two glasses on a tray and two cans of Coke. He sat down next to Kip on the sofa, placing the tray on a low stool that stood close by.

“You can have water instead if that’s what you want,” he said. “But I thought you might like one of these. They’re straight from the fridge.”

“No, this is great,” Kip said. “Thanks.” He popped the seal on the can and poured the frothing liquid into the glass. He thought how typical it was of Croft, that he would drink Coke from a glass instead of straight from the can. It went with his old Minolta, his Oxfam clothes… and the thought that he could still predict Croft this way, that he could read him, made Kip feel calmer. He had come here of his own free will, after all. If he wanted to he could just get up and leave.

“Well?” Croft said. He took a sip of his Coke then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Did you bring anything to show me?”

“You can have a look at these if you want. They’re my most recent.” Kip hesitated. “I didn’t print them out. I don’t think they’re good enough.” He handed Croft the Nikon. He had cleared its memory of everything except the pictures he had taken on the Saturday night, the mock scene-of-crime photos of his own living room. He wondered if Croft would have any difficulty operating the camera but he handled it as if he had been using digital cameras for years, and Kip supposed he probably had. He wondered if all the spouting about film was just guff, a pose that Croft had affected to impress him.

Croft scrolled quickly through the series of images and then worked his way backwards more slowly, taking time to examine each frame.

“These are good,” he said. “Interesting. Did you take them at home?”

Kip nodded. “I was trying to look at the room in a different way, as if there’d been a murder there or something. It made me wonder what things might be important, you know, if you were photographing a real crime scene. I never thought about working for the police before but I think I might like it. It’s interesting.”

“Do you think you’d be able to handle seeing the bad stuff?”

Kip looked down at his hands. “It’d be my job to handle it, wouldn’t it? I’d have to get used to it.”

“Well, that’s something you’d have to find out for yourself.” Croft put his glass down on the floor and stood up. He leaned over, resting a hand briefly on Kip’s shoulder and reaching behind the sofa. He drew out a large portfolio, black leather with a long brass zip. The zip gleamed in the black like a row of bared teeth. “I’ve got some shots here you can look at. Some of them are quite strong. I’d probably get into trouble actually, if anyone knew I’d been showing you these without your parents’ permission.” He caught Kip’s eye and winked, though whether to show he was joking or trying to implicate Kip in his guilt Kip didn’t know. Croft retook his seat on the couch, so close beside him now that Kip could feel his warmth through his jeans, Croft’s leg resting against his own with a slight outward pressure. Croft smelled of the house, as if his clothes were not quite fresh. Kip unzipped the portfolio. It was crammed with images, photographic prints mainly though there were some newspaper clippings and photocopies, everything jumbled together like an insane montage. On top of the pile lay an enlarged shot of what had once been someone’s living room, only now it was mostly reduced to a heap of ash. On the picture’s right-hand margin stood a humped black thing about the size of a wheelie bin which Kip guessed had probably been an armchair. In front of this object was a single plate-sized patch of carpet that had somehow escaped being burned. Its colours were still bright, an interlocking pattern of blue and red diamonds. Kip thought there was something naked about the colours, something horrible. Underneath the photo of the burned-out living room there was a picture of a bicycle wheel, bent almost in half by the force of some impact. Its spokes jutted in all directions like shattered ribs.

“The lad on that bike was fifteen,” Croft said. “He died at the scene.” He pulled another picture from the stack, seeming to do it at random though Kip found time to wonder later if it had all been planned. The photograph, an enlarged detail, showed a pair of hands bound at the wrists with a coil of barbed wire. The thumbnails were caked with blood, so thick in places that Kip thought at first it was mud. There were long vertical gashes around the wrist bones, showing clearly how the wire had been dragged into place before it was tied.

Kip could not tell if the hands belonged to a man or a woman though the crooked, rather ugly shape of the top thumb joint gave him the feeling it was probably a man. The photograph was horrible, yet it was also beautiful, immortal somehow, like a still from a documentary about the First World War. It was clear as life, with the kind of singing exactitude people meant when they talked about photographic clarity even when most photographs taken by ordinary people, Kip knew, were not clear at all. Most amateur shots were blurred or badly composed, off kilter in some way. The photograph of the bound hands was so true to life it leaked its atmosphere all over the room, the drizzle-grey of a cold morning in November when a man had died in pain with his face in the mud.

“This guy turned up on a building site in Charlton,” Croft said. “He was dead when they found him. I took these pictures while we were waiting for the ambulance.”

“Did they catch the killers?”

Croft nodded. “It was a gang crime. Seven men were arrested. Two of them got long prison sentences.”

“And your photos helped to get them put away?”

“Maybe. Probably. But that’s never the thing you think about, at least not until later. At the time all you care about is the picture, about getting it right. I hardly gave that poor guy a thought while I was taking these shots, he was just a subject. I despise myself for that, but it doesn’t change anything. But you already know all this, Kip, you’re an intelligent boy. If what you wanted was to help catch murderers you’d become a detective inspector, not a photographer.”

Kip stared down at the photograph. He knew that what Croft said was true, truer even than Croft realized. If Kip’s interest lay in solving crimes he would have reported Croft to the police a fortnight ago. Instead he had taken pictures of him, and now he was here in Croft’s house, talking with him about photography. He did not care if Croft was the monster, only that he was here to have this conversation. He was glad the police had arrested Steven Jepsom instead of him. He wondered if Croft would help him with his college application.

“Can I use your loo?” Kip said suddenly. It was not just that he needed the toilet, although the can of Coke had filled his bladder to bursting. Mostly it was that he wanted to get away from Croft for a couple of minutes. Being with him was exhausting. He was also curious to see the upstairs of Croft’s house.

“It’s the first door upstairs, to your right,” Croft said. “We could go for a curry later, if you like.”

“That’d be good,” Kip said. He got up from the couch. He tried to smile at Croft, but the smile seemed to slide from his face at the last moment.

He made his way back down the hall. He noticed that the door to the understairs cupboard had a bolt on it, wondered briefly why that was and then supposed that the basement floor was where Croft kept his darkroom. He went upstairs, stepping over the bin bags, which looked to be full of old clothes. There were four doors on the upper landing. Kip opened one at random and found Croft’s bedroom, the bed unmade, a crumpled T-shirt strewn across the floor. The room next door was piled high with old furniture.

The bathroom, when he found it, was at least clean. The window was open, letting in the outside air. There was a faint smell of disinfectant.

He used the toilet and then washed his hands. He thought he would tell Croft that he had decided against the curry, that he should go home, that he had schoolwork to do, something or anything, he did not know why. He turned to go back downstairs, glancing as he did so into the one room he had not yet entered, a narrow room at the back, a spare bedroom most likely, or the bedroom that had belonged to Croft’s dead father. There was a wooden bedstead, the mattress stripped to its striped cover, stained with age, the shallow depression towards the centre where the old man had lain. Kip wondered if he had died there. He felt instinctively for the Nikon, then realized he had left it downstairs. He pulled the door to, wondering if Croft might give him permission to photograph the room anyway, whether it would be rude or strange to ask.

He noticed there were some photographs propped by the skirting board, enlargements mounted on cardboard and protected by cellophane. They did not look like forensic shots. Kip bent to look at them, curious. He remembered how Croft had talked of using some of his father’s money to buy a new camera. He wondered what kind of photography Croft was into, now that he was no longer working for the police.

There were six photographs, and they were all of Rebecca Riding. Two were in colour. Kip recognized her red jumper from the Crimewatch reconstruction, the fair hair hitched up on one side by a slide in the shape of a butterfly.

The rest of the pictures were in black-and-white, four miraculous, pristine prints that revealed the child for what she was: the only girl in the world at that moment, and Dennis Croft her only audience. In the final shot she looked straight at the camera, her gappy teeth bared in a sweet, shy smile that seemed to suggest she knew she was being looked at, but didn’t mind.

She did not seem in the least afraid. Kip felt a rush of nausea, and then of cold, as if he were going down with a virus. The girl was so there in the photographs it was impossible to accept that she was no longer alive.

He turned the pictures around to face the wall then went back into the bathroom. He leaned over the toilet bowl, wanting to be sick, but the only thing that came was a kind of dry gagging. He ran water into the basin, turning both taps on full to make the maximum noise. Then he flushed the toilet again. He knew he had to go back downstairs, that his life might now depend on him being able to act as if nothing had happened.

He crossed the landing to the head of the stairs. He stared down into the hallway, at the front door with its stained-glass fanlight, the delicate leaded panes arranged in a design he believed was called fleur de lys. The door was probably not locked, Kip could not remember Croft locking it. The idea that he might have done was crazy, of course, but all Kip could think of was the image that had come to him before: worlds colliding, a wrecking ball spinning on its chain as it crashed through the wall of the known universe.

He heard footsteps at the end of the hall. A moment later Croft’s voice came rising towards him up the stairs.

“You okay up there?” Croft said. “I want to show you the darkroom. Dad’s cellar was part of the reason I moved back in here permanently.”

Kip stayed where he was, paralyzed by the sound of his own breathing. He knew that what he did in the next few seconds would decide everything.