A Snapshot of Murder Read online

  ‘Go to work! You’ll be late.’

  ‘I’m going, I’m going. But how did whoever wrote this know that I’m an usherette?’

  I looked at the piece again. ‘It sounds as if it’s been written by a chap, but it could have been one of the other women in our railway carriage who listened to us talking. The Mole is such a scurrilous rag, but some people will do anything to earn a few extra shillings.’ I walked her to the front door.

  ‘I’m going to solve this puzzle, as to who knows all about us and our trip to Parliament.’

  She picked up the old umbrella. ‘Oh and I meant what I said, Auntie, about Carine. What if she really is in danger from that horrible husband of hers?’

  ‘Don’t pay attention to gossip.’

  ‘Think of it this way, though. You look into crimes after they happen. Wouldn’t it be much better to investigate before something bad happens, especially if Carine is in danger?’

  She waved to me from the gate. I watched her go. Harriet had set me thinking. I must try and find out whether there were grounds for her and Derek to be worried about Carine.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Darkroom

  It is 1901. Carine has been to Betty Cleverdon’s birthday party, with five candles on the cake.

  Now Carine is with her mammy, on Woodhouse Moor, sitting on a bench. Being with Mammy is better than watching the magician at Betty Cleverdon’s birthday party because Mammy makes her laugh, and never holds a rabbit by its ears.

  Betty is not to keep the rabbit. The rabbit belongs to the magician. But Betty has a pretty guinea pig with a fine cage.

  Carine’s mammy is clever with the camera. Everyone says so. As they sit side by side on that bench, Mammy takes a picture by pressing a rubber handle on the end of a tube. An old man with a Yorkshire terrier stops to stare. The terrier sniffs at the tripod.

  When it comes to the next go, Mammy gives Carine the rubber handle to press. The terrier yaps. The man walks away.

  Later, there are two photographs. They are nearly the same. Carine has to pick one. She picks the one that she likes best, the one where her eyes are wide open.

  ‘These are ours,’ her mammy says, ‘just for you and me.’

  ‘Shall we have one with Daddy?’

  ‘Another day.’

  That night when she has tucked Carine in bed and told her a story, Mammy whispers that she will go away for just a little while. She will come back for Carine.

  This will be their secret. She certainly will come back. At playtime and at home time, Carine must look at the school gates. That is where she will come.

  Carine knows not to tell Daddy that Mammy is coming back. It will be a surprise. She pictures Mammy at the school gates, as promised. They would walk home together.

  Carine always looked at the school gates.

  Carine was allowed to leave school on her thirteenth birthday, not wait until the end of term. She did not have to wait until the end of the day either because her dad had called to say he needed her at home. Where he needed her was the darkroom, but he did not tell the teacher that, and nor did she.

  When she was leaving school for the last time, she turned back to look. The sun behind the gates created a shadow, like bars on a window. The thought came to her: Mammy would not have taken her from school at playtime. She would have missed the next lesson. Carine wondered whether she had somehow become mixed up about what her mammy had said.

  She was standing near the gates, thinking this, when someone called her name.

  She turned.

  It was Betty, hurrying to catch up with her. ‘I slipped out when Miss went you-know-where.’

  Carine had not felt lonely until that moment. There would be the walk home. It wasn’t far, but usually there would be others walking, or running, glad to have been let out of prison.

  Now that Betty was here, Carine saw that she did not know what to say. And then it came out in a rush, so she must have planned the words. ‘We an’t always been friends, Carine, but we will be if you want.’

  ‘We can if you like, then.’

  ‘When you came to stay for a bit, after your mammy left, and there was that thing with my guinea pig …’

  Carine looked at her shoes. Black. One of the laces undone.

  ‘… I blamed you, but I see now it wasn’t your fault. We were little. You were sad. You were holding him too tight.’

  Carine smiled. It was the smile everyone liked. She used to practise it in the mirror. Now it came naturally, when she wanted it to.

  ‘So we’ll be friends?’ Betty persisted.

  ‘Yes, Betty. We’ll be friends.’

  ‘Did your mammy ever write to you?’

  Carine shook her head. She smiled again, sadly this time. She hated Betty. Betty would go back into the classroom. She would whisper, ‘Carine has gone. Her mammy left her when we were five. She never came back and she never wrote.’

  Betty would be important. ‘Ta-ra then, Carine.’

  ‘Ta-ra, Betty.’

  Carine was glad to have left school. She would be in the darkroom. That was her job now. She would take the negatives that showed nothing, and turn them, as if by magic, into pictures.

  She walked home slowly, careful not to step on a crack. The sun was behind her making her shadow stretch. Her shadow would be home before her. Unsure what might happen if she took a misstep, she kept her fingers crossed.

  It was as she thought. Dad was waiting for her as she opened the door and stepped into the studio. ‘Good lass. See how quick you can be.’

  Carine switched on the light and went down the stone steps into the cellar. Perhaps it was the strangeness of being a worker, not a schoolgirl, but she took a misstep as she crossed the stone floor to the darkroom. She stood not on a crack but on that stain, and then could not move. She froze.

  A moment later, her father was behind her. ‘Where’s the mouse?’

  ‘There is no mouse.’

  ‘You screamed.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You screamed.’

  ‘I stepped on the stain.’

  He looked at the floor. ‘There is no stain. It’s gone.’

  ‘I can see it.’

  ‘Then it’s only the damp rising.’

  He manoeuvred her from her frozen place on the spot.

  She shivered as she went into the darkroom and had to blow on her hands. As she mixed chemicals, the thought came to her: Once before she had asked her father about that stain. The answer then was, ‘Your mother once spilled fixative.’

  My mother never spilled anything. She was so careful.

  In the autumn of 1913, Carine was in the studio alone, adjusting the saddle on the rocking horse. She had photographed a little boy. The only way to make him still was to promise that, after the photograph, he could ride the white horse to Banbury Cross. He did rather a lot of kicking. She was glad when his mother gathered him up. Carine gave her a ticket and told her that the photographs would be ready next week.

  Moments later, the clapper sounded. She turned to see two young men, about her own age. Students. One was tall, thin and sandy-haired. He carried a gown over his arm, and held a cap in his hand, obviously here for a portrait, yet he hung back shyly. His friend nudged him towards the counter. The friend was not entirely handsome, being of middle height, with broad shoulders, black hair, rather heavy brows, brown eyes and a cast of skin that made her think he might be descended from one of those Spaniards said to have been shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland.

  Yet he was the one whose photograph Carine would like to have taken. He had what she called character, something you did not always see in young students. Had this dark-haired young man been a little lad, she would have dressed him as a pirate. That was her thought. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was used to that. This time, she stared back, until he looked away. She turned her attention to the shy boy.

  ‘I want a portrait of myself, for my mother please,’ the shy one said.

&nb
sp; Carine invited him to put on the cap and gown. She showed him the mirror where he could look, to have his cap at the right angle.

  He looked surprised. People often did. They expected her to call someone, the owner, her father.

  She met the boys again, when she and Betty Cleverdon were leaving the Headingley Picture House on Cottage Road.

  They said hello.

  Carine told the shy boy, whose name was Frank Nettleton, that his portrait was ready for collection. ‘I developed it straight away because I thought your mother might be anxious to have it.’

  The truth was that she had developed it straight away because the roll of film was at its end, but a reputation for being obliging was important in business.

  Frank thanked her.

  ‘You know Frank’s name, but you don’t know mine,’ the dark-haired one said. ‘I’m Edward Chester.’

  ‘And I’m Carine, and this is Betty.’

  Betty fell into step with Frank Nettleton.

  Edward smartly switched positions and walked on the outside of the pavement next to Carine, all of them going in the same direction. ‘Is that your name above the studio?’ Edward asked.

  ‘It is, and it was my grandmother’s name.’

  Edward smiled. ‘She was a thrifty gran, then. “There’ll be no call to change that sign if we call the young ’un Carine.”’

  ‘I never knew my grandmother,’ Carine said simply. ‘She died when I was a baby.’ She did not tell him that her mother left when she was five years old. Once, she could not speak those words at all. She went dumb if the question arose. Now, she could not speak those words without fear of tears, and so she kept silent.

  Perhaps Betty told Frank and Frank told him. Edward knew not to ask.

  They agreed that all four would go to the pictures again, the night after next.

  She told her father she was going to Ilkley with Betty Cleverdon. This would have been true, but by then Edward’s friend Frank had gone to see his mother, who had taken a turn for the worse. Only Edward was waiting at the station. Betty decided not to go.

  Edward had brought a book. He asked what Carine liked to read.

  ‘I don’t have a lot of time for reading, and when I do I can’t settle to it.’

  ‘Then I’ll read to you. I’ll find a teaching post that has accommodation. You’ll come with me. I will read to you every night. Every morning, I will bring you a cup of tea.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re mad!’

  She did not tell him her true thought: I belong in the studio where my name is on the window.

  They walked from Ilkley station to the moor, and the Cow and Calf rocks. Carine had never climbed so high, but it presented no difficulty. Soon they were looking out across the moor, master and mistress of the world.

  Something sprang up between them, a closeness Carine had never known before. He felt it, too, and reached for her hand. A new light created the world afresh. All became wondrous, and special, the day, the moor, the world. It was because they were together.

  She did not notice the other people roundabout. Their voices and laughter were a babble of nothing. There were just two of them, Carine and Edward. Edward and Carine.

  They left the Cow and Calf rocks far behind, striding across the moor as if floating. When they came to a rock that was all alone by a stunted tree, Edward took a chisel and a little hammer from his haversack.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ll see.’ He chipped at the rock. ‘This is because you and I will be together always.’

  He carved EC loves CW.

  When he hit his thumb and finger with the little hammer, she took his hand and kissed it better. ‘Have you ever carved anyone else’s initials?’

  ‘No, and I never will.’

  They had found each other so unexpectedly, but knew without doubt that this was meant to be.

  It was several months before they returned to the moors. They found a secluded spot where they could be alone. By then, there was a dark cloud on the horizon, but they turned their backs to it. And the talk was of war, but they did not listen. They held each other close. She liked that he recited to her. He did it in a way that made words new. She never could tell whether the lines were his alone, or borrowed from another voice.

  ‘Only our love hath no decay; This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday, Running it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.’

  The ‘hath’ gave it away. It wasn’t his own poem.

  On the day they were to be married, her father got wind of it and locked her in the cellar. He said that she would be grateful to him one day. A poet would be neither use nor ornament.

  He went to the register office and told Edward that she had changed her mind.

  Later, her father put on a great performance, which at the time she did not know was a performance. His heart would break. Her mother had gone, she could not go too. It was for the best, she must believe that.

  When Edward came thumping on the shop door, and on the back door, and her father called the police, something inside Carine gave way. She came out in blotches, red blotches all over her body. Something happened under her skin. Something happened in her head. The doctor could not explain it. She was taken to Otley to stay with an aunt. By the time she was better, Edward had gone to war.

  She went to drive trams when the call for women workers came. Edward would come back. He would have leave. He would not give up on her. She was right. He wrote to her. Luckily she got to the letter first, and wrote back.

  The studio could not remain closed. Men in uniform came to have a photograph taken. Dad could manage that. Otherwise, he had become useless. He was drinking. Each night he staggered in. Sometimes he brought a woman.

  She could not turn her back on the studio. Any photographs he managed to take, she made the best of, working late into the night when the trams had stopped running.

  One night he stumbled in when she was just coming up from the darkroom in the cellar. She heard him fall on the stairs, and curse. Before she went to bed, Carine looked in on him, sleeping on the bed in his clothes. She unlaced his shoes and took them off. She pulled the eiderdown from under him and placed it over him.

  When she looked at him, she knew something. What was it that she knew?

  In a voice not her own she asked the question. He might think that, while he slept, an angel spoke. ‘What did you do to my mammy?’

  ‘She would have left us.’

  ‘Did you do something to her?’

  She did not want the answer, and no answer came.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Magic Lantern Show

  Headingley is named in the Domesday Book. This long ago ‘Out-Township’ to the north of the city, grew and grew. So did the city of Leeds, until it and Headingley could almost reach out and touch each other. Walking south, to the heart of the city, is no great distance from my house. On that spring evening, I walked north, up Headingley Lane, for the meeting of our photographic society. This takes me close to Carine’s Photographic Studio. I was undecided about calling for her because I was early. She may be still working, or settling her invalid father for the night. Oh just do it, I told myself. If it’s too early for her, she will say so.

  People always stop to look at her studio window because she changes the displays frequently. That evening, daffodils in a painted earthenware vase provided a welcome splash of colour. On either side of the window was a three-tiered arrangement of cube-shaped boxes on which stood silver-framed photographs. On the left of the window was a wedding party from the last century; a couple in the first motorcar to grace the streets of Headingley, and a 1902 charabanc outing. On the right of the window, were modern photographs: a family portrait including six children and a fox terrier; a graduating student in mortar board and gown; an almost-smiling bride and a serious groom. Several old-fashioned cameras provided decoration in the centre of the window. On a stand, a simple white display card, lettered in go
ld, showed the price of studio portraits and ended with the lines:

  HOME VISITS AND WEDDINGS ENQUIRE WITHIN

  The clapper sounded as I opened the door. Carine erupted from the back room, parting the beaded curtain, a smiling vision in a bronze dress draped with gold chains. A halo of red-gold wavy hair gives her the look of an angel in a Renaissance painting. But no painted angel was ever so full of life. This might sound fanciful but it is almost as if her nervous energy gives off an electric current that draws people to her.

  ‘Hello, Kate. You’re early for the big night.’

  ‘I didn’t know if you’d be ready to go yet.’

  ‘Well I am, but there’s plenty of time. We ought to have a glass of sherry.’ She held the curtain open and we went into the back room.

  There was a bottle, and two small glasses. ‘I knew you’d call for me.’ She poured. ‘Here’s to your picture show. Everyone will love it.’ We sat down at the kitchen table. ‘I’ll be your assistant tonight and move the slides as you give me the nod.’

  ‘That would be a great help.’

  Never having put on a photographic display before, it was a relief that Carine had taken me through the process step by step. I am a latecomer to the gentle art of photography. Carine has been taking photographs since her fingers were strong enough to click a shutter.

  I took out the cutting Harriet had given me, about our trip to Parliament.

  ‘Did you see this? One of the café customers gave it to Harriet.’

  She glanced at it. ‘Tobias showed it to me. It’s someone who knows us but I can’t think who would write such rubbish. Could it be someone who goes in the café and hears Harriet talking?’

  ‘By all accounts, she’s too busy to talk.’

  ‘Someone has pieced the nonsense together. We’ll just ignore it.’

  Carine looked remarkably well, yet there was something different about her, a slight air of distraction. I thought back to Harriet’s remark, that her husband Tobias was persecuting her in some way. He would not be such a fool, would he? ‘Is everything all right with you, Carine?’

  She looked surprised. ‘Does it show?’