‘Flint.’ Lol opened the partition and leaned towards him with one of her ‘how can you resist me I’m so adorable and I’m about to ask you a really annoying favour’ faces on.
‘Ye-es.’
‘Can we have some music in the back?’
‘Yes.’ He sighed and switched on the radio. Groovejet. Had to be. Everywhere he bloody went this summer. Big Brother and Groovejet.
Ten minutes later, he pulled up outside the photoshop on Latimer Road and watched as Lol and Ana both unfurled themselves and scuttled into the shop together like a pair of exotic stick insects, music blaring from the back of the car and everyone stopping to stare at them as they passed, wondering who they were. Flint sighed and wiped a slick of sweat off his upper lip with the back of his hand. A minute later they emerged from the shop, flapping photographs around and acting in a generally overexcited manner.
Lol threw herself into the back of the car. ‘We got pictures!’ she squealed, so loudly that Flint had to put his hands over his ears.
‘Jesus, Tate,’ he said, ‘calm down, will you?’ He picked the photos out of Lol’s hand and looked at them. Ana slid into the passenger seat and looked over his shoulder. Shesmelled of Gill’s house – of fabric conditioner, of fresh bedclothes.
‘God,’ Ana said in a whisper as Flint flipped through the pictures, ‘Bee looks so … so grown-up. Her hair’s really different. I always thought she’d still have that black bob she used to have.’
‘Nah,’ said Lol, taking the pictures as they circulated her way, ‘she got rid of that when she turned thirty.’
Flint swallowed and felt it catch at the back of his throat as he looked at Bee in the photos. She looked beautiful and was, of course, immaculately dressed in every picture. Her hair was decorated with fresh tropical flowers, fat white camellias and sprigs of mauve bougainvillea and, most surprisingly, she looked rapturously happy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her looking that happy. He flicked faster and faster.
Bee on a beach.
Bee in a restaurant.
Bee haggling with a market trader.
Bee on a bridge.
Bee wearing a bindi.
Bee eating a coconut.
And then, finally, a couple of photos from the end of the pile, there was a picture of a man. They all stopped breathing. Lol shrieked, ‘Ohmygod, it’s a fella. It’s a fucking fella!’, and grabbed the picture from his hands.
He was in his early forties, his hair nearly completely white and shorn close to his head. He was wearing long shorts with trendy sandals and a brightly coloured Hawaiian shirt, with a pair of those cool, popstar type sunglasses on his head. He was sitting outside a restaurant,with one leg crossed high upon the other one, in a classic groin-display position, and he was looking slightly cross. He wasn’t particularly good-looking and he wasn’t ugly. He looked like a tosser.
‘Who is he?’ Ana asked, urgently.
Flint leaned in towards Lol and took another look at the picture, before Lol snatched it away, again. He rubbed his stubbled chin. ‘I’ve got no fucking idea,’ he sighed, ‘I’ve never seen that man before in my life. Maybe it was just some bloke she met on holiday. Maybe she got chatting to him at that restaurant and she took his picture. He’s not in any of the others.’
‘Yes,’ said Lol, impatiently, ‘but who took the others? Bee must have been with someone …’
‘Not necessarily. Bee wasn’t shy of strangers. She might just have got other people to take those pictures for her.’
Ana shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no. She looks too … relaxed, too aware of the person taking her picture. Look – you can see it in her eyes …’
‘What?’
‘Excitement. Or something. Understanding.Love.’
Flint grunted, cynically. ‘That was just Bee,’ he said, ‘a born flirt. And boy did she love the camera.’
‘Look!’ said Ana suddenly, tapping at a photo of Bee patting a mangy old street dog.
‘What?’
‘The ring.Thisring,’ she pointed at the diamond band she was wearing on her own finger, ‘she’s wearing it in these pictures. On her engagement finger.’
‘And where did you find it?’