“Vaguely.” He didn’t know how or in what connection.
“Photographer, big in the sixties. Bailey, Duffy, Fisher. The big three, according to some. Fashion, that was his thing. Everyone’s thing. Biba. Vogue. You couldn’t open a magazine, look at a hoarding without one of his pictures staring back at you.” She took a sip from her espresso. “He disappeared for a while in the eighties — early seventies, eighties. Australia, maybe, I’m not sure. Resurfaced with a show at Victoria Miro, new work, quite a bit different. Cooler, more detached: buildings, interiors, mostly empty. Very few people.”
Skip the art history, Kiley thought, this is leading where?
“I did a profile of him for the Independent on Sunday,” Kate said. “Liked him. Self-deprecating, almost humble. Genuine.”
“What’s he done?” Kiley asked.
“Nothing.”
“But he is in some kind of trouble?”
“Maybe.”
“Shenanigans.”
“Sorry?”
“Someone else’s wife; someone else’s son, daughter. What used to be called indiscretions. Now it’s something more serious.”
Following the high-profile arrests of several prominent media personalities, accused of a variety of sexual offences dating back up to forty years, reports to the police of historic rape and serious sexual abuse had increased four-fold. Men — it was mostly men — who had enjoyed both the spotlight and the supposed sexual liberation of the sixties and later were contacting their lawyers, setting up damage limitation exercises, quaking in their shoes.
“You’ve still got contacts in the Met, haven’t you, Jack?”
“A few.”
“I thought if there was anyone you knew — Operation Yewtree, is that what it’s called? — I thought you might be able to have a word on the quiet, find out if Fisher was one of the people they were taking an interest in.”
“Should they be?”
“No. No.”
“Because if they’re not, the minute I mention his name, they’re going to be all over him like flies.”
Kate cut away a small piece of toast, added mushroom, a smidgeon of egg. “Maybe there’s another way.”
Kiley said nothing.
As if forgetting she’d changed the style, Kate smoothed a hand across her forehead to brush away a strand of hair. “When he was what? Twenty-nine? Thirty? He had this relationship with a girl, a model.”
Kiley nodded, sensing where this was going.
“She was young,” Kate said. “Fifteen. Fifteen when it started.”
“Fifteen,” Kiley said quietly.
“It wasn’t aggressive, wasn’t in any sense against her will, it was... like I say, it was a relationship, a proper relationship. It wasn’t even secret. People knew.”
“People?”
“In the business. Friends. They were an item.”
“And that made it okay? An item?”
“Jack...”
“What?”
“Don’t prejudge. And stop repeating everything I say.”
Kiley chased a last mouthful of spinach around his plate. The waitress with the tattoos stopped by their table to ask if there was anything else they wanted and Kate sent her on her way.
“He’s afraid of her,” Kate said. “Afraid she’ll go to the police herself.”
“Why now?”
“It’s in the air, Jack. You read the papers, watch the news. Cleaning out the Augean stables doesn’t come into it.”
Kiley was tempted to look at his watch: ten minutes without Kate making a reference he failed to understand. Maybe fifteen. “A proper relationship, isn’t that what you said?”
“It ended badly. She didn’t want to accept things had run their course. Made it difficult. When it became clear he wasn’t going to change his mind, she attempted suicide.”
“Pills?”
Kate nodded. “It was all hushed up at the time. Back then, that was still possible.”
“And now he’s terrified it’ll all come out...”
“Go and talk to him, Jack. Do that at least. I think you’ll like him.”
Liking him, Kiley knew, would be neither here nor there, a hindrance at best.
There was a bookshop specialising in fashion and photography on Charing Cross Road. Claire de Rouen. Kiley had walked past there a hundred times without ever going in. Two narrow flights of stairs and then an interior slightly larger than the average bathroom. Books floor to ceiling, wall to wall. There was a catalogue from Fisher’s show at Victoria Miro, alongside a fat retrospective, several inches thick. Most of the photographs, the early ones, were in glossy black and white. Beautiful young women slumming in fashionable clothes: standing, arms aloft, in a bomb site, dripping with costume jewellery and furs; laughing outside Tubby Isaac’s Jellied Eel Stall at Spitalfields; stretched out along a coster’s barrow, legs kicking high in the air. One picture that Kiley kept flicking back to, a thin-hipped, almost waif-like girl standing, marooned, in an empty swimming pool, naked save for a pair of skimpy pants and gold bangles snaking up both arms, a gold necklace hanging down between her breasts. Lisa Arnold. Kate had told him her name. Lisa. He wondered if this were her.
The house was between Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill, not so far from the Portobello Road. Flat fronted, once grand, paint beginning to flake away round the windows on the upper floors. Slabs of York Stone leading, uneven, to the front door. Three bells. Graeme Fisher lived on the ground floor.
He took his time responding.
White hair fell in wisps around his ears; several days since he’d shaved. Corduroy trousers, collarless shirt, cardigan wrongly buttoned, slippers on his feet.
“You’ll be Kate’s friend.”
Kiley nodded and held out his hand.
The grip was firm enough, though when he walked it was slow, more of a shuffle, with a pronounced tilt to one side.
“Better come through here.”
Here was a large room towards the back of the house, now dining room and kitchen combined. A short line of servants’ bells, polished brass, was still attached to the wall close by the door.
Fisher sat at the scrubbed oak table and waited for Kiley to do the same.
“Bought this place for a song in sixty-four. All divided up since then, rented out. Investment banker and his lady friend on the top floor — when they’re not down at his place in Dorset. Bloke above us, something in the social media.” He said it as if it were a particularly nasty disease. “Keeps the bailiffs from the sodding door.”
There were photographs, framed, on the far wall. A street scene, deserted, muted colours, late afternoon light. An open-top truck, its sides bright red, driving away up a dusty road, fields to either side. Café tables in bright sunshine, crowded, lively, in the corner of a square; then the same tables, towards evening, empty save for an old man, head down, sleeping. Set a little to one side, two near-abstracts, sharp angles, flat planes.
“Costa Rica,” Fisher said, “seventy-two. On assignment. Never bloody used. Too fucking arty by half.”
He made tea, brought it to the table in plain white mugs, added two sugars to his own and then, after a moment’s thought, a third.
“Tell me about Lisa,” Kiley said.
Fisher laughed, no shred of humour. “You don’t have the time.”
“It ended badly, Kate said.”
“It always ends fucking badly.” He coughed, a rasp low in the throat, turning his head aside.
“And you think she might be harbouring a grudge?”
“Harbouring? Who knows? Life of her own. Kids. Grandkids by now, most like. Doubt she gives me a second thought, one year’s end to the next.”
“Then why...?”
“This woman a couple of days back, right? Lisa’s age. There she is on TV, evening news. Some bloke, some third-rate comedian, French-kissed her in the back of a taxi when she was fifteen, copped a feel. Now she’s reckoning sexual assault. Poor bastard’s picture all over the papers. Paedophile. That’s not a fucking paedophile.” He shook his head. “I’d sooner bloody die.”