Suckers

'No, and it's not like her to go all incommunicado like this. Do you think I should call the police?'

'She's probably pissed off at you for getting drunk and staying out all night. Did you ring Multiglom?'

'I tried. They were all at lunch.'

'When was that?'

'Three o'clock, and again at four and five.'

'Some lunch,' I said. I had already decided not to tell him what I'd seen that morning. There was no point in worrying him unnecessarily.

'Christ,' he said. 'If only we hadn't got arseholed, I would have got home in time to stop her. I could have shown her the negs.'

'Negs? What negs?'

"The ones you half-inched from our friend Francine. I printed them up.'

I'd forgotten all about Dino's negs. I'd left the envelope in the car. 'And?'

'I think you should come round and take a look.'

'Can't it wait till tomorrow?'

'No, this is urgent.'

I sighed loudly enough for him to hear. I didn't feel like going out, especially after having spent half the day making my flat secure.

'Please, Dora…'

'All right.' I would just have to hope Violet wasn't out on the razzle in W11. I prepared as best I could and set out into the night, stinking of garlic and jingling with junk jewellery. There were plenty of people around, but they weren't the sort of people you wanted to bump into at that time of night. Just off Westbourne Grove, I saw a small mob moving with a great deal of laughter and shouting along the opposite pavement. One or two heads swivelled in my direction, and somebody shouted, 'Hey little girl!', but I pretended to ignore them and they swept along the street. A little further on, I heard the sound of bottles being smashed, and screaming, but I didn't think it was the same crowd; the noise seemed to be coming from the opposite direction. Fights were nothing unusual — not in that area — but I clutched my crucifix and walked faster.

Duncan let me in, reeling back in mock shock as he smelled my breath. 'Blimey. You've been picking up social tips from Francine.'

'Garlic for supper,' I said. He could talk, I thought. Put a match to the alcohol on his breath and he'd go up like a Christmas pudding.

He looked at me and laughed. 'Sure you're wearing enough jewellery?'

It's true I was clanking like a suit of armour; I'd dug out my entire collection. 'Just to be on the safe side. Can't be too careful.'

His smile vanished. 'Something's happened, hasn't it? What's going on?'

I said nothing had happened. I told him to show me the blasted photos.

Lulu had been gone three days and already the living room looked as though a bomb had hit it. Duncan poured me a large brandy, poured himself another even larger one, and showed me into his office. He was drunk, but not the way he'd been drunk before. Now he was dogged and forceful; he was going to hammer away until I said exactly what he wanted to hear. I hadn't seen him this animated for years. It was as though he was waking up after a deep sleep. He was getting all manic and obsessive again, and it was frightening me, but it was kind of exciting as well.

'Here we are,' he said, and flung down a pile of black and white prints. I sifted through them; these photographs didn't seem to be part of a regular assignment, they were more a record of an important social occasion. The setting was the same in each; a large room cluttered with antique furniture and a carved mantelpiece, heavy and a little oppressive — not the sort of place likely to be featured in Home Beautiful, let alone Bellini. People were standing around with champagne flutes in their hands, proposing toasts and generally looking rather jovial. One or two had noticed the photographer but were pretending they hadn't; others were mugging shamelessly for the camera. In one picture, a balding businessman was licking the ear of a pouty blonde young enough to be his granddaughter.

Most of the people in the pictures were smiling, and some appeared to be laughing out loud. This was the bit I didn't like. The worst photos were those in which I could see their teeth, because they forced me, finally, to face up to the truth. We were not dealing with a single vampire here. We were dealing with a pack of them.

I was shocked into silence. This put a whole new slant on things. It might not have been Violet who had dropped in on Patricia after all — it could have been any one of the people here.

'Look,' said Duncan, jabbing at the pictures with his finger. 'Here, here, and here. Just look at them, will you. Look at this fat guy — what's this in his mouth?'

'Maybe it's a Twiglet,' I suggested.

Duncan jabbed again. 'And what about the shape on the sofa?'

'What about it?' He pointed, and I looked. In the background of some of the prints was a couch with two women on it. They could have been twins, each with the same blank face and slicked-back hair, each clutching a wineglass, and perched stiffly, head cocked as if listening to her master's voice. I'd seen both of them, before — behind the reception desk at Multiglom Tower.

There was space between them, and in that space a blur. 'Yes, well, that's definitely someone moving,' I said, shuffling through the blow-ups. In each of the pictures in which the couch was visible, the space between the blank-faced women was occupied by that same blur. You could see there was someone there, but you couldn't make out arms, or legs, or facial features.

'Try this one,' Duncan said, handing me another print — an enlargement of the blur on the couch, blown up so it almost filled the paper. The image was nearly lost in the grain, but you could see it was a woman, and that she had long dark hair.

Duncan helped himself to one of my cigarettes and lit up. He ran his free hand through his hair, leaving it sticking out at odd angles. His spectacles were perched halfway down his nose and he looked completely mad. 'She never did like having her picture taken,' he said.

'Who?' Now I was deliberately being dense. Duncan rolled his eyeballs. He pulled open one of the drawers in his filing cabinet, extracted a folder, and handed it to me. The photographs inside were printed on bromide, not on the modern resin-coated stuff, and the edges had never quite lost their curl. I recognized the locations: Kensal Rise, Highgate, Abney Park. The old cemetery circuit. All night-time views, all taken after dark, with flash.

'You did these at college?' Duncan nodded. There were stone angels, and Grecian urns, and Latin inscriptions, and crumbling dogs, and weeping women, and egg-timers with wings. And in each of the pictures, sometimes flitting through the trees in the background, but occasionally to one side at the front of the frame, I saw the blurred shape of someone who had shifted at the precise instant the shutter had been pressed.

'I could never catch her off-guard. She always moved, every bloody time. She always knew — even with a wide-angle lens, even at 1/125th of a second. She never, ever let me take her picture.'

I felt a sharp pang in my chest, like the bite of a scalpel. He had taken photos of all of them, of Lulu and Alicia and all the ex-girlfriends whose names I didn't know, Jesus, he had even tried to take photos of Violet. But he had never taken photos of me. In his files, I didn't exist.

'Oh boy,' I said. 'You really want me to say she's come back for you, don't you? You're not going to rest until you've got me to say it.'

'I just want you to confirm it's not all in my head.'

I'd had enough. 'OK, she's back. She's definitely back, Duncan. No question about it, she's back. And she's going to rip your head off. Happy now?'

He smiled and nodded courteously. 'Thank you.' He pulled the darkroom door open and slipped into the shadows on the far side, and I could hear him throwing up in the sink. I wondered if there were any prints in the wash there. If so, he would have to rewash them.