The Trawlerman, стр. 18
‘That’s the story you wanted a picture for?’
‘The murders were yesterday’s news. What’s the follow-up? This was a human angle. So yeah. Not a bad story.’
‘I suppose not. Stitches up the nurse, mind you, for leaking confidential details of a patient.’
She shrugged. ‘They don’t have to know it was him. Besides, it wasn’t just me he was telling. It was half the bloody pub. Public space, like you said.’ The photographer jumped up onto the fence beside her, making the old ironwork sway. She hooked her legs over one by one, turning to sit facing towards Loftingswood Grange, the opposite direction to Alex. ‘Shit life, eh?’
‘Could be worse,’ said Alex. ‘It’s a good question, though, isn’t it? Who’s going to pay for him to be there now?’
‘He’s one of the lucky ones,’ said the photographer. ‘He’s in there. They must have been paying thousands for that.’
Alex turned, too; both of them now sitting facing the private nursing home and its carefully maintained garden. ‘What’s that to you?’
The woman looked straight ahead. ‘My brother is autistic, categorised as requiring substantial support. Only we can’t afford private.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. The people who look after him love him just as much as them lot do, only they don’t get paid half the money to do it or have half the facilities. And don’t think that’s me trying to justify what I’m doing here, because I don’t actually feel I need justification. It’s a story, and people want to know. That’s all the justification I need.’
Vapour trails cut the blue sky into parallelograms. Summer hung hot and heavy over them. ‘I wasn’t judging you.’
‘Yeah you were. Kind of.’
Alex smiled. ‘The law’s there to protect people like Callum and your brother. I’m all about the law.’
‘From what I hear, Callum’s not going to read anything I ever put in any paper so he doesn’t really need a lot of protecting, does he?’
‘You’ve been to the house too?’
The photographer eyed her warily. ‘Close as I could get, yes. Was there on Thursday. Crawling with you lot there too. Got one photo in yesterday’s Mirror.’ She reached down and plucked a long stalk of grass, put it into her mouth and chewed.
‘That was your windfall?’
‘Exactly. Quite good money for a change. Nobody else got close.’
‘Congratulations.’
The woman turned the camera on Alex again and fired off a couple of shots. ‘You want my take on it? I reckon this coast attracts psychos. Something about it. The way the wind blows. I don’t know. Not so bad in summer, I suppose, but in winter it can feel like everyone here’s just hopped the wall of some kind of institution. All the devils are here . . .’
‘You live nearby?’
‘Hythe.’ A few miles up the coast.
Alex climbed back over the fence and jumped down. ‘Do you think I could see your photographs some time?’
‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘The ones of the house. To see what you saw, that’s all.’
‘Would you pay me?’
‘Not a single penny.’
‘Like you said, got to try, haven’t you?’ Still sitting on the fence, the woman reached into a pocket in her utility vest and pulled out a card. Alex read it. Georgia Coaker. Freelance photographer.
‘I’ll call you,’ Alex said, and set off back down the path towards her car.
Georgia Coaker called after her. ‘There’s actually no such bird as a lesser spotted wood pigeon, is there?’
When she got back to Dungeness it was afternoon, and Bill South was balancing himself on the roof of his house with a hammer in his hand, dressed in faded blue shorts and a loose shirt, sweat showing on its back.
Alex parked the car, went inside the shack and emerged with a glass of water, then climbed one-handed up the ladder. ‘Nice view,’ she said, looking around when she’d reached the top.
She put the glass down carefully on the guttering and, when she had manoeuvred herself onto the slope of the roof, stood, picked it up and approached South with it. ‘You must be thirsty,’ she said.
‘Careful. Not sure how much weight these rafters can take.’
‘You’re not supposed to say things like that to a woman, Bill.’
He took the glass from her and gulped it down. She could see now that he had cut a rectangular hole in the corrugated zinc roof. ‘Putting in ventilation,’ he explained. ‘Too hot in there now, summers like this.’
‘So you just saw a hole in the roof?’
‘That’s the beauty of a wooden house.’
She looked around at the surrounding landscape from this new elevated angle: the haphazard bungalows, the lines of railway track, the expanse of stones dotted with plants that were strong enough to survive here. ‘Maybe you should build another floor up here while you’re doing it. The view’s great.’
‘Works for me like it is,’ he said.
‘I wanted to ask you something,’ she said. She bent to sit down but when she put her hand down, the zinc sheets were sizzling. ‘About Frank Hogben,’ she said, straightening again.
Thirteen
They stood on the roof, a suitable distance apart so as not to put too much strain on the timbers.
‘Well?’ said Bill.
A gaggle of tourists, possibly Japanese or maybe Korean, who were walking up the narrow track alongside the power station fence, paused and stared. One of them raised a camera to photograph them, up there on South’s roof. There must have been something comical about the pair of them, she supposed. Maybe they imagined it was how the locals lived here, on their roofs, and would tell their friends about it back home. Soon another raised his camera, then a third.
‘Look. We’re an attraction,’ said Alex, and waved back. The entire group waved at them now.
‘You’re