‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘You did? Em, you hero. Did you clear our stuff out?’
‘I got my phone. He’d smashed it, remember? Wasn’t going to leave that behind.’
‘OK. And when you were in there, did you by any chance pick up a black case, about this big’ – my hands frame the shape of the object that is going to cook my goose – ‘with a little leather strap?’
‘Er … no, sorry. Was I meant to?’
‘Oh,God.’
At this point, I think I should admit what I do for a living.
7
Or what Ididfor a living. It seems highly unlikely I’ll be able to pick up my old career at this point.
I take photos of nice houses.
It’s not a huge money-spinner – even per job it’s not spectacular, and if I was trying to pay rent on the proceeds, I’d be in trouble – but for a man with my style of living it pays perfectly well. And it does mean I get to see some of the most beautiful places going (I work at the upper end of the market). Needless to say, it helps with the interloping no end too.
There are agencies for this sort of thing, specifically property photography agencies, and I work for one of the classier ones, meaning the homes on their books tend to be nice. The low end is about £3m, the high end … I mean, name your mad property-price excess really. What the agencies want issomeone a) willing to travel to remote places at short notice, b) who can make themselves presentable to the rich, and c) who knows which way round a camera goes. I can do all that.
Quite a lot of the photos I take don’t end up being made public, of course – they’re circulated to a discreet number of poshos looking for their new place. That doesn’t matter. It’s not like I crave publicity, and I get paid whether or not the pictures go online.
And now I have just realised that my camera – with a memory card full of photos of recognisable homes around the country, homes I have recently been paid to go and snap – is sitting in the house of a murdered man, with no earthly reason to be there. The camera is going to ruin my life. I am literally Canon fodder.
Tremendous.
Back in the van, Em has just asked me a charming question.
‘Why theshitdid you bring a camera, Mister Rules?’
‘So I could …’ I consider telling them all about my job, then remember I have no idea who these three are. Rule 16:Don’t give people anything more than they need. Embellishing your story is the equivalent of tying a load of tripwires as you’re heading into a place. Don’t do it, because unless you remember every single wire, they’ll mess you up on your way back out.
I’ll give them a bit of the truth instead. ‘It’s part of my process. I take pictures so I’ll have a record of the rooms. I do it everywhere I go.’
‘So it’s just photos of the houses?’
‘They’re not selfies. But I think you might be able to piece together who I am from the memory card.’ That’s an understatement. Any copper with half a brain could just look for the properties I’ve snapped – the main front-of-house shots in particular – reverse-image-search the locations, and work out what ties them together. Might take a thick work-experience kid half an hour.
‘Well,’ says Elle, slowly, as though she’s feeling her way towards the most optimistic possible view of the matter and coming up with nothing, ‘that does sound like a problem.’
‘I would say so. If you guys want to go on without me, I’ll understand.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ says Em. ‘Jonny’s got his fingerprints problem, you’ve got the camera problem, we’re all on the CCTV. We’re all involved.’
Elle says, ‘But they might not even look at your camera. If you were the police, which bits of the house would you examine most closely?’
‘The hall first. That guy will presumably have been in lots of other rooms, but they’d surely pay most attention to the spot where he was killed, right?’
‘So the odds are they’ll never even open the camera case.’
Elle is my new favourite member of the group. ‘Thank you.’
‘Unless, of course …’ She tails off. ‘No. That seems unlikely.’
