Page 9

CHAPTER NINE

S tupid! Stupid! Stupid!

So much for being anonymous, Nina!

Discreet people didn’t get themselves plastered all over social media or back on the police’s radar. Now they had her name and her face. All because she’d been enticed by a man! And a copper at that!

While he and his pal had saved her from Shah, they’d also nailed her coffin shut and set it adrift at sea. All she had to do was wait for the flaming arrow to set her ablaze.

There was no point in running across the country or hunkering down in her flat now. Despite her changed identity, the police would find her… as easily as she’d found herself on social media.

A disguise wouldn’t help – there were only so many variations you could do to ensure you blended in, especially when you were ethnically Indian.

Despite these obstacles she’d never simply sat back and accepted her fate. She’d fight this until they shoved her in a cell for life.

Nina stuffed a few clothes, toiletries, the camera bag and laptop into her backpack and stopped. Why the hell was she still carrying Jonas’s camera bag with her? Ever since she’d saved it from the fiasco at the airport, it had lain discarded by the front door. She didn’t intend to pawn the camera off; nor did she love photography.

Nina huffed as she unzipped the camera bag and peered into the contents. On the outside, the bag was as large as a toaster, but on the inside, there was very little space. The walls of the bag were stretched taut with cushioning, so much so that the actual brick-sized camera sat snuggly inside.

It had been a while since Nina had seen an actual camera. She used her phone when working on solo pieces. A phone let her be discreet yet efficient.

Nina wasn’t someone who liked appearing on camera herself – which made the current social media situation all the worse for her – and her photographs were more for evidence collection than anything else. Most people didn’t expect high-quality photographs of criminals caught red-handed. In fact, the grainer the image, the more they believed it.

Nina reached into the bag with both hands and plucked the camera out. Cradling it in her arms, she took the camera to her sofa and sank into the plush cushions. The last time she’d operated one of these – nothing as fancy as this one though – it had come with an SD card.

She studied the carbon-black body of the camera. It was matte with some kind of pattern etched on it, perhaps to keep it from slipping from your hands. Then she rotated the thing around, looking at it from all angles, almost like a Victorian who’d stumbled upon a modern contraption.

It had all the hallmarks of a camera – lens, buttons on a dial for zoom, flash, focus and myriad other settings she had no clue as to the purpose of. Still, no matter how sophisticated you were, every photographer needed a way to get photos from the camera onto a laptop. And the higher the quality of the image, the less likely it was that using the internet would be a viable option.

Where was the SD card? Or a slot from where you could transfer the photos using a cable?

She leaned across the couch and switched on the lamp. Then she studied the camera again. Holding it so it faced her, she ran her hands along the flash, then the rim of the lens and paused. The lens was covered by a cap which had a small latch. She pinched the two clasps of the latch, and the lens cap sprang out.

She twisted the camera round and peered through the screen. But it was blank.

Frowning, Nina hesitated over the ‘on’ button. It was a camera, but everything came with advanced technology nowadays and an internet connection. Would someone be able to track her using the camera’s location?

Her eyes landed on the backpack she’d just unpacked. It hardly mattered, didn’t it? She could leave at any given time.

Nina pressed the ‘on’ button, and the screen came to life, showing her the carpet on the floor. More icons popped up in the margins: a flash, a grid, a timer, a focus and an information ‘I’.

She played with the buttons, zooming in and out, trying to find the photo gallery stored within the camera. If she couldn’t find a way to connect the camera to her laptop, she could at least browse the images Jonas had taken.

After much contention and navigation, she finally found the gallery. The first picture was hers. Nina recognised the scene immediately. It had been taken that night.

The nightclub downstairs had been buzzing with teenagers – or new adults – just barely over eighteen. She’d noticed the vestiges of innocence in their eyes as she’d walked past them.

Dodging and looping around hordes of drunk eighteen-year-olds had been a challenge. Some of them had been barely lucid, stumbling towards the main road with their friends.

A couple of men had leaned against the other wall sharing a fag. When Nina had pushed past them to the door, she’d met a man. His beard had reminded her of Einstein’s hair, only reversed, and the tattoos peeking out from beneath his collar and sleeves had stereotyped him as a thug. And so did his nose ring and ear piercings.

This photo staring back at her didn’t show him, though. No, it was pixelated and tilted. Everything was a blur – her, the drunk teenagers and the puddle on the ground.

This couldn’t be the work of a professional, could it? Nina recalled the crowd again. The initial plan had been for them to go inside together, but Jonas had kept saying how meeting a lead in a near derelict building was a dangerous idea.

They’d got to the building, and he’d finally chickened out. Perhaps he’d been terrified of the teenagers. For all his snark, Jonas had been a big nerd who didn’t like parties or the ‘it-crowd drunks’ as he’d put it.

His argument’d had some merit to it. Nina had been in this business long enough to know it was critical for her own safety to research leads before she met them. But this lead had called and given Nina a fifteen-minute window to meet up or miss out, and Nina never missed out. She’d negotiated for thirty minutes as it would take her a while to get there, and half of that time she’d spent arguing with Jonas, but she had made it before…

Nina flicked to the next image.

In this photograph, the tattooed man had his eyes pinned on her while she looked at something behind him. People mingled around them, but in contrast to their fancy coloured clothes, Nina’s plain black stood out.

Nina bent low until her nose almost pressed against the camera’s screen. That man… If you cut that beard and tattoos out, he looked almost like Pratt.

Frowning, she toggled to other photos. A close-up of Jonas’s nose appeared, followed by a floor, a ceiling, cupboards in someone’s kitchen. Each photograph misaligned and blurred.

There had been a few images of the research they’d done so far together, but when investigating sham marriages, most people refused to have their picture taken.

Turning the thing around once more, Nina gave it a quick look under the lamp. Had she seriously been lugging this camera bag around for blurry images? What had Jonas been playing at?

Yes, he couldn’t take pictures of the people they were investigating, but he could have snapped artistic images of them in silhouette… something. Hell, why didn’t he have blurred shots of the clandestine meet-ups they’d gone to with agencies?

She’d been in charge of getting audio recordings from those meetings, but they needed images – and video!

For fuck’s sake! She’d agreed to work with Jonas because her client wanted to make a documentary from this investigation. Apparently, sham marriages made for the best documentaries, and documentaries led to recognition. That’s why she’d agreed to wear a camera or have a photographer capable of shooting video follow her around.

Her client was a sharp lady who also believed in running background checks on people. So Jonas was smart. Perhaps if she attached the camera to a laptop, she’d find what she needed?

She held the camera under the lamplight and checked the sides. There! Right between the bottom and the side was a small ‘slide’ icon. She pressed her thumb to it and swiped downward. A click sounded in the room, and the plate slide open to reveal a small port.

No SD card, but if she found the right wire, she could connect it to her laptop.

Nina set the camera on the table in front of her and raced to the camera bag. She stuffed her hands in, rummaging around. Nothing. She checked the outside of the bag and let out a curse. It had no outside pockets.

What professional carried a camera around without its charger or the wires used to transfer its contents?

Frustrated, Nina started up the slideshow of the photographs again, from the last one to the first Jonas had ever taken. Again, she saw the photograph from that night, then a few images to do with their work. A few videos played – a moving train, a car going across the road. Nothing directly related to their work.

She looked around some more, found a junk folder and?—

Her heart rate picked up, beating so hard, she thought her heart would gallop into her throat and go down her oesophagus.

It was an image, one she saw in her nightmares every night.

The image showed a floor, but in place of wooden planks, tiles or carpet, the entire concrete appeared slathered in dark red blood. Blond hair splayed at the top of the image attached to a human face, the latter off camera. Blood matted the hair, giving the blond streaks tinges of red and brown.

But the main focus of the image wasn’t the injured person. No. At the centre sat a large, pointy butcher’s knife pointed towards the hair, its blade dripping blood.

A hand clutched the knife, identifiable by the two silver rings bejewelling its fingers – one with a jade stone on it and the other a Celtic lover’s knot.

If she hadn’t recognised those rings, she surely would have recognised the hand and its contours.

That was her hand clutching the knife.

Oh fuck!

The tiny niggle of doubt protesting her innocence snuffed out. Nina shut her eyes and accepted – maybe for the first time since she’d been on the run – that she’d indeed killed somebody.

Even if she couldn’t remember how or why.