Sonata of the Dead Read Online Free Page B

nothing on the back of the photos, either. Except for one: a date three weeks ago and the words ‘SLX sesh’.
    What was SLX? A kind of camera? Sesh, presumably, was session. I found myself praying to a god I didn’t believe in that he hadn’t just misspelled SEX.
    Why did he have this set of photographs on him when he died? Was he on his way to meet Sarah, maybe, in order to show her? Or was he on his way back? Surely he would have let her keep these prints if he had the negatives. Maybe she hated them. I sure as shit did. But that would be another reason for Sarah to keep them. So if he was on his way somewhere – neatly dressed, man bag – why was he on some shitty track away from any of the conventional routes into the city centre? Which meant what? That Sarah lived nearby? Or that he was killed elsewhere and brought to this spot?
    I checked my watch. Eight o’clock. I picked up the phone. Philip Clarke answered on the first ring. Clarke was one of a number of forensic pathologists used by the Met. He was the only one I knew well enough to share an occasional bottle of wine with.
    As usual, his voice sounded brisk and bright though he’d probably been working over fourteen hours. I imagined him in his surgical gown, portly, dashing, with a nose broken and bent from a collision with an oar during a boat race when he was at university. Under his thousand-pound double-breasted sharkskin suits from Gieves & Hawkes he wore novelty braces. ‘Joel, I’m about to get very red. Can’t it wait?’
    ‘Red with whom? Not the guy who looks like he shaved on a trampoline with a samurai sword?’
    ‘He’s only just landed on my plate, J,’ he said. ‘He’s fresher than my lunchbox.’
    ‘He knows… he knew my girl, Phil. I’m just looking for an in. Anything that might lead me to her. Ian Mawker’s blocked me out of this one. I’m in the cells if I kick around in his dust any more.’
    ‘You’ll cost me my job, Sorrell.’
    ‘Well, maybe, unless they catch you at your work-time hobby, necro-boy.’
    ‘I’ll email you if I see anything unusual. It will be anon. It will be unsigned. Got it?’
    I fired up my Triassic-era laptop and stared at the winking cursor. I typed in: ‘SLX sesh’. I got a bunch of surfing references. I tried ‘SLX camera’. Bingo. There was a Rolleiflex SLX, a single lens reflex camera from the 1970s. Naturally it used film, which fit with Gower’s Luddite work ethic. I typed in ‘Martin Gower photography’.
    Gower had a Tumblr account but he hadn’t posted any candids here. Just more of what Mawker had described. Lone tree in a field. Rainy urban back street. Desolate beach. At the foot of the page was a badge with a cartoon camera lens sketched upon it and the words ‘Swain’s Lane Snappers’. I copied and pasted that into the search engine: an amateur photography group who met regularly at the Leopold Café, a little place on Swain’s Lane. I knew that café very well.
     
‘BLOODBITCH’
12 MARCH – 15 MARCH 1985
    There weren’t many things that made him happy. Marilyn Monroe in
Niagara
, a full moon, the park on a freezing November morning, fish soup.
    So when he found himself smiling at the young boy on the bus home one Friday afternoon, he was surprised. And when he realised he was smiling he was a little shocked, angry, and for some as yet unknown reason, more than a bit afraid.
    His shopping list for Saturday demanded a small onion, a bottle of tomato sauce, a meringue base and a packet of rice. He came back with a kilo bag of Winalot dog food and a trowel from the market, which was strange as he despised dogs and didn’t own a garden. That was when he sat down and began to worry. And think.
    He decided that he needed a helping hand, so he padded barefoot to the drinks cabinet and liberally poured from a bottle of Teachers, watching the golden liquid swirl in hypnotic shimmers. He got back to the couch and slumped in one well used corner, glass in one hand, botle in