Part 14 (2/2)

He closes the kitchen door, pulls down the blackout blinds. A sc.r.a.p of light seeps in through the door hinges, and he seals them with parcel tape. Nothing can go wrong. He unscrews the bulb in the fridge just in case he happens to b.u.mp into the door. You can't be too careful.

The room is pitch dark. He gropes his way over to the table.

He breaks open the first roll of film, winds it onto a spool. Then the next, and the next. When the films have been placed inside the drum he switches on the light and measures out the developing fluid with military precision.

He turns the drum once every thirty seconds precisely. He makes a huge effort to control himself, to maintain this meticulous approach. Something within him wants to rush things, get it all done as quickly as possible.

When the stopwatch beeps he sets the films to rinse. Now they are negatives, irrevocable. He bites his nails. What if he's done something wrong without realising? Used the wrong fluid. What if the negatives are blank when he takes them out of the drum?

With trembling hands he switches on the light box and unrolls the first reel of negatives.

The film is not blank.

It shows the pool, the chairs, the table, the house.

And nothing else.

He unrolls the entire film, looks at every single picture, and every single picture shows the same thing. The surface of the pool, yellow on the negatives, black deckchairs and a grey house. No people.

Frank slumps down on a chair and hardly even feels the throb of pain in his back. It's something that's happening far away.

How the h.e.l.l...

He takes the other reels out of the bath and unrolls them on the light box without bothering to dry them.

The same thing in every picture. The same subject, in different degrees of enlargement. On one film he is able to follow the sequence of events, remembers zooming in and out.

That's where Roberto was lying on the chair. That's where I zoomed in as she climbed on top of him.

But Roberto is not on the chair. And there is no Amanda riding him. There is only a chair, and a table with a book on it.

Frank has one hundred and eighty pictures of a patio with a pool in Djursholm. Nothing else.

He hangs the negatives up to dry and stands there with his arms dangling limply by his side. Has he gone mad, imagined the whole thing? No. He saw what he saw. Somehow the camera has been deceived.

I'm not having this.

By the time the negatives are dry he has set up the processor, and prints twenty pictures, four from each film, on 10 15 paper.

As the photographs emerge in the bath of fluid, they still show the same thing as the negatives, but he refuses to accept it.

There must be something there.

He wasn't hallucinating. Roberto and Amanda were there, just as clear whether he was looking through the lens or with the naked eye. What kind of illusion can tolerate all those changes of focus, go on for so long and be so detailed?

He examines the pictures closely. Nothing. In his agitation he has been careless with the exposure time: everything blue is a couple of nuances too pale. The sky is almost white. The surface of the pool...

Hang on, what's this...

He looks from one picture to the next. Takes out a magnifying gla.s.s and examines them even more closely. He had hoped to find some kind of...trace left by Roberto and the woman. That is not what he finds. But there is a difference between the pictures. He studies them carefully, one after the other, with the magnifying gla.s.s.

Of course it could be due to carelessness during the developing process, but in several of the pictures there is a faint shadow at the bottom of the pool. What has captured his attention is that the shadow moves. Changes shape. In some of the pictures it is no bigger than a football, in others it takes up a significant portion of the pool.

The shadow of a cloud...

Yes. If there had been any clouds.

At half past ten Frank is back in the car. There is a hole in the exhaust, and the engine roars throatily as he drives out towards Djursholm. A few hours earlier, when he was driving in the opposite direction, he was sitting here wondering what kind of new car he should buy when he had sold the pictures.

Almost amusing.

There are no pictures, no millions. He is able to accept it now. For some incomprehensible reason the subject was not captured on film. Terrible but true. OK. What he cannot accept is the idea that the subject never even existed. That he is-to put it bluntly-ready for the funny farm.

And there is, after all, something that can prove he isn't crazy. Yellow polka dots on a red background: the bikini that was thrown in the pool. If it's still lying on the bottom, then he saw what he saw. If it isn't...well, somebody might have removed it.

Or something.

He stops at the 7-Eleven on Sveavagen, buys a bar of chocolate and the evening papers, and stuffs the chocolate in his mouth on the way out.

The houses belonging to the multimillionaires sparkle like wedding cakes in the summer evening, and a faint aroma of barbecued meat drifts in through the open car window as he pulls up outside the house where he has spent the last few days sitting in the garden. The gates are closed, and the ba.s.s beat from some dance hit is pulsating out into the garden. Through the panorama windows Frank can see bodies moving. Marcus is having a party.

He sits there, uncertain what to do. The party could go on for hours, should he wait until it's finished? Or go in right away? He hasn't got the five thousand to give to Marcus, and he'll have all his cronies behind him, high as kites, yelling abuse as Frank climbs the tree...

No.

He picks up one of the evening papers, turning the pages distractedly, and suddenly stiffens. On the entertainment pages is a picture of Roberto and Amanda. They are standing side by side at what must be an airport. A heart surrounds their faces.

'LOVE IS IN THE AIR IN MEXICO'

Frank reads the caption. It says that the picture was taken the previous day at the airport in Cancun.

The couple have kept their relations.h.i.+p secret for a long time...a week's relaxation at a secret location in Mexico...future film project...new alb.u.m...left Sweden the day before yesterday...

Frank looks up from the paper, stares at the gates of the house with the pool. 'It's all lies,' he murmurs, without knowing exactly what he means.

Wrong. Something else is...wrong.

He looks at the picture in the paper. He sees it now. Amanda has short hair. She's had her hair cut since the last time he saw her on TV, at the Oscars ceremony. But the Amanda he saw by the pool a few hours ago had long hair.

He sits there in the car, trying to make sense of it: Amanda's long hair. The couple's stiff, unnatural movements.

The fact that they didn't appear on the film ought to be the most significant thing. And yet it didn't feel that way. The most important thing of all is the bikini, the red one with the yellow polka dots.

He closes his eyes, tries to picture it. The curve of Amanda's hips, Roberto's hand caressing the broad strip of elastic fabric. The big yellow polka dots. Then Maria: those sweaty moments behind the white wooden building where every single knot had been poked out to make peepholes.

It's...the same.

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