Free Naomi's Room by Jonathan Aycliffe Page B

Spitalfields was a major centre for Huguenot refugees at one time.’
    It was mid-morning. Lewis had come straight from London. I watched him coming up the path towards the house, nervous, glancing around him, and looking up from time to time. I knew what he was looking at, looking for. He had his camera with him this time, in one of those large bags photographers carry.
    ‘Did you get the photographs?’ he asked.
    I nodded.
    ‘Is that why you rang?’
    ‘No. Something else . . . Something else has happened.’ I told him of the incidents, keeping my narrative as plain and unemotional as possible. But I could see his eyes widen as the force of my words sank in. When I had finished, I picked up the folder.
    ‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘Something related to your photographs.’
    ‘I kind of thought it might be that,’ he said. He had an instinct, Lewis, a sixth sense. They say the Celts are a bit like that, a little fey, attuned to other dimensions. Sons of Arthur. Well, perhaps. Lewis had it at least. And lived to regret it.
    Out of the folder I took two sets of photographs. I laid them down side by side on the table.
    ‘I was disturbed,’ I said. ‘By the little girls. The ones in your photographs. Something about them kept nagging at me. They seemed familiar, as though I’d seen them before. Does that make sense to you?’
    He nodded.
    ‘Go on,’ he said.
    ‘Well, I couldn’t place them at first, no matter how much I thought about them. And then . . . Just after I went up to the attic, the time Laura heard footsteps, I remembered.’
    I took a photograph from the first of the two small piles. In the foreground was Laura, several years younger, her arm resting on the stone balustrade of a low bridge. It could, perhaps, have been Cambridge, but it was not. The photograph had been taken on our honeymoon in Venice. A couple of months after we bought the house.
    ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Look behind her.’
    Lewis picked up the photograph and looked carefully. Standing on the bridge, a few paces behind Laura, were two small girls, hand in hand, smiling at the camera.
    ‘Were they visible when you took the photograph?’ Lewis asked. ‘I mean, can you remember if you actually saw them on the bridge?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘It’s impossible to remember now. I do recall being a bit puzzled when the shots were developed. I was sure I’d posed Laura on an empty bridge. I didn’t much like shots that had other people in. The bridge was somewhere behind St Mark’s, I’m sure of that. But people are everywhere in Venice, it’s hard to shake them off, to be on your own. So I thought the girls must have appeared just as I pressed the shutter.’ I paused. ‘Now, look at this.’
    Another photograph of Venice, this time a shot of us together, taken by a waiter in a little restaurant off the Strada Nuova.
    ‘Look closely,’ I said.
    At a table to our left, a family was sitting eating. A man in black, a woman in grey, two little girls in long skirts. All were looking at the camera. There was something about the man’s face that I did not like.
    ‘And here,’ I said, pushing another photograph across the table.
    Laura in St Mark’s square feeding pigeons. Barely visible in the crowd, unnoticed until a day ago, two small girls staring, not at the camera this time, but at Laura.
    ‘There are others,’ I said. ‘You have to look hard, but they’re there. Sometimes the children on their own, sometimes the woman, sometimes all three.’
    ‘What about the man?’
    ‘He only appears in the restaurant photograph.’
    Lewis nodded, scrutinizing the photographs carefully one by one. He used one of those odd magnifying devices photographers carry, a small stand raised above the surface by about an inch.
    ‘And these?’ he asked, tapping his finger on the second pile.
    ‘I had these developed yesterday,’ I said. ‘They’re photographs we took in the week or two before Christmas, up until . . . Up until