Chapter 4
A3
You’re picking up where you left off.
On the Saturday she began by trying to manufacture it.
It was the only intelligent thing left. If a file on her phone carried a capture date set a week in the future, then there was a way of producing that result, and if she found the way, the whole thing would become a computing problem again. She had made coffee at seven, taken out the work laptop, connected two disks, and put beside the keyboard a spiral notebook on which she wrote: what ought to work.
She spent the day on it.
She started with the simplest thing: dating a file in the future and getting it accepted. That is child's play on a computer. She took a photograph of the living room, rewrote the capture field to 20 March, and put it back in the library. The service accepted it — and logged it as an addition, filing it obediently at the end of the queue with a discreet note saying it had been imported from a computer. Three lines of trace. The Friday file had none.
She started again through the phone itself, changing the device clock. The service corrected it on its own and grumbled in its log.
She forced a sync and cut the network halfway through, to see whether you could obtain a half-written item. She obtained a half-written item: a grey square with a green band, exactly what the theory predicted, and it looked like nothing at all.
She deliberately corrupted a backup. She opened a copy with a hex editor, changed four bytes at random in the middle of the file, closed it. The photograph of the Leith wall went magenta across its lower third and shifted by one line. She changed forty bytes. The lower third became noise. She changed four thousand. There was no image at all.
She wrote underneath: you never obtain something else. You obtain less.
At eleven she rang the photo service's support line, because you have to, because you cannot say afterwards that you did not.
She got a queue, then a pleasant voice, and she set out her case in order: item identifier, original date, modification date, fingerprints before and after, absence of any import trace.
— You may have pressed edit without meaning to, said the voice.
— Editing would have created a version. There would be a version.
— There is always a version.
— Precisely. There is not one.
A silence. A sound of typing.
— I can see a modification event at 08:43:07 on the 13th, said the voice, with what sounded like genuine interest for about four seconds. That comes from your device. Do you have the device with you?
— I have had it since the start of this call.
— Then it is the device.
— The device was on my table and I was looking at it.
— Madam, I cannot see anything other than what the log tells me, and the log tells me it is the device.
She hung up after eighteen minutes with a case number, the certainty of having dealt with somebody decent, and the very precise sensation of having pushed a door set into a wall.
She wrote in the notebook: everybody is right. It is the device. It is me.
At one o'clock she ate standing up, a cracker, and turned the page.
Then she looked for what she would have looked for on behalf of a client: who could have got in.
She went through the devices connected to the account, one by one, and there were four, all hers, all where they should be. Open sessions. Connections over the last thirty days, with cities. Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Glasgow on 2 February — her sister, her sister's computer, a weekend. Active shares: two albums, one with Morag, the other with a colleague who had left in 2022. Authorised applications. Passwords, all of which she changed, including the ones that had nothing to do with anything, because the act felt good.
She followed the logic to the end: she considered Daniel.
She did it properly, without emotion, the way you eliminate a hypothesis. He did not know how to use a hex editor. He did not know how to take a screenshot without asking either. He lost his keys in the bowl. And above all, the image carried no trace of any device but her own, which would have required of him the work of a forger whose necessity nobody in the world could have imagined.
She wrote: it is not him, and looked at the sentence, and found it obscene, and did not tear the page out.
At three she went out.
The print shop was ten minutes away on foot, under a tired sign, and the man behind the counter was used to people having family photographs enlarged. She handed over the file on a memory stick.
— What size do you want it?
— A3. Matt. No retouching.
— We usually correct the light a bit.
— Especially not.
He shrugged and started the print. Ellie looked at the wall, the display frames, a dog in a suit, a couple on a beach, a baby asleep in a basket. She heard the machine behind the partition, and she was suddenly physically, absurdly afraid that the sheet would come out and the man would look at it.
He brought it out without looking at it. He saw three hundred a day.
She paid, rolled the sheet into a tube, and went home.
The print changed everything, and she understood it the moment she unrolled it on the dining table, the four corners held down by books.
A phone screen is ten centimetres across. You see on it what you are looking for. An A3 sheet is forty-two centimetres wide, and on it you see what you were not looking for: the edges, the corners, the things the eye skips when the image is small because the middle is shouting.
She got out the desk magnifier, the one with the black plastic handle, bought for reading the dimensions on Daniel's drawings, and she settled on a method, because without a method she was going to look at the same thing a hundred times.
She divided the sheet into sixteen rectangles in light pencil, in the margin. She numbered them. She began with sixteen, bottom right, the furthest from the body.
It took her two hours to do all sixteen.
She noted everything. The waxed boards and the paler strip. The foot of the radiator, the paint that had run and set in a tear, the nut, the dust. The bottom of the duvet, whose cover she recognised — the striped one, bought in spring, the one they used when the other was in the wash. The corner of the bed. Daniel's calf, bare, and his right foot turned inward in a way that does not happen to somebody lying down.
And in rectangle eleven, against the skirting board, the dark rectangle.
She had taken it for a shadow on the first day, for a book on the second. It was neither. Under the magnifier you could see the thin pale strip running along one of the long sides, and the point of a lens, and above all the way the floor was lit just in front of it: a puddle of cold light, rectangular, with a border.
A phone, stood on its edge, screen lit, turned towards the room.
Ellie sat down.
It was not a dropped object. A dropped object does not stand itself upright against a skirting board with its screen facing the scene. Somebody had put it there. Somebody had propped it, and had taken the time to prop it, in a room where a man was on the floor.
She wrote in the notebook, in capitals, a sentence that would carry her for six days and that was wrong:
Somebody is filming.
She rang Daniel at five. He was at his cousin's in Portobello, taking down a conservatory, and there was wind in the phone.
— When will you be back?
— Eight? Half past eight. We have found asbestos.
— You are not to touch it.
— It is not asbestos. Gavin says it is asbestos because he wants to stop.
— Put Gavin on.
— You are not going to interrogate my cousin.
— Put Gavin on.
She heard Daniel's laugh move away from the microphone, then come back.
— He says you are the only person who frightens him.
— Good.
There was a gap, wind, and the sound of a drill somewhere.
— Are you all right? he said.
— Why?
— Because you are ringing. You never ring for nothing.
She looked at the tube propped against the table leg, the notebook, the sixteen pencilled rectangles.
— I wanted to know about tonight, she said.
— All right.
He did not believe her, and he did not ask, and that was precisely what she had obtained by ringing: one minute of his voice, and one more debt.
She took the sheet up again at six, the other way round, starting with rectangle one.
She learned that day something she would never forget: an image does not contain what it shows, it also contains everything it let in by accident. The photographer chooses the centre. Nobody chooses the edges. The edges tell the truth because nobody is looking after them.
She was on rectangle four, top left, the magnifier three centimetres from the paper, trying to decide whether the pale mark above the skirting board was a reflection from the window or something else, when the phone vibrated on the table beside the print.
Once only. The small dull knock of plastic against wood.
She did not move for three seconds.
The oven clock, in the kitchen, said two minutes past seven.