Beautiful

The fundamentals of the situation are: he doesn’t know what the situation is; he doesn’t know if she even exists, let alone has a name.

Antonio Andolini (an assumed name, changed to upset his mother, confuse his father, prevent his erroneous ex-wife tracking him down) placed his distinctly un-Italian, clearly Irish head in his hands and sighed. You could sustain an entire colony of mosquitoes in the heated vapour he had emitted from his mouth that day. His small, dank office was tropical with it.

His fingers traced backwards into the velvet pelt of his buzzcut and gently kneaded his scalp. He dropped his hands to the back of his neck and rolled his head backwards, eyes closed, aching and stiff and longing to go home. But a private investigator has no home but the street, no bed but the front seat of a car, no life but the observed lives of the people he follows.

Andolini groaned inwardly at how much his internal monologue began to sound like a cheap Philip Marlowe impersonation.

The woman in the photograph was the obsession of a client. The man had come, furtive and paranoid, two months ago, brandishing the picture and urgently, conspiratorially, demanding to know whether Andolini could help him find her.

Andolini had looked at the picture. She was a brunette. Nothing special. Average build, average features, pretty in an abstract way. He had checked that the photograph was genuine; not some clipping from a magazine, not some faked publicity shot glossed up to look like a personal snap. It was important to be sure you weren’t taking on the work of an out and out crank. Out and outers never paid up.

This one was genuine. He caught sight of the subtle elegance of his wristwatch as he stretched his hand out from the cuff of his well-tailored jacket. He had peeled off a couple of hundred from a roll of cash as a first instalment, without even asking what the rate was, or whether he needed to pay anything up front.

“To cover your expenses,” was all he’d said.

Andolini could barely believe his luck. His daily grind only ever involved shadowing salesmen with bad skin whose wives were convinced they were having affairs with lacquered secretaries the length and breadth of the city. Salesmen whose only reason for not getting it up for the wife was that they were ground down by the desolation of their existence, driving their samples around in Vectras, jollying up potential clients, flirting with the lacquered and hard-faced secretaries their wives didn’t understand would never yield.

He took their money, though. It was theirs to do with as they wished. They had earned it, the same way he earned it from them by taking on their jobs.

Two months, though, and he had got nowhere. His client had no extra information beyond the photograph for him, other than that he had spent the day with her looking at art in a private gallery, but when he went back (to find her, not to buy any of the paintings), the owner denied all knowledge of her. The photograph, he claimed, had appeared in the inside pocket of his jacket. Just appeared. He had no idea how it had arrived there. The only reason he had found it was because he had been looking for an old receipt from a business lunch to satisfy the tax man.

Andolini hadn’t dared to think how much that business lunch had cost, if the tax man was interested in the receipt. A far cry from his £3.98 sandwich from Greggs, accompanied by a polystyrene cup of their best brown sludge coffee.

His whole existence was tumbling further into cliché with each and every day.

So, the task that was set him was to find this woman. Because now his client was obsessed with her. He couldn’t accept that it was a brief encounter, that he was only ever supposed to see her that once. He had looked at that photograph every day for three months, and now Andolini had looked at it every day for a further two months, and he could feel the obsession starting to creep around his own gills. She was nothing, but she was everything. Beautiful, but was she? She was standard dark hair, green eyes, pale skin. Welsh, he thought. Somewhere along the line. Not Irish. Not Scots. We’re all Celtic mongrels, he thought. He was third generation Irish if you traced the route from Kerry to Levenshulme. English if you took a more Jewish slant on inheritance and looked at his mum.

The photograph is sitting flat on the desk in front of him. In spite of all the handling, all the pulling in and out of his pocket, showing it to people, letting them handle it, it looks as pristine as it must have done the day it was developed.

If it was developed.

Andolini was getting one of those hair prickling on back of neck feelings about this picture. It just appeared in his client’s pocket. It never deteriorated in appearance. The woman, to all intents and purposes, never even existed.

Stupid. He’d watched too many episodes of Dr Who, with his notepad of intelligent paper, or whatever it was he carried round with him. There was nothing supernatural or alien about this photograph. It was just printed on really high quality paper. And of course the woman pictured in it existed. She just didn’t want to be found, was all.

Strange, though, how it seemed to always be at body temperature; how, sometimes, he could swear that he felt a second heart beat if the picture was in his inner coat pocket, near his own heart.

His eyes were gritty and stinging with tiredness, gone small with fatigue, bloodshot round the rims. An attractive look.

He switched off the light and left the office, locking the door behind him. He left the photograph sitting on his desk. If he’d glanced at it even once, even quickly, before he’d shut the door behind him, he might have seen that it seemed to be glowing slightly.

The woman fumbled slightly with the lock. Although it locked with a key from the outside, it had a thumb turn lock on the inside. Someone was paranoid about getting locked in, she thought. She managed to release the lock, but had to leave the door unsecured when she left the office. She didn’t have a key. She had never been there before.

She walked down the corridor to the stairs. She wondered where she was this time. Her clothes felt slightly damp. That office had been slightly damp. Dark, too.

She took the stairs quickly, her descent to street level rapid. She hoped that there wasn’t any sort of alarm system protecting the building. She hadn’t picked up on one. She hated it when she had to dismantle the electronics. It gave her a headache.

The main exit was a doddle, after the mechanical technicalities of that lock upstairs. This was a simple paddle release. A swipe card mechanism. Secured against entry only, not against exit.

She emerged onto the street. It had been raining. The light was strange. Sort of pink and grey at the same time. It was too early for sunset, though. She wondered whether her visual cortex was playing up again. She would have to get that seen to if it was.

She walked quickly away from the office block, hoping that she was heading in the right direction.

Antonio Andolini just missed seeing her turn the corner at the opposite end of the street. It had felt wrong, leaving the photograph on the desk like that. Callous, somehow. He climbed the stairs back up to his office and frowned when the door opened as he pushed the key into the lock. He pushed it a bit more, cautiously, peering round the edge of the frame to see if he could sense any movement inside the room.

“Hello?” he said. “Is anyone in there?”

Stupid of him. Of course a burglar would tell him if he or she were in there.

He pushed the door open more fully, at arm’s length, not wanting to be in the line of fire, should it come down to that.

With the door open, he could see practically all the office. There was nobody in there. He relaxed slightly. He mustn’t have locked the door properly. That would be it.

He walked into the room, towards the desk. He could see already that the photograph wasn’t there. He patted his coat pockets, although he knows that he didn’t pick it up, didn’t stow it away in any one of his many pockets. Not even the trouser pockets he was checking at that moment.

He stood, looking down at the empty surface of the desk, puzzled and rubbing his chin with his right hand. No photograph.

He didn’t know what to do. It had definitely been there as he left. And now it had simply disappeared.

He took his phone from his pocket and dialled his client’s number.

“Bad news,” he launched straight in. There was silence on the other end of the line. “I’ve lost the photograph.”

“I’m sorry,” his client said, in his educated, clipped tones. “To whom am I speaking?”

“Antonio Andolini,” Andolini replied. “The private investigator you hired to track down the woman in the photograph?” He made the statement into a question, in the hope that it would trigger his client’s memory.

“I’m sorry,” the voice said, a little impatiently. “I’m afraid I know nobody by that name.”

Andolini’s phone beeped. His client had hung up on him. He dialled back.

“Andolini,” he said. “Antonio Andolini. You came to my office two months ago and paid me in cash to track down a woman you met in a private art gallery three months prior to that.”

There was silence in response.

“You found a photograph of her in your jacket pocket?” he cajoled.

More silence.

Give me a break, Andolini thought. He tried one last time.

“When you showed the photograph to the gallery owner, he denied all knowledge of the woman having worked there.”

His client cleared his throat.

“Mr… Andolini?”

“Andolini, yes.”

“Mr Andolini, I really have no idea who you are, or how you obtained my number. I purchased art from a private gallery five months ago, yes. Although how you could know that is beyond me. But I was assisted by a young man, who is still employed there. I know this because we have an… arrangement…”

It was Andolini’s turn to be silent. Then he spoke up again.

“I’m very sorry to have troubled you,” was all he said, and hung the phone up.

He stood looking down at the desk, at the place where the photograph had been. Something caught his eye. A piece of paper, something white and faintly glowing, had fallen just under the desk, and he could see the corner of it now.

He bent down to pick it up. It was a photograph, lying face down. He took it in his hand and turned it over. It was a photograph of a woman. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Tall, slim, blonde. She was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts. Summer, sometime. Perhaps on holiday.

He felt like he knew her. The paper that the photograph was printed on was warm to the touch. He stroked a finger along its surface. The woman’s smile seemed to broaden slightly. His finger left no mark on the image’s surface.

He sat down at the desk and stared at the picture. At the woman. She was so beautiful, and he knew that he would not be able to rest until he had found her.

© J R Hargreaves May 2006