Thicker Than Water

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"After half an hour of methodical but unproductive rummaging, all I’d come up with was Kenny’s porn stash tucked away on the top shelf of the wardrobe and a shoebox behind the porn that was full of old decks of playing cards, all apparently well used. Sometimes I can get emotional resonances from objects, too, although they tend to be more muted and tenuous than the ones I get from touching people. I took off one glove and touched the inside edge of the box, very lightly. It echoed with pulses of old excitement, anticipation, pleasure, layered very deep and very strong.

Evidently Kenny had enjoyed the odd game of poker.

Thinking about the absence of photos I realised that I was ignoring the obvious. I went back through into the living room and checked the bookcase, where I’d suddenly remembered that one of the book spines was a lot bigger than the rest: yeah, there among the Jeffrey Archers and the Wilbur Smiths was a photo album bound in red leather-effect plastic.

Slipping my glove back on, I drew the album out with a feeling of muted satisfaction. This might at least give me a feel for what was going on in Kenny’s life: probably not a smoking pistol, but maybe something that would point me in another direction. At the very least, I’d get to meet the elusive wife and kid.

In fact, I got one out of two. The album started with baby photos of a chubby, wrinkled Winston Churchill-alike baby who progressed over the space of ten or twelve pages into a much less chubby toddler and then into an increasingly tall and gangly boy with riotously unruly brown hair and a sheepish grin that seemed to be his default option when facing a camera.

I flicked a few more pages and watched him grow into an even more gangly, longer-haired teen. And in the process I found the first mutilated photo. After that there were many more.

It wasn’t the boy’s image that was being mutilated: it was that of a woman who was sometimes with him - holding him as a baby, cuddling him when he was older - sometimes alone and sometimes posing beside a man who was unmistakably Kenny.

In every photo where she appeared, the woman’s head had been excised with angular slashes from a knife or razor blade - usually in situ, creating holes that went right through to the other side of the page and cut out irrelevant wedges from the photos that backed onto them.