51. Flipping Through Pictures

They sat quietly for a minute after the door slammed. There was one suspect left. They needed to go through those photo albums.

The small boardroom in the station was rarely used and therefore clean and tidy, the chairs were nicely upholstered apart from the coffee stains and Kathy sank into one, glad to be in a different space after hours in interrogation rooms.

Brampton flipped open the lids of the banker’s boxes and peered inside. “Anything to tell me before we start going through all these pictures?”

“Grant took most of them seven or eight years ago, and they’re mostly around the beach at Channel Lane Point. That alone is interesting, the first murder happened there and Shaye whispered those words to me. There’s a lot of landscapes and girls on the beach,” she glanced at him, but he responded with a so what expression. “The last couple of albums I looked at had pictures of Catrina, it looks like he was infatuated, and a couple are definitely creepy.”

Rather than go straight to those photos, Kathy took him through the books in the order she had viewed them. It was slow going. They studied each page searching for clues to the cold case and anything that might connect them to the recent murder.    

The light faded outside the windows. Despite its padding, the chair was giving Kathy an ache in her thigh. She got up to pace around the room and did a couple of side kicks to release the tension.

“The martial arts stuff is getting to you,” he said drily. She stuck out her tongue. They had never spent such long hours together, a kind of battle-weary companionship had developed.

At last they got to the final albums, she hesitated before digging them out from the box.

“I forgot to say there are some nude photographs here. He was in an artistic phase, exploring the landscape of the body.” Brampton raised his eyebrows and she laughed. “Yes, that’s what I thought, too, a creative way to pick up liberal-minded girls.”

Sure enough, the first page of the second last album featured an unfamiliar girl perched on the arm of a battered armchair in a dorm room. Her demure cross-legged pose was at odds with the white crew cut, ear, nose and lip piercings and a tattoo of Albert Einstein stretching from ankle to knee on one slender leg.

“Moving right along,” said Brampton gruffly, flipping the page. Similar photos followed, some better than others, but most poorly lit. The nudes were interspersed with moody shots of snowy courtyards, where nature set the lighting for him. Halfway through, they changed to beach shots and studies of the pretty cottage, straightforward shots, close-ups of woodwork and shingles and studies of the roses round the window.

“Is this the place?”

Kathy nodded. “I think so. Channel Lane Point.”

    They moved on to the last album which opened with a beach landscape, empty except for a lone young woman staring up at the sky. It was taken with a telephoto lens and Kathy shuddered to think the woman likely thought she was alone.

The next page made Brampton’s eyebrows shoot up. Here was the headshot of Catrina Somers, her name in black ink below it. He turned back to the lonely beach figure, was it Catrina? Back to the headshot then on to the next page where he was confronted with the full-length nude. He looked up silently at Kathy who nodded.

It was artful, subtle, carefully posed and undoubtedly Catrina. Brampton flipped through four or five pages of smaller pictures of her, on the beach, walking along a road, some posed, others likely taken with a long lens.

“He was obsessed with her.”

Kathy sighed. “I wonder if she ever knew how much he loved her? Maybe he was too shy to tell her, but he couldn’t get enough of photographing her.”

Brampton leaned in closer and stared hard the next set of photos, the shots taken from outside the cottage through a window framed with roses. Catrina, naked and drying her wet hair, Catrina moving around the room, Catrina seemingly unaware she was being photographed.

Kathy paused for dramatic effect before turning the page, and there she was again, naked in the arms of a fully clothed man. She was bent backwards. The man’s face was obscured and so was the hand that held her head, her long hair flowing over it. His other hand was on the small of her back in plain view, but the picture was blurry, the hand looked large but they couldn’t make out any detail.

This was potentially the killer, but there was no way to identify him.

They finished the books, making notes here and there but not feeling they’d made any real progress. Kathy pushed her chair back, groaned and waited for him to speak. He rubbed his eyes and said nothing.

“Sandy, we’re missing something. I’ve got this feeling in my belly there’s something there. It’s not against the law to have photographed a girl who was later murdered, but it’s got to mean something. I can’t put my finger on it.”

Brampton carefully placed the albums back in the boxes and slipped on the lids. “We need to sleep on it. I have to turn my brain off for a bit. Maybe something will come to me in the middle of the night,” he stole a glance at her, but she didn’t react to the accidental innuendo.

“Let’s meet tomorrow at Rosy’s and go over it all. We’ve ruled out a number of people but it won’t hurt to revisit everybody and everything, stuff we know for sure and things that still doesn’t make sense. We’ll get this nailed down.”

Little did they know, what they would find would turn the whole case upside down.