Murrayl, his second wife, at a police scene-of-crime murder reconstruction in a town in the West Midlands. Bearing a strong resemblance to the murdered woman, Murrayl had volunteered to put on clothes similar to the ones the woman was wearing on the night she died, and follow the route from the commuter station to her home ten minutes’ walk away that she was taking when she disappeared. Hawkins had approached Murrayl at the end of the photo call and a few days later persuaded her to lie down in the weed-choked alley adjacent to a Salvation Army Citadel where the body had been found. He photographed her with a supermarket carrier bag taped over her head and her clothing disturbed, resting against a bunch of flowers with a card that said, ‘From regulars and staff at the Railway Inn. A tragic loss.’ Murrayl went on to do some glamour modelling and, now separated from Heath, currently works as a nineteen-forties-costumed cinema usherette at the Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank.
This time when Annie needs a light, Hawkins provides it with one of his best-known props: the veteran Zippo lighter with the inscription that reads, ‘Though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for I am the biggest bastard in the Valley.’ I notice that Annie cups his gaffer-taped hand in a way she failed to do with Myc Doohan, a charged but tentative contact, like Billie or Ella putting the lock on an old RKO steam-radio mike. ‘The left hand, which signifies unjustly the evil side of life,’ Hawkins says, ‘the sinister portion of space, the side from which we’re told we mustn’t come upon a corpse or an enemy, or a bird.’ Annie briefly touches her cigarette to the tip of the wayward, sheeting flame, and excuses herself.
Hawkins takes a lens out of his camera satchel and removes it from its chamois-leather wrapping. It locks into the body of the Nikon with an important, finely engineered snap. He brings the camera to his eye and demonstrates the soundless, smooth, oil-on-oil movement of the lens as it is focused. Then he sets the camera down and proceeds to something that I have started to suspect is coming. He takes the black draw-string bag from around his neck, and sits back to wait for Annie’s return.
The hands are the hands of a child, conceivably a baby: shrunken, dark-skinned, leathery-looking, the skin brought together where the wrists would be and secured with a metal band, like a blood sausage or a continental salami. Hawkins places the hands either side of the base of the glass from which Annie has been drinking, so that it looks like some shocked-to-your-socks appeal on behalf of the latest Third World drought and famine, or a sentimental Victorian funerary arrangement.
He has been here before. He waits for the tears to come, tracking down her freshened matte cheeks, over the no-make-up make-up of her spasming mouth, before snapping off the shot that casts her in the role of tragic wife, grieving mother; as participant now, rather than professional witness, dealing hands-off with the world, separate from what she sees.
‘Let smiles cease. Let laughter flee,’ Hawkins says. ‘This is the place where everybody finds out who they are.’
The tiny hands, loosely fisted around the stem of the glass, are patinated with a close, mottled pattern of amber and black-brown translucent tones; they look almost like an outgrowth of the laminate plastic surface of the table. I can see now that the glass-rings, far from being irregular or random, would form a pattern if reproduced over a larger area, and are an in-built part of the design.
*
Scott McGovern has attracted the inevitable cargo of loonies, the usual fruitcake fringe of clairvoyants, UFO spotters, astral seers, poison-pen letter writers, faith healers and intergallactic travellers. And, outside the hospital, some kind of demonstration is going on. But it is impossible to tell from the silent, circling, grave-faced
This time when Annie needs a light, Hawkins provides it with one of his best-known props: the veteran Zippo lighter with the inscription that reads, ‘Though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for I am the biggest bastard in the Valley.’ I notice that Annie cups his gaffer-taped hand in a way she failed to do with Myc Doohan, a charged but tentative contact, like Billie or Ella putting the lock on an old RKO steam-radio mike. ‘The left hand, which signifies unjustly the evil side of life,’ Hawkins says, ‘the sinister portion of space, the side from which we’re told we mustn’t come upon a corpse or an enemy, or a bird.’ Annie briefly touches her cigarette to the tip of the wayward, sheeting flame, and excuses herself.
Hawkins takes a lens out of his camera satchel and removes it from its chamois-leather wrapping. It locks into the body of the Nikon with an important, finely engineered snap. He brings the camera to his eye and demonstrates the soundless, smooth, oil-on-oil movement of the lens as it is focused. Then he sets the camera down and proceeds to something that I have started to suspect is coming. He takes the black draw-string bag from around his neck, and sits back to wait for Annie’s return.
The hands are the hands of a child, conceivably a baby: shrunken, dark-skinned, leathery-looking, the skin brought together where the wrists would be and secured with a metal band, like a blood sausage or a continental salami. Hawkins places the hands either side of the base of the glass from which Annie has been drinking, so that it looks like some shocked-to-your-socks appeal on behalf of the latest Third World drought and famine, or a sentimental Victorian funerary arrangement.
He has been here before. He waits for the tears to come, tracking down her freshened matte cheeks, over the no-make-up make-up of her spasming mouth, before snapping off the shot that casts her in the role of tragic wife, grieving mother; as participant now, rather than professional witness, dealing hands-off with the world, separate from what she sees.
‘Let smiles cease. Let laughter flee,’ Hawkins says. ‘This is the place where everybody finds out who they are.’
The tiny hands, loosely fisted around the stem of the glass, are patinated with a close, mottled pattern of amber and black-brown translucent tones; they look almost like an outgrowth of the laminate plastic surface of the table. I can see now that the glass-rings, far from being irregular or random, would form a pattern if reproduced over a larger area, and are an in-built part of the design.
*
Scott McGovern has attracted the inevitable cargo of loonies, the usual fruitcake fringe of clairvoyants, UFO spotters, astral seers, poison-pen letter writers, faith healers and intergallactic travellers. And, outside the hospital, some kind of demonstration is going on. But it is impossible to tell from the silent, circling, grave-faced
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