The aluminium legs of the tripod click into place against the floorboards. Frances Whitlam works with the practiced economy of a woman who has spent forty years chasing the light across four continents, her hands steady as she tightens the mounting plate. The spare bedroom of Beryl’s cottage is thick with the scent of old lavender and cedarwood, a stillness that the village of Thistle Fen seems to have perfected.
Outside, the afternoon is bruising into a cold Lincolnshire purple. The river runs like a vein of mercury behind the orchard, sluggish and heavy with silt. She adjusts the focus ring, the long lens zooming past the gnarled apple trees to where the reeds shiver in the wake of a passing heron. It is a quiet, stagnant beauty. Too quiet for a Sunday, she thinks, peering through the glass at the opposite bank.
She catches a flash of movement where the current pulls against the drainage gate. It is not the silver roll of a pike or the ripple of a water rat. In the bottom corner of the viewfinder, a shape is rising from the black water.
