Matt Johns had told him to take a screenshot the next time something appeared. Jason emailed him the one he had just taken, then picked up a new gesso board and placed it on his easel. He donned his apron and gloves, then assembled his painting tools, with difficulty, having to concentrate hard, his thoughts all over the place.
He walked over to the window. Watched a small group of people in white oversuits for a few moments: two of them on their hands and knees, around the area where the worker died. Did they need to be this thorough, he wondered? But at least the site was silent.
Then he picked up a pencil, returned to his easel, opened his photos on his phone and looked for the photographs he had taken in the pub, of the elderly couple in their bright cagoules.
They weren’t there.
They had to be! He’d shown one to Emily just ten minutes ago.
He searched again. Again.
His phone rang.
‘Jason, hi.’
It was Matt Johns.
‘You just sent me a blank email – did you forget the attachment?’
‘I’m sorry – it was a screenshot, as you asked for. I had more digits appear, another sequence, this time on my phone and laptop. I’ll check and send them again.’
‘No problem,’ Johns said.
Jason checked the sent folder on his phone email. There was one to Matt. He opened it. It was blank.
He checked his online album. Any screenshot he took should automatically be saved to this. But just like the vanished old couple in their cagoules, there was nothing.
‘I can’t see them,’ he said lamely.
‘Do you have the details?’ Johns asked. ‘I can do my own search.’
‘I’m pretty sure it said JDEAD and the numbers zero and nine.’
He ended the call, then focused on his blank gesso board. Sod the photographs; he could remember the couple so clearly. It was their stance he needed to get right. The woman prim and upright, the man – her husband most likely – brow-beaten, defeated by life, sitting all hunched in front of her. Worshipping at his own sad temple. The wife with her iron-grey hair who wiped the floor with him.
He set to work, sketching out their positions. The sanctimonious look on the woman’s face, doubtless a regular at the parish church. Defeat written all over her husband. Someone miserable as sin, who had left it too late to change anything in his life. Stuck, until death did them part, with a woman he clearly disliked and who clearly disliked him back, every bit as much.
Mr and Mrs Angry.
Yes!
He began to sketch with sudden, furious energy.