or Pink Knickers or some daft name. Anyway, it was round the corner from Windlesham Street, and this Cordle was in there having a pint after one of his sessions. Heâd got a lot of his equipment with him, in cases, like, and Dale struck up a conversation because of that, and he took it out and showed him. He was the first professional photographer Dale had met, and he was a very enthusiastic kid . . . a lovely lad . . . â He dabbed at his eyes. âAnyway, they got on like a house on fire. Very nice man, Dale saidâhe always said that. Give you the top brick off the chimney, he would, according to Dale, and always helping people one way or another. Anyway, the upshot was he said Dale could tag along to some of his sessions if he wanted, and Dale was over the moon. Not for money, you understand, just for the experience. Thatâs how it happened. Dale used to go along two or three times a week. Felt he was really learning the practical side.â
âThese sessions you mentionâdid Dale tell you precisely what they were?â
âYes. There wasnât any harm in them, so far as I could see. You canât shield a boy from seeing a bit of titty, not these days, can you? It was mostly girls wagging their boobs and blokes flexing their muscles.â
âThere was nothing . . . more?â
âWell, he did other things, this Cordle chap. There was countryside stuff, and buildings, and that. Dale went with him once down to Essexâyou know, thatched cottages and all that malarky. Then a lot of stuff for some architectural paper or other. Dale liked that. He loved buildings, specially old buildings. I used to say to him: âYou like the buildings better than the bodybuilding,â and heâd say: âThey last longer.â I think thatâs what he would have gone in for, photographing buildings . . . if heâd lived.â
âAnd there was neverâwell, never any hard porn photography in these sessions?â
âOh no. Never nothing like that.â
âAnd you think he would have told you if there were?â
He thought long.
âYes, I do. I really think he wouldâve.â
I had to respect that. But it didnât stop me keeping an open mind.
â¢Â â¢Â â¢
âBut he was a good man!â
Mrs. Cordleâs outburst was at once an expression of complete mystification and a personal protest to the President of the Immortals. When I interviewed her, she had just returned from her motherâs, where she had been told the news. Ellen CordleâNellie, I guessed, to her husbandâwas a slim, fresh-looking woman in her late forties, with a faded prettiness that in other circumstances would have been very endearing. Now, though not weeping, she was clearly in pain from shock and sorrow.
âIâm sure he was,â I said awkwardly.
âI suppose youâve heard lots of bereaved people say that, havenât you?â she said, shrewdly. âWell, I meant it literally: he was good. You think that because he worked for a rather tatty magazine, bought mostly by pretty pathetic people, that he must have been a bit like that himself: grubby round the edgesâI bet thatâs how youâve got him marked down in your own mind, isnât it?â
I was in fact finding it rather difficult to mark Bob Cordle down in my own mind.
âNot really,â I said. âI heard from Dale Herbertâs father how enormously kind your husband had been to his son.â
âOh God, that poor lad . . . My husband treated him like a son. Weâve got a daughter, you know, but she married and went off to Australia . . . Bob thought the world of Dale. But it wasnât just him. He was good to anybodyâeverybody, even if he didnât particularly like them. I used to tell him he was daft, but I wouldnât have had him any other way. And he used to say that