Bodies

Bodies Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Bodies Read Online Free PDF
Author: Robert Barnard
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. He’d 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 . . . ” He dabbed at his eyes. “Anyway, they got on like a house on fire. Very nice man, Dale said—he 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. That’s how it happened. Dale used to go along two or three times a week. Felt he was really learning the practical side.”
    â€œThese sessions you mention—did Dale tell you precisely what they were?”
    â€œYes. There wasn’t any harm in them, so far as I could see. You can’t 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€œThere was nothing . . . more?”
    â€œWell, he did other things, this Cordle chap. There was countryside stuff, and buildings, and that. Dale went with him once down to Essex—you 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: ‘You like the buildings better than the bodybuilding,’ and he’d say: ‘They last longer.’ I think that’s what he would have gone in for, photographing buildings . . . if he’d lived.”
    â€œAnd there was never—well, never any hard porn photography in these sessions?”
    â€œOh no. Never nothing like that.”
    â€œAnd you think he would have told you if there were?”
    He thought long.
    â€œYes, I do. I really think he would’ve.”
    I had to respect that. But it didn’t stop me keeping an open mind.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    â€œBut he was a good man!”
    Mrs. Cordle’s 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 mother’s, where she had been told the news. Ellen Cordle—Nellie, I guessed, to her husband—was 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.
    â€œI’m sure he was,” I said awkwardly.
    â€œI suppose you’ve heard lots of bereaved people say that, haven’t you?” she said, shrewdly. “Well, 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 edges—I bet that’s how you’ve got him marked down in your own mind, isn’t it?”
    I was in fact finding it rather difficult to mark Bob Cordle down in my own mind.
    â€œNot really,” I said. “I heard from Dale Herbert’s father how enormously kind your husband had been to his son.”
    â€œOh God, that poor lad . . . My husband treated him like a son. We’ve got a daughter, you know, but she married and went off to Australia . . . Bob thought the world of Dale. But it wasn’t just him. He was good to anybody—everybody, even if he didn’t particularly like them. I used to tell him he was daft, but I wouldn’t have had him any other way. And he used to say that
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