Read Chapter 2: A Favor for a Foot

The darkroom smelled of acetic acid and patience. Mara’s fingertips were stained the color of bruises as she watched the last print float in the tray, image bleeding into being like a secret finally told. Robbie Vale mid-stride, bass slung low, lips parted around a snarl. The flash had caught the sweat on his collarbone. She’d gotten him. She’d gotten all of them.

She slid the prints into a manila envelope and checked the clock. Eleven a.m. The Yew Tree, a pub off Wardour Street that smelled of stale ale and ambition, was where the roadie had said Dex held court before the Electric Ballroom gig. She had twelve quid to her name and a roll of film left undeveloped because she’d spent her last bit of change on the prints she now carried. This had to work.

Dex was easy to spot. He wasn’t the loudest man in the corner booth, but he was the stillest, a smoke-tendril curling from his cigarette while younger men in cheap suits leaned in to whisper. His eyes moved slow, cataloging, the way a buyer looked at cattle. Mara walked over, set the envelope on the table, and sat down before anyone could tell her to leave.

Dex didn’t look at her. He looked at the envelope.

“You’re the one they said snuck into the Blue Cat,” he said. His voice was rough, like cloth dragged over a nail.

“I’m the one who got the shots nobody else did,” she said.

He opened the flap. Pulled out the prints one by one. His expression didn’t change—not at the strobe-lit chaos of the drummer mid-crash, not at the singer’s mouth wide in a scream you could almost hear. Then he got to the one of Robbie. He held it for three long heartbeats.

“This one,” he said. “He looks like he wants to kill you.”

“He does.”

Dex almost smiled. He stubbed out his cigarette and looked at her properly for the first time. Took in the leather jacket with the patched elbow, the Leica around her neck like a second collar, the ink under her nails she hadn’t bothered to scrub.

“I’ve got a label showcase Thursday. Two bands. I need contact sheets by Friday morning. Pay’s twenty-five quid.”

Twenty-five pounds. It was insulting. A man would get sixty for the same work, she knew it, and Dex knew she knew it. But it was also an in. She did the arithmetic in her head—food, more film, maybe bus fare so she wouldn’t have to walk six miles to a shoot in her only pair of boots that didn’t leak.

“Fine,” she said.

Dex slid a card across the table. “One job first. Lenny Marsh’s doing a promo shoot for his new act. He wants a photographer with a good eye and a closed mouth. He called me. I told him I knew someone.”

Mara picked up the card. Lenny Marsh—she’d heard the name whispered in the dark corners of recording studios, always with a wary glance over the shoulder. A producer. A label owner. A man whose acts either got famous or got vanished.

“What kind of promo shoot?” she asked.

“The kind that pays thirty quid and asks no questions. You take the pictures, you hand over the negatives, you forget what you saw. Can you do that?”

Something cold tickled the back of her neck. But thirty quid was thirty more than nothing, and a job for Lenny meant Dex owed her a proper favor. “I can do that,” she said.

Dex nodded. “Show the card at the front desk. Tomorrow, two o’clock. Don’t be late. Lenny doesn’t like lateness.” He leaned forward, and for a moment his eyes weren’t cattle-buyer eyes. They were something sharper. “And don’t get clever. That’s my job.”

---

The studio was in a basement on Greek Street, a door with a frosted glass panel and no name on it. Mara knocked. A slot slid open, an eye inspected the card she held up, and the door buzzed.

Inside was all velvet and low light. Furniture that didn’t match, plants that didn’t grow. A chandelier crusted with dust. Lenny Marsh was a thin man in a linen suit that might have been expensive ten years ago, when it fit him. His grip was dry and light, like handling a dead bird.

“They told me you’re the best,” he said, without preamble. “Don’t often get women doing this work. Must be a head for heights.”

Mara kept her face neutral. “I’m ready when you are.”

Lenny gestured to a back room where a girl—she couldn’t have been older than eighteen—sat on a low stool under a single hot lamp. She was dressed in a slip that might have been meant to look elegant and instead looked borrowed. Her eyes had the flat shine of someone on something, or someone who’d been told to look dreamy and hadn’t been told when to stop.

“Sophie here’s my new discovery,” Lenny said. “She’s going to be a star. I want shots that sell the dream. Classy, you understand. A little sad, maybe. That’s what men like. A beautiful woman who looks like she needs saving.”

Mara looked at Sophie. Sophie looked at the floor. The same floor Mara’s feet were on, which meant the same power imbalance, just in different heels.

The shoot took an hour. Mara clicked through two rolls, directing Sophie gently, trying to find the light that made her look human instead of hunted. Lenny stood in the doorway the whole time, smoking, watching her hands as much as the girl.

When it was done, Mara pulled the film canisters from the camera. Lenny’s palm was out before she could pocket them.

“All of it,” he said.

Mara hesitated. Just a beat too long.

Lenny’s smile didn’t move, but his eyes went cold. “I said all of it, love. Everything on those rolls. Nothing else leaves with you.”

She handed them over. She’d been ready for that, had taken a practice roll earlier at the market outside. There was one frame on the second roll—just one—that she’d angled at Sophie when Lenny was checking his watch. The girl’s real face. Not the dreamy vacant mask, but a flicker of genuine fear, the moment her composure cracked.

It was somewhere in the film she’d handed over, Mara was fairly sure. Unless she was wrong about which roll was which.

Lenny handed her thirty quid in damp notes. “Pleasure doing business. Dex says you’re shooting his showcase Thursday. Good. I told him I’d keep an eye out for talent.” He glanced at Sophie, then back at Mara. “You’re good. Know what you might consider doing instead of pointing that thing at other people’s careers? Start your own.”

It was almost a compliment. It came out like a threat.

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She was at the Electric Ballroom when the Unknowns soundchecked Thursday, early enough to stake out her spot at the barrier. Dex had given her a laminated pass that said PHOTO on it, which got her past the bouncer and into a hall still smelling of cleaner and yesterday’s sweat.

The band was loose on stage. The singer, Kit, was running scales. Drummer and guitarist traded riffs. And Robbie stood at the edge of the stage, tuning his bass, head down, the long hair hiding his face.

Mara raised her camera. Took a test shot. The shutter clicked like a cricket.

Robbie’s head snapped up.

He saw her. His eyes narrowed, and then he was jumping off the stage, landing in front of her with an easy grace that made her breath catch despite herself. He was taller than she remembered. Up close, the glare from the club took on texture—annoyance, maybe, and something else she couldn’t name.

“You’re back,” he said.

“I’m working.”

“Working,” he repeated, like he was testing the word for a hidden meaning. He looked at the pass around her neck. “Dex actually hired you?”

“I’ve got an eye.”

“You’ve got a mouth, is what you’ve got.” He shook his head, a half-smile flickering that wasn’t friendly. “Thought I might have scared you off.”

“It takes more than a bassist with a temper to scare me off.”

He laughed at that, short and sharp. “You talk too much for a photographer. The good ones listen.”

“The good ones notice things.” She raised the camera, focused on him without meaning to. “Like how you don’t sing backing vocals when Kit’s watching, but you do when he’s not.”

Robbie’s expression shut down, quick as a door closing. For a moment, she saw the same cold that had been in Lenny’s eyes, and it worried her more because this was a boy who played the street, not a suit who played with power.

“Don’t turn your clever eyes on me, sweetheart,” he said quietly. “They’ll get you trouble.”

Before she could answer, Kit’s voice rang out from the stage. “There you are, gorgeous—Vale, stop flirting with the photographer. We’ve got eight minutes before they open the doors.”

Robbie stepped back. He looked at her one last time, a longer look than a dismissal, and something shifted in his face. A crack in the armor, maybe. Or a decision made.

“Your mouth’s going to write checks you can’t cash, darlin’,” he said. “But your eyes…” He shook his head, almost rueful. “Your eyes are honest.”

He turned and vaulted back onto the stage. Mara stood there, heart beating too loud, watching his back while the lights came up and a thousand people began to shove through the doors behind her, hungry for noise.

She hadn’t asked him about the mirror. She hadn’t told him she was listening.

But she had one roll of film in her bag she hadn’t handed over to Lenny—and right now, she was almost certain she knew which roll it was.