Read Chapter 3: The Leica's Weight

The Leica sat on the darkroom table like a patient in a hospital bed, its chrome top plate gleaming under the amber safelight. Mara had been up since five, printing contact sheets from the night at the dive—the Unknowns, Dex, that first electric moment of Robbie’s glare—but when she’d gone to rewind the roll from Lenny’s shoot, the advance lever had seized solid. Stiff. Useless. The camera that had survived three years of punk spit, drunken punters, and one memorable fall down a fire escape had finally given up.

She turned it over in her hands. The brass showed through where her thumbs had worn the black paint away. It smelled of stale beer and fixer. Her father had never understood it—this lump of steel and glass that her mother’s brother had left her when he died. Uncle Ray, who’d shot the Beatles at the Cavern, who’d told her once that the camera was just a box, but the *eye*—the eye was everything. She’d been twelve. He’d let her hold it, and the weight had felt like a promise.

Now the promise was broken.

The phone rang in the hallway, a shrill electric trill that cut through the morning quiet. Mara wiped her hands on her trousers and answered.

“Mara? Dex.” His voice was clipped, businesslike. “Soundcheck’s at six. I want you there by five-thirty with the good cameras. The Electric Ballroom’s press list is a mile long, but you’re the only one getting backstage. Don’t cock it up.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, but he’d already hung up.

She looked at the Leica. Then at her watch—a gold-plated Accurist her mother had given her for her twenty-first, the one piece of jewellery she owned that wasn’t costume. It sat on the table beside the camera, its face catching the light.

The pawnshop was on Denmark Street, squeezed between a guitar shop and a strange little café that sold only tea and regret. The man behind the counter looked like he’d been there since the war, a wizened figure with spectacles perched on a nose that had clearly been broken at least twice. His name, according to the faded sign above the door, was Goldman.

Mara placed the watch on the glass counter. “I need a loan. Against this.”

Goldman picked it up, turned it over, squinted at the workings. “Accurist. Gold plate, not solid.” He looked at her over his spectacles. “Thirty pounds.”

“It’s worth double that.”

“Then go somewhere else.” He slid it back toward her.

Mara’s jaw tightened. She needed the camera fixed before five-thirty. The repair shop two doors down had quoted her forty-five pounds for the new advance mechanism, parts included. She had eleven in her purse and a roll of undeveloped film she hadn’t been able to afford to process.

She pushed the watch back. “Forty. And I’ll retrieve it within the month.”

Goldman studied her for a long moment. Then he shrugged, pulled out a ledger, and began to write. “Name?”

“Mara Ellis.”

A bell chimed as the shop door opened, and two men came in. One was young, barely out of his teens, with a black eye and a split lip. The other was older, wider, with a flat cap pulled low. They didn’t look at her. Goldman did—a flicker of something in his eyes—then returned to his ledger.

“Sign here,” he said, and Mara scrawled her name. He counted out four ten-pound notes, and she folded them into her pocket, the paper crisp and heavy against her hip.

The older man was talking to his companion in a low, urgent voice. “—said he just didn’t show. Not a word to anyone. The gear’s still in the van, untouched.”

“Maybe he did a runner,” the younger one said.

“With his amp? His *vintage* Rickenbacker? He loves that thing more than his own mother.” The man shook his head. “Jack’s not the type. Something’s off.”

Mara paused, her hand on the door. It was none of her business. It was nothing to do with her. But the name—Jack—and the word *amp*, the mention of a van with gear still in it—it conjured a specific image. A musician vanished between gigs. A band missing a member. It happened more than people liked to think. Bands dissolved over a single missed note, a manager who ran off with the float, a member who got tangled in the wrong crowd.

She turned back to the counter. “Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t help but overhear—your friend’s missing?”

The older man fixed her with a wary look. “Wasn’t a private conversation, love. But it’s nothing that concerns you.”

“I’m a music photographer,” she said. “I hear things. If you tell me who he was with, who he was working for, I might be able to point you somewhere useful.”

The man studied her, weighing her. The younger one shuffled his feet. Then the older man said, “Jack Mercer. Bassist. Was playing with a pickup band for some label showcase—a producer named Lenny Marsh was running it. Jack went for the soundcheck yesterday and never came home.”

Mara’s stomach dropped. Lenny Marsh. The same Lenny Marsh whose studio she’d photographed in yesterday. The same Lenny Marsh whose smile had sat wrong on his face, whose hand had rested a little too long on Sophie’s shoulder, whose eyes had slid over Mara like she was a piece of furniture that might occasionally be useful.

She didn’t say any of that. She said, “I don’t know him. But I’ll keep my ear to the ground.”

The man nodded, disinterested now. “You do that.”

Goldman handed her a ticket. “Three months. After that, the watch is mine.”

Mara took it, pocketed it, and left the shop with the bell chiming behind her. She stood on the pavement for a moment, the London morning grey around her, and thought about the way Lenny had looked at Sophie. The way he’d watched the camera like he was deciding whether to let it live. The roll of film still in her bag, unprocessed, holding who-knew-what.

She walked to the camera repair shop, paid the forty-five pounds, and left the Leica with the technician, a young man named Pete who handled it like it was made of glass. “She’ll be ready by five,” he said. “Good as new. Better, maybe. This is the one with the smooth advance, right? Pre-M4?”

“M3,” she said. “My uncle’s.”

Pete nodded, respectful. “He had good taste.”

Mara left the shop with empty pockets and a hollow feeling where her watch had been. She checked the clock on the chemist’s across the road: 11:40. Six hours until she needed to be at the Ballroom. Six hours to find a way to develop that film, to see if she’d actually caught what she thought she’d caught in the frame of Sophie’s face—the split second of real fear before the mask came back down.

She had no money. No camera. No watch. But she still had the roll of film, wound tight in its plastic canister, waiting to be coaxed into light.

And she had a name—Jack Mercer—that she couldn’t shake. A bassist who’d vanished after a Lenny Marsh showcase. A bassist who’d never touched his gear. The same way Sophie had looked at Lenny’s hands like she was waiting for an earthquake.

Mara turned her face toward the chemist’s, where the photo lab developed rolls in an hour for four pounds fifty. She didn’t have four pounds fifty. But she knew a man who ran a darkroom in his basement near Camden Lock, a retired press photographer named Frank who owed her a favour from a job last year.

She started walking. The Leica was in the shop, out of reach, but its weight was still in her memory—solid, familiar, a promise her uncle had made her. She would get it back before six. She would shoot the Unknowns and prove she belonged in that press pit.

But as she walked, she kept turning the pawnshop conversation over in her mind. Jack Mercer, vanished. Lenny Marsh, smiling. And her, with a roll of film in her bag that contained the face of a girl who looked like she knew something she shouldn’t.

The Leica was being repaired. But its weight had moved somewhere else now—settled into her chest, cold and unmovable, the press of a question she was afraid to answer.