Camera Lucida
As soon as the nanocams became commercially available, Roy went right out and bought one. It was just short of three grand, and though a lot of his mates told him to wait – as with all consumer electronics, the price was bound to come down if he left it six months or so – Roy just couldn’t. He had to have one now. He programmed it immediately to follow Katriona wherever she went. There was an as-live feed of Katriona-cam always available on his desktop, and the feed was backed up on hard disk, from which Roy could sit and edit the highlights package whenever his wife was out of the way. Katriona shopping at the Outlet Mall, Katriona eating lunch at the Greek deli with Susan and Jemima, Katriona shagging Dennis Roper in the stockroom of the hardware store, or blowing Pete Sherringham in his lock-up down by the canal, or having a threesome with Carl and Collette Brewster in the artex-stalactite lair of their master bedroom on Willow Tree Drive.
None of this came as a surprise to Roy: he’d always known what his wife was like. The first time he slept with her was at a marketing conference in Bath. He woke later that night to hear Katriona creeping out of the room, and on a whim decided to follow. All the way down to the night porter’s office, then all the way up to an empty room on the third floor, leading the porter by his clip-on tie like a child trailing a thirsty puppy. The seduction had taken all of thirty seconds. As the bedroom door closed, Roy wanted to turn and stride back to his own room, chalk it up as another grubby one-nighter and move on to the next. Except. Except the door Katriona went through had a keyhole. It was the middle of the night, there was nobody else around, and that bloody keyhole was calling him. And so Roy got down on his knees… and three weeks later, he asked Katriona to marry him.
So Roy didn’t mind what Katriona got up to, as long as she came home to him at night. Or in the morning. Whenever she was done. And as long as, should the opportunity present itself, Roy got to watch. For the first few years of their marriage, this involved elaborate planning – hiring a private detective and setting up spy cameras in their bedroom, and sometimes just plain following Katriona around and hoping for another keyhole. It was frustrating, but sometimes it paid off. And when it did… oh boy, was it worth it. But like any voyeur, like any addict, the more Roy saw – the more he wanted to see. Sometimes he thought about confessing everything, in the hope Katriona would become a willing participant… but what if she wouldn’t? Besides, it wouldn’t be the same if she knew he was watching. It wouldn’t be the same at all.
So that nanocam then, it was everything Roy had ever dreamed of. To be able to watch his wife wherever she went, whomever she was with, from whatever angle he chose. In high definition too – it was better than being in the room! Or in the back seat of Derek Bronson’s Range Rover. Or in the shed on Tony Wood’s allotment, with the compost and the pigeon mash. And as long as Katriona came home to Roy once she was done, he’d have been happy for things to carry on like that forever. But then one day…
“Leave him, then.”
Jerry Hawkins, landlord of The Fighting Cocks, an especially odious little man with a handlebar moustache that made Katriona giggle whenever it brushed her thighs. She’d been seeing a lot of him lately, at the expense of some of her other regulars, and Roy had become so bored with their couplings he’d resorted to fast-forwarding or at least backing them up for later. It was pure accident that he hit play just at that moment, just in time to hear Jerry Hawkins say those words: but once heard, they could not be ignored.
“Leave him, then.”
And so began the rewind. Digging out the previous week’s footage, then further back still. Slowly Roy pieced together the truth behind Jerry and Katriona’s relationship, a relationship that had grown beyond casual shags into something far more deliberate, something that led to those three dreadful words. Those three dreadful words, and all the words that preceded them.
“All I ever wanted was to find the right man. The one who’d make all the others seem not worth the effort. For a while, I thought maybe Roy was that man… that perhaps I really could settle down and be with just him… But he’s always so distracted, always so busy… he never has the time – and he doesn’t seem to care either. Where I am, who I’m with… sometimes I think we could do it right under his nose and he wouldn’t even bother. Wouldn’t even…”
“Leave him, then.”
And so it happened. Early Sunday morning out behind the Cocks, as low peach light broke over the fields. Out there towards the horizon, lazy sheep chewed: sole witness. Or so it seemed. Jerry Hawkins came out in his dressing gown, blinking and rubbing sleep from his eyes. Roy took the axe and split open Jerry’s head like a turnip. Katriona followed in her underwear (that slip, Roy had been with her when she tried that on in the shop – though obviously she hadn’t known it) and tried to wrestle the weapon from her husband’s fingers. She met the same fate as her lover. Taking the axe with him, Roy walked back across the fields to Old Cross Road. Three miles, to where he’d left his car in a lay-by hidden by a copse of new grown pines. From there, he drove home. The police were waiting for him.
With no more restrictions on their sale or use, the nanocams had replicated and multiplied exponentially, until there wasn’t any place in the world that wasn’t being filmed, from every single angle, every second of every day. The government had been quick to capitalise on the opportunities this presented, especially in law enforcement. Having programmed the rampant worldwide eyes to alert the authorities to any and all illicit activities, conviction rates soared. So Roy was merely a statistic, his court case a formality.
The cell was a single room, eight by ten, with a makeshift bed on the floor. A large screen filled the main wall, and at first Roy mistook it for a window. But it couldn’t be a window, because the view was all wrong – a pre-dawn sky at three in the afternoon. Besides, the cell was on the fifth floor, and the scene beyond the window was ground level. A country yard looking out over fields, a fence, a small black and white cat sent running by the arrival of a shadowy figure in the half-light.
It didn’t take long for him to understand. Though he’d never seen it from this angle, Roy recognised that yard, those sheep-spotted fields, and the man reaching for his phone, dialling a number that would change his life. A dull axe hung sleep-dead from his other arm, soon to be lifted.
“Get used to it,” said the warder. “You’re going to be watching this flick a lot.” Just five minutes of footage, but it was to be played and replayed in this cell, day and night and every time in between, on a loop set to last ‘til his 65th year.
As the door closed on him alone, Roy settled down with the blankets, and started to watch.
He could think of far worse punishments.
