This time, though, I was much closer to them.

I was looking at the pictures in detail, seeing people Zaid had shared time with, the places he’d worked in and visited, the experiences he’d had. For the first time, from just inches away, I was properly able to take in the chronicle he’d mounted of his life.

And, as I did, I felt a sudden twinge of panic.

Something wasn’t right.

55

There must have been over forty photographs on the wall, different sizes and in different frames, arranged in a series of vague, concentric circles. It should have a looked a mess, but it didn’t: when I’d first come into the house, I’d thought how warm it made the place feel, a document of Robert Zaid’s life that quietly suggested, despite his wealth, Zaid was a normal guy.

He’d had family he’d loved.

He’d done things he was proud of.

In the very centre was a shot of Zaid and his parents. Zaid couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve. They were on a veranda, sea in the distance behind them, the whitewashed walls of Spanish villas dotted about in the greenery in between. This must have been the home that Zaid’s father had owned in Marbella, a place – according to the profile piece I’d read – that Robert had sold when his parents died in a helicopter crash in 1989. They’d come down in the Pyrenees after a weekend skiing.

Something about the picture didn’t add up.

In it, Zaid was tall and thin, a good-looking kid but a scrawny one. His father was the same: even in adulthood, he’d remained slender, his height – six two, six three – appearing to narrow him even further. And he was incredibly dark, his hair and moustache jet black, his eyes like blobs of ink, his skin almost sepia, as if some artificial filter had been added. Except it hadn’t: Zaid’s mother was beside his father, holding her husband’s hand, as physically different from the man she’d married as it was possible to be. She would have been in her forties at the time the picture was taken, but her age seemed immaterial: she was absolutely beautiful, timeless, her skin pale – almost pearlescent – her eyes a deep, ocean blue. In front of them, Robert was smiling, his father’s hand on his shoulder, and it was easy to note both his parents in him: his father’s stature, his mother’s eyes, skin colour that was a near-perfect mix of the two.

So what could I see?

What didn’t feel right?

My eyes switched to three shots on its left.