Caught in the Light (44 page)

"It certainly feels like it is."

"Are you still looking for her?"

"Eris? No. Not any more."

"You should look for something."

"Why? Where's it ever got me?"

"That's not the point. You're a photographer. If you stop looking, you stop living."

"Good advice." I stepped across to the mantelpiece and traced Amy's photographed smile with my finger. "But I may not take it, even so."

A few days later, I moved back into the home I'd walked out of three months before. But it was a home no longer. I'd volunteered to house-sit until a buyer could be found, and to pack up the contents for storage or shipment to Australia or whatever Faith ultimately decided to do with them. If you stripped away the memories, it was just so much clutter. But the memories couldn't be stripped away. I found myself slowly but surely packing up my own past. With no future to go to.

I might have stopped looking for Eris. But others hadn't. Inspector Forrester of the Metropolitan Police for one. A prospective buyer was due the morning he chose to call round. I made no effort to disguise the inconvenience of his visit. I wanted an end to questions that had no answers. But how can a question end except in an answer?

"I'm hoping you might have heard from Miss Moberly, sir or whatever her real name is." "No, Inspector. I haven't."

"Pity. You're about our only chance of finding her now." "Weren't the Swedish authorities able to help you?" "Fraid not. Turns out there was another Brit in prison with

Nyman. George Latham. A Londoner. Murdered a prostitute in Malmo. Died of hepatitis a year before Nyman's release, aged fifty-three. But he had no recorded next of kin. And, as far as we can tell, no visitors from this country. We think Nyman may have been having us on."

"Having me on, more like. He probably hoped I'd follow the trail."

"A trail that leads nowhere."

"Exactly."

"Like the rest of this inquiry when you come down to it. With Nyman dead and Miss Moberly missing, there's not much of a case against Miss Sanger. The SFO will pick over the bones of Nymanex. Otherwise .. . it'll run into the sand." He sighed. "Well, while I'm here, there is one other thing. On the tape you found in his car, Nyman referred to an old letter Niall Esguard stole from Montagu Quisden-Neve."

"I remember." It would have been truer to say I'd forgotten until that moment. "He sent it to Quisden-Neve's brother."

"Who was happy to show it to me."

"And?"

"And nothing. What you might call the historical side of this has had me fuddled all along anyway. I wondered what you'd made of it."

"I haven't seen it."

"You haven't?"

"No."

"I felt sure you must have."

"Why?"

"Curiosity, I suppose."

"I'm right out of that."

"And conscience."

"That, too."

"And conscience," he repeated.

"What do you mean?"

"Montagu Quisden-Neve's murder isn't strictly my pigeon. With Niall Esguard dead, there's never going to be a trial anyway. But, once all the reports are in, there will be an inquest. And you'll be the principal witness. It just seems hard to make the poor bugger's twin wait till then to hear how it happened. From your lips. If you know what I mean."

I knew what he meant. And he was right. I wasn't out of curiosity. Not quite. Maybe it's an ineradicable component of the human condition whatever the circumstances. I still had the card in my wallet that Valentine Quisden-Neve had given me in Guernsey, with his phone number written on it. I rang the number as soon as Forrester had left. An answering machine took my message. And Quisden-Neve phoned back six hours later.

He lived at Northiam, on the Kent-Sussex border, in a tile-hung cottage a pair of cottages, more accurately, knocked together to form a spacious residence overlooking a lush stretch of water meadows. And he looked so like his brother that I couldn't really have said for sure which of them I'd found dead on that train. Or which of them I was now telling the truth to, for the first time, over whisky and water, in a sun-dappled country garden.

"I'm sorry I couldn't tell you this in Guernsey. I reckoned it was safer for you not to know about Niall. He was a dangerous man. It was safer for me as well, of course. I'm not trying to dress it up as a white lie. I was chasing too many shadows to trust anyone."

"Rather like Monty, it seems. As the police have done their best to explain."

"I should have explained myself. Before now."

"But you've been visited by a loss surpassing that of a brother, Mr. Jarrett. I have no complaint. What I may have, however, is a surprise for you."

"A letter written to Barrington Esguard in September 1851?"

"Yes. It was one of a number of documents I received through the post, bundled together in an envelope, and without any note of explanation, on Friday the eleventh of April. The Norfolk postmark meant nothing to me. It was only when I read of Nyman's suicide and your daughter's dreadful murder, also in Norfolk, on the very same day, that I realized there had to be a connection. When the police played me the tape Nyman left behind, the connection became clear."

"And what's the surprise?"

"The identity of the writer of the letter."

"Who was it?"

"Somebody you were led to believe had died by her own hand twenty-seven years before the letter was written."

"Marian Esguard?"

He smiled and nodded in answer.

"That can't be."

"Oh, but it can. The envelope also contained a letter she'd written to her father in April 1817. Aside from the changes in penmanship you'd expect with age, the hands are unquestionably the same."

"I don't understand."

"No. But you will. When you read the letter."

He took me into his study, where the letter was lying ready and waiting on the desk, with the earlier letter lying alongside it to confirm they were written by the same person. They undoubtedly were. I sat down, aware of Quisden-Neve slipping out of the room behind me and closing the door. The desk was solid mahogany, old enough to pass for the one Barrington Esguard had no doubt sat at in his house in Bath to read the very same unexpected communication. Not much separated us in this instant of discovery, except the opaque but invisible curtain of time. And even that seemed to be twitched back as I read.

Euston Hotel, London Sunday 7th September 1851

My dear Barrington,

I am as surprised to find myself writing this letter as you may well be to receive it. To break a silence after such a long interval is a strange thing, is it not? Nearly thirty-four years have elapsed since we parted in the ball-room at Midford Grange. I do not suppose you expected to see me again during those years any more than I expected to see you again. But I dare say there have been many unlooked-for reunions amid the milling throngs at the Crystal Palace this summer. The Great Exhibition has worked many a human wonder among its mechanical marvels.

Perhaps, had we not both been so startled by the sight of each other, we would have found a few fitting words of greeting. But the explanations we should then have been obliged to offer to our respective companions would undeniably have been as embarrassing to them as to us. Perhaps, therefore, upon reflection, it is as well that we passed by without exchanging more than a glance of recognition.

It was gratifying to see how well you are carrying your years, and I do sincerely hope that Susannah's absence from your side had no doleful significance. The middle-aged gentleman to whom you were talking was surely dear Nelson. He did not notice me or catch your glance in my direction, and might not have recognized me even had he done so. But the face of the child is there in the man and in the face also of the child who was tugging impertinently at your coat-tail, who I would surmise must be your grandson.

Was it you, I wonder, who led your party to the photographic exhibits? I have not forgotten our last conversation, and nor, I suspect, have you. It was a poignant experience, I cannot deny, to see what others have accomplished in the years since I was forced to abandon my research in the field of heliogenesis, as photography might now be called but for your brother's how shall I phrase it?

rigidity of mind.

I do not wish to traduce the dead, nor lodge claims of scientific primacy which others would regard as preposterous. What was done was done, what was lost lost. There is an end of it. We are both too old to squander our remaining years on futile regrets. My purpose in writing to you is entirely sentimental and I pray you will respond in kind.

It has occurred to me that your evident shock at catching sight of me yesterday may have been occasioned by your harbouring till then the belief that I was dead. It is a belief Jose would have been pleased to entertain himself and to encourage in those of his friends and relatives who knew me. Perhaps he hoped that I had died of a broken heart. He had, after all, done his very best to foster conditions in which I might easily have done so. I feel sure you are familiar with the sordid details of his conspiracy with Mr. Byfield to break my spirit and imperil my sanity. What you may not be familiar with are the exact circumstances of our final parting. I can hardly suppose that he gave you an accurate report of them. If, however, his distortion of the facts persuaded you that I had embarked upon a foredoomed quest after the errant Mr. Byfield, you will not have been misled. I wasted seven years of my life seven years of my precious freedom from your brother

in such a quest. At its end I tracked Mr. Byfield to his hiding place on the island of Guernsey. I succeeded. But what a success! I will tell you the truth of it in the hope that my candour will find an echo in your own soul. On the crossing to Guernsey I made the acquaintance of a woman who had believed herself to be Mr. Byfield's wife until his desertion of her and their child some years previously and her subsequent discovery that she was not his first such victim. It was a bigamous union, quite possibly not the only one Mr. Byfield contracted in his amorous career. The child had died. The woman was close to despair. She had, like me, traced his whereabouts in the face of many difficulties. She proposed to throw herself upon his mercy. For she loved him still, with a shameful passion. He was ever one to command such emotions. I speak, of course, from personal experience.

What was I to do? Confronted by this ample proof of Mr. Byfield's duplicity and my folly, I did not disembark with the woman when we reached Guernsey. I remained on the ship and returned to England, sadder and wiser and quite possibly harder hearted than I had been before. To have found him out was in the end more important than to seek him out.

I shall not weary you with an account of my doings in the years since. Suffice it to say that, if I have not always been happy, I am now at least content. Where I live and how I live are matters you need not concern yourself with. Indeed, my experiences at your brother's hands have left me reluctant to disclose too much of myself to any member of his family, including, alas, you, dear Barrington. Forgive me if I am too harsh. Forgive me and confer blame on the one who should bear it.

Jose is dead and I will say no more about him. It is the manner of his death that concerns me. I had fondly imagined that there would eventually be an opportunity for me to revisit Gaunt's Chase and to retrieve my heliogenic records and equipment, all of which I was obliged to leave behind. But the fire destroyed everything. I saw that for myself when I paid the house a surreptitious visit some weeks after reading of the disaster. All was gone.

Or was it? I remember your interest in my heliogenic researches. I remember your proposal to take them forward under your stewardship. And I remember your curiosity about the heliogenic picture I made of you and Susannah. It occurs to me as no more than the frailest of hopes, I grant that you may have rescued something of my work from Gaunt's Chase, either with Jose's consent or, more probably, without it. It occurs to me, as rather more of a guess than a hope, that you must at least have tried, if I read your character right.

You can tell me whether I do or not. You can, with the munificence of the venerable, reassure me that I did not dream my former accomplishments. Our chance meeting of yesterday prompts me to beg this favour of you. I hope the same chance will prompt you to grant it, if not for old times' sake, then for family's sake.

A letter or a package, or whatever you are able to send, will reach me if sent care of Miss Arabella Humphreys, Arnwick

House, Burnham Market, Norfolk. She is a good friend of mine and her discretion is absolute.

I wish you well, and close this letter wondering if I will hear from you as you have now heard from me, in a spirit of reconciliation.

Yours most sincerely,

Marian

After I'd read the letter, I went back out to the garden, where Quisden-Neve was waiting. He cocked his eyebrow questioningly at me as I sat down opposite him. Then he leaned forward to pour me some more whisky.

"I did say it was a surprise, didn't I, Mr. Jarrett?"

"You did."

"I take it you assumed Marian Esguard was the woman whose suicide apparently prompted Lawrence Byfield's fatal duel on Guernsey. Monty would have known better, of course, already being in possession of the letter. He was very close to the answer, wasn't he? Too close, as it turned out."

"I'm afraid so."

"I further take it Barrington Esguard had indeed helped himself to some of the negatives Marian left at Gaunt's Chase and was sufficiently moved by her letter to return them to her via her friend in Burnham Market."

"It looks like it. Marian's sister and her husband lived at Brant's Carr Lodge. I think Marian lived with them. But perhaps she didn't confide in them about her photographic work. Maybe they didn't approve of women dabbling in science. That would have been another reason for using Miss Humphreys as a go-between. And for hiding the negatives under the stairs. Where they remained until Nyman discovered them."

"And subsequently destroyed them?"

"Yes. He probably burned them on the fire in the bedroom. The ashes were still warm when I arrived."