Caught in the Light (46 page)

"Conrad Nyman was Isobel's brother, Miss Whiting."

"I had surmised something of the kind, I can't deny. It seems quite .. . dreadful."

"It was. It is. But tell me about your client. She's what brought me here."

"She wrote to Mr. Noakes a few weeks ago. It was the strangest kind of letter. Delivered by hand, so there was no postmark. No address either. And no phone number. No way of replying at all, in fact."

"Anonymous?"

"Not exactly. There was a name. She signed herself Kay Bradshaw. But I couldn't help doubting if that was genuine."

"What did the letter say?"

"It asked Mr. Noakes if he was interested in handling the valuation and subsequent sale of what the writer described as "very early photographic negatives". She claimed to have seven in all and enclosed a photocopy of a print of one as a sample. I've brought it with me." She snapped open her briefcase. "Would you like to see it?"

"Oh yes."

Suddenly, there it was in front of me, wavering slightly in Mary Whiting's hand. It was only a photocopy, of course. But I knew the Regency couple standing at the foot of those broad stone country-house steps. I knew them as if I'd seen them before. As in a sense I had. Often enough to know what the caption said without reading it. Barrington and Susannah Esguard, Gaunt's Chase, 13 July 1817.

"This was the only reference to the name?" I asked. "There was no mention of Marian Esguard?"

"None." She slipped the piece of paper back into her briefcase and closed it. "But it set me thinking, even so."

"Did it set Mr. Noakes thinking?"

"Naturally. It could easily have been a forgery. A photocopy proves less than nothing. But such tantalizing possibilities cannot be ignored. The date alone, with the clothing of the subjects as partial confirmation, sufficed to arouse his curiosity. Miss Bradshaw said she would phone in a day or so to see if he wished to examine the originals. If he did, a meeting could be arranged."

"And did she phone?"

"Yes. And an appointment was made for her to call. Mr. Noakes was very excited. I think he envisaged a professional as well as a financial coup."

"But you didn't?"

"I was simply cautious. Miss Bradshaw's extreme secrecy and the appearance of that name Esguard on the caption worried me. Hence my unsuccessful attempts to contact you. As it turned out, though, I needn't have worried."

"Why not?"

"Because Miss Bradshaw didn't turn up. She failed to keep the appointment. And she hasn't been in touch since."

She'd lost her nerve. That had to be the explanation. Getting a valuation from Noakes, let alone selling the negatives, ran the risk of alerting the police, who, for all she knew, were convinced she'd murdered Niall. And then there was the risk of alerting me. My feelings were probably as unclear to her as hers were to me. I wasn't even sure myself how I'd react to meeting her again. But for her, Nyman's conspiracy might never have got off the ground. Then Amy would still be alive. She didn't have Daphne's excuse of avenging a lost love. Yet in some irrational part of my mind I knew I might still be prepared to excuse her.

Mary Whiting promised to alert me to any renewed approach from Kay Bradshaw. Eventually, she'd try to cash in on what she had. That seemed obvious. But when? How much longer would she wait? Just how cautious would she be?

Tim advised me to forget her, which was only what I'd already told myself to do. To some extent, I'd actually succeeded. I wasn't looking for her now as I had nine months before, in longing and despair. My mood was different, tempered by the blows I'd been dealt. Yet still I yearned for a resolution of some kind. Without an ending, how could I begin again?

By having to, came back the bleak but oddly consoling answer. I had some money behind me. I'd rediscovered my self-confidence as a photographer. I even had an idea: to tour the former Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe, photographing changed people in a changing world, the failures as well as the successes. There was a story there for the telling in pictures. I was sure of it.

While I was still planning the trip, one of the Sunday supplements bought three of my Icelandic photographs. The features editor liked them so much he commissioned me to take some pictures of an eccentric Welsh sculptor and the massive rock-form creations he'd scattered across an Anglesey hillside. Then Latent Image, a gallery in Pimlico so new I hadn't even heard of it, offered me a quarter-share in an exhibition of landscape studies. My stock was suddenly rising. There's nothing like being forgotten for making you potentially fashionable. As if to prove the point, Time Out gave me a write-up that almost qualified as a rave, even if it was confined to a single paragraph.

The Land and Lens show ran for the first two weeks of November. It was halfway through the second week that I heard from Mary Whiting.

"I thought you ought to know, Mr. Jarrett. Miss Bradshaw's been in touch."

"And?"

"She has an appointment with Mr. Noakes. Tomorrow. At three o'clock."

I pretended to myself that I might stay away. I went through the motions of regarding the matter as fifty-fifty a chance I might or mightn't take. But at a quarter to three the following afternoon I was there.

The sky was grey. There was a cold drizzle in the air, a foretaste of dusk. Lamps burned brightly in the glittering shop fronts of Bond Street. Cars, vans, taxis and courier bikes wound their way south towards Piccadilly. Logo-laden shoppers streamed along the pavements. Outside the blue-canopied entrance to Sotheby's a pair of pinstripe-suited punters clutching catalogues debated lot prices over fat cigars. They'd have made a good subject for a photograph. But

I didn't have my camera. " don't like having my picture taken" was virtually the first thing she'd said to me. So this time there'd be no pictures.

I stood in the lee of one of the pillars flanking the entrance to Rennor House, five doors north and across the street from Sotheby's. I had as clear a view as the traffic allowed. Whether she arrived on foot or was dropped off by cab, there seemed no way I could miss her. Once she was inside, she couldn't escape me. And then ... I didn't know. I had no idea what I'd say to her, let alone what reply she might give. I was nervous. My hands, holding open the newspaper I wasn't reading, were damp with sweat. It would have been easier, after all this time and all this searching, to walk away. But I kept on watching. And waiting. And wondering.

Three o'clock approached. It would be soon, I told myself. Any minute now I'd see her. People drifted by Sotheby's. Some went in. Others came out. The cigar-smokers vanished. Taxis pulled up. Figures flitted past, crossing the road, hurrying by, window-shopping, gossiping. I scrunched my shoulders, forcing them to relax. I looked up and down, then back across the street. Nothing. She still wasn't here.

Three o'clock came. And went. She was late now. Not too late. Not yet. Five past. Ten past. The odds were lengthening. I glanced round. So many people. So many faces. But not hers. Not now. Not

I pulled out my mobile and phoned Mary Whiting. I almost wanted her to say she'd slipped in past me. That would have been better than believing she wasn't coming at all.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Jarrett, but she hasn't turned up. And there's been no message. It looks as if she's going to stand us up again. There's time yet, of course. She might still be on her way."

So she might. But time only stretches so far. I stayed there, as the damp grey twilight strengthened, till the point where it snapped, finally and absolutely. That's when I knew: I was waiting for something that wasn't going to happen.

Then I turned and walked away. I was alone. And almost glad of it.

I met Tim for a drink at the White Horse that evening and told him about Kay Bradshaw's no-show. He was more worried by my conduct than he was mystified by hers. I think he'd hoped I'd given up the search altogether. Now he was afraid I might throw myself back into it all over again.

"That isn't going to happen," I told him.

"Sure about that?"

"I think so."

"Only thinkT

"Well, sooner or later, if she really does have the negatives, she'll sell them. It stands to reason. Overseas, maybe. Or through an intermediary. When she does, it'll be big news. I'll hear of it whether I want to or not. It's inevitable. This year, next year, eventually, she'll show herself."

"And then?"

"Then we'll find out if it's over. Or if I'm kidding myself by thinking it is. There's no other way to be sure."

"And until then?"

"I live with the uncertainty." I glanced away, thinking of the woman I'd known in Vienna and the stranger I'd been looking for ever since. "And so does she."

I drove to Cheltenham next day. It was my first visit to Amy's grave since returning from Iceland. I bought some flowers on the way, only to find them redundant amidst the spray of carnations and chrysanthemums left by my mother-in-law. The rain that had kept them fresh was still falling, dank and pattering, on the soft green grass. The sky was grey, the light thin.

"AMY JARRETT, BELOVED DAUGHTER AND GRANDDAUGHTER," read the inscription Faith had chosen. "FOREVER YOUNG IN OUR HEARTS." And so she was. In our memories, too. Young and precious and more vulnerable than we'd ever realized. I could picture her smile in my mind, could almost hear her laughing voice. But reality was a headstone in a municipal cemetery. It was the mud and leaf-mush beneath my feet. It was bonfire smoke drifting across a line of trees. Amy wasn't part of it any more. Except for the part of her that remained in me. I swung a long, slow punch towards her nose. And hit the empty air.

I began to cry. The tears suddenly filled my eyes, distorting the image of my fist held out in front of me. Even that, it seemed, was only a picture. But the tears were real. And different from those I'd shed before. They were for Amy now, not for me. They were for the tomorrows she'd been denied, not the yesterdays I couldn't alter. They were for letting go. And moving on.

Land and Lens closed that weekend. I drove round to Latent Image on Sunday afternoon to collect my unsold pictures. The manager of the gallery, Roz, had said she'd be there all day, setting up a new exhibition. Her notorious mood swings were currently near the top of their sine curve, so she was all smiles and good cheer, keen to use my arrival as an excuse to stop for a cup of tea.

"The show was great," she enthused. "Only one or two for you to take away. Oh, and there's this. Somebody put it through the door. It was here when I arrived this morning." She handed me a board-backed buff envelope the kind that carries the request PLEASE DO NOT BEND printed on it in red. My name was written on the front. In a hand I recognized. "I suppose you really know you've cracked it when fans send you their work for an opinion."

I tore the flap open and slid out the contents: a single black-and-white photograph in ten by eight enlargement. It looked to have been taken with a zoom lens from the far side of Maddox Street, across the angle of its junction with Bond Street. There was a lot of blurring from intervening vehicles and pedestrians. But the man leaning against the pillar on the left-hand side of the entrance to Rennor House was in sharp focus. He was holding a newspaper open in front of him, but the jut of his chin and the bunching of his brow made it clear he was looking over the top of the page at something on the other side of the road.

"No note?" asked Roz.

"No need for one," I murmured. "The message is in the picture." I stared down at my face in the photograph. Looking, without seeing. Seen, without knowing. Whether red against the snow, or grey against the drizzle, she eluded me. But I couldn't elude her. Unless I stopped looking. That was the only escape. For either of us.

"What's your next project?" Roz tossed the question back over her shoulder as she walked across to switch off the kettle. "Something exciting?"

"Something different," I replied, slipping the photograph back into the envelope and letting it drop into the large metal waste-paper bin beside me as I spoke. "That's all I know."

I stopped in Putney on my way home from Latent Image and walked out onto the bridge, to the exact spot where I'd stood with Tim seven months before, watching the sunrise. I remembered how inconceivable any kind of future had seemed that day. Yet here I was, in that unimaginable place: the rest of my life. The sun was obscured by thick, drizzling cloud. The light was spare, raw and granular. It held no more secrets.

Photographs don't discriminate between the living and the dead. I understand that now. In the fragments of time and shards of light that compose them, everyone is equal. Marian, Isobel, Amy, Eris, Conrad, even me we're all the same. Now you see us; now you don't. It doesn't matter whether you look through a camera lens and press the shutter. It doesn't even matter whether you open your eyes or close them. The pictures are always there. And so are the people in them.

Robert Goddard was born in Hampshire, where he and his wife now live. He read History at Cambridge and worked as an educational administrator in Devon before becoming a full-time novelist. His previous novels are Past Caring, In Pale Battalions, Painting the Darkness, Into the Blue (winner of the first WH Smith "Thumping Good Read' Award and later televised starring John Thaw), Take No Farewell, Hand in Glove, Closed Circle, Borrowed Time and Beyond Recall.

jacket photograph by Jonathan Ring