Caught In the Light

by Robert Goddard

  ‘And what did they explore?’

  ‘No idea. Doris and me were just grateful Robbie was being kept out of mischief. It meant we could relax on the beach – when it wasn’t blowing a gale. There was some big estate a few miles inland – a house and park open to the public. They hung round that quite a bit, I think.’

  ‘Taking photographs?’

  ‘Isobel always took photographs.’

  ‘But Robbie was with her this time.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘You said on Monday there are hundreds of Isobel’s photographs upstairs.’

  ‘So there are.’

  ‘Including the ones she took in Norfolk?’

  ‘I suppose. I mean … I’m not sure. We couldn’t bear to throw any of them away. But I’ve never … sorted through them to check … what’s there and what isn’t.’

  ‘It’s time we did, then. Don’t you think?’

  The photographs were stored in a wardrobe in the bedroom that had once been Isobel’s and was now a dusty jumble of her youthful possessions, hoarded by her grieving parents: school books, fluffy toys, the Brownie box camera she’d taken her first pictures with, pop records she’d bought as a teenager – and albums and shoeboxes piled one upon the other, filled with the photographs that had been her passion.

  I dragged them out onto the floor and began sifting through the unmounted prints and negatives while Sam wearily turned the leaves of the old-fashioned black-card albums. Almost at once I began to recognize the subjects of her photographs – Chichester, Bath, Dorset: the triangulations of Marian Esguard’s life. There was East Pallant, in seemingly infinite variations of light and angle. Here was Bentinck Place, pictured again and again on a sunny day long ago. And this, surely, was the empty patch of downland near Tollard Rising where Gaunt’s Chase had once stood. She’d followed the trail, long before she knew where it led – or even why it led there.

  ‘Here’s the caravan,’ Sam interrupted, lowering himself onto the bed and holding the album open for me to see. ‘This is the Norfolk holiday.’

  It was a black-and-white shot, like most of the others. Isobel seemed to have had no taste for colour. The caravan was viewed from one end, with a plumper, younger Sam and a woman who was obviously Doris sitting beside it at a picnic table, teapot and cups and saucers before them, plus two bottles of Coca-Cola, one with a straw in it. Ten yards or so behind them, a youth dressed in denim jeans and jacket sat astride a bicycle, one arm propped on the handlebars, his hand supporting his chin. He had a mass of blond hair and a blank, unsmiling gaze. He was Robert Courtney, alias Conrad Nyman, at fifteen years of age.

  There was another shot of him on the facing page, striding along a bank and viewed from below, silhouetted against a mackerel sky. ‘That was the path into the village,’ said Sam. ‘The caravan site was half a mile out, at the mouth of the harbour.’

  I turned the pages. There were long shots of a grand house set in parkland; of formal gardens, an obelisk, a monument of some kind, cottages and lodge gates bowered in summer-heavy trees. ‘The country estate?’ I queried. Sam nodded. I turned on. Most of the remaining pages in the album were devoted to one particular building: a medium-sized stone-and-slate Georgian country house of no obvious architectural interest, viewed from the end of a curving drive, from further along a road running past it, from a field to the rear, from another field to one side, from a hill half a mile away, then much closer to, right outside the pillared and pedimented front door, on the lawn, on the terrace, even on the threshold of the wisteria-draped French windows, in which a reflection of Isobel could just be discerned in one of the panes, her face obscured by the fringe of her hair as she looked down into the camera.

  ‘She wore her hair long then,’ I murmured as the memory of another glimpse of it tugged at me.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Sam. ‘Lovely it was.’

  ‘Do you remember this house?’

  ‘No. She and Robbie must have found it.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘Somewhere in the area, I suppose.’

  ‘Hold on. There’s a name.’ I peered more closely at the photograph taken from the end of the drive, in which a nameplate could be seen on one of the gate pillars. ‘Brant’s Carr Lodge. Mean anything to you?’ Sam shook his head. ‘Nothing at all?’

  He shrugged. ‘She liked Georgian architecture.’

  ‘But it’s run of the mill. You could see a dozen houses like this in the average country parish.’

  ‘I don’t know, then.’

  I turned over the last page and found myself looking at Isobel’s teenage brother, pictured in profile, leaning, hands in pockets, against a finger-post at some rural crossroads, with a telephone box in the background, against which two bicycles were propped. All four direction markers on the post were legible: BURNHAMS 3½; WELLS 3; CREAKES 2½; WALSINGHAM 4½. ‘Where was this taken?’ Once more, Sam could only shrug. ‘Haven’t you any idea?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But within easy cycling distance of Wells. That’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well … Yes.’

  ‘Have you got an atlas?’

  ‘What sort of atlas?’

  ‘Any kind.’

  ‘Well … There’s an old AA handbook downstairs. There are motoring maps at the back of that. But it’s years out of date.’

  ‘More than twenty years out of date?’

  ‘Easily.’

  ‘All the better. Come on.’

  * * *

  He was seriously short of breath by the time we’d reached the sitting room and ferreted out his well-thumbed and nearly thirty-years-old AA members’ handbook from the bureau. I held it under a lamp and leafed through the map section to the north Norfolk coast. There was Wells-next-the-Sea, about halfway between Hunstanton and Cromer. It had a caravanning and camping symbol against it. My eye followed a circle inland. Great and Little Walsingham lay to the south, North and South Creake further to the west, Burnham Market and a clutch of other Burnhams further west still. In the middle of the circle was a historic-house symbol and the name Holkham Hall.

  ‘Holkham,’ panted Sam. ‘That was the estate. I remember now.’

  ‘The crossroads must be about here,’ I mused, tapping the map just below the hall, where several minor roads intersected. Then I looked back at the photograph I’d removed from the album. Nyman’s younger self wasn’t looking in any of the waymarked directions, but out across the fields, somewhere to the east, towards … Brant’s Carr Lodge. It had to be. He’d promised me a clue. And this was it.

  Chichester to Wells-next-the-Sea had to be 200 miles. More with the diversion round London. I wasn’t likely to get there in much under four hours, and first light in mid-April was going to be in the region of half-past four to five o’clock. The cloudless sky would show the very first streaks of dawn out on the east-facing flatlands of Norfolk. I was already short of time and I might need a lot of it to track down Brant’s Carr Lodge. Nyman had judged it to a nicety once more. It wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t exactly probable either.

  Yet I had the feeling he wanted me to make it. There was a challenge implicit in his threat. I could offer to take Amy’s place. Maybe his contempt for me made him doubt I would, but there, at least, I could prove him wrong. I couldn’t stop thinking of Amy as I drove north along the night-tunnelled roads towards Norfolk. Of the things I’d done for her. Of the times I’d spent with her. Of the love I’d given her. They’d never been enough, any of them. A crumbling marriage and nomadic career had made me a poor kind of father. But Nyman had given me the chance to change all that.

  If he really had given me the chance, that is. The long dark miles of night driving revived fears I’d not examined till then. The worst of them was that Amy was already dead and that Nyman was merely tormenting me with the delusion that I could save her. If so, Faith would blame me for throwing away the only frail hope we’d had by setting off alone and in secret on a fool’s errand. Though no more tha
n I’d blame myself, of course.

  I stopped for petrol at the last services before leaving the motorway system and seriously considered phoning Faith to tell her where I was going and why. What stopped me was the mad logic of Nyman’s ultimatum. The scant understanding I had of him suggested that Amy’s only chance lay in trusting my instinct that this was between him and me and no-one else. I filled the tank and drove on.

  The A10 ran out at King’s Lynn. From there I headed north-east across a dark, flat, empty landscape towards the coast. I knew I was close when I reached Burnham Market. The road signs gave the distance to Wells-next-the-Sea in single figures now. And the dashboard clock confirmed I was still on schedule – but only just.

  Suddenly the headlamps caught a cluster of tourist signs for Holkham Hall – the gardens, pottery, house and some sort of agricultural museum. I turned round in the entrance to the hall, drove back the way I’d come and took a succession of lefts, reckoning they were bound to lead me south of the park. But the narrow, high-banked lanes were a maze of potential wrong turnings. I ended up on the Fakenham bypass, way off course, and had no choice but to follow the signs back to Burnham Market.

  Nothing had been moving in the village when I first drove through. This time I spotted a milkman starting his round and stopped to ask him if he knew Brant’s Carr Lodge. No joy.

  I had another stab at circumnavigating Holkham Park then, forcing myself to drive more slowly and study every finger-post I passed. It was painstaking, but it paid off when the headlamps picked out a blob of telephone-box red at a crossroads ahead. I pulled up with the lamps trained on the finger-post and studied the waymarkers. BURNHAMS 3½; WELLS 3; CREAKES 2½; WALSINGHAM 4½. There couldn’t be any mistake. I turned off the lights, stopped the engine and climbed out to get my bearings. I was at a corner of the park, a boundary wall and a belt of trees behind me, open fields in front. In the deep rural darkness, it was hard to be sure of anything else. Except that the darkness wasn’t as deep as it had been. There was a barely perceptible lightening of the sky. And then I realized that it wasn’t as silent as it had been either. A few birds were already singing in the park. Night was nearly done.

  I jumped back into the car and took off along the Walsingham road, which was the closest route to the direction Nyman had been facing in the photograph. Left at the next crossroads was just a guess and not a lucky one. There were no roadside houses and the first turning off, bar a few muddy tracks, led me back along the boundary of the park to the telephone box. I set off again towards Walsingham and chose a different turning at the next crossroads more or less at random.

  I slowed to inspect the first building I came to, but it was only a barn. A little way ahead was the concreted entrance to a drive of some kind. My hopes soared when I saw the name on the roadside board: Brant’s Pit Farm. It couldn’t be far now. I decided to give myself a couple of miles, then, if necessary, backtrack to the farm and ask there.

  But it wasn’t necessary. Soon a straggling garden hedge appeared on my left, then the white pillars of a gateway. I slowed as I drove past and caught a glimpse of a gravel drive and the roof-tree and chimney stacks of a house, outlined against the ever paler sky. I coasted on for twenty yards or so, then pulled off the road and stopped.

  The dawn chorus was louder now. It seemed to fill the twilit air as I climbed from the car and hurried back along the soft grass verge towards the gate. The sky was an opaque and sickly yellow, weirdly shot with something that would soon be blue. There were no lights showing in the house. I couldn’t see a car on the drive. But the nameplate was where it had been in Isobel’s photograph. I rubbed some grime clear of the letters and saw what they spelled. Brant’s Carr Lodge.

  I stepped gingerly across the gravel and took to the long weed-pocked grass of the lawn as soon as I could, though stealth made little practical sense in the circumstances. Nyman would be watching out for me. He’d see me coming, whatever precautions I took.

  The overgrown garden, the unlit windows and the carless drive all hinted at desertion, as perhaps they were meant to. I surveyed the front of the house from the shelter of a vast rhododendron bordering the lawn, watching and listening closely. But there was nothing to see or hear: no shadow across the window, no flicker of a curtain, no creak of a board. The house seemed not merely empty, but vacant. It couldn’t be, though. Nyman had brought me here for a reason. And he wanted me to know what that reason was.

  My patience snapped. Caution wasn’t going to do me any good. I strode out across the lawn, the moist grass squelching beneath my shoes. As I reached the driveway in front of the house there was a sudden loud switch to crunching gravel. Then I was at the door.

  It was open. As I touched the handle it swung slowly away from me. I stepped into a broad, bare-boarded hall that ran the depth of the house. The French windows Isobel had photographed from outside more than twenty years ago were ahead of me, viewed now from inside. A staircase curved away to one side. Doors stood open to left and right, leading to empty reception rooms. None of the floors was carpeted, none of the windows curtained, none of the rooms furnished. There were bulbs in the overhead light sockets, though, and when I flicked one of the switches the bulb lit. There was no dust on my finger either. Somebody had been there.

  ‘Nyman?’ I shouted his name angrily, certain he was somewhere in the house, waiting for me. There was no answer. I moved to the stairwell and shouted again. Still no answer.

  Then I heard something. A rustle, carrying with it some slight papery echo. It seemed to come from above. I bounded up the stairs to the first-floor landing and caught sight of the edge of a rug in one of the rear bedrooms.

  The rug covered the floorboards round a narrow bed, on which somebody had recently lain. There was an uncased pillow at the head, dented in the centre, and a jumble of blankets across the mattress. A pair of handcuffs hung from the bed-rail, steel clinking faintly against brass in time to my footfalls. What had Nyman done? Where was he? Where was Amy? I was here by dawn. I’d met his terms. He had no right to cheat me again.

  A drift of smoke came to me as I stood looking at the bed. I swung round and saw the faltering glow of embers in the tiny fireplace. A fire had burned there for some time to judge by the accumulation of ash in the grate. It must have been fed till the last few hours.

  Then I saw the large square sheet of paper Sellotaped by its corners to the chimney breast. One of the corners had lifted the tape off the wall. It was its sudden curl of release I’d heard from the hall. I pressed it down again, then stepped back to switch on the light. The sheet of paper was a large-scale map of the area, showing every field and building, including Brant’s Carr Lodge by name. A circle had been roughly drawn in red round a spot a few miles to the east of the house. Its centre was a point where the old runways of a disused airfield intersected with a lane. It was a message from Nyman.

  And its meaning couldn’t be doubted. For there, lying on the narrow mantelpiece in front of me, was Amy’s wristwatch. I recognized the pink leather strap. It had been a present from Faith and me for her eleventh birthday. The face was decorated with a yellow sun and a blue quarter-moon, given grinning human features. But I couldn’t see the sun or the moon. Because the watch had been smashed – as if by a hammer blow.

  * * *

  The airfield was a Second World War relic spread across an empty windswept plateau, beyond which the sun rose as a swollen fireball in the clean chill air. I pulled off the road onto a grass-seamed expanse of fifty-year-old concrete at the centre of the X formed by the runways. There were a few patches of stunted woodland nearby, planted as windbreaks presumably, and a row of old hangars that looked to have been converted into grain-stores by a local farmer, but nothing else, except the wind tugging at my hair as I climbed from the car. Man-made desolation stretched in every direction.

  Then I saw it – a dark shape on the south-western horizon, moving fast along one of the runways towards me, maybe a quarter of a mile away across the plateau. I w
alked clear of the car, deliberately making myself visible, as the shape coalesced into a black Range Rover, pitching and jolting as it sped through the potholes. It was Nyman. It had to be. And all I could do now was stand where I was.

  I’d expected the Range Rover to slow as it approached. Instead, it accelerated still further, engine roaring, suspension lurching. I willed myself to stand still, at least until I could be certain Nyman was at the wheel. But, as the car burst across the tarmac of the road, I realized the windscreen was smoked almost as black as the bodywork. He wasn’t going to stop and he was heading straight for me. I started to run to my left, then hurled myself clear as the Range Rover surged past, the tyres thwacking over the patch of concrete I’d just been standing on, dust and grit spraying round me.

  Only then did he slow. I saw the brake lights glare as he skidded to a halt thirty yards away. By the time I’d scrambled to my feet, he’d completed a U-turn and was facing me once more, engine revving. ‘Nyman,’ I shouted. ‘Get out of the car.’

  His answer took me by surprise. The engine cut out and silence suddenly engulfed us, so intense that I could hear the sleeve of my jacket flapping in the wind and a second later catch the distant cry of a skylark. Nothing moved. Nobody got out of the car. I started walking towards it.

  I’d covered about ten yards when the gun went off. It was an explosion of sound within the car. The suspension rocked slightly with the impact. But none of the windows shattered. Whatever the bullet had hit, it had hit home.

  One thought filled my mind as I sprinted towards the driver’s door. He’d killed her. Nyman had killed Amy; had shot her there, with me as a helpless witness. What he meant to do next I didn’t care. He could shoot me for all he liked, provided I could lay a hand on him first.

  But what he’d actually done was the last thing I’d expected. As I wrenched open the door, he fell out to meet me. For a second, he was in my arms, his face close to mine, his blue eyes blankly staring. The left side of his head was a bloody mess of smashed bone and exposed brain. A tiny rivulet of blood was seeping from his mouth, down over his chin. The gun slipped from his trailing hand and hit the concrete. I watched the first bright-red drop of blood reach the pearly cream collar of his shirt. Then, as his legs slid off the seat, I was pushed back by the weight of him. I let go. He fell heavily, the last breath he’d drawn shooting out of him as he struck the ground.