Not for the police, however, who called me in for further questioning about the deaths of Niall Esguard and Montagu Quisden-Neve. I didn’t object to being given such a going over. The events they wanted me to recount would have filled my thoughts wherever I went and whoever I talked to. Nothing could be changed and nothing gained by their recital. But it had to be done. And it had to be better than being left to my own devices.
Daphne had already made a clean breast of her part in Nyman’s machinations. The fact that her account matched mine no doubt made it easier to believe us both. The links with the long-ago life of Marian Esguard confused them, though. They seemed reluctant to dwell on the point. Vengeance, conspiracy, persecution and violent death formed a coherent pattern beyond which they were reluctant to stray.
The one loose end they were interested in was Eris. I don’t think they swallowed my contention that she’d killed Niall in self-defence, even with Nyman’s posthumous testimony to back me up. They wanted to find her. But neither Daphne nor I could tell them how to. Nyman had given them a clue, though not much of one. That apart, she was as elusive as ever.
At some mid-point of that long day of questions and answers, I realized I for one had opted out of the search. Eris could hide or show herself as she pleased. My obsession with her was over. Nyman had killed that, too, when he’d held the gun to Amy’s head and pulled the trigger. He’d made an end of everything.
Daphne was waiting for me when I left the police station. The condolences she proffered were doubtless genuine. Her desire to punish me for Isobel’s death hadn’t run to any of this. What Nyman had done he’d done alone. Nevertheless, her words struck a false note. Her regrets merely added to the waste and hopelessness Nyman had left behind for me to sift through.
She offered to drive me back to Parsons Green and I couldn’t seem to find the energy to refuse. It was a Saturday afternoon. The traffic moved sluggishly in fume-hazed sunshine. A football crowd was making its way home from Stamford Bridge. I stared out of the car at their faces as they passed, unable to connect with the world they inhabited. I’d never felt so lonely in my life.
‘I can only imagine how you’re feeling, Ian,’ said Daphne as we crept forward. ‘I never thought Nyman would do such a thing. He must have been insane.’
‘Aiding and abetting a madman. Quite an achievement for a psychotherapist.’
‘I won’t be a psychotherapist much longer. The police have made it obvious they’ll see to it that I’m not allowed to continue practising, whether or not they press charges against me.’
‘Are you expecting sympathy?’
‘No. Of course not. I—’
‘Anyway, Nyman wasn’t insane. You know that as well as I do.’
‘Yes,’ she murmured in response. ‘You’re right. He knew exactly what he was doing.’
‘And we never stood a chance of stopping him.’
‘Probably not.’
‘Definitely not.’
We crawled on in silence to the next red light. Then she said, ‘If there’s anything I can do to—’
‘Help? I don’t think so, do you? Some things can’t be helped.’
‘No. They can’t.’
‘I’ll get out here and walk.’
‘There’s no need for that.’
‘Yes, there is.’ I opened the door. ‘The truth is, Daphne, I can’t bear my own company, let alone yours.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She looked round at me. ‘Really.’
‘I believe you. You’re sorry. I’m sorry. Everyone’s sorry. But Amy’s dead.’
I climbed out and slammed the door and walked away down the nearest side street. I couldn’t have said what direction I was heading in. It didn’t matter anyway. No direction led me where I wanted to go. Back to all the days before yesterday.
‘Ian.’
Nicole’s voice reached me through the amber-leached darkness as I walked along the road towards Tim’s house several empty hours later. She was standing by her car a few yards further on, her face tight and drawn and pale.
‘I guessed I’d find you here.’
‘You were always good at guessing.’
‘The police told me about Amy. And Nyman. And Isobel Courtney, too. Is it really true?’
‘Depends what they told you.’
‘The whole thing, Ian. For God’s sake. Amy was killed … for revenge?’
‘Yes. Effective, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I just can’t believe it. He never … I mean, there was nothing to—’
‘Give the game away? There wouldn’t have been. That’s what he called it, by the way. A game. And he was quite a player, wasn’t he?’
‘How’s Faith … taking this?’
‘Without me. That’s how she’s taking it.’
‘I had absolutely no way of knowing what he was up to. He never even hinted—’
‘That the money he was paying you wasn’t just a straightforward bribe? I don’t suppose he did. But straightforwardness wasn’t in his nature. As Nymanex’s shareholders are going to discover.’
‘If it comes out that I was on his payroll, I’ll be finished. You realize that?’
‘Finished? I don’t think you know the meaning of the word, Nicole. I say that as someone who’s just beginning to.’
‘I’m sorry, Ian. God, I’m sorry.’
‘Join the club.’
‘It seemed such easy money. If I’d ever once thought––’
‘How well did you know him?’
‘I didn’t know him at all. It was just a … financial arrangement.’
‘Really? What about that night when I called round to warn you of the danger I thought you might be in? You said you had an important guest. It was Nyman, wasn’t it? A bit late for a financial arrangement, wouldn’t you agree?’
She said nothing. But her answer was clear enough. Nyman had been thorough in his inventory of my past and present – and in its demolition.
I sat up most of that night with Tim, drinking whisky and remembering Amy. Tim was the only one left I could talk to freely, the only piece of me Nyman hadn’t touched. He was also Amy’s godfather. We’d both wondered what sort of a woman she’d grow into. Only we hadn’t acknowledged as much until this second night of so many without her. When we knew we’d never find out.
At dawn, we walked down to Putney Bridge and watched the sun rise slowly over the river, swollen and benign and cruelly beautiful.
‘It’s going to be a lovely day,’ I said. ‘Nyman even fixed the weather.’
‘This is as bad as it gets,’ Tim said after a pause. ‘Remember that. It has to get better. Eventually.’
‘You’re probably right. But eventually’s a long time. And I don’t seem able to look far enough ahead to see it. I’m not even sure I want to.’
‘Amy would have wanted you to.’
‘Yes. She would. But she’s not here to tell me that, is she? It’s too late now. For everything.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re here to say it, Ian. Why else?’
I gave him a weary smile and squeezed his shoulder. We stood watching the sunrise for another minute or so. Time doled out a few grudging increments. Then we turned and headed back across the bridge.
* * *
The press didn’t trouble me over the next few days. I suppose they had plenty to keep them busy without delving into Nyman’s reasons for targeting my family. Murder and suicide committed in the face of commercial ruin and probable imprisonment summed up the public explanation of his actions. I was left out of it. The reckoning between Nyman and me remained a personal affair. As perhaps he would have wished.
I stayed with Tim until the funeral. It was held in Cheltenham. The choice of venue was Faith’s. There was no dispute about it. I was willing to go along with whatever she preferred. On some unwritten scale of sentimental values, the mother always outranks the father. And in this case there was another factor. Behind
Nyman’s primary responsibility for what he’d done lay my own secondary responsibility for making him do it. It was something I couldn’t dodge. It was going to be with me as long as I lived. And I was going to think of it every time I thought of Amy.
Doubtless it was in her grandparents’ minds, too, when we met at the church near their home – the very church in which Faith and I had been married sixteen years before. The funeral became a ceremonial confirmation of what it still took a gigantic effort of will to believe: Amy was gone. Sixteen years reduced themselves to the bleak realization that we’d come full circle – and found the circle empty.
Faith travelled in the undertaker’s limousine with her parents and her sister, Jean, who’d flown from Australia to attend the funeral. I rode in Tim’s car. The result was that Faith and I had exchanged no more than a few stilted words and an awkward hug by the time I saw her slip away from the gathering of friends and relatives in her parents’ drawing room. She caught my eye as she left and, after asking Tim to cover for me, I followed.
We went upstairs, to the bedroom she’d slept in as a child and was clearly now sleeping in again. The photograph I’d taken of her and Amy that had hung in the hall at Castelnau was standing propped up on the narrow mantelpiece, facing the bed.
‘I drove down and fetched it a few days ago,’ Faith said, noticing the direction of my gaze as she closed the door behind us. ‘I just wanted to see us together again. To look at her face. To be sure she existed.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘Do you? Sometimes I wonder if you’ve ever known what I meant.’
‘If I haven’t, it’s too late to start now.’
‘Far too late.’
‘I mourn her, too, Faith. You can’t doubt that.’
‘I don’t. But I can’t seem to stop blaming you for her death.’
‘I am to blame.’
‘No, you’re not. At least not exclusively. Nyman played on my weaknesses as well as yours. It took both of us to let him get close to Amy.’
‘But if I’d gone straight to the police when I guessed what the clue he left on the tape meant …’
‘He’d still have killed her. I’m certain of that.’
‘So am I. But it doesn’t help, does it – being certain?’
‘Not one little bit.’
I walked to the window and gazed out for a minute or so at the vapid Cheltenham skyline, then looked back at Faith and said, ‘What are we going to do now?’
‘Sell the house. If you agree. Split the proceeds and …’
‘Go our separate ways?’
‘When Jean flies home next week, I’m going with her. I’ll stay a month at least. Then … I don’t know. Maybe I’ll stay for good. A fresh start. A new life. Something like that. It’s too soon to say.’
‘Is that why you’ve had Amy buried here? Because you think your parents will take better care of the grave than me?’
She shook her head. But she also looked away.
‘I’ll go along with whatever you want to do about the house.’ I shrugged. ‘And about us.’
‘It’s all over, Ian.’
‘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 Malmö. 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.
Caught In the Light Page 35
