Caught in the Light (45 page)

"What would such items be worth if he hadn't burned them?"

"A lot."

"How much is a lot?"

"Enough to have made your brother a wealthy man. Enough to have run quite a few risks for."

"But not enough to get killed for."

"Nothing ever is." I glanced away and sipped some whisky, eager suddenly to talk of anything but death. "What will you do with the letters?"

"I don't know. Donate them to the Royal Photographic Society, perhaps. What are they worth, without the negatives?"

"Financially, very little, I imagine. They could be mid-Victorian forgeries. Or Marian could be lying. No-one but Nyman ever saw the negatives. He could have been lying, too."

"But you don't think so?"

"No. I'm sure they existed. And I'm equally sure they don't exist now." I sighed. "Nyman was good at destroying things."

I was planning to drive straight back to London when I left Quisden-Neve's house. Just a few miles outside Northiam, however, I spotted a sign for Bodiam Castle. Instantly and completely, sharper than any photograph, the memory came back to me of going there one summer Sunday with Amy. The castle was a picture-book medieval relic that could have been made for children, with its battlements and portcullises and crumbling spiral staircases. Amy had adored it.

A school party was swarming over the place when I arrived. They looked to be about the age Amy had been then. I walked round the lilied moat, listening to their voices filling the air. Somewhere, I knew, if I looked hard enough, I'd be able to find the film I'd had in my camera that day. But Amy wasn't on it. I hadn't taken any pictures of her or the castle. I'd let the visit go unrecorded. And now, just like Marian Esguard's secret experiments with light and paper in the spring and summer of 1817, there was no proof it had ever happened. What I was remembering I could just as easily be imagining. Nyman had erased the past as well as the future.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The only thing left in an empty life is time. I could almost touch it as it passed that spring and summer. Amy's existence slipped away behind me like a single turning on a long straight road. I looked back at it fixedly, fearing that if I once glanced away it would vanish for ever. The world I was in wasn't her world any more. And it didn't feel like mine either.

The house sold easily, for a good price. I banked my share of the money and moved into a rented flat in the centre of Barnes. Faith wrote to say she'd taken a book-keeping job with a wine shipper in Adelaide and was staying on in Australia, for six months or so at least. She hoped I was getting back into photography. I didn't reply. It seemed fairer to let her think I was too busy.

The reality was that a kind of wilful inertia had settled over me. Hours and days seemed to flash by while I did nothing but walk the streets and stare at the sky. Sometimes I simply lay on my bed and watched the light change as the sun moved slowly round me. I took no photographs. In a sense, my life had become a photograph: a Fenton landscape in which I was the silhouetted figure in the middle ground, back turned to the camera, face unseen, purpose unknown. Every moment was frozen. And every moment was the same. I was slowly losing sight of everything that should have mattered but no longer did. I was spiralling down into a dark place where I could neither see nor be seen, but felt, in some strange way, safe from every kind of harm.

Tim was just about my only human contact. He'd look at me during his periodic visits with such a despairing expression that I'd momentarily want to break out of the cycle I was trapped in. Then the desire would fade and I'd tell him not to worry.

Tim had most of his advice and encouragement thrown back at him. But he didn't give up. And, despite his denials, I detected his hand in the unexpected offer that came my way at the beginning of September. My agent broke the silence he'd maintained since the Vienna-in-winter fiasco with a weird and grudging proposition. The Icelandic Geodetic Survey wanted a set of up-to-date photographs of the island's volcanoes to combine with their maps of the areas and the descriptive writings of some eminent vulcanologist in a definitive study of the subject. The vulcanologist was the problem. She was an eruptive character in her own right, and so notoriously reckless that no local photographer could be found who was willing to work with her. They'd all had their fingers burned one way or another. And so, like the runner who finishes last in the race, only to be handed the winner's medal because everyone else has been disqualified, I was chosen for the job.

I'm not sure why I took it. I think the finality of the opportunity shocked me into acceptance. Last chances are difficult to turn down. Besides, I knew nothing about volcanoes and I'd never been to Iceland. The whole project was alien to me. Which was the essence of its appeal. It was more of an escape than a challenge.

Or so I thought until I stepped off the plane at Keflavik and met Dr. Asgerthur Sigurthsdottir. She drove me into Reykjavik at what seemed foolhardy speed through a rainstorm that lifted only occasionally to reveal glimpses of an arid black landscape, treating me as we went to her contemptuous views of men in general and male photographers in particular.

She was a large, flame-haired, gruff-voiced woman of forthright opinions and no discernible reserves of either patience or tact. "They told me your daughter was murdered a few months ago," she bluntly announced as we approached Reykjavik. "They think that will make me gentle on you. Maybe you think that also.

Think again. You are here to work. I will work you. We start tomorrow."

Over the next six weeks we travelled the island, by Jeep and plane, and sometimes on foot, in all weathers, more of it foul than fair, trying to pin down, in her words and my pictures, the mood of the strange places she took me to. Asga the diminutive she came to accept from me in preference to my mangled pronunciation of her full name had been obsessed by the volcanoes of her native land since the explosive offshore birth of Surtsey in 1963, when she'd watched its column of ash rising into the sky from her school classroom 100 kilometres away. Since then, she'd been approximately 100 kilometres closer to every big bang the geodynamics of Iceland could supply which was quite a few. Witnessing an eruption was, she said, 'like sex with a man who knows what to do rare, violent and unforgettable'.

I let that and all her other provocative remarks pass me by. I was content to concentrate on photography. Iceland was a place like no other I'd ever been. Its vast, black, smoking wildernesses soaked into my mind, along with the wind and the rain and the cold dazzling sunlight. I felt removed into a realm of heightened vision, where some kind of photographic perfection was within my grasp. I filled film after film with hallucinatory images of glacial white and sulphurous yellow and deep drowning blue. I returned to the only thing I did well with an eagerness I could neither control nor deny. The pictures imposed themselves upon me.

Early autumn was hazardously late to be visiting some of the sites, but that didn't seem to bother Asga. And the volatility of the weather gave my photographs a menacing hue I could almost taste. There was an edge to them I couldn't help relishing. I already knew they were going to be some of the best work I'd ever done.

The nearest we came to disaster wasn't, as I'd anticipated, in the grey deserts of the interior, where Asga's giant-wheeled Jeep took swollen streams and sandstorms in its stride, but on Snaefellsjokull, the dormant volcano near the far western end of the Snaefellsnes peninsula, Jules Verne's famous starting point for his Journey to the Centre of the Earth. We approached from the south-east, climbed as high as possible in the Jeep, then took a chance on the weather allowing us to make it to the summit and back on foot before nightfall. In the event, a blizzard blew up from nowhere, we lost our way, went down the wrong side of the mountain and reached the coast road in a state of near-collapse, with the light all but gone.

Asga had just about enough breath to blame me for the position we found ourselves in. "You're supposed to be the cautious one, lens brain." But she also had the sense to realize we weren't going to make it back to the Jeep and the local knowledge that led us to an old fish-drying shed, fitted out as an emergency shelter, where we holed up for the night.

It was there, 1,000 miles and more from all my previous experiences, that I finally explained to somebody who'd never met Amy how she'd died and why. "It's too cold to sleep," Asga said. "You'd better tell me your story." It was her prickly way of admitting she wanted to hear it. And to my surprise I wanted to tell it. The time had come to do more than picture the horror and the waste of it in my mind. The time had come to speak. And in some inchoate way to accept. It was done and couldn't be undone. I was going to live through it. Something in my nature was going to force me to survive. Whether I wanted to or not.

Asga gave every impression of having forgotten all about our heart-to-heart by morning, when we trudged back round the coast road to the Jeep. She never so much as mentioned Amy's name. Or Nyman's or Eris's or Isobel's or Marian Esguard's, or any of the others I'd felt at the time she was taking such clear and cogent note of. She said nothing about any of them. Until the night before I flew back to England, that is, when she stood me a farewell dinner at a seafood restaurant near the harbour in Reykjavik. Then, at last, when I'd come to think she never would, she broke her silence.

"I've been thinking about your story, Jarrett. Best brain-food I've had from one of you click-clickers."

"Glad it entertained you," I said, way past taking offence at any remark she made, however insensitive.

"I don't know the people in it. Not one. I reckon that's why I see it clearer than you."

"Do you?"

"Sure thing. So I wanted to tell you, before you left, where

you've got it wrong. You missed something, Jarrett. You didn't get the picture. It must have caught you without your camera."

"What must?"

"Nyman lied. On the tape. He didn't destroy the negatives."

I smiled at her across the table. "What makes you think that?"

"Obvious. Because he lied about the reason for destroying them. He could have cut you out of the deal easy as slicing by sending them to Quisden-Neve's brother along with the letters. Or just by leaving them where they were. They didn't belong to you, did they?"

"But he didn't leave them where they were. The police searched the house from top to bottom and found nothing. And he didn't send them to Valentine."

"Because he didn't have them." She grinned triumphantly. "The other lie proves that."

"Which other lie?"

"The one about Eris. About how he first met her. He didn't want you to find her. Don't you get it? She has the negatives."

"Rubbish."

"Don't you ever think, Jarrett? I mean, just for a few minutes at a time? If not, listen to somebody who does. He sent Eris to your flat, didn't he, planning for Niall to kill her there and make it look like you did the crime?"

"So?"

"What was your motive going to be?"

"What do you mean?"

"The negatives, stupid. She was carrying them. They were what the police were supposed to think you'd murdered her for."

"That can't be."

"And she's still got them."

"No. Nyman burned them."

"He made you think he'd burned them. That's not the same thing. Trust Dr. Sigurthsdottir on this. She has them. And that's how you'll find her. Because they're worth big bucks, right? So, when she thinks it's safe, when she thinks she's left it long enough, she'll try to sell them. And she'll have to show herself to do that, won't she? That's when you'll have her. If you want her. But do you want her, Jarrett? Do you really?" She puffed at her cigarette and frowned at me. "That's a question only you can answer." Then she added after a pause, "And maybe not even you."

I tried not to think about Asga's theory when I returned to London. There was plenty to keep my mind off it, given how spectacular the prints were that Tim made from the films I'd brought back. He agreed with me that the pictures really were quite something. So did my agent, who reckoned he could interest other people besides the Icelandic Geodetic Survey in them. He even gave my 'career' an optimistic mention.

But none of it was quite enough. As I emerged from the shock of Amy's death, old attractions and stubborn curiosities reasserted themselves. Could Asga be right? Where was Eris? And what was the answer to that other nagging question?

I phoned Mary Whiting at Sotheby's in a spasm of impatience with my own inability to draw a line under the past and the people in it. There weren't many ways Eris could sell the negatives for what they were worth without attracting the attention of Sotheby's photographic expert, Duncan Noakes, and hence his keen-eyed assistant, Mary Whiting. If she could assure me that her boss had seen and heard nothing relating to such items, Asga's theory, while not disproved, would at least go unsupported. That would have satisfied me. And it was what I confidently expected to happen. But something else happened instead.

"Did you hear I'd been trying to contact you, Mr. Jarrett?" she asked, before I'd had a chance to explain what I wanted. "I'd quite given up hope of tracking you down."

"I've been out of the country."

"Well, no matter. The situation resolved itself anyway."

"What situation?"

"Oh, it was that name you mentioned to me in connection with poor Isobel. Esguard. It cropped up a few weeks ago. As soon as it did, I thought of you. I couldn't help wondering if you knew the identity of our mysterious client. She was offering us some antique negatives, you see. One of them bearing the name of Esguard."

I met Mary Whiting that evening after work in a pub near Berkeley Square. She was sipping an orange juice when I arrived and clutching her briefcase in her lap like a nerve-racked spy about to pass on state secrets.

"I read of your dreadful loss in the newspapers, Mr. Jarrett. Please accept my condolences. Am I correct in supposing that this matter and Isobel's death are connected with what happened to your daughter?"