Caught in the Light (43 page)

His body had already been found, by a farm manager doing his rounds of the converted hangars up at the airfield. The pathologist probably told the police it looked like suicide there and then. Apparently the Range Rover matched the description of a vehicle seen speeding out of the beach car park at Wells by a caravanner shortly before he stumbled across Amy's body in the dunes. At some point I gave them Faith's phone number. They didn't seem to want me to contact her direct. Not that it made any difference, since the Met were monitoring Faith's calls by then in the hope of hearing from Nyman. Faith had called them in as soon as she'd listened to the tape. Her estimate of my chances of success had turned out to be exactly right.

By the time she arrived in Wells a few hours later, the local police had pieced together most of the story and satisfied themselves as to where I figured in it. Faith and I met in the stark privacy of the station's one and only interview room. I can't remember what we said. But I can remember her eyes, bloodshot and brimming with tears. And the silences between whatever words we stumbled over, silences heavy with grief and anger and condemnation.

An inspector called Forrester, who'd accompanied Faith from London, badly wanted to talk to me. There was the small matter of Niall Esguard's murder to be thrown into the pot. He knew I'd lied about that from his questioning of Daphne. He was treading carefully, but he was suspicious all the same. Whether the second tape made him less suspicious or more I neither knew nor cared. It was over. Everything now was post mortem.

By early evening he'd finished with me and I was, in that chilling masterpiece of police-speak, free to go at least for the time being. Tim was waiting to collect me. Faith had asked him to make sure I came to no harm. She'd gone to Norwich, where Amy's body had been taken. Her parents were driving over from Cheltenham to meet her. There were arrangements to be made in the wake of what had happened, but no-one supposed for a moment that I was capable of making them.

I have a memory of walking with Tim along the harbour side at Wells, fishing boats bobbing at anchor, the setting sun gilding the salt marshes, neither of us speaking because there were no words equal to the horror that had overtaken us. The world proceeded on its placid way while we stumbled in a void.

It was dark when we started back for London. Nightfall seemed to cut me off from Amy more profoundly than ever. She was in the past now. With every nightfall to come she'd slip further and further away. Her death had been instantaneous, the work of a moment. But I was going to lose her, bit by bit, memory by memory, for the rest of my life.

I stayed with Tim overnight. Early next morning Faith's father phoned from Norwich to say they'd be taking her back to Cheltenham with them. There was a clear implication that I should stay away. I wanted to share my grief with her. Maybe she wanted to share hers with me. But too much had gone wrong between us for that to be possible. Each of us instinctively recoiled from the only person who could truly understand how we felt.

The press were on the scent by then. Nyman's suicide started as a shock to the business world, and turned with bewildering speed into a features-page sensation. Money and murder made an irresistible combination. Luckily for me, none of the papers got wind of the revenge element. Nymanex's shady dealings and its founder's violent end, spiced by Nyman's murder of his lover's daughter as a brutal prelude to the taking of his own life, were more than enough to be going on with.

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 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."