Caught in the Light (40 page)

I hope you 're listening to this, Jarrett, because it represents your only chance of seeing Amy alive again. She's here with me now, safe and secure. But she can't move and she can't speak. And she'll never speak again if you don't find us before dawn tomorrow. It's not long, I know, but it's long enough for someone as sharp-witted as you. Oh, I nearly forgot. You don't know where we are, do you ? You "II need a clue. Well, here it is. I first came here with Isabel, a long time ago. In fact, it was the very last time we were all together. Be seeing you, Jarrett. Or not. As the case may be.

i Tim switched the tape off and looked at me questioningly. "Do you think he means it?"

"Yes."

"So do I. When I spoke to him I had the impression, the very distinct impression, that he meant every word."

"It's been leading up to this all along. An eye for an eye. I don't have a sister. But I do have a daughter."

"A sis terT

"Nyman is Isobel Courtney's brother."

"Flesh and blood."

"Exactly."

"What are you going to do?"

"Find them. By dawn tomorrow."

"How? Did that... "clue" .. . mean something to you?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe. Play it again."

Tim rewound the tape and stood watching me as I listened to Nyman's sneering voice, in which there was also some bubbling undercurrent of desperation. "I first came here with Isobel, a long time ago." But where? Where had they gone? "In fact, it was the very last time we were all together." He wanted me to work it out. He needed me to solve the puzzle. And he reckoned I could.

"Again, Tim. Once more."

"I hope you 're listening to this, Jarrett..." Oh, I was listening. I was listening so hard I could almost see the pictures in his head, the pictures of what had been and what was yet to come. "Be seeing you, Jarrett. Or not. As the case may be."

"That's it." I snapped my fingers. "Photographs." I looked across at Tim. "Will you do me a favour?"

"Name it."

"I've got to go now. Give me an hour's start, then take this tape to Faith. Tell her to do as she thinks best. Contact the police, whatever. I doubt it'll make any difference, but... she has to know."

"Know what, exactly?"

"That I'm doing the only thing I can to save Amy."

"And that is?"

"Just what Nyman wants me to do."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was gone ten o'clock when I reached Chichester. The night was mild and windless and Chichester itself seemed eerily empty. There were no lights showing at the Pipe Rack. If Sam Courtney was still up, I reckoned he'd be in the small sitting room behind the shop, with Isobel's photographically preserved smile waiting for him whenever he happened to glance up at the mantelpiece. Not that I much cared. I was sure he'd be at home and that was all that mattered. I'd break the door down if I had to.

But I didn't have to. I added a few thumps on the woodwork to my slams at the knocker and soon saw a wedge of lamplight towards the rear of the shop, then made out a stooped figure slowly rounding the counter.

"Who's there?" the old man ventured when he was closer.

'Ian Jarrett," I shouted. "I have to speak to you."

"Who?"

"Jarrett. You remember, Mr. Courtney. I was here Monday afternoon."

He hesitated so long you'd have thought Monday was a distant memory. Then he said, "What do you want?"

"It's urgent, Mr. Courtney. A matter of life and death. Please open the door."

"I've got nothing to say to you."

"I think you have."

"Well, I don't."

"It concerns your son."

"What?"

"You heard, Mr. Courtney. Your son. Robert. Middle name '

He reached up and slipped the top bolt. It snapped back explosively, silencing me. I waited as he released the bottom bolt, turned the key in the lock and edged open the door. Amber light from the nearest street lamp shimmered on the thick lenses of his glasses. His eyes, blurred and magnified behind them, gaped at me in alarm. "I've got no son," he muttered, as if repeating a mantra. "Isobel was our only child."

"Why don't we talk about it inside?"

"There's nothing to talk about."

"Then why did you open the door?" I stepped in slowly and he moved back, letting me enter with a shrug that was two parts submission to one of stubbornness. "The "friend" Isobel was visiting in Barnet the night she died was her psychotherapist, Daphne Sanger." I pushed the door gently shut behind me. "Her psychotherapist and .. . something more."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Yes, you do. It's why you denied all knowledge of her when I mentioned her name on Monday. You're pretty good at closing your mind to things you don't want to think about, aren't you?"

"Fat lot you know about it."

"Come on, Mr. Courtney. I know all about it. Isobel and Daphne were lovers."

"Rubbish."

"And Conrad Nyman is your son."

"No. He isn't."

"Yes, he is. Much as I wish he weren't. He's Isobel's brother and he holds me to blame for her death."

"You are to blame."

"Yes. I am. But my daughter isn't."

"Your daughter? What's she got to do with it?"

"Amy. Fourteen years old. Nine when Isobel died. Entirely blameless, wouldn't you agree?"

He frowned at me in confusion. "I never said she wasn't."

"He's kidnapped her."

"Who?"

"Your son."

"I have no son."

"He's kidnapped her and he's threatening to kill her."

"I don't believe you."

"Got a cassette player?"

"What?"

"A cassette player."

"Well... Yes, I've got one."

"I have a tape I'd like you to listen to." I slid it out of my pocket and showed it to him. "Then I think you will believe me."

He stared at me for half a minute or so before leading the way, at a shuffling pace, back across the shop. It was hard to tell if he was trying to stall me or just short of breath. But eventually we reached the sitting room. News at Ten was playing with the sound turned down. The old man stooped to switch it off completely, then pointed to a bureau in the corner. A radio cassette player was stationed there, flanked by a bowl of wrinkled apples and an empty vase. "Isobel gave it to us a couple of Christmases before she died," he said. "Doris used to listen to her Val Doonican tapes on it, but I only bother with the radio. You'll have to work it."

"All right." I moved to the bureau, switched on the machine and set the tape running. Sam Courtney listened in silence, his shoulders hunched, his jaws clenched so tightly the muscles created their own shadows on his sunken cheeks. Nyman's voice filled the void between us, his words echoing in the loudspeaker and in the room that had once been his home. Then he was done. I stopped the tape and rewound it. "Do you want to hear it again?"

"No."

"It is your son's voice, isn't it?"

Sam looked at me and nodded dolefully in confirmation. Then, defeated by his own admission, he sat down slowly in the armchair.

"We did our best for that boy," he murmured, as if to himself. "He wanted for nothing. He had a good upbringing. We taught him the difference between right and wrong. We were firm but fair. We treated him the same as Isobel. But he didn't turn out the same. There was always something .. . evil in him."

"But he loved his sister."

"Oh yes. He loved her well enough. And she loved him. So much that she went on seeing him and writing to him after we'd .. ." He shook his head despairingly.

"After you'd disowned him."

"Well? I couldn't stop him defying us. But I could stop him disgracing us."

"Have you seen him since he got out of prison?"

"No. He knew better than to come here."

"But you were aware he'd turned himself into Conrad Nyman?"

"Only when I saw his face in the county magazine, showing off that house of his over at Cuckfield."

"Too close for comfort?"

"He never did concern himself with my comfort. I heard nothing from him when Doris died. Not a word."

"Nor did he from you when Isobel died."

Sam flushed slightly. His voice thickened. "I shouldn't be in any hurry to side with him ... now you know what he's capable of."

"How far do you think he might go?"

"As far as he wants. He's never accepted any limit on what he does. The only person beside himself he's ever cared about... is Isobel. If he's got your daughter like he says .. ." Sam swallowed. "She's in danger of her life."

"Will you help me find them?"

"How can I?"

' "The very last time we were all together." What does that mean?"

The old man shrugged. "I don't know."

"Think, for God's sake. "We" could be him and Isobel, but "we all" must be the family. You, your wife and your two children. Together. For the very last time."

"Maybe."

"When would that have been?"

"Well... I'm not sure. Before he ... went to prison, I suppose, the first time. But he'd been keeping his distance from us for years. I mean, he lived under this roof, at least until he went away to university, but... you wouldn't call that.. . being together."

"What would you, then?"

"When we still did things together. Properly. As a family."

"What things?"

"Holidays and such."

"What was the last holiday you took, then all four of you?"

"Oh, that would have been .. ." He paused to think, his brow furrowing with the effort. "The Norfolk coast. Summer of Seventy-three. Isobel was seventeen that year and Robbie was ... fifteen."

"Where did you go precisely?"

"A caravan site. At a place called Wells-next-the-Sea. It was Isobel's idea. She said she'd always wanted to photograph the area."

"Why?"

Sam gave another of his vast and helpless shrugs. "I don't know. You couldn't question her about her photographs. She had her reasons and we went along with them. Made a change from Weston-super-Mare, I'll say that, though the wind off the North Sea was as cold as charity. That caravan was all draughts. But Isobel didn't care. She was out every day round the countryside with Robbie. They hired a couple of bikes to explore on."

"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 down land 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."