Caught in the Light by Robert Goddard

Author:Robert Goddard [Goddard, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-12-08T12:54:51.970000+00:00

"Were they at the funeral?"

"I... I'm not sure. I suppose so. My memory's not as sharp as it used to be. I forget. Except the things I want to forget. They don't go away." He stuck out his lower lip pugnaciously. "I try to think of Isobel as she is in that photograph, but my mind won't always let me. Sometimes, too often, it puts a different picture in its place. The picture of what I saw on that slab in the mortuary when I went in to identify her. How she was after you'd ..."

He flapped his hand, at me or the memory, I couldn't tell which, and caught a small tower of tobacco tins with one of his fingers. The tins toppled across the counter, several skidding off onto the floor, where they rolled and rattled slowly to rest.

"I'd like to close up now," he said, breaking the silence that followed. "Would you mind leaving? I'm rather tired."

Sam Courtney was tired. Maybe I was, too. Or maybe my confidence was ebbing. It was no more than a five-minute walk to East Pallant. Number eight stood at the end of an elegant parabola of Georgian houses. Like most of the others, it had been converted into offices, whose occupants were beginning to leave for home, strolling away in the mellow late afternoon sunlight, briefcases in hand, coats over arms. Everything was ordinary and orderly. Nothing was out of place.

But if I raised my gaze to the rooftops and the sky and let my mind discard the sights and sounds of the present I could almost imagine that, with enough thought and concentration, enough desire to make it so, I could look down again and see Marian Esguard emerging from the door of her father's house into the world she'd known. The same bricks and mortar, the same railings and paving stones. It wasn't so very different, nor so very far away. She'd been here. Maybe, in some sense, she still was here.

But when I did eventually look down, all I saw was a schoolgirl walking slowly past me and on along the street. I hadn't heard her approaching and I watched her receding figure with a fixity of mind I couldn't quite fathom. She was wearing school uniform boater, blazer and pleated skirt and was carrying a satchel over her shoulder. Her long blond hair bounced on the collar of her blazer as she walked. She was probably about Amy's age, and I could easily imagine what Amy would say about having to wear a boater, though this girl didn't seem to mind. She glanced back at me, or at something behind me, as she crossed to the other side of the street, then vanished from sight round the curve of the buildings.

I didn't think any more about her until I was driving north out of the city, back towards London. Then it came to me. It was still the Easter holiday. There shouldn't have been any schoolgirls in uniform on the streets of Chichester.

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