The Light of Day: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

what then? The sudden urge to move again?
    It’s out of sight from here, back from the corner. And there’s this gold-and-rust camouflage of trees. A stillness, a crystal light.
    I can’t do it. As if there’s a cordon, striped tape, stretched across. The kind of cordon I might have lifted, years ago, and stepped casually under. A police matter, but I was the police. And of course there was a cordon
then,
and a policeman stepping under it, in charge of proceedings. Marsh, DI Marsh. The Nash Case.
    When he found out who I was I saw the shift in his face. An interview room, a statement. I was principal witness, after all, and principal snag in an open-and-shut case. How strange to be there, in an interview room, on the other side of the table. The other side of the law.
    The sights and sounds of a nick. The whiff of the cells.
    When he found out who I was, he might have leaned on me pretty hard. If it wasn’t for that little admission he let slip in return—the one thing for the other, it almost seemed. That he was retiring in four weeks, that this was his last real case. And they’d put him on it because it was a simple mopping-up. No complications—except me, so it seemed. He might have leaned on me pretty hard, and he did a bit. Grey shifting eyes. So that while he had me there on the spot, and sweating, on the other side of the table, it was as though he too was on the edge of some scary gap, and I was even the one holding out a hand and saying, Come on, you can do it, you can take the jump. Lean on me.
    I could see in his face the question he never exactly asked—and that had become less simple anyway, just by meeting me.
    What’s it like? What’s it like, not being a policeman?
    The Nash Case. Who remembers it? Not every case that finds its way into police files makes the papers as well. It takes something. But even then, in a little while, it’s forgotten. Even right here, maybe, they’ve forgotten. Especially here.
    I can’t do it. As if the car doesn’t want to make the turn, wants to forget as well. I rev the engine. A cold sick feeling of betrayal. As if Sarah’s still in that house, locked up in it—it’s her real prison—and I’m leaving her.
    But how can I approach that house without bringing back how I approached it, twice, that night? The black taste suddenly filling my mouth as I drove away then, the first time. And I knew what it meant. Or why should I have
gone
back,
turned round and gone back?
    I should have understood it sooner, tasted it sooner. I should have stopped him, overhauled him, right here maybe, at the entrance to his own street. Blocked his way. “Mr. Nash? Mr. Robert Nash? I’m a police officer . . .”
    Or I should have overtaken him long before. Got there
first.
“Sarah—it’s not Bob, it’s me.”
    I shouldn’t have just followed him to the corner, watched, then turned away.
    He wouldn’t be where he is now. Nor would she.

8
    Café Rio. A big stencilled mural on one wall: Sugar Loaf Mountain, parrots, palm trees, beach girls. It’s what you need in Wimbledon at the thin end of October. And they play samba music, smoochy and soft.
    Our cars waited for us in the supermarket car park. We’d had to deal with our shopping first. I’d said, “I’m over there,” pointing to my car, near the far corner, “I’ll see you in a moment.” She might have just driven away.
    Late October. The clocks about to go back. Now more things could happen in the dark.
    I’ve got the job, I thought. I won’t pass it on to Rita.
    And she’s got something too, I thought, and knows it: more than the simple job she’ll pay for. Not just a private eye, a private ear. I fetched coffees. This might not have happened, I might just have got her second-thoughts call.
    Doctors and patients aren’t supposed to meet by chance, but they do, and there’s a loosening, an unwinding, a Latin-American beat.
    “So you want to know the story?” she said.
    I hadn’t said I did. I might have