Four young people sat on a stone wall in the sunlight. It was a simple enough photograph. The kind that might be found in any album of holiday snapshots. A memento of youth, of halcyon days. But look deeper, beyond the frozen smiles, and there were stories behind the image. The camera had captured a mere instant in time in the lives of four people but in that tiny fragment lay clues to what had passed before and to what had come afterwards. Glimmers of insight, there for anybody who cared to look with an open mind. But, Adam thought bitterly, he hadn’t seen them.
He had been sitting in his room at the New Inn for some time. While he stared at the picture he fiddled with the pair of broken glasses he’d found at the site of the accident, turning them over and over between his fingers.
Three young men and a girl sat in a row. Ben’s arm was around Jane Hanson’s waist. The first time he’d seen the picture he’d noticed Jane’s body language, the way her hands were clasped loosely in her lap and the way she leaned very slightly away from Ben. He remembered thinking they appeared unbalanced. Whoever had snapped the photograph had inadvertently captured the signs of a relationship breaking down. When he looked closely he thought he could see that Ben’s smile was a little strained, while Jane appeared composed, almost self-contained. It was clear who was ditching whom.
But there was more than that. He focused on Jane alone. The more he studied her the more she came to life. She wore a faint smile, but hers was the expression of somebody suffering an interlude from the serious business of why she was there. If he had to say now what his impression of her was, he would say here was a strikingly attractive girl who exuded an air of seriousness. There was something about the set of her chin that suggested doggedness. Perhaps single-mindedness.
How could he have missed what now seemed so glaringly obvious? Everything that he’d learned about Jane supported what her image portrayed. She had been at odds with protesters like Peter Fallow. She thought their methods would ultimately fail, that in fact they actually alienated the community whose support they needed. So, when she’d heard about Janice Munroe’s suspicions regarding the planning committee she’d seen an opportunity to stop the development. An opportunity that was altogether pragmatic and one that she had pursued relentlessly.
Ellie had told him that Jane had overheard somebody talking in a pub, and it was that conversation that had sent her looking for Jones. He himself had followed the same trail, dogging her steps all the way. First to Dr Grafton and then to Webster and the newspaper records and ultimately all the way to a rundown hotel in Tynemouth. That had taken a lot of determination. A singular sense of purpose, and it had been staring him in the face all along and he had ignored it.
He should have known that Jane wasn’t corruptible. She hadn’t gone to such lengths to stop a development she was philosophically opposed to, only to roll over at the end. Nor would she have simply returned to London. When she had left the camp it was Durham she had gone to, not London. At the Barstock Clinic she’d been given Jones’s old address in Durham, but tracing him from there to Tynemouth must have taken some time. Time that Adam himself had been saved thanks to Dr Hope. But once Jane had arrived at the Park Hotel, where she’d discovered Marion Crane’s patient records and a copy of Judith Hunt’s birth certificate, she must have pretty well known what had happened. But she had never confronted Hunt with what she knew, and the following day Ben and the two people with him in the car had been killed.
Adam went to the window. Outside it was snowing heavily. He thought he knew now what had happened the night of the accident and he couldn’t wait until morning before he discovered if he was right. By then the snow would be too thick on the ground and he would have to wait for the thaw, which could be days or even weeks away.
He grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He left the broken glasses lying on the photograph. He should have seen earlier what was now painfully obvious, but he’d been blinded by his own preconceptions. They were the same glasses, he had finally seen, that Jane wore in the picture.
It was dark and driving was difficult. The windscreen wipers flopped back and forth at full speed, but even so there was time for a thin covering of snow to settle briefly on the glass. As he climbed towards the fells it was several inches deep on the road. He drove in second gear, hunched over the wheel, peering at the narrow black and white world lit by the headlights. The landscape was uniformly white except for the bare trees and the stone walls which stretched across fields like pencil-drawn lines on pristine paper. The only evidence of life he saw was in the occasional glimpse of headlights in the rear-view mirror. Somebody else braving the roads.
It took him forty minutes to reach the place where the Vauxhall had left the road. When he got out the wind froze his hands and face and icy chips stung his eyes. He shone the beam of his torch down the slope through the trees where the snow hadn’t penetrated much yet, forming only a thin layer. Recalling the last time he’d been there he pondered the wisdom of tempting fate. His knee was aching. While he hesitated snow settled on his shoulders and trickles of moisture found a way down his collar. It was the relentless snow that made up his mind. The reports on the radio were that it was expected to last all night with more predicted for the coming week. By morning there would be no chance of finding anything and he had wasted enough time already. He needed to know. He looked for the best route down and then making his choice he sat on the frozen ground and began slowly to slide.
He gathered speed quickly and felt as if he was plummeting into a chasm. The snow deadened all sound as he slithered and slipped past trees and rocks, everything flying past in a blur. The snow, however, not only made his descent quicker, it also smoothed the bumps where it had drifted and eventually he began to slow and finally came to rest a short distance to the right of the tree that bore the scar of the wreck’s final impact. Here and there a branch sagged under its burden and dumped a load of snow on the ground. The same thing was beginning to happen all around. Minor cascades began in the upper branches and then there would be the occasional dull thump of another fall and again the whispering trickle of snow.
Adam got to his feet and gingerly tested his weight on his knee. It hurt, but not badly. Logic told him that if his suspicions were right, he would find what he was looking for further down the hill, so he began his search fifty feet beyond the place where the wreck had come to rest. Using the scarred tree as a reference he covered the ground in a methodical pattern, working sixty or so feet on either side, ranging back and forth in lines ten feet apart.
The slope was gentler than up by the road but working by torchlight didn’t make his task any easier. Several times something caught his eye but when he got down on his knees to check there was nothing there. After almost an hour he was far enough down the hill that he couldn’t see where he’d started. He rubbed his numbed hands together and thrust them inside his coat to get warm. As the circulation returned it felt like small blades jabbing the tips of his fingers. Countless snowdrifts punctuated the darkness. Any one of them, he thought, could hide what he was looking for.
He heard a movement close by, the sound of something skittering down the slope, but when he shone the torch he couldn’t see anything. Once again he resumed his pattern, slowly moving back and forth in straight lines sweeping the beam before him in a narrow arc, looking for some disturbance, something out of place.
And then finally he found it.
Beneath a holly bush, where a patch of ground was partly concealed, the beam fell on disturbed earth. A rudimentary attempt had been made at concealment and there were signs of animal activity. For some time, maybe a minute or more, he couldn’t move. Though this was what he’d expected to find, he supposed part of him had hoped that in the end he was somehow wrong. He was overcome by a sense of hopelessness. If he had missed this, and it had been there right before his eyes from the beginning, then what else had he missed?
He sat down heavily on the cold ground.
He wasn’t sure how long it was before he became aware that he was no longer alone. Though he hadn’t heard anyone approach he felt a presence nearby and when he turned around he saw a figure standing in the trees silently watching him, holding a shotgun loosely in one hand.