Free Caught in the Light by Robert Goddard Page B

which role Tim was tailor-made; and my wife to confirm I really had run out on her, which Faith naturally wasn't going to deny, especially when asked by a psychotherapist, the sort of person whose help she'd more or less told me I badly needed.
    I warned Tim to expect a call from Miss Sanger and let him believe I was consulting her for the sake of my mental well-being. I left Faith to make what she liked of it, then sat back and waited for the results. My visit to Harley Street was fixed for Wednesday afternoon, which gave me two clear days to check Miss Sanger's credentials they proved to be impeccable and drive down to Tollard Rising again.
    Nothing had changed at St. Andrew's Church, or at the sloping swathe of farmland that had once been the deer park and landscaped vistas of Gaunt's Chase. For an idea of what the place had looked like I had to call at the local-studies library in Dorchester and leaf through various old county histories until I came across a reproduction of an oil painting by Canaletto, no less, of the house as it had appeared in 1753. A four-square, red-brick construction, faced in pale stone, with tall chimneys springing from a broad-hipped roof, it sat starkly in a strangely empty park, with only the rolling hills in the background to remind me that it was the same corner of Cranborne Chase where I'd seen nothing but fields and barns and fences. The county histories were principally interested in its architecture 'restrained Dutch Palladian of the 1690s, possibly the work of William Talman' and the circumstances surrounding Canaletto's commission to paint it a flirtation with the role of patron of the arts by Nathaniel Esguard, grandfather of Joslyn. The Esguards' money was airily attributed to substantial holdings in the East India Company. Their eventual decline and fall along with that of Gaunt's Chase was undocumented, apart from the terse caption to Canaletto's depiction of the house. "Destroyed by fire, 1838." Canaletto's original was evidently in the hands of a private collector in Texas. Everything, it seemed, was either long ago or far away. And of no obvious concern to me. Except that Daphne Sanger's Eris Moberly and my Marian Esguard had decided that it should be.
    "Take a seat, Mr. Jarrett," said Daphne Sanger as I entered her ground-floor consulting room in Harley Street. It was furnished and decorated in soothing shades of green, blending with the shadows of an overcast late afternoon. "It doesn't have to be the couch. I only have one because so many people expect me to." Her self-assurance seemed magnified in this, her particular domain. It was warm and comfortable, yet oddly impersonal odd because the lack of clutter, the lightness of her presence, somehow contrived to lower my de fences As no doubt it was meant to. "May I call you Ian?"
    "By all means."
    "And what will you call me?"
    "What did Eris Moberly settle for?"
    "Daphne."
    "Daphne it is, then. How did the positive vetting go?"
    "Positively. Tim Sadler made all the right noises. And your wife .. . seemed pleased to hear you were coming to see me."
    "She thinks I'm mad. Or says she does."
    "From her point of view, your recent behaviour hardly looks ... rational."
    "What about from your point of view, Daphne?"
    "I have the advantage of knowing rather more of the background."
    "And am I to share that advantage?"
    "Yes. I've decided to set my ethical reservations to one side."
    "I'm glad to hear it," I said, exerting some effort not to look it. "Where do we begin?"
    "With any doubts you may have that Marian Esguard and Eris Moberly are in fact the same person. Listen to this." She pressed the play button on a tape recorder stationed on the desk in front of her, and a voice that made me start with surprise floated into the room between us. "My name is Eris Moberly." It could have been Marian whispering to me in the darkness in Vienna. Daphne must have been able to read the startled recognition in my face even as she switched the