The Image in the Water by Douglas Hurd Read Free Book Online Page A

the photograph. I have and will have no comment to make.
    Yours sincerely,
    Roger Courtauld
    â€˜You should have e-mailed this to me at once. You know I’m following the matter closely.’
    â€˜I’m sorry.’
    Lord Spitz was indeed hot on the trail, telephoning fromNew York or Toronto several times a day. Seebright sometimes felt that he rather than Roger Courtauld was being hunted.
    â€˜So you’re stuck.’
    â€˜Not at all. We can publish the photograph and make much of the refusal to comment. Roger’s Guilty Secret.’
    â€˜Not strong. He has realised that once he begins to explain and give details he provides a scent for you to follow. He must be sure that there is no scent which others can provide.’
    â€˜So we shall find the young German. That will be stage two.’ Seebright hated being goaded. He was being pushed beyond reality. The girl he had sent down to Mothecombe had come back empty-handed. The trail was more than forty years old. The restaurant on the cliff top had changed hands and provided no witnesses. Mr Reynolds, who had sent the photograph, was over eighty, house-bound and surrounded by the photograph albums that seemed to be the only harvest of his life. He was kept alive by the vigour of his right-wing views. He remembered the Courtauld family and their visits to Mothecombe over the years, but had never known them personally. He was too old to remember and too honest to invent any particular of the afternoon when he had snapped these young men on the beach. He had been angry when the girl reporter had offered him ten thousand pounds to help his memory.
    â€˜You should have gone the whole hog,’ Seebright had said. The girl had been authorised to offer fifty thousand.
    â€˜He would have hit me with his stick.’
    Sometimes Seebright despaired of England.
    He ended the conversation with Lord Spitz as best he could, and picked up the soon-to-be-famous photograph forthe hundredth time. He disliked Roger Courtauld on political grounds, but he had come to hate the fair-haired anonymous German with the closed eyes, faint fatuous smile, and damnable anonymity. If he ever found that German he would mercilessly destroy him. He focused on the magazine that lay half concealed beside the towel. They had checked, of course. The magazine was an illustrated monthly published by the Lutheran Church. It gave full and respectable details of youth conferences, expeditions and aid projects across the world. Because it was a national publication it gave no clue of the young man’s origin inside Germany.
    But, thought Seebright, it gave a clue to his interests. How would a young Lutheran spend his time in Cornwall in the mid-eighties? He might or might not make love to a thrusting young Conservative from Exeter University called Roger Courtauld. Almost certainly not, but that was no longer the point. He would certainly have visited churches. Churches, churches, churches. Churches kept visitors’ books. And visitors’ books included a space for addresses. Within an hour the hounds, six of them this time, were back on the trail. Time was desperately short. Of course it was not easy.
    â€˜Visitors’ books? What an old-fashioned idea! We threw them away long ago with the old prayer books.’
    â€˜We charge two euros for entry, and of course visitors can e-mail comments, but we don’t take names unless they do.’
    â€˜Here you are, but they’re falling to bits rather.’
    On the second day luck turned. On the sea, surrounded by caravans, St Peter’s harboured in its cemetery a forgotten minor poet, and dozens of fishermen drowned through the centuries. Holy Communion was held in the chancel once a month. Because they could enter by a gap in the boarding thatseparated chancel from ruined nave, this service was attended in summer by more swallows than human worshippers. In the vestry, discoloured with damp, was a pile of identical