Robert Goddard — Borrowed Time

by Unknown

  “He has nothing to fear from me.”

  “Maybe not. But how do I know that?”

  “I’m only asking if you might know his present where-abouts.”

  “Last I heard, he was working for Dave Gormley. He runs a tyre-and-exhaust place down Raymouth Road.”

  With that, he moved off to serve another customer. Freeing a paunchy greasy-haired man on the bar-stool next to me to snigger at my expense. “Syd’s short-changing you,” he muttered. “Don’t take it personal. He does it to his regulars as well.”

  “You mean Vince doesn’t work for Dave Gormley?”

  “Not any more. Done a runner about a fortnight ago. Dropped out of sight like a rabbit down his burrow. Only in Vince’s case even his burrow’s empty. The Old Bill have been after him. Don’t know what for. Wouldn’t be the same reason you’re looking for him, would it?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “Makes no difference either way. Vince has turned into the Invisible Man.”

  “Doesn’t anybody know where he is?”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?” He winked, swallowed the last of his beer and frowned at the empty glass. Subtlety wasn’t his stock-in-trade. But a fresh pint and a double whisky chaser revealed that information was. Vince Cassidy had a sister. And my thirsty acquaintance knew her address.

  _______

  Sharon Peters, née Cassidy, lived in one of the crumbling yellow-brick tenement blocks wedged between Jamaica Road and the main railway line out of Charing Cross. To the east, the Canary Wharf tower shimmered in the sunshine, a perpetual reminder to the residents of how worthwhile the economies were that deprived them of adequately lit stairways and an occasional dab of fresh paint. They were the slums of a future that was very nearly the present, as unnerving a place for somebody like me to visit as it was no doubt depressing for somebody like Sharon Peters to inhabit.

  She was a busty bottle-blonde in her late twenties, dressed in grubby grey leggings and an orange T-shirt, cleaning away the remnants of a junk-food lunch left behind by her children. They might have been among the jeering group that had jostled past me on the stairs and I couldn’t help wondering if they were even now opening my car door with a bent coat-hanger prior to a Sunday afternoon joy-ride round the estate. Either way, there was no sign of them. Nor of their father, assuming he still lived with them. Sharon Peters was alone. And she looked as if she preferred it that way. The omnibus edition of East-Enders was playing on the television, though not loudly enough to blot out the beat of the reggae music from a neighbouring flat. The door had been ajar and she’d shouted for me to enter when I’d rung the bell, assuming I was somebody else, I suppose. Now she stared at me across her toy-strewn lounge as if I were an alien from another planet. Which in a sense I was.

  “Christ! Who are you?”

  “Robin Timariot, Mrs. Peters. I believe you’re Vince Cassidy’s sister.”

  “So what?”

  “I’m looking for him.”

  “Oh yeh?”

  “And I was hoping you might be able to—”

  “Like I told the fuzz, I haven’t a clue where he is.”

  “Naturally you’d say that to the police, Mrs. Peters. But I’m not the police.”

  “No? Well, maybe there’s worse than them looking for our Vince. Even if I knew where he was—which I don’t—I wouldn’t tell the likes of you. What are you? Debt collector? Private detective? Bit of both?”

  “Nothing of the kind. I was a witness at Shaun Naylor’s trial and this latest turn of events has put me in a difficult position. Just like Vince.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Come on, Mrs. Peters. Why has Vince gone to ground? If he was telling the truth at the trial, he has nothing to fear. And if the police put words into his mouth, he wouldn’t be running away from them, would he? So, somebody else must have put him up to it. I’d like to find out who that was.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do. But never mind. Just tell Vince—”

  “I can’t tell him anything. I don’t know where he is.”

  “I might be able to help him.”

  “Pull the other one.”

  “All right. I might be able to reward him. If he turns out to have some valuable information. I gather he’s out of a job at the moment. Maybe he needs some spare cash.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “Quite.” The hostility in her gaze had fractionally diminished, allowing the hint of a proposition to emerge. “Well, if a little . . . money . . . would help you remember where Vince said he was going . . .”

  “You have a bloody nerve, you do.” Her face flushed red with rage. “If I was ready to sell my own brother down the river for a few quid, I’d be up Soho, wouldn’t I, waggling my tits at men like you, not stuck here, working my fingers to the bone just so—” She broke off and turned away, leaning against the kitchen doorway for support as she chewed at her thumbnail. She was angry at Vince as well as me, I sensed. Maybe she was even angry at her own loyalty. “Why don’t you just piss off?” she murmured.

  “All right. I’ll go. But here’s my card.” I took one from my pocket, wrote my home telephone number on the back and slid it towards her across the table that stood between us. “Tell Vince what I said . . . if you see him.” She glanced down at the card, but made no move to pick it up. My impression was that when she did, it would only be to throw it in the bin. But at least I’d given her the option. In the circumstances, it was the most I could hope to achieve.

  Sharon Peters’ flat was at the far end of a second-floor walkway. As I retraced my steps along it, I glanced down into the courtyard below, noting with some relief that my car was still where I’d left it, complete with four wheels.

  A young woman emerged from the stairwell ahead of me as I looked up and strode swiftly towards me, high heels clacking. She was thin and slightly stooped, with dark curly hair framing a pale gaunt-featured face. Her clothes were market-stall haute couture: a black imitation leather coat several sizes too big for her over a striped sweater and red mini-skirt. Her eyes met mine for a fraction of a second as we passed. Something close to recognition flickered in her gaze and stirred in my mind. Then both of us seemed to dismiss the thought and hurry on.

  But by the time I’d reached the head of the stairs, the faint impression of familiarity had revived. I stopped and looked back along the walkway. She was standing outside Sharon Peters’ door, staring at me over her shoulder as she rang the bell. She frowned. I could sense her thinking what I was thinking: who is that? Then the door opened and she stepped inside, smiling briskly. The door closed. And I was alone. With the answer slipping from my grasp.

  C H A P T E R

  NINETEEN

  I combined my visit to Cambridge with a long-overdue tour of willow suppliers in Suffolk and Essex. This kept me away from the office for most of the following week, which was something of a bonus, since Adrian was due back from Australia halfway through my absence and was sure to think I was deliberately avoiding him.

  Cambridge turned out to hold no more clues than Chamonix to the secrets of Paul Bryant’s soul. Even if he’d revealed anything of himself to Doctor Olive Meyer, I doubt she’d have noticed. She wasn’t exactly the sensitive type. Largely as a favour to Sarah, however, she did give me the name of a third-year student who’d roomed next to Paul in his first year. But Jake Hobson, when I finally tracked him down in the college bar after a lengthy vigil outside his Romsey Town lodgings, had difficulty even remembering what Paul looked like. “Hardly said two words to him all year, mate. He was a closed book to me.” In that, I reckoned, Jake was unlikely to have been alone.

  So, once more, like a laboratory mouse in a maze, I was back where I’d begun. I stood on the riverside path opposite the Garden House Hotel, imagining Louise walking towards me through the chill October mist as she’d walked towards Paul through the warm June sunshine. I we
nt to the gallery where they’d met that momentous March night and strolled past the pale still lives that had succeeded Bantock’s blood-bright daubings. I paced the courts of King’s College and wondered why I couldn’t see her, as Paul had, rounding a corner or looking down, half in fear and half in temptation, from a high window. But the past didn’t lie like the yellowing leaves about me, waiting to be gathered. It kept its distance. One step behind. Or ahead.

  I got back to Greenhayes on Thursday night, at a loss to know what I should do next. But there, obligingly, the answer was waiting, among the bills and junk mail on the doormat. A visiting order from Albany Prison, authorizing me to pay a call on Shaun Andrew Naylor of E Wing any afternoon during the next four weeks. There and then I decided to go the following day. Delay wasn’t going to make the encounter any easier. Urgency just might.

  It was another apple-crisp autumn day, with the Solent like a millpond and the cosy countryside of the Island bathed in golden light. But Albany was still a prison with a high wall and a locked gate. And the cramped foyer I waited in with the other visitors still contrived to preserve, like an essence in the air, the closeness of confinement, the claustrophobic reality of long-term imprisonment. Naylor had served just over three years of a twenty-year sentence. Standing there with the wives, girlfriends, mothers and children, I began to wonder, for the very first time, what it was like to face such a future when you knew—as nobody else did—that you were innocent, not guilty, not the right man; that you were going to spend a third or more of your life rotting in this place or some place like it as a punishment for something you hadn’t done.

  Two o’clock came and the other visitors went in. There was a delay, they told me. Naylor hadn’t known I was coming and had to be fetched from the gymnasium. I read the signposted Home Office prohibitions for the nth time, stared out at the blue sky and the traffic moving on the Cowes to Newport road, struggled to remember what Naylor looked like and tried to decide what to say to him. Then, after twenty minutes that had seemed like hours I was called.

  A prison officer took me through two time-locked closing doors, up a flight of steps, through a metal detector and into the visiting room. Which, to my surprise, was comfortably furnished and pleasantly decorated, with potted plants and pictures on the walls that somehow made you forget the bars on the windows. Family groups sat at well-spaced tables in peach-upholstered chairs, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, chatting and smiling. While in the farthest corner from the supervising officers’ desk sat one man without companions. And he was staring straight at me.

  A stone heavier perhaps and longer-haired than when I’d studied him in the dock at his trial, Shaun Naylor looked bemusingly fit and well, his eyes clear and intense, his gaze direct and mildly challenging. He was wearing the regulation outfit of blue denim trousers and striped shirt, cuffs rolled high above the elbows to reveal gym-honed biceps and forearms. He finished a cigarette as I approached and stubbed it out in the ashtray without taking his eyes off me. He didn’t smile or get up or even uncross his legs. He just waited, like a man who’d learnt the necessity of patience, like a man with time to spare—even for me.

  “You came, then,” he said quietly as I sat down. “Didn’t think you would.”

  “Didn’t Mr. Sarwate explain? I—”

  “Oh, he explained. Still didn’t think you’d show up, though. These places put people off.”

  “Well . . .” I glanced around. “Facilities here seem quite . . . reasonable.”

  “Yeh. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Different story back there.” He nodded towards a door behind him, the door to the rest of the prison.

  “Yes. I imagine it is.”

  “That’s all you have to do, though, ain’t it? Imagine. You don’t have to live it.”

  “No. Well, of cour—”

  “Get us a cup of tea, will you?” He pointed over my shoulder to a serving hatch. “Two sugars.” Obediently, I went and bought him a cup. When I brought it back to him, he uttered no word of thanks, merely took a gulp and said: “It ain’t so bad here. I don’t get as much harassment as . . . other places. My first night at Winson Green, well, I thought it was going to be my last. Anywhere. They beat the shit out of me. Literally. Cons don’t like nonces, see.”

  “Nonces?”

  “Sex offenders. We have to be segregated. That’s why I’m here in the VPU. Vulnerable Prisoner Unit. Locked away with the child molesters. You know? Really nice people. But I can’t complain, can I? Being a rapist and a murderer. I’m getting off lightly. Don’t you reckon?”

  “It’s not for me to—”

  “You know I didn’t do it. You met her that day. You must have known what she wanted. Is that it? Have you got it in for me because you missed out on a sure thing?”

  It was the tiny fragment of truth in his question that angered me more than the suggestion itself. “If you’re trying to antagonize me, Mr. Naylor, you’re going the right way about it.”

  “That right?” A sneer quivered across his lips. “Well, if you came here expecting me to beg, you’ve had a wasted journey.”

  “I came here at your solicitor’s suggestion, in the hope you might be able to—”

  “Tell you who tipped off Vince? Yeh, he said. He also said the police think you did.”

  “Yes. They do. But I’m sure you don’t.”

  He lit another cigarette and took a long draw on it, then said: “Tell you what. Agree to alter your statement. Agree to say you knew all along she was on the pull that day. Then I’ll give you what you want.”

  “Are you trying to blackmail me?”

  “Nah. You’d know if I was. That’s just an offer. A fair offer. Causes you no grief. It’s only the truth anyway.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Come on. You know what she was after. I could tell when I heard you give evidence. You’d seen the signs. Like me. Oh, you hadn’t done anything about it. Too well-bred, I suppose. But you knew what her game was, didn’t you?”

  “No. I didn’t. What was her game?”

  “You want me to tell you? You want to hear me say it? OK. She was seeing how far she could go. Seeing how far she enjoyed going. And that was quite a way. She wanted a stranger to do the things to her she’d never dared ask her husband to do. Or her lovers. She was after some rough trade. And I gave it to her. You bet I did. A classy lady, no holds barred. Too good to refuse. A real bargain, I reckoned. But it didn’t turn out to be much of one, did it?”

  “Obviously not.” Remembering Sarah’s suggestion, I added: “Tell me, did she mention anybody else to you that day?”

  “No.”

  “Some man in her life who’d ditched her or . . . let her down in some way?”

  He looked nonplussed. “She didn’t say nothing like that.” And it was clear to me he didn’t have a clue what I was getting at.

  “Never mind, then,” I concluded lamely.

  He grinned cockily. “I’m going to get out, y’know. Never thought I would. Never thought the bastard who croaked them would cough. But he has, hasn’t he? Pretty soon, everybody’s going to know I didn’t do it.”

  “You don’t need me to change my statement, then.”

  “It ain’t vital, if that’s what you mean. But Sarwate thinks it’ll help, so . . . I said I’d talk to you.”

  “Who tipped off Cassidy?”

  Naylor smirked and picked a flake of tobacco from his tongue. “Not so fast. You going to change your statement?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I need a promise.”

  “They come cheap. What if I gave you one, then broke it?”

  “I’d bear it in mind. For when I get out. I’ll have some scores to settle then. You wouldn’t want to be one of them.” He took another gulp of tea and eyed me knowingly. “What you said on the telly would be good enough.”

  And what I’d said on the television had been truer than I’d realized at the time. To resist the conclusion was to cling stubbornly to a memory
every fresh discovery showed up as a lie. And stubbornness was a luxury I couldn’t afford. He was going to get out. He knew it. So did I. There would be other settlements—other surrenders—more painful than this one. “All right. I’ll make a fresh statement. Along the same lines as my interview on Benefit of the Doubt. You have my word.”

  He chuckled. “The word of a gentleman?”

  “If it amuses you to say so.”

  “Yeh. It does. But, then, the whole thing’s a bit of a joke, ain’t it? All that effort—all that closing of ranks—to get me put away. And the real murderer turns out to be one of your own. I’ve heard of keeping it in the family, but—”

  “Who was Cassidy’s informant?”

  “Ain’t it obvious?”

  “Not to me.”

  “I’m only entitled to a couple of visits a month, mate. Why d’you think I’d waste one on you?”

  “Because Sarwate advised you it was—”

  “Sarwate? I don’t take orders from some—” He broke off and smiled grimly. “Truth is, I got visits to spare. The missus don’t come to see me no more. Says it’s bad for the kids. But that’s bullshit.”

  “Why doesn’t she come, then?”

  “Because she’s got somebody else. Simple as that. Can’t blame her, really. I mean, twenty years is a long time, ain’t it? Must have come as a bit of a shock to hear I was going to be out in less than four. Like I say, I can’t blame her. Leastways, I wouldn’t. If it had been anybody else but Vince Cassidy.”

  “You’re saying . . .”

  “My wife tipped off Vince. Nobody else it could be. Sarwate told her about Bryant. She told Vince. And Vince scarpered. What else could he do? Hang around till the police came for him, then explain he helped have me sent down just so he and Carol could . . .” He shook his head. “Don’t think so, do you?”

  “Why didn’t you say this at your trial?”

  “Didn’t know, did I? Not then. Carol talked me into believing he’d done it to get the Drugs Squad to drop some charges against him. But I’ve heard since he was having it away with her long before . . .” He swirled the tea glumly in his cup and drained it. “Should have guessed. She was always thick with that tart Vince had for a sister.”