Robert Goddard — Borrowed Time

by Unknown

  “For God’s sake!” I shouted, horrified more by Paul’s gloating tone than the ugly weals on Naylor’s face.

  “But that’s right,” said Paul. “It is for God’s sake. And Rowena’s. And her mother’s. And Oscar Bantock’s. We’re doing it for all their sakes.”

  “That’s your justification for torture?”

  “It isn’t torture,” said Sarah, stepping into the room behind me. I swung round to look at her. There was no hint of shame in her expression—or in her voice. “It’s justice.”

  “What?”

  “You wanted to know why. Well, this is why. When Rowena died, Paul and I agreed we had to put an end to the evil and suffering this man”—she pointed at Naylor—“chose to inflict on those we’d loved. We agreed to do what everybody seemed so anxious to do. Prove him innocent. Get him released from prison. Set him free. And then . . .”

  “Take his freedom away again,” Paul concluded with a quivering smile.

  “This doesn’t make any sense.” I looked at each of them in turn and could see in their eyes the proof that it did make sense. To them.

  “They’d never have given up, Robin,” said Sarah. “I told you that. They’d have gone on and on and on. Until they’d turned Naylor into some kind of folk hero. Well, he’s no kind of hero. And we’re going to prove that.”

  “How?”

  “We’ve tape-recorded his confession. That’s why we had to get him out of prison. So we could make him answer for what he’d done. And why we had to lure him here. So we could have him all to ourselves. It’s thanks to you we worked out how to pull it off. You went to see him in Albany and told me afterwards about his marital problems. So, I went to see him myself. I’ve been every other week since. Assuring him how sorry I am he should have been wrongly imprisoned. Offering him whatever . . . consolation . . . he might need after his release. I was there on Tuesday, urging him to come round here as soon as he could. Didn’t take him long, did it? I think he was expecting me to drop my knickers for him the moment he stepped through the door. I’d promised him a surprise Christmas present, you see. Well, I’ve kept my word, haven’t I?”

  “Not about this place you haven’t,” complained Paul. Instantly, I was alert to the hint of friction between them. “It was supposed to be impossible for anyone to trace the address.”

  “Yes.” Sarah frowned in disappointment, as if somebody had just pointed out a trivial flaw in a legal argument. “It was. But I suppose something was bound to go wrong eventually. We’ve been lucky to get as far as we have. There were times I thought we were certain to be found out.” She raised her head defiantly—almost proudly—as she looked at me. “But you believed Paul’s confession, didn’t you, Robin, when we tried it out on you? And so did the police. They never dreamt I was feeding Paul the information they couldn’t account for him possessing. Sarwate let me examine his files on the murders when I went to him and said I was beginning to have doubts about his client’s guilt following the Benefit of the Doubt broadcast. That’s how I got the facts right. By combing through all the statements from witnesses and speaking to one or two of them myself—without telling them who I was, of course. Sarwate had copies of just about everything. Even the scene-of-crime photographs. I asked him not to tell anybody about my enquiries to spare me family and professional embarrassment. And he agreed. From his point of view, it would have been advantageous to have me on his side. I don’t suppose it ever occurred to him that Paul and I were conspiring together. He was hardly likely to look a gift horse in the mouth, was he?”

  “You talk about this as if it were some kind of game.”

  “It’s no game,” said Paul.

  I turned on him, stupefaction swamping my fear of what they meant to do. “Whose idea was it? Which of you suggested it to the other?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Sarah.

  Paul smirked grimly at me. “It matters to you, though, doesn’t it, Robin? Well, for what it’s worth, I suggested it. I’d spent weeks mourning Rowena and our unborn child and the ache of it—the anger I couldn’t vent—only got worse. I started looking back on our life together, trying to see how I could have prevented her death. It always came back to her mother’s death. And to this worthless bastard.” He waved his gun at Naylor, who seemed hardly to notice. “It started as an idle thought. Where was I the night Louise died? The answer was so banal. In bed in a cheap pension in Chamonix with some Swedish girl whose name I couldn’t even remember. But then it came to me. How easily I could pretend I’d been somewhere else. How easily I could claim to have committed the murders. Then they’d have to let Naylor go. Well, he couldn’t argue, could he? He couldn’t change his mind and say he was guilty after all. And he wouldn’t want to. Freedom’s worth any amount of bewilderment. But once he was free . . . he was at our mercy.” He sniggered. “I couldn’t have done it without Sarah’s help, of course. She had her mother’s diary and her trained memory of what happened and when. She also had the forensic skill to put the whole thing together. All I had to do was act the part she wrote for me. Christ, it was a demanding performance, though. Three months of twisting my mind to fit the past we’d invented. Three months pretty close to hell. But they were worth it. For this moment.”

  I turned back to Sarah, my gaze telegraphing the question it was hardly necessary for me to ask. “Why did you go along with it?”

  “Because Rowena’s death was one death too many. I’d just about succeeded in putting what happened to Mummy behind me. In ceasing to imagine what it must have been like for her. Then Rowena threw herself off that bloody bridge. How I wished and wished I could have stopped her. But there was nothing I could do. She was dead and so was the baby I hadn’t even known she was carrying. That made a third generation touched by murder. I wanted to strike back, to retaliate. But I couldn’t see any way to. Until Paul told me what he’d been thinking and I saw there was a way to avenge them all.”

  “And in the process portray your mother as some sort of nymphomaniac? What kind of revenge is that?”

  Sarah bit her lip. “We had no choice. The record will soon be set straight. I only wish Daddy had lived to—” She broke off, grief washing back over her. “Tell me how he died, Robin. Was it his heart? He had a coronary about twelve years ago and ever since the murders I’ve been afraid—”

  “He fell from a cliff, Sarah.”

  “What? In Biarritz? Surely—”

  “In Portugal.”

  “I don’t understand. What was he doing in Portugal?”

  “Nobody seems to know. The authorities think it was an accident.”

  “But you don’t, do you?” She seemed oblivious to the tears glistening in her eyes. “You’re implying he killed himself. Like Rowena. And for the same reason. You’re trying to blame me, aren’t you? You’re trying to suggest the things Paul said about Mummy drove him to suicide.” She swayed slightly on her feet and raised a hand to her forehead. “God, if that’s true, we’ve—”

  “It isn’t true,” shouted Paul. He rushed forward, pushing me aside and taking a stand directly in front of Sarah. His gaze was fixed so firmly on her—and hers on him—that I wondered for a moment if I should try to grab one of the guns. But as soon as the thought formed, I dismissed it. The only hope of a peaceful outcome was to reason with them. “Listen to me, Sarah,” Paul continued. “Do you want to waste all these months of planning and preparing? That’s what it’ll mean if you start blaming yourself for your father’s death. We don’t know the circumstances. You can’t trust a one-sided account of them. For Christ’s sake, if anyone is to blame, it’s Naylor, isn’t it? He started this. But we’re going to finish it.”

  “Yes.” Every muscle in Sarah’s body tensed. Her knuckles blanched with the ferocity of her grip on the gun. “You’re right. It’s too late to stop now.” She glanced down at Naylor. “I’d have liked to get more from him on tape, but what we have will suffice.”

  “For what purpose?” I put in, desperate to plant as man
y doubts in her mind as I could. “A confession extracted in these circumstances surely carries no legal weight.”

  “None whatever.” She sounded calm again, but I knew she wasn’t. Her empty left hand was clasped as tightly as her right to stop it shaking. “This isn’t about the law,” she declared. “It’s about morality. It’s about making Naylor pay for what he did to my mother and indirectly to my sister. And from the sound of it to my father as well. He’s destroyed them all, hasn’t he? So now . . .”

  “You mean to kill him?”

  “No,” said Paul emphatically. “We mean to execute him.”

  “You wouldn’t.” I looked at Sarah as I spoke, silently urging her to see reason. “You couldn’t.”

  “Why not?” Her gaze challenged me as much as the question itself. “A bullet through the brain’s more merciful than rape and strangulation, isn’t it? Much more.”

  “Maybe. But it would still be murder.”

  “Only in the eyes of the law.”

  “And doesn’t that matter? You’re a solicitor, for God’s sake. You’re supposed to believe in the law.”

  “I did once. But not any more. Not since I’ve seen how powerless it is to draw the poison from the wounds people like Naylor inflict—on the living as well as the dead.”

  “But if you kill him, you’ll only end up where he belongs. Behind bars.”

  “So be it. Don’t you understand, Robin? What’s right can’t be made wrong by fear of the consequences.” I saw her certainty gleam like religious fervour in her eyes. And I saw beyond it the futility of debate. Part of me agreed with her. And the other part wouldn’t be able to talk her out of it. Only the truth—only the one discovery she hadn’t made—could sway her. “He deserves to die.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why. Because he murdered two people and wrecked the lives of several others.”

  “He’s solely responsible for that, is he?”

  “Of course he is.”

  “What are you getting at?” Paul fired the question at me over his shoulder.

  “I’m getting at the truth. Which is more complicated than you think.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Sarah, staring at me intently.

  “Has he said why he went to Whistler’s Cot that night?”

  “Some crap about being paid to kill Bantock,” snorted Paul.

  “It’s not crap. He was paid. Or would have been. By a man called Vince Cassidy. Who later testified against him at his trial.”

  Sarah blinked in surprise. “How could you know he told us that?”

  “Because it’s the truth. Somebody hired Cassidy to kill Bantock. And Cassidy sub-contracted the job to Naylor. Your mother simply got in the way.”

  “You can’t know that for a fact.”

  “I can. Because that somebody was your father.”

  “No. It’s not possible.”

  “I’m afraid it is. He was convinced your mother meant to leave him for Oscar Bantock. And he was prepared to commission Bantock’s murder to prevent her. It was to be dressed up as a burglary that went wrong. And it did go wrong. But not in the way he or any—”

  “Shut up!” Paul rounded on me, raising the gun as he did so. His mouth was twisted into a snarl and his eyes were bulging. The mania I’d glimpsed in him before—the capacity for violence he probably didn’t know the full extent of himself—drove me back across the room until I collided with the wash-hand basin. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re trying to do?” he raged. “Do you think I can’t guess the way your mind’s working?”

  “Daddy?” Sarah murmured behind him. “Daddy . . . started all this?”

  “He’s lying,” Paul shouted at her. “He’ll say anything to talk us out of what we agreed we had to do.”

  “But that was before . . .” She looked past him at me, insisting I return her gaze. “How can you know? How can you be sure?”

  “He told Bella, to convince her Paul’s confession was false. Remember his certainty, Sarah. Remember his insistence that it couldn’t be true. All because he knew it wasn’t.”

  “But . . . he let Paul go on.”

  “He couldn’t stop him without admitting to complicity in his own wife’s murder. But that’s what he decided he had to do when he heard Naylor was to be released. He was going to make a clean breast of the whole thing. A former patient of his with underworld connections who’d retired to the sun was the man who’d set it up for him. That’s why your father went to Portugal. To warn the man what he meant to do. But he wasn’t allowed to do it. His death wasn’t an accident or suicide. He was murdered. To protect the people who’d hired Cassidy on his behalf. Ring any bells, does it? A faintly shady acquaintance living in the Algarve? You may have met him a few times in the past.”

  Sarah stared at me without speaking for several seconds while a host of puzzling recollections and unanswered questions must have assembled themselves in her mind and assumed the unmistakable symmetry of truth. Then she murmured “Oh my God” under her breath and leant slowly back against the wall behind her. “Ronny Dugdale.”

  “Surely you don’t believe him?” demanded Paul, stepping across to Sarah and shaking her by the shoulder. “He’s making the whole thing up.”

  “I thought Daddy’s reaction was just a different kind of grief,” she said quietly, almost reflectively, as if unaware of Paul’s words ringing in her ears. “I thought he just couldn’t bring himself to think ill of Mummy and that’s why he refused to accept our story. But I was wrong. It wasn’t grief. It was guilt.”

  “Jesus Christ, Sarah, concentrate on what we’re here to do. You’re letting it all slip away.”

  “I was doing this for him. I was trying to take away his pain as well as mine. And now I discover . . . he was ultimately responsible for everything Naylor did.”

  “Snap out of it.” Paul slapped her cheek and glared into her eyes. I moved cautiously towards them. “Robin’s lying to you.”

  Sarah frowned pityingly at him. “No, Paul. He isn’t. Naylor named Cassidy as his accomplice when we held a gun to his head and gave him no choice but to tell as much of the truth as he knew. We just didn’t want to listen. Because blame is so much easier to deal with when it’s indivisible. Now it has to be shared out among God knows how many people, some of whom we’ve never even heard of. And my own father has to take the largest portion.”

  “Only Naylor raped your mother. Only Naylor strangled her.”

  “That’s not good enough any more.”

  “Not good enough?”

  “No.” Her cheek had reddened where he’d slapped her. She cast me a fleeting look of conviction mingled with resignation. In it I felt I could read her exact state of mind. The justification she’d prepared for her actions had lost its purity. If she went on, its debasement would become all-consuming. Slowly and carefully, she opened the chambers of the revolver and slid the bullets out one by one into her palm.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m giving up. I have to. We have to.” She reached past him, dangling the empty gun by its trigger-guard from her forefinger, offering it to me while she kept her eyes fixed on Paul, so intently—so imploringly—that he seemed unaware of what was happening. I stretched forward, lifted the gun from her finger and slipped it into my raincoat pocket. Unloaded, it didn’t feel like a real weapon at all, merely a weight dragging at my coat, an encumbrance we’d all be well rid of. But I knew there was a second gun, clutched in Paul’s right hand. And that was still very much a weapon. “It’s over, Paul,” Sarah said gently. “We can’t go on with it. Not now.”

  “You can’t, you mean.”

  “It amounts to the same thing. We’re in this together or not at all.”

  “And at your say-so I have to write off three months of making people think I’m a murderer? I sometimes thought I’d be driven mad by the contradictions and convolutions of what you said I had to do to convince them. I only survived because I believed in what we’d set ou
t to do. And now you’re telling me to forget it. Dismiss it from my life. Well, I can’t. And I won’t.” The pitch of his voice had been rising as he spoke. Now something like a convulsion seemed to grip him. He took a step towards Sarah, then swung round and stared at me. “You bastard!” he roared. “You may have got to her, but you won’t get to me.” He raised the gun and for a heart-stopping second I thought he was actually going to shoot me. Sarah must have thought the same because she rushed forward and grabbed his arm, the bullets she’d taken from the other gun spilling out of her hand and clattering to the floor.

  “Paul! Listen to me.”

  But Paul wasn’t about to listen to anyone. He flung Sarah off, spun round, leant over the bath, grasped Naylor by the collar and clapped the gun to his head. Naylor winced and squirmed, but was unable to resist. With the tape sealing his mouth, he couldn’t even try to reason with the man who had it in his power to destroy him with one squeeze of his forefinger. The fragility of life—ours as well as his—was suddenly and horribly clear. Sarah and I stood stock still, both of us paralysed by the ease and imminence of the act. Perhaps Sarah hadn’t imagined what it might mean until now; hadn’t envisaged the smashed bone and spattered blood. If so, the images swarming in my head hadn’t entered hers until this moment. It was a harsh awakening that might soon become a gory reality.

  “Don’t do it,” she said hoarsely.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Paul looked round at us, his eyes blazing. “I haven’t forgotten Rowena, even if you have.”

  “It’s for her sake I’m asking. She wouldn’t want you to do this.”

  He hesitated. His grip slackened. The barrel of the gun eased back from Naylor’s temple, leaving its circular imprint on his flesh. Paul began to tremble. He seemed to be holding tears only just at bay. Tears of anger and frustration and grief. “We can’t just . . . give up,” he sobbed.

  “We must,” said Sarah.

  “He deserves to die. You said so yourself.”

  “Not this way. Not now.”

  “It would be murder, Paul,” I said as calmly as I could. “And Sarah would be an accessory. You’d be condemning her to prison along with yourself.” Whether this was legally true or not I had no idea. I could only hope Paul had none either. “Do you want to do that? Do you really want to do that?”