Borrowed Time

by Robert Goddard

  Telling Adrian I needed to take a few days’ leave so soon after the day I’d already spent in Birmingham was the easy part. Explaining myself to the Paxtons was next to impossible. In the end, I didn’t even try, travelling up by an early train on Monday morning and squeezing into the court just before proceedings began. Sir Keith spotted me at once, of course, and was clearly puzzled. But he was on his own, which was a relief as well as a surprise.

  There was time for us to have a quick word before the judge entered. To my astonishment, Sir Keith seemed to think I’d come for his benefit. “Sarah’s had to go back to college for the start of the summer term and Rowena’s staying with her in Hindhead. Bella can keep an eye on her there. Besides, I didn’t see why she should have to listen to Naylor’s lies. It’s bad enough any of us should have to. I don’t mind admitting I’m glad I shan’t be sitting through it alone, though. This is much appreciated, Robin, believe me.”

  The court was fuller than it had been on the day I’d given evidence. There was a buzz of expectancy, an unspoken but unanimous understanding that we’d come to the crunch. Naylor was already in the dock, staring into space and chewing at his fingernails, right leg vibrating where it was angled under his chair. His nervousness was hardly surprising in view of the sledgehammer blows the prosecution had been able to deliver. He looked what we all thought he was: a hardened over-sexed young criminal with a streak of malicious violence he couldn’t control. But he was trapped now. And the only way out was to persuade the jury he’d been wrongly accused. Which he didn’t look capable of doing. Not remotely.

  The jury filed in. Then the judge made his entrance. And Naylor’s barrister rose to address the court. His opening speech was short and to the point. “Mr. Naylor has nothing to hide, members of the jury,” he concluded. “Which is why I propose to call him to give evidence in his own defence.”

  And so it began. Naylor was taken from the dock to the witness-box and sworn in. He spoke firmly and confidently, almost arrogantly. His answers were casually phrased but cleverly constructed. Too cleverly, I suppose. Some mumbling show of awe might have won him a few friends. Instead, he came across as somebody so contemptuous of the world that he couldn’t believe it had turned against him now. And he seemed positively proud to admit how he made a living.

  “I’m a thief. That’s what I am. I clock targets while I’m doing the day job. Call back later to collect. Thieving’s what I do. But I don’t murder people. I might lay somebody out if they tried to stop me getting away, though I’ve never had to. But I wouldn’t kill them.” And rape? What about that? “I’m no rapist. I reckon they’re the lowest form of life there is. Them and child molesters. I’m a married man with children. But like my wife’ll tell you, I’m no saint. I’ve never been able to say no to women. They like me. I’ve never had to force them into it. I’ve never wanted to. I never would.”

  That much seemed credible. He had the cocksure manner and smouldering looks some women find attractive. But he also had such confidence in his own irresistibility that it was easy to imagine him reacting violently to rejection. As for murder, well, he’d more or less said it himself. If Bantock had tried to stop him, worse still to apprehend him, he’d have done whatever was necessary to escape. Candour was his only hope. But candour revealed him as a man quite capable of committing the crimes he’d been charged with.

  So, what was his version of events? It took him the rest of the day to spell it out. But what it amounted to was this. He’d gone to stay with a friend in Cardiff while the dust settled on a row with his wife. The usual cause—his chronic infidelity—had been aggravated by the latest piece of skirt being her sister. He reckoned a trip to Disney World for her and the kids might patch things up. So, he set about raising some cash to pay for the holiday by breaking into likely looking rural properties, all of them far enough from Cardiff to avoid embarrassing his friend. A house near Ross-on-Wye on the night of 14/15 July. Another near Malvern on 15/16 July. And a third near Bridgnorth on 16/17 July. He stayed in the area next day and looked around the Ludlow-Leominster-Bromyard triangle, spotting a couple of possibilities. Then he drove towards Kington and stopped at the Harp Inn, Old Radnor, to while away the evening before deciding which one to try. And that’s when his plans changed.

  “I was sitting outside in the sun. What was left of it. The place was pretty busy. Lady Paxton—I didn’t know her name then, of course—walked up and asked if she could share my table. I said yes and offered to buy her a drink. She didn’t go into the pub herself. And she’d left her car a little way down the lane, near the church. We talked. Like you do. It was obvious . . . Well, I got the pretty clear impression she was . . . interested. We had another drink. She got friendly. Started to flirt with me. Eyefuls of smile. Hand brushing my thigh. You know. I got the message. And I thought: why not? Beautiful woman. Lonely and a long way from home. Who wouldn’t? She didn’t say much about herself. Or ask me much about myself. We left about eight forty-five, I suppose. It was getting dark by then. She suggested we go back to a friend’s house nearby. Said the friend wouldn’t be there and . . . she could use it. She led the way in her car. I followed in mine. It wasn’t far. A cottage up a narrow lane near Kington. The friend was a painter. A woman, she said. She showed me her studio. I didn’t spend long looking around. We both knew what we were there for. It started in the studio. But there were too many things to bump into. So she took me upstairs to the bedroom. I didn’t rape her. I didn’t need to. She was . . . a willing partner. And she . . . well . . . liked it a bit rough. But that’s not rape. Not anything like. I didn’t stay long afterwards. She said her friend was due back around eleven and she wanted time to clear up. So, I made myself scarce. It can’t have been much later than half past ten when I left. She was still in bed then, alive and well. I stopped for a drink at a pub in Leominster just before closing time. The Black Horse. Then I went on and did the place near Bromyard. Big house at Berrow Green. I got a good haul there. Felt pretty pleased with myself. I got to Cardiff around dawn. Next day, I set off back to London. Reckoned I’d got enough to pay for the Florida trip. And it was about time I made it up with the wife.

  “I heard about the murders on the telly. At first, I couldn’t believe it was the same woman. But when I saw her picture in the papers . . . I knew. And I knew the best thing I could say was nothing. I mean, I had to be in the frame, didn’t I? They said she’d been raped. And I knew they could tie me to that. Probably to the cottage as well. So I laid low. Didn’t go down the Greyhound. Let alone say anything to Vince Cassidy. What he says I said . . . It isn’t true. Any of it. She was alive when I left the cottage. And the painter wasn’t there. I don’t know who murdered them. Or why. But it wasn’t me.”

  “At times he was almost plausible,” said Sir Keith over a drink in the bar of the Midland Hotel at the end of the afternoon session. “I mean, if you didn’t know Louise, that is.”

  “He didn’t seem plausible to me. A slick liar, yes. But nobody was taken in.”

  “I hope you’re right. I don’t want Louise’s memory sullied by any of the things he said about her.”

  “It won’t be. He can’t achieve anything this way—except a longer sentence.”

  “I’d give him a short sentence if I could. The shortest one of all.”

  “Yes,” I said, lowering my voice. “I rather think I would too.”

  “The evil-minded bastard,” Sir Keith muttered, massaging his brow. “God, I’m glad the girls didn’t hear any of that.”

  “They’ll read it though, won’t they?”

  “Yes. They’re bound to. But at least they won’t have to watch his weaselly eyes while they’re about it. Or listen to his Jack-the-lad voice reeling off lies like grubby fivers from a wad in his back pocket. I expected to hate him, of course. To despise him. To want him dead. But I didn’t know he was going to make my flesh creep. Well, tomorrow he’ll be cross-examined. I hope the prosecuting counsel puts him through hell. Because that’s what he
deserves.” He broke off and shook his head, bemused, it seemed, by the force of his response. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to get carried away.”

  “Don’t apologize. I agree with you. One hundred per cent.”

  Sir Keith and I drank too much and stayed too long in the hotel bar that night. Sickened by the way Naylor had sought to portray his wife as some kind of ageing nymphomaniac, his anger gave way in the end to grief. I sat and listened to his increasingly tearful reminiscences of their life together. How they’d met when Louise had been working as a hospital receptionist during a university vacation. How he’d fought off the younger rivals for her affections. How they’d married despite her parents’ opposition.

  “Both dead now, thank God. I wouldn’t have wanted them to go through this. Even though they never liked me. Well, I was fifteen years older than Louise, with a divorce behind me. I wasn’t what they had in mind for their daughter at all. She was an only child and naturally they wanted the best for her. And they thought she could do a great deal better than me. Maybe they were right. I didn’t have the knighthood then, of course. I didn’t have the lifestyle I have now. But that didn’t deter Louise. She was never a gold-digger. She accepted me for what I was. And for what I might become.”

  In the event, Sir Keith had given his wife wealth and status as well as love. They’d been married for twenty-three years and he’d never once regretted it. A beautiful wife and two lovely daughters to adorn his middle age. He’d known he was lucky, blessed with more than his fair share of good fortune. But he’d never supposed there’d come such a savage reckoning. He’d never imagined he might have to pay so dearly for the joy and fulfilment Louise had brought into his life.

  “And now it’s so empty, Robin. Like a husk. I’ve felt so old since Louise died. So tired. So decrepit. And I’m not very good at being alone. I suppose that’s why . . . well, why Bella . . . She’s been good for me. Good for all of us. She can never replace Louise. Nobody can. But . . . it helps . . . to have somebody . . . It helps her as well, I think. She loved Hugh very much, didn’t she?”

  I probably said yes. I certainly didn’t disabuse him of the notion. What would have been the point? I felt sorry for him. I even felt I understood. That night, indeed, I began to imagine I understood more about Louise Paxton than Sir Keith ever had. The lonely childhood and the disapproving parents were two more pieces of the jigsaw. Somewhere still, out there, she was waiting to surprise me. I dreamt of her sitting beside me outside the Harp Inn, as Naylor had claimed she’d sat beside him. The setting sun was behind her. I couldn’t see her face clearly. Her hand brushed my knee. And she laughed. “Follow me,” she said. “You can’t imagine what I have in mind.”

  The prosecuting counsel spared no effort in his cross-examination of Naylor. Yet for all his remorseless probing, Naylor’s story remained intact. He didn’t make the mistake of taking up counsel’s invitation to explain the improbabilities and inconsistencies in his account. Why should a respectable married woman like Lady Paxton seek sex with a man like him? He didn’t know. Why should she take him to the house of somebody she knew only slightly? Again, he didn’t know. Why should anybody but him want to murder her? Yet again, he didn’t know. Didn’t he have any remorse for inflicting such a distasteful lie on Lady Paxton’s family? No, because it wasn’t a lie. Why, then, had he initially denied all connection with the case? Because he’d panicked. Simple as that. It had been an act of stupidity, not guilt. Did he seriously expect anyone to accept that? Yes. Because it was the truth. “And truth’s stranger than fiction, don’t they say?” He was still confident, still giving as good as he got. “I’m putting my hand up to four burglaries. I’m admitting the kind of man I am. I’m not trying to pretend anything. I’m just saying this. I’ve never murdered anyone. I’ve never raped anyone. I’m not guilty.” Sometimes, just sometimes, you could think he believed it. But, glancing round the court, you could sense what he must have sensed as well. If he really did believe it, he was the only one.

  I went back to Petersfield that night. Sir Keith, who meant to see the trial through to its end, saw me off at New Street station. “It’ll be over by early next week, I reckon,” he said as I leant out of the train window for a parting word. “And I want to be here to see how he takes the verdict—and the sentence. Will you be coming up again?”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to. Pressure of work, you know.”

  “Of course, of course. I won’t forget the support you’ve given us, Robin. Helping Rowena. Sarah too. And listening to me ramble on last night. Other people’s lives. Other people’s problems. They can be hard to take, I know. And it’s not as if you even knew Louise, is it? Not really.”

  “No. I never did.”

  Not his Louise, anyway. Another one maybe. A version of her as far removed from the person he’d lived with for twenty-three years as Naylor’s version of events was from the truth as I thought I knew it. The light faded as the train rushed south towards London. And the darkness grew. Who could be sure, absolutely sure, of anything? Where she’d gone that night after leaving Hergest Ridge. What she’d done and why. What she would have done if I’d gone with her. And where we’d all be now if I had.

  The defence called four more witnesses after Naylor himself. The friend he’d stayed with in Cardiff, Gary Newsom, who spoke up for him as a bit of a rogue but no murderer, who’d returned to Newsom’s home in Cardiff on 18 July 1990 “relaxed and a bit pleased with himself, but looking forward to going back to London.” A customer at the Harp Inn the night before who recognized Naylor as “a man I saw sitting outside with a good-looking woman; it was definitely him and the woman could have been Lady Paxton, but I can’t be certain.” A barmaid at the Black Horse, Leominster, who remembered serving Naylor just before closing time that night. “He bought me a drink and chatted me up a bit. He seemed nice enough. I quite took to him, as a matter of fact.” And lastly Naylor’s wife, Carol. “It’s true about the row. A real up-and-downer. And about the holiday. He was full of it when he came back. I knew how he’d got the cash. The stuff he stole was in his van. Like he says, thieving’s in his blood. Always has been. But murder ain’t. Nor’s rape. My Shaun would never go in for that sort of thing.”

  It didn’t sound to me as if any of this amounted to very much. As the prosecuting counsel pointed out in his closing speech, Naylor might well have been at the Harp that evening. But the witness hadn’t been able to put a definite time on the sighting or identify Lady Paxton as Naylor’s companion. She could have been anyone, given Naylor’s roving eye. As for his late visit to the pub in Leominster, that could have been a futile attempt to set up an alibi. Futile because there was still plenty of time for him to have gone to Whistler’s Cot, murdered Bantock, raped and murdered Lady Paxton, then driven the fifteen miles to Leominster before eleven o’clock. By Naylor’s own admission, he’d had sexual intercourse with Lady Paxton. Did anybody seriously believe this was with Lady Paxton’s consent? If it was, why should she choose Whistler’s Cot as a venue? And why take Naylor into Bantock’s studio first? Because, of course, Naylor had to say she did so in order to account for the forensic evidence of his presence in the studio: the paint and the fibres. Whereas the real explanation was that he’d torn his clothing and stained his jeans during the fatal struggle with Oscar Bantock. When Lady Paxton had surprised him at the scene of the crime, he’d forced her to go upstairs and undress, probably threatening her with the knife or the gun. He’d raped her, as was shown by the amount of vaginal bruising, which he’d attempted, with breath-taking impudence, to attribute to masochistic tendencies on Lady Paxton’s part. Finally, he’d strangled her as he had Oscar Bantock, using a ligature of picture-hanging wire taken from the studio. Then he’d fled, the original purpose of his visit to the house forgotten. These were crimes of horrifying brutality, motivated by material and sexual greed and made possible by a complete indifference to the pain and suffering of others which Naylor had continued to exhibit in his outrageous mocker
y of a defence. Guilty verdicts on all three charges were the only appropriate way to respond.

  Strong stuff. But Naylor’s barrister responded by pointing out that his client’s explanation of the events of 17 July 1990 was consistent with the evidence. He’d met Lady Paxton at the Harp, where they’d been seen together. They’d gone to Whistler’s Cot and had vigorous sexual intercourse, Lady Paxton having some good reason to believe the owner of the house wouldn’t return until later. Naylor had then left. Subsequently, a person or persons unknown had entered the house and murdered Lady Paxton and Bantock, who was either on the premises by then or arrived while the murderer was escaping. The estimated time of death, 9 to 10 p.m., was only that: an estimate. It certainly didn’t rule out such a sequence of events. As for the identity or motive of the murderer, who knew? The police had stopped looking once they’d found Naylor. He specifically denied making the confessions attributed to him by two witnesses, one of whom had a criminal record. Those witnesses were either mistaken or were lying for reasons of their own. Finally, it should be remembered that Naylor had been completely honest about his criminal lifestyle. He’d admitted four burglaries in the Kington area, all confirmed by the police. One of them had taken place only a few hours after he was supposed to have committed rape and double murder at Whistler’s Cot. Was this really what he’d have done after carrying out such horrendous acts? Surely not, his barrister urged the jury to agree. They should give his client the benefit of the doubt.

  Yet very little doubt seemed to exist in the judge’s mind when he summed up. To accept Naylor’s version of events, he stressed, it was necessary to suppose that Lady Paxton had gone to Kington not simply to buy a painting but to satisfy a craving for casual sex with a stranger. If the jury found that improbable, they might well conclude that the defendant was guilty as charged. Naturally, they should give due weight to the possibility that he was telling the truth, but they should also remember that he had, by his own admission, lied in his initial statement to the police. The coincidence of an unknown murderer arriving at Whistler’s Cot shortly after his departure was, moreover, bound to strain credulity. The judge’s implication was clear.