Borrowed Time

by Robert Goddard

  Rainwater draining from the fields ran in curling rivulets down to meet me as I went. Sunlight glistened on moisture-beaded leaves and wet slate roofs. The truth, I sensed, retreated ahead of me, out of sight though never far off. Over the hedge, perhaps, where Paul had hidden that day. Or round the corner. Always just beyond the next encounter. Like the one awaiting me at Whistler’s Cot.

  A car stood half in and half out of the garage, its boot raised on several box-loads of mops, brushes, soapflake cartons, polish tins and aerosol cans. Just about every window in the house was open, red-and-white check curtains billowing out in the breeze. And the frantic whirr of a washing machine in its spin cycle could be heard from within above the growl of a vacuum cleaner.

  If I’d realized what all this activity implied, I think I’d have turned and fled. But I was so distracted by the half-grasped meanings of other less commonplace occurrences that I simply stared in bemusement. And then it was too late. Because Henley Bantock had emerged from the rear of the house clutching a well-filled black plastic refuse sack—and pulled up at the sight of me.

  “Mr. Timariot!” He peered at me round the tuft his fastening of the sack had created. “Good heavens, it is you. What an unexpected pleasure.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know . . . That is . . .”

  “Don’t be sorry. This is just the excuse Muriel and I need to take a break. You find us in the midst of the end-of-season clear-out. The last of the holidaymakers left at the weekend. But they didn’t take all their rubbish with them.” He grinned and plonked the sack down in front of him. “Why don’t you step in and have a cup of tea?”

  Tea with the Bantocks in a sitting-room smelling of beeswax and air freshener was a salutary if depressing experience. Muriel was a twitteringly attentive hostess full of apologies for her housekeeping kit of tennis shirt and tracksuit bottoms. She was also an alarmingly affectionate wife, given to squeezing Henley’s knee in mid-conversation and casting him long and loving looks. Henley, meanwhile, coped with the antagonism he must have detected in me by pretending we were the most civilized of rival theorists, who’d simply agreed to disagree. It was as if the angry letter I’d sent him after the publication of Fakes and Ale and his sarcastic reply to it had never been written.

  It might have been different if Whistler’s Cot had still resembled Oscar Bantock’s home in anything more than the dimensions of its rooms. But it didn’t. Everything from those years had been swept away. Along with any ghosts that might have lingered. In the studio, where Oscar had lain dead beneath his easels, a pool table stood, flanked by conservatory chairs. The walls around us, where his pictures had hung thick and vibrantly, were filled with insipid hunting prints and reproduction maps of Olde Herefordshire. While in the bedroom . . . I didn’t like to ask. But even there, I felt sure, the process would have been the same. It was exorcism by disinfection. And its effectiveness was undeniable.

  “Fakes and Ale will be coming out in paperback next spring,” Henley announced through a mouthful of custard cream. “We’re very pleased, of course.” For some reason he seemed to think I’d also be pleased. “And the hardback should do well over Christmas, I think, don’t you, Muriel?”

  “Oh yes, dear.”

  “What happens,” I couldn’t stop myself saying, “if it’s overtaken by events?”

  Henley frowned. “How do you mean?”

  “Well, the book follows a certain line about the murders, doesn’t it? Ties them in with your uncle’s art fraud. What would you do if that was shown to be incorrect?”

  “But it’s not incorrect, Mr. Timariot. It’s clearly what happened.”

  “Mr. Maitland went into it very thoroughly,” said Muriel in a tone of deep awe.

  “No doubt he did. But it doesn’t amount to proof positive, does it?”

  “Not legally, perhaps,” said Henley. “But we can’t expect it to, can we? Not at this late date.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. You never know what might come to light.”

  My persistence was beginning to worry Henley—as it was meant to. “You have . . . something specific in mind?”

  “No, no. Just . . . stray thoughts. For instance . . . have you ever wondered whether there might have been something between Oscar and Lady Paxton?”

  It was a question designed as much to mislead as to goad. I never expected any useful information to come my way as a result. But, as so often, my expectations were to be confounded. “No need to wonder,” said Henley with a chortle. “I can absolutely rule it out.”

  “But your uncle’s reputation as a ladies’ man surely—”

  “Led me to assume something of the kind long ago. But when I was rash enough to hint at it to Uncle Oscar, he nearly boxed my ears for my trouble. ‘She’s far too good for me, boy,’ I remember him saying. ‘And far too good a patron to risk losing for half a chance of some slap and tickle.’ ”

  “Well, you wouldn’t expect him to admit it, would you?”

  “Oh, but I would. Uncle Oscar never stopped boasting about his conquests. If Lady Paxton had been one of them, I’d have heard about it, you can be sure.”

  “It was purely a business relationship, then?”

  “I didn’t say that. He relied on her support. What she asked for in return may not have been so businesslike. I believe she brought Naylor here that night. So do Barnaby Maitland and Nick Seymour, for that matter. The question is: why? In its way, it’s an ideal place . . . for what she seems to have planned. And perhaps the night of the murders wasn’t the first time she’d done it. Perhaps Uncle Oscar regularly absented himself when she required him to. He may have thought it was a price worth paying.”

  Yes. That was what they would say. It was what Seymour had implied in his TV programme. And it fitted the facts. Better than Seymour or Henley yet knew.

  “Unless you think that theory too might be . . . overtaken by events?”

  “No,” I said, resisting the impulse to tell him that very soon it would not be overtaken but vindicated by events. Events that would nevertheless scupper the paperback edition of Fakes and Ale. But it seemed only fair not to forewarn him of his modest share in the disaster to come. After all, he’d done as much as I had to bring it about. “I shouldn’t think so,” I concluded with a smile. “Like you say, it’s probably too late for anything of the kind.”

  “More tea, Mr. Timariot?” asked Muriel.

  “Thank you, but no. I think it’s probably too late for that as well.”

  “Off so soon?” said Henley as I rose from my chair.

  “I’m afraid I must be.”

  “But you haven’t explained yet what brought you here.”

  “Goodbye,” I said, smiling broadly and ignoring Henley’s remark too brazenly for him to protest. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  The showers blew themselves out as I drove east. Hergest Ridge and its surrounding peaks fell away behind in the rear-view mirror. The truth drew back to watch me from its hidden vantage-ground. The stranger merged with the twilight. His unseen face dissolved into the dusk. And only my reflection looked back at me. I travelled alone. But in company.

  I reached Bristol at nightfall, diverted to Clifton and found Sarah at home. It was a relief to have someone to share my unguarded thoughts with. A friend to see and set them in proportion. I was beginning to curse Bella for starting me down this road. The road back into a mystery I’d walked away from. But couldn’t escape.

  “It seems Howard Marsden harboured an unrequited passion for your mother for many years,” I explained. “She and Sophie both knew that. It’s what Sophie most keenly resented: the fact that it was unrequited.”

  “Hence her eagerness to blacken Mummy’s character.” Sarah shook her head in dismal recognition of Sophie’s motives. “What a sad petty-minded woman she must be. To think I’ve known her all these years without realizing that. I can’t help feeling sorry for Howard. She must make his life hell.”

  “Yes,” I said, careful no
t to imply I had any specific knowledge of the subject. “I think she may do.”

  “But you believe her about this . . . other man . . . in Mummy’s life?”

  “It sounded like the truth. The question is . . .”

  “Who was he?”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know.” Sarah rose and crossed to the mantelpiece, returning with the framed photograph of her and Rowena with their mother. “Taken on her fortieth birthday. She was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

  “She certainly was.” Louise Paxton smiled delphically at me from the faintly blurred snapshot. Her beauty was preserved in the developer’s emulsion, but something else was lost. Like the sepia smear left by a moving figure on an early Victorian photograph, the secret of her soul had bequeathed an unfocused ambiguity to her gaze, a perpetual uncertainty about what or who beyond the camera she was really looking at.

  “The further into the past her death slips,” said Sarah, “the more mysterious her life seems to become. I’ve wondered if this man, whoever he was, deserted her at the last moment. Didn’t turn up where he was supposed to be. Left her in the lurch. I’ve wondered if that’s why she encouraged Naylor. But unless you find him, we’ll never know, will we?”

  “How can I find him? There are no clues left to follow.”

  “I know. That’s why I think the question will never be answered. Unless Naylor knows. I mean, she may have said something to him. Given him a clue. Nobody’s ever asked him, have they? Nobody’s ever thought to. But we’ll get the chance soon enough.”

  “When he’s released, you mean?”

  “Yes. When he’s released.” The words were spoken almost as a sigh. She took the photograph back to the mantelpiece, positioned it carefully between a carriage clock and a china rabbit, then looked round and smiled wryly at me. “None of which helps get you off the hook with Bella, of course.”

  I shrugged. “Can anything do that?”

  “I doubt it. She wants you to disprove something you and I—and probably she—believe to be true. And that’s a game you can’t win, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “But one you’ll go on playing?”

  “I’m afraid I have to.” Now I too summoned a smile. “At least for a little longer.”

  Sarah offered me a bed for the night, but I insisted I’d better press on home. It occurred to me, flogging across Salisbury Plain through the inky blackness as rain spat at the windscreen, that the offer might just possibly have been more than a friendly gesture. But then I dismissed the thought. In the prevailing circumstances, Sarah needed a friend far more than she needed an aspiring lover. And so did I.

  Besides, my relations with the Paxton family were already quite complicated enough. As the three recorded messages from Bella on my answering machine testified. Each one ended with the same promise: “I’ll call again.” Early the following morning, when I was still only half awake, she did so. And it was immediately obvious the hour didn’t agree with her temper.

  “You’ve turned up nothing?”

  “It’s not for the want of trying, Bella.”

  “Then you’ll just have to try harder.”

  “But how? There’s nobody left to ask.”

  “This postcard Mrs. Bryant remembers . . .”

  “Thinks she remembers.”

  “And thinks was sent from Chamonix. Where Paul claims he never went.”

  “Not from Chamonix, according to Paul. Chambéry. A station on the main line from Lyon. It was a ruse. A deliberate blind.”

  “Or else his explanation’s the blind. I went to the pension he says he stayed in here in Biarritz yesterday. Showed his photograph to the landlady. She’s never seen him before in her life.”

  “You mean she didn’t recognize him.”

  “Same difference.”

  “No it isn’t, Bella. He spent a few days there more than three years ago. Did you seriously expect her to remember him?”

  “The fact is she didn’t. But maybe somebody in Chamonix does.” I knew at once what she was going to say next. And I also knew what my answer was bound to be. “So you’re going to have to go there, Robin. Aren’t you?”

  C H A P T E R

  EIGHTEEN

  I flew out to Chamonix the following Friday, telling Adrian, Simon and Jennifer that a friend in Brussels needed helping out of an emotional crisis and I was going to see what I could do for him in the course of a long weekend. God knows what Adrian made of it, since he was due to have left for Sydney by the time I got back. Simon suggested I was hoping to discover an EC regulation that the Bushranger bid could be said to contravene. But I don’t think he was serious.

  In the event, I might have been better employed on just such an errand. Several days of trekking round the hotels, restaurants, cafés and boarding-houses of an out-of-season Alpine skiing resort from which the vast shadow of the Mont Blanc massif seemed never to lift proved as futile as I’d anticipated—and even more frustrating. Nobody remembered the name Paul Bryant. Nobody recognized the bridegroom’s face in the photograph I’d brought with me of his and Rowena’s wedding. And nobody thought it remotely likely that anybody else would. “Un étudiant, monsieur? Il y a plus de trois ans? Vous plaisantez, non?”

  I wasn’t joking, of course. But I might as well have been. I’d had enough by the end of the first day, but felt obliged to plug on. Come the third day, however, I called a halt at lunchtime and rode the cable-car—as Paul had told his mother he’d done—up the mountainside to the Aiguille du Midi. I stared out from the observation platform at the dazzling snowfields that stretched as far as Italy, breathed the clear cold air and reflected on the pointlessness of my journey. Paul had never been there. His footprints were nowhere to be found. But somehow I didn’t think that conclusion was going to satisfy Bella.

  Answering to Bella, however, wasn’t the first problem to confront me when I flew home on Tuesday. Liz had left a recorded message saying that Detective Inspector David Joyce of West Mercia C.I.D. would be coming down to see me the following afternoon. And she’d added a disturbing rider. “I tried to tell him I couldn’t confirm the appointment until I’d spoken to you, but he told me he wasn’t asking for an appointment; he was making one.”

  He looked as irksomely youthful as he had three years before. I congratulated him on his promotion, which his desultory thanks implied was old news. He enquired after my mother and seemed genuinely sorry to hear of her death. And then, when Liz had delivered the tea and gone again, he weighed in.

  “As you may know, sir, we’ve been asked to investigate Paul Bryant’s confession to the murders of Louise Paxton and Oscar Bantock.”

  “I knew it was likely to come to that, Inspector, of course. But I didn’t know your investigation was actually under way.”

  “Well under way. And already we’ve learnt from Mr. Bryant’s family and from a Mr. Peter Rossington that somebody else seems to be engaged on what you might call a parallel inquiry.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “But I don’t, sir. What exactly are you trying to accomplish?”

  “The same as you, I imagine. I simply wanted to check Paul’s story before it became public. To spare the family any unnecessary—”

  “The Paxton family, you mean?”

  “Well, yes, of course.”

  “Of which you’re not a member.”

  “Not directly, no. More a friend. Although my sister-in-law—”

  “Ah yes, the present Lady Paxton. With you. More complicated than the Borgias, isn’t it?” His smile would have been no more than irritating had I thought sarcasm his sole object. But I detected an implication that my connection with Sir Keith’s second wife had aroused his suspicion. Which I doubted could be dispelled by a simple explanation of how such a state of affairs had come about. “Do I take it you’re unconvinced of Mr. Bryant’s guilt?”

  “No. But there must be a remote possibility he’s lying.”

  “Why would he be lying?” />
  “I don’t know. But his wife killed herself only four months ago. A thing like that could . . . well . . . lead to irrational behaviour.”

  “We’ve had a psychiatrist give him the once over. He’s pronounced Mr. Bryant as sane as you or me.”

  “Really?”

  Joyce’s smile took on a weary edge. “The point is, Mr. Timariot, we’re paid and equipped to enquire into all these matters. And we’re doing so. Thoroughly and expeditiously. Interference from amateurs, however well-meaning, is only likely to obstruct our efforts.” So we’d arrived where I’d assumed we would from the start. The warning off.

  “I didn’t realize asking a few questions constituted interference.”

  “Well, it does. Raking over the ashes of a dead case is disagreeable enough at the best of times.”

  “Especially when you may have to admit you got the wrong man.”

  It was a dig I’d been unable to resist. But the flush of anger in Joyce’s face and the steely hint of a threat in his voice made me regret it at once. “Exactly, sir. It could prove very embarrassing. For us—and the witnesses at Naylor’s trial who helped send him down.” He cleared his throat. “I have with me a copy of a statement you signed on the twenty-fifth of July, nineteen ninety.” He pulled the document out of his pocket and held it out. “Do you want to refresh your memory of what you said?”

  “I can remember perfectly well, thank you.”

  “And is there anything you want to add to it?”

  “No.”

  “Despite what you said on TV earlier this year?”

  “I was the victim of selective editing.”

  He treated me to a long sceptical frown, then took another piece of paper from his pocket and read my own recorded words back at me. “‘When she offered me a lift, I thought it was just a kindly gesture. Now I’m not so sure. I think she must have wanted me—wanted somebody—to stay with her.’ ” He looked up at me. “Not quite the same as your statement, is it?”