Borrowed Time

by Robert Goddard

  He was on the stairs now, climbing gingerly, keeping to the edges of the treads. An old trick. She had used it herself in times gone by. Another smile. What use was reminiscence now, far less regret? What she had done she reckoned, on the whole, she had done well.

  She reached out and picked up the torch from the bedside cabinet. Its barrel was smooth and cold in her grasp, as smooth and cold as . . . She set off across the room, concentrating on action to deflect any doubts that these last moments might bring.

  She had left the door ajar and now, raising it fractionally on its hinges, swung it open in absolute silence, then stepped out onto the landing. And froze. For he was already rounding the bend near the top of the stairs, a black hunched shadow visible only because she had known he would be there. Her heart pounded in her throat. For all the preparation—for all the rehearsal—she was frightened now. It was absurd. And yet, she supposed, it was only to be expected.

  As he reached the landing, she raised the torch, holding it in both hands to stop it shaking, and pushed the switch with her thumb. And there, for an instant, like a rabbit in a headlamp, he was caught, dazzled and confused. She made out jeans and a black leather jacket, but could not see his face clearly past the object he was holding up to shield his eyes. Not that she needed to, because she knew very well who he was. Then she recognized what he had in his hand. One of the candlesticks from the drawing-room mantelpiece, his fingers entwined in its brass spirals. It was upside-down, with the heavy sharp-rimmed base held aloft.

  “Hello, Mr. Spicer,” she said in as steady a voice as she could command. “It is Mr. Spicer, isn’t it?”

  He lowered the candlestick an inch or so, struggling to adjust to the light.

  “You see, I knew you were coming. I’ve been waiting for you. I could almost say you were overdue.”

  She heard him swear under his breath.

  “I know what you’ve been paid to do. And I know who’s paid you to do it. I even know why, which is more, I suspect, than—”

  Suddenly, time ran out. The advantage of surprise expired. He launched himself across the landing and seized the torch from her grasp. He was stronger than she had supposed and she was weaker. At any rate, the disparity was greater. As the torch clattered to the floor, she realized just how frail and helpless she really was.

  “It’s no good,” she began. “You can’t—” Then the blow fell and she fell with it, crumpling to the foot of the balustrade before the lance of pain could reach her. She heard herself moan and made to raise her hand, dimly aware that he was about to strike again. But she would not look. Better to focus on the stars she could see through the uncurtained window, scattered like diamonds on jeweller’s velvet. Tristram had died at night, she recalled. Had he glimpsed the stars, she wondered, as death closed in? Had he imagined what would become of her without him? If he had, this would surely not have been it, for this he could never have anticipated. Even though the makings of it were there, beside him, as he died. Even though—

  C H A P T E R

  TWO

  Hello?”

  “Charlie? This is Maurice.”

  “Maurice? What a lovely surprise. How—”

  “Not lovely at all, old girl. I’ve got bad news. It’s Beatrix.”

  “Beatrix? What—”

  “Dead, I’m afraid. Mrs. Mentiply found her at the cottage this afternoon.”

  “Oh, God. What was it? Her heart?”

  “No. Nothing like that. It seems . . . According to Mrs. Mentiply, there’d been a break-in. Beatrix had been . . . well . . . done to death. I don’t have any details. The police will be there by now, I imagine. I’m going straight down. The thing is . . . Do you want me to pick you up on the way?”

  “Yes. All right. Yes, perhaps you could. Maurice—”

  “I’m sorry, Charlie, really I am. You were fond of her. We all were. But you especially. She’d had a good innings, but this is . . . this is a god-awful way to have gone.”

  “She was murdered?”

  “In the furtherance of theft, I suppose. Isn’t that how the police phrase it?”

  “Theft?”

  “Mrs. Mentiply said there were things taken. But let’s not jump the gun. Let’s get there and find out exactly what happened.”

  “Maurice—”

  “Yes?”

  “How was she killed?”

  “According to Mrs. Mentiply . . . Look, let’s leave it, shall we? We’ll know soon enough.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

  “OK.”

  “Have a stiff drink or something, eh? It’ll help, believe me.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “I am. Now, I’d better get on the road. See you soon.”

  “Drive carefully.”

  “I will. ’Bye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Charlotte put the telephone down and walked back numbly into the lounge. The house seemed even larger and emptier than usual now this latest sadness had come to add its weight to the silence. First her mother, with lingering slowness. Now, with sudden violence, Beatrix too. Tears filled her eyes as she looked around the high-ceilinged room and remembered them gathered there, in paper hats, to celebrate one of her childhood birthdays. Her father would have been present too, of course, grinning and tickling and casting animal shapes on the wall with the shadows of his clenched fingers in the firelight. Now, thirty years later, only her shadow moved as she turned towards the drinks cabinet, then stopped and slowly turned away.

  She would not wait. She had done enough of that over the years, more than enough. Instead, she would leave a note for Maurice and drive herself to Rye straight-away. No doubt there was nothing to gain by it, except the relief that mobility might bring. It would stop her moping, at all events. That is what Beatrix would have said, in her brisk no-nonsense way. And that, Charlotte supposed, was the least she owed her.

  It was a still June evening of hazy sun, mocking her grief with its perfection. A sprinkler was swishing on the neighbouring lawn as she went out to the garage, a dove cooing in the trees that screened the road. Death seemed preposterously remote in the perfumed air. Yet death, she knew, was here to dog her steps once more.

  As if to outrun it, she drove with reckless speed down across the Common and out along the Bayham road, past the cypress-fringed cemetery where her parents lay, south and east through the somnolent woods and fields where she had played and picnicked as a girl.

  She was thirty-six years old, materially better off than she had ever been in her life, but emotionally adrift, assailed by loneliness and barely suppressed desperation. She had given up work—one could hardly call it a career—in order to nurse her mother through her final illness and thanks to what she had inherited did not need to resume it. Sometimes, she wished she were not so independent. Work—however humdrum—might introduce her to new friends. And economic necessity might force her to do what she knew she ought: sell Ockham House. Instead of which, since her mother’s death seven months before, she had departed mournfully for a long holiday in Italy and had returned from it none the surer what she wanted from life.

  Perhaps she should have asked Beatrix. After all, she had seemed happy—or at least content—in her solitude. Why could Charlotte not be the same? She was younger, of course, but Beatrix had been her age once and even then had been a woman alone. She overtook a tractor and trailer, calculating as she did so in what year Beatrix had been thirty-six.

  Nineteen hundred and thirty-eight. Of course. The year of Tristram Abberley’s death. A young man of artistic temperament carried off by septicaemia in a Spanish hospital, little realizing the fame posterity would heap upon him or the fortune it would confer upon his heirs. Behind him, in England, he had left a young widow, Mary—of whose subsequent remarriage Charlotte was the issue; a one-year-old son, Maurice; a solitary sister, Beatrix; and a slender body of avant-garde poetry destined to be enshrined by the post-war generation in
A level syllabuses up and down the land. It was Tristram Abberley’s posthumous royalties that had set up Charlotte’s father in business, that had paid for Ockham House and Charlotte’s education, that had left her as free and friendless as she currently was.

  For this, she realized with a sudden drying of the throat, was what Beatrix’s death represented: the loss of a friend. She was old enough to have been Charlotte’s grandmother and in the absence of a real one had happily filled the role. During her schooldays, Charlotte had spent most of every August with Beatrix, exploring Rye’s cobbled alleyways, building castles on Camber Sands, falling asleep to the strange and comforting mew the wind made in the chimneys of Jackdaw Cottage. All so long, so very long ago. Of late—especially since her mother’s death—she had seen little of Beatrix, which now, of course, she could do no more than bitterly regret.

  Why, she wondered, had she taken to avoiding the old lady? Because Beatrix would not have hesitated to tell her she was wasting her life? Because she would have said guilt and grief should never be indulged lest they take too strong a hold? Perhaps. Perhaps because she did not wish to confront herself, and knew Beatrix Abberley had the discomforting knack of obliging one to do precisely that.

  When Charlotte arrived, the day-trippers and souvenir-hunters had left and Rye was settling into a drained and drowsy Sunday evening. She drove up the winding cobbled streets to St. Mary’s Church, where a few worshippers were still wandering away after Evensong. Then, as she turned towards Watchbell Street, she was confronted by a trio of police cars, one with lights flashing, a cordon of striped tape round the frontage of Jackdaw Cottage and a huddle of idle onlookers.

  She parked in Church Square and walked slowly towards the cottage, remembering all the hundreds of times she must have come this way knowing she would find Beatrix waiting—tall, thin, keen-eyed and intent. But not this time. Not this time nor ever again.

  The constable who was on duty directed her inside. There she found, seemingly in every doorway, plastic-gloved men in boiler suits, armed with powder and tiny brushes. In the drawing room stood one man distinct from the rest, grey-suited and frowning, picking his way through the tea cups and sugar bowls displayed in one of Beatrix’s glass-fronted cabinets. He glanced up at Charlotte’s approach.

  “Can I help you, miss?”

  “I’m a relative. Charlotte Ladram. Miss Abberley’s—”

  “Ah, you’d be the niece. The housekeeper mentioned you.”

  “Not a niece, exactly. But never mind.”

  “No. Right.” He nodded wearily and made a visible effort to summon a greater degree of attentiveness. “Sorry about this. Must be a dreadful shock.”

  “Yes. Is . . . Is Miss Abberley . . .”

  “The body’s been removed. Actually . . . Look, why don’t you sit down? Why don’t we both sit down?” He shooed a stooping figure away from the fireplace and led Charlotte towards one of the armchairs on either side, then sat down in the other one. It was Beatrix’s, as Charlotte could easily tell by the jumble of cushions and the crooked pile of books on the floor beside it, where the old lady’s questing left arm could easily reach. “Sorry about all these people. It’s . . . necessary.”

  “I quite understand.”

  “My name’s Hyslop. Chief Inspector Hyslop, Sussex Police.” He looked about forty, with thinning hair combed forward in a style Charlotte disliked, but there was a winning edge of confusion to his features and a schoolboyish clumsiness about his dress that made her feel it should be her putting him at his ease, not the other way about at all. “How did you hear about this?”

  “Maurice—Maurice Abberley, that is, my half-brother—telephoned me. I gather Mrs. Mentiply found . . . what had happened.”

  “Yes. We’ve just sent her home. She was a bit upset.”

  “She’d worked for Miss Abberley a long time.”

  “Understandable, then.”

  “Can you tell me . . . what you’ve learned?”

  “Looks like a thief broke in last night and was disturbed while helping himself to the contents of”—he pointed across the room—“that cabinet.”

  Turning, Charlotte saw for the first time that the glass-fronted cabinet in the corner was empty and that its doors were standing open, one of them sagging on its hinges.

  “Full of wooden trinkets, according to Mrs. Mentiply.”

  “Tunbridge Ware, actually.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s a special form of mosaic woodwork. The craft has long since died out. Beatrix—Miss Abberley—was an avid collector.”

  “Valuable?”

  “I should say so. She had some pieces by Russell. He was just about the foremost exponent of . . . Ah, the work-table is still here. That’s something, I suppose.”

  In the opposite corner, beside a bookcase, stood Beatrix’s prize example of Tunbridge Ware: an elegantly turned satinwood work-table complete with drawers, hinged flaps either side of the leather-covered top and a silk work-bag beneath. All the wooden surfaces, including the legs, were decorated with a distinctive cube-patterned mosaic. Though it was not this but the array of mother-of-pearl sewing requisites kept in the pink silk-lined drawers that Charlotte remembered being fascinated by in her childhood.

  “The effect is produced by applying a veneer of several different kinds of wood,” she said absently. “Highly labour-intensive, of course, especially on the smaller pieces. I suppose that’s why it died out.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” said Hyslop. “But we have an officer who specializes in this kind of thing. It’ll mean more to him. Mrs. Mentiply said the cabinet contained tea-caddies, snuff boxes, paper-knives and so forth. Is that your recollection?”

  “Yes.”

  “She agreed to draw up a list. Perhaps you could go over it with her. Make sure she leaves nothing out.”

  “Certainly.”

  “You say this stuff is worth a bit?”

  “Several thousand pounds at least, I should think. Possibly a lot more. I’m not sure. Prices have been shooting up lately.”

  “Well, we can assume our man knew that.”

  “You think he came specifically for the Tunbridge Ware?”

  “Looks like it. Nothing else has been touched. Of course, the fact he was disturbed may account for that. It would explain why he left the work-table behind. If he was in a panic to be away, he’d only have taken what was light and portable. And he would have been in a panic—after what happened.”

  Charlotte gazed around the room. Aside from the empty cabinet, all else seemed intact, preserved in perfect accordance with her memory of so many tea-time conversations. Even the clock on the mantelpiece ticked to the same recollected note, last wound—she supposed—by Beatrix. “Where did it . . .” she began. Then, as her glance moved along the mantelpiece, one other change leapt out to seize her attention. “There’s a candlestick missing,” she said.

  “Not missing, I’m afraid,” said Hyslop. “It was the murder weapon.”

  “Oh, God. He . . . hit her with it?”

  “Yes. About the head. If it’s any consolation, the pathologist thinks it must have been a quick exit.”

  “Did it happen here—in this room?”

  “No. On the landing upstairs. She’d got out of bed, presumably because she’d heard him down here. He seems to have climbed in through one of these windows. None of them would have given a professional burglar much trouble and that one there”—he pointed to the left-hand side of the bay—“was unfastened when we arrived, with signs of gouging round the frame, probably by a jemmy. Anyway, we can assume he heard her moving about upstairs, armed himself with the candlestick and went up to meet her. He probably didn’t intend to kill her at that point. She had a torch. We found it lying on the landing floor. Perhaps he panicked when she shone it at him. Perhaps he’s just the ruthless sort. There are a lot of them about these days, I’m afraid.”

  “This was last night?”

  “Yes. We don’t know the exac
t time of death yet, of course, but we reckon it was in the early hours. Miss Abberley was in her night-dress. The curtains in her bedroom, in the bathroom and down here were all closed. They stayed that way until Mrs. Mentiply arrived at half past four this afternoon.”

  “What made her call? She doesn’t usually come in on Sundays.”

  “Your—half-brother did you say?—Mr. Maurice Abberley. He’d telephoned his aunt several times and become concerned because there was no answer. She’d told him she’d be in, apparently. He lives quite some way away, I believe.”

  “Bourne End. Buckinghamshire.”

  “That’s it. Well, to put his mind at rest, he telephoned Mrs. Mentiply and asked her to look round. I’ll need to confirm her account with him when he arrives, of course. You live somewhat nearer yourself?”

  “Tunbridge Wells.”

  “Really?” Hyslop raised his eyebrows in sudden interest.

  “Yes. I suppose that’s why I know so much about Tunbridge Ware. It’s a local speciality. There’s a very good collection in the—”

  “Does the name Fairfax-Vane mean anything to you, Miss Ladram?”

  “No. Should it?”

  “Take a look at this.” He opened his pocket-book, slid out a small plastic bag enclosing a card and passed it to her. Set out boldly across the card in Gothic script was the heading THE TREASURE TROVE and beneath it, in smaller type: COLIN FAIRFAX-VANE, ANTIQUE DEALER & VALUER, IA CHAPEL PLACE, TUNBRIDGE WELLS, KENT TNI IYQ, TEL. (0892) 662773. “Recognize the name now?”

  “I know the shop, I think. Hold on. Yes, I do know the name. How did you come by this, Chief Inspector?”

  “We found it in the drawer of the telephone table in the hall. Mrs. Mentiply remembered the name as that of an antique dealer who called here about a month ago, claiming to have been asked by Miss Abberley to value some items. But Miss Abberley hadn’t asked him, it seems. She turned him away, though not before Mrs. Mentiply—who was here at the time—had shown him into this room, giving him the chance to run his eye over the Tunbridge Ware. Now, how do you know him, Miss Ladram?”