Borrowed Time (8 page)

“But surely . . . if nobody saw them there . . .”

“It’s still theoretically possible though, isn’t it? Mummy offered you a lift. You said so yourself. The defence will try to make that sound like a pick-up line. They’ll say it failed with you but worked with Naylor.”

“I won’t let them get away with that.”

“It won’t be easy to stop them. Once you’re in court, you’re on their territory.”

Court. There was the word. And there was the realization I’d somehow dodged. Making a guarded statement to the police wasn’t the end of this. I was going to have to give evidence at Naylor’s trial. To answer questions on oath. If Naylor persisted in his plea of innocence, it was virtually certain I’d be called as a witness by one side or the other.

“Naylor’s guilty. But proving it could be messy. Mummy loses her wedding ring, flies to England and goes to see a man who lives alone on the Welsh borders. On the way, she offers a stranger a lift that would take her on a long detour if he accepted. Don’t you see how it could all be made to sound?”

She’d come to find out what I meant to say. That was it, of course. I could tell by the hint of impatience in her tone. She didn’t want my help in coping with her grief. What she wanted was my confirmation that there was nothing else still to emerge. A bundle of slender connections and stray coincidences was bad enough. But something concrete—something attributed to her mother by a disinterested witness—would be infinitely worse. She needed me to tell her it wasn’t going to happen.

“Mummy was careless with possessions and tended to lose all sorts of things. She was keen enough on Expressionist art to break off a holiday simply to buy a coveted example. And she had a generous nature. She acted on impulse. Whim, you could call it. Like offering you a lift. There’s no hidden meaning in any of it.”

“Of course there isn’t.”

“But you have to have known her to understand that. The jury will be strangers. So will the judge and the barristers and the people in the public gallery and anybody who reads about the trial while it’s going on. They won’t understand her at all. But they’ll think they do.”

“If I’m called, Sarah . . .” I leant forward to give emphasis to my words. “I’ll do my best to ensure there’s no possibility of any misunderstanding. Your mother’s reputation won’t suffer at my hands.”

She looked at me intently for a moment, then said: “I’m so glad to hear you say that.”

“I mean it.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s no need to thank me. All I’ll be doing is telling the truth.”

But that wasn’t all, was it? And if my evidence was compromised, how could I be sure the explanations Sarah had given me for the loss of the ring and the impetuous flight from Biarritz weren’t as well? In doing the decent thing, I was tacitly agreeing to play my part in a subtle editing of the facts: a damage limitation exercise on behalf of Louise Paxton’s good name. And why not? It couldn’t do any harm. Nobody lost by it. Not even Naylor. Since he was undoubtedly guilty. Wasn’t he?

I wasn’t sure whether Sarah expected to meet me again while she was in Brussels. When I showed her back to the Hilton, I asked—more out of politeness than anything else—if she wanted to see the sights. The city didn’t boast many, to be honest, but it seemed the least I could do. To my surprise, her reaction was enthusiastic. I suppose a solitary weekend in a foreign country was the last thing she needed. I agreed to pick her up at ten o’clock the following morning.

Saturday dawned warm and bright. She was waiting for me when I reached the Hilton and we set off for a tour of what Brussels had to offer. The Grand Place and the Mannekin Pis on foot. Then out in my car to the Atomium—Belgium’s answer to the Eiffel Tower. Lunch at a café near Square Montgomery. A stroll round the Parc du Cinquantenaire and a visit—at her insistence—to the Berlaymont. Followed by tea back at my flat in rue Pascale.

At first, we didn’t talk about the trial—or even directly about her mother’s death. Instead, I described the life of a Eurocrat and the alternative attractions of Timariot & Small, revealing more about myself in the process than I’d intended to. It turned out that Sarah’s knowledge of the poems of Edward Thomas put mine to shame. She could quote them seemingly at will. And she could recite the names of the hangers above Steep even though she’d been there no more than once.

“Mummy drove me down to Steep one Sunday during my last year at school,” she recalled as we stood in the top-most ball of the Atomium, ostensibly admiring the view of the Parc de Laeken and the Château Royal but both picturing in our mind’s eye the thickly wooded flanks of Stoner Hill. “We were studying Thomas for A level and he’d become my favourite poet. Something to do with his melancholia, I suppose. Adolescents understand that condition better than most adults, don’t you think?” Seeing me frown in a vain effort to recollect my state of mind at the age of eighteen, she took pity and went on: “I wanted to see the places that had inspired his poems. And Mummy was keen to take me, though she must have regretted it later, driving round and round those winding lanes while I lapped up the scenery. We probably passed Greenhayes several times in the course of the afternoon. Without ever thinking that one day . . .”

“When would this have been?”

“Spring eighty-seven. May, I think.” She paused. When she resumed, I knew at once the words were no longer hers. “‘The cherry trees bend over and are shedding, on the old road where all that passed are dead, their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding, this early May morn when there is none to wed.’ ” She gave a sad little smile. “Strange, isn’t it? I mean, our paths coming so close three years ago, but not crossing till now. I suppose fate just wasn’t ready.”

“You believe in fate?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps it helps if you do. If anything
can
help.” She took a long calming breath. “The police offered to arrange counselling for us and Daddy persuaded Rowena to try it. She’s seeing a trauma expert twice a week.”

“But you aren’t?”

“I don’t want counselling. I want justice.” The hardness was back in her voice now, the sentimental philosophizing brought abruptly to an end. “I want Shaun Naylor put behind bars for the rest of his unnatural life.” Another smile, different now, self-aware, almost self-mocking. “A trainee lawyer isn’t supposed to talk like that, is she?”

“Maybe not. But I’m no lawyer, so I can say it. Any man who does what Naylor did has forfeited the right to live.”

She looked at me sharply. “You really think so?”

“Yes. Don’t you? I mean, when the platitudes—the social niceties—are swept aside. Don’t we all fundamentally believe in an eye for an eye?”

She didn’t answer. Her gaze moved past me to focus on some distant point beyond the horizon. And I felt suddenly embarrassed by my own vehemence, ashamed by the primitive instinct Louise Paxton’s death had stirred in me—but that her daughter was capable of keeping in check. “Let’s go down,” she said softly. “I’ve seen enough.”

Over lunch—and afterwards, as we sat on a shady bench in the Parc du Cinquantenaire—Sarah grew more forthcoming about herself and the Paxton family. Her grandfather, Dudley Paxton, had been in the Diplomatic Service, his career culminating in his appointment as British Ambassador to several former French African colonies just after their independence in the late fifties and early sixties. He and his Basque wife spent their retirement in Biarritz, close to
Grandmère
’s numerous relatives. Their villa, L’Hivernance, inherited by Sarah’s father, was the scene of many of her happiest childhood memories. She and Rowena would spend days on end playing in the garden or building sandcastles on the world-famous beach, only a pebble’s throw away, during long sun-drenched summers.

Sir Keith, meanwhile, was making a name for himself in the medical world. With royal patients and a knighthood came a lucrative private practice, a large town house in Holland Park, a homely weekend retreat in the Cotswolds and the best of everything for his wife and children. He was a doting and generous father, buying both daughters an expensive education, a succession of well-bred ponies, a skiing holiday every winter and a car for their eighteenth birthdays. As for Louise, who was fifteen years younger than him and looked more beautiful at forty than she had at thirty, there was nothing Sir Keith wasn’t prepared to do. A dress allowance she couldn’t spend. A luxury car she didn’t want. And a gilded cage—I couldn’t help suspecting—she wasn’t prepared to remain in for ever.

Sir Keith didn’t share Louise’s interest in Expressionist art and, for all his lavishness in other directions, seemed to begrudge the money she spent on it. She and a school-friend, Sophie Marsden, began dabbling as collectors to see if they could make more than their husbands earned from sound and sober investments. They didn’t, of course, but they enjoyed becoming expert amateurs and started trying to spot unrecognized talent before it acquired the price-tag to match. Oscar Bantock was more of a has-been than a might-be, but Louise did her best to make something of him, arranging exhibitions at small but select galleries where the right sort of people might realize what they were missing.

One such exhibition was held in Cambridge during Sarah’s last year at King’s College. Her presence at the private view was virtually mandatory and it was there she met Bantock for the first and last time. “A short and stocky man with white hair and a bushy beard. A bit cantankerous, of course. A bit ‘Why am I dressed up like a dog’s dinner sipping warm white wine with this rabble of Philistines?’ But you could see he was trying to behave well for Mummy’s sake. Which was ironic, since the event was supposed to be for
his
benefit, not hers. He was nice to me, probably for the same reason. Even to the man I’d brought with me, who made some pretty cringe-inducing remarks I remember. But old Oscar just grinned and twinkled his eyes at me. They were a quite startling blue. Pale yet bright at the same time. And he had this low rumbling
suppressed
voice. Like some operatic baritone singing a lullaby. You know? Power on a short leash. Energy waiting to be released. I can see him now so clearly. It’s no more than five months ago. But in other ways it seems like five years.”

There it was. The same dead end we couldn’t avoid coming back to. Take any path you liked through the maze. Admire any vista you pleased over the hedge en route. It was still waiting. If not round the next corner, then round the one after that.

“Why did he do it?” she asked later. “I mean, if he was just a burglar, as they seem to think. Why murder? Why rape?”

“One thing leads to another, I suppose. Probably high as a kite on drugs. And your mother . . .”

“Yes?”

“Was a very beautiful woman.”

“You make that sound almost like an excuse.”

“It’s not meant to be. Just an explanation. His type see something lovely and precious and want to destroy it. Looking—even touching—isn’t good enough for them. What they can’t have they smash.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “And the rest of us are left to pick up the pieces.” She walked on down the tree-lined avenue of the park and I stood where I was, watching her for a few seconds, before following. Her head was bowed, her shoulders almost visibly sagging. She was doing her best to gather up the fragments of her life—and her sister’s and her father’s too. But there were so many. They were so widely scattered. And so sharp that those who touched them were bound to bleed.

I didn’t analyse the assumptions and prejudices Sarah and I shared that weekend until much later. They were there, of course, underpinning everything we said and thought. Long before we knew all the facts, long before a court of law had weighed and tested the evidence, we were sure we knew exactly what had happened. Above all, we were sure Shaun Naylor was guilty.

According to Sarah, the police had only caught him thanks to a tip-off. From whom she didn’t know. A wife. A girlfriend. A mate he’d boasted to. It didn’t really matter who or why. The evidence must have piled up against him since. Otherwise he’d never have dreamt up such an implausible story. Would he?

I took Sarah out for dinner that night to my favourite Italian restaurant, Castello Banfi. She gave me a sharp lesson in her determination to be beholden to nobody by threatening a public scene if I didn’t let her pay half the bill. But she did let me walk her back to the Hilton. There it could easily have been goodbye, since she was flying home the following afternoon and I’d been invited to Sunday lunch by some Eurocrat friends in Waterloo who were concerned for my sanity. But, unsure whether I wanted to face them anyway, I claimed to have no commitments and offered her a ride to the airport, which she accepted.

As I walked away from the hotel, I glanced across the boulevard at the frontage of the Toison d’Or cinema complex. One of the films whose illuminated titles glared back was the latest Harrison Ford thriller:
Presumed Innocent
. But I can honestly say that the irony registered with me for no more than an instant before I pressed on towards rue Pascale, devising an excuse for my friends in Waterloo as I went.

Something else I chose not to analyse was my reluctance to let Sarah Paxton vanish from my life so soon after entering it. Such analysis might have revealed whether the attraction I’d begun to feel was to her or the part of her that reminded me of her mother. Perhaps we always chase ghosts or tokens or chance resemblances. Perhaps everyone we’re ever drawn to is really only a pallid version of the real thing we’ll never meet. But, if so, it doesn’t help to confront the fact.

It was only when I was sitting with Sarah in the airport coffee bar an hour before her flight, in fact, that I thought to ask what life—what immediate future—she was going back to in England. And only when I heard her answer did I realize that keeping in touch with her needn’t be so difficult after all.

“A year at law college before I take articles. I’d thought of postponing, but . . . what would be the point? Life, so they tell me, must go on. So, I’ve enrolled to start at Guildford next month.”

“Guildford? But that’s not far—”