Borrowed Time (4 page)

“Oh, how wonderful.” She jumped up and kissed me. “Your father would have been so pleased.”

“Would he?”

“I must phone Larry. He’ll be delighted.” She bustled out into the hall, leaving me staring vacantly into space. By rights, I should be the one using the telephone. But to call the police, not Uncle Larry. I smiled ruefully. It would be quicker to drive to the police station in Petersfield than wait for my mother to come off the line. Still, at least she’d given me—

The newsreader’s voice cut across my thoughts.
“West Mercia police have now charged the man they’ve been holding since yesterday with the murders of Louise Paxton and Oscar Bantock at Kington in Herefordshire last week. Shaun Andrew Naylor, a twenty-eight-year-old electrician from Bermondsey, south London, has also been charged with the rape of Lady Paxton. He will appear before Worcester magistrates tomorrow morning. Here’s our Midlands crime correspondent, David Murray.”

And there
was
David Murray, a sloppily dressed figure in front of Worcester police station, mouthing the customary platitudes at the fag end of what looked to have been a bad day. I hardly heard what he said. A name, an age, an occupation and an approximate address. That was all we were getting. And all we would get, until the trial. Unless we were looking for an excuse, of course. Like I was. They’d charged him. With rape as well as murder. They must have all the evidence they wanted. They didn’t need my obscure little piece of the jigsaw. I’d just be wasting their time by telling them. Wouldn’t I?

It seemed sensible, in the end, to sleep on the problem. Easier, anyway, than explaining it to my mother. But sleep wouldn’t play along. My first idle day after six on the hoof left me alert and thoughtful long past midnight. I lay in my bed, listening to the owl-hoots and fox-barks that drifted in through the window, to the muffled fluttering of bats and the distant scurrying of other things I couldn’t name.

Eventually, I realized there was only one thing for it. It was a solution that neatly spared me a cross-examination by my mother, while just as neatly salving my conscience. Getting out of bed as quietly as I could, I tiptoed down to the hall, carried the telephone into the sitting-room, closed the door over the trailing lead and dialled the number given in the paper for West Mercia C.I.D.’s incident room. But the only answer was a recorded message, to which I responded with one of my own.

“My name is Robin Timariot. I’ve just returned home after walking Offa’s Dyke and only now heard about the Kington killings. I believe I may have met Lady Paxton near Kington during the early evening of July seventeenth. If I can be of any assistance, please ring me on Petersfield 733984.”

I put the telephone down with a sensation of relief. The ball was in their court now. Perhaps they wouldn’t call back. Perhaps they wouldn’t even listen to the message. Then I’d be able to say I’d done my duty. If they chose to neglect theirs, I wouldn’t be to blame. So I told myself, anyway, as I crept back up to bed.

Uncle Larry’s reaction to my decision to accept the post of works director of Timariot & Small was to call an informal board meeting the following morning. Only executive directors were invited, which eliminated Bella as well as my mother. Having inherited Hugh’s 20 per cent shareholding, Bella was potentially a power in the land, but so far she’d shown no sign of wishing to exert any influence. She’d given my appointment the sort of disdainful blessing those more credulous than me took for the numbed consent of a grieving widow. But I knew there was a hint of scorn behind the veil.

The meeting was fixed for eleven o’clock. Determined to start as I meant to go on, I was at the factory by nine thirty, ingratiating myself with the clerks and secretaries. Then I toured the workshops with Reg Chignell, sniffing the glue-flavoured air, shaking hands with the bat makers, listening to their words of cautious welcome. Ethel Langton, who’d been binding bat handles since Grace was a lad, reminded me of some scrapes I’d got into as a student labourer. And Barry Noakes, the misanthropic storekeeper, explained why the cricket bat industry was bound to go down the drain before he reached retirement. I tried to take it all in good part and found it surprisingly easy to do so. After twelve years at the so-called centre of Europe, I was eager to immerse myself in a world where people, profits and products had some obvious and tangible connection. Peripheral or not, Timariot & Small was suddenly where I wanted to be. I’d often talked at dinner parties in Brussels when the nostalgia flowed with the wine of how I missed the culture, language and countryside of my homeland. It was a simple and obvious sentiment, shared by many in the expatriate community. But, standing in the yard between the ramshackle sheds and patched-up Nissen huts that comprised my new and far from gleaming empire, I realized what I’d really missed all along. Just a place to belong. And this, for better or worse, was it.

The office block was a modern featureless structure of brick and glass. But the boardroom, thanks to subdued lighting, wood-panelled walls, gilt-framed photographs of the staff at twenty-year intervals and a presiding portrait of Joseph Timariot in mutton-chop whiskers and top hat, preserved a soothing air of tradition.

I arrived there a few minutes late, having been detained in the sanding shed by one of Dick Turner’s rambling monologues. Uncle Larry was already in the chairman’s place. He’d agreed to stay on until I—or whoever they’d have chosen if I’d turned the job down—was in post. Catching his keen-eyed glance and dimpled grin, I wished for a moment that he could remain as chairman. He was getting a little shaky, it was true, but there are many things worse than decrepitude. His mind was still razor-sharp. And, with him in the chair, we might at least have pretended to be loyal siblings.

My brother Adrian, managing director and chairman elect, sat at Uncle Larry’s right hand. He seemed to look sleeker and slimmer every time I saw him, a smooth-talking tribute to the merits of fatherhood, fitness and low-alcohol lager. He’d turned himself, from unpromising beginnings, into a perfect simulacrum of the snappily dressed businessman. I couldn’t help admiring his transformation from the sullen child I’d grown up with. In the process, he’d become just what he wanted to be. Head of the family business. And, by this latest manoeuvre, my boss. Which, if I cared to dwell on it, cast a disturbing light on his eagerness to recruit me.

Jennifer, who sat opposite him, seemed by contrast less and less ambitious as the years passed. With Hugh gone, she was, at forty-five, the oldest of us. She didn’t look it, thanks to a stylish dress sense and a boyish haircut, but her impish humour was less in evidence than it used to be. An earnestness—a conservatism that would once have horrified her—was extending its stealthy grip. I hadn’t forgotten her colourful youth. Her exotic taste in clothes and boyfriends, glamorized by never specified dabblings in the drugs scene, was a source of wonderment to me in my early teens. But if I’d mentioned any of that to her now, she’d probably have accused me of making it all up. And looking at the cautious smile playing across her face, I might even have believed I had.

Simon, however, who was sitting next to her, had remained loyal to his own reputation if to nothing else. He was in the lower sixth at Churcher’s, the local grammar school, when I arrived as a callow first-former. During the next two years, he got himself expelled, reinstated and expelled again while proving he was the hell-raiser everybody thought, before earning short-lived celebrity in October 1967 as the first driver in Hampshire to be breathalysed. All this rebellious irresponsibility was supposed to have been laid to rest by marriage to the redoubtable Joan Henderson, but it didn’t stay dormant for long and divorce soon followed, though not before the birth of a daughter, Laura. She was destined for an expensive upbringing and Joan dedicated many of her waking hours to ensuring Simon made a fair contribution to the cost.
Un
fair, to listen to him, of course. And certainly a drain on his natural ebullience these past seventeen years. The drink had also begun to catch up with him lately, his once handsome features acquiring a tell-tale flush. But he was, for all that, the first to shake my hand.

“Welcome back to the asylum, Rob,” he said with a conspiratorial wink.

And welcome, strangely enough, I felt. There was, I sensed, a general agreement that, come what may, it was good to have me aboard. Hugh’s death had touched each of us in different ways, but for the moment those ways had drawn us together. The effect was temporary, of course. It was bound to be. The death of a close friend or relative reminds us of the brevity of life and the absurdity of every form of conflict and rancour. But, being human, we soon forget all over again. Those of us gathered at that table hadn’t forgotten just yet. But in due course we would.

We talked about which office I’d have, which secretary, what kind of car the business might run to, how soon I could start. It was all briskly good-natured. I could see contentment spreading slowly across Uncle Larry’s face. And I could feel the beginnings of it in myself. This was the right thing to do. For them as well as me.

We broke up around noon with an agreement that I’d sit in on the next production meeting, on Thursday, and go over my duties with Adrian in more detail afterwards. I told them I’d be handing in my resignation from the Commission as soon as I got back to Brussels: I was hoping to negotiate an early release, but would be with them by November at the latest. Everything sounded perfectly straightforward. And for the first time since seeing Louise Paxton’s face in my mother’s newspaper, I forgot about Hergest Ridge and the killings at Whistler’s Cot altogether.

But I wasn’t to be allowed to do so for long. Simon caught up with me in the corridor and invited me to an early lunch, by which he meant a two-hour soak at his favourite watering-hole, the Old Drum, in Chapel Street. Ordinarily, I’d have excused myself, not sharing his liking for thick-headed afternoons or caring much for the diatribes against Joan he usually embarked on when he’d had a few. But we were both indulging the long-lost brothers routine and I had nothing to get back to Greenhayes for, so I let him lead the way.

Only to be hijacked, before I’d swallowed my first mouthful of Burton bitter, by his hoarse whisper: “Bit of a coinkidinky, you being in Kington when those murders were done.”

I tried to laugh it off. “Any chance of an alibi?”

“Seriously, did you see anything?”

This was awkward. If the police never followed up my message, I didn’t want to broadcast what I knew. But if they did contact me, Simon was going to remind me of any denial I uttered now. “What sort of thing did you have in mind?” I prevaricated.

“I don’t know. The local constabulary mob-handed. Flashing blue lights. That fluorescent red-and-white tape they rig up everywhere. Oh, and a helicopter. Didn’t I read something about a helicopter?”

“Wrong day, Sime. I was on my way south and none the wiser when all that happened.”

“You didn’t know about it?”

“Not until I got back to Greenhayes yesterday afternoon.”

He snorted in disappointment. “Bang goes my chance of some gory details, then.”

“You wouldn’t really want any, would you?”

“Maybe.”

“Sorry to let you down.”

“Oh, it’s no surprise. You’re the sort who’d have been on holiday in Texas in November sixty-three and left Dallas the day
before
Kennedy was shot.”

I shrugged. “None of us can foretell the future.”

“No, thank Christ. Otherwise, I’d have topped myself the day I first met Joan.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t I?”

I sat back and looked at him and decided, on an impulse, to test just how predictable he thought I was. “What would you say, Sime, if I told you I met the woman who was murdered—Lady Paxton—in Kington the day I was there—July seventeenth? What would you say if I told you she offered me a lift to the next village and I turned her down?”

“I’d say you were stark raving bonkers. According to the papers, she was driving a brand new Mercedes SL. Nobody would turn down a ride in that.”

“It
was
a nice car.”

He frowned. “You’re having me on.”

“No. It’s the truth. I recognized her photograph in the
Sunday Telegraph
.”

“Bloody hell.”

“What do you think I should do? Tell the police?”

His reply was instant and instinctive. “No, I bloody don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t know what you’d be getting yourself into.
Have
you got an alibi?”

“I don’t need one. I’m not even a witness.”

“We all need alibis, old son. Every step of the way.” He leant across the table and lowered his voice. “You’ll admit I’ve never been one for handing out brotherly advice?”

“True.”

“Well, I’m going to start now. If you can avoid getting mixed up in something like this, avoid it. Like the plague. There’s no telling where it might end.”

“And if I can’t avoid it?”

“Then don’t say you weren’t warned.”

Simon’s concept of the responsible citizen had never coincided with mine. I didn’t take his warning seriously. Nevertheless, I’d already decided that, if there was no response to my message, I wouldn’t be sorry. I wasn’t bothered about alibis—or the lack of them. But I was beginning to suspect that what little I knew was best forgotten. I couldn’t properly have explained why, but something about my meeting with Louise Paxton had already become unreal, disturbingly elusive. I’d dreamt about her on several occasions without clearly being able to recollect what I was dreaming. And perhaps that was just as well. The dreams had begun before I knew of her death. But not before the fact of her death. My mind had begun looking for somebody who was no longer there to be found. And I wanted it to stop.

But I’d already given up the power to call a halt. When I reached Greenhayes that afternoon, my mother had a message for me.

“What’s this all about, Robin? I’ve had the police on the phone. A Detective Sergeant Joyce. From Worcester. He wants you to ring him. Urgently.”