Borrowed Time

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

There was a window to my left, admitting some grey remnants of daylight. Ahead, the entrance hall narrowed into a passage, lit by two bare bulbs and the glare from a third beyond the right-angled corner at its end. Three or four doors stood open along the passage, but the rooms they led to were in darkness. The flat looked what I sensed it to be-carpeted and curtained, but otherwise unfurnished.

I heard the front door click shut behind me and turned to find Sarah looking straight at me. She was dressed all in black-pumps, tights, mini-skirt and polo-neck sweater. Her eyes were wide and staring. She was breathing with audible rapidity. And she was holding her right arm behind her back at an awkward angle, bizarrely reminiscent of a suitor concealing a bunch of flowers from his beloved.

“Hello, Sarah,” I ventured. “Where’s Paul?”

“Never mind Paul,” she replied breathlessly. “How did you get here? And why did you come?”

The how was easy to explain. And I did. But the why? Something in her manner-something in her dilated eyes-stopped me telling her there and then that her father was dead.

“Mrs. Simpson,” Sarah muttered when I’d finished. “The stupid stupid woman. What do her bloody Christmas cards matter compared with-” She broke off and her tone became more controlled. “Why was Bella so anxious to contact me? Why isn’t she with you?”

“It’s your father. He’s… not well. Bella is… with him.”

“In Biarritz?”

“Look, can we-”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Why don’t we go somewhere more comfortable?”

“No. Tell me now. Tell me here.”

“I’m sure it would be better if-”

“Tell me!” Her cry-of pain as much as impatience-echoed in the empty hallway.

“All right. Calm down.” I moved towards her, but she stepped smartly back, bumping against the wall behind her. I saw a muscle tighten in her cheek. Her gaze narrowed.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I’m sorry, Sarah. Really I am. But the answer’s yes. Your father’s dead.”

She half-closed her eyes and tears sprang into them. Her head drooped. Her voice faltered. “How? How did it happen?”

“It’s not entirely clear. Some kind of-” I stopped as her right arm slipped from behind her back and fell to her side. Then I saw what she was holding in her hand. A snub-nosed revolver, its barrel and chambers glistening in the cold electric light. “Sarah! What in God’s name-”

There was a movement-a shadow across my sight-further down the passage. I whirled round and saw Paul standing at the end. He was wearing jeans, trainers and a dark green sweat-shirt. And he too was holding a gun.

“Paul?”

“Leave now, Robin,” he called to me. “Walk out and forget you were ever here.”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

“This isn’t your affair. Don’t get involved.”

“Involved in what?”

“Just go. While you still can.”

“Sarah?” I turned and looked at her. She raised her head and dabbed away her tears with the knuckles of her left hand. She was holding the gun firmly, her forefinger curled round the trigger. And her jaw was set in a determined line. “Sarah?”

“You don’t understand, Robin. But you will. Later. Just tell me how Daddy died. Then go.”

“I’m telling nothing and going nowhere until you two tell me what the hell’s going on here.”

“It’s best if you don’t know. Believe me.”

“That’s right,” Paul cut in. “Believe her.”

“Why should I?”

“Just do it!” He leant against the wall behind him, glanced along the passage to his right, then looked back at us. “I’ll give you five minutes to get rid of him, Sarah.” With that he pushed himself upright and moved out of sight.

“Where’s he gone?” I demanded, turning to Sarah.

“Don’t ask.”

“But I am asking.”

“This is nothing to do with you.”

“Oh, but it is. I’ve seen through your deception, you know. Paul’s confession. The faked corroboration. The whole elaborate game you’ve been playing.”

She stared at me incredulously, something in her expression signalling that she didn’t intend to deny it. “How?” she murmured.

“Never mind. What I want to know is: why did you do it? Why the secret address? Why the guns, for God’s sake?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“No. I can’t.” I peered down the passage. There was no sign of Paul. But there’d been a sound-a groan and a chink of metal. “Paul?” I called. There was no response. Except the same faint metallic rattle. I started towards it.

“Robin!” Sarah cried after me. “Stop!” But I didn’t stop. I don’t think I could have done. The passage drew me on down its carpeted length, dream-like and surreal in the low-wattage light, with the black gulfs of empty rooms to either side. I had to know now. I had to see for myself.

I reached the corner and looked to my left. At the far end of the passage, bright light spilt from an open doorway. A shadow moved across it. I glanced round at Sarah, who was slowly following me, shaking her head, as if to urge me even at this stage to turn back, to reconsider, to leave well enough alone. Then I walked on.

It was a bathroom, blue-walled and chill. The view through the doorway was of a wash-hand basin and a frosted sash window. Propped incongruously on the window-sill was a bulky black tape recorder. As I stepped into the room, my view broadened to encompass a half-open door in the far corner, a wooden-seated loo visible in the gloom beyond. The bath was to my left, an old roll-top cast-iron tub with ball-and-claw feet. The tap end was out of my sight for the moment, behind the wide-open door. Paul was leaning against the wall near the other end, his right arm crossed over his chest, his left hand supporting his elbow while he nestled the gun against his cheek. I didn’t know what to make of his narrow-lidded stare, but a phrase of Bella’s came into my mind-“extremely clever as well as seriously insane”-and fear suddenly descended on me, like some unseen and unsuspected creature leaping onto my back.

“You shouldn’t have come down here,” he said matter-of-factly. There was a moan and a rattle from behind the door. I stepped forward and turned my head. And then I saw.

Shaun Naylor, dressed in jeans, T-shirt and a denim jacket, was on his knees in the bath. His wrists and ankles were shackled together behind him, the shackles held fast by a chain tied round the tap mountings and stretched taut to eliminate all freedom of movement. His arms were bound so tightly that his shoulders had been dragged back and his chest pushed forward. His chin was lolling against his chest, but he raised it to look at me. One of his eyes was swollen to the point of closure. There was a gash on his forehead and drops of congealed blood round the neck of his T-shirt. A broad strip of adhesive brown sealing tape had been stuck across his mouth. He was breathing hard through his nose and sweating profusely, either from panic or the vain struggle to escape. He strained at the chain as I watched, his brow creasing with the effort, his eyes swivelling up to meet mine. The hollow noise of metal on pipework was what I’d heard from the hall. But his knees slid no more than an inch forward or sideways and he gave up, slumping against the wall of the bath and groaning in protest.

“He thinks he can fight his way out of this,” said Paul with a snigger. “But he can’t. Hear that, Naylor? There’s no way out this time, you stinking bastard.”

“For God’s sake!” I shouted, horrified more by Paul’s gloating tone than the ugly weals on Naylor’s face.

“But that’s right,” said Paul. “It is for God’s sake. And Rowena’s. And her mother’s. And Oscar Bantock’s. We’re doing it for all their sakes.”

“That’s your justification for torture?”

“It isn’t torture,” said Sarah, stepping into the room behind me. I swung round to look at her. There was no hint of shame in her expression-or in her voice. “It’s justice.”

“What?”

“You wanted to know why. Well, this is why. When Rowena died, Paul and I agreed we had to put an end to the evil and suffering this man”-she pointed at Naylor-“chose to inflict on those we’d loved. We agreed to do what everybody seemed so anxious to do. Prove him innocent. Get him released from prison. Set him free. And then…”

“Take his freedom away again,” Paul concluded with a quivering smile.

“This doesn’t make any sense.” I looked at each of them in turn and could see in their eyes the proof that it did make sense. To them.

“They’d never have given up, Robin,” said Sarah. “I told you that. They’d have gone on and on and on. Until they’d turned Naylor into some kind of folk hero. Well, he’s no kind of hero. And we’re going to prove that.”

“How?”

“We’ve tape-recorded his confession. That’s why we had to get him out of prison. So we could make him answer for what he’d done. And why we had to lure him here. So we could have him all to ourselves. It’s thanks to you we worked out how to pull it off. You went to see him in Albany and told me afterwards about his marital problems. So, I went to see him myself. I’ve been every other week since. Assuring him how sorry I am he should have been wrongly imprisoned. Offering him whatever… consolation… he might need after his release. I was there on Tuesday, urging him to come round here as soon as he could. Didn’t take him long, did it? I think he was expecting me to drop my knickers for him the moment he stepped through the door. I’d promised him a surprise Christmas present, you see. Well, I’ve kept my word, haven’t I?”

“Not about this place you haven’t,” complained Paul. Instantly, I was alert to the hint of friction between them. “It was supposed to be impossible for anyone to trace the address.”

“Yes.” Sarah frowned in disappointment, as if somebody had just pointed out a trivial flaw in a legal argument. “It was. But I suppose something was bound to go wrong eventually. We’ve been lucky to get as far as we have. There were times I thought we were certain to be found out.” She raised her head defiantly-almost proudly-as she looked at me. “But you believed Paul’s confession, didn’t you, Robin, when we tried it out on you? And so did the police. They never dreamt I was feeding Paul the information they couldn’t account for him possessing. Sarwate let me examine his files on the murders when I went to him and said I was beginning to have doubts about his client’s guilt following the Benefit of the Doubt broadcast. That’s how I got the facts right. By combing through all the statements from witnesses and speaking to one or two of them myself-without telling them who I was, of course. Sarwate had copies of just about everything. Even the scene-of-crime photographs. I asked him not to tell anybody about my enquiries to spare me family and professional embarrassment. And he agreed. From his point of view, it would have been advantageous to have me on his side. I don’t suppose it ever occurred to him that Paul and I were conspiring together. He was hardly likely to look a gift horse in the mouth, was he?”

“You talk about this as if it were some kind of game.”

“It’s no game,” said Paul.

I turned on him, stupefaction swamping my fear of what they meant to do. “Whose idea was it? Which of you suggested it to the other?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Sarah.

Paul smirked grimly at me. “It matters to you, though, doesn’t it, Robin? Well, for what it’s worth, I suggested it. I’d spent weeks mourning Rowena and our unborn child and the ache of it-the anger I couldn’t vent-only got worse. I started looking back on our life together, trying to see how I could have prevented her death. It always came back to her mother’s death. And to this worthless bastard.” He waved his gun at Naylor, who seemed hardly to notice. “It started as an idle thought. Where was I the night Louise died? The answer was so banal. In bed in a cheap pension in Chamonix with some Swedish girl whose name I couldn’t even remember. But then it came to me. How easily I could pretend I’d been somewhere else. How easily I could claim to have committed the murders. Then they’d have to let Naylor go. Well, he couldn’t argue, could he? He couldn’t change his mind and say he was guilty after all. And he wouldn’t want to. Freedom’s worth any amount of bewilderment. But once he was free… he was at our mercy.” He sniggered. “I couldn’t have done it without Sarah’s help, of course. She had her mother’s diary and her trained memory of what happened and when. She also had the forensic skill to put the whole thing together. All I had to do was act the part she wrote for me. Christ, it was a demanding performance, though. Three months of twisting my mind to fit the past we’d invented. Three months pretty close to hell. But they were worth it. For this moment.”

I turned back to Sarah, my gaze telegraphing the question it was hardly necessary for me to ask. “Why did you go along with it?”

“Because Rowena’s death was one death too many. I’d just about succeeded in putting what happened to Mummy behind me. In ceasing to imagine what it must have been like for her. Then Rowena threw herself off that bloody bridge. How I wished and wished I could have stopped her. But there was nothing I could do. She was dead and so was the baby I hadn’t even known she was carrying. That made a third generation touched by murder. I wanted to strike back, to retaliate. But I couldn’t see any way to. Until Paul told me what he’d been thinking and I saw there was a way to avenge them all.”

“And in the process portray your mother as some sort of nymphomaniac? What kind of revenge is that?”

Sarah bit her lip. “We had no choice. The record will soon be set straight. I only wish Daddy had lived to-” She broke off, grief washing back over her. “Tell me how he died, Robin. Was it his heart? He had a coronary about twelve years ago and ever since the murders I’ve been afraid-”

“He fell from a cliff, Sarah.”

“What? In Biarritz? Surely-”

“In Portugal.”

“I don’t understand. What was he doing in Portugal?”

“Nobody seems to know. The authorities think it was an accident.”

“But you don’t, do you?” She seemed oblivious to the tears glistening in her eyes. “You’re implying he killed himself. Like Rowena. And for the same reason. You’re trying to blame me, aren’t you? You’re trying to suggest the things Paul said about Mummy drove him to suicide.” She swayed slightly on her feet and raised a hand to her forehead. “God, if that’s true, we’ve-”

“It isn’t true,” shouted Paul. He rushed forward, pushing me aside and taking a stand directly in front of Sarah. His gaze was fixed so firmly on her-and hers on him-that I wondered for a moment if I should try to grab one of the guns. But as soon as the thought formed, I dismissed it. The only hope of a peaceful outcome was to reason with them. “Listen to me, Sarah,” Paul continued. “Do you want to waste all these months of planning and preparing? That’s what it’ll mean if you start blaming yourself for your father’s death. We don’t know the circumstances. You can’t trust a one-sided account of them. For Christ’s sake, if anyone is to blame, it’s Naylor, isn’t it? He started this. But we’re going to finish it.”

“Yes.” Every muscle in Sarah’s body tensed. Her knuckles blanched with the ferocity of her grip on the gun. “You’re right. It’s too late to stop now.” She glanced down at Naylor. “I’d have liked to get more from him on tape, but what we have will suffice.”

“For what purpose?” I put in, desperate to plant as many doubts in her mind as I could. “A confession extracted in these circumstances surely carries no legal weight.”

“None whatever.” She sounded calm again, but I knew she wasn’t. Her empty left hand was clasped as tightly as her right to stop it shaking. “This isn’t about the law,” she declared. “It’s about morality. It’s about making Naylor pay for what he did to my mother and indirectly to my sister. And from the sound of it to my father as well. He’s destroyed them all, hasn’t he? So now…”

“You mean to kill him?”

“No,” said Paul emphatically. “We mean to execute him.”

“You wouldn’t.” I looked at Sarah as I spoke, silently urging her to see reason. “You couldn’t.”

“Why not?” Her gaze challenged me as much as the question itself. “A bullet through the brain’s more merciful than rape and strangulation, isn’t it? Much more.”

“Maybe. But it would still be murder.”

“Only in the eyes of the law.”

“And doesn’t that matter? You’re a solicitor, for God’s sake. You’re supposed to believe in the law.”

“I did once. But not any more. Not since I’ve seen how powerless it is to draw the poison from the wounds people like Naylor inflict-on the living as well as the dead.”

“But if you kill him, you’ll only end up where he belongs. Behind bars.”

“So be it. Don’t you understand, Robin? What’s right can’t be made wrong by fear of the consequences.” I saw her certainty gleam like religious fervour in her eyes. And I saw beyond it the futility of debate. Part of me agreed with her. And the other part wouldn’t be able to talk her out of it. Only the truth-only the one discovery she hadn’t made-could sway her. “He deserves to die.”

“Why?”

“You know why. Because he murdered two people and wrecked the lives of several others.”

“He’s solely responsible for that, is he?”

“Of course he is.”

“What are you getting at?” Paul fired the question at me over his shoulder.

“I’m getting at the truth. Which is more complicated than you think.”

“What do you mean?” asked Sarah, staring at me intently.

“Has he said why he went to Whistler’s Cot that night?”

“Some crap about being paid to kill Bantock,” snorted Paul.

“It’s not crap. He was paid. Or would have been. By a man called Vince Cassidy. Who later testified against him at his trial.”

Sarah blinked in surprise. “How could you know he told us that?”

“Because it’s the truth. Somebody hired Cassidy to kill Bantock. And Cassidy sub-contracted the job to Naylor. Your mother simply got in the way.”

“You can’t know that for a fact.”

“I can. Because that somebody was your father.”

“No. It’s not possible.”

“I’m afraid it is. He was convinced your mother meant to leave him for Oscar Bantock. And he was prepared to commission Bantock’s murder to prevent her. It was to be dressed up as a burglary that went wrong. And it did go wrong. But not in the way he or any-”

“Shut up!” Paul rounded on me, raising the gun as he did so. His mouth was twisted into a snarl and his eyes were bulging. The mania I’d glimpsed in him before-the capacity for violence he probably didn’t know the full extent of himself-drove me back across the room until I collided with the wash-hand basin. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re trying to do?” he raged. “Do you think I can’t guess the way your mind’s working?”

“Daddy?” Sarah murmured behind him. “Daddy… started all this?”

“He’s lying,” Paul shouted at her. “He’ll say anything to talk us out of what we agreed we had to do.”

“But that was before…” She looked past him at me, insisting I return her gaze. “How can you know? How can you be sure?”

“He told Bella, to convince her Paul’s confession was false. Remember his certainty, Sarah. Remember his insistence that it couldn’t be true. All because he knew it wasn’t.”

“But… he let Paul go on.”

“He couldn’t stop him without admitting to complicity in his own wife’s murder. But that’s what he decided he had to do when he heard Naylor was to be released. He was going to make a clean breast of the whole thing. A former patient of his with underworld connections who’d retired to the sun was the man who’d set it up for him. That’s why your father went to Portugal. To warn the man what he meant to do. But he wasn’t allowed to do it. His death wasn’t an accident or suicide. He was murdered. To protect the people who’d hired Cassidy on his behalf. Ring any bells, does it? A faintly shady acquaintance living in the Algarve? You may have met him a few times in the past.”

Sarah stared at me without speaking for several seconds while a host of puzzling recollections and unanswered questions must have assembled themselves in her mind and assumed the unmistakable symmetry of truth. Then she murmured “Oh my God” under her breath and leant slowly back against the wall behind her. “Ronny Dugdale.”

“Surely you don’t believe him?” demanded Paul, stepping across to Sarah and shaking her by the shoulder. “He’s making the whole thing up.”

“I thought Daddy’s reaction was just a different kind of grief,” she said quietly, almost reflectively, as if unaware of Paul’s words ringing in her ears. “I thought he just couldn’t bring himself to think ill of Mummy and that’s why he refused to accept our story. But I was wrong. It wasn’t grief. It was guilt.”

“Jesus Christ, Sarah, concentrate on what we’re here to do. You’re letting it all slip away.”

“I was doing this for him. I was trying to take away his pain as well as mine. And now I discover… he was ultimately responsible for everything Naylor did.”

“Snap out of it.” Paul slapped her cheek and glared into her eyes. I moved cautiously towards them. “Robin’s lying to you.”

Sarah frowned pityingly at him. “No, Paul. He isn’t. Naylor named Cassidy as his accomplice when we held a gun to his head and gave him no choice but to tell as much of the truth as he knew. We just didn’t want to listen. Because blame is so much easier to deal with when it’s indivisible. Now it has to be shared out among God knows how many people, some of whom we’ve never even heard of. And my own father has to take the largest portion.”

“Only Naylor raped your mother. Only Naylor strangled her.”

“That’s not good enough any more.”

“Not good enough?”

“No.” Her cheek had reddened where he’d slapped her. She cast me a fleeting look of conviction mingled with resignation. In it I felt I could read her exact state of mind. The justification she’d prepared for her actions had lost its purity. If she went on, its debasement would become all-consuming. Slowly and carefully, she opened the chambers of the revolver and slid the bullets out one by one into her palm.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m giving up. I have to. We have to.” She reached past him, dangling the empty gun by its trigger-guard from her forefinger, offering it to me while she kept her eyes fixed on Paul, so intently-so imploringly-that he seemed unaware of what was happening. I stretched forward, lifted the gun from her finger and slipped it into my raincoat pocket. Unloaded, it didn’t feel like a real weapon at all, merely a weight dragging at my coat, an encumbrance we’d all be well rid of. But I knew there was a second gun, clutched in Paul’s right hand. And that was still very much a weapon. “It’s over, Paul,” Sarah said gently. “We can’t go on with it. Not now.”

“You can’t, you mean.”

“It amounts to the same thing. We’re in this together or not at all.”

“And at your say-so I have to write off three months of making people think I’m a murderer? I sometimes thought I’d be driven mad by the contradictions and convolutions of what you said I had to do to convince them. I only survived because I believed in what we’d set out to do. And now you’re telling me to forget it. Dismiss it from my life. Well, I can’t. And I won’t.” The pitch of his voice had been rising as he spoke. Now something like a convulsion seemed to grip him. He took a step towards Sarah, then swung round and stared at me. “You bastard!” he roared. “You may have got to her, but you won’t get to me.” He raised the gun and for a heart-stopping second I thought he was actually going to shoot me. Sarah must have thought the same because she rushed forward and grabbed his arm, the bullets she’d taken from the other gun spilling out of her hand and clattering to the floor.

“Paul! Listen to me.”

But Paul wasn’t about to listen to anyone. He flung Sarah off, spun round, leant over the bath, grasped Naylor by the collar and clapped the gun to his head. Naylor winced and squirmed, but was unable to resist. With the tape sealing his mouth, he couldn’t even try to reason with the man who had it in his power to destroy him with one squeeze of his forefinger. The fragility of life-ours as well as his-was suddenly and horribly clear. Sarah and I stood stock still, both of us paralysed by the ease and imminence of the act. Perhaps Sarah hadn’t imagined what it might mean until now; hadn’t envisaged the smashed bone and spattered blood. If so, the images swarming in my head hadn’t entered hers until this moment. It was a harsh awakening that might soon become a gory reality.

“Don’t do it,” she said hoarsely.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Paul looked round at us, his eyes blazing. “I haven’t forgotten Rowena, even if you have.”

“It’s for her sake I’m asking. She wouldn’t want you to do this.”

He hesitated. His grip slackened. The barrel of the gun eased back from Naylor’s temple, leaving its circular imprint on his flesh. Paul began to tremble. He seemed to be holding tears only just at bay. Tears of anger and frustration and grief. “We can’t just… give up,” he sobbed.

“We must,” said Sarah.

“He deserves to die. You said so yourself.”

“Not this way. Not now.”

“It would be murder, Paul,” I said as calmly as I could. “And Sarah would be an accessory. You’d be condemning her to prison along with yourself.” Whether this was legally true or not I had no idea. I could only hope Paul had none either. “Do you want to do that? Do you really want to do that?”

“I want… justice.”

“Then let him live. There can’t be any further doubts about his guilt. He’ll go back to prison and rot there. You’ve made sure of that. You have his confession on tape. And we know the truth. Once that’s out in the open, nobody’s going to lift a finger to help him.”

“Aren’t they?”

“You know they aren’t.”

I could sense him longing to hear us say his efforts hadn’t all been in vain. He’d risked his sanity, his liberty and his future to make amends to Rowena for not saving her. And they were still in the balance. But tilting even as we watched. Towards life. Towards hope. Towards some kind of dignity.

“You’ll have stopped the tongues wagging, Paul. You’ll have nailed the lies. Isn’t that enough?”

It should have been. Paul should have said “I suppose it’ll have to be” and handed me the gun, reluctantly but conclusively. Then it would have been over. Finished. With no permanent damage done. We could all have breathed again. And lived.

But it wasn’t over. And it was far from finished. Because Paul didn’t respond to reason and logic the way I’d expected. I’d made the oldest mistake in the book. I’d calculated what I would do in his shoes. I’d imagined how I could best be talked into surrender and assumed it would work with him. But we never really know what’s going on inside another person’s head. We never have the faintest clue. Which words will douse the flame? Which words will fan it into a blaze that can become in a second a raging conflagration? We have no idea. We can only guess. Right or wrong.

“Isn’t that enough?” No. It wasn’t. Not nearly.

Paul stood upright and swung round, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on me. He put his left hand into the hip pocket of his jeans, pulled out a small key and held it in front of him, cupped in his palm. “Take it,” he said quietly.

“What is it?”

“The key to the shackles. You want to let Naylor go, don’t you? Well, do it.”

“Hold on. I’m not sure we should just-”

“Do it!” He raised the gun and pointed it straight at me, his finger still curled around the trigger, just as it had been when he’d held the weapon to Naylor’s head.

“This isn’t necessary, Paul,” put in Sarah. “We can leave him where he is until the police arrive.”

“The police? Yes. I suppose they’ll have to be called. To clear up the mess. That’s about all they’ve ever done.”

“Why don’t we-”

“Take the key and release him, Robin!” Paul’s voice was unsteady and his hands were shaking enough to joggle the key in his palm.

“OK, OK. Whatever you say.” I reached out and took the key. Then Paul moved smartly aside and waved me past. I stepped over to the bath and glanced down into Naylor’s eyes. Fear and pleading were swirling there. He knew how much was hanging by a thread. But he’d also heard me assure Paul that, whatever happened, his guilt was now incontestable.

“Go on,” said Paul from behind me.

I stooped over the bath and saw the twin keyholes on the shackles. I smelt Naylor’s sweat, souring in the chill air. He was trembling too. And so was I. I looked back at Paul. “We don’t have to do this,” I pleaded. “We really don’t have to.”

“I say we do. Release him. Now.” He moved to the end of the bath and raised the gun again.

“All right.” I held up the key for him to see. “I’m not arguing.” I leant into the bath, steadying the wrist manacles with one hand while I slid the key into the slot with the other. One turn and they snapped open. Naylor shuddered and parted his arms, allowing me to reach the other set and release his ankles. The shackles clanged hollowly against the enamel as they swung free at the end of their chain. I stood up and watched Naylor fall against the side of the bath, then straighten slowly out along it, his limbs uncoiling stiffly, his face grimacing as blood surged back into constricted joints and stretched muscles.

“Satisfied?” Paul asked bitterly. He leant forward and ripped off the strip of tape sealing Naylor’s mouth in a single sweep of the arm. Naylor gave a cry of pain and squeezed his eyes tightly shut, rolling over as if to hide from his torturer. “I hope you are. I hope you all are.” Paul’s voice cracked as he spoke. He stood up, holding the gun oddly in front of him, as if he’d never seen it before, glancing quizzically at it and Naylor and us in turn.

“We should call the police,” said Sarah, fear writhing beneath the superficial logic of her words. “Without delay.” She must have sensed by now what I too had sensed. That madness was streaming in around us like wolves into an undefended camp. None of us was going to get out of this unscathed.

“You disconnected the phone,” said Paul with a strange mirthless chuckle.

“We can use a neighbour’s. It won’t take long.”

“No hurry, then, is there?” He took a deep breath. “Plenty of time, in fact.” Another breath, deeper still. “You left and I should have followed. But I didn’t have the courage.” Tears began to stream down his face. He wasn’t talking to us any more. He wasn’t talking to anyone we could see. But he could see her. Clearly and distinctly. “I’ve found it now, though. This is the only way, isn’t it?” He opened his mouth wide, pushed the barrel of the gun between his jaws, hesitated for a fraction of a second, then pulled the trigger.

The force of the shot blew Paul back against the loo door, which flew wide open. He fell onto his back in the doorway and the gun clattered to the floor at his feet. Blood trickled down the panelling of the door as it creaked back from its stop and came to rest against his shoulder. And more blood-much more-pumped out behind him in a spreading pool. Silence and immobility closed around us-a long frozen moment of jarred senses and delayed reactions.

Followed by the sound of Sarah sobbing. Then movement, rustling and gathering like reality breaking into a dream. I saw Naylor levering himself up and over the rim of the bath, head bowed, eyes trained on Paul’s body. Time stretched elastically in my mind. And Naylor’s intention burst into a realization. We’d told him his release from prison was an illusion we had the means to shatter. But Paul had been alive then. Now he was dead. If his conspirator were to die as well, along with the only other first-hand witness to what they’d done and why, then Naylor might-just might-walk free.

And even if he didn’t, what did two more murders matter to him? They were a risk well worth taking. We’d made him more dangerous than he’d ever been before. We’d turned him into a man with nothing to lose.

I launched myself across the room as he stepped out of the bath and shoulder-barged him with all my weight. Taken off balance with his limbs still rubbery, he fell towards the wall. I raised an arm to help him on his way, but he had the wit to grab my wrist and take me with him. Then his foot slipped on the enamel and I was free of him for as long as it took to drop to my knees and grab the gun from the floor.

I swung round, the gun in my right hand, my forefinger tracing the trigger-guard and sliding towards the trigger itself. Naylor was above me, one leg out of the bath and one in. He stopped when he saw what I was holding, freezing in mid-movement. His face, distorted by the gashes and bruises Paul had inflicted, knotted into a frown. To lunge at me. Or not. To go for broke. Or play for time. The calculations traced their pictograms across his features as I stared up into them.

“Don’t move,” I said hoarsely, rising slowly and carefully to my feet, with the gun pointing straight at him all the time. And he didn’t move. Not so much as a muscle. “Sarah!” I called without taking my eyes from his. I could just make her out at the edge of my sight, a crouched figure in the doorway, arms clasped defensively around her shoulders. But I knew better than to look directly at her. Naylor would seize any chance I gave him, however slight. “Sarah!”

“Y-Yes?”

“Go and call the police.”

“But-”

“Go!”

“All… All right. I’ll be… as quick as I can.”

“Don’t come back here. Wait for them outside. They’ll need directions.”

“Outside? Surely-”

“Get out, Sarah. Get out now.”

She went without another word, perhaps guessing more of my meaning than I’d intended her to. I listened-and watched Naylor listening-to her footfalls as she ran down the passage. We heard the front door of the flat open and shut behind her. Then silence flooded through the empty rooms around us. It was just the two of us now. Just the confrontation-the decisive moment-we’d spent three and a half years feinting and circling and inching towards.

Naylor slowly lifted his other foot out of the bath and lowered it to the floor, his eyes daring me to tell him to stop. But if I told him and he didn’t stop, I had only one sanction. He was testing my resolve, judging what I did-or didn’t-have the nerve for. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. And neither was I.

“What happens now?” he asked, the challenge mounting as he spoke.

“We wait for the police.”

He shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

“I say we do. And I have the gun.”

“But you won’t use it. You haven’t got the bottle.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

His gaze narrowed. For a second or two, he weighed the question in his mind, seeking the certainty he needed. Then he said: “Tell you what. I’ll make a deal with you.”

“A deal?”

“Yeh. You let me climb through the window, with the tape in my pocket, before the Old Bill turn up… and we’ll call it quits.”

“Why should I?”

“’Cos if you don’t, when they do turn up, I’ll say you were in on it. I’ll say three people took me prisoner and tortured me and threatened to kill me-and you were one of ’em. Abduction. Assault. Conspiracy. Christ knows what. You could be looking at quite a few years inside.”

“They wouldn’t believe you.”

“Can you be sure of that?” He smirked. “Look at it this way. Why risk it? What’s it to you? The girl’s mother. This bloke’s wife. Some poxy old painter. What did they ever mean to you? Nothing, right?”

I almost wanted to smile. Naylor had just repeated my mistake. He’d fallen into the same fatal error. And taken my decision for me. “You’re right, of course,” I said. “They were nothing to me but strangers. Perfect strangers.”

“There you are, then.”

“Do you know why I told Sarah to wait outside? I didn’t. Until now.” I raised the gun and pressed the barrel against his forehead. His eyes widened. His mouth dropped open. He tried to step back, but, with the rim of the bath behind his knees, there was nowhere for him to go. “Can we really change anything, do you think?” Maybe we can, Louise. Maybe we can’t. I don’t know. I’m still not sure. But finishing things? That’s different. When the moment comes and you recognize it for what it is, that’s completely different. “There’s been a change of plan, Naylor. We aren’t going to wait for the police after all. Or, rather, you aren’t.”

“What?”

“You should be grateful. I’m actually doing you a favour. This way you don’t have to go back to prison. And you find out how Louise Paxton felt when she realized you weren’t going to spare her life.”

“Hold on, mate. You can’t be-”

“Serious? Oh yes. I’m serious.” The trees thinned before me as I ran. There was a clearing ahead, a sun-filled glade where Louise was waiting. And this time I knew she wouldn’t walk away. “Never more so.”

“Yeh, but-”

He didn’t finish his sentence. Although, in another sense, I suppose you could say he did. He paid the overdue penalty for what he’d done. There and then.