Borrowed Time

CHAPTER ONE

It began more than three years ago, on a golden evening of high summer. I’d started out from Knighton that morning on what was projected to be a six-day tramp along the southern half of Offa’s Dyke. I’ve always found I think best when walking alone. And since I had a great deal to think about at the time, a really long walk seemed one way of ensuring I thought clearly and well. Decisions masquerading as choices were closing in around me. Middle age was beckoning, a fork in life’s path looming ahead. Nothing was as simple as I wanted it to be, nor as certain. But up in the hills, there was the hope it might seem so.

It was Tuesday the seventeenth of July 1990. A well-remembered date, well remembered and much recorded. A day of baking heat and unbroken sunshine, declining to a dusk of sultry languor. A day of solid walking and serious thinking for me, of bone-hard turf beneath my feet and hazy blue above my head. I saw no buzzards, as I’d hoped to, circling in the thermals, though maybe, after all, there was something hovering up there, out of sight, seeing and knowing what I was heading towards.

I’d travelled up to Knighton by train from Petersfield the previous day, happy to be away and alone at last. My eldest brother, Hugh, had died of a heart attack, aged forty-nine, five weeks before. It had been a shock, of course. A grievous one-especially for my mother. But Hugh and I had never been what you’d call close. Twelve years was just too big an age gap, I suppose. About the only time we’d really got to know each other as brothers was when we’d walked the Pennine Way together, in the summer of 1973. Since his death, the memory of those three distant weeks on the northern fells had become in my mind a sort of talisman of lost fraternity. My trip to the Welsh borders was partly a conscious act of mourning, partly a search for just a few of the pleasures and opportunities life had offered then.

Above all, however, the trip was intended to clear my mind and decide my future. My sister Jennifer and my other two brothers, Simon and Adrian, all worked in the family business, Timariot & Small, of which Hugh had been managing director. In that sense-and several others-I was the odd one out. I used to claim my career with the European Commission in Brussels gave me immunity from their parochial cares and perpetual squabbles. And so it did. Along with absolute security and relative prosperity. It had given me twelve years of that and could be relied on to give me at least another twenty. Followed by early retirement and an index-linked pension. Oh yes, the life of a Eurocrat has its undoubted rewards.

But it also exacts its penalties. And they’d begun to weigh me down of late. The Berlaymont, an X-shaped mountain of glass and concrete where I’d worked in one cramped office or another since arriving in Brussels, had become even more oppressive in my imagination than it was in reality. It’s been closed since, following the discovery of carcinogenic asbestos dust in its every cavity. So, even if you shake the dust of the Berlaymont from your feet, it may still linger in your lungs, waiting patiently-for many decades, so the experts say-to claim its due. Well, there’s nothing I can do about that now. And, at the time, it wasn’t anything as tangible as asbestos that was choking me. It was the knowledge of all the kilometres of corridor I’d dutifully trudged, all the hectares of memoranda I’d solemnly paraphed, all the tonnes of institutional gravitas I’d played my small part in bearing-and would go on bearing, year after year, until kingdom or retirement or asbestosis come.

I would have done, of course. I’d have gone on for want of any alternative, becoming more cynical and disillusioned as the years passed, becoming more and more like those worn-down colleagues of mine in their mid-fifties, dreaming of Surrey bungalows and golfing days to come. It was already too late to avoid sharing their fate. It was already, as sometimes I realized in the bland Brussels night, over for me.

But then Hugh died. And it didn’t have to be over after all. It gives me no pleasure to say this. God knows, I still wish it hadn’t happened to him. But my life’s turned around since he succumbed to his own punishing workload and slid slowly to the floor of his office just after nine o’clock one evening in June 1990. I could never have believed what his death would lead me into. And perhaps that’s just as well. I’d have fled back to my dull but secure existence in Brussels if I’d known even half of it. That’s for certain. But, despite everything that’s happened, I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad to have followed this road.

At first, it just seemed like a savage bolt from the blue, a nasty intimation of my own mortality. But the signs were there at the funeral, in the tension that wasn’t just grief. For fifteen years, Hugh had been Timariot & Small, sustaining it as much by his energy and commitment as by any nurturing of commercial advantage. Now he was gone. And the question wasn’t simply who would replace him, but whether the company could survive without his hand on the tiller. Even at the crematorium, Simon and Adrian were eyeing each other in preparation for the contest to come, while Reg Chignell, the production manager, was eyeing both of them and clearly wondering if either was up to the job.

Uncle Larry had come out of retirement to chair the board on a temporary basis. It was he and my mother who put a suggestion to me the day after the funeral which I was still mulling over a month later when I set out from Knighton. Though the youngest of us, Adrian had worked in the company the longest. He also had two sons, which was two more than the rest of us put together and by my uncle’s quaint logic made him a fitting guardian of family tradition. Moreover, by virtue of some shares held in trust for the eldest of those sons, Adrian brought more voting power to the table than Simon, Jennifer or me. The managing directorship was properly his, they explained. With the support of Hugh’s widow, Bella, who had inherited his shares, they proposed to offer Adrian the post. But they foresaw friction between him and Simon. Well, that hardly required a crystal ball. What was needed was a calming influence, somebody to succeed Adrian as works director and bring the cool good sense of a trained economist to the board’s deliberations. What was needed, in short, was me.

Their case wasn’t, to be honest, a strong one. I’d worked in the factory during university vacations and in the office during the eighteen months or so it had taken the European Commission to decide they wanted me. But that was all a long time ago and my background in economics was so much eyewash. What my mother really wanted was to lure me home and see me settled in Petersfield, ideally with a wife and children, before she died. Uncle Larry was more than willing to play along. And I was tempted to do the same-for reasons of my own.

I didn’t tell them how eager I was to leave Brussels, of course. I didn’t want them-and I especially didn’t want my brothers or sister-to think they’d be doing me a bigger favour than I’d be doing them. I did my best to imply that for the sake of the family I might be prepared to give up my lucrative career-on the right terms. But there was the rub, as the Commission’s conditions of service artfully ensured. The terms would never be good enough. Frustrated or not, as a fonctionnaire I was feather-bedded. With Timariot & Small, I was going to feel the draught.

Then there was the future of the company to consider. I wasn’t absolutely sure it had one. A past, yes. In 1836, my great-grandfather Joseph Timariot went into partnership with John Small making cricket bats in a modest workshop in Sheep Street, Petersfield. With one change of site-to the present factory in Frenchman’s Road-the business had grown since into something like the third largest manufacturer of cricket bats in the country. But that hardly made it General Motors. It employed about fifty people in a medium-sized Hampshire market town, using old-fashioned methods to turn out a handcrafted product in one branch of the sports industry where the Far East hadn’t yet caught up with English traditions. The past it proudly possessed, in faded medal certificates from the Great Exhibition, in brown-edged letters of appreciation from Edwardian cricketers, in the sawdusty air of the workshop my father walked through in the footsteps of his father and his father before him. But the future? Did that really hold a place for the likes of Timariot & Small?

The Timariot family, as I saw it, was in danger of putting all its eggs in one very old and increasingly frail basket. I don’t think my father ever thought all five of his children would work for the company. Until his retirement, only Hugh had done so. Then Adrian went into the business straight from school. Uncle Larry retired a few years later and was succeeded as finance director by Jennifer, who until then had been working as an accountant for a supermarket chain. When my father died, Hugh became chairman in fact as well as name and promptly installed Simon as marketing director, rescuing him from some long and inglorious struggles as a photocopier salesman. Which left only me on the outside.

Where good sense suggested I should remain. But the offer of a directorship had been made. And, flushed with generosity following his move to the top of the table, Adrian was happy to confirm it. Simon and Jennifer, seeing me, I suspect, as some sort of check on Adrian ’s power, urged me to accept. I went back to Brussels promising to give them a decision during the fortnight’s leave I’d booked for late July.

So, in a sense, the Rubicon rather than the Severn waited for me at the end of Offa’s Dyke. But careworn was the last thing I felt when I stepped out of the George & Dragon in Knighton early that Tuesday morning. I took one glance up at the clock tower, then headed down Broad Street in the direction of the Dyke. My rucksack was full, but, strangely enough, my shoulders felt as light as if they’d just been relieved of some heavy burden. For six days I was free, incommunicado, unobtainable, gone away. For six days, I was my own man.

I walked south through the rolling East Radnor hills as the sun climbed burningly in the sky, shadeless ridges alternating with steep wooded valleys. At some point of the early afternoon I’d have been able to see Hergest Ridge ahead of me, if I’d troubled to look at my map and pick it out through the heat haze. But it was only one landmark among many to me then. Just a name and a place.

I spent the hottest hour and a half of the day in a pub off the route, then pressed on towards the next town on the Dyke: Kington. It waited below me as I rounded the eastern flank of Bradnor Hill: a compact huddle of slateroofed houses dozing in the sunshine, with the Black Mountains rising beyond. It was a sleepy vision of rural England, with a picturesque touch of wild Wales thrown in.

My destination that night was Gladestry, a village about three miles west of Kington, where I’d booked a room at the Royal Oak Inn. The walk to it along Hergest Ridge was a pleasant one according to my guidebook, so I’d decided to leave it until the cool of the evening. I spent the late afternoon in Kington, pottering aimlessly round the shops until the pubs opened and I could slake my thirst. At a corner table of the Swan Inn, I eavesdropped happily on the local gossip while trying to do some of the thinking my week in the hills was supposed to facilitate. Giving up on the grounds that there were another five days for that sort of thing, I wrote a postcard to my mother instead. It was a muddy-coloured shot of Kington Market Hall circa 1960 and was the only depiction of the town I’d found in any of the newsagents’ carousels. I dropped it into a pillarbox on my way back to the path.

The ascent to Hergest Ridge was a narrow tarmac lane called Ridgebourne Road, deteriorating after it had passed a few houses into a stony track. I started up it shortly after seven o’clock. The going was steep but steady. Midges were massing between the fern-banks to either side, the sunlight filtering warmly through the foliage. It was-I’d have said if anyone had asked me-a perfect summer’s evening.

A five-bar gate separated the end of the track from the open moorland of the ridge. To the right of the gate, a car had been parked beneath the trees. It was a G-registered white Mercedes two-seater, gleaming from a recent clean. I glanced at it approvingly-even enviously-as I passed, thinking of the wretched little can-on-wheels I ran around Brussels. Some people, I reflected, had all the luck.

I went through the gate and out onto the ridge: a whale-backed expanse of grass and gorse, views to the north opening up as I gained height. Sheep were bleating everywhere, occasionally scattering as I came on them unawares. I passed two weary-looking walkers bound for Kington, who nodded in some kind of fellowship at the sight of my rucksack. Otherwise, my attention was reserved for the horizon of hill and forest, bathed in fading sunlight. As mornings bring expectation, so evenings, I suppose, are naturally peaceful. Certainly, I felt something very like peace descend on me as I gazed out at the loveliness of one portion of my homeland. Returning to the Berlaymont after this, I realized, was going to be like returning to prison.

It must have been near the mid-point of the ridge that I stopped simply to stare for a few minutes at the wide green world laid out before me. I sighed and shook my head and said aloud, for no particular reason: “Heavenly.”

And a voice behind me said, “Isn’t it just?”

I started and looked round. A few yards away, a woman was sitting on a flat stone at the base of a ruined cairn. She was smiling, though whether at me or the scenery her dark glasses made it impossible to tell. Her blonde shoulder-length hair looked golden in the sunlight, though maybe there were some streaks of silver there as well. She wore a white blouse and tailored beige slacks, slender ankles showing above moccasin-style shoes. Her smile was beguiling, almost girlish, but my immediate impression was of somebody who was no longer young but somehow better for it, somebody who might once have been pretty but was now beautiful.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” she continued, in a soft slightly husky voice.

“No, no. It… doesn’t matter. I was…”

“Lost in thought?”

“Well…” I too smiled. “You could say so, yes.”

“It’s an ideal place for it. I quite understand.” Oddly, I felt she did. I felt she understood completely without needing to be told. She took off her glasses and gazed past me. “Up here, everything’s so… so very clear. Don’t you think?”

“You… come here often?” I asked, wincing at the inanity of the question.

“Not as often as I’d like. But that may be about to change. What about you?”

“Never before. I live… a long way away.” Thinking of Brussels, I added: “But that may be about to change as well.”

“Really?”

I shrugged. “We’ll see.”

“You’re walking Offa’s Dyke?”

“Part of it.”

I stepped across to the cairn, lowered my rucksack to the ground and sat down on a boulder beside her. She looked round at me, her smile fading into the gentlest of appraising frowns. Closer to, my earlier guess was confirmed. She was older than me, in her mid-forties perhaps, but younger in spirit. There was something graceful but also skittish about her, something elegantly unpredictable. Hers was the face you’d notice across a crowded room, the voice you’d strain to hear, the quiet air of mystery you’d long to breathe.

I glanced at her left hand where it rested on her knee. There was no ring on the fourth finger. But there was a pale band of untanned flesh where one had recently been. Some flicker of her blue-grey eyes suggested she knew I’d noticed. But she didn’t withdraw her hand. I coughed to cover my embarrassment and said: “Yours is the Mercedes parked in the lane?”

“Yes.” She laughed. “Pathetic, isn’t it? That it’s so obvious, I mean.”

“It was the only car there. I-”

“Can we really change anything, do you think?” Her tone had become suddenly urgent. Her hand tightened on her knee. “Can any of us ever stop being what we are and become something else?”

“Yes,” I said, taken aback by her intensity. “Surely. If we want to.”

“You think it’s as simple as that?”

“I think it is simple, yes. But not easy. I think the real problem is…” I hesitated. We were talking about each other’s life without knowing what the other’s life comprised. It made no sense. And yet it seemed to.

“What is the real problem?”

“Knowing what we want.”

“Deciding, you mean?”

“If you like.”

“But once we have decided?”

“Then… it’s still not easy. But at least it’s possible.”

“You believe that?”

She was staring at me intently, as if what I said-as if my exact choice of words-might make a real difference. For a fleeting instant, I was convinced she was asking me to make up her mind for her. What about I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. The freedom to choose a future mattered more than our separate pasts. That freedom was what she was silently urging me to assert. So I did-for my sake as well as hers. “I believe it,” I said, with quiet emphasis.

She nodded in satisfaction and glanced down at her wristwatch, then back up at me. “Where are you heading tonight?”

“Gladestry.”

“Then I should let you get on.”

“I’m in no hurry. But perhaps you…”

She chuckled faintly. “I’m in no hurry either. But, still, I must be going.” She rose to her feet, leaning forward as she did so. I caught a lacy glimpse of bra-a cool hint of flesh-between the buttons of her blouse. Then I stood up as well and realized how much shorter she was than I’d thought, how much slighter and more vulnerable than her eyes and voice had implied. “Yes, I really must be going,” she murmured, scanning the horizon. She turned to me with a broad smile. “Can I offer you a lift to Gladestry? Or would that be cheating? I know what sticklers you hikers are.”

I was tempted to contradict her, to say no, on the contrary, a lift to Gladestry-perhaps a drink in the pub there-would be delightful. But somehow I knew she didn’t want me to say that. The true value of a stranger lies in his never becoming anything else. “I’ll walk it, thanks.”

“Goodbye, then,” she said. “And good luck.”

I grinned, thinking she was casting humorous doubt on my hiking abilities. “You reckon I’ll need it to reach Chepstow?”

“I’m sorry.” She blushed slightly and shook her head. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Never mind. I probably will. Good luck to you too.”

“Thank you.”

I found myself shaking her hand. One fleeting touch of palms and fingers. Then the same dazzling smile she’d greeted me with. Before she turned and walked away down the broad grass track towards Kington. I watched her for a minute or so, then, fearing she’d look back to find me staring dolefully after her, I too turned, heaved on my rucksack and started on my way. I glanced at my watch as I did so and noted the time. It was just after a quarter to eight. She would still have been in sight then. The future would still have been retrievable. But by the time I next stopped to look back, near the summit of the ridge, she’d vanished. And the future had taken its invisible shape.

I reached Gladestry at dusk. A cluster of stone cottages by a drought-sapped brook, complete with church, school, post office and pub. I lingered long enough in the bar of the Royal Oak to eat a hearty supper. Then I went up to my feather-mattressed bed and slept the log-like sleep of the long distance walker. Early next morning, I set out for Hay-on-Wye.

That day and the four following settled into a pattern of prompt starts, midday lay-ups to dodge the heat and evening arrivals at comfortable inns. The landscape varied from the bleak grandeur of the Black Mountains to the soothing beauties of the Wye Valley. On a conscious level, I thought of little beyond mileages and map references. But subconsciously, as I realized at the end of the walk, my mind was hardening itself against a return to the life I’d led in Brussels. I’d have to go back, of course, if only to resign, but I could never go back in the true sense. Somewhere behind me on the path, a bridge had been decisively burnt. If I’d had to specify where, I’d have opted for Hergest Ridge. The woman I’d met that first evening didn’t fade from my memory. On the contrary, my encounter with her seemed to grow in significance as I went on. Not because of the words we’d exchanged so much as the suspicion that somehow, by letting her go so easily, I’d let some opportunity-sexual, psychological, altogether magical-slip from my grasp. I didn’t know her name or where she lived. I knew nothing about her at all. And now I never would. It was a melancholic reflection, heightened by solitude. Yet it steeled my resolve. Whatever happened, I wasn’t going back to the life I’d left behind.

During those six days on Offa’s Dyke, I was effectively sealed off from the outside world. I read no newspapers, watched no television, heard no radio. My conversation was limited to trifling exchanges with publicans, shopkeepers and fellow hikers. I suppose it was a little like retreating to a monastery for a week. As a source of refreshment, it equalled the most ravishing scenery. Being out of touch came to seem a deliciously pleasant condition. I didn’t want it to end. But it had to, of course. Every journey has a destination. And mine was the real world.

At sunset on Sunday the twenty-second of July, I stood on Sedbury Cliffs, at the very end of the Dyke, gazing across the Severn Estuary at the motorway suspension bridge, thick with traffic speeding back to London and the cares of the working week. I remember thinking at the time how pointless their haste was. With the perspective of six days walking behind me, I saw their ant-like bustle as stupendously futile. I felt momentarily superior to them all, detached from their petty struggles and enlightened beyond their power to imagine. Which was ironic, since most of them probably already knew. Had known, anyway, even if they’d subsequently forgotten. What I’d not yet found out. But very soon would.

I stayed overnight in Chepstow, at the George Hotel, and left late the following morning after treating myself to a long lie-in and a leisurely breakfast. The rail route back to Petersfield was time-consumingly indirect, though I can’t say I much minded, dozing in sun-warmed carriages as various trains rattled me around South Wales and Wessex. With my mind made up, I was no longer in any hurry.

When my father retired from Timariot & Small, he and my mother sold the house in Petersfield where I’d been born and bought a bungalow in the nearby village of Steep. It was where I was heading that day: a thirties construction of tile and brick set on sloping ground near the foot of Stoner Hill, easily mistakable for an ancient cottage thanks to swags of wisteria, patches of lichen and a riotously fertile flower garden. Its name-Greenhayes-was ancient, belonging to a demolished dwelling whose stones had survived in a rockery. Steep’s famous dead poet, Edward Thomas, is supposed to have mentioned Greenhayes in one of his prose pieces, though I’ve never bothered to track it down, so I don’t know what he made of the original. As for its successor, it was looking at its best that late summer’s afternoon when I climbed from the taxi. But I never forgot the mists that rolled down from the combes in winter and stayed for days, shortening, I maintained, my father’s life. Greenhayes’ welcome was for me always double-edged.

My mother, by contrast, loved the house without reservation. She’d filled it to the brim with the hotchpotch furnishings and bric-à-brac of the family home and had become an ever more demonic gardener as the years of her widowhood passed. She’d also acquired a yappy little cross-bred terrier called Brillo (on account of his strong resemblance to a wire scouring pad) who rendered a doorbell redundant. As usual, he alerted her to my arrival before I’d done much more than lift the latch on the front gate.

“Who’s that, Brillo?” she called from out of sight as he growled at the scent of alien soil on my boots. Then she emerged round the side of the house, rubber-gloved and panting from some vigorous bout of weeding. She was in her gardening outfit of faded frock and broken-down shoes, bare-headed despite my gift to her two birthdays back of just the wide-brimmed straw hat she’d claimed to want. It had lain unused in a supermarket carrier bag on top of her wardrobe ever since and I’d stopped asking why she never wore it. “Oh, it’s Robin. How lovely to have you back, dear,” she said, advancing to give me an elderflower-perfumed hug. “Nice walk?”

“Fine, thanks.” And so eighty miles of Offa’s Dyke were somehow written off as no more than a stroll down the lane.

“You’re just in time for tea.”

“I thought I might be.”

“And in need of it, by the look of you.” Stepping back to examine me, she frowned and said: “You’re getting too thin, dear. Really you are.” Actually, it was she not me who was growing thinner with the years. But any of her offspring who were less than two stones overweight were anorexic in her eyes. “We’ll have to feed him up, won’t we, Brillo?” At which Brillo barked in what she took for agreement but I knew to be an automatic reaction to any mention of food.

I followed her into the house, scarcely listening as she described the difficulties she was having with her runner beans on account of the heat. I wondered when-if I said nothing-she’d ask what decision I’d made about joining the company. Around the time she offered me a third cup of tea and a second slice of cake-or earlier?

I dumped my rucksack at the foot of the stairs, pulled off my boots and ambled into the sitting-room. On the mantelpiece, propped between framed photographs of two of Adrian’s children, was my postcard from Kington. But of the other two I’d sent-one from Hay-on-Wye, one from Monmouth-there was no sign.

“Only one card so far, Mother?” I shouted into the kitchen, where crockery was rattling and the kettle already sizzling.

“What, dear?”

“There are two more cards on their way.”

“Cards?” She bustled in with a cloth for the coffee table and pulled up beside me. “It’s there, look. Staring at you.” She nodded at the fuzzy shot of Kington Market Hall.

“Yes, but-”

“Which reminds me. Simon was here for lunch yesterday. He was peering at that card. Said what a coincidence it was.”

“Coincidence?”

“Said I was to ask you whether you’d seen anything. Police. Film crews. Journalists. I suppose the place was crawling with them.”

“Sorry?”

“Kington. Where you sent the card from.” She snatched it up and squinted at the postmark. “The eighteenth. When was that?”

“Wednesday. But it was Tuesday when I-”

“Wednesday! There you are. That’s when it was on the news.”

“What was?”

“The two people who were murdered. You must have heard about it. They’ve arrested somebody now, according to the papers. Haven’t you seen today’s?”

“No. Nor any-”

The kettle began to boil. “It’s there, by my chair.” Pointing vaguely at the crumpled wreckage of her Daily Telegraph, she hurried out. Puzzled, I grabbed up the paper and riffled my way to the front page. A single-column headline towards the bottom caught my eye. KINGTON MURDERS: MAN HELD. Police investigating last week’s brutal double murder in Kington yesterday confirmed that a man is helping them with their enquiries. They did not indicate whether charges were imminent, but the shocked population of the quiet Welsh borders market town will be hoping this brings an early end to the hunt for whoever was responsible for strangling internationally renowned artist Oscar Bantock and raping and strangling a woman since identified as Louise Paxton, wife of royal physician and society doctor Sir Keith Paxton, at Mr. Bantock’s home in Kington on the evening of July 17. The man, who has not been named, was arrested in London yesterday afternoon and taken to Worcester Police Headquarters for questioning. A spokesman for West Mercia C.I.D. said it was unlikely that-

The evening of July 17. I’d left Kington at seven o’clock and walked along Hergest Ridge to Gladestry. And on the way I’d met- There was no reason why there should be any connection. There were lots of reasons, in fact, why there shouldn’t be. But my hands were still shaking as I pulled the previous day’s paper from the canterbury. It was Sunday’s and therefore likely to have a feature on the case. I knelt over it on the floor and began turning the pages. Then I stopped. There was her face, gazing out of the black-and-white photograph as she’d once gazed past me at the sunset-gilded horizon. And the caption beneath the photograph read: Rape and murder victim Louise Paxton. I’d let her walk away from me that evening-to her death.