Borrowed Time

CHAPTER THREE

Detective Sergeant David Joyce of West Mercia C.I.D. arrived at eleven o’clock the following morning. He was smartly dressed and well-spoken, with choirboy looks that made him seem even younger than he probably was. My mother took an instant and irritating shine to him, plying him with coffee and cake as if he were the new curate paying a courtesy call. Eventually, she left us to ourselves in the sitting-room.

I’d had the whole of a restless night to prepare what I was going to say. When it came to the point, however, I was tempted to be frank as well as factual. Why not tell him about Louise Paxton’s elliptical remarks, her enigmatic glances to the horizon, her implications by word and gesture that she was about to take some significant step in her life? Because I didn’t want to be responsible for throwing those particular pebbles into the pond, I suppose. Because I didn’t want to share what she’d made exclusive to me: insight without understanding.

Accordingly, I stuck to a plain and simple version of events. We’d met on Hergest Ridge. We’d exchanged a few comments about the weather and scenery. She’d offered me a lift to Gladestry which I’d declined. And then we’d parted. A brief and inconsequential encounter which I’d forgotten all about until I’d seen her photograph in the paper.

“And the time, sir? You said on the telephone you could be specific about the time.”

“Seven forty-five, when we parted.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“It couldn’t be later?”

“No. I looked at my watch as she walked away.”

It was a point he seemed anxious about, almost fretful, but he wouldn’t say whether it had any bearing on the evidence they’d amassed against Shaun Naylor, whose blanket-draped figure I’d seen bustled out of a Worcester court on the television news the previous night. Clearly, however, the time and circumstances of our parting interested Joyce more than a little.

“This lift, sir. Why do you think she offered you one?”

“The sun was setting. I was probably looking pretty weary. It had been a hot day…”

“A friendly gesture, then?”

“Yes.”

“But Gladestry was out of her way, wasn’t it, if she was going to Whistler’s Cot?”

“I didn’t know where she was going.”

“No, sir. Of course you didn’t. But tell me, why did you turn the lift down?”

“Because the point of walking a long distance footpath is to walk all of it, not all of it bar two miles.”

“With you there, sir. I did it myself, a few years ago. Offa’s Dyke, I mean. The whole way. Chepstow to Prestatyn.”

“Congratulations.”

“But you were only doing the southern half, weren’t you? So, completeness doesn’t really come into it, does it?”

I looked at him levelly. What was he driving at? “I’m hoping to do the northern half next year.”

“Oh, I see. Right. And you wouldn’t want to have to go back to Hergest Ridge.”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

“So, that was the only reason for refusing the lift?”

“What other reason could there be?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You might have decided to play safe. If you thought she was offering something more than a lift, I mean. If you and her… misunderstood each other.”

I felt a surge of anger at what he was implying. But I was determined not to show it. “I at no point suspected-or had cause to suspect-that Lady Paxton was trying to pick me up.”

“No, sir. Of course not.”

“In the circumstances, the very idea seems positively offensive.”

“Oh, I agree, sir. But we have to consider offensive ideas in this sort of case. If only to anticipate what the defence may come up with. They can be very inventive, you know.”

“This man Naylor’s denying everything?”

“In a manner of speaking, sir. But I really can’t discuss the matter. I’ve probably already taken up too much of your time. If I made the appropriate arrangements, could you call at the station in Petersfield, say this afternoon, and make out a formal statement of what you’ve told me?”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“Good. And the time, sir. Seven forty-five. You can swear to that?”

“I can. And will, if necessary.”

“Thank you, sir. That’s just what I wanted to hear.”

I walked into Petersfield to dictate and sign the statement that afternoon. My mother had even more questions to ask me than Sergeant Joyce and I was keen to grasp any opportunity of being alone. It wasn’t just that I was afraid of letting something slip. The fact was that my life in Brussels had become more and more solitary and this I’d grown rather to enjoy. Since a disastrous affair with an Italian stagiaire, I’d deliberately kept intimacy at bay. My bachelor flat in the rue Pascale had become a haven which I only now realized I was going to miss. Especially if my mother’s hopes of my living with her at Greenhayes were fulfilled. Which naturally I was determined they wouldn’t be.

I was at the police station nearly an hour. The statement I signed, when at last it had been typed, was as accurate yet uninformative as the account I’d given Joyce. It seemed at the time to answer all the different calls on my conscience, though none of them fully.

I can’t remember what I was planning to do when I left the station. Perhaps I still hadn’t decided by the time I reached the pavement. If not, my mind was soon made up for me. A car horn sounded and, looking round, I saw my sister-in-law Bella smiling at me from behind the wheel of her BMW convertible as it coasted to a halt beside me. “Hop in,” she said. And, obediently, I did.

By the time I’d fastened my seat-belt, we’d accelerated away down the street. Bella turned onto the main road and headed south out of the town. Middle age and bereavement hadn’t sapped her enthusiasm for speed and glamour; quite the reverse. But then I was confident nothing ever would. She’d always been larger than life. And not just metaphorically. Tall, red-haired and built like an Olympic skiing champion, she’d never been what you’d call beautiful. Her jaw and nose were too prominent, her shoulders too broad for that. What she had was a striking, almost intimidating, presence. The way she ate and drank, the way she walked and talked, were part of a physical message only slightly muted now the copper sheen came out of a bottle and the firm thighs courtesy of dedicated hours on an exercise bike. I knew why Hugh had fallen for her. I knew only too well. I understood exactly what drew men to her, formerly in droves, but lately still in appreciative numbers. She exuded sexual appeal like a musk, stronger than any perfume. Meeting her, it was always difficult not to imagine-or remember-the act she took such pleasure in. When would it fade? I sometimes wondered. This power she couldn’t help exerting. And the only answer I could give was: not yet.

“Were you going back to Brussels without seeing me, Robin? That wouldn’t have been very nice, would it?”

“I haven’t been avoiding you, Bella. But… pressure of time…”

“And pressure of police inquiries? Hilda’s told me all about it. That’s how I knew where you were.”

“This isn’t a chance meeting, then?”

“There’s no such thing, is there?”

I couldn’t help thinking of Hergest Ridge as I replied: “I’m not sure.”

“I was hoping you’d come out for a drink with me. It’s a lovely evening. The sunny garden of some country pub with an unattached lady for company. What more could you ask for?”

A decent sense of mourning, I was tempted to suggest. But what would have been the point? Bella had never made any secret of her indifference to Hugh. She’d never made a secret of very much at all, to tell the truth. Except what she really felt. About me. And the rest of my sex.

“Shocked not to find me in tears and widow’s weeds, Robin?”

“No. Not shocked.”

“But disappointed?”

“No. Not even that.”

“You’ll come, then?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Oh yes. We all have a choice. And from what I hear, you’ve been making some pretty odd ones lately.”

We stopped at the Red Lion in Chalton and sat with our drinks in the garden. The sun was still hot, unnaturally so, as it had been all week, the sky cloudless, the air dry. Behind us, a gentle breeze rolled in slow blue waves across a field of linseed. I sensed unreality at the edge of my sight, significance close by but out of reach. As if there were symbols in everything I saw and said, but I couldn’t find the key to read them by.

Bella closed her eyes and bent back her head, luxuriating in the heat. Her white shirt was knotted at the waist, exposing an inch or more of well-tanned midriff above her pale blue jeans. The bangles at her wrist glinted and rang as she lowered her arm to the table. Then I noticed: she too had abandoned her wedding ring. But the tan had hidden the mark. She must have cast it aside soon after the funeral. Or perhaps not so soon. It would only have taken a day or so in such burning sun to obliterate all trace. In which case-

“I’m no longer married,” she said suddenly. Her eyes were open and trained on mine. “Why wear the chain of office?”

“Out of respect, I suppose.”

“Ah, but I never was respectful. Was I?”

“Not very. But enough to keep on wearing it while Hugh was alive.”

“I don’t believe in throwing things in people’s faces. Nor do you, as I recall.” She slid the tip of a finger down the condensation on the outside of her glass. “Tell me about Lady Paxton.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“Liar.”

I couldn’t help smiling as I sipped some beer. It was good to know something she didn’t when it had so often been the other way around. “You haven’t congratulated me on the directorship,” I said, changing the subject, as I thought, adroitly.

“Congratulations aren’t in order, Robin. You’re making a big mistake.”

“You think so?”

“A tiny old-fashioned company making cricket bats? It’s got no future, has it? In twenty years, all the kids will be playing baseball. And Timariot and Small will be history.”

“Maybe the European Community will be as well.”

“You know better than that.”

I shrugged. “We’ll see. Meanwhile, I’m throwing in my lot with history.”

“And coming home to Petersfield. I expected better of you, I really did. Hilda says you’ll be moving in with her at Greenhayes.”

“Wishful thinking.”

“Where will you live, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s plenty of room at The Hurdles.” That I could easily believe. The Hurdles was the uxoriously over-sized house Hugh had built for Bella at Hindhead in his first flush of possessive ardour. “I feel quite lonely there these days. I miss Hugh, I suppose. The idea of him living there, I mean. The coming and going. I’ve even thought of taking a lodger. Just for the company. Perhaps…”

“I don’t think so, do you?”

“No.” She treated me to a glance of withering assessment. “Perhaps not.” She took out a cigarette and lit it, then offered me one. I shook my head. “My, we are becoming ascetic, aren’t we?”

“Just taking care of my health.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Is that what Offa’s Dyke was all about?”

“Partly.”

“But you got more than you bargained for, didn’t you?”

“Did I?”

“Well, getting mixed up in these murders.”

“I’m not mixed up in them. I just… happened to meet one of the victims.”

“The last person to see her, according to Hilda. Other than the murderer.”

“Apparently.”

She stroked her neck reflectively. “Was it really rape, do you think? Or just some fun that got out of hand? Sex can, can’t it? Sometimes.”

“It was rape. The woman I met wouldn’t have…” I grimaced, aware of the expertise with which she’d drawn me out.

“There is something to tell, then?”

“No. Nothing at all.”

“The place where it happened. Whistler’s… Whistler’s…” Her wrist made a few jangling circles in the air.

“Cot.” Another grimace.

“Did you see it while you were in Kington?”

“No, Bella. I did not.”

She nodded and took a thoughtful sip of her spritzer, then grinned mischievously. “Want to?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you must be interested. Just a little. If you had your car with you, I bet you’d drive up there and take a look before going back to Brussels. Too good a chance to miss. But you haven’t, have you? So, perhaps I could give you a lift. Come along for the ride, so to speak. Satisfy my curiosity as well as yours.”

I couldn’t suppress a chuckle at her audacity. “No. Definitely not.”

“Tomorrow?”

“No.”

“The day after?”

“No.”

“Think about it.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.” She gave a throaty laugh. “I know you will.”

My meeting with Adrian the following morning went as well as I could have hoped. He made it clear I’d be expected to pull my weight; the works directorship was no sinecure. If offering me the post was a favour, it was the only one he meant to do me. But that’s how I wanted it as well, so we parted on good terms. Mercifully, he said nothing about the Kington killings. He probably considered it beneath his new-found dignity. Whatever the reason, I was grateful to be spared another round of explanations.

“When do you go back to Brussels?” he asked as I was leaving.

“Sunday.”

“So, you’d be free tomorrow? I’ve got three tickets for the Test Match. Debenture seats. Simon and I were going to make up a threesome with…” His face fell. “Well, with…”

“Hugh?”

“Yeh.” The managerial mask had slipped for an instant. “Hugh liked his cricket. Never missed a Lord’s Test that I can remember.” Adrian had known Hugh better than me, probably better than Bella. He’d certainly respected him more. And now he missed him. All this show of confidence and control was really only over-compensation for the loss of his big brother-and mentor. “Can you make it? It should be a good day. And it’s been years since-”

“Sorry, but I can’t. I’d really like to. But… I have to be somewhere else.”

Bella collected me from Greenhayes at nine o’clock on Friday morning and by midday we were in Kington. The cross-country route and heavy traffic should have delayed us, but Bella was so annoyed by the drizzle that forced her to keep the roof up that she drove even more aggressively than usual. She’d hoped for brilliant sunshine and a warm breeze to stir her hair. But instead the day was grey, still and sappingly humid.

Kington was exactly as I remembered it: a small unpretentious town busily attending to its own affairs. The media circus that had rolled in the week before had rolled out again, leaving the staleness of old news in its wake. Normality had so completely reasserted itself that I could have believed-as part of me wanted to-that nothing had happened there at all.

With some difficulty, I persuaded Bella to leave the car by the church at the western edge of the town and walk down Hergest Road to Butterbur Lane. On foot I thought we’d look less like sensation-seekers than townies out for a stroll, but Bella’s idea of casual wear didn’t preclude a conspicuous quantity of jewellery and an ostentatiously styled hat straight out of Harper’s & Queen. We attracted several suspicious looks from occupants of wayside cottages who happened to be in their gardens. And the haughty stare which Bella treated them to in return probably convinced them we were a TV director and his secretary-cum-mistress researching locations for a fictionalized study of rape and murder in the Welsh borders.

Butterbur Lane itself was quieter, as if the residents were deliberately lying low. The cottages here were tucked away behind overgrown hedges and folds in the hillside, sheltered from prying eyes as well as winter winds. We climbed in silence towards a sharp bend which I knew from the map was about halfway to Whistler’s Cot. Nothing but the knowledge of what had occurred there infected the scene with strangeness, the breathless air with expectancy. But even Bella sensed it.

“What a place for such a thing to happen,” she whispered to me. “It’s so… eerie.”

“You’re imagining it.”

“I know. But that doesn’t-”

Suddenly, a car burst round the bend ahead of us, the sound of its approach deadened till the moment it appeared by the banks and hedges to either side. It was a large maroon estate, travelling too fast for such a narrow lane. It slewed round the corner, peppering a garden fence with pebbles, then swung back to the crown of the road and headed straight for us. Instinctively, I grabbed Bella’s arm and pulled her towards the ditch. Only for the driver to realize the danger and slam on the brakes. More pebbles showered up behind him, followed by a crunching skid and a cloud of dust. Far too late for comfort, he lurched to a halt.

And stared blankly at us through the open side window of the car. He was a man of fifty or sixty, with a thatch of silver-grey hair and a round sagging face. Loose skin hung beneath his jaw where once it might have sat confidently as a double chin. His cheeks were hollow, his eyebrows drooping. And he was crying. His eyes were red and brimming, the tear-tracks moist against his skin. For a second or two, he looked at me, as if trying to frame an apology. I saw him lick his lips. Then he mumbled, “Sorry,” released the brake and coasted on down the lane.

“Stupid bugger,” hissed Bella. “He could have killed us.” I heard him engage a gear and speed up, moderately this time, as if he’d been shocked back to reality. “What did he think he was doing?”

“Probably didn’t think at all. You know what it’s like. Some old codger who’s never passed a test or driven in town.”

“He wasn’t that old.”

No. He wasn’t. Nor did he fit the picture I’d painted in any other way. He hadn’t looked remotely bucolic. The car was new and in good condition, for which we could be grateful. And he was disorientated by grief, not failing faculties. But I was reluctant to draw the obvious conclusion-that he’d been mourning one or both of the people killed at Whistler’s Cot. Why I couldn’t have explained. Unless it was the intensity of his grief, the glimpse it had given me of the passion such events could stir. Perhaps I wasn’t ready to admit how deep it could run, how formidable it could be. Perhaps I just didn’t want to understand.

We went on, both of us shaken but pretending not to be. The bend approached, then fell behind. The cottages thinned. Hints of field and heath appeared beyond the hedges. And then we were there. I recognized Whistler’s Cot instantly from newspaper photographs: an old half-timbered dwelling facing the lane, with a modern brick wing running away behind and a garage to one side, set a little back from the line of the house. A gravelled path between led to the rear, without gate or hindrance. The garden looked neglected, the house likewise. Tiles slipping, paint peeling: money spent but never followed up, or never replenished. The name, Whistler’s Cot, carved on a wooden sign in runic characters. And some weird sculpture by the front door, half cherub, half God knows what, crudely carved by design, one hand raised, as if to beckon or bar the way but uncertain which.

“Is this it?” asked Bella, a note of disappointment in her voice.

“Yes. This is all there is.” I glanced around. Several windows were open. When Bantock was alive, that wouldn’t have meant much. Now it implied occupation. His family, perhaps? If so, I didn’t want them to notice us. “Shall we walk on?”

“Aren’t we going to take a closer look?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I didn’t drive a hundred and fifty miles just to walk on. Let’s see if there’s anybody in.” She started towards the door.

“Bella!”

But she wasn’t to be deterred. Pausing only to stick out her tongue at the statue, she rapped the knocker. Then, when several silent seconds had passed and I’d begun to hope she might give up, she rapped it again, louder.

At which the garage door slowly swung up and a figure appeared beneath it, craning across the bonnet of an old Triumph sports car to operate the handle. He was a slightly built man in corduroy trousers and check shirt, a narrow squirrel-like face framed by tufts of ginger hair. He peered out at me with raised inquisitive eyebrows and all I seemed able to say was a weak “Good morning.”

“It’s afternoon, actually,” he replied. “The afternoon of a long and trying day. I’d be grateful-enormously grateful-if you didn’t make it any more trying than it already has been.”

“Sorry. I-”

“Was just nosing around the scene of the crime? Believe me, you’re not the first. And it would be unreasonable of me to expect you to be the last, wouldn’t it?”

“We are sorry,” said Bella, walking boldly across to him, hand outstretched. “But we’re not what you think.”

“No?” He sounded sceptical, but Bella’s smile was hard to resist. His head twitched slightly, as if he were about to bow, even kiss her hand. Instead, he merely shook it. “What then, might I ask?”

“My brother-” She glanced towards me, acknowledging the misrepresentation with a faint flick of the eyebrows. “Knew Lady Paxton.”

“Really?” Doubt wrestled for a moment with susceptibility, then gave way. “Well, pleased to meet you, Mr…”

“Timariot. Robin Timariot.”

“Henley Bantock.” We shook hands. “Nephew and heir of Oscar Bantock.”

“My… er… sister, Bella… Timariot.”

“Delighted, I’m sure.”

“Lady Paxton’s death came as a… a terrible shock. I… felt I had to…”

“That’s quite all right. Why don’t you both come inside?” He led the way and we fell in behind, Bella treating me to a triumphant smirk. “I’m sorry if I was a little curt. This is the first day the police would allow me past the door and I’ve been attempting to sort things out. But the interruptions have been continual. Neighbours thinking I might be a squatter. Tradesmen flapping unpaid bills under my nose.” We were heading for the rear of the house, taking the same route the postman had that fateful morning. “And, just before you came, a well-dressed middle-aged man weeping-yes, I do mean weeping-on the doorstep. He was in floods of tears. It was quite pitiful.”

“Who was he?” I asked.

“I really couldn’t say. You might have known him. I’m surprised you didn’t meet him in the lane.” The studio was in front of us now, commanding a broad view to the south, where the garden sloped away. It was an airy structure, lit by enough windows to resemble a conservatory. The blinds were half down, but, through the gaps beneath them, I could see disorderly piles of canvases, large and small, covered in aggressive swirls of colour; Oscar Bantock had been nothing if not prolific. “As a result, I’ve made scant progress. Which is inconvenient, to say the least.” He opened the kitchen door and ushered us in. “Call me superstitious if you like, but I’ve no intention of staying here overnight.”

And so we entered the house where two people had died-violently and recently. But their deaths had left no presence there, not one I could detect anyway. There were no bloodstains, of course, but, even if there had been, I’m not sure it would have helped me conjure up what had happened. The studio, bathed in sallow light, filled with half a lifetime’s unappreciated work and its impedimenta: canvases, frames, brushes, paints, palettes, easels, rags, pots of varnish, bottles of turps and a spattered smock gathering dust in its folds. I’d never seen Oscar Bantock alive and I couldn’t imagine him dead, a stark slumped form beneath one of the benches. There was no helpful chalk outline of the corpse to tell me where he’d been found and I hadn’t the heart to ask his nephew. Not that Henley Bantock looked or sounded like a man gripped by grief. He stood between us in the kitchen, watching calmly as we stared through the open doorway into the room where his uncle had been choked to death with a noose of picture-hanging wire. Then he sighed heavily.

“It’s going to be quite a task, shifting that lot. And cataloguing it, of course. I can’t abide the stuff myself. I mean, why couldn’t he have turned out tasteful landscapes? But it sets some people’s pulses racing, so who am I to complain?”

“Lady Paxton liked his work,” I murmured.

“Yes. So I believe. You could say she died for his art.” Catching my eye, he added: “I’m sorry. That was unfeeling of me.”

“The picture she wanted. Black Widow. Is it here?”

“Wrapped up in the lounge. I haven’t moved it. Uncle Oscar must have had it ready for her, I suppose.”

“Could we see it?”

“Why not? Who knows, you might want to…” He frowned. “Were you a close friend of Lady Paxton, Mr. Timariot?”

“Not close, no.”

“A friend of the family, perhaps?”

“Not really.”

“Only one of her daughters is due to meet me here this afternoon. I wondered if…”

“We would like to see the painting,” put in Bella with a winning smile. “If that’s possible.”

“Certainly. Follow me.” He led us out of the kitchen, down a short passage and into a sitting-room. It was comfortably if untidily furnished. There were well-stocked bookshelves and several paintings by Bantock-or fellow Expressionists-lining the walls. A parcel stood on the only table, the wrappings folded open to reveal the back of a canvas, already hooked and strung with copper-coated wire. Henley lifted the picture out and propped it against the wall behind the table, then stepped back to let us admire it. “The English Rouault, they said of him in the sixties. I think this one dates from that period. No better or worse than the rest, in my opinion. But, happily, my opinion counts for little.”

Black Widow measured about three feet by two foot six. It depicted a woman’s face-or a young boy’s-seen against a pale blue background. The hair and shoulders were splashes of black and purple, the face yellow tinged with red, the eyes nowhere save in the contrivance of dab and daub, their gaze-solemn, averted, downcast, defiant-a haunting mix of whatever you wanted to read there: the spider, the widow, the murderess, the victim. There was nothing pretty or comforting about it. Louise Paxton hadn’t wanted this picture to brighten her wallpaper. But precisely why she’d wanted it we’d never know now.

I stepped back to view it from the doorway. As I did so, Bella moved closer to Henley, cocking her head to squint at the image before her. “I’d have to agree with you, Mr. Bantock,” she said with a chuckle. “Not quite my idea of art.” I saw Henley glance appreciatively at the smooth T-shirted outline of her breasts beneath her linen jacket. His idea of art was fairly obvious: more Ingres than Rouault, I’d have guessed. “Inheriting all this must have caused you quite a few problems.”

“It certainly has. The police. The press. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Have you travelled far today?”

“From London.”

“You must have made an early start, then.”

“Indeed I did.”

I edged out into the passage. There were the stairs, leading up to the room she’d died in. Why not go up and take a look? Henley would tell Bella his entire life story if she continued to encourage him. She was assessing him, of course. I knew that. Worth getting to know, or not? Not, I suspected. But clearly she hadn’t yet reached that conclusion. And until she did…

I took the stairs two at a time, relieved not to set off a fusillade of creaks. The landing was small and narrow. There was a bathroom in front of me, built over the houseward half of the extension. Through a window I could see the shuttered skylights of the studio. The bedrooms were to left and right. The one on the left had been given over to storage: a desk and filing cabinet marooned in a sea of tea chests, packing cases and yet more canvases. From the one on the right came a faint draught. Henley must have opened the window, in an attempt to blow away the memory as well as the mustiness. I walked in, hurrying to forestall any sense that what I was doing was better not done.

But there was nothing to see. A bare room, with white walls and no paintings. One wardrobe, its doors closed. A large double bed, stripped to the mattress, its pillows, sheets and blankets all gone. Absurdly feminine flower-patterned curtains stirring languidly. And a huge gilt-framed mirror on the wall facing the bed, smashed in one corner, cracks radiating to all sides, fracturing the reflection of the room into random triangles. When had it been smashed? I wondered. At what moment? Before? Or after? I shivered and looked at the bed. It was impossible to imagine, too awful to want to imagine. The breath straining, the wire tearing, the flesh yielding. So much agony. So much revulsion. Too much of everything. And now, as its antithesis, a vacuum, a space waiting to be filled. The room was drained, as the house was drained, exhausted by the violence that had briefly filled it. The night of July 17 wasn’t there any more. Even the impression it had left had been removed, on strips of tape and forensic slides, in sterile bags and sealed envelopes. In its place was an empty tomb.

By the time I returned to the sitting-room, Henley Bantock’s general amiability had refined itself into a drooling eagerness for Bella’s company: I knew the signs well enough. Forgetting his earlier determination to “sort things out” and apparently oblivious of my brief absence, he proposed we go out to lunch together. Bella not yet having ceased to find him amusing, we went. To the Harp at Old Radnor, a hilltop hamlet a few miles north-west of Kington, just off the road to Gladestry. It was a charmingly well-preserved old inn, with picnic benches set up on a bank outside, where a vast panorama of Radnor Forest was added gratis to the menu.

Henley had gone there with his uncle several times, apparently, during periodic visits with his wife, Muriel. She hadn’t been able to come this time and Henley was clearly enjoying being off the leash. They both worked as administrators for one of the London Boroughs. Havering, I think. Or Hounslow. Henley spoke so casually of Oscar that I couldn’t help suspecting the visits had been designed more to safeguard his inheritance than check on the old boy’s well-being. Muriel probably hadn’t considered it necessary to accompany him now Whistler’s Cot and an entire Expressionist oeuvre were in the bag. She might have changed her mind, of course, if she’d known her husband was going to spend half the day ogling my sister-in-law over a ploughman’s lunch.

I listened distractedly to his autobiographical insights into the character of Oscar Bantock, which grew less and less complimentary as the shandy flowed. “He might have looked like a cross between Santa Claus and Captain Bird’s Eye but there was a streak of cruelty in him. Call it an artistic temperament if you like, but I saw it differently. He lived with us most of the time I was growing up and coping with him as well as a sick husband was what took my mother to an early grave in my opinion.” While he waxed resentful, my eyes drifted north to the hills I’d crossed ten days before on the path from Knighton. If I’d accepted Louise Paxton’s offer of a lift that evening, we might have stopped here for a drink. Then, at the very least, she might have arrived at Whistler’s Cot a crucial hour later. Life, in Henley Bantock’s self-pitying account, wasn’t fair. But death, it seemed, had an artistic temperament.

“What little he made from painting he spent twice over. Not on us, of course. Not even on anything as useful as brushes and canvases. Most of it went on whisky. Only the finest malts would do for Uncle Oscar. And then there were his women. He had a better eye for the ladies than for art, I can’t deny. You’d certainly not have left Whistler’s Cot in his day without a pinched bottom to remember him by at the very least, Miss Timariot, believe you me. But then, as I say, he did have good taste in that regard if in no other.”

This contrived compliment, risqué as Henley no doubt thought it, was followed by an outburst of chortling and the appearance in Bella’s eyes of the steely boredom I’d often seen before. It seemed like the cue I’d been waiting for. “You don’t make your uncle sound like a natural candidate for burglary, Mr. Bantock.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He was probably splashing money around in some pub. Spending the price agreed for Black Widow before he’d actually been paid it. That would be his style. Some ne’er-do-well from London on a housebreaking tour of the provinces takes note and follows him home. Then things turn nasty. Uncle Oscar wouldn’t have backed down from a fight, especially not with drink on board.”

“That’s how you see it, is it?”

“That’s how the police see it. So I understand, anyway. He must have been out when Lady Paxton first called. Probably forgot the time they’d fixed to meet. It would have been unlike him not to. That would explain why she left home at lunchtime. Set on buying the picture, she went back later, I suppose. And walked straight into… well, something quite frightful.”

“You think it’s open and shut?”

“Presumably. The police must have had good reason to arrest this man Naylor. They seem certain he did it. I assume there’s clinching forensic evidence. What more is there to say? Apart from the acute distress Lady Paxton’s family must have suffered, of course. Identifying my uncle’s body was upsetting enough for me. What it can have been like for Lady Paxton’s daughter-a girl not yet out of her teens, I believe-to see her mother, well, in the state she must have been in, in a mortuary, in the middle of the night…” He shook his head, briefly sobered by the contemplation of such an experience.

“Is she the daughter you’re seeing this afternoon?”

“No, no. The elder daughter’s coming. Sarah, I think she said her name was. I’m not quite sure what she hopes to accomplish, but…” A point suddenly occurred to him. His nose quivered as it registered. “Are you acquainted with the girls, Mr. Timariot?”

“No. I only ever met their mother.”

“You knew her well?”

I could sense Bella watching me as I replied. “I felt I did, yes. We… understood each other. So I thought.”

“You shared her interest in Expressionism?”

“We never discussed it.”

“Never?”

“We only met once, you see. Just once. Before the end.”

“But… I thought you said…” He frowned at me, his mouth forming a suspicious pout. “When exactly did you meet her, Mr. Timariot?”

“The early evening of July seventeenth.”

“When?”

“The day she died. Just a few hours before, as a matter of fact.”

“But… I understood you to say… you were a friend of hers.”

“No. I didn’t say that. You assumed it.”

“You’re splitting hairs. You let me think…” He glared round at Bella. “You both let me think…”

Bella glanced irritably at me, then laid a calming hand on Henley’s elbow and smiled sweetly at him. “When’s your appointment with Miss Paxton, Mr. Bantock?”

“What? Oh, three o’clock. But-”

“We’d better get you back, then, hadn’t we? We wouldn’t want her to be stood up.”

It was half past two when we drove away from Whistler’s Cot. I’d assured Henley that the police knew all about my meeting with Louise Paxton, but I still reckoned he’d be on the phone to them before we reached the bottom of the lane. His wasn’t a trusting nature. Nor a grieving one, for that matter.

It would be different for the Paxton family, of course. Louise had left a husband and two daughters, rather than one ingrate nephew. They’d be mourning her now, in full and genuine measure. And one of those mourning her-Sarah Paxton-would be there, on the doorstep, within half an hour of our departure. I could easily have waited for her. Henley couldn’t have prevented me, even if he’d wanted to. But I didn’t. When it came to it, I was impatient to be gone, eager to avoid the encounter.

What it amounted to, I suppose, was fear. The fear that Sarah Paxton might resemble her mother too closely for me to fob her off with the account I’d given the police. But she wouldn’t necessarily welcome the truth. Nor would anyone else who’d loved Louise Paxton. Because the truth made what had happened to her seem just a little too complicated for comfort. To enlighten might also be to antagonize. So I preferred to do neither.

There was another fear as well, running even deeper. The fear of what I might learn in the process. Who was Louise Paxton? What sort of woman was she? What sort of mother? What sort of wife? And what had she been trying to change, that evening on Hergest Ridge? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers. We’d met and parted as total strangers to each other. Perhaps that’s what we ought to remain. If we could.

I flew back to Brussels on Sunday as planned. The following morning, I returned to my office at the Berlaymont and informed my head of unit that he would soon be losing my services. Around the same time, I read later, at a village churchyard in Gloucestershire, Louise Paxton was buried.