Borrowed Time (43 page)

“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.”