“I won’t let them get away with that.”
“It won’t be easy to stop them. Once you’re in court, you’re on their territory.”
Court. There was the word. And there was the realization I’d somehow dodged. Making a guarded statement to the police wasn’t the end of this. I was going to have to give evidence at Naylor’s trial. To answer questions on oath. If Naylor persisted in his plea of innocence, it was virtually certain I’d be called as a witness by one side or the other.
“Naylor’s guilty. But proving it could be messy. Mummy loses her wedding ring, flies to England and goes to see a man who lives alone on the Welsh borders. On the way, she offers a stranger a lift that would take her on a long detour if he accepted. Don’t you see how it could all be made to sound?”
She’d come to find out what I meant to say. That was it, of course. I could tell by the hint of impatience in her tone. She didn’t want my help in coping with her grief. What she wanted was my confirmation that there was nothing else still to emerge. A bundle of slender connections and stray coincidences was bad enough. But something concrete-something attributed to her mother by a disinterested witness-would be infinitely worse. She needed me to tell her it wasn’t going to happen.
“Mummy was careless with possessions and tended to lose all sorts of things. She was keen enough on Expressionist art to break off a holiday simply to buy a coveted example. And she had a generous nature. She acted on impulse. Whim, you could call it. Like offering you a lift. There’s no hidden meaning in any of it.”
“Of course there isn’t.”
“But you have to have known her to understand that. The jury will be strangers. So will the judge and the barristers and the people in the public gallery and anybody who reads about the trial while it’s going on. They won’t understand her at all. But they’ll think they do.”
“If I’m called, Sarah…” I leant forward to give emphasis to my words. “I’ll do my best to ensure there’s no possibility of any misunderstanding. Your mother’s reputation won’t suffer at my hands.”
She looked at me intently for a moment, then said: “I’m so glad to hear you say that.”
“I mean it.”
“Thank you.”
“There’s no need to thank me. All I’ll be doing is telling the truth.”
But that wasn’t all, was it? And if my evidence was compromised, how could I be sure the explanations Sarah had given me for the loss of the ring and the impetuous flight from Biarritz weren’t as well? In doing the decent thing, I was tacitly agreeing to play my part in a subtle editing of the facts: a damage limitation exercise on behalf of Louise Paxton’s good name. And why not? It couldn’t do any harm. Nobody lost by it. Not even Naylor. Since he was undoubtedly guilty. Wasn’t he?
I wasn’t sure whether Sarah expected to meet me again while she was in Brussels. When I showed her back to the Hilton, I asked-more out of politeness than anything else-if she wanted to see the sights. The city didn’t boast many, to be honest, but it seemed the least I could do. To my surprise, her reaction was enthusiastic. I suppose a solitary weekend in a foreign country was the last thing she needed. I agreed to pick her up at ten o’clock the following morning.
Saturday dawned warm and bright. She was waiting for me when I reached the Hilton and we set off for a tour of what Brussels had to offer. The Grand Place and the Mannekin Pis on foot. Then out in my car to the Atomium-Belgium’s answer to the Eiffel Tower. Lunch at a café near Square Montgomery. A stroll round the Parc du Cinquantenaire and a visit-at her insistence-to the Berlaymont. Followed by tea back at my flat in rue Pascale.
At first, we didn’t talk about the trial-or even directly about her mother’s death. Instead, I described the life of a Eurocrat and the alternative attractions of Timariot & Small, revealing more about myself in the process than I’d intended to. It turned out that Sarah’s knowledge of the poems of Edward Thomas put mine to shame. She could quote them seemingly at will. And she could recite the names of the hangers above Steep even though she’d been there no more than once.
“Mummy drove me down to Steep one Sunday during my last year at school,” she recalled as we stood in the top-most ball of the Atomium, ostensibly admiring the view of the Parc de Laeken and the Château Royal but both picturing in our mind’s eye the thickly wooded flanks of Stoner Hill. “We were studying Thomas for A level and he’d become my favourite poet. Something to do with his melancholia, I suppose. Adolescents understand that condition better than most adults, don’t you think?” Seeing me frown in a vain effort to recollect my state of mind at the age of eighteen, she took pity and went on: “I wanted to see the places that had inspired his poems. And Mummy was keen to take me, though she must have regretted it later, driving round and round those winding lanes while I lapped up the scenery. We probably passed Greenhayes several times in the course of the afternoon. Without ever thinking that one day…”
“When would this have been?”
“Spring eighty-seven. May, I think.” She paused. When she resumed, I knew at once the words were no longer hers. “‘The cherry trees bend over and are shedding, on the old road where all that passed are dead, their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding, this early May morn when there is none to wed.’ ” She gave a sad little smile. “Strange, isn’t it? I mean, our paths coming so close three years ago, but not crossing till now. I suppose fate just wasn’t ready.”
“You believe in fate?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps it helps if you do. If anything can help.” She took a long calming breath. “The police offered to arrange counselling for us and Daddy persuaded Rowena to try it. She’s seeing a trauma expert twice a week.”
“But you aren’t?”
“I don’t want counselling. I want justice.” The hardness was back in her voice now, the sentimental philosophizing brought abruptly to an end. “I want Shaun Naylor put behind bars for the rest of his unnatural life.” Another smile, different now, self-aware, almost self-mocking. “A trainee lawyer isn’t supposed to talk like that, is she?”
“Maybe not. But I’m no lawyer, so I can say it. Any man who does what Naylor did has forfeited the right to live.”
She looked at me sharply. “You really think so?”
“Yes. Don’t you? I mean, when the platitudes-the social niceties-are swept aside. Don’t we all fundamentally believe in an eye for an eye?”
She didn’t answer. Her gaze moved past me to focus on some distant point beyond the horizon. And I felt suddenly embarrassed by my own vehemence, ashamed by the primitive instinct Louise Paxton’s death had stirred in me-but that her daughter was capable of keeping in check. “Let’s go down,” she said softly. “I’ve seen enough.”
Over lunch-and afterwards, as we sat on a shady bench in the Parc du Cinquantenaire-Sarah grew more forthcoming about herself and the Paxton family. Her grandfather, Dudley Paxton, had been in the Diplomatic Service, his career culminating in his appointment as British Ambassador to several former French African colonies just after their independence in the late fifties and early sixties. He and his Basque wife spent their retirement in Biarritz, close to Grandmère’s numerous relatives. Their villa, L’Hivernance, inherited by Sarah’s father, was the scene of many of her happiest childhood memories. She and Rowena would spend days on end playing in the garden or building sandcastles on the world-famous beach, only a pebble’s throw away, during long sun-drenched summers.
Sir Keith, meanwhile, was making a name for himself in the medical world. With royal patients and a knighthood came a lucrative private practice, a large town house in Holland Park, a homely weekend retreat in the Cotswolds and the best of everything for his wife and children. He was a doting and generous father, buying both daughters an expensive education, a succession of well-bred ponies, a skiing holiday every winter and a car for their eighteenth birthdays. As for Louise, who was fifteen years younger than him and looked more beautiful at forty than she had at thirty, there was nothing Sir Keith wasn’t prepared to do. A dress allowance she couldn’t spend. A luxury car she didn’t want. And a gilded cage-I couldn’t help suspecting-she wasn’t prepared to remain in for ever.