“Both dead now, thank God. I wouldn’t have wanted them to go through this. Even though they never liked me. Well, I was fifteen years older than Louise, with a divorce behind me. I wasn’t what they had in mind for their daughter at all. She was an only child and naturally they wanted the best for her. And they thought she could do a great deal better than me. Maybe they were right. I didn’t have the knighthood then, of course. I didn’t have the lifestyle I have now. But that didn’t deter Louise. She was never a gold-digger. She accepted me for what I was. And for what I might become.”
In the event, Sir Keith had given his wife wealth and status as well as love. They’d been married for twenty-three years and he’d never once regretted it. A beautiful wife and two lovely daughters to adorn his middle age. He’d known he was lucky, blessed with more than his fair share of good fortune. But he’d never supposed there’d come such a savage reckoning. He’d never imagined he might have to pay so dearly for the joy and fulfilment Louise had brought into his life.
“And now it’s so empty, Robin. Like a husk. I’ve felt so old since Louise died. So tired. So decrepit. And I’m not very good at being alone. I suppose that’s why… well, why Bella… She’s been good for me. Good for all of us. She can never replace Louise. Nobody can. But… it helps… to have somebody… It helps her as well, I think. She loved Hugh very much, didn’t she?”
I probably said yes. I certainly didn’t disabuse him of the notion. What would have been the point? I felt sorry for him. I even felt I understood. That night, indeed, I began to imagine I understood more about Louise Paxton than Sir Keith ever had. The lonely childhood and the disapproving parents were two more pieces of the jigsaw. Somewhere still, out there, she was waiting to surprise me. I dreamt of her sitting beside me outside the Harp Inn, as Naylor had claimed she’d sat beside him. The setting sun was behind her. I couldn’t see her face clearly. Her hand brushed my knee. And she laughed. “Follow me,” she said. “You can’t imagine what I have in mind.”
The prosecuting counsel spared no effort in his cross-examination of Naylor. Yet for all his remorseless probing, Naylor’s story remained intact. He didn’t make the mistake of taking up counsel’s invitation to explain the improbabilities and inconsistencies in his account. Why should a respectable married woman like Lady Paxton seek sex with a man like him? He didn’t know. Why should she take him to the house of somebody she knew only slightly? Again, he didn’t know. Why should anybody but him want to murder her? Yet again, he didn’t know. Didn’t he have any remorse for inflicting such a distasteful lie on Lady Paxton’s family? No, because it wasn’t a lie. Why, then, had he initially denied all connection with the case? Because he’d panicked. Simple as that. It had been an act of stupidity, not guilt. Did he seriously expect anyone to accept that? Yes. Because it was the truth. “And truth’s stranger than fiction, don’t they say?” He was still confident, still giving as good as he got. “I’m putting my hand up to four burglaries. I’m admitting the kind of man I am. I’m not trying to pretend anything. I’m just saying this. I’ve never murdered anyone. I’ve never raped anyone. I’m not guilty.” Sometimes, just sometimes, you could think he believed it. But, glancing round the court, you could sense what he must have sensed as well. If he really did believe it, he was the only one.
I went back to Petersfield that night. Sir Keith, who meant to see the trial through to its end, saw me off at New Street station. “It’ll be over by early next week, I reckon,” he said as I leant out of the train window for a parting word. “And I want to be here to see how he takes the verdict-and the sentence. Will you be coming up again?”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to. Pressure of work, you know.”
“Of course, of course. I won’t forget the support you’ve given us, Robin. Helping Rowena. Sarah too. And listening to me ramble on last night. Other people’s lives. Other people’s problems. They can be hard to take, I know. And it’s not as if you even knew Louise, is it? Not really.”
“No. I never did.”
Not his Louise, anyway. Another one maybe. A version of her as far removed from the person he’d lived with for twenty-three years as Naylor’s version of events was from the truth as I thought I knew it. The light faded as the train rushed south towards London. And the darkness grew. Who could be sure, absolutely sure, of anything? Where she’d gone that night after leaving Hergest Ridge. What she’d done and why. What she would have done if I’d gone with her. And where we’d all be now if I had.
The defence called four more witnesses after Naylor himself. The friend he’d stayed with in Cardiff, Gary Newsom, who spoke up for him as a bit of a rogue but no murderer, who’d returned to Newsom’s home in Cardiff on 18 July 1990 “relaxed and a bit pleased with himself, but looking forward to going back to London.” A customer at the Harp Inn the night before who recognized Naylor as “a man I saw sitting outside with a good-looking woman; it was definitely him and the woman could have been Lady Paxton, but I can’t be certain.” A barmaid at the Black Horse, Leominster, who remembered serving Naylor just before closing time that night. “He bought me a drink and chatted me up a bit. He seemed nice enough. I quite took to him, as a matter of fact.” And lastly Naylor’s wife, Carol. “It’s true about the row. A real up-and-downer. And about the holiday. He was full of it when he came back. I knew how he’d got the cash. The stuff he stole was in his van. Like he says, thieving’s in his blood. Always has been. But murder ain’t. Nor’s rape. My Shaun would never go in for that sort of thing.”
It didn’t sound to me as if any of this amounted to very much. As the prosecuting counsel pointed out in his closing speech, Naylor might well have been at the Harp that evening. But the witness hadn’t been able to put a definite time on the sighting or identify Lady Paxton as Naylor’s companion. She could have been anyone, given Naylor’s roving eye. As for his late visit to the pub in Leominster, that could have been a futile attempt to set up an alibi. Futile because there was still plenty of time for him to have gone to Whistler’s Cot, murdered Bantock, raped and murdered Lady Paxton, then driven the fifteen miles to Leominster before eleven o’clock. By Naylor’s own admission, he’d had sexual intercourse with Lady Paxton. Did anybody seriously believe this was with Lady Paxton’s consent? If it was, why should she choose Whistler’s Cot as a venue? And why take Naylor into Bantock’s studio first? Because, of course, Naylor had to say she did so in order to account for the forensic evidence of his presence in the studio: the paint and the fibres. Whereas the real explanation was that he’d torn his clothing and stained his jeans during the fatal struggle with Oscar Bantock. When Lady Paxton had surprised him at the scene of the crime, he’d forced her to go upstairs and undress, probably threatening her with the knife or the gun. He’d raped her, as was shown by the amount of vaginal bruising, which he’d attempted, with breath-taking impudence, to attribute to masochistic tendencies on Lady Paxton’s part. Finally, he’d strangled her as he had Oscar Bantock, using a ligature of picture-hanging wire taken from the studio. Then he’d fled, the original purpose of his visit to the house forgotten. These were crimes of horrifying brutality, motivated by material and sexual greed and made possible by a complete indifference to the pain and suffering of others which Naylor had continued to exhibit in his outrageous mockery of a defence. Guilty verdicts on all three charges were the only appropriate way to respond.