“Agricultural machinery. But you don’t want to hear about that. Very boring.”

“No more so than the cricket-bat business, I’m sure.”

“Believe me, it is.” Abruptly, she changed the subject. “Have you heard from Henley Bantock, by the way?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Oscar Bantock’s nephew. He’s writing his uncle’s biography. Has written it, I suppose. It’s due out next spring. He came to see me a few months ago. I have two Bantocks on my drawing-room wall and he wanted to photograph them for the book. Wished I hadn’t agreed in the end. Appalling little creep.”

I smiled. “He is rather, isn’t he?”

“Oh, so you have met him?”

“Once, yes. But not about the book. There’s nothing I could have told him anyway.”

“No?”

“Of course not.” Her questions were becoming more and more baffling. I could have believed she was trying to provoke me into disclosing something, but for the fact that there was nothing to disclose. “I never knew Oscar Bantock.”

“No. But you knew his foremost patroness, didn’t you?”

I frowned. My bemusement must by now have been apparent to her. Along with my growing irritation. “You mean Louise Paxton?”

“Who else?”

“You’ve lost me. I met Lady Paxton for a few minutes on the day she died. That’s all. We didn’t discuss Oscar Bantock’s painting career.”

“Then what made you contact the revolting Henley? It’s you who’ve lost me.”

We stared at each other, incomprehension battling with incredulity. I sensed it would be foolish-perhaps dangerous-to try to explain how I’d met Henley. But why I couldn’t have said. Sophie Marsden seemed not just to know something I didn’t, but to know it about me. I couldn’t decide which might be worse. To find out what it was. Or never to.

“Are you two all right?” asked Sarah, surprising both of us, even though her approach along the gravel path can hardly have been stealthy.

“Fine,” replied Sophie. “Just chatting.”

“Yes,” I said. “But as a matter of fact-” I glanced ostentatiously at my watch. “I think I ought to be starting back now. I’ve… er… a long drive ahead of me.”

“Of course,” said Sarah, smiling warmly. “It’s wonderful you were able to share the day with us, Robin. Rowena really appreciated it, I know.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” I responded, leading them out through the gate and moving round to the driver’s door of my car. “Well, I…”

“Goodbye,” said Sarah, stepping forward to kiss me. “Lovely to see you.”

“You too,” I murmured. Then I turned to shake Sophie’s hand. “Goodbye, Mrs. Marsden,” I said, hoping my grin wouldn’t look too stiff.

“Please call me Sophie,” she replied, fixing my eyes with hers as she added: “After all, I’m sure we’ll meet again.”

CHAPTER NINE

Timariot & Small’s financial circumstances didn’t improve as 1992 faded towards 1993. There were, to be honest, no grounds for expecting them to. Jennifer spent nearly as much time in Melbourne as Petersfield, but the more she learned about Dyson’s management of Viburna Sportswear, the worse the outlook seemed to grow. While Adrian ’s attempts to negotiate an exemption for us from Bushranger’s agreement with Danziger’s came predictably to nothing. The road back to profit and self-respect was going to be long and hard.

But we had no obvious choice other than to tread it. For my part, I took some comfort from being the least blameworthy member of the board and concentrated on running the Frenchman’s Road operation as efficiently as possible. The workforce knew about the Viburna disaster, of course. How couldn’t they? It led to some cynicism about the calibre of the directors, but no more than I’d have expected. Less, in some ways, than was justified. Don Banks had been making cricket bats of consistently high quality for as long as I could remember. It had taken him fifteen years just to learn how. His standards were as demanding as ever. And he was no moaner. A stern reticent deferential man was Don. But I saw the look on his face as Adrian and I stood talking in the workshop one day. And I knew what the look meant. We’d let him and his fellow craftsmen down. We’d failed to live up to their standards.

I think it was people like Don who made me determined to see it through. I could have scuttled back to Brussels and index-linked security any time I liked. I often thought of doing so, I can’t deny. The Maastricht Treaty was bulldozing its way through the parliaments of Europe and lots of juicy new posts were sure to follow in its wake. One of them might have my name on it. Nobody could blame me for grabbing a ripe plum from the laden bough. Except Don Banks and the rest, of course. Except all their predecessors and successors for whom Timariot & Small had meant and might yet mean something more satisfying than an adequate living. Except, in the final analysis, me.

So I stuck to the task, over-compensating for the board’s strategic deficiencies by working excessive hours and paring back my life until it comprised little more than the short-term worries and long-term problems of the family firm. Hugh’s example should have deterred me from becoming a workaholic. But during an evening of home truths and brotherly bonding in the Old Drum, Simon assured me that was just what I was turning into. And he was right, however reluctant I might be to admit it. I had few friends and no leisure pursuits besides country walking. Since the break with Ann, I’d deliberately avoided intimacy with another human being. Not just sexual intimacy, but any kind of lowering of the psychological defences. I found the limitations of my existence strangely comforting in an ascetic sort of way. More and more, I was coming to see how safe-how undemanding-the solitary life really was. And I was beginning to think I’d probably settle for it.

Thanks largely to Bella, I stayed in distant touch with the Paxtons. She invited me to a Boxing Day lunch at The Hurdles, which Paul and Rowena also attended, along with Sarah and a humourless young lawyer called Rodney who was clearly more taken with her than she was with him. That and a few similar occasions apart, however, our worlds no longer overlapped. Sir Keith had given his daughters the use of The Old Parsonage as a weekend retreat within easy reach of Bristol, while he and Bella divided their time between Biarritz and Hindhead. The lives of Louise Paxton’s husband and children were back on an even keel. Sir Keith was settling into marriage and retirement. Sarah was looking ahead to her career as a solicitor. And Rowena was probably only waiting to finish her degree course before starting a family. Equilibrium had been restored. As for Louise and her stubborn but elusive memory, those who couldn’t forget her didn’t speak of her. Those, like me, who couldn’t stop wondering, knew better than to wonder aloud.

In March 1993, however, the Kington killings’ slide into a discarded past came abruptly to a halt. That month saw the publication of Fakes and Ale: the Double Life of Oscar Bantock, by Henley Bantock and Barnaby Maitland. I remember clearly the moment when I came across a review of the book and learned of its existence for the first time. It was an unremarkable Thursday afternoon. I was eating a snack lunch at my desk, waiting for our timber agent to return a call and leafing idly through the newspaper. Then the headline caught my eye. NEGLECTED EXPRESSIONIST’S LAST LAUGH AT ART WORLD. What had apparently already been made much of in the specialist art press was summarized in the column below.

This entertaining if sometimes uneven biography of Oscar Bantock, the eccentric English Expressionist who was murdered three years ago, is a collaborative venture between Bantock’s nephew Henley and the unorthodox art historian Barnaby Maitland. It reveals that Bantock, written off in his lifetime as a prickly drink-sodden recluse determined to plough a lonely and deeply uncommercial Expressionist furrow, was actually a womanizer of considerable charm, a popular and sociable pub-goer and a gifted forger of several different artists and styles. His scorn of naturalistic and sentimental work emerged in subtle pastiches of its most popular examples from which he made far more money than he ever did painting in his own name. Maitland’s researches are based on journals inherited from Bantock by his nephew and meticulous cross-checking with the records of dealers named in them, often to those dealers’ vigorous displeasure. They reveal the curmudgeonly idealist’s double life as the most mercenary of forgers. He seems to have stuck at first to middle-rank recently dead artists, notably a clutch of Edwardian specialists in drawing-room or garden scenes of children and pets, greetings card material in reasonable demand but not famous or pricey enough to attract expert attention. In the last few years of his life, however, he became more ambitious, mining his own Expressionist vein to produce several brilliant fake Rouaults and Soutines. Henley Bantock’s insight into his uncle’s drift towards cynicism supports Maitland’s contention that this change was triggered by the artist’s acceptance that he could not hope for recognition in his own right and that material reward represented his only prospect of satisfaction. If they are correct, which many irate dealers, auctioneers and owners will say they are not, Bantock and one of the few tireless fans of his own work, the late Lady Paxton, paid a heavy price for his revenge against the artistic establishment. The authors’ most startling conclusion is that the murders of Bantock and Lady Paxton in July 1990 may have had more to do with his output of fake art than any of the motives imputed to the man convicted of the crimes. If this sad and fascinating tale of frustration and forgery turns, as it well might, into a cause célèbre of miscarried justice, then the authors will have exposed a legal as well as an artistic scandal. But that, as they say, is another story.