Borrowed Time

by Robert Goddard

  “We told Cheryl you were coming,” said Mr. Bryant. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. I’m glad you did. Will your other daughter be—”

  “Ally lives in Canada,” said Cheryl. “Well out of it.”

  There was an edge to the remark her father seemed to feel he couldn’t ignore. “We haven’t told Allison, Mr. Timariot. There seemed no point burdening her with it. Not before we have to, anyway.”

  “We’re forgetting our manners,” said Mrs. Bryant abruptly. “Please sit down, Mr. Timariot. Would you like some tea?”

  “Thanks. That would be nice.”

  “I’ll make it,” said Cheryl, heading for the kitchen with the eagerness of somebody glad of any excuse to leave the room.

  “Use the cups and saucers,” her mother cried after her, before turning to me with a blush. “I do so hate mugs. Don’t you?”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “Mr. Timariot hasn’t come here to talk about crockery, love,” said Mr. Bryant, patting his wife’s hand. They sat on the sofa facing me, a pitiful optimism blooming in their expressions. Could I somehow, they seemed to be wondering, put matters right? Could I turn the clock back to their son’s blameless childhood and correct the fault before it was too late? “It goes without saying that we’re . . . very sorry . . . very sorry indeed . . . about all this . . .”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “You wonder if it is, though,” he said, frowning down at the carpet between us. “You bring them up as best you can. You give them so many things you never had yourself. So many advantages. And then . . .”

  “He was such a good-natured baby,” Mrs. Bryant remarked. Then, as if aware how irrelevant the observation was, she launched herself on another tangent. “Sir Keith must feel this dreadfully, he really must. My heart goes out to him.”

  “It must be just as bad for you,” I said.

  Mr. Bryant nodded and flexed his hands. “He came here last weekend. Paul, I mean. Sat us down and told us. From the chair you’re sitting in now. Calm as you like. Poured it all out.”

  “Awful,” murmured Mrs. Bryant.

  “Said he hoped we’d understand. But how can you understand that?” He sat forward and stared at me. “I’m afraid I lost my rag. I hit him, you know. For the first time in his life, I actually hit him. I was angry, you see. But he wasn’t. Even then. He was so . . . controlled. I hardly recognized him as my son.”

  “He was never a violent boy,” said Mrs. Bryant. “Secretive. But never violent. That’s why I can’t believe it.”

  Mr. Bryant gave me a confidential smile, as if to say: “That’s motherhood for you.” But fatherhood, apparently, wasn’t quite so blinkered. “He didn’t make it up, love. We’re going to have to accept it. At least he’s owned up. Better late than never.”

  “Why do you think he’s owned up now?” I asked.

  “He said it was because of Rowena,” answered Cheryl as she bustled into the room with the tea tray. “Said he couldn’t stand it any longer.”

  “So some good’s come out of poor Rowena’s . . .” Mr. Bryant adjusted his glasses and looked at me as Cheryl moved between us with the cups. Suicide was the word. But he couldn’t bring himself to pronounce it. Or murder, come to that. The truth could only be approached obliquely. “At least an innocent man won’t be kept in prison much longer,” he concluded with a sigh.

  “You’re sure he is innocent?” I said at once, seizing the opportunity now it had been presented to me.

  “Well . . . aren’t you?”

  “Not entirely. Bella . . . Lady Paxton, I mean . . . and I have considered the possibility that Paul might be confessing to the murders in order to punish himself for Rowena’s suicide.”

  “You mean . . .” Mr. Bryant’s brow furrowed. He looked round at his wife and daughter. “You mean he might . . .”

  “Not have done it?” put in Mrs. Bryant, her eyes wide with sudden hope.

  But Cheryl was too realistic to be taken in. And in no hurry to let her parents be. “That’s crazy,” she said, looking straight at me.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “I heard him say it, Mr. Timariot. All of it. And it was all true.”

  “I heard him myself. And it was convincing, certainly. But there’s a possibility—no more, I grant you—that he might be lying.”

  “Because he feels responsible for Rowena’s death? Come on.”

  “It’s true he’s never got over it,” said Mr. Bryant. “But I can’t believe—”

  “What about the postcard?” His wife had seized her husband’s elbow and jerked forward in her chair, spilling tea into her saucer. “I told you I didn’t imagine it.”

  Mr. Bryant sighed. “Not that again.” He shook his head and looked across at me. “You know Paul went round Europe by train that summer, Mr. Timariot?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, he sent us several postcards. Half a dozen all told, I should think. Just tourist stuff. The Eiffel Tower. The Acropolis. That sort of thing. I can’t remember much about them. But Dot seems to think—”

  “One of them was of Mount Blank, Mr. Timariot,” his wife put in. “And that place he told his friend he was going to when they split up . . .”

  “Chamonix?”

  “Yes. It’s right underneath Mount Blank, isn’t it? I looked it up in the atlas.”

  “Are you saying the card was posted in Chamonix?”

  “Well . . . Not exactly. I don’t recall where . . .”

  “And she’s thrown it away since,” Mr. Bryant explained.

  “I thought I’d kept them,” Mrs. Bryant said stubbornly. “For the stamps. I can’t think how they came to be—”

  “Dot’s a great one for clear-outs,” said her husband, with a rueful smile.

  “It must have been some peak in the Austrian Alps, Mum,” said Cheryl, her tone suggesting she’d already heard enough of the topic.

  But Mrs. Bryant wasn’t to be moved, even though her excruciating mispronunciation of Mont Blanc only underlined her capacity for error—as well as self-delusion. “It was Mount Blank,” she insisted.

  “Maybe it was,” said Cheryl, glancing at me as she spoke. “Maybe Paul sent it specifically to make us think he’d been to Chamonix. But when and where was it posted? That’s the question.”

  “I don’t know.” Her mother was becoming irritated now. “I didn’t take down the details of the postmark.”

  “What does Paul say?” I asked, anxious to calm the waters.

  “We haven’t asked him,” Mr. Bryant replied. “He’d gone by the time Dot thought of it.”

  “And the card’s gone too,” said Cheryl. “So there’s not really much point talking about it, is there?”

  “Perhaps not,” I said, still trying to sound like the embodiment of sweet reason. “But it’s the sort of thing that could be helpful. If Paul is lying, some little slip he’s made is what will find him out. I mean, if he wasn’t in Kington on the night in question, he must have been somewhere else, mustn’t he? And somebody must have seen him there.”

  Cheryl sighed. “He wasn’t anywhere else.”

  “But supposing he was . . . for the sake of argument . . . Then—and on those other occasions. In Cambridge and—”

  “He did stay up there after the end of term,” tolled Mrs. Bryant’s mournful voice. “I remember that.”

  “During the Easter vacation that year, then. Did he seem . . . in a strange mood?”

  “He was always in a strange mood,” said Cheryl. “From birth, as far as I could tell.”

  Mr. Bryant looked round sharply at her, then said: “Paul’s never been what you’d call open. It’s never been easy to know what’s going on inside his head.”

  “We know now,” murmured Cheryl.

  Her mother, meanwhile, had been casting her mind back to April 1990. “He seemed the same as usual, Mr. Timariot. Like Norman says, he’s always had a . . . private nature. Never one to make friends easil
y, our Paul.”

  “Or at all,” Cheryl threw in.

  “What about Peter Rossington?”

  “We’ve never met him,” Mr. Bryant replied. “I think they were just travelling companions.”

  “Paul must have some friends.”

  Mr. Bryant shrugged. “Not really. The boy’s always been a bit of a lone wolf.” He seemed to wince, as if suddenly struck by the predatory connotations of the description. “That’s why we were so pleased when he and Rowena . . .” He tailed off into silence, realizing every word only took him in deeper.

  “Somebody ought to check with that Peter Rossington,” his wife resumed. “He might know when Paul was in . . . what do you call it? . . . Chamonicks.”

  “He was never in Chamonicks,” snapped Cheryl. She took a deep breath and pressed a hand to her forehead before quietly correcting herself. “Chamonix.”

  “The police will check with him, love,” Mr. Bryant consoled his wife.

  “I’d be happy to speak to him myself,” I said, coming rapidly to terms with the likelihood that my visit was going to leave me with no other avenue to explore. “Do you know where he can be contacted?”

  “Paul said he worked for some big advertising agency in London,” Mrs. Bryant replied. “But I can’t quite . . .”

  “Schneider Mackintosh,” said Cheryl, smiling coolly at me. “You know? The people we can thank for the result of the last election.”

  “Ah yes. Of course.”

  “Are you going to see him?” asked Mrs. Bryant.

  “If he’ll see me, certainly.”

  “Good.” She risked a sidelong glance at her husband. “I’m glad somebody’s doing something.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” said Cheryl. “He’ll only confirm what Paul’s already told us.”

  “Perhaps. But—”

  “And do you know why? Because it’s the truth.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because he’s my brother, Mr. Timariot. I’ve known him all his life. I’ve watched him grow up. But I’ve never really understood him. Until now. He’s always been hiding something before. Keeping something back. But not any more. It’s all out in the open now. I wish it wasn’t. But it is. And the sooner we face up to it, the better.”

  “Cheryl’s right,” said Mr. Bryant as he walked me to my car. “We have to accept what Paul did as best we can. There’s no sense in . . . blocking our ears to it.”

  “I just want to be sure, Mr. Bryant. Only your wife doesn’t seem to be.”

  “She’s his mother. What else would you expect? She can’t bring herself to believe he could commit murder.”

  “But you can?”

  We reached the car and stopped. He didn’t look directly at me or answer my question specifically. But a shuffle of his feet and a droop of his chin gave me some kind of response. “It was good of you to call, Mr. Timariot. I appreciate it. But I have to think of Dot, you see. I have to help her come to terms with what’s happened. And what’s going to happen. Raising her hopes will only make her feel worse when they’re dashed.” Now he did look at me. “As you and I both know they will be.”

  “I’m trying to keep an open mind on the subject. I think you should do the same.”

  “Paul’s walked out on his job, you know. It was a good job too. The basis of a fine career.”

  “You think that proves something?”

  “I think it proves he’s preparing for the worst. That’s why we have to do the same.” He frowned. “I’d be grateful, Mr. Timariot . . . for Dot’s sake . . . if you didn’t come to see us again . . . in the circumstances.” Then he sighed and added: “Sorry.”

  “What if I learn something useful from Peter Rossington?”

  A car drove past us and Mr. Bryant waved over my shoulder to the driver, a smile coming instantly to his lips—and leaving as quickly. His eyes followed the vehicle for a moment, as if he were wondering how many neighbourly waves he’d have to do without, once Paul’s guilt became widely known. Then he looked back at me. “You won’t,” he said, without the least hint of animosity.

  “I might.”

  An expression of politely restrained scepticism crossed his face, such as I could imagine him having worn when a heavily overdrawn customer of the bank sought an extension of credit on the flimsiest of grounds. “Goodbye, Mr. Timariot,” he said, shaking my hand and turning dolefully back towards the house.

  I phoned Schneider Mackintosh from my office first thing Monday morning. Peter Rossington proved elusive, being out of the room or on another line each time I tried and showing no inclination to return my call. Eventually, around four o’clock, I struck lucky and was rewarded with a brief conversation. He sounded young, cocksure and faintly patronizing. He also sounded distinctly suspicious when I said I wanted to talk to him about Paul Bryant. Well, I couldn’t blame him for that. But jumping to the conclusion that I was some kind of headhunter keen to check Paul’s suitability for prestigious employment was quite another matter. Since it was an idea I’d done nothing to plant in his mind, it seemed only fair to make the most of it. Especially since lunch at my expense in a restaurant of his choice was the fancy price I had to pay for whatever information he was prepared to dispense. I suggested the following day, but he pleaded pressure of other commitments and we finally settled on Thursday.

  By then, Bella had been in touch, eager for news of my progress. But a description of my visit to the Bryants didn’t seem to qualify under that heading. “You didn’t get anything out of them at all?” she complained, contriving to imply the reason lay in some deficiency on my part rather than the dismal truth that there was nothing to be got. “Well, you’d better be more persistent when you meet Peter Rossington, hadn’t you?”

  But I doubted if persistence—or any other kind of interrogative ingenuity—was going to reveal a flaw in Paul’s account of his activities in the summer of 1990. Cheryl Bryant had told me I was wasting my time and, as far as I could see, she was absolutely right. But Bella wouldn’t be satisfied until I’d wasted a good deal more of it.

  Another difficulty weighing on my mind when I travelled up to London on Thursday morning was how to question Peter Rossington about Paul without revealing the real reason. Posing as a headhunter was only going to carry me so far. And it was a pose I knew an astute young advertising executive would see through in pretty short order.

  It transpired I needn’t have worried. Not about that, anyway. Rossington was waiting for me when I reached The Square, a light, airy and punctiliously staffed establishment in the heart of St. James’s. He was a pencil-thin pasty-faced fellow with haircut and suit so abreast with the fashions that he looked even younger than I reckoned he was. More like nineteen than twenty-five. His smile was broad but cool, his eyes frankly appraising. A keen brain was apparent behind the braying voice and sneering air. I disliked him at once. And I had the distinct impression that the feeling was mutual. But neither of us was there to indulge our feelings. Though the senses were evidently a different matter, as his call for a second glass of champagne immediately revealed.

  “Cards on the table, Mr. Timariot,” he said straightaway. “There was something ever so slightly fishy about your invitation. So I decided to check with Paul. One of the reasons I put off meeting you until today. I wanted time to take the temperature.” He raised his eyebrows and lowered his voice. “Turned out to be a lot hotter than I’d ever have imagined.”

  “Right,” I said, my mind racing to accommodate the consequences of what he’d said. My cover was blown, of course. But worse still, Paul now knew I was digging around in his past. It was something I might have avoided if I’d been honest with Rossington from the outset. But it was too late to repair the damage. “So . . . You know what this is about, do you?”

  “’Fraid so. Wish I didn’t, as a matter of fact. Sounds hideously messy. But that’s Paul’s problem, isn’t it? And yours, apparently.”

  “Have you seen Paul?”

  “Yeh
. We met yesterday. He told me the lot. It was a real shaker. I mean, we were never close friends. Never friends at all, come to that. Paul wasn’t the matey type. He didn’t let you see inside his head. And now I know what was going on inside it, I can understand why. But even so . . .” He lit a cigarette, without troubling to offer me one. “Even so, it takes some getting used to, doesn’t it? Being acquainted with somebody capable of . . .” He shook his head and sent up a plume of smoke. “Bloody hell.”

  I smiled awkwardly. “Sorry to have misled you.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Yeh. Well, so you should be. Perhaps you’d like to explain why you did. It’s the one thing Paul couldn’t enlighten me about.”

  “I’m simply trying to confirm his story before the police become involved.”

  “They already are, according to Paul. He warned me to expect a visit. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Why not?”

  He frowned. “Because nobody likes being mixed up in something like this. Murder’s bad enough. Especially with a sex angle. But . . .” He made another effort to speak softly. Clearly, it didn’t come naturally to him. “But a miscarriage of justice makes it worse, doesn’t it? Big headlines. Mega-coverage. And my name in there somewhere. Where colleagues are bound to notice it.”

  “So you’re worried about a little . . . professional embarrassment?”

  “You bet I am. Some swine’s going to suggest I should have tumbled what Paul was up to, aren’t they?”

  “And should you have?”

  “Of course not. He never gave me any hint—” He broke off to order his meal. Unprepared, I ordered the same. Wine wasn’t mentioned. Something rather stiffer might have hit the mark. But that wasn’t mentioned either. “Like I told you,” Rossington resumed, “Paul was and is a closed book to me. I suggested we tag along together on the trip to Europe because I didn’t fancy going alone. Simple as that. He gave me no inkling of an ulterior motive. Well, I suppose there wasn’t one at the time. That came later, didn’t it?”