It was strange, I reflected as I drove back to Petersfield, how time alters the way we feel. If Paul Bryant had turned himself in to the police before Naylor’s arrest in July 1990, his prompt surrender wouldn’t have deflected our wrath. We’d have wanted him punished to the limit of the law. Waiting three years while an innocent man languished in prison should have magnified his offence. Yet instead it had somehow mitigated it. There was a tendency, which Sarah and I had both displayed, to blame Paul’s victims for the delusion he’d let us labour under. It was absurd and contemptible, of course. As if Louise had invited her murder. Or Naylor his wrongful conviction. And yet it squirmed there, at the back of the mind, seducing us in moments of weakness with the promise that our responsibility for a monstrous miscarriage of justice could be passed off onto others.
But it wasn’t the worst evasion we could be reduced to. There was something more desperate still. The thought that could never be spoken but was bound to be shared. It would have been better if Paul had owned up straightaway. Obviously. Self-evidently. But since he hadn’t, since every solution to the problem he’d handed us was now second best, mightn’t it have been preferable-or at least less awful-if he’d never confessed at all?
It reminded me of an apocryphal tale I’d once heard, based on the famous massacre of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae. The people of Sparta took such pride in their soldiers’ self-sacrifice-“Go tell the Lacedaemonians that we die here, obedient to their wishes”-that when one of them who’d survived the massacre by an honourable fluke returned to his wife and children, he was turned away and cast out as a stranger. His failure to have died was an embarrassment to them. Just as Louise Paxton’s and Shaun Naylor’s failure to have played the parts allotted to them was an embarrassment to us. But, unlike the Spartans, we couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist. Paul Bryant wasn’t going to let us.
Three days passed without news of any kind. My determination to let the Paxtons confront their difficulties without interference from me was sorely tested, but it held. Even though the silence from Bella in particular assumed an ominous significance in my mind. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, Sarah phoned me at the office.
“I’m at The Hurdles, Robin. With Daddy and Bella. Can you join us?”
“Er… yes. I suppose so. I take it… they both…”
“They know everything. Daddy spoke to Paul this morning. He wants… Well, I’d be grateful, too… if you could talk to Daddy. It might help him understand.”
“All right. I’ll be there in an hour.”
It was Sarah who opened the door to me, which I thought odd until I followed her into the lounge and found Sir Keith pacing up and down by the fireplace while Bella sat stiffly in an armchair, smoking a cigarette. She didn’t even get up to greet me and I recognized her mood at once. This was one bolt from the blue too many for her tolerance. She was opting out of the whole ghastly affair. Leaving her husband to repair the damage she no doubt held him responsible for. I couldn’t blame her, really. Scandal had nowhere featured in her understanding of their marriage settlement. But now here it was. A codicil that didn’t need her consent. And therefore wouldn’t be honoured with her attention.
I hadn’t seen Sir Keith since Rowena’s death. It was immediately obvious that the tragedy had aged him. His hair hadn’t been as white before, or his shoulders as rounded. His complexion was as ruddy as ever, but there was an unmistakable haggardness to his features. He looked like a man driving himself-or being driven-too hard. But not by the cares of a career. I’d dreaded meeting him because I’d thought he was bound to blame me for his daughter’s suicide. Yet suddenly that was no longer an issue between us. It had been overtaken by events. As we all had.
“I’m sorry to have dragged you up here, Robin,” he said, shaking my hand distractedly. “This is a god-awful business.”
“There’s no need to apologize. If there’s anything-”
“Sarah tells me it was you Paul first came to.”
“Yes. It was.”
“I saw him this morning. In Bristol.”
“How did he seem?”
“In a trance, if you really want to know. Like a man in a bloody trance.”
I looked at Sarah in search of clarification. She shrugged and said: “He’s resigned from Metropolitan Mutual. As of last Friday. Now he’s just sitting in that little house at Bathurst Wharf waiting for them to come for him.”
“But… you said it could be months before…”
“It will be. But he doesn’t seem to care. It’s like he’s ceased functioning. For any purpose other than seeing his confession through to the end.”
“If it goes that far,” put in Sir Keith.
“Isn’t it bound to?” I said. “As soon as the police have verified his account-”
“But will they verify it?” he snapped. “That’s the question.”
“They won’t have any choice, surely?”
“You’re assuming he’s telling the truth.”
“Well, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know.” He stopped and cast a strangely suspicious glance at Bella and Sarah. “Unlike everyone else, I’m keeping an open mind on the subject.”
“Daddy thinks Paul may have made it all up,” said Sarah, her tone not quite concealing her exasperation. “As some sort of self-imposed punishment for failing to prevent Rowena’s suicide.”
“Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?” he responded, as much to me as to Sarah. “None of us knows what’s been going on in his head these past few months. He’s taken to going to church, you know.”
“That settles it, then,” Bella remarked through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “He can’t be telling the truth.”
Sir Keith rounded on her and opened his mouth to speak. I thought for a moment his patience with her had finally snapped. And I couldn’t help feeling pleased if it had. But he swallowed the rebuke before it was uttered, slumped back against the mantelpiece and frowned sulkily. “He isn’t telling the truth,” he growled. “Not about Louise, anyway. She was my wife, for God’s sake. I ought to know.”
“Yes,” Bella’s fleeting glare announced. “You ought to. But it seems you don’t.” Sir Keith didn’t catch her look. He wasn’t meant to. Not yet.
I felt sorry for him then, ground between the millstones of his first wife’s fickle memory and his second wife’s failing sympathy. Perhaps he felt he had no alternative but to go down fighting for his edited version of the past. Perhaps he’d rehearsed it so many times he really believed it. But if so, he was the only one who did. “Isn’t the truth really only a matter of our point of view?” I ventured. “I mean, what we believe is the truth. Until it’s shown not to be.”
“Until it’s proved not to be, you mean,” muttered Sir Keith.
“Well, yes. But the police will do their damnedest to disprove Paul’s story. If they fail, we have to accept it.”
“If they fail,” he said stubbornly.
“They won’t,” said Sarah from behind me. “You know they won’t, Daddy. It’s ridiculous to suppose he could have invented such a story. That weekend in Cambridge after the exhibition when he pestered me and Mummy. That day he came to Sapperton and took me out to lunch at the Daneway. I know he did those things because I witnessed them. I just didn’t see the pattern they were part of. When he visited Mummy in Holland Park. When he met her in Covent Garden. When he lay in wait for her at the Garden House Hotel. How could he make those events up? He couldn’t have been sure we wouldn’t be able to rule them out, could he? To say ‘No, actually, we know for a fact she was elsewhere the day you claim to have seen her in London.’ The chances of him getting away with such a deception would be astronomical.”