I didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry when the weekend came. By then, I’d had a bellyful of the recriminations at Timariot & Small that had followed Thursday’s board meeting. Adrian and I said nothing to each other, biding our time for our own particular reasons. But Simon and Jennifer more than compensated for that with endless dissections of a situation both confessed they couldn’t understand. “What’s Bella up to?” demanded Jennifer. “The game you’ve persuaded her to play could lose us this offer, you know.” She treated me to more of the same, in innumerable variations. While Simon veered from bemusement to paranoia. From “Adrian can’t seriously think he’s going to get anything out of Harvey McGraw,” to “You’ve cooked this up with Joan, haven’t you, to stop me buying my way out of her clutches?” But however wild his theories became, they could never match the truth. I felt I was almost doing him a favour by keeping him in the dark where that was concerned.
The Bryants lived in Skylark Avenue, a long curving road of identical pebble-dashed mock Tudor semis on the Berrylands side of Surbiton. I knew from Paul, of course, that they’d lived there all their married life. Driving along it on a mild grey Saturday afternoon of lawnmowing and car cleaning, I sensed the stultifying predictability he’d rebelled against in his teens. Yet I couldn’t help identifying with it at the same time. The scrawny youth tinkering with his rust-patched car while a football commentator lisped at him from a badly tuned radio. The overweight commuter working up a weekly sweat by trimming his hedge to geometric perfection. They were each in their own frustrated way part of the fabric of life. Which Paul had ripped to shreds in a single night.
The first sign of which was the lack of outdoor activity at number 34. The silence and stillness of mourning reigned. And Norman Bryant invited me in with the subdued politeness of the recently bereaved. What I’d called to discuss was worse than a death, though. Paul’s mere extinction wouldn’t have left his father’s shoulders bent with shame as well as sadness. It would in fact, his bearing implied, have been preferable to the blow he’d suffered. He was a thin stooped timid-looking man in his early sixties, the tie beneath his pullover a testimony to forty years of dressing for the bank. His skin and hair were grey, his clothes brown, his mind set in ways not designed to meet their present challenge. “It’ll be a relief just to be able to talk about it to somebody else,” he admitted. “Bottling this up isn’t doing Dot any good.” Nor him, I strongly suspected. “Thank God at least we’ve both retired. How I’d have faced them at the bank…” He shook his head at the unthinkability of such a prospect, then showed me into the lounge.
Mrs. Bryant was waiting there with one of her daughters. I recognized them from the wedding, doleful though the contrast was. Mrs. Bryant was a small round pink-faced woman whose dimpled smile had been my clearest memory of her. But there was no sign of that now. She was trembling and fidgeting like a startled dormouse, her eyes alternately staring and darting. And her handshake was so limp I expected her arm to drop to her side the moment I let go. “You’re… Lady Paxton’s brother?” she said, so hesitantly I hadn’t the heart to correct her. “This is… our daughter… Cheryl.”
“Hi,” said Cheryl, smiling faintly. “We met last year.” She was a tall slim fashionably casual woman of thirty or so, not quite as smart and self-confident as Paul but nearly so, with short dark hair, a direct gaze and a hint somewhere at the back of her eyes that she was on her best behaviour for her parents’ sake.
“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.”