“Must and will aren’t the same.”
“This time they are.”
“And next time?”
“Like I told you. There won’t be one.”
But she didn’t believe me. Or perhaps she just wasn’t prepared to let me have the last word. As I walked from the room, she flung a parting remark at me with the conviction of a prophetess. “Be seeing you, Robin.”
I drove south down the A49 to Leominster. As far as Leominster, I could tell myself I meant to keep to the homeward route. But must and will, as Sophie had said, aren’t the same. From Leominster I took the Kington road and saw the hills I’d walked along more than three years before rising slowly on the horizon, darkened by shower-cloud and the massing of memories. Always I was drawn back, it seemed. To the point of intersection. The place of meeting and parting. The ridge of no return. But swifter now than before. For now I had a quarry as well as a quest.
I travelled fast, in hopes I should
Outrun that other. What to do
When caught, I planned not. I pursued
To prove the likeness, and, if true,
To watch until myself I knew.
Who was he? There was no way to tell. He wasn’t waiting at the Harp Inn, where I lunched alone and watched a rainbow form beyond the squall-line over Radnor Forest. He didn’t tap me on the shoulder as I stood by the cairn on Hergest Ridge where Louise and I had sat together that lost summer’s evening of long ago. I came and I went. But nobody joined me. The sun shone feebly as the wind honed its solitary edge. And the rain came in hastening gusts, blurring the edges of sight, smearing the margins of perception. There was nothing to give him a name. Or to deny him mine. There was only the doubt, as there had always been. And the still unanswered question. “Can we really change anything, do you think? Can any of us ever stop being what we are and become something else?” Or someone else. Perhaps that’s what she’d really meant. Perhaps that’s what she’d been trying to tell me. All along.
I’m not sure what stopped me driving up to Whistler’s Cot. Stealth? Caution? A touch of dread? Something of all three, perhaps. Something, at all events, that made me park at the bottom of the lane and walk up from there.
Rainwater draining from the fields ran in curling rivulets down to meet me as I went. Sunlight glistened on moisture-beaded leaves and wet slate roofs. The truth, I sensed, retreated ahead of me, out of sight though never far off. Over the hedge, perhaps, where Paul had hidden that day. Or round the corner. Always just beyond the next encounter. Like the one awaiting me at Whistler’s Cot.
A car stood half in and half out of the garage, its boot raised on several box-loads of mops, brushes, soapflake cartons, polish tins and aerosol cans. Just about every window in the house was open, red-and-white check curtains billowing out in the breeze. And the frantic whirr of a washing machine in its spin cycle could be heard from within above the growl of a vacuum cleaner.
If I’d realized what all this activity implied, I think I’d have turned and fled. But I was so distracted by the half-grasped meanings of other less commonplace occurrences that I simply stared in bemusement. And then it was too late. Because Henley Bantock had emerged from the rear of the house clutching a well-filled black plastic refuse sack-and pulled up at the sight of me.
“Mr. Timariot!” He peered at me round the tuft his fastening of the sack had created. “Good heavens, it is you. What an unexpected pleasure.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know… That is…”
“Don’t be sorry. This is just the excuse Muriel and I need to take a break. You find us in the midst of the end-of-season clear-out. The last of the holidaymakers left at the weekend. But they didn’t take all their rubbish with them.” He grinned and plonked the sack down in front of him. “Why don’t you step in and have a cup of tea?”
Tea with the Bantocks in a sitting-room smelling of beeswax and air freshener was a salutary if depressing experience. Muriel was a twitteringly attentive hostess full of apologies for her housekeeping kit of tennis shirt and tracksuit bottoms. She was also an alarmingly affectionate wife, given to squeezing Henley’s knee in mid-conversation and casting him long and loving looks. Henley, meanwhile, coped with the antagonism he must have detected in me by pretending we were the most civilized of rival theorists, who’d simply agreed to disagree. It was as if the angry letter I’d sent him after the publication of Fakes and Ale and his sarcastic reply to it had never been written.
It might have been different if Whistler’s Cot had still resembled Oscar Bantock’s home in anything more than the dimensions of its rooms. But it didn’t. Everything from those years had been swept away. Along with any ghosts that might have lingered. In the studio, where Oscar had lain dead beneath his easels, a pool table stood, flanked by conservatory chairs. The walls around us, where his pictures had hung thick and vibrantly, were filled with insipid hunting prints and reproduction maps of Olde Herefordshire. While in the bedroom… I didn’t like to ask. But even there, I felt sure, the process would have been the same. It was exorcism by disinfection. And its effectiveness was undeniable.
“Fakes and Ale will be coming out in paperback next spring,” Henley announced through a mouthful of custard cream. “We’re very pleased, of course.” For some reason he seemed to think I’d also be pleased. “And the hardback should do well over Christmas, I think, don’t you, Muriel?”
“Oh yes, dear.”
“What happens,” I couldn’t stop myself saying, “if it’s overtaken by events?”
Henley frowned. “How do you mean?”
“Well, the book follows a certain line about the murders, doesn’t it? Ties them in with your uncle’s art fraud. What would you do if that was shown to be incorrect?”
“But it’s not incorrect, Mr. Timariot. It’s clearly what happened.”
“Mr. Maitland went into it very thoroughly,” said Muriel in a tone of deep awe.
“No doubt he did. But it doesn’t amount to proof positive, does it?”
“Not legally, perhaps,” said Henley. “But we can’t expect it to, can we? Not at this late date.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. You never know what might come to light.”
My persistence was beginning to worry Henley-as it was meant to. “You have… something specific in mind?”
“No, no. Just… stray thoughts. For instance… have you ever wondered whether there might have been something between Oscar and Lady Paxton?”
It was a question designed as much to mislead as to goad. I never expected any useful information to come my way as a result. But, as so often, my expectations were to be confounded. “No need to wonder,” said Henley with a chortle. “I can absolutely rule it out.”
“But your uncle’s reputation as a ladies’ man surely-”
“Led me to assume something of the kind long ago. But when I was rash enough to hint at it to Uncle Oscar, he nearly boxed my ears for my trouble. ‘She’s far too good for me, boy,’ I remember him saying. ‘And far too good a patron to risk losing for half a chance of some slap and tickle.’ ”
“Well, you wouldn’t expect him to admit it, would you?”
“Oh, but I would. Uncle Oscar never stopped boasting about his conquests. If Lady Paxton had been one of them, I’d have heard about it, you can be sure.”