“It was purely a business relationship, then?”
“I didn’t say that. He relied on her support. What she asked for in return may not have been so businesslike. I believe she brought Naylor here that night. So do Barnaby Maitland and Nick Seymour, for that matter. The question is: why? In its way, it’s an ideal place… for what she seems to have planned. And perhaps the night of the murders wasn’t the first time she’d done it. Perhaps Uncle Oscar regularly absented himself when she required him to. He may have thought it was a price worth paying.”
Yes. That was what they would say. It was what Seymour had implied in his TV programme. And it fitted the facts. Better than Seymour or Henley yet knew.
“Unless you think that theory too might be… overtaken by events?”
“No,” I said, resisting the impulse to tell him that very soon it would not be overtaken but vindicated by events. Events that would nevertheless scupper the paperback edition of Fakes and Ale. But it seemed only fair not to forewarn him of his modest share in the disaster to come. After all, he’d done as much as I had to bring it about. “I shouldn’t think so,” I concluded with a smile. “Like you say, it’s probably too late for anything of the kind.”
“More tea, Mr. Timariot?” asked Muriel.
“Thank you, but no. I think it’s probably too late for that as well.”
“Off so soon?” said Henley as I rose from my chair.
“I’m afraid I must be.”
“But you haven’t explained yet what brought you here.”
“Goodbye,” I said, smiling broadly and ignoring Henley’s remark too brazenly for him to protest. “It’s been a pleasure.”
The showers blew themselves out as I drove east. Hergest Ridge and its surrounding peaks fell away behind in the rear-view mirror. The truth drew back to watch me from its hidden vantage-ground. The stranger merged with the twilight. His unseen face dissolved into the dusk. And only my reflection looked back at me. I travelled alone. But in company.
I reached Bristol at nightfall, diverted to Clifton and found Sarah at home. It was a relief to have someone to share my unguarded thoughts with. A friend to see and set them in proportion. I was beginning to curse Bella for starting me down this road. The road back into a mystery I’d walked away from. But couldn’t escape.
“It seems Howard Marsden harboured an unrequited passion for your mother for many years,” I explained. “She and Sophie both knew that. It’s what Sophie most keenly resented: the fact that it was unrequited.”
“Hence her eagerness to blacken Mummy’s character.” Sarah shook her head in dismal recognition of Sophie’s motives. “What a sad petty-minded woman she must be. To think I’ve known her all these years without realizing that. I can’t help feeling sorry for Howard. She must make his life hell.”
“Yes,” I said, careful not to imply I had any specific knowledge of the subject. “I think she may do.”
“But you believe her about this… other man… in Mummy’s life?”
“It sounded like the truth. The question is…”
“Who was he?”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know.” Sarah rose and crossed to the mantelpiece, returning with the framed photograph of her and Rowena with their mother. “Taken on her fortieth birthday. She was beautiful, wasn’t she?”
“She certainly was.” Louise Paxton smiled delphically at me from the faintly blurred snapshot. Her beauty was preserved in the developer’s emulsion, but something else was lost. Like the sepia smear left by a moving figure on an early Victorian photograph, the secret of her soul had bequeathed an unfocused ambiguity to her gaze, a perpetual uncertainty about what or who beyond the camera she was really looking at.
“The further into the past her death slips,” said Sarah, “the more mysterious her life seems to become. I’ve wondered if this man, whoever he was, deserted her at the last moment. Didn’t turn up where he was supposed to be. Left her in the lurch. I’ve wondered if that’s why she encouraged Naylor. But unless you find him, we’ll never know, will we?”
“How can I find him? There are no clues left to follow.”
“I know. That’s why I think the question will never be answered. Unless Naylor knows. I mean, she may have said something to him. Given him a clue. Nobody’s ever asked him, have they? Nobody’s ever thought to. But we’ll get the chance soon enough.”
“When he’s released, you mean?”
“Yes. When he’s released.” The words were spoken almost as a sigh. She took the photograph back to the mantelpiece, positioned it carefully between a carriage clock and a china rabbit, then looked round and smiled wryly at me. “None of which helps get you off the hook with Bella, of course.”
I shrugged. “Can anything do that?”
“I doubt it. She wants you to disprove something you and I-and probably she-believe to be true. And that’s a game you can’t win, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It is.”
“But one you’ll go on playing?”
“I’m afraid I have to.” Now I too summoned a smile. “At least for a little longer.”
Sarah offered me a bed for the night, but I insisted I’d better press on home. It occurred to me, flogging across Salisbury Plain through the inky blackness as rain spat at the windscreen, that the offer might just possibly have been more than a friendly gesture. But then I dismissed the thought. In the prevailing circumstances, Sarah needed a friend far more than she needed an aspiring lover. And so did I.
Besides, my relations with the Paxton family were already quite complicated enough. As the three recorded messages from Bella on my answering machine testified. Each one ended with the same promise: “I’ll call again.” Early the following morning, when I was still only half awake, she did so. And it was immediately obvious the hour didn’t agree with her temper.
“You’ve turned up nothing?”
“It’s not for the want of trying, Bella.”
“Then you’ll just have to try harder.”
“But how? There’s nobody left to ask.”
“This postcard Mrs. Bryant remembers…”
“Thinks she remembers.”
“And thinks was sent from Chamonix. Where Paul claims he never went.”
“Not from Chamonix, according to Paul. Chambéry. A station on the main line from Lyon. It was a ruse. A deliberate blind.”
“Or else his explanation’s the blind. I went to the pension he says he stayed in here in Biarritz yesterday. Showed his photograph to the landlady. She’s never seen him before in her life.”
“You mean she didn’t recognize him.”
“Same difference.”
“No it isn’t, Bella. He spent a few days there more than three years ago. Did you seriously expect her to remember him?”
“The fact is she didn’t. But maybe somebody in Chamonix does.” I knew at once what she was going to say next. And I also knew what my answer was bound to be. “So you’re going to have to go there, Robin. Aren’t you?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I flew out to Chamonix the following Friday, telling Adrian, Simon and Jennifer that a friend in Brussels needed helping out of an emotional crisis and I was going to see what I could do for him in the course of a long weekend. God knows what Adrian made of it, since he was due to have left for Sydney by the time I got back. Simon suggested I was hoping to discover an EC regulation that the Bushranger bid could be said to contravene. But I don’t think he was serious.