Robert Goddard - Borrowed Time

“If this is true-”

“It’s true.”

“Then we must go to the police. Without delay. Naylor isn’t innocent after all. A guilty man’s just been set free.”

“Perhaps you’d like to explain what we’d go to them with .” There was more pity than scorn in her expression as she stared at me. “Keith’s dead. And I can’t prove a single thing he told me.” She sighed and looked away, motioning dismissively at me with her palm. Only to abandon the gesture halfway through and slowly lower her hand to her side. “Get me some gin, Robin,” she said wearily. “I think it’s time you heard the whole story.”

Bella took a deep swallow from the very large gin and tonic she’d just poured herself, lit another cigarette and crouched forward across the coffee-table between us. The central heating had already taken the edge off the chill, but Bella, whose preferred temperature was five degrees above most people’s, hadn’t even turned down the collar of her raincoat, let alone taken it off.

“You’ll say I mishandled it from the start,” she began. “You’ll say I shouldn’t have kept you in the dark or tried to solve the problem without forcing Keith to own up to what he’d done. Well, you can say what you damn well please. I was actually trying to spare everyone a lot of unnecessary suffering. I might even have succeeded if you’d been just a bit more-” She broke off and gave me a little head-shaking smile. “Sorry. Recriminations won’t get us anywhere, will they? And nor will being wise after the event. You remember coming to The Hurdles a few days after Paul had confessed to you? You remember Keith insisting Paul had made it all up? Well, I didn’t believe him any more than you did. But the following day, after Sarah had gone back to Bristol, Keith told me how he could be so sure. And then I did believe him.

“It seems Keith became convinced during the spring of nineteen ninety that Louise meant to leave him for Oscar Bantock. He accused her of having an affair with Bantock and she neither admitted it nor denied it. She said he had to make up his own mind about her fidelity. As for leaving him, she wouldn’t promise not to do that either. He’d always been a possessive husband. Sometimes an irrationally jealous one as well. I’ve seen that side of him myself. And ours was never exactly a love match. Whereas he really did love Louise. Too much for her peace of mind, I suppose. She wanted the freedom to do as she pleased. And if leaving Keith was what it took to find it, that’s what she was willing to do.

“I don’t blame her. In fact, I’m sorry never to have known her. She sounds like a woman after my own heart, though you probably think I’m flattering myself. But, reasonable or not, it was a dangerous line to take with Keith. He’d always suspected there was something going on between Louise and Howard Marsden, despite Louise telling him how unwelcome Howard’s attentions were. Perhaps he suspected it just because she told him. In his mind there were lots of other men she didn’t tell him about.”

“He can’t have believed that,” I put in. “The idea’s absurd.”

“How would you know?” Bella eyed me curiously for a moment, then said: “Anyway, jealousy is absurd. It’s also destructive when left to fester. The point is that Keith couldn’t prevent himself believing his own fantasies, couldn’t help interpreting every gesture of independence by Louise as an act of infidelity. To him, her interest in art had always seemed like perfect cover for an affair. Her friendship with Oscar Bantock was the last straw. Keith simply couldn’t bear the thought of Louise letting a man like Bantock touch her. As for the possibility of them running away together, well, that was too much for him to take.

“He’d probably have done nothing about it even so, except that he happened to know somebody who could have Bantock taken out of Louise’s life on a permanent basis. Keith never told me his name. Said it’d be safer for me not to know. Let’s call him Smith. About fifteen years ago, Keith treated Smith’s wife for infertility. Carried out some tricky operation that enabled the poor cow to have children. Smith’s one of those men who thinks life isn’t complete without a son and heir. He was very grateful to Keith. I mean, extremely grateful. Said if there was ever anything he could do for him, any favour, however small or large, Keith had only to ask. And Smith, behind the respectable lifestyle-big house in the suburbs, golf club membership and so on-was actually a full-time professional criminal. A crook. A gangster. One of those Mr. Big types you read about who never go to prison even when their capers go wrong. He never said that’s what he was, of course. But Keith had got the message clearly enough. So now he decided to contact Smith and call in the debt. By asking him to have Bantock killed.”

“Just like that?”

“Well, I wouldn’t think you’d need to dress things up for a man like Smith, would you? You just put it to him and he says, ‘Sure, no problem. Leave it to me.’ It’s the kind of thing he does, after all. Kill people. For money, usually. But in this case as a favour.”

“Good God.”

“The plan was to wait until Keith and Louise left for Biarritz after Sarah’s graduation, then take out poor old Oscar. That’s all Keith knew and all he wanted to know. Smith was to handle the details. Keith didn’t have to worry about a thing. But he should have worried. Because Smith was semi-retired by then. Spent most of his time at his villa in the Algarve.”

“The Algarve?”

She nodded. “That’s right. Southern Portugal. Well, it seems Smith’s contacts weren’t as numerous-or as reliable-as they had been. But he hadn’t wanted to disappoint Keith, so he contracted the job out to somebody more active-let’s call him Brown-who sub-contracted it to a man called Vince Cassidy. Remember him? He was a prosecution witness at Naylor’s trial.”

“I remember.” Bella could have no idea just how memorable Cassidy was to me. Instantly, I wished I hadn’t refused to listen to him when I’d had the chance.

“Cassidy took the job, but at the last moment got Naylor to do it for him. Brown would never willingly have used Naylor, apparently. He had a reputation for carelessness. And for mixing business with pleasure if women were involved. But women weren’t involved. Or weren’t supposed to be. The trouble was Louise chose the same weekend to walk out on Keith as Naylor chose to raid a few houses in Herefordshire, adding Bantock’s murder onto the list. The prosecution got it right. Louise must have walked in on Naylor just after he throttled Oscar. And Naylor must have decided he couldn’t afford to let her live.”

“He’d have had no idea who originally commissioned the murder, would he?” I asked, picking up the thread of Bella’s reasoning. “Or why?”

“Exactly. To his warped mind, she must have seemed like an unexpected bonus. So he raped her-and then he strangled her.”

“When did Keith find out?”

“When he got back to Biarritz from his conference in Madrid. He found Louise had gone, leaving a note for him. It didn’t say she’d dashed back to England on impulse to buy one of Bantock’s paintings, as he claimed later. It said she’d left him for good. And it also said she hadn’t left him for anybody, least of all Oscar Bantock. She’d simply had enough of his possessive ways and meant to start a new life on her own. Then, almost immediately, Keith heard the news of her death and realized what must have happened. By setting out to do everything in his power to keep her, he’d only succeeded in destroying her.”