Borrowed Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

their appeals for information. They’d been trying to trace the last movements of the deceased with remarkably little success. Somebody thought they’d seen Bantock in Ludlow, twenty miles north-east of Kington, at about four o’clock on the afternoon of July 17. Somebody else thought he’d staged a reckless piece of overtaking on the Hereford to Abergavenny road, twenty miles
south
of Kington, around the same time. They might both be wrong, but they couldn’t both be right. As for Lady Paxton, she’d had lunch with her daughter Rowena at their Cotswold home and set off for Kington at about three o’clock that afternoon. She’d declared her intention of taking
Black Widow
, if she bought it, to show off to an old schoolfriend in Shropshire who shared her taste. In that event, she wasn’t to be expected back until sometime the next day. The daughter had assumed that’s exactly what she’d done.
    So, from at least mid-afternoon onwards, both the deceased had vanished from sight. At least as far as the police were concerned. But I knew better. I knew precisely where one of them had been within two hours of their estimated time of death. As that fact emerged more and more clearly, so what I knew became not just important but disturbing. At first, I felt excited, intoxicated by the uniqueness of the information I possessed. Then it began to worry me. Would I be believed? Would I, perish the thought, be
suspected
? Somewhere, at the back of my mind, dwelt an old adage that the last person known to have seen a murder victim alive is the first person the police suspect of being the murderer. Then I dismissed the idea as paranoid nonsense. They already had their murderer. And I had an alibi. The landlord of the Royal Oak, Gladestry, wouldn’t have forgotten me. Would he? Well, he might be vague enough about my time of arrival to be inconclusive, it was true. And for all I knew the man they’d arrested in London might by now have been eliminated from their inquiries. But, then again, there’d be fingerprints, wouldn’t there? More than fingerprints if rape was involved. DNA analysis of sperm and blood meant they couldn’t really get the wrong man these days. Could they?
    I walked out into the garden and gazed up at the thickly wooded hills above Greenhayes, sun and shadow revealing the switchback succession of crest and combe beneath the trees, the bone of white chalk beneath the flesh of green leaves. I remembered Hergest Ridge and the world spread out in golden promise at our feet. Two strangers. One fleeting moment. It didn’t mean anything. They had their man. Why confuse the issue? Why involve myself? Because there was nobody else, of course. Nobody else who knew where she’d been and what she’d said that evening.
    Ah yes.
What she’d said
. Was I really going to reveal that? Every word? Every hint of a double meaning? Was I going to break her confidence? She’d trusted me as a stranger. Perhaps that’s what I ought to remain. No, no. That was special pleading. That was the false logic part of me wanted to cling to. The other part dwelt on the horror of her death. Stripped. Raped. Strangled. What, as a matter of simple fact, could actually be worse? I shook my head, sickened by my inability—my unwillingness—to imagine. And sickened also by a memory. A single recollected pang of lust. Mine. With her as its object. It wasn’t to be compared with what
he
had done to her. Of course it wasn’t. But it was how it began. For him as well as me. A long way, a world, apart. Yes. But linked, like two distant dots on a graph. Connected, however faintly, by some tiny strand of sympathy.
    I walked slowly back into the house and looked down at the pile of newspapers spread out on the kitchen table. The television was on in the sitting-room, the signature tune of an Australian soap fading vapidly away. My mother would be wondering what I was up to. And her curiosity, once aroused, was indefatigable. Only a vigorous