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“I’ll miss you,” she said, her breath clouding in the frosty air as we stood beside her car in the pool of yellow light cast from the windows of the pub. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone else who understands.”
“You must have better friends than me, Sarah.”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t think I have.”
“What about Rodney? Aren’t you going to make him a happy man one day soon?”
“No. Since you ask, I’m not.”
“Really? You almost make me wish-”
“Don’t say it.” She put her gloved hand to my mouth to stop me speaking, then smiled at the extravagance of the precaution. “Sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Saying goodbye?”
“Yes. I suppose that’s it.” She frowned. “Don’t let anything make you postpone your flight, will you?”
“Why should it?”
“No reason. It’s just… I think it’ll do you good to go. And I wouldn’t want newspaper talk about Mummy… or Daddy, come to that… to make you think you had to stay.”
“There’ll be some hard things said.”
“I know. But none of them will be your fault. So promise me you’ll leave on Friday. Whatever happens.”
“All right. It’s a promise.”
“Good.” She brightened. “And now you’d better kiss me. And let me wish you bon voyage.”
A few minutes later, I was standing at the side of the road, watching the lights of her car vanish from sight. She’d offered me a ride back to Greenhayes, of course, but I’d declined, preferring a solitary walk up the hill through the cold night air. The stars were scattered brightly across the sky, a sickle moon riding high and clear among them. “‘When first I came here I had hope,’” I recited under my breath as I went. “‘Hope for I knew not what.’” And now, just when I thought I might know… “‘I’m bound away for ever. Away somewhere, away for ever.’”
Wednesday the twenty-second of December. The clouds had rolled in from the west and it had been raining all morning, in London as well as Steep. There was the sheen of it on the pavement behind the trench-coated correspondent as he gave his report in front of the Law Courts in the Strand for the one o’clock television news. And there was the steely tap of it at the window behind me as I sat and listened to his words.
“Shaun Naylor will be released from prison later today following an hour-long hearing before Lord Justice Sir John Smedley at the Court of Appeal this morning. He was granted bail pending a full appeal next March against his convictions for the murders of Oscar Bantock and the rape and murder of Lady Louise Paxton in July nineteen ninety: the so-called Kington killings. The judge at his trial ten months later described him as “a depraved and dangerous individual” and recommended that he serve at least twenty years in prison. But Naylor has consistently protested his i
So he was free. Or soon would be. What his wife would say to him about Vince Cassidy if and when they met “at an undisclosed address” I couldn’t imagine. And what Shaun pla
Je
It was nearly midnight when I got back to Greenhayes. To say the sight of Bella’s BMW parked in front of the garage was a surprise would be a considerable understatement. As I pulled up behind it and climbed out of my car, the unlikely idea occurred to me that she’d decided I shouldn’t be allowed to leave without some parting words of advice. But the expression on her face when she opened the window of the BMW and gazed up at me suggested an altogether more serious purpose.
“God, I thought you were never coming back,” she said. And somehow the lack of reproachfulness in her voice heightened my concern.
“I’ve been at Je
“Yes. I guessed you were probably with her.”
“Then why didn’t you call round-or phone?”
“Because the fewer people who know what’s happened the better.”
“What has happened?”
She peered past me, as if fearing I mightn’t be alone, before answering. And when she did, it was no answer at all. “Can we go inside?”
I led the way indoors, busying myself with keys, light switches and heating controls while Bella went into the sitting-room. She’d already lit a cigarette by the time I joined her and was standing by the fireplace, flicking ash into the empty grate. I’d stripped the walls of pictures and plates and shrouded the furniture in dust-sheets in preparation for the redecoration Je
She was wearing no make-up beyond a smear of lipstick and looked pale and haggard as a result. Her eyes were red with fatigue, her hair in need of brushing and there was that faint tremor in her hands I’d noticed in Bordeaux. It was hard to imagine what could have had such an effect on her. I’d seen her ride out the loss of a husband and a stepdaughter without batting a tinted eyelid. But now-
“What’s wrong, Bella?”
“Keith’s dead,” she said abruptly.
“What?”
“My husband is dead.”
“But… how?”
“His body was found yesterday at the foot of some cliffs in southern Portugal. They seem to think it must have been there since the weekend.”
“Portugal? I don’t understand. What was-”
“They have no idea why he should have gone there.”
“But… was this… an accident?”
“That’s what the Portuguese police seem to think. His car was parked near the top of the cliff. It’s something of a tourist attraction apparently, not far from Cape Saint Vincent.”
“It couldn’t have been…”
“Suicide?” She stopped pacing up and down and looked straight at me. “Well, it could have been, of course. There’s no way to tell. Nobody’s going to believe Keith went there to admire the view, are they? So I suppose suicide is what most people will assume, whatever the official verdict.”