“You believe in fate?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps it helps if you do. If anything can help.” She took a long calming breath. “The police offered to arrange counselling for us and Daddy persuaded Rowena to try it. She’s seeing a trauma expert twice a week.”
“But you aren’t?”
“I don’t want counselling. I want justice.” The hardness was back in her voice now, the sentimental philosophizing brought abruptly to an end. “I want Shaun Naylor put behind bars for the rest of his unnatural life.” Another smile, different now, self-aware, almost self-mocking. “A trainee lawyer isn’t supposed to talk like that, is she?”
“Maybe not. But I’m no lawyer, so I can say it. Any man who does what Naylor did has forfeited the right to live.”
She looked at me sharply. “You really think so?”
“Yes. Don’t you? I mean, when the platitudes-the social niceties-are swept aside. Don’t we all fundamentally believe in an eye for an eye?”
She didn’t answer. Her gaze moved past me to focus on some distant point beyond the horizon. And I felt suddenly embarrassed by my own vehemence, ashamed by the primitive instinct Louise Paxton’s death had stirred in me-but that her daughter was capable of keeping in check. “Let’s go down,” she said softly. “I’ve seen enough.”
Over lunch-and afterwards, as we sat on a shady bench in the Parc du Cinquantenaire-Sarah grew more forthcoming about herself and the Paxton family. Her grandfather, Dudley Paxton, had been in the Diplomatic Service, his career culminating in his appointment as British Ambassador to several former French African colonies just after their independence in the late fifties and early sixties. He and his Basque wife spent their retirement in Biarritz, close to Grandmère’s numerous relatives. Their villa, L’Hivernance, inherited by Sarah’s father, was the scene of many of her happiest childhood memories. She and Rowena would spend days on end playing in the garden or building sandcastles on the world-famous beach, only a pebble’s throw away, during long sun-drenched summers.
Sir Keith, meanwhile, was making a name for himself in the medical world. With royal patients and a knighthood came a lucrative private practice, a large town house in Holland Park, a homely weekend retreat in the Cotswolds and the best of everything for his wife and children. He was a doting and generous father, buying both daughters an expensive education, a succession of well-bred ponies, a skiing holiday every winter and a car for their eighteenth birthdays. As for Louise, who was fifteen years younger than him and looked more beautiful at forty than she had at thirty, there was nothing Sir Keith wasn’t prepared to do. A dress allowance she couldn’t spend. A luxury car she didn’t want. And a gilded cage-I couldn’t help suspecting-she wasn’t prepared to remain in for ever.
Sir Keith didn’t share Louise’s interest in Expressionist art and, for all his lavishness in other directions, seemed to begrudge the money she spent on it. She and a school-friend, Sophie Marsden, began dabbling as collectors to see if they could make more than their husbands earned from sound and sober investments. They didn’t, of course, but they enjoyed becoming expert amateurs and started trying to spot unrecognized talent before it acquired the price-tag to match. Oscar Bantock was more of a has-been than a might-be, but Louise did her best to make something of him, arranging exhibitions at small but select galleries where the right sort of people might realize what they were missing.
One such exhibition was held in Cambridge during Sarah’s last year at King’s College. Her presence at the private view was virtually mandatory and it was there she met Bantock for the first and last time. “A short and stocky man with white hair and a bushy beard. A bit cantankerous, of course. A bit ‘Why am I dressed up like a dog’s dinner sipping warm white wine with this rabble of Philistines?’ But you could see he was trying to behave well for Mummy’s sake. Which was ironic, since the event was supposed to be for his benefit, not hers. He was nice to me, probably for the same reason. Even to the man I’d brought with me, who made some pretty cringe-inducing remarks I remember. But old Oscar just grinned and twinkled his eyes at me. They were a quite startling blue. Pale yet bright at the same time. And he had this low rumbling suppressed voice. Like some operatic baritone singing a lullaby. You know? Power on a short leash. Energy waiting to be released. I can see him now so clearly. It’s no more than five months ago. But in other ways it seems like five years.”
There it was. The same dead end we couldn’t avoid coming back to. Take any path you liked through the maze. Admire any vista you pleased over the hedge en route. It was still waiting. If not round the next corner, then round the one after that.
“Why did he do it?” she asked later. “I mean, if he was just a burglar, as they seem to think. Why murder? Why rape?”
“One thing leads to another, I suppose. Probably high as a kite on drugs. And your mother…”
“Yes?”
“Was a very beautiful woman.”
“You make that sound almost like an excuse.”
“It’s not meant to be. Just an explanation. His type see something lovely and precious and want to destroy it. Looking-even touching-isn’t good enough for them. What they can’t have they smash.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “And the rest of us are left to pick up the pieces.” She walked on down the tree-lined avenue of the park and I stood where I was, watching her for a few seconds, before following. Her head was bowed, her shoulders almost visibly sagging. She was doing her best to gather up the fragments of her life-and her sister’s and her father’s too. But there were so many. They were so widely scattered. And so sharp that those who touched them were bound to bleed.
I didn’t analyse the assumptions and prejudices Sarah and I shared that weekend until much later. They were there, of course, underpinning everything we said and thought. Long before we knew all the facts, long before a court of law had weighed and tested the evidence, we were sure we knew exactly what had happened. Above all, we were sure Shaun Naylor was guilty.
According to Sarah, the police had only caught him thanks to a tip-off. From whom she didn’t know. A wife. A girlfriend. A mate he’d boasted to. It didn’t really matter who or why. The evidence must have piled up against him since. Otherwise he’d never have dreamt up such an implausible story. Would he?
I took Sarah out for dinner that night to my favourite Italian restaurant, Castello Banfi. She gave me a sharp lesson in her determination to be beholden to nobody by threatening a public scene if I didn’t let her pay half the bill. But she did let me walk her back to the Hilton. There it could easily have been goodbye, since she was flying home the following afternoon and I’d been invited to Sunday lunch by some Eurocrat friends in Waterloo who were concerned for my sanity. But, unsure whether I wanted to face them anyway, I claimed to have no commitments and offered her a ride to the airport, which she accepted.
As I walked away from the hotel, I glanced across the boulevard at the frontage of the Toison d’Or cinema complex. One of the films whose illuminated titles glared back was the latest Harrison Ford thriller: Presumed Innocent. But I can honestly say that the irony registered with me for no more than an instant before I pressed on towards rue Pascale, devising an excuse for my friends in Waterloo as I went.
Something else I chose not to analyse was my reluctance to let Sarah Paxton vanish from my life so soon after entering it. Such analysis might have revealed whether the attraction I’d begun to feel was to her or the part of her that reminded me of her mother. Perhaps we always chase ghosts or tokens or chance resemblances. Perhaps everyone we’re ever drawn to is really only a pallid version of the real thing we’ll never meet. But, if so, it doesn’t help to confront the fact.