“Rubbish. Nobody can prove I knew anything.”
“No. But they can go a long way to proving I did, can’t they? Thanks to the enquiries you got me to make on your behalf. Which I suppose you could deny asking me to make. If it suited your purpose.”
“I wouldn’t do that.” But smiling as she spoke gave the game away. We both knew she would do it-if she thought she had to. Was this, then, why she’d chosen to enlighten me? So I’d be in no doubt how much I stood to lose along with her? So I’d refrain from telling Sarah the truth for fear she’d blame me, not Bella, for trying to suppress it? “Just find Sarah for me, Robin,” Bella concluded in her most mellifluous tone. “Then fly away from all this. And count yourself lucky you can.”
Bella probably read into my subdued farewell a reluctant agreement to do what she’d more or less instructed me to do: break the news to Sarah of her father’s death without challenging the official view that it was a tragic accident; leave Paul well alone; and view subsequent developments, whatever they might be, from a safe distance.
But that was her way, not mine. And no amount of pressure, whether subtle or overt, was going to force me to follow it. There was something she’d overlooked, something she’d never have been capable of understanding. The truth was shocking and appalling. Of course it was. But it was also immensely uplifting. Because suddenly Louise Paxton was free of all suspicion. She hadn’t led Naylor on. She hadn’t been having a secret affair with anyone. Her “perfect stranger” had been an invention, designed to deflect Sophie’s curiosity. Or else some kind of joke at Sophie’s expense. Either way, Louise had met nobody on Hergest Ridge until the day she’d met me there. And that was the day she’d died. She was an innocent victim. Not only of a brutal rapist, but of a jealous husband, a treacherous friend and a self-serving pack of doubters and deceivers.
After Bella had gone, I lay on the dust-sheeted sofa in the sitting-room, an alarm-clock stationed on the floor beside me. It was set to go off at half past five. If I was on the road by six, I could be in Clifton by eight. Not that I expected to need an alarm to wake me. Tired though I was, sleep seemed a remote contingency. Fear and elation stalked my thoughts, stretching my weary nerves. I felt if I could only rest and reflect on what Bella had told me, the answer would emerge, as logical as it was obvious. What was the final link in the chain connecting Sir Keith Paxton’s hidden jealousy with Paul Bryant’s manufactured guilt? What purpose could be served by setting a murderer free?
I did fall asleep, of course, though not for much more than an hour. But that was time enough to dream of Louise. She was waiting to meet me as I walked along Offa’s Dyke. The sun was setting behind her and I couldn’t see her face clearly. She was standing a few yards beyond an artist’s easel, set up directly in my path, with a canvas ready for use on its frame. But the canvas was blank, save for the tentative pencilled outline of a figure that seemed to dissolve as I approached. I tried to speak, but couldn’t seem to. I knew I had to warn her of something, but what it was I couldn’t remember. Then she turned and walked away down the slope. I ran after her, but the gap between us only widened. There was a line of trees at the foot of the slope. I sensed I had to overtake her before she reached them in order to avert a catastrophe. But there was nothing I could do to stop her. She entered the trees without looking back. And vanished from my sight.
Then the alarm was buzzing angrily close to my ear. With a jolt, I sat up and stabbed at its button until silence returned. The trees were still visible to my mind’s eye, the patch of shadow she’d stepped into still tantalizingly close. But as the ghostly shapes of the shrouded furniture emerged from the darkness around me, the trees slipped away, until only the faintest trace of a memory-the lightest breath of a breeze between their leaves-remained.
A blank canvas. Ready to picture the future she’d never lived to shape. Like her diary. An empty space that would never be filled. “Can we really change anything, do you think?” I could remember the words, but couldn’t re-create the voice. There seemed to be nothing I- Then it came to me, so suddenly and forcefully it was as if somebody had struck me in the face. The diary. Of course. If Paul was lying, then every detail of his obsessive pursuit of Louise was also a lie. Even his meeting with her in the Covent Garden café. It hadn’t happened. Yet Sarah had shown me the proof that it had happened. In her mother’s own handwriting. Thursday April 5: Atascadero, 3.30. A forged entry? Or a clever manipulation of a genuine one? Either way, Paul couldn’t have had access to Louise’s diary without- “Sarah.” I spoke her name aloud as I rose from the sofa and headed for the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was a cold wet dawn in Bristol, too bleak and early, I’d have guessed, for Sarah to have gone out. But there was no response to my persistent prods at her bell in Caledonia Place. And only a recorded answer when I tried her number on my car-phone. I went back to the door, intending to use the keys Bella had given me to go in, but a well-dressed middle-aged woman emerged as I approached and fixed me with a suspicious glare.
“Are you the person who’s just been ringing Sarah Paxton’s bell? I live in the flat below and couldn’t help wondering when you were going to give up.”
“Well, it was me, actually, yes. I’m a friend of Sarah’s.”
“Really? Well, I know for a fact that she’s gone away. So you’re wasting your time, aren’t you?”
“Apparently so.” I smiled uneasily. “Any idea where she’s gone? Or for how long?”
“None at all, I’m afraid. Excuse me.”
She bustled off to her car, but lingered ostentatiously after opening the boot, clearly reluctant to leave while I was lurking around her front door. In the circumstances, there was nothing for it but to retreat to my own car and drive away.
I could have doubled back straightaway of course, but I decided to wait and see what I could glean from Anstey’s first. I parked on the circular road round Clifton Down and gazed along the gorge at the suspension bridge, its familiar shape blurred and distorted by the runnels of rainwater on the windscreen. How often did Sarah come up here, I wondered, and study the same view? How often did she imagine she could see Rowena leaning against the railings in the middle of the bridge and staring back at her? As now I almost did myself.
By nine o’clock, I was at Anstey’s offices in Trinity Street, explaining to a bemused secretary that I was a friend of the Paxton family, trying to contact Sarah on a matter of extreme urgency. The news that Sarah wasn’t at home clearly embarrassed the poor woman, who until now had been happy to believe her absence was due to flu. “She phoned in sick on Monday morning. As far as I know, we haven’t heard from her since.” She wanted me to wait for the senior partner, who usually arrived by nine thirty, but her confirmation that Sarah had lied to me about the course in Guildford made such a delay unthinkable. Did she know where I could find Sarah’s boyfriend? Yes, she did. “You mean Rodney Gardner. He’s a solicitor too. But not with this firm. Haynes, Palfreyman and Fyfe. In Corn Street.”
I’d met Rodney just once, at The Hurdles a year before. He remembered me as well as I remembered him: not very. Which turned his natural caution into acute wariness when he received me in his office at ten o’clock that morning.
“Why exactly are you looking for Sarah?”
“A family matter.”
“But you’re not family, are you?”
“Does that make a difference?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look, I may as well tell you. Her father’s died.”