Free Borrowed Time by Robert Goddard Page B

of it. Neither of us dared.
    “She seemed happy?”
    “Very.”
    “Contented?”
    “Yes.”
    “At ease with herself?”
    “That too.”
    “Not . . . worried about anything?”
    “No. But it was only a fleeting encounter. A few words. No more. I didn’t think it was important . . . at the time.”
    “Of course not.”
    “I wish there was more I could tell you. More I could say. But there were no presentiments, Sarah. Nothing to show her—or me—what was about to happen. We met. And we parted. As strangers. I didn’t even know her name. But for the photograph in the paper . . .”
    “You’d never have known.”
    “No. I wouldn’t.”
    “And now you know so much about her. Where she lived. Who she was married to. The sort of art she collected. The make of car she drove. Even her date of birth.” Her tone had become suddenly bitter, almost sarcastic. But at whose expense I couldn’t tell. “And one thing none of the papers has revealed. She wasn’t wearing her wedding ring, was she, Robin? Don’t pretend you didn’t notice. Men do, don’t they? They notice that sort of thing.”
    I shrugged. “All right. She wasn’t. I didn’t think anything of it.”
    “You’re the only one, then. The police didn’t know what to make of it. But it certainly worried them. Not at first. At first, they thought
he’d
taken it. Because it was gold, I suppose. But then Rowena mentioned Mummy didn’t have it on when she got home that morning. She’d lost it, apparently, the day before. On the beach. In Biarritz. We have a villa there. Mummy and Daddy spend . . .” Her face fell. “They
used
to spend a lot of time there. Daddy’s father bought it just after the war. My grandmother was French, you see. They retired there. Daddy thought he and Mummy would do the same one day.”
    “So,” I said awkwardly, “she simply lost it.”
    “Apparently.”
    “It doesn’t mean anything, then, does it?”
    “That depends.”
    “On what?”
    “On whether you believe she lost it.” Seeing me frown, she went on. “Naylor denies the charges. All of them. He plans to plead not guilty. The police think he’ll change his mind before the trial, but if he doesn’t . . .”
    “How can he plead not guilty? You said yourself. DNA fingerprinting. It’s foolproof.”
    “Not if he claims the sex was voluntary.”
    “
Voluntary?
That’s absurd. He murdered her, for God’s sake.”
    “Somebody murdered her. I’m not sure the police have any evidence to prove it was Naylor who actually strangled her. They haven’t told us much, of course. I’ve pieced this together from the questions they’ve asked. And the ones they haven’t asked. I’m actually studying to be a lawyer. It doesn’t help a lot, but it gives me some idea what’s going on. Naylor’s going to say he met her at a pub near Kington. A place called the Harp, at Old Radnor.” She paused. “You look as if you know it.”
    “I had lunch there with Henley Bantock. The day we . . . just missed each other.”
    “How did he know it?”
    “Through his uncle.”
    “Damn,” she said under her breath.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “It’s a connection, isn’t it? With Mummy. It means she could have been there before.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Old Radnor’s the back of beyond. Naylor’s story isn’t credible if it’s unlikely Mummy ever went there. But if she did go there . . .”
    “With Oscar Bantock?”
    “Maybe. She’d visited him in Kington before. And he liked a drink. It’s possible, isn’t it?”
    “I suppose it is. But so what?”
    “Naylor will say they met there by chance. She propositioned him. Or he propositioned her. It doesn’t matter which. He’ll say she took him to Whistler’s Cot and they had what the law calls consensual sex. Then he left, with Mummy alive and Oscar Bantock nowhere to be seen. He’ll say somebody else must have murdered them later.”
    “Nobody will believe that.”
    “No. But the defence will argue it