Borrowed Time by Robert Goddard Page A

morning.
    Saturday dawned warm and bright. She was waiting for me when I reached the Hilton and we set off for a tour of what Brussels had to offer. The Grand Place and the Mannekin Pis on foot. Then out in my car to the Atomium—Belgium’s answer to the Eiffel Tower. Lunch at a café near Square Montgomery. A stroll round the Parc du Cinquantenaire and a visit—at her insistence—to the Berlaymont. Followed by tea back at my flat in rue Pascale.
    At first, we didn’t talk about the trial—or even directly about her mother’s death. Instead, I described the life of a Eurocrat and the alternative attractions of Timariot & Small, revealing more about myself in the process than I’d intended to. It turned out that Sarah’s knowledge of the poems of Edward Thomas put mine to shame. She could quote them seemingly at will. And she could recite the names of the hangers above Steep even though she’d been there no more than once.
    “Mummy drove me down to Steep one Sunday during my last year at school,” she recalled as we stood in the top-most ball of the Atomium, ostensibly admiring the view of the Parc de Laeken and the Château Royal but both picturing in our mind’s eye the thickly wooded flanks of Stoner Hill. “We were studying Thomas for A level and he’d become my favourite poet. Something to do with his melancholia, I suppose. Adolescents understand that condition better than most adults, don’t you think?” Seeing me frown in a vain effort to recollect my state of mind at the age of eighteen, she took pity and went on: “I wanted to see the places that had inspired his poems. And Mummy was keen to take me, though she must have regretted it later, driving round and round those winding lanes while I lapped up the scenery. We probably passed Greenhayes several times in the course of the afternoon. Without ever thinking that one day . . .”
    “When would this have been?”
    “Spring eighty-seven. May, I think.” She paused. When she resumed, I knew at once the words were no longer hers. “‘The cherry trees bend over and are shedding, on the old road where all that passed are dead, their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding, this early May morn when there is none to wed.’ ” She gave a sad little smile. “Strange, isn’t it? I mean, our paths coming so close three years ago, but not crossing till now. I suppose fate just wasn’t ready.”
    “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