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Borrowed Time

Borrowed Time

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It is a golden evening of high summer. Walking a ridge on the Welsh Borders, Robin Timariot meets by chance an elegant middle-aged woman who seems strangely out of place. They exchange only a few words, but those words prove to be unforgettable. A few days later Timariot learns from the newspapers that, just hours after their meeting, the woman was raped and murdered.

A man is swiftly charged and convicted of the crime, but a string of inexplicable events begins to convince Timariot that all is not what it seems. Fascinated by the dead woman's memory, he is sucked into the complex motives and tortured relationships of her family and friends, searching against his better judgement for the secret of what really happened the day she died.The closer he gets to the truth, the more hideous and uncertain it seems to be. And far too late he realizes that anybody who uncovers it is unlikely to be allowed to live.

The stretch of Offa’s Dyke that runs along Hergest Ridge, between Kington and Gladestry, on the border between Herefordshire and Wales, is one of the loveliest parts of the whole route. Walking it one summer’s evening in 1993, I was treated not only to beautiful scenery but to the gift of an idea – the idea that forms the basis of the plot of Borrowed Time.

At its simplest, the story is about chance meetings and what they might lead to. The chance meeting in this case is between the narrator of the story, Robin Timariot, and a woman who is soon, though he doesn’t know it of course, to be brutally murdered. Slowly, in the course of the novel, Timariot is drawn deeper and deeper, and ever more dangerously, into the mysteries of her life – and her death.

Just as chance meetings can have unpredictable consequences, so plots can have surprising ramifications. The story as it grew took me to Brussels, to gain an insight into the lives led by the legions of Eurocrats based there; to a cricket bat factory in Kent, where work of a very different kind is practised; and on a voyage of eerie coincidences into the poetry of Edward Thomas. His verses, scattered through the narrative, seem to echo the plot in a way that I genuinely feel must in some way be connected to my decision to base the fictitious cricket bat business of Timariot & Small in the corner of Hampshire that inspired so much of Thomas’s writing. Some things can never be fully explained, only experienced.

There are some hard, realistic questions posed by this story, however. Just how far might someone be prepared to go to gain the justice they believed the legal system had denied them? How many lies would they have to tell in the process? And what strain would that put on them and those close to them? Would it really, in the end, be worth it?

There’s an answer to that question in the climactic conclusion of Borrowed Time. It isn’t an easy or a simple answer. But I feel it is a true one.

'An atmosphere of taut menace…heightened by shadows of betrayal and revenge'

Mail on Sunday

'A thriller in the classic storytelling sense…hugely enjoyable'

The Times