CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“He said he was going to Truro. To see Melvyn Napier.” I recalled Alice Graham’s exact words, and the puzzlement in her eyes, as I drove out of Brighton late that afternoon. She couldn’t have missed my flinch of surprise, nor the irony that it sharpened into the kind of joke Edmund Tully might have relished. “You really didn’t know, did you? You had no idea.” None whatsoever. She was right there. I felt as if I’d woken suddenly, to discover I was no longer in the room where I’d fallen asleep. “I’m afraid your father must have been keeping you in the dark, Mr. Napier.”
“Maybe Tully didn’t go through with the visit,” I’d managed to say.
“He seemed determined to. There was money in it for him, he said. And he must have got some, because if he’d thought better of the idea or been turned away empty-handed, he’d have come back here for another handout. But he never did.”
“Why should he have thought my father would give him anything?”
“You’ll have to ask him, won’t you?” Yes. I would have to ask him.
But could I trust him to give an honest answer? “Edmund always seemed to think there was money to be made in Truro. That’s why he went there in the first place.”
“I thought he just drifted into town.”
“Hardly. He told me once he had an old chum in Truro he could squeeze for cash if he needed to. Somebody he was certain wouldn’t refuse him.”
“How could he be certain?”
“I took it he meant to blackmail the man.”
“Blackmail? What would he have had on Michael Lanyon?”
“Who knows?” She’d flushed a little at that, some remembered grievance still burning inside her.
“I have the distinct impression you do, Mrs. Graham.”
“Well, I could take a guess, it’s true.”
“And what would you guess?”
“That he was one of several “chums” of Edmund’s. I realized pretty soon after I married Edmund that he preferred men to women. He hid a bundle of letters at the back of a wardrobe in the miserable little house in Stepney we moved into after getting married. I came across it while he was away. They were from men he’d had affairs with.”
“And Michael Lanyon was one of them?”
“I don’t know. But they were close friends at Oxford. They toured Europe together. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Michael Lanyon was married himself by then, with a son. And he had a well-paid job. Ideal prey for Edmund. Especially if he genuinely loved his wife.”
“I think he did.”
“There you are then. Edmund only stayed with me for a few months when he came back from the war. Long enough for me to see how it had changed him, though. He’d always been selfish and idle. Now he was cruel and vindictive into the bargain, as if he wanted to repay his torturers by torturing others in turn. When he left he took the letters with him.”
“When was that?”
“December forty-six. Just before Christmas.”
“And the next you heard from him?”
She’d smiled grimly at the memory. “I simply read about his arrest in the newspapers nine months later like everyone else. Edmund kept quiet about me, and I was more than happy to keep quiet about him. I’d moved by then, anyway, hoping he wouldn’t be able to find me again, so there was no-one to connect us.”
“Why do you think he let the police think he was single?”
“Because of what I might have told them about him. I suspect he’d been calling in old debts with the contents of those letters for months.
Being exposed as a blackmailer wouldn’t have helped his defence, would it?”
“It might have helped Michael Lanyon’s.”
“Might it?” She’d eyed me defiantly. “Well, that was nothing to do with me. As far as I was concerned, Edmund and his “chum” could ‘
“Go hang?”
She’d paused before replying, as if to deliberate on the point. “Yes.
Exactly.”
But only one of them had hanged. The other had returned, like a dog to its vomit, to the murder he still hoped to profit by. But how? What pressure could he apply? What threat could he make so long after the event?
My father knew. Had known, for twelve years. Or maybe longer. Sam Vigus’s perjury and Gran’s complicity in it weren’t enough. There had to be something Tully could prove beyond doubt that would hurt the family badly. Nothing less would work. And evidently it had worked.
Well enough to set up Tully somewhere beyond the reach of the law, able to afford the relative luxury of leaving his wife in peace.
I telephoned my parents as soon as I reached home, intending to tell them I’d be down the following day on urgent business, though without giving them any inkling of just what that business might be. Not for the first time, however, I was unprepared for the course events were taking. Mine wasn’t the only hand pr ising open a long-closed door.
“Chris?” Dad barked. “What the hell is going on? First Pam tells us some kind of madwoman is pursuing a vendetta against you, then … then this, for Christ’s sake.”
“What? What’s happened?”
“We went to Truro today to have lunch with Pam and Tabs and discuss how to sort out this God-awful mess with Trevor. When we got back here, just a few hours ago, we found the house had been ransacked.”
“You’ve been burgled?”
“Oh no. Nothing so damned reasonable as that. As far as we can tell, nothing’s missing. Not even your mother’s jewellery. But the place looks like a bomb’s hit it. Ornaments smashed. Paintings slashed.
Armchairs ripped. And red paint daubed everywhere. As if it was just thrown around. On curtains, carpets, walls. You have no idea.
She was thorough, all right. There isn’t much she didn’t ruin in some mean-minded way. And what I want to know is ‘
“Who she is?”
“You bet I do. The police think it was vandals. Yobbos high on drugs.
But it wasn’t, was it?”
“Probably not, no.”
“Mrs. Hannaford didn’t come in today. And we were in Truro. It’s the first chance she’s had to do this. Now, who is she? And what does she want?”
“I don’t know. But maybe you do.”
“Me? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I can’t explain over the telephone. There’s too much involved.”
“Then you’d better get yourself down here and explain to my face.”
“For once, Dad, I agree with you. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
Whit week, 1969. According to Alice Graham, that’s when Edmund Tully had left Brighton, bound for Truro and the execution of a money-making scheme he’d had twenty-two years to devise and refine. Whitsun normally fell in late May or early June, close to my grandmother’s birthday. That year, she’d been ninety, the occasion for a full-scale family celebration at Tredower House. I should have been there. It was expected of me, if not required.
But expectations and requirements didn’t mean much to me in the late Sixties. The slow sputtering fall to earth of the Meteors in the two years following Andy Wicks’s death dragged me down into a drink problem that became, at some indefinable point, outright alcoholism. Then sleek-bodied sweet-voiced Myfanwy Probin, alias Melody Farren, came to my rescue. But it was a short-lived salvation. We met when the Meteors were briefly her backing group, in the autumn of 1966, and were married the following spring, shortly before she realized there were better and more attractive propositions in the pop music business than me. Well, undoubtedly there were, though even she’d admit she didn’t choose wisely, which is why her singing career fizzled out so rapidly.
Our marriage fizzled out even sooner. The eighteen months we were notion ally together I store now in the deepest basement of my memory, not so much because of the nerve-sapping remorseless ness of our rows as because of the pitiful shambles it reduced me to. During the winter of 1968/9, I was living in a bed sit near Archway tub
e station, deluding myself, thanks to a bottle of vodka a day, that I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t reclaim a normal and respectable existence any time I chose. I’d lost a wife and at least two careers, and it was easy enough to make the choice between caring and drinking.
Occasional telephone calls to my mother and sister kept up a front for the benefit of my family. I was too ashamed to admit to them how low I’d sunk, and too proud to ask for their help. Whether they believed my claim to be spending Christmas at Johnny Newman’s villa on the Costa del Sol he didn’t have one and wouldn’t have invited me there if he had1 wasn’t sure. But even in my addled state I knew that Gran’s ninetieth birthday on the last day of May, 1969, was a family gathering I couldn’t dodge.
I actually meant to go. I even managed to scale down the booze intake for several days beforehand, my will to do so strengthened by the thought of how ashamed they’d all be of me if I didn’t. By then there were too many symptoms of what I still hadn’t admitted was a disease for them to miss. But an interlude of relative sobriety enabled me to gain control of the more obvious ones. I set off for Truro by train on the 30th looking far better than I felt and determined to fool everyone at Tredower House with a well-rehearsed imitation of a healthy and contented member of the family.
Around the same time, Edmund Tully headed for Truro as well. My resolution failed me before I was halfway there. But Tully didn’t turn back. Already, I felt certain of that.
My mother was directing clean-up operations at Lanmartha when I arrived on Wednesday afternoon. Mrs. Hannaford had drafted in her daughter to assist and they told me the place already looked a lot better than it had, with many of the smashed items disposed of or bundled up for repair, the damaged furniture shrouded in dust sheets and most of the paint, if not exactly erased, at least reduced from blood-red daubings to salmon-pink shadows on walls and carpets. The house smelled of shampoo and polish and disinfectant, but it also had the hollow scoured feel of somewhere that was no longer home.
My father had spent the morning on the golf course, Mum told me, without any noticeably beneficial effect on his temper. He was still in a black mood, holding me partly responsible for what had happened.
I found him in his study, deep in a desk load of paperwork. “I’m checking to see if any of my financial records have been disturbed,” he explained, seeing me raise an eyebrow at the stacks of bank statements, share certificates and accountants’ letters. “It occurred to me the vandalism could have been a cover for finding out how much we’re worth.”
“I don’t think so, Dad.”
“Then what do you think?”
“I think it was done to hurt you. Simple as that. Pam’s marriage. My business. Your home. All natural targets in their way. Things we valued, and things Pauline Lucas had the ability to harm.”
“So, now you’re here, are you going to tell me who she is?”
“I don’t know.”
“But on the phone you said ‘
“That you might. Yes. I think it’s more than possible.”
His lip quivered, but he held a sneer at bay. “This had better be good, boy,” he said, with that shake of the head he’d given me so many times before, in which carefully judged measures of disappointment and disapproval were mixed with a dash of contempt.
“It’s something to do with Edmund Tully.”
Tully?”
“I know from his wife that he came to see you shortly after his release from prison twelve years ago.”
“What?”
“You can’t have forgotten his visit.”
“Forgotten?” He jumped up from his chair and rounded the desk to confront me. “What the bloody hell are you talking about? I saw Tully in court thirty-four years ago and that’s it. I’ve never spoken to him in my life.”
“He travelled to Truro in the spring of sixty-nine. He told his wife he had business with you.”
“He had no “business” with me. And so far as I recall he had no wife.
Have you taken leave of your senses?”
“No, Dad. I’m just beginning to use them. Think back to Gran’s ninetieth birthday in May sixty-nine. That’s about when Tully would have called.”
“Tully, Tully, Tully. Will you stop babbling that name at me? I’m surprised you want to dredge up memories of your grandmother’s ninetieth in view of how you celebrated it. Drunk in a ditch, wasn’t it?”
“Not exactly.”
“It might as well have been. What have you ever contributed to this family, Chris? Tell me that. What precisely have you ever done that entitles you to start cross-questioning me?”
“I wouldn’t call this cross-questioning.”
“Then what would you call it?”
“I’d call it a search for the truth.”
“The truth? My God.” He gestured towards the papers behind him.
“There’s the truth, boy. There’s the reality of what I’ve done for you. Shrewd hard-headed financial management. One day you’ll benefit from that. One day you’ll be rich. Not because of your own efforts, which God knows have been feeble enough, but because of mine. My bloody efforts. So don’t preach to me.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked mildly. “Why are you so angry?”
“I have every right to be angry. Have you seen the state of this house?”
“Yes. And I’ve seen the state of my workshop as well. It’s a good deal worse. But I haven’t blamed you for that, have I? Not yet.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m still waiting for an answer. Why did Tully come to see you?”
“You’ve had your answer. He didn’t.”
“I don’t believe you.”
‘ What ?” If he’d been twenty years younger, or even ten, I think he’d have hit me then. Calmly and deliberately, I’d laid it on the line. He was lying, and I wasn’t prepared to let him rant his way out of it. He was lying, and we both knew it.
“Tully was blackmailing Michael Lanyon with some letters proving they’d once been lovers. That’s why Michael paid him five hundred pounds. And why he couldn’t explain his reasons for doing so.”
“Rubbish. It was proved at the trial ‘
“Sam Vigus lied.”
“Oh, he lied, did he? And the evidence was planted and the police were corrupt? Is that your brilliant new theory?”
“No.”
“Then tell me, Chris. Why should Sam Vigus have lied on oath?”
“Because Gran forced him to.”
“Gran?” He glared at me and in his face I read the hint of artifice I’d been looking for. He was angry all right. But not as angry as he was trying to appear. Something was hiding beneath the excess, and I was close to finding out what.
“Vigus told me all about it.”
“You’ve spoken to him?”
“Yes. Last week.”
“Your mother put you up to this, didn’t she?”
“She told me Vigus had been phoning you, yes. But it was my idea to go and hear what he had to say. He couldn’t understand why you hadn’t responded to his calls.”
“Why should I want to speak to the old fool?”
“No reason at all, I suppose, if you already knew what he was going to say.”
“All I know is that he’s not worth listening to.”
“You mean now or thirty-four years ago?”
“I mean any time. If he perjured himself at the trial, that’s his affair. It’s nothing to do with me.”
“But it is. It’s to do with all of us. Gran put Vigus up to it so she could be sure of inheriting Uncle Joshua’s money. But she miscalculated. She assumed Michael really had paid Tully to commit the murder. But I don’t think he had. And who better to know that for a fact than Tully himself? If I’m right
“Yes? What if you are right?”
“Then no wonder he headed for Truro after his release. He knew Vigus was a perjurer. But he didn’t come to see Vigus, did he? He came to see you.”<
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“He did not.”
“He must have done. And you must have paid him to shut up, otherwise he would have gone on to Vigus.”
“You’re talking absolute bloody nonsense.”
“How much did you pay him? And what for, exactly? He had no way of knowing it was Gran who’d twisted the evidence. It was simply his word against Vigus’s. And who’d have taken the word of a convicted murderer? Or cared anyway? Nobody would have been I stopped and stared into my father’s wary eyes. Suddenly, I understood. And in that instant I could only wonder at why I’d not done so sooner. “But the Lanyons would have cared, wouldn’t they?
Beyond Recall Page 24
