by Susan Moody
‘Mother’s never been the same since it happened,’ Mr Johnson tells me. ‘And she . . . well, she’s . . . she’s not got long, Miss Beecham, so don’t mind what she says, will you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I’ll just go and get her.’
He leaves the room again.
There are photograph albums on the table beside one end of the sofa and I pick one up, turn the thick black pages. Oh my God! I press a hand to my chest. After all these years, here is Nicola again, a black-and-white Nicola, grinning at the camera, her arm through that of a girl I now know to be Valerie. And here she is once more, and again, and still again. The sight of her brings back such vivid memories that I find it hard to breathe. She looks far too innocent to have seduced Bertram Yelland, or shoplifted in Woolworths, far too sweet to have deliberately ruined her mother’s evening dress or treated Miss Vane so spitefully.
Many of the photos show Valerie with various relatives at various family gatherings. One woman is obviously her grandmother, the Justice of the Peace, there’s an aunt and some cousins, an uncle with Valerie sitting on his shoulders. But there are enough pictures of Valerie and Nicola to make it clear that they were very close. And there are several of Mr Johnson, dark-haired, tall and hunky, muscled arms akimbo, or striking a bodybuilder’s pose, or carrying two little girls on his shoulders – Valerie and Nicola, I assume.
Guiltily I put the album down as I hear his voice soothing his wife along the passage. She appears on his arm, tiny and shrunken, looking a good fifteen years older than he is. She is painfully thin; her skin has the waxy yellow look that betokens some mortal disease, cancer, I would imagine. Her tiny claw-like hands are manicured and she wears a wedding band and a diamond engagement ring; both of which must have been resized to fit her emaciated fingers. Behind them patters an aged liver-and-white spaniel, wheezing like a furnace.
‘Who are you?’ Mrs Johnson shuffles into the upright chair and her husband fusses with pillows, making sure that she’s comfortable. I imagine she’s had at least one stroke, because her mouth droops on one side and it’s obvious that one arm is useless. ‘I thought you were Valerie come home at last.’
‘This is a friend of . . . of Valerie’s,’ Mr Johnson says.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Hello, Mrs Johnson,’ I say. ‘I’m Alice Beecham.’ I speak clearly, not sure if she’s deaf.
‘Beecham? I don’t remember any Beecham,’ she says.
‘Yes, you do, Mother. You’ve forgotten, that’s all.’
‘Have I?’
‘I was just passing through the village, and I remembered somebody telling me you lived here now.’
‘So I invited her in for a cup of tea.’
‘That’s good of you, Mike.’ She turns in my direction. ‘He’s always been a kind man, ever since I first met him. We were always so happy, weren’t we, Mikey? Not like we are now.’
‘I’m always happy when I’m with you, Maureen, you know that,’ says her husband, his voice not quite steady. He takes her hand in his and pats it.
I imagine that neither of these two have been happy since the day Nicola’s father killed their daughter.
The ancient dog totters across the carpet and drools over my sandals.
‘That’s Minnie,’ says Johnson. ‘Minnie the Third, actually. We gave Valerie a puppy when she was ten, just like this. Since then, well, we always have the same kind of dog, don’t we, Mother?’
‘Always call them Minnie,’ says his wife.
We sit for a while, making desultory chat. The subjects we wish to talk about – Nicola and Valerie – are too big for this little room, too much present. I am filled with a sudden fear that I will end up like these two, unable to shake off my traumas, unable to move on. I’ve tried. I fled to Paris, and then to Michigan. But flight doesn’t work, I know that now, any more than simply standing still does.
‘It’s her birthday, end of next week,’ Mr Johnson says suddenly.
‘She’d have turned thirty-four.’ Mrs Johnson raises a hand to her face and starts to claw at her cheeks.
Her husband takes her hand in his. ‘Now, Mother . . .’
‘He’s free!’ She tries to shout but her voice is too feeble. ‘That devil, that evil devil . . . He’s served his sentence, but we’re still serving ours. It’s not fair, it’s not fair . . .’ And she collapses into weak sobs.
I rise to my feet. ‘I think I should leave you. Thank you for the tea, both of you.’
‘I’ll walk you to the gate.’ Mr Johnson opens the front door and we both step out onto the carefully tended path. He pulls the door half-closed behind him. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘I know we should move on, but there’s little enough for Mother to do, these days.’ He sighs. ‘When I think of her before all this happened . . . in the WI, leader of the Girl Guide pack, volunteer at the church. She used to take part in the local drama society, too . . . matter of fact, that’s where she met Nicola’s mother, only amateurs, of course, but some of their shows were . . . she doesn’t do any of that now. At least I have my garden, and I’m a churchwarden. There’s Minnie to walk. It helps a little.’ He straightens himself, adjusts his tie. ‘Have you come far?’
‘Actually . . .’ I hesitate a little. ‘I live in Shale.’
‘Nice little place,’ he says. ‘Unspoiled. I get over there from time to time – Mother loves the sea. I take her down the end of the pier, have a nice cuppa before we come home. Makes a change.’
‘Oh,’ I say, before I can stop myself. ‘You must look me up next time you come.’ I scrabble in my wallet for one of my new business cards, cursing myself, for I know that I do not wish to meet the Johnsons again, or be further ensnared in their grief.
He glances at the card, then puts it into the pocket of his shirt. ‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘We might just do that, one of these days.’
As I pull open the gate, I say, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but were you surprised by Mr Farnham’s confession?’
He shakes his head, stretches his mouth. ‘To be honest, not really. I was in the Army during the war, and what I learned about human nature . . . and none of us are what we seem, are we? We all wear disguises.’
I nod; he is right.
‘So when I heard that a reputable bloke like Geoff Farnham had killed my little girl, I . . . let’s say I was less surprised than I might have been. Over the years, Nicola had let one or two things drop, not just about him but about her mother as well . . . it wasn’t quite the respectable sort of house it appeared to be on the surface. Sometimes we wondered whether we should try to stop the girls seeing each other, but if I mentioned it, Valerie would get so upset that we didn’t have the heart to insist.’
Just like me. ‘And your wife said that Mr Farnham’s been let out now?’
‘That’s right. It’s been quite a while now, as a matter of fact . . . eight years or so? Maybe longer. Whichever it is, it was much too soon for Maureen.’
‘I presume you’ve never seen any of them again.’
He looks at me as though I’m insane. ‘Why on earth would I want to do that? We moved away from the area as soon as we could sell our house, came down here to be near my wife’s parents. If you told me that Louise Farnham was going to be staying next door, I’d leave at once. I don’t want to see any of them again, ever.’ His face has flushed and there is sweat along his jaw. He straightens the collar points of his shirt. ‘It’s bad enough to be so obsessed with our own memories – we don’t need to be part of theirs as well.’
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have . . .’
‘You probably think we’ve wasted our lives,’ he says. ‘And on the surface, that’s probably what it looks like. But Valerie was everything to us, she was our . . . what’s the word? . . . raison d’être when she was alive, and she still is, even though she’s dead.’ His smile is grim. ‘I’m not saying it’s the best way, but it’s the way we’ve chosen
to handle it.’
Driving back to Shale, I consider the fact that Geoffrey Farnham is out of gaol, and has been for some time. Why? How? According to Ava’s scrapbooks, he was sentenced to twenty years. Even with time off, that would mean fourteen years to serve, so why had he been released even earlier than that? I could find out, I suppose, if I knew where to start looking.
I think too, of Nicola. Is she still loved and mourned, as Valerie Johnson is? Does someone tend her grave and leave fresh flowers?
By the time I get home, the shadows are lengthening as the sun moves lower in the sky behind the town. This is the time of day when the cliffs of Cap Griz Nez are particularly clear, the long green headlands of France seemingly as close as the ones only a few miles further round the coast from Shale. Gulls float on the water like scraps of torn newsprint; streaks of crimson indicate that we shall have yet another fine day tomorrow.
I sit at the table in my bay window and force myself to face facts. I make a list. I am not going to think about what I would do if I were able conclusively to point to a culprit responsible for Nicola’s murder, but I am sure that the answer to the puzzle is in front of me, if I can only figure it out.
Julian Tavistock, I write.
Bertram Yelland
Miss Vane
Gordon Parker
Louise Stone
Simon Stone
Edwardes
I arbitrarily dismiss my parents and Ava, my older brothers and their friends. Perhaps wrongly, I also omit Charlie Tavistock, Jeremy Pearce and David Gardner as being too young or too weak to have been responsible for such violence as was perpetrated on the body.
Finally, reluctantly, I add two more names to the list of possible suspects: Sasha Elias, and, lastly, Orlando.
Each of them had the means, and, to a greater or lesser degree, a motive, though it would be hard to imagine Miss Vane, for instance, wishing to kill Nicola just because of a malicious trick played on her, or, for that matter, Gordon Parker. The same could be true of Ava’s former husband, Mr Edwardes. Whatever poison Nicola breathed into his ear, it was hard to see what motive he might have in killing her. In the end, I put brackets round all three names, sidelining them from my list of suspects.
Simon Stone, too. What possible reason could he have to kill his own sister? Unless, as with at least two of the other suspects, there might have been a sexual motive. But according to the inquest, she had not been sexually assaulted. Simon’s name, too, I bracket.
I pour myself a finger of Islay single malt. It is easy to see the scenario in Julian’s case, Nicola promising, tantalizing, teasing, stringing him along until, at the last moment, she refuses him, and he snaps. My guess is that whatever liberties she might have allowed him in the form of kisses and fondles, Julian was still a reluctant virgin that night. To come so close to his heart’s desire, only to be thwarted at the final post . . . I remember how he carried everywhere with him that golf club, that weapon. There is the added, if intangible, fact that he has come back here to Shale, when he might have been expected to move on. Is this from some spiritual inertia or a pervasive guilt that pins him here at the scene of the crime?
Bertram Yelland: Orlando and I were in a position to observe him closely, and we had concluded that it could not have been him. But what did we know, back then? We were innocents, we had no inkling of the trouble Yelland might be in if word of his unorthodox sexual arrangements were to leak out. It is easy to imagine Nicola offering another liaison that night, and he falling for it, only to come suddenly to his senses, realize how close to the wind he was sailing, that he would be facing a prison sentence if he were discovered. I can well imagine Nicola at his trial, her big-eyed pretence of ignorance and fear, putting the blame entirely onto him. Maybe she taunted him, pointed out the sword of destruction she dangled above his head. He was certainly big enough, choleric enough, to have killed her.
I face the option of the murderer being Louise Stone. It seems so unlikely, so impossibly wide of the mark, for a mother to kill her own daughter. Yet I recall the look on her face as Nicola gave that indifferent shrug, in the dining room of Glenfield House, the clear intention to take absolutely no notice of whatever her mother had asked. A small enough detail, but add it to years and years of similar actions, to a lifetime of wilful damage, careless disregard, cruelty, even. Like Erin, I remember the Bad Seed. Might not Louise have taken a reluctant decision, realizing the impossibility of loosing Nicola upon an unsuspecting world? I recall her agitated behaviour the following afternoon. Looking back, isn’t two o’clock somewhat late to start calling on your missing daughter’s friends in the hope of finding out where she’d gone? And I remember, too, Mr Johnson, earlier, saying Louise was a member of the amateur dramatic society. If she could act, wouldn’t it be relatively easy to pretend to be distraught?
I consider Sasha Elias. His motive was strong enough to make him an obvious suspect. Gordon Parker had hinted that the townspeople thought he might have been responsible, but that could have been no more than anti-German feeling so close to the end of a war which had plunged Britain into poverty. I doubted that anti-Semitism had much to do with it; there’d have been sympathy rather than hostility.
But Nicola’s malicious stories were losing him clients. Or were they malicious? I wonder how naive I have been, all this time. I recall his arms round me, his hands over mine on the keyboard, the brush of his arm against my breasts. Then I recall the pages he has written about his little lost sisters, and am once again certain that there was nothing perverted in his behaviour. But if Nicola was deliberately sabotaging his carefully built-up stable of private pupils, it could have meant serious financial repercussions for him. And I know, from the gathering at the lifeboat station, that he had reserves of anger to draw on. But Gordon Parker had implied that Sasha had been cleared at the time of any involvement in the murder.
Finally, fearfully, I look at Orlando’s name. I don’t want to, but I must. I draw a heart round it, cross-hatch it, add thorny tendrils, berries, each of which I meticulously fill in.
Although he had not yet reached his full height, he was certainly strong enough to kill a slender little creature like Nicola, though he might have had some trouble getting her into the grassy clearing without leaving any trace. There was the fact that he hated Nicola. And she’d threatened to desecrate his blackberry patch . . .
I seriously contemplate the possibility that the man who is, among much else, my oldest and dearest friend, could be a murderer. Then I scrumple up my list, and go to bed.
TEN
Nothing has changed by the next morning.
Nor had I imagined that it would.
I pick my crumpled list from the waste-paper basket and smooth it out on the table. On a fresh piece of paper, I write down Julian’s name, and Louise’s. I omit Orlando’s. I will face the possibility of his guilt later, if I have to, though it squats at the back of my head like a malevolent toad.
Meanwhile, there are Julian and Louise to consider. Should I tackle them, lay my case in front of each of them, see how they respond? And if so, whom should I approach first? Is it really my place to take such a responsibility on to myself, to behave as though I were an amateur detective? In any case, how can I determine if either of them is guilty? There’s always the possibility that one or other might break down and confess, but I can see no reason why they might suddenly end their silence after so long, just because I come round asking questions. And if they did, what would I do, go to the police? And how dangerous would it be to confront someone who has got away with such a crime for so long, and therefore might reasonably either resent or fear my impertinent intrusion?
And then there is the question of their personal trauma. Louise has obviously made a success of moving on from the death of her daughter, Julian is a pillar of the community. If they are innocent, what right do I have to bring it all up again? And again, how exactly would I introduce the subject into the conversation?
My head spins.
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I came down here on a whim of the fate I did not believe in. Maybe I should let fate, chance, destiny, intervene again.
Which it does, five days later. It’s five fifteen and I’ve been working for eight hours at a stretch, another boring report from Brussels, this time concerning the use of fossil fuels in East European countries. I sit for a moment, twiddling a pencil between my fingers. My friend and colleague, Anna Krampedach, would never be offered such work, or, if she was, would refuse it. She translates only the things that, as she puts it, ‘sink’ to her. Plays for the most part, sometimes poetry. In the bureaucratic corridors of Brussels, am I labelled ‘the fossil fuel person’, the one who can be relied on to accept the boring jobs nobody else will touch? I probably earn twice as much as Anna, but, as Erin has colourfully pointed out, who needs money that badly?
The pencil snaps, and I get up and walk into the kitchen. My fridge is empty. If I am to eat that night, I need groceries. Walking along the road towards the only shop that stays open late, I glance through the windows of the Wooden Lugger, and spot Julian Tavistock sitting alone with a drink in front of him. He has both fists on the tabletop and is staring morosely into a glass of what looks like gin and tonic. It’s not a cosy sort of place: no twinkling horse-brasses or hunting prints, no snug corners or padded banquettes, just glaring overhead lighting, rough wooden tables, and an absence of anything that could detract from the main purpose of the place, which is clearly to consume alcohol.
I can always buy fish and chips, I tell myself, and I push open the door of the pub. The place stinks of stale tobacco smoke; over the years, the walls and ceiling have been stained the colour of fudge by countless cigarettes. I order a drink and stand in front of Julian.
‘Mind if I join you?’
He looks up apprehensively and then recognizes me. His face brightens. ‘Alice!’ He rises to his feet. ‘Of course not. Please sit down. Nice to have someone to talk to.’
Knowing that he is as haunted by Nicola’s death as I am, I don’t beat around the bush. ‘Were you sleeping with her?’ I ask abruptly.
