Losing Nicola

by Susan Moody

  He has no need to ask whom I’m talking about. Nor does he appear to take offence at my question, though he blushes awkwardly. ‘Not exactly,’ he says. ‘She let me go . . . well, at the time it seemed pretty far to me. But what did I know about sex, except that I wanted it? We were so young, so ignorant, really. Innocent. No idea what it was all about.’

  ‘Was it her you were attracted to, or sex in general?’

  ‘Sex in general, I suppose, but only with her. Not that there was anyone else to have it with. Let’s face it, back then, nice girls didn’t.’

  ‘Except for her.’

  He looks at me quizzically. ‘But then she wasn’t a nice girl, was she?’

  I let the question pass. ‘What happened the night of my party?’

  Suddenly he looks panic-stricken. ‘I . . . I don’t know. Nothing.’ Waving his hands about, he fixes his attention on a local boatman in navy-blue sweater and short rubber boots who has just come through the door.

  ‘Don’t be naive, Julian. Something did.’

  ‘Nothing to do with . . . with what happened.’

  ‘Nicola’s murder, you mean.’

  He winces. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I saw you kissing her out in the garden.’

  ‘But that was earlier.’

  ‘Earlier than what?’

  ‘Than . . . well, than her leaving your house and, presumably, going off with . . . meeting up with whoever it was who . . .’

  ‘Whoever it was who killed her.’ I am brutal. I can see that for years he has avoided saying or thinking about the specifics of what happened to Nicola.

  ‘Yes, that.’ He raises his glass and drains it.

  ‘Can I get you another of those?’ It seems fairly obvious that the drink he has just finished was not his first.

  He looks at his watch. ‘I shouldn’t really. But what the hell.’ He has not yet met my eyes.

  While I’m up at the bar, ordering for us both, I watch him resume the position he was in, staring at the scarred wooden tabletop. How many times has he sat there brooding, I wonder. I sense that the reason he has answered my questions is that he is desperate to talk about Nicola and until now has not allowed himself to do so.

  The boatman has settled on a barstool and is talking about a huge shoal of herring off the Dogger Bank. He glances at me and turns back to the bartender. ‘You could lean over the side of your boat and pick them out of the water with your bare hands,’ he says.

  Back at my table, I push Julian’s drink across to him. ‘Did you see her leave my party?’ I ask.

  He shakes his head, still avoiding my gaze.

  ‘Did you go off with her, Julian?’

  The blush returns to his face. He stares over my shoulder, and his eyes begin to water.

  I lean forward. ‘Was it you, Julian? Did you kill her?’

  There is a silence. He picks up his fresh drink but doesn’t raise it to his lip. Ice tinkles faintly against the side of the glass. Have I got him, I wonder? Surely, if he was innocent, he would rush to deny it, be vehement, be indignant. But he says nothing.

  ‘Julian . . .’ I gentle my voice. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone, I promise.’

  ‘Oh Jesus . . .’

  ‘I’m as hung up on it all as you are. I’m only trying to reach a resolution for myself. I’m not really interested in who did it, or even why.’ I’m lying, but he is not to know that.

  ‘Oh God . . .’ He puts his glass down again and knuckles his eyes. ‘Oh, dear God . . .’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I wish I knew what to do.’

  ‘What about?’

  He shakes his head. Puts his elbows on the table and hides his face in his hands. I wait. When he finally speaks, his voice is muffled and I have to lean forward to hear him. ‘I’ve been living with this for twenty years,’ he says.

  ‘So have I.’

  ‘And it only gets worse.’

  I feel as though I’m standing on the edge of a high cliff, trying to persuade someone to leap off onto the rocks far below. ‘What happened that night, Julian? What did you do?’

  From the breast pocket of his bank-manager’s suit, he removes a folded white handkerchief and presses it carefully to each of his eyes, then returns it to its place. He takes hold of his glass with both hands. ‘I don’t really know.’

  I try to keep my expression neutral. ‘How can you not know?’

  ‘Look . . .’ Julian’s shoulders sag. ‘. . . if it was happening today, I’d have said she was on something that evening, but of course we didn’t know about drugs, stuff like that, not back then - not even her.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘She was all hyped up. Excited.’ His gaze flutters around until it finds the bar behind me. ‘Dangerous. You remember how she was.’

  ‘Vividly.’ She has brought so much trouble to us all. I wonder what kind of a woman she’d have become.

  ‘She was . . . leading me on,’ continued Julian. ‘Touching the . . . the front of my trousers. Slipping her hand inside so her fingers were on my . . . on my skin. I felt as though I was going to burst. I thought . . . I don’t really know what I thought. She said that later, if I wanted to, she would . . . she would let me, you know . . . let me go all the way.’

  He seems so miserable and ashamed that I can hardly bear to look at him. ‘And did she?’

  He looks at his watch again. ‘Look, I really am going to have to get home. Nicola will be—’ He stops abruptly, his face appalled. ‘I mean Monica will be waiting for me.’ He pushes himself upright. ‘Alice, I really can’t talk about this any more.’

  ‘You have to,’ I say firmly. ‘Sit down, Julian. Just tell me what happened.’

  He sighs, as though he knows he has no choice. ‘I’ve never told anybody any of this – in fact, I’ve tried never to think about it.’

  ‘I’m the same, Julian. I understand.’

  He fidgets for a bit with his glass. Then the words come out in a rush. ‘What happened is, that at some point, I don’t exactly know what time, but quite late, after people started going home, she told me she was going to walk along the seafront and if I really wanted to . . . you know . . . I was to follow her five minutes later, because she didn’t want anyone to see us leaving together. So I did that, waited four or five minutes and then ran along the promenade after her. There were some people walking their dogs, some man wheeling a bicycle, two girls walking along, giggling. I could see Nicola clearly in the distance, the moon was tremendously bright, and it only took me a couple of minutes to catch up with her, so she grabbed my hand, and we walked along and she told me in . . . in extremely graphic detail what we were going to do as soon as she reached a place she knew where we could be private.’ He stops.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘She . . . she made me put my hand up her skirt and . . .’ He swallows. ‘. . . she wasn’t wearing any underpants.’ He shakes his head. ‘I can’t explain how exciting it was. I was fifteen, nearly sixteen, it was the first time I’d ever felt a woman’s . . . I couldn’t believe I was only a few minutes away from . . . well, from losing my virginity. God! I’ve never experienced anything as frantically exciting. Not before, not since.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘We got up to that area just beyond the castle, and we walked up a lane and out between some trees onto a grassy bit, near a huge roundish area of brambles and bushes. You could see the moon shining on the water, and lights on the horizon, the lightship blinking. Even though it was night time, there were birds singing, and some seagulls, I remember. And she said, she said, This is okay, right here. And she walked up close to me, and started undoing my belt . . .’ Julian looks over at the boatman who is now talking impassionedly about a monstrous catch of cod he’d seen once off the Scilly Isles. ‘. . . I have to tell you, Alice, I felt as though I had a flagpole in my trousers. I’d got my putter with me, God knows why – I think I was trying to pretend I was just going to practise putts, if anyone asked – an
d I dropped it on the ground, put my arms round her. And then, then . . .’ His voice fades to silence.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘She turned away from me and said in that cool little voice of hers, she said, “Actually, Julian, actually, I think I’ve changed my mind.”’

  His mouth twists and I can see how that long-ago rejection torments him still. ‘What did you do?’ I am surprised at how accurate my reconstruction of the scene has proved to be.

  ‘I couldn’t believe I’d heard right. I said, What do you mean? And she said, I don’t feel like it, after all, or something like that. Obviously I was devastated. Mortified. When I finally realized she was serious, I grabbed her by the neck and shook her as hard as I could, I shouted that she was a rotten bitch, words to that effect, I shoved her, so hard that she fell over. Then I . . . I kicked her a couple of times. I was . . . I was sobbing, not just with the . . . the sexual let-down, but with the humiliation of it. I looked down at her lying on the grass and her eyes were shining with triumph, and I realized that she must have planned the whole thing.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Oh God, I was so . . . so angry, so utterly frustrated. I think I kicked her again, and then I turned away and walked off, walked home. I heard her laughing, so I know she was alive when I left. But for years I’ve wondered whether maybe she collapsed and died after I’d gone, from my kicking her, or half-strangling her or something.’

  ‘But you must have known that wasn’t so.’

  ‘Why should I have?’

  ‘Because she was found inside that clump of brambles, not outside.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve never been entirely sure where she was found. Once I heard that she was dead, I tried never to think about her again.’ He smiles ruefully. ‘And utterly failed.’

  ‘The point is that after you’d gone, someone else must have moved her.’

  ‘Yes, but Alice, don’t you see? What terrifies me is the possibility that it was me who actually killed her.’ A spasm contorts his face and for a moment I see again the boy I once knew.

  ‘I don’t think you could have, Julian. Did you look back, did you see her get up?’

  ‘I didn’t look back at all. You can’t imagine how embarrassed and foolish I felt.’

  ‘Which is what she wanted.’

  ‘I suppose so. But on top of that, there’s the fact that it was probably my golf club which was used to kill her.’

  ‘You don’t know that. They never found the weapon.’

  ‘The wounds on her . . .’ He shudders slightly. ‘According to the local paper, they were consistent with a weapon like a golf club.’

  ‘Even so, it’s not your fault.’ Behind me, the boatman chortles at some witticism of the barman’s. ‘Did you see anyone else on your way back?’

  ‘Someone walking a dog, a couple of teenagers snogging under a tree, a man and woman climbing up the path to the top of the hill. And when I got nearer to your house, I met Orlando on his bike. Otherwise, nobody was around. The place was deserted.’

  ‘What about the police? They must have interviewed you.’

  ‘Of course they did. More than once.’

  ‘Didn’t they ask for an alibi?’

  ‘Yes. But it seemed fairly obvious that they couldn’t be sure when she left your house. I said I’d been on the beach for a bit, that I’d danced with various girls, I’d been in the dining room and out in the garden. There were so many people milling around that night that nobody could be sure who was where at any particular time.’

  ‘So you lied.’

  ‘Through my teeth. And please don’t think I’m proud of it. But I was so terrified that I’d be accused of murdering her. Until now, I’ve gone on being terrified, if you really want to know, though I realize that, firstly, I didn’t kill her, and secondly, nobody could pin anything on me if I had. But I can’t have been away from the party more than twenty or thirty minutes, And then I walked home with my brother Charlie, shortly after my mother left.’

  ‘Which Charlie corroborated?’ I hated the way I sounded like something out of a crime novel.

  ‘Of course – because it was true. The police believed everything I said because there were plenty of people to say they were pretty sure they’d seen me around more or less the whole time.’

  He stands up and stretches, then comes round the table and puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘I really have to go, Alice. But thank you for doing something which should have been done years ago.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘You’ve forced me to tell you what happened, to face up to the past. It’s immensely liberating. I suppose I ought to feel ashamed of myself, but I don’t.’

  ‘Ashamed of what?’

  He lifts his shoulders. ‘Lying to the police, kicking a girl – and she was such a little thing, wasn’t she? I’ve lived for years in terror that one day I’ll feel a hand on my shoulder and find myself accused of murder, and carted off to jail, unable to do a damn thing about it.’

  ‘Even though over the years you must have realized you had nothing to do with her death.’

  ‘That hasn’t stopped me feeling that in some way I was morally responsible, even if not actually so.’ And then he looks at me directly for the first time since he’d started talking, and smiles at me. ‘It sounds silly, really, but by telling you about it, someone who was there, someone who knew Nicola, I feel almost . . . reborn.’

  This rough-and-ready pub makes a strange confessional, I think, as the door opens to let in a waft of sea-flavoured air, and then closes again behind him. The question I have to ask myself is whether I believe him. I suspect that I do.

  I long for my own rebirthing.

  Crumpling my fish and chip newspaper and stowing it in the rubbish can under my kitchen sink, I make a mug of tea and go over to sit on my window-seat, looking out at the sea.

  Orlando. My beloved Orlando. Can he possibly be implicated? If I accept the version of events which Julian has just given me, then I also have to accept that he did indeed see Orlando cycling in the direction of the Secret Glade. What did he find when he got there, if he did get there? Can I really believe it possible that Orlando, of all people, could have killed Nicola?

  His story about her threat to lay waste to his special blackberry patch sounded such a Nicola kind of thing to say, and if he’d believed it, if he’d seen her go off with Julian in that direction, he might well have followed, if only to protect what, over the summer ripening, he must have come to consider, in some way, his own property. Had he found her there, in pain, perhaps, from Julian’s kicks, found her at his mercy, wanted to inflict some damage? Had he, too, seized her by her vulnerable neck, shaken her – ‘such a little thing’ – and found, to his horror, that he’d killed her? It sounds all too horrifyingly plausible.

  ELEVEN

  Do I wait for fate to intervene once again, or do I grab hold of the future? Be reactive, or proactive? In other words, do I bide my time, in the hope that sooner or later, I’ll encounter Louise Stone in some casual way, or should I boldly go and knock at her door?

  Outside my windows, the green has turned into a dusty plain reminiscent of the African veldt. The sun hangs like a golden clock face in a white-blue sky. Major de Grey’s garden is full of shrubs so parched that their dried-up leaves are falling fitfully to the baking soil in which they are planted. It is too hot to work, or even to think. I change into my swimsuit and sit on the shingle, plunging every now and then into a sea which has turned the unreal green of a travel-brochure photograph.

  After two days of dithering, while fate does nothing to help, I wait until dusk and then make my way to the North End. Although it is cooler after dark, there is no need for me to delay this visit until the light is fading, yet by doing so, I feel more secure, as though I am a creature of the night, whose natural habitat is the dank and gloom of a subterranean cave, a burrow in the ground.

  Eventually I find myself at Number Twelve, Fisher Street, in front o
f Louise’s racing-green front door. The curtains are not yet drawn, and when I glance through the window into the as yet unlit sitting room, I can see it is empty. Perhaps she’s out. I hope so because I can then further postpone this meeting. I tap the knocker, just to be sure.

  Footsteps approach along the narrow hall. They’re heavier than the quick brisk ones I associate with Louise and I surmise that the person now lifting the old-fashioned latch will prove to be the man I glimpsed when I last came down this street, some weeks earlier.

  I am right. My smile is ready when the door opens. He raises enquiring eyebrows. ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name’s Alice Beecham,’ I say.

  He frowns, as though wondering whether the name should register with him, and then decides it shouldn’t. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I wondered if I could have a word with Mrs Stone – Louise.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Er . . .’ I’m not prepared for this question. ‘She’ll know who I am.’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  He retreats down the passage. I hear voices, an angry exclamation, something being banged down on a table. A few minutes later he returns. ‘I suspect you’re going to try and rake over matters which we much prefer not to think about.’

  ‘Well, yes, maybe, but . . .’

  ‘In that case, you’ll have to forgive us if we appear uncooperative. However, since my wife seems to think you should come in, you’d better do so.’

  As I follow him, I try to digest the fact that this pleasant-looking man is Louise’s husband. Is this Geoffrey Farnham himself – Valerie’s father has told me that he has been released from prison – or has she remarried in the years since I left Shale? He reminds me very much of Mr Johnson, with the same open face, the same haunted eyes. He moves ahead of me into the sitting room, still familiar to me from the past. The wooden beam, now wreathed in pot-plant ivy, still holds up the ceiling at one end of the room, the walls are a simple cream, there are long curtains of ivory and oyster linen.

  Louise is sitting on a sofa covered in beige and piped in chocolate-brown. ‘Hello, Alice,’ she says, without smiling. ‘After we met the other day, I knew you would eventually show up here.’ She indicates the man now standing protectively beside her. ‘This is Nicola’s father.’ She looks up at him. ‘Darling, Alice is one of the two children who found her body.’