Losing Nicola

by Susan Moody

  He looks me over. ‘I’m sorry that had to happen,’ he says.

  ‘In fact, it was from Alice’s twelfth birthday party that Nicola disappeared.’

  ‘I remember you telling me about it,’ Farnham says. His expression is marginally less hostile. ‘You were by way of being Nicola’s closest friend down here, weren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What do you want from us?’ Louise asks. There is a smudge of pinkish lipstick on the rim of her glass, like half a kiss.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure. Any help you can give me. Any . . . clarification. Illumination. Something like that.’

  She regards me steadily, without speaking. Then she nods. Sighs. ‘I suppose it’s about time.’

  ‘You don’t have to go into all this,’ Farnham tells her. ‘It’s done. It’s finished with.’

  ‘Is it? I don’t think so. Not for any of us.’

  I regret having come here. ‘I’ll go,’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t have come in the first place.’

  ‘No, Alice, wait. If anyone has the right to hear what really happened, to hear what we have to say, you do. But it won’t be easy; we may need a drink to help us through.’ She lays a hand affectionately on her husband’s arm. ‘Would you mind, darling?’

  Farnham retreats to a side-table at the end of the room where bottles and glasses wait. Without asking what I’d like, he pours gin-and-tonics for all three of us, slides a lemon slice into each glass, and hands them to us. ‘Right,’ he says, ‘Let’s get it over with, shall we?’ He’s clearly a man used to making decisions, to being in command.

  ‘Alice?’ Louise looks at me.

  I take a deep breath. Embarrassed by the sympathetic manner with which she waits for me to speak, I stumble through my now-familiar recitation about my inability to move onward, my urgent need for some kind of resolution.

  ‘I apologize for bringing this up,’ I finish lamely. ‘It must be terribly painful for you both.’

  Louise nods. ‘It is.’

  I try not to stare too hard at Farnham, who has seated himself close to his wife on the sofa. This man killed a girl by pulling a scarf around her neck so tightly that she strangled to death. I wonder whether he heard the small bones in Valerie Johnson’s neck snap. I wonder if he felt pity as her dying fingers clutched at the suffocating ligature. He seems so ordinary, yet he must surely have nightmares about those brief minutes in which he lost control and an innocent child was murdered. Given his war record, perhaps killing came more easily to him than to others. But that is not my present concern. ‘It’s painful for me, too, believe me.’

  Husband and wife glance at each other as I lurch to a halt. Neither says anything for a moment, as though they are collecting their ammunition, armouring themselves against me. Louise says finally, faintly, ‘The shock of finding her must have been . . .’ Staring down at her drink, she says, ‘I always remember your faces, that afternoon. Yours and Orlando’s. So white and pinched. I think I knew then what had happened’ She grimaces. ‘You were far too young to have been through such an appalling experience.’

  ‘I feel that the more I can find out,’ I say, ‘the clearer it will all become. And that once I can look at it without flinching, the nightmares will go.’ And with them, I hope, though I do not say, the inanition which plagues my inner self, holds me mired in the past.

  Farnham leans towards me, hands clasped between his knees. ‘Maybe we should start with the background which led to me being sent to prison for murder, and why my family moved down here in the first place,’ he says.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I enjoyed my job,’ he begins. ‘I was a good headmaster. The kids liked me, I liked them. If you’re at all conversant with the circumstances surrounding the death of Valerie Johnson . . .’ He waits for a moment, and I nod my awareness of the case. ‘. . . you will be aware that a girl pupil, Barbara-Jane Finch came forward to say that I had spoken to her suggestively, or inappropriately, which added to the prosecution’s case. And, of course, I confessed to the crime. Open and shut case, send him down, next case, please.’

  ‘I know all that.’

  ‘What you may not know is that a few years ago, Barbara-Jane Finch got married and eventually had a baby, a girl. She and her husband then went to the police and withdrew every word of her testimony at my trial.’

  ‘She said that even though her evidence hadn’t been crucial,’ put in Louise, ‘nonetheless she’d been wrestling with her conscience for years, that she’d been terrified she’d be sent to prison herself, for perjury, and it was only when she had a daughter of her own that she realized she couldn’t keep silent any longer, she had to put the record straight.’

  ‘Of course it was far too late for me by then, and besides, my wife and I weren’t anxious to have the facts made public.’

  ‘What facts were those?’

  ‘It turned out . . .’ Head bent, he clears his throat while Louise puts her hand on his knee, murmurs some sympathetic endearment. ‘According to Barbara-Jane Finch, our daughter had bullied her into making a false statement, threatened her with whatever kind of reprisal girls do threaten each other with, in order to strengthen the case against me.’

  ‘Nicola did that?’ I stare at him, disbelieving. ‘To her own father?’

  ‘Hard to take in, isn’t it? So devious.’

  ‘So downright wicked,’ says Louise.

  ‘But . . . but why?’

  ‘Self-preservation, I should imagine.’ Farnham’s voice is dry. ‘Though it was hardly necessary since I’d already confessed to a murder I didn’t commit. My wife and I had decided, right from the start, that it was better me than the real culprit.’

  ‘And who was that?’

  Geoffrey looks at me in surprise. ‘I would have thought it was obvious.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Before I can process the nebulous possibilities in my head, Louise says, ‘Nicola, of course.’

  ‘Nicola?’ I return to that distant summer and try to rearrange it. ‘Nicola?’ Nicola had killed Valerie? It was because of Nicola that her father was given a twenty-year prison sentence, because of Nicola that Louise had to move away from her home, set up a new life under a different name and without a much-loved husband, because of Nicola that Simon was forced to start his life over again? I think back to those years, Simon’s sullen silence, Louise’s brave attempts at normality. I can see that over both of them must have hung the constant fear that somehow, some time, their true identities would be discovered. ‘She actually murdered her best friend?’

  ‘Even after all these years, it’s hard to accept, but yes, she did.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Neither could we. At least . . .’ Louise glances at her husband. ‘. . . not at first.’

  ‘Do Valerie’s parents know?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Farnham. ‘As far as I’m aware, nobody does. Except us. And the police. And now you.’

  ‘Certainly we’ve never told the Johnsons,’ explains Louise. ‘We talked it over and decided it was better if they went on believing Geoffrey had done it, than if they were told that Nicola, the little girl they’d known since nursery school days, was a killer.’ She shrugs. ‘I don’t know . . . maybe we were wrong. But having discussed it for hours, that’s the conclusion we came to.’

  ‘But the . . . murder.’ I cannot process this information. ‘How on earth could such a thing have happened?’

  ‘It was just the latest – and infinitely the worst, of course – in a never-ending line of problems with Nicola.’ Louise sounded weary. ‘We long ago realized that just as some babies are born with a cleft palate or a hearing deficiency, so our child was born with a defective sense of morals.’

  ‘She was a premature baby, wasn’t she?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Louise seems surprised that I know this. ‘Perhaps she didn’t have time to develop a conscience. Today I imagine she’d be diagnosed as a sociopath.’

  ‘She
was an almost textbook example,’ says Farnham. ‘Believe me, I had plenty of time to bone up on the subject. Like most of them, even from earliest childhood, she displayed all the classic features. The charm, the cunning, the manipulative behaviour, the domineering hostility, the constant lying.’

  ‘The worst thing, as far as I was concerned,’ said her mother, ‘was the complete lack of shame or remorse, if she was caught out. Even when confronted with conclusive evidence about something she’d done, she twisted her way out of every accusation, blamed everyone but herself. And as for any kind of empathy with the people she took advantage of, like poor Valerie, she simply despised them for being weak enough to suffer.’

  Painfully I remember the look on Miss Vane’s face as she opened the packet containing the corsets. We had all been embarrassed by Nicola’s cruelty to someone whom, even then, we recognized in some indefinable way as weaker than ourselves, but none of us had made any objection, about that or about her other unkindnesses. None of us, except Orlando.

  ‘And once she started her periods,’ Louise says matter-of-factly, ‘there was the constant worry that she’d get herself pregnant.’ She presses her lips together, as though trying to hold back tears. ‘As well as everything else, she was . . . horribly promiscuous.’

  ‘Especially with older men,’ Farnham said grimly.

  Louise’s mouth quivers. ‘We tried,’ she whispers. ‘We tried so hard to love her. To accept her. To see her as disadvantaged, rather than as . . . evil.’

  Farnham takes her hand in his and holds it tightly. Both of them seem utterly spent, as though the strain of recalling those years of raising Nicola, added to her subsequent violent death, is proving to be too much for them to handle.

  ‘How did she . . . what happened with Valerie Johnson?’

  ‘Apparently the poor child had a new scarf, a very pretty silk one which her doting parents had just given her. Nicola wanted it, but for once Valerie dug her feet in and refused to hand it over.’ Louise covers her mouth with her hand. ‘I hate talking about this. I hate remembering that awful awful time.’

  ‘If you’d rather I went . . .’ My head feels as though it might explode with shock. I try very hard not to imagine what happened in Nicola’s bedroom, but nonetheless, scraps of horrified speculation wing through my brain.

  ‘I hate the fact that our daughter was responsible for someone’s death.’ Louise has not heard me. Her voice has risen.

  ‘Calm down, darling.’ Farnham gives her arm a little shake.

  ‘That she actually killed someone.’ Louise is breathing hard. ‘Someone who was supposed to be her best friend. Over a scarf.’

  ‘As far as we were able to make out from Nicola’s hysterical account of what happened,’ says Farnham, ‘when none of her usual techniques of persuasion worked on Valerie, she more or less said, all right, keep your stupid scarf, grabbed at the ends and pulled it as tightly as she could round Valerie’s neck.’

  ‘I don’t think . . . I don’t want to think that she meant to kill Valerie,’ Louise says. ‘If I really thought that, I’d . . .’

  ‘But having done so,’ continues her husband, ‘she came down the stairs from her bedroom, pretending to talk to Valerie, then pretended to see her to the front door, shutting it hard so her mother would hear her and simply assume that Valerie had gone home.’

  ‘Then she came into my office, lounged about a bit, as she so often did, announced that she was bored and reminded me that I’d promised to take her shopping. Which indeed I had. So the two of us went on the Tube to South Kensington.’ Louisa looks at her husband.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’

  The two of them fall silent. Louise puts her drink down and closes her eyes. Farnham breathes deeply through his nose, relaxes his shoulders.

  Seconds tick by. I say nothing. What is there to say? I wish I were somewhere else. Their grief and pain sit beside us in this room where once their daughter existed.

  Finally, Farnham starts again. ‘When they got back, Nicola went up to her room where she “discovered” the body of her friend, and started screaming her head off.’ He presses a hand to his forehead. ‘I saw some terrible sights during the war, unspeakable sights, but I have never been so shocked and appalled as when we ran up the stairs and found poor little Valerie lying dead on the floor. I went through some brutal campaigns, but the sight of that child’s body . . .’ He falters, ‘. . . so cold, already stiffening . . . even after all this time, it’s still almost beyond belief.’

  ‘And Nicola went shopping . . .’ I can hardly hear Louise’s words.

  ‘Of course she tried to pretend that Valerie must have come back to the house and been killed by an intruder, or even that the poor child had strangled herself, but in the end, it all came out.’

  ‘And then we had to work out what to do for the best.’

  ‘The best,’ repeats Farnham. He slowly shakes his head. ‘If that’s what you want to call it.’

  Louise sits up straighter, presses herself against the back of the sofa. ‘You probably think we sound heartless,’ she says, ‘But I have to be honest . . .’

  ‘We’ve had a long time to face up to our feelings.’

  ‘And the fact is, that when Nicola died, atrocious and heart-rending as that was, it was, quite simply, a relief.’

  Her husband nods. His hand grips the stem of his glass, knuckles straining against the skin that covers them.

  ‘I’m ashamed even to have thought it, let alone to be saying it aloud, but it was.’ Louise looks at me directly. ‘If you really want to know, Alice, by the time she died, she’d done so much damage to us all that I . . . I almost hated her.’

  ‘Darling, you didn’t.’

  ‘I did. I really did. What she did to you . . . to Simon . . . to me . . .’ She chokes slightly on the words, and falls silent.

  They seem so distressed that I feel I ought to leave, but before I can get to my feet, Farnham has risen and is refilling our glasses.

  I try to digest what I’ve heard. Farnham is, of course, exonerated from any part in the murder of his own daughter because at the time he was safely incarcerated in one of Her Majesty’s prisons. But it stills seems feasible that Louise could have been driven to murder, especially after what I’ve just been told. But she would surely not be talking so freely to me if she were guilty.

  We take our fresh drinks and eye each other. Despite their apparent candour, I am still wary. After all, they’ve had twenty years to refine their story, to get it straight. I’d already noted that he was a man used to command. He was also a man used to winning, and he had been spectacularly defeated by Nicola. Even if he had chosen, for all the right reasons, to take the rap for her, he must have resented being a loser. Is it too far-fetched to wonder if, through connections made in prison, he could have organized Nicola’s murder, taken revenge on his daughter? I see again the moonlit garden at Glenfield, Nicola’s surprise as she half-turned towards the voice that had spoken to her from behind the hedge. Reckless, amoral, daring, it wouldn’t have taken much persuasion for her to go off with a stranger, especially if he had mentioned her father. Perhaps money was offered, or sex asked for in exchange for a sum far larger than Bertram Yelland could afford.

  My brains spools through the last half hour or so. When I arrived, Farnham had warned me that they might seem uncooperative. But they have been quite the opposite. Almost too much so. Almost too eager to tell me their story, a story which, looking back at the events of that distant summer, I find completely convincing. Perhaps that’s what they want. Perhaps by appearing to be totally open with me, and also by showing themselves in a less-than-positive light, they hope to deflect me from further enquiry, persuade me that what they are telling me is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But sad though it was, Valerie Johnson’s murder is not why I am here.

  ‘You were let out early,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, but on parole.’

  ‘How come?’

 
‘What with Barbara-Jane Finch’s statement to the police, and those letters which kept—’

  Although he is not a man you would normally interrupt, I do so now. ‘Letters?’

  ‘Some nutter,’ Farnham says. ‘After Nicola’s death, these letters started arriving. Written to the police, the barrister who’d taken on my case, even me. All saying the same thing: that I wasn’t guilty of Valerie’s murder, that the letter writer knew who’d done it, that at the earliest possible moment the truth would be divulged. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Letters like that are always the same, full of assertions but without any solid proof to back them up.’

  ‘Who was sending them?’

  ‘Nobody knew. The police never took them seriously, just buried them in some file or other. After all, why should they bother, when they already had a clear confession of guilt?’

  ‘When Barbara-Jane came forward, Geoffrey’s barrister wanted to push for a retrial, on the grounds of reasonable doubt, a confession made for compassionate reasons, and so on,’ says Louise. ‘But Geoffrey wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘Why not? Nicola was dead by then, she couldn’t have been harmed.’

  ‘But Simon could. He was newly married. Can you imagine the fuss there’d have been, a father who’d served years in jail to protect a daughter who was subsequently murdered herself? Can you imagine the press on his doorstep, the notoriety? It wasn’t fair on him and his wife.’

  ‘So you just sat there in prison?’

  ‘No. Although I insisted that I didn’t want any kind of retrial, my barrister made representations, there was a judicial review, I gave a new statement about what had really happened. Barbara-Jane, bless her, was insistent on her own new version of the truth. They even managed to find those letters mouldering away in the police archives, not that they could be counted as evidence. In the end, they quietly let me out.’