Losing Nicola

by Susan Moody

  I rise to my feet. ‘Thank you for telling me all this,’ I say. It is only as I’m about to walk out of the room into the passage leading to the front door that I realize that none of this has any bearing on what I want to know.

  I turn to face the two of them. ‘But who killed Nicola?’ I ask.

  ‘Good question. Excellent question,’ says Geoffrey. ‘I really wish I knew.’

  Again Louise looks at her husband, as though seeking his approval for what she is about to say. ‘We thought . . .’ She presses her thumb and first two fingers against her forehead. ‘God, how could we have considered such a thing? We wondered whether it could possibly have been Simon.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He resented the move down here, he hated the change in our circumstances. It was just the wrong time for him, and he never really made friends at school here, or fitted into the local teenage scene. And he never believed for a single moment that his father had killed Valerie.’

  ‘He’s told us since then that he knew immediately – not that we ever discussed it - that his sister was responsible,’ Farnham says.

  ‘For a while, I did wonder if she could have said or done something, the night of your birthday party, that just pushed him over the top.’

  ‘But in the end, it wasn’t him, couldn’t have been.’ Farnham gives a grim chuckle. ‘He turned out to have a watertight alibi – if a whiskey hangover can be called watertight!’

  ‘Apparently he walked Rosemary Mitchell home,’ Louise explains. ‘Her parents were out at some RAF reunion, in London, and she and Simon got stuck into Squadron-Leader Mitchell’s whiskey. The two of them eventually passed out on the floor of the Mitchells’ sitting room and were found there around two o’clock in the morning, dead drunk.’

  I remember the hangdog expression on Simon’s face the next day, as Louise talked to the police in our drawing room. The smell of him, which I now realize was whisky fumes. But if it wasn’t him, it could still have been his mother. Especially after the feelings she has just confessed to.

  She comes over to me as I stand hesitant, one hand on the door frame. As though she can read my mind, she says, ‘And if you’re wondering whether I had anything to do with Nicola’s death, I will tell you frankly, Alice, there were many many times – God forgive me! – that I seriously considered it. Not in anger, but in fear. What harm would she go on to do when she was an adult? What kind of a life could she expect to live in a world where she wouldn’t get away with things as easily as she had so far? Wouldn’t it be kinder simply to press a pillow to her face, or hold her under water when she was in the bath? But in spite of everything, she was my daughter, the darling little cherub whom we nearly lost at the very beginning of her life, the red-haired baby we all doted on. When it came down to it, I knew I couldn’t possibly have committed such a grossly unnatural act.’

  Sitting on the window-seat of my flat, I realize that the baggage Nicola’s family drags around is far heavier than my own. They are shackled by it until the grave receives them, with no possibility of ever shedding the burden. Whereas I . . .

  I am luckier than they are. Dimly I perceive a possibility of emancipation, which they can never achieve. An unaccustomed calm fills me. The events of long ago now seem less of a burden; they no longer drag me down quite so deeply. On the horizon, the very last of the daylight streaks the blazing sky with scarlet and flushes the sea crimson. In a band of blue-gold sky, a single star gleams like a promise.

  From here I can see the new-built pier. So much of the post-war years has been swept away, subsumed in the bright freedoms of the Sixties and Seventies, and I can’t help wondering how much effect the war had on the children who were raised in its shadow. Despite the dullness and the routine, there was so little in our lives of what could be called ordinary; the times themselves were extraordinary. Perhaps Nicola was simply more affected than most by the casual brutalities of war. We grew up inured to death and destruction, even though it was more as a concept than as something particular. We read books, saw films, looked at comics, all dealing with the ruthless elimination of the enemy. We took blood, atrocity, in our stride. The broken pier, the landmine collecting-box, Jewish refugees; we were never clear of it. By then the horrors of the concentration camps had been revealed to a revolted world. Nicola was older than I was, and far more aware, and perhaps that, rather than moral dysfunction, had helped to shape her into what she became.

  TWELVE

  Orlando sits opposite me, his face glowing in the dusky light. The room is lit only with candles, and in the flickering glow, he seems leaner, browner, more taut than I’m used to seeing him.

  He has come by his own invitation, telephoning two days ago to ask if he might stay for a day or two, until after Vi Sheffield’s party. ‘And your birthday, too,’ he said. ‘Is there anything you’d particularly like?’

  ‘Just yourself.’

  ‘Ah.’

  As always, I wondered at the telepathic link between us. He knew I needed to speak to him, and was probably aware of what – yet again – I wanted to discuss. Was he also aware that I am terrified in case I discover, by confession or intuition, that he is the one who killed Nicola?

  She links us together but at the same time keeps us apart. If I could prise her from her entrenched position in our lives, I know that at last we could set right whatever it is that seems to have gone awry between us.

  ‘Are you coming alone?’ There’d been a crack in my voice.

  ‘Why should you think otherwise?’

  ‘I wondered if you and the blonde flautist . . .’

  ‘I’m not quite at the stage of introducing her to the family,’ he said.

  He has brought wine, which we continue to sip after dinner. A melancholy has settled upon us both, although we have resolutely discussed only the present. Before his arrival, however, with much trepidation I had gone through what I perceived as happening on the night of my twelfth birthday party, placing him at the centre. I did this over and over again, and each time, the pieces of the puzzle seemed welded closer and closer together, until the whole scenario appeared completely seamless. My heart quails. If I discover that he was in some way connected to or even responsible for Nicola’s death, how will I feel?

  What would I do?

  If I say nothing, we can continue as we have for so many years, closer than twins yet constantly divided, though it is hard to say by what. If I say nothing about Nicola tonight, then he will never bring it up. Only a few weeks ago he’d told me that he never thinks of it any more, it’s long gone, though I wonder how true that is. I remember his agonized face – ‘I shall never, ever forget this, as long as I live.’ and I know he was right then. But over these summer weeks, if nothing else, I have come to a greater acceptance. I see that you cannot disregard the past. Nor can you reconstruct it. In many ways it has a stronger hold than the present.

  Leave it lay, I tell myself. It was a favourite phrase of Allen’s and I have always admired its lazy tolerance of that which cannot be put right, or is not worth bothering about. Leave it lay . . .

  ‘Orlando,’ I say, and watch his face stiffen, his eyes grow wary. ‘Orlando . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just tell me, and I’ll never ask again, I swear it. I’ll never mention any of it, not ever.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Alice . . .’

  ‘Was it you, Orlando? Did you kill her?’

  ‘What would you do if I said yes? What difference would it make?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Yet there is no question that a difference of some kind would be made.

  ‘She’s dead, Alice.’ His voice drops in a comic old-crone tremble: ‘Dead and gone these twenty years, m’dear.’

  ‘Did you?’

  He looks defeated. ‘Oh, Alice . . .’

  ‘Did you?’

  For a long moment, he gazes out of the window. He pulls back his shoulders. Sets down his wine glass. Finally he speaks. ‘For a long, long time,’ he says qui
etly, ‘I almost thought that maybe I had. I wanted to so badly. Particularly that night, when she tried to sabotage your party – oh, darling Alice, when I saw your face crumple, all your confidence just ooze away, I could so easily have throttled her.’ He reaches out to me. ‘You were such an insecure little thing. So nervous.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Remember how difficult you found it to get to sleep? When we still shared a bedroom, I used to try everything I could to stay awake until you’d finally gone to sleep, so that you wouldn’t be left alone in the dark. You had black shadows under your eyes for years. And the nightmares . . .’

  ‘That’s now,’ I say.

  ‘And then. Don’t you remember? About soldiers rushing into the house through the windows, guns firing?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ I lie.

  ‘Anyway, on top of everything else . . .’ He stops.

  After a pause, I say, ‘Anyway what?’

  He twists his neck about, tossing his head like a horse. It’s a gesture I recognize, signifying unease. ‘The night of your party . . .’ he says. ‘. . . you weren’t around, but I was standing in the drive – I forget why now – and suddenly Nasty Nicola jumped out at me, yelling something. She was so close that she actually knocked me over. I could feel the gravel on my cheek, and I was terrified in case my school trousers were torn. They were brand new and very expensive. Fiona would have been furious. The worst thing was that she was wearing this horrible clown mask, white, with black crosses on the eyes, and a huge red mouth.’ He shudders. ‘She was a vile girl.’

  ‘What on earth did she do that for?’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe she was hoping to scare me to death. Maybe it was revenge for something unforgivably rude I’d said to her earlier in the evening. Or maybe it was just her usual generalized malice.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What could I do? I struggled to my feet, wiped away a surreptitious tear of sheer terror, and pretended I couldn’t have cared less. I would have strangled her, I think, if Julian hadn’t been standing nearby, sniggering, his zits aglow with sexual repression. Or at least hit her. Knocked her down. I went back into the house, washed the dirt off my face and carried on with my evening.’

  ‘And later?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did you leave the house?’

  ‘Yes. I went down to the beach with some of the others. Sat in the garden swigging some of Callum’s beer and hoping Fiona wouldn’t see me.’

  ‘Did you see Nicola leave?’

  ‘From my position cowering behind a leaf, hoping she wouldn’t attack me again, do you mean? Yes. Her and Julian. They went off towards the cliffs.’

  ‘To the Secret Glade?’

  ‘So I presumed.’

  ‘Did you go after them?’

  He twists his head again.

  ‘I know you did, Orlando. Julian met you, when he was coming back along the front.’

  ‘All right. Yes, I did. I went up to the Secret Glade. Julian, obviously, wasn’t helping her, since he was back at Glenfield, but she could still have been stripping my blackberry bushes – our bushes. It was very bright, a full moon, if you remember.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  He presses his lips firmly together, as though he does not want the incriminating words to emerge. My heart sinks, drops, falls in pieces. ‘Oh God, Orlando, what did you do?’

  He shakes his head. He gets up and fetches another bottle of wine from the rack, opens it and refills our glasses, while I watch him with growing dismay. My darling Orlando, a killer?

  ‘What I did . . .’ His voice shakes slightly. ‘What I did . . . was nothing.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t kill Nicola? I never really thought—’

  ‘What I did was . . .’ His expression is one of distaste, self-dislike. ‘. . . I stood by and – I think, I believe, I have always been afraid that – I watched her being murdered.’

  ‘What?’ I see the black shadow of a boy advance across the moonlit grass towards the blackberry bushes. I see an arm lift, hear a stifled terrified scream, a thud, blows raining down on defenseless flesh. See the boy pausing, frowning, wondering what to do, what he is listening to, realizing, at last, with terror and with impotence.

  ‘Alice, why do you think I’ve never wanted to talk about this? Do you think I’m proud of myself?’

  ‘Are . . . are you sure?’

  ‘Not one hundred per cent. But ninety per cent.’ He begins to breathe heavily. His nostrils are pinched and white.

  ‘What happened?’ My own breathing matches his. We are joined at the hip, at the head, at the heart. What happens to him happens to me as well. I remember Wuthering Heights, Cathy’s passionate, despairing cry: he is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

  ‘Jesus, Alice. You should have been there. Or, let me rephrase that, thank God you weren’t.’ He rests his elbow on the table, drops his head into his hand.

  ‘Tell me, Orlando,’ I say, when he says nothing further.

  ‘I went up along the green lane,’ he says heavily. ‘I could see her, the glimmer of her white blouse, between the trees. She was so small. I think she called someone’s name, softly. And then the outline of a person stepped out from the cover of the brambles.’

  ‘A person?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell. I’m pretty certain it was a man, or male, certainly, but it could have been a woman, a biggish woman.’

  ‘Like,’ I ask tentatively, ‘Miss Vane?’

  ‘That sort of size, I suppose. Whoever it was grabbed Nicola’s arm, pulled her back behind the bushes. I knew there was something wrong. It was like that . . . incident we were unlucky enough to witness with Bertram Yelland, though at first I thought it was just Nicola turning tricks again for money. But I gradually realized this was something much more secretive and sinister than that. In fact, I’d started to cross the grass towards them, to see if there was something I could do, when I heard her give a little scream, almost a yelp, which was immediately cut off. As though he’d clapped a hand over her mouth or something.’

  ‘Orlando, this is horrible.’

  ‘It gets worse, darling. I thought, I’m only a boy, what can I do? And I thought of all the terrible things she’d done and I hesitated, and that’s when I saw this . . . this hand come up and then down again. Up and down. And each time there was this terrible awful sort of thwack. Awful, Alice, awful. He must have been using a golf club – I could see the moonlight glinting on the shank of it.’

  ‘A golf club?’ Julian’s putter, fortuitously dropped as he rushed away.

  ‘Unless he was going equipped, as the police say. But Alice, I knew what was happening, I was perfectly well aware that he was . . . he was killing her, or at the least very severely assaulting her and I did absolutely nothing to try and save her.’

  ‘What could you have done?’

  ‘That poor little girl.’

  ‘Nicola, a poor little girl?’

  ‘No one deserves to die like that. And I just let it happen. I was too frightened to do anything. Maybe if I’d called out, he would have let her go. But maybe he’d have come after me next, attacked me. And do you know what in a way was the most bizarre thing of all?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There was a dog barking somewhere, almost in time to the blows. Thwack, bark, thwack, bark . . . something so ordinary, combined with something so horribly abnormal.’ He sighed heavily. ‘So I took off. I just turned and ran down the lane, back to the sea. I didn’t do anything to help her. I’ve had to live with that appalling act of cowardice all these years, and I grow more and more ashamed.’

  I shake my head, cover his hand with mine. There is nothing I can say to comfort him. Not meeting his eyes, I ask, ‘Did you see anyone else around when you were walking towards the Secret Glade?’

  ‘Apart from Julian, no.’

  ‘He said something about a couple going up the hill.’

  ‘They were
n’t around when I got there.’

  ‘And someone walking a dog, some lovers kissing under a tree.’

  ‘I didn’t see any of them.’

  ‘And there was only the one person involved?’

  ‘As far as I’m aware.’ He sighs. ‘And the next day, when we went up there to pick blackberries, I almost couldn’t face it, except I knew you’d start asking questions I wasn’t prepared to answer. I looked for the body when we got to the big bramble patch, and there wasn’t anything, not a sign of anything. I was so damned relieved. I thought maybe I’d dreamed it, or misinterpreted the situation – and then we went into the clearing and . . . oh God, it was so awful.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell the police all this?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know then and I still don’t.’

  But I do. I remember his terror, his plea for us not to say anything about what we had discovered. He was a boy who had always read too much, and too widely, who knew about miscarriages of justice, about police intimidation, about borstals, bullies, death and sin and retribution, adults who wouldn’t listen. As a chorister, he would have regularly listened to the dire warnings of the Old Testament God. He would know that the wages of sin is death. He was too clever not to be aware that sins of omission can be as evil as sins of commission.

  We stare sombrely at each other across the dinner table, our gaze shadowed.

  Do I believe him? Trust him?

  All my life I have done so. In spite of what he’s told me, I can see no reason to change now.

  ‘It doesn’t solve the question of who did kill her,’ I say, some hours later. We have cleared the table, tidied up, strolled beside the sea for a while, dropped into a pub for a final whiskey. Now we are both showered and in our dressing gowns, as we so often used to be when we were children.

  ‘Does it matter?’ says Orlando. ‘As long as it wasn’t me?’

  I contemplate him for a long moment. Consider what he has just said. Is this the secret fear that I have been carrying inside my head for so long, that it was? Until the last few days I would have sworn that I never for a single moment thought that it could possibly have been him, despite the hostility he had for Nicola.