“Yes.” A faraway look came into my father’s eyes. “So he did.”
“Michael Lanyon.”
“I know his name, boy. I know it well.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” Why hadn’t it occurred to me sooner? That’s what Nicky must have been thinking, as he watched the grand and wealthy people admiring each other on the lawn. That they could have been his friends, attending a party at his house, eating his food, drinking his champagne. But for his father’s conviction for the murder of Joshua Carnoweth. Because the law doesn’t allow a murderer to profit from his crime by inheriting his victim’s estate. Though it does allow his son to be ordered off what would otherwise be his property -without compunction.
“What’s funny?”
“How things turn out.”
Dad’s potting went off the boil after that, but mine did too, so he still won comfortably. We went back to the lounge, where Mum had fallen asleep, and Trevor was swiftly volunteered to drive them home.
After they’d gone, I planned to stage a speedy retreat to bed. But Pam insisted I have some coffee with her, and somehow I felt sure it wasn’t for the pleasure of comparing notes on Tabitha’s going-away outfit.
“Trevor told me about Nicky.”
“Ah. Did he?”
“What’s he doing in Truro?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“He was your friend.”
“You make that sound like an accusation.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. I’m tired and … I wouldn’t want anything to mar the day.”
“Nothing has marred it.”
“No, but… Was it a coincidence, do you think? Him showing up here this afternoon.”
“Not sure. He said he’d read about the event.”
She frowned. “That must be the piece in last week’s West Briton. Mum and Dad’s golden wedding tied to some free publicity about our reception facilities. Trevor thought it was a good idea.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Well, they hadn’t actually got to the day then, had they? And Tabs and Dominic … I just thought it could have been better left till afterwards.” She sighed. “I don’t believe in tempting providence.”
“Don’t worry. It looks like providence has resisted temptation.”
“Let’s hope so.” She gazed at me with sisterly concern. “Was it a shock, seeing him after all these years?”
“Naturally.”
“How did he look?”
“Rough.”
“How did he seem?”
“Confused. Fuddled. Distressed.”
“Not all there, Trevor reckoned.”
“Maybe not.”
“Where’s he living now?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Nor why he’s come back?”
“No,” I lied solemnly. “Not a hint.”
I didn’t dream about Nicky that night, which was a victory in itself. I slept soundly in the room I’d occupied when we moved into Tredower House early in 1948. It was a sentimental gesture on Pam’s part to allocate it to me. She wasn’t to know I’d have preferred a room with fewer footholds in the past.
When I woke, early, to birdsong and the traffic less hush of Sunday morning, I found myself recalling the day of the move from Crescent Road. Gran had planned it like a military campaign and must have been pleased by how smoothly it went. She’d had long enough to refine her plans, of course. She’d known we’d end up there since Uncle Joshua’s death the previous August. Assuming the man he’d willed the house to was convicted of his murder, as in due course he was.
It was then already nearly six months since I’d last seen Nicky. Six months that were to stretch to thirty-four years, thin and hard, across our adolescence and adulthood. Even then, he was lost to me. And I was glad. It meant I could do what everybody wanted me to do: forget him.
Looking back, I could forgive my behaviour. The enormity of murder the black stain of my friend’s vicarious part in it would have suborned most eleven-year-olds. Especially when my family and half of Truro seemed so happy to fasten guilt by association on all the Lanyons, whatever their age. But that wouldn’t do any more. I was no longer a child. I’d had all my adult life to track down Nicky and learn if I could help him cope with having a murderer for a father. But I hadn’t.
Instead, I’d let him track me down.
I took a shower, put some clothes on and walked out into the grounds, confident that nobody else would be up and about so early. The marquee was still in place. The lawn was littered with paper serviettes, discarded cocktail sticks, cigarette butts, champagne corks and miniature drifts of confetti blown across from the drive in the course of the night. The caterers would be back later to clear up, but for the moment everything was still and desolate, yet strangely peaceful.
I found myself wishing that Nicky would arrive now, when I was prepared for him and free to speak as I wanted to, when there was nobody to object or interfere. I followed the path the long way round the lawn towards the spot where I’d seen him the previous afternoon, hoping somehow that he’d come back and was waiting to give me a second chance.
It wasn’t much of a hope, more a fantasy really. Life doles out second chances with a sparing hand. I knew that. It’s why I started in surprise when I first made out the figure beneath the horse chestnut tree.
I raised my hand and quickened my pace, smiling uncertainly. But there was no response, and as I neared the top of the rise between us, I saw why. More clearly with every hurrying step. There was somebody there, dressed like Nicky. He wasn’t standing, and he wasn’t swinging either.
He was hanging by a single length of rope from the bough I’d seen Nicky stretch his hands towards. Hanging with arms limp, head bowed and feet dangling.
CHAPTER TWO
I could see the crown of the horse chestnut tree, green and sleepy in the thickening sunlight, from my chair near the tall windows of the lounge. Not the branch scored by the rope, nor the bosky patch below, where they’d zipped Nicky into his plastic shroud. Just the dense green cumulus of the big old tree we’d climbed in and knocked conkers from and swung beneath in heedless childhood days. My gaze rested on it with my memory, while in the present metal chinked on metal as the pink and gold marquee slowly came down and Detective Sergeant Collins laboriously checked the facts one more time.
We’re sure it is Nicholas Lanyon, are we?” Our certainty on the point, given that we admitted he’d been beyond our ken for more than thirty years, clearly puzzled him. “Mrs. Rutherford?”
“Yes,” said Pam. “I mean, that is, I haven’t actually ‘
“The dead man is Nicky Lanyon,” I put in. “You can take my word for it.”
“For the moment, we have to, sir. He didn’t seem to be carrying any identification. In fact, he didn’t seem to be carrying anything at all.”
“No money?”
“Less than two pounds in loose change.”
“What did I say?” remarked Trevor gloomily. “Down and out. There’s your motive, I suppose.”
“But why come here, sir? That’s what I don’t understand. You said his family left Truro years ago.”
“Thirty-four years ago,” I softly specified. “If he was planning to kill himself, coming back here to do it makes perfect sense.”
“Chris,” pleaded Pam, ‘do we really need to bother the sergeant with all that?”
“I should think he’d want to be forewarned of the interest the press will take in this.”
“Minimal, I’d guess, sir. Suicide’s not ‘
“Murder, Sergeant. That’s why they’ll be interested. Nicky Lanyon’s father and another man murdered the owner of this house in 1947.”
Collins frowned. “In that case, you’re probably right. Hanged, were they?”
“Nicky’s father was. Enough to start the crime correspondents rooting through the archives, do you think?”
“More than likely, sir. Any idea at all about next of kin?”
“Nicky said his mother was dead.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
“None living.”
“Anybody in Truro who might still have been in touch with him?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“Hold on,” said Pam. “Wasn’t there an aunt?”
“Yes,” I responded, amazed for a moment at how easily and completely I’d forgotten. “Nicky’s mother had a sister who married into a farming family down on the Roseland the Jagos. He used to spend a week with them every summer. I… went with him one year.”
“Then you’ll know where we can find them.”
“Yes.” My eyes focused on the horse chestnut tree again. “I know.”
Detective Sergeant Collins looked as if he hadn’t even been born in (1947. No wonder the name Lanyon meant nothing to him. It was so long ago. But not as long ago as the start of it all. You had to go back much further for that. To the turn of the century and beyond. To a time when Truro Cathedral was only half built, a scaffolded giant slowly taking shape in the heart of the city it would eventually tower over, an Anglican cuckoo swelling and soaring in a nest of Methodism.
There was a framed photograph of the west front of the cathedral circa 1900 hanging in the hotel bar. It showed the western half of the building as no more than a shell, with the stone masons and surveyors pausing in their toil to gaze down from their lofty platforms at the camera. My great-grandfather, Amos Carnoweth, wasn’t one of them. I knew that for a fact, despite stone masonry having been his craft and the cathedral his last place of work. I knew because he’d died in a fall from scaffolding at the other end of the cathedral back in the spring of 1887. His son Joshua was fourteen years old then; his daughter Adelaide, my grandmother, was eight. She told me once that her grandmother claimed the tragedy was God’s judgement on a Methodist daring to turn his hand to Anglican granite. Those were the good old days.
Great-Grandfather’s death meant a move from the family home in Old Bridge Street. Gran and Uncle Joshua had grown up there, next to the stables of the Red Lion Hotel, a mere drove’s throw from the cathedral, in air tinged with dung, harness oil and granite dust. They found cheaper lodgings in Tabernacle Street, just off Lemon Quay, where mud and fish and sailcloth were the prevailing scents.
The past is always closer than you think. The Red Lion was finished off by a runaway lorry in the late Sixties, and the river flowing past Lemon Quay was covered over in the Twenties. I only ever remember the triangular space between Lemon and Back Quays as a car park, with the cathedral looming to the north as a complete and permanent edifice. But somehow I also seem to remember what my grandmother remembered: a different, darker, sweeter Truro, six hours from London by the fastest train, but in many ways as remote as Constantinople.
Uncle Joshua became the family breadwinner after his father’s death, labouring in a tin mine out at Baldhu twelve hours a day. Gran used to take a freshly cooked pasty out to him for his lunch, wrapped in a cloth to keep it warm. Three miles there and three miles back. There must have been loyalty between them then, a trusting tenderness, and no reason in this world to think it wouldn’t last their lifetimes. Their mother’s health, mental as well as physical, declined, but they held their life as a family together.
Gran left school at fourteen, despite her academic promise, as she often later lamented. Maybe, if her father had still been alive, it might have been different, but with her mother no longer even up to taking in washing, there was a living to be earned. She took a job as a seam-stress-cum-sales-assistant at Webb’s drapery store in Boscawen Street. Another assistant of her own age, Cordelia Angwin, struck up a friendship with her and became a regular visitor to the house in Tabernacle Street. Cordelia was an energetic and vivacious girl rapidly blossoming into a beauty. At first Uncle Joshua paid her little heed, but then, as time passed, and she grew older and more composed and more and more beautiful… Uncle Joshua never told me any of this and Gran was never an entirely reliable chronicler of events involving herself, so a lot had to be guesswork. Deduction, I prefer to call it. Joshua Carnoweth when I knew him was a taciturn and watchful man, seemingly incapable of grand romantic gestures. But things were different then, and so was he. He fell hopelessly in love with Cordelia Angwin and pleaded with her to marry him. But she wanted to wait and preferably find a husband capable of elevating her in society, which no mere tinner was likely to be able to do. The rift between Gran and Uncle Joshua dates from this period. Reading her character as well as I can, I should think she was at first embarrassed by his pursuit of her friend, then angry at both of them when she realized just how deeply he adored her. Neither was behaving as she wished something she never could abide.
Matters came to a head in the summer of 1897. Cordelia was eighteen and had made it clear to Uncle Joshua that she wouldn’t even consider marrying him until she was twenty-one. The implication, I suppose, was that she thought a better choice of husband might cross her path by then. Uncle Joshua must have reckoned that gave him three years to transform himself into an irresistible catch. News had just seeped out of a big gold strike in the Canadian Yukon the previous year. The word reaching the tin-mining community via the dockside taverns of Falmouth was that there were fortunes to be made by those twith the right skills. Uncle Joshua was offered a cheap passage on a cargo vessel bound for Nova Scotia. He took it, reckoning he could work his way across to the west coast and reach the Yukon by spring. He extracted some sort of parting promise from Cordelia to wait for him, promising in return that he’d be back before the three years were up, pockets bulging with gold dust.
Gran regarded this as an unforgivable betrayal, since it left her to support their ailing mother alone. She thought that if there were rich pickings to be had in the Yukon, there’d be none left by the time her brother got there. It was a realistic assessment. But young love and realism are mutually exclusive. Uncle Joshua went off to chase his dream.
A few letters reached Gran and Cordelia in the course of the winter and spring, reporting his progress across Canada. Then nothing. No news; no word; no contact of any kind. Joshua Carnoweth vanished from sight and, eventually, as the years passed, from mind. Dead, or too ashamed to come home and admit his failure nobody knew which. But, either way, he didn’t return. In three years, or six, or twelve, or twenty.
Back in Truro, Gran started going out with a young man named Cyril Napier. No hopeless love match for her. My grandfather was chosen as just the sort of level-headed but ambitious young man she needed as a companion in life. His parents were originally from Worcestershire.
They’d moved to Cornwall some years before and opened a grocery shop in River Street. His father was in poor health and had hoped the milder Cornish air would agree with him. It may have done so, but only up to a point. He died shortly after Gran and Grandad got engaged. They brought forward the wedding, so as to be able to take over the running of the shop as a married couple, and moved into the Napier home in Cardew Street with both mothers to save money. Grandad’s mother helped in the shop, of course, which meant they didn’t have to employ anyone.
It was hard work, trading from seven in the morning till eight at night, six days a week, but it was their own business, and Cardew Street was a little higher up the hill, both topographically and socially. My father’s birth in 1905 meant they were working to improve the lot of the next generation as well. Gran was setting out her stall for the future.
So, in a sense, was Cordelia Angwin. She left Webb’ sand went into service at a big house on the Falmouth road. She waited for Uncle Joshua or a better proposition, depending how cynical you want to be until she was twenty-one, and well beyond. She and Gran lost touch, although they must have bumped into one another from time to time; Truro’s too small a city for them not to have. What they said or thought on such occasions I don’t know.
About ten years after Uncle Joshua’s departure for the Canadian unknown, Cordelia married. Her husband worked as a junior clerk for the city council. His n
ame was Archie Lanyon. They moved into a small house in St. Austell Street, where their first and only child was born in 1910. They christened him Michael.
The cathedral was finished that same year, and the stone masons had to look elsewhere for work.
Detective Sergeant Collins was long gone and most of the caterers’
clearing-up crew likewise. I stood on the lawn, watching the men from the marquee hire company stowing the last of their gear onto a lorry parked halfway down the drive. The afternoon was still and sultry, the sunlight warm on my face. Some small creature was rooting through the leaf litter beneath the trees beyond the flower border. With very little effort of the imagination, the discovery I’d made that morning could have been consigned to the realm of delusion. But its consequences couldn’t be ignored. They were still queuing up to remind me of the reality of Nicky’s crooked lolling head, his chin crusty with dried spittle, his tongue swollen and protruding, his eyes dead and staring straight at me.
Beyond Recall Page 3