For Nicky and me, the real beginning was the autumn of 1943. Truro School’s prep department was a much smaller and more secluded institution then than it is today, so I was bound to become better acquainted with Nicky than occasional teatime encounters at Tredower House had made possible. But friendship requires something more than proximity. Nicky and I shared a dreamily inquisitive nature that would probably have drawn us together even if our families had been totally unconnected.
A routine established itself whereby Nicky called for me on his way up Chapel Hill in the mornings. Pam would walk with us as far as the County Grammar School, then we’d go on together to Treliske. Going back in the afternoon, we’d wait for Pam to come out of school, then walk with her down Chapel Hill into Truro to call at the shop. Grandad would set off in the van on his delivery round while Pam helped Gran behind the counter. Nicky and I went with him, Nicky dropping off at Tredower House en route. On Saturdays, I’d go up there to see him and we’d play tennis with the Belgian children, or restage Montgomery’s North Africa campaign on his bedroom floor with toy soldiers and matchboxes for tanks, or climb the horse chestnut tree to watch out for imaginary German soldiers marching in from St. Austell, or take turns on the swing Uncle Joshua had rigged up for us on a stout lower branch.
So it was that we became, with the easy imperceptibility of childhood, each other’s best friend. During school holidays, we’d mount all-day expeditions to Idless or Malpas or out along Penweathers Lane towards the open moorland, unwittingly retracing the route Gran must have walked fifty years before with Uncle Joshua’s lunch. But we knew more about the Norman Conquest than we did about our families’ recent past.
That was one book we weren’t encouraged to open. When we saw Nicky’s grandmother and my great-uncle strolling across the lawn at Tredower House together, we didn’t have a clue what they might be talking about.
There were greater and more immediate concerns in our lives, like whether we could cadge any chewing gum from the GIs coming and going at the American army camp in Tresawls Road, or name-spot a new jeep hurtling along the lanes. To us, the war was the best game ever invented.
The reality of its dangers only became apparent to me in the aftermath of Freda Lanyon’s death from whooping cough early in 1944. Nicky stayed with us at Crescent Road for a week to minimize the risk of infection. We both thought this a great lark, until shocked into an early awareness of mortality by his sister’s sombre fate. Michael Lanyon came home to comfort Rose and his heavy limp proved that the crash landing on a Kentish airfield Nicky had told me about wasn’t just a thrilling ‘prang’. People really could be hurt. Events, it seemed, had consequences.
And the war, it also transpired, would eventually run its course. Most of the American troops vanished across the Channel after D-Day in June 1944 and a more humdrum pattern of life established itself in Truro.
Michael Lanyon was transferred to a radar base down on the Lizard. This meant he spent most weekends at Tredower House. According to Nicky, he wasn’t as much fun as he’d once been. No doubt the stresses of active service, not to mention physical injury and the loss of his daughter, accounted for that. The limp, and presumably the memories, didn’t go away. But I always found him kindly, almost gentle, in his manner.
His slick-haired good looks, his smart flight lieutenant’s uniform and the oddly graceful way he carried his stiff leg became an ideal of manliness in my mind. My own father, whose captain’s uniform never seemed to fit quite as well and whose vital contribution to the war effort had never involved the slightest personal danger, was a disappointment to me when measured against the same standard. I never said so, of course, but I envied Nicky such a glamorous parent.
Everything Michael Lanyon did, whether it was smoking a Player’s Airman cigarette or challenging us at French cricket, whether cutting back the rhododendrons or simply staring into space with that quizzical lopsided smile Nicky had inherited from him, he did with elegant panache.
School life proceeded in comforting isolation. Nicky and I lost our Cornish accents and acquired some polished ways to set us apart from the likes of Don Prideaux. But the differences didn’t go very deep. We all followed the celebratory Floral Dance from the football ground down to the cathedral on VE Day in May 1945. And did the same three months later for VJ Day.
The war was over. Michael Lanyon went back to Colquite & Dew and my father returned to the shop, allowing my grandfather to ease his way into retirement. Gran remained actively involved, though, and not just in the grocery business. As I grew older and my understanding of the subtleties of tea-table conversation at Crescent Road deepened, I began to see for myself that she had as many fears as hopes riding on her brother’s generosity. “I’m doing my best to ensure Joshua makes proper provision for his family,” she announced more than once in the style of a sermon. “I expect you all to do the same.” And by his family she meant us, of course, not the offspring of Cordelia Angwin. Uncle Joshua was seventy-two that last summer of the war. Time was running short. And not just for him.
The sun shone for Nicky’s funeral as it had for my last meeting with him. There was no preliminary church service. The mourners, all five of us, proceeded straight to Penmount Crematorium and met in one of the two chapels there. Another much better attended funeral was going on in the other chapel, which gave a hole-in-the-corner feeling to our sparse gathering. It was made all the worse by the tangibility of Ethel Jago’s dislike for Neville Considine and my own suspicion that it was obvious Don Prideaux and I were in cahoots. Dennis Jago probably came out of it best, by remaining wordless throughout, other than to utter the appropriate prayers more distinctly than anyone.
The clergyman Ethel had recruited made a hasty departure after his perfunctory conduct of the service. There were no wreaths to inspect, none of us having apparently thought it fitting to send one. All that remained was to thank the undertaker and assemble awkwardly in the car park, aware that at any moment we’d be overrun by the other party, while above us smoke drifted in seemly shreds from the furnace chimney.
“Didn’t realize you were at school with Nicky till you told me so, Mr.
Prideaux,” Ethel said to Don, dabbing away the last of her tears.
“Oh yes,” Don replied. “I was never as close a friend as Chris, of course, but…”
“I’m glad you came,” put in Considine. “Nicholas’s mother would have appreciated the gesture, I know.”
“God rest her soul,” murmured Ethel.
“We were thinking…” Don began awkwardly. “What I mean is, would you all like to join Chris and me for lunch? We thought we’d go to the Heron at Malpas.”
“That would be most agreeable,” said Considine, in a tone that somehow implied we’d already offered to stand him the meal.
Ethel glanced at Dennis before responding. How he conveyed his wishes was unclear, but by a meek little nod she seemed to acknowledge them.
“We’d best be getting back, Mr. Prideaux. We can’t leave the farm for long, see.”
“No. I suppose not.”
“Goodbye then, Ethel,” I said, stepping forward to kiss her.
“Goodbye, Christian.”
“Dennis.” He shook my hand firmly, his face stiff and expressionless.
Then they both headed off towards the mud-streaked Land Rover that cast their immaculate funeral clothes in such odd relief. I sensed this was a final goodbye to both of them and that it warranted more words, a greater show of feeling. But who would that have been kind to? “I can hardly suffer to think of it all,” Ethel had said earlier. So why force her to? I let them go with no more than a farewell wave.
Considine had travelled to Penmount in the undertaker’s limousine, so he rode with Don when we left and I followed. We drove back into Truro past Tredower House, with the roofs of Truro School showing above the trees to our left, then took the Malpas road down past Boscawen Park. I was alone, but at every twist of the lane could remember Nicky’s company on fishin
g expeditions and aimless rambles long ago. We’d often enough walked the way I was now driving, down to Malpas, the village clinging to the headland at the junction of the Truro and Tresillian rivers. Sometimes we’d taken the ferry across to Tregothnan and staged daring forays onto Lord Falmouth’s estate. And sometimes we’d just ambled up the track towards Tresillian, watching the sailboats coming and going across the silver-grey water. All those unremarkable days had conspired in my memory to become a Shangri-La to which I could never retrace the route. The past is a room you only realize you’ve left when you hear the door close behind you.
Don hadn’t wasted his journey from Penmount on yearning reminiscence.
That was obvious when I caught up with him and Considine at the Heron Inn. It seemed as if they’d already struck some kind of deal. Don had stationed a running tape recorder on the table by Considine’s elbow and it was apparent he’d shown his journalistic colours. I was there as a guarantor of his good faith, required to do little but watch and listen.
“How did you meet the Lanyons, Mr. Considine?” Don was venturing when
I joined them.
“Electrician’s my trade.” Considine paused to sup his brown ale, then went on. “I’m Clacton born and bred. I used to do a good deal of work at Butlin’s holiday camp all the lighting and so forth. It was a really smart place back then big name performers and every chalet taken in the season. Rose worked in the kitchens. I knew her to pass the time of day with, nothing more. I never heard a whisper about her late husband and what he’d done. She’d come to Clacton to put all that behind her, of course. Early Fifties this would be. Her mother-in-law was dead by then. Rose and the children Nicholas and little Michaela lived out at Jaywick, a holiday town just west of Clacton. Wooden bungalows mostly, intended for summer use only, chucked up in the Thirties. But it was the cheapest accommodation going and a lot of hard-pressed families settled there permanently, the Lanyons among them.
“Jaywick was always prone to flooding. That’s why the council had tried to stop it being developed in the first place. Well, a lot of it was swept away in the floods of fifty-three. The sea just washed over it. Dozens of people were drowned and hundreds made homeless. Rose and the kids got out with their lives and nothing else. When I heard what had happened, I offered to take them in. Mother and me had plenty of room at our house. It would have seemed a crime not to do what we could for them.
“That’s how we got started. Rose was a fine woman: a good mother and a hard worker. Before it came time for them to leave, I let her know how I felt about her and we decided to get married. She told me about the murder then. She didn’t want me to find out later and feel let down.
But it didn’t make any difference to me. None of it was her fault, was it? Or the children’s. We married that summer.”
“And remained so until her death?” asked Don. “Ethel seemed to imply
…”
“There was a separation before the end,” said Considine levelly. “But no divorce. I reckon the illness affected her mind. She’d have come back to me, I’m sure, if she’d lived.”
“No doubt,” said Don with a reassuring smile. “How did you get on with Nicky? He’d have been, what, seventeen when you married his mother.”
“Well enough. An adolescent and his stepfather…” Considine sighed. “It’s never easy, I dare say. Nicholas wasn’t troublesome, I’m not saying that. But he was guarded, yes, very guarded.
Introverted,
the trick cyclist would have said, I expect, if we could have afforded to send him to one.”
“Did he have any kind of employment?”
“He worked at a laundry out on the St. Osyth road. My, the fleas he used to bring home from that place. But it was honest work, and he was taking evening classes to better himself. Nicholas tried hard to make a go of life, no question about it. He passed some exams and got a respectable job at the public library. Rose was really pleased about that. Career; wife; children: she had it all mapped out for him in her mind.”
“What went wrong?”
“Oh, several things. He got mixed up with those anti-nuclear campaigners. You know CND. All on account of some girl, actually. She was no good for him. And being seen waving a banner in Trafalgar Square wasn’t any good for his career in the library service either. I tried to set him straight, but he wouldn’t listen. Then the girl chucked him and … things went from bad to worse. It wasn’t all his own fault, mind. When Michaela disappeared, well, it really shook him.
It shook his mother too, of course. And me. I loved the girl like she was my own. But Nicky … just couldn’t come to terms with it.”
“What exactly happened?”
“She was in the sixth form at the County High School, doing really well. She was a bright girl, just turned seventeen. April of sixty-five, it was. Her first week back at school after the Easter holiday. Well, one afternoon, a Thursday, she just didn’t come home for tea. Some friends had seen her leaving by her normal route, across the recreation ground behind the school. Then nothing. There wasn’t a sign of her. No sightings, no clues nothing. She’d vanished. The police thought at first she might have run away. But she had hardly any money and no change of clothes. Her school uniform would have made her conspicuous. And she hadn’t said anything even to school friends
-to suggest she was thinking of such a thing. Besides, Rose and I were sure she wasn’t thinking of it. She was happy. A real home-bird, you know? Not one to wander.
“The police changed their tune later. Several young girls had been murdered in the Colchester area over the previous couple of years. They arrested the culprit about six months after Michaela went missing. He was the worst kind of sex maniac. A real animal. Rape, mutilation and God knows what. He ended up in Broadmoor. Perhaps you remember the case. Brian Jakes, his name was.”
“Can’t say I do,” said Don, glancing at me.
I shook my head. “Nor me.”
“I’m not that surprised,” said Considine. “The Moors Murderers were grabbing all the headlines then. Their trial and Jakes’ coincided.
Anyway, the police reckoned and so did we that Michaela was one of his victims. There were several missing girls he wouldn’t say he’d murdered, but wouldn’t say he hadn’t either. He lived on his own in a caravan on a site just outside Colchester. He was a rat-catcher by trade, travelling from job to job in his van. And on the day Michaela disappeared he’d done some work for a farmer up near Thorpe-le-Soken, just a few miles from Clacton. He must have dropped down to Clacton afterwards, waylaid Michaela at the rec, overpowered her, bundled her into his van, driven away and… Well, perhaps it’s best we never found out exactly what he did to her, if the mess he left some of the others in is anything to go by.”
“And you said Nicky took it pretty badly?”
“Yes. He was very protective towards his sister. He seemed to think he should have prevented it happening. There was no way to reason with him. It wasn’t a reasonable view. But he held to it, firm and solid.
He was to blame. Rose reckoned he’d always thought he should have saved his father as well. He had this way of loading the responsibility for misfortune on his own shoulders. It didn’t make a scrap of sense except to him. I tried to help him, of course, but I suppose getting Rose over the worst of her grief took up most of my attention. My mother died in the middle of it all, too. It was a grim time, I don’t mind admitting. And we were only just beginning to come out of it when Nicholas came by some information that set him so far back he never really caught up with himself again.”
“What information?”
“I don’t know how he found out, but he did. A few years after Michaela’s disappearance sixty-eight or sixty-nine, I’m not sure which they let Edmund Tully out of prison.”
Edmund Tully. Michael Lanyon’s accomplice in the murder of Joshua Carnoweth. The lucky recipient of a commuted sentence of life imprisonment. Across the years, I felt the fading aftershock of what the news must have meant
to Nicky. His father had hanged, but Edmund Tully, the man who’d struck the fatal blow, had served scarcely more than twenty years in prison and then he’d walked free. He was out there somewhere, breathing the clean fresh air, while Nicky’s father rotted in a prison grave and his sister … “That seemed to make everything worse for him. He started to go downhill around then. His appearance deteriorated. He lost a lot of… self-respect. He used the library to get hold of all the press cuttings about his father’s trial and went through them over and over again. I don’t know what he was looking for. I’m not sure he knew himself. He moved out into a flat of his own. It wasn’t much of a place, but he was adamant he wanted to be on his own. He seemed to spend more and more of his time that way. I suppose he turned into a bit of a recluse. It can’t have been any good for him. He lost his job at the library in the end or gave it up, I’m not sure which. Either way, he was in a downward spiral even before his mother died. I’ve seen nothing of him since then, but from what I’ve heard… he was heading for what happened last weekend for a long time.”
“You don’t think there’s any chance Michaela might still be alive, do you?” asked Don.
“Jakes murdered her. I reckon that’s plain enough.”
Beyond Recall Page 8