“But he’s never admitted it?”
“Not as such, no. As far as I know.”
“Did Nicky believe she was dead?”
“Oh yes,” I said in an undertone. “He told me so himself.” Looking up, I found the other two staring at me, disconcerted by my intervention. “Well,” I added defensively, ‘so he did.”
“There you are then.” Considine eyed me. “Nicholas had no doubts, it seems.”
“But there’s no proof,” persisted Don. “Whereas there was proof his father murdered Joshua Carnoweth. And it seems he did doubt that.”
True,” agreed Considine. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Loyalty to his father’s memory, we must suppose.”
“No other reason?”
“What other reason could there be?”
“Maybe he turned up something trawling through those cuttings you mentioned. An inconsistency in the evidence. An element of doubt.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because, if he had, he wouldn’t have killed himself. The possibility of clearing his father’s name would have given him a reason to live.
Don’t you agree, Mr. Napier?”
“Sorry?” My mind had wandered to my encounter with Nicky at Tredower House. He’d told me then what he was looking for. But what he was looking for couldn’t be found. Maybe he’d finally realized that. “He
… that is …”
“Never mind,” cut in Don. “I think I’ve got enough.”
“I’m afraid it’s all a great tragedy,” said Considine, the faintest hint of self-satisfaction souring the mournfulness of his words. “Poor Nicholas never really stood a chance.”
There was a time when Nicky had stood a chance. I remembered it well.
Back in the summer of 1946, when we’d had our carefree week together at Nanceworthal, his prospects had been as bright as mine, his future every bit as cloudless. He had Tredower House for a home; a mother and father who loved him as much as they did each other; and my great-uncle to confer on him just as many advantages as he might need. As a start in life, I’d have had to say it surpassed my own. But I was too young to dally with such thoughts, and consequently free of the resentment that simmered away inside my parents and grandparents all the more perniciously because it could never be expressed.
I’ve often wondered if they’d have been able to hold their tongues had they realized just how much there was for them to resent. They knew everyone knew that Joshua Carnoweth had come back from his travels many years ago a wealthy man, but what that actually meant in pounds, shillings and pence was never even guessed at. But then wealth didn’t entitle you to an increased butter ration, and most of the luxuries you might have dreamed of spending it on simply weren’t available. In post-war England, wealth was largely theoretical. The Talbot came out of the garage, but petrol rationing meant it couldn’t be taken to Perranporth very often, let alone further afield. Customers queued back out into the street at the shop, but goods were few and prices were fixed; the business couldn’t expand as Dad had hoped it would when he came home from the war. The fruits of victory in the Napier household amounted to an occasional and much celebrated banana.
Gran, however, was never one to be daunted by adversity, let alone austerity. In the autumn of 1946, she started a credit drapery business in the room over the shop, having bought the stock of a certain deceased Miss Odgers for 100. According to her, credit drapery was cleaner, easier and potentially more profitable than grocery. She proceeded to win a name for herself the following spring as the only outlet in Truro for New Look fashions. I’ve often wondered what would have happened to her sideline in the long run, whether eventually it would have eclipsed the grocery business altogether. We’ll never know, of course, because their relative economic merits were about to be swept into irrelevance by a far greater upheaval in our lives.
None of us had any inkling of that during the long cold winter of 1946/7. The nation was in crisis. I knew that because of my father’s frequent tirades against the Labour government, whom he held responsible for every difficulty. Turning out Mr. Churchill was where the country had gone wrong, according to him. To Nicky and me, it seemed that an endless supply of snow to play with and thickly frozen ponds to skate on constituted a pretty whizz-bang state of affairs. We had a lot of time for the snowman we made on the lawn at Tredower House and christened Mr. Dalton in honour of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, principal target of my father’s wrath. Our Mr. Dalton didn’t melt till March and we were sorry to see him go.
Strangely enough, the privations of that winter drew my family closer to Uncle Joshua than ever before. The pipes froze solid at Crescent Road, but hot water was still to be had at Tredower House, where a vast store of logs meant there was a fire to sit by as well, coal shortage or no coal shortage. For a good couple of months we took baths and meals there, and many of the unspoken differences between the two households thawed long before the weather did. It was during this period that Uncle Joshua volunteered some of his gold-hunting experiences to me. He and Gran spoke more readily and freely to each other than I could ever recall. Even she and Cordelia discovered some common ground to tread. It was a perversely happy time, symbolized in my memory by a party on the Sunday between Nicky’s eleventh birthday and mine. There weren’t any candles on our cake they were as scarce as knobs of coal and it wasn’t exactly a big cake either, but it was a wonderful party, even for the adults. Gran and Uncle Joshua danced together and my father and Nicky’s chatted like old friends. The spring of 1947 arrived early for the Napiers and the Lanyons.
There was plenty to look forward to as well. The summer for a start, when Nicky and I were hoping to spend another week maybe longer at Nanceworthal. Then the autumn, when we’d penetrate the glamorous mysteries of the senior school.
We left the prep department for the last time one hot afternoon in July after a classroom tea party and a hopeful hymn. We took a long rambling route home up Treliske Lane as far as the ford, then along the path beside the River Kenwyn into Truro. This brought us into the city along St. George’s Road, under the viaduct and into Victoria Gardens, where we sat on a bench near the bandstand to compare our latest cigarette card acquisitions and dispute whose batting average in the house cricket team had been the higher. It was mine, though not by much. Nicky vowed to reverse that the following season. We bet his Douglas Bader to my Denis Compton on the result. I doubt we’d have remembered the bet a year on, but I remember it now, as clear as the air that afternoon in Truro. Because that was our last school day together. There would never be another.
Don Prideaux and I stood between his car and the railings above the beach, on the other side of the road from the Heron. Considine was still inside, relieving himself after four brown ales and a three-course lunch. The ferry was chugging back to the Tregothnan shore with a party of walkers on board, while the afternoon sun turned the scene into a picture-postcard vista of waterside ease. Only in my mind were storm clouds racing across the sky.
“Is he worth what you’re paying him, Don?”
“I’m not paying him anything.”
“Come off it. He wouldn’t have been that forthcoming just for a pub lunch.”
“He’s on a promise, if you must know. It depends on whether I can sell the story on. My editor wouldn’t put money up front if you offered him Lord Lucan’s address and telephone number.”
“And can you sell it on?”
“I shan’t know till I try. I’ll have to check up on Jakes first. If they’ve let the bastard out, which I wouldn’t put past them, I could play up the “free to kill again” angle. But if he’s still inside and especially if he’s confessed to killing Michaela Lanyon then it’s just ancient history.”
“Not as ancient as my great-uncle’s murder.”
“You’re thinking of Tully? It was to be expected he’d be out by now.
Life seldom means life.”
“But it
makes hanging Michael Lanyon seem so … pointless.”
“You surely didn’t think they’d locked up Tully and thrown away the key?”
I looked out across the river. The ferry had reached the other side.
Its passengers were stepping ashore. “I’m afraid the problem is, Don, I didn’t think at all.”
CHAPTER FIVE
A fortnight passed. Nicky didn’t fade from my memory, but he did from my thoughts, as they found more everyday concerns to dwell on. His suicide had certainly aroused public interest in a thirty-four-year-old murder, but the effect didn’t last. Don Prideaux sent me a copy of his Western Morning News article about the tragedy of the Lanyon family, but in an attached note admitted he’d been unable to find a market for it elsewhere. No pay-off for Neville Considine, then, who nevertheless didn’t seem in much of a hurry to supply me with the details of Nicky’s creditors. I had the feeling not an unpleasant one that I wasn’t going to hear from him again.
The only new information I gained from Don’s article was bleakly inconclusive. Brian Jakes had been murdered by a fellow inmate at Broadmoor in 1974. If he had killed Michaela Lanyon, he’d taken the knowledge to his grave. As for Edmund Tully, the Home Office confirmed his release on licence back in 1969. But that was as much as they were prepared to reveal. Don speculated that he had a new name and identity by now. The man who’d done more than anyone to lay waste to Nicky’s past had apparently been granted official protection from his own.
My family reflected the general tendency to brush off the Lanyons’
misfortunes as a bundle of life’s vagaries. A week after their return from honeymoon, Tabitha and Dominic invited me to dinner at their smart home in Chelsea. Dominic’s best man and his girlfriend were there, as was Trevor, who’d left Pam in Truro while he spent the weekend cultivating contacts at an international hotel catering fair being staged at Olympia. I was asked to describe my discovery of a hanged man at Tredower House as if the passage of three weeks had turned Nicky’s death into nothing more than a cheaply thrilling anecdote. Why did I play along? Because I was too ashamed of my neglect of him to admit what his death really meant to me. None of the people I was eating and drinking with had been in Truro in 1947. None but Trevor had even been born. They didn’t know. They couldn’t imagine. And I didn’t want them to.
“Do you remember much about the murder, Chris?” Dominic asked me at some point.
“Not really,” I unhesitatingly replied. “It all went on at several removes from me. The trial was up in Bodmin, and I was too young to read the newspaper reports. We didn’t even have a television then.”
“The other murderer this man Tully. Was he local?”
“No.” I smiled. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I never so much as set eyes on him.”
I noticed Trevor studying me as I spoke. I wondered if he was in any position to know I was lying. Something in his expression suggested he was. But, if so, he wasn’t about to draw it to the others’
attention.
My attention, however, was a different matter. As became apparent when I gave him a lift back to his hotel at the end of the evening.
“I’m surprised you’re not staying with Tabs and Dominic,” I remarked casually.
He grinned. “I didn’t want to cramp their style. Besides, they’ve their own lives to lead now. I don’t mean to get in the way. I’m only glad they don’t seem unduly bothered by the Lanyon ghastliness. But dike you said He turned in his seat to look at me. “It never had anything to do with you and Pam, did it? Or Melvyn and Una.” He paused before quoting my words back at me. “It all went on at several removes from the lot of you. Just as well, really. I mean, if any of you had seen something significant, you might have had to testify at the trial.” There was another pause. Then he added, as if unable to resist making the question explicit, “Mightn’t you?”
But I never had seen anything significant. Not for certain, anyway. If only I had. I was an eleven-year-old boy. To me, certainty meant tea on the table when I got home; the Cornish Riviera Express pulling into Truro station at a quarter to five in the afternoon; the cathedral bells ringing for evensong; the coming up of the sun and its going down; the fret and play of an average childhood. None of that measured up to what began for me and Nicky and his father one afternoon in late July, 1947. None of that helped any of us.
On account of his duties as Colquite & Dew’s roving valuer of art and antiques, Michael Lanyon enjoyed a comparatively generous commercial petrol ration for his car a handsome 1937 Alvis Silver Crest. He had an appointment in Helston that afternoon and, finding Nicky and me kicking our heels in the garden when he returned to Tredower House for a snatched lunch, bundled us into the car and took us along. It was a rare and exciting treat and we made the most of it, persuading him to take us down to Porthleven after his business was concluded to buy us an ice-cream each. We sat by the harbour eating them, while he smoked a cigarette and gazed out to sea and the gulls wheeled overhead and the fishing boats creaked at their moorings and the sun sparkled on the wavetops. I don’t know whether he felt happy, but he certainly seemed contented, taking his ease there in the sunshine, with his son beside him and his wife waiting for him at home. He was thirty-seven years old to my father’s forty-two, but he looked a lot more than five years younger, with his unlined face and his clear-eyed gaze. He looked, to tell the truth, like a man with nothing to worry about.
It was gone six o’clock when we got back to Truro. Michael said he’d only have to pop into the office for a few moments, then he’d take me home. The office was above Colquite & Dew’s showrooms off Lemon Quay.
When we pulled into the yard, it looked deserted, with the premises closed for the night. At Porthleven there’d been a refreshing breeze, but here in Truro the evening was close and airless. The inside of the car smelled of hot leather and Airman cigarettes. The sky was a bruised blue-grey. A hooter was blowing in the gas works behind us.
Hazy sunlight was washing across the western towers of the cathedral. A cat was stalking something near the wall at the back of the yard. Nicky was winding the string of his catapult round and round his fingers.
All these things I remember. All these details. But nothing significant.
As the car coasted to a halt, a figure detached itself from the deep shadows beneath the overhang of the warehouse roof. It was a man, dressed in a baggy double-breasted suit and battered fedora. He was smoking a cigarette. A tightly folded newspaper was wedged into his jacket pocket. He took a few steps into the sunlight, stopped and looked towards us, expectant and unhurried. Michael turned off the car engine. The hooter sounded louder, but so did the motionlessness of the scene. So did everything. I heard Michael catch his breath. Nicky let the catapult string fall slack. The man moved closer, stopped again and cocked his head. We could see his face now pale and narrow, with the smudge of a clipped moustache beneath a flattened nose.
Michael ground out his cigarette in the dashboard ashtray and grasped the door handle.
“You boys wait here,” he said with quiet emphasis. “Don’t leave the car.”
He climbed out, slammed the door behind him and walked slowly across the yard to where the other man was standing. They didn’t shake hands.
They didn’t even nod in greeting. But they weren’t strangers. You could tell that by their stance, by the way they looked at each other.
I heard them speak, but they were too far away to catch more than an odd phrase. “Long time…” “Never thought.. .” Their tone was even yet uneasy, neither hostile nor affectionate. The man in the fedora sniggered. He drew on his cigarette before flicking what was left of it away. Michael glanced round at us, then laid his hand on the other’s shoulder, stepping towards the showroom entrance as he did so, urging him, it seemed, to move back to where he’d been waiting.
Slowly, they went, then stopped, completely out of earshot now.
They spoke for maybe three minutes. Nicky and I watched them in silence. Somet
hing was wrong. Something wasn’t normal. I saw Michael reach inside his jacket, take something out and hand it to the man. The hooter died. The man looked down at what he’d been given, then slid it into his pocket and smiled broadly. With that he turned and walked away, casting a single glance across at us as he moved towards the gateway onto Lemon Quay. He caught my eye for a second and I wished he hadn’t. Still he was smiling.
“Who is he?” whispered Nicky.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But I don’t like the look of him.”
“Neither do I.”
The man vanished from sight but Michael stayed where he was for another minute or so, staring after him. Then he turned on his heel and strode back to the car, speed exaggerating his limp, the soles of his shoes sounding like gunshots on the cobbles of the yard. He climbed straight in and started the engine.
“Aren’t you going into the office, Daddy?”
“No, son. I’m not.”
“Who was that man?”
“Nobody. Don’t worry. You won’t see him again.”
He was right there; we didn’t. Not even when we drove out of the yard and turned along Green Street towards Boscawen Bridge. He was nowhere to be seen. But we recognized his photograph in the newspapers a few weeks later. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in our minds. He was Edmund Tully.
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