There were bungalows actually floating by us. And dustbins and cars and God knows what. Our bungalow was wedged against a brick shed by the current. I suppose that’s what saved us. But, actually, without Nicky, Mum and I would have drowned for certain. He saved our lives.
That’s literally all we got out with when the rescue boat came for us: our lives. Everything else clothes, furniture, the lot, down to the smallest possession ended up in the North Sea. But thanks to Nicky we were still alive. I suppose that’s why I can’t accept that he died in vain.”
“You may have to,” I said gently. “I wouldn’t know how to start trying to prove your father innocent even supposing I thought he was.”
“Can’t you give him the benefit of the doubt for Nicky’s sake?”
“I can. But where does that get us?”
“I’ve been thinking, you see.” Her eyes sparkled with sudden enthusiasm. “That journalist ‘
“DonPrideaux.”
‘ Yeh. He said Edmund Tully was released from prison twelve years ago.
Well, he’s the one man who knows the truth, isn’t he? The absolute truth.”
“If he lied at the trial, he’ll lie now. Besides, we have no way of contacting him. He could be anywhere. He could be dead, for God’s sake. If he was the same age as your father, that would make him seventy now.”
“Wouldn’t the Home Office have told Prideaux if he was dead?”
“Maybe.”
“So it’s odds on he’s still alive.”
“Even so ‘
“And Nicky became more and more obsessed with the case after I left.
That’s what Considine said, wasn’t it? Collecting press cuttings about the trial. Going through the evidence, over and over again, searching for the answer. Don’t you see? He’s bound to have gone looking for Tully.”
“So?”
“He kept everything. He always did. If Nicky found Tully, there’ll be a record of his whereabouts at the very least a clue to them -amongst his possessions. And where are those possessions now?”
“With Considine, presumably.”
“Exactly.” She fixed me with her appealing gaze. “That’s why I can’t do this and you have to. For Nicky and me. It has to be you. There’s no-one else.”
I might have found it more difficult to absorb the shock of Uncle Joshua’s death if Gran and my parents had been open with me about the details. As it was, their determination to keep me in the dark or shield me from the gruesome facts, as they no doubt saw it provided me with a mystery to puzzle over. This gave me more than enough with which to occupy my thoughts as early morning blended into a long day of dislocation and uncertainty. Dad and Gran departed straight after breakfast for Tredower House, leaving Mum to open up the shop, assisted by Pam. Grandad stayed at home with me. He was to remain there in case of messages and I was to remain with him on the grounds that I’d be a nuisance anywhere else.
What I wanted to do above all was to see Nicky, knowing that I could rely on him for a full account of the facts. I reckoned he was bound to know more than me, since he actually lived at Tredower House, which I imagined to be the nerve centre of police investigations. I assumed that was why Dad and Gran had gone there; that and the wish to share their grief with the Lanyons. But when I suggested as much to Grandad, he indignantly rejected the idea ana unintentionally revealed what may have been their true motive.
“He was your gran’s brother. He was no relative of the Lanyons. It’s not for them to take charge of his affairs much as they might like to.”
So, amidst the dismay of bereavement, the lineaments of a power struggle were beginning to appear. The spring truce was over, broken by Uncle Joshua’s death. Gran had gone to Tredower House to stake out her territory. But was it her territory or Cordelia Lanyon’s? It had taken only a few hours for bereavement to turn to rivalry.
And what of Uncle Joshua? How could he be dead, when I’d seen him, stout and proud and striding, the previous afternoon? Banished to the back garden, I played tennis against the garage wall as the day dragged on, my thoughts coming back to him all the time. He’d seemed so permanent, so indestructible like some outcrop of granite up on the moors. You couldn’t break granite with a knife. Something more than a thin steel blade would have been needed to topple Uncle Joshua, something more profound and elemental. A blood feud perhaps, like in several of the Sherlock Holmes stories I’d read. Maybe some secret society had reached out its vengeful arm from Alaska to strike him down. I was already convinced, despite Grandad’s scepticism, that Uncle Joshua had gone to Barrack Lane to meet somebody by appointment.
It was the other side of the city from Tredower House, after all. Why else would he have been there at midnight? He’d been heading in that direction when I last saw him. On urgent business, by his own admission. Had he returned to Tredower House in the interim? If not, where had he been? And why?
But answering my questions was top of nobody’s agenda. Enlightenment of a meagre kind came only when Dad and Gran returned with Mum and Pam
at six o’clock. A family conference of sorts was staged around the tea table, with everybody too taken up with events to bother keeping any of them from me. The murderer had apparently been apprehended. A clerk at the railway station had recognized his description as matching that of a passenger he’d sold a ticket to for the first train to London that morning. The man had been token off the train at Plymouth and was presumably back in Truro by now, being interrogated by the police. His name and motive had not been disclosed supposing them to be known at all. Only the nature of his crime was clear: murder. None of us expressed any doubt of his guilt.
Gran had been to see Uncle Joshua’s body. That much I gleaned from her description of him as looking ‘uncommonly peaceful’. I wanted to ask where she’d seen him, but couldn’t summon the nerve.
Perhaps that was just as well, in view of the temper she flew into when Pam asked about the Lanyons.
“Anyone would think he was Cordelia’s brother, not mine, from the way they’re carrying on. What were they ever to him except… hired help?
They’re sitting there in Joshua’s house like it was their own, with never so much as a by your leave. Disrespectful, I call it.”
“There’ll be time enough to sort out such matters later, Ma,” said Dad.
“Time enough? That’s what Mr. Cloke had the nerve to tell me. “All in due course, Mrs. Napier.” But whose course? That’s what I’d like to know. We’ve the right to be told now.”
“Uncle Joshua went to see Mr. Cloke yesterday,” I remarked, eager to involve myself in the discussion.
Suddenly, silence consumed the room. All eyes were turned on me. The significance of my words was slowly absorbed. Then Gran said, “What do you mean, Christian?” She stared at me, her brow furrowing, as I stumbled through an account of my walk with Uncle Joshua twenty-four hours before. She seemed to find it hard to believe he’d sought my advice about anything, but ‘business in Lemon Street’ meant his solicitor. About that she was certain. And from that certainty it was a short jump to a disturbing conclusion. “I told you, Melvyn,” she said, turning to Dad. “This is about money. Solicitors and murderers have that much in common. Money’s at the root of it, and Joshua had more than was good for him.”
“But the real question is who’s he Dad broke off, regretting, I think, the hint of greed in his voice. Uncle Joshua was only eighteen hours dead and a long way from being buried. It was too soon, too offensively premature, to be pondering who’d profit by his death. But it was in his mind, as it was in Gran’s, and it couldn’t be dislodged.
“I mean to find out sooner than Mr. Cloke might care for,” said Gran, slowly and deliberately, as if Dad had finished the question. Then she added, without any apparent awareness of irony, “I owe it to Joshua.”
“No-one’s interested, are they?” mused Michaela Lanyon, alias Emma Moresco, as she read the note Don Prideaux had sent me with the copy of his newspaper article. “That�
��s why he couldn’t sell the story on.
Because nobody really cares.”
“I do.” I intended the remark to be consolatory, but she gave no sign she’d so much as heard it.
“Do you know what the weirdest thing is? Until I saw his photograph in the paper some old police mugshot1 didn’t even know what my father looked like.”
“Did he know about you before he died?”
She glanced up at me. “No. Mum was only three and a half months pregnant when he was hanged, and I was a small baby, so she was hardly showing. She told me she’d thought it kinder not to tell him, but I’m not sure she didn’t regret that later. I’ve often wished she had told him. It would mean there was something between us, something real, not just… a biological fact. As it was, I felt one worse than an orphan.
I was always afraid people would find out neighbours, school friends and label me the murderer’s daughter. Considine threatened me with just that several times when I wouldn’t…” Her expression faltered.
She rose and moved away across the room, resuming with her gaze trained on the world beyond the window. “I suppose I was running away from Michael Lanyon as well as Neville Considine when I left Clacton that day.”
“Had you been planning it for a long time?”
“Thinking, yes a long time. But actually planning? No more than a couple of weeks. Since meeting Norman in a coffee bar over Easter.
Without his offer of accommodation, I wouldn’t have had the nerve. I bought some second-hand clothes and hid them in my locker at school. I took them with me in my bag when I left school that afternoon, changed into them in the loos on the recreation ground, then hung round for an hour before catching the five o’clock train to London. Norman knew who I was, of course, but nobody else. Then or since. I haven’t trusted a soul with the truth in all those years.” L “Apart from me.”
“Yen. Apart from you.” She looked back at me. “So, it’s pretty important you don’t let me down.”
“I can’t guarantee to prove your father innocent, you know. I can’t promise the impossible.”
“I’m only asking you to try. Not much, is it?”
“Not too much, certainly.”
“Does that mean you’ll give it a go?”
“Yes.” A smile suddenly flashed across her face. “I suppose it does.”
A police spokesman confirmed last night that the man arrested earlier in the day after being removed from a London-bound train at Plymouth North Road station, Edmund Tully, has been formally charged with the murder in Truro on Thursday night of Joshua Caraoweth, a wealthy and highly respected resident of the city. The spokesman said that Tully would appear before Truro magistrates on Monday, and added that a further arrest in connection with the case could not be ruled out.
So ran the front-page article in the Western Morning News of Saturday 9
August 1947. I first read it craning over Pam’s shoulder in the kitchen at Crescent Road while we were supposed to be washing up after breakfast. It told me two things that I found tantalizing as well as baffling. Firstly, the murderer was somebody I’d never heard of, presumably a stranger who’d come to Truro for the specific purpose of doing Uncle Joshua harm; my theory about an Alaskan equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan was thus partly vindicated, at least in my own mind.
Secondly, there might be a second murderer, an accomplice or accessory of some kind; the police spokesman could only have declined to rule out a further arrest because he was actually expecting one.
I decided there and then to go and see Nicky. It was only what I’d normally have done on a Saturday morning anyway and Gran and my parents
had evidently been too preoccupied to think of prohibiting it, so my excuses were ready-made. Nicky might know more than I did. Above all, he might be able to help me start believing in the reality of Uncle Joshua’s death. The event still seemed like a cross between a bad dream and a James Cagney gangster movie. It was going on out there somewhere, but my brain refused to register it as a fact. Uncle Joshua was dead but not to me.
So, as soon as the washing-up was done, I told Pam I was going down to the railway station to do some train-spotting, instead of which I made for Tredower House. I planned to take a circuitous route via Daniell Road, Strangways Terrace and Gas Hill in order to avoid passing either the shop, where Mum might waylay me, or Mr. Cloke’s offices at the bottom of Lemon Street, where Gran and/or Dad might be intending to put in an appearance. This route had the additional advantage of crossing Lemon Street at its other end, close to its junction with Barrack Lane.
If there was anything to be seen there, I meant to see it.
And there was something to see, something that achieved what the protracted agonizing of my parents and grandparents had failed to. At the top of Lemon Street, dead opposite me as I emerged from Daniell Road, stood the Lander Monument, a tall granite column supporting a statue of Richard Lander, the famous Truronian explorer of darkest Africa. At its foot, a man in overalls was working with a broom and bucket, scrubbing at the paving stones. An acrid smell of cleaning fluid drifted across to greet me and I stopped, puzzled by the intensity of his efforts. A dark and patchy stain straggled round from the monument towards Barrack Lane, but at first I couldn’t think what it might be, nor why its removal should be so important.
Then, as I stared across the road, it came to me. Uncle Joshua’s blood, spattered along a length of Truro pavement. It was real. In my mind’s eye, I could see the moonlit struggle at the foot of the monument, the flash of the blade, the fatal lunges. I could see Tully turning to flee while Uncle Joshua reeled and stumbled towards the corner of Barrack Lane, blood gouting from his wounds. I could see and believe it all.
Suddenly I was running down Lemon Street, the slope speeding me on. The diversion was forgotten now. I just wanted to be as far as possible from the bloodstained pavement. Uncle Joshua had roller skated down this very hill as a youth; Gran had told me so. I thought of him, young and lean and eagle-eyed, out pacing me as I ran. I must have passed Mr. Cloke’s offices at the bottom, but I didn’t notice. I dodged through the bustling shoppers in Boscawen Street and darted along Cathedral Lane to the spot where I’d last seen Uncle Joshua.
There I stopped. But there he wasn’t. I could summon the scent of his cigar from my memory, the curve of his grin as he tossed me the coin.
But already the lustre of immediacy was gone. He was fading, like a photograph exposed too soon. He was slipping away, and I could see it happening.
I began following the route we’d taken from Tredower House on Thursday in reverse, past the Lanyons’ old home in St. Austell Street, across Boscawen Bridge and up Tregolls Road. My pace slowed as I neared my destination. For some reason, I was beginning to dread arriving there, whereas earlier I could hardly wait to. Curiosity had turned to foreboding.
When I reached the entrance to the drive, I stopped and crouched down to tighten my shoelaces. They weren’t loose, but I was now seriously worried about the wisdom of visiting the Lanyons. I wanted to see Nicky, but I didn’t want to learn what that dark suspicion forming at the back of my mind really was. I couldn’t stop thinking about the man who’d met Michael at Colquite & Dew’s yard; about their anxious secretive talk. I couldn’t stop being afraid of something I couldn’t have named.
As I stood up, I heard a car labouring down the drive in low gear. It emerged slowly into view round the bank of the raised lawn and I blinked at the sight of the bell on its bumper and the police sign across its radiator. It drew to a halt gently beside me and the driver started checking for traffic, glancing to right and left. As he did so, I looked into the rear seat and saw, wedged between two burly constables, Michael Lanyon. Our eyes met and he smiled faintly, as if to assure me there was nothing to worry about, as if the whole thing was just an amusing embarrassment. Then the car pulled out into the road.
At the same moment I heard rapid footfalls behind me, approaching down the drive. As I turned, they stopped. And there was Nicky
, panting and tearful, staring at me from ten yards away.
“What’s happened?” I called to him.
“They’ve arrested him,” said Nicky. They’ve arrested Daddy.”
“You do realize, don’t you,” I said as we entered the outskirts of Reading, ‘how compelling the evidence against your father was?” I’d volunteered to drive Emma into Reading when she left, late-night trains from Pangbourne being few and far between.
“Oh yeh,” she murmured. “I realize.”
“He was seen handing an envelope to Tully in a pub a couple of nights before the murder. That envelope, with his fingerprints on it, was later found in Tully’s possession, stuffed with five hundred pounds’
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