Beyond Recall

by Robert Goddard

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I telephoned Emma as soon as I got back to Pangboume. She was as disappointed as me by the slim pickings my journey to Clacton had yielded, but glad there’d been at least some and relieved, I suppose, that there was no question of my calling off the search.

  “I’ll go down to Cornwall tomorrow. I have a hunch Nicky went to see Treffry. And I want to know what Treffry told him.”

  “So do I. But, Chris …”

  “Yes?”

  “About Considine. You didn’t… let anything slip, did you?”

  “I was careful not to. Though I don’t mind admitting there were times, listening to his simpering voice as he talked about you and Nicky, when I wanted to …”

  “What?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Considine doesn’t matter. Let’s try to remember that.”

  “He’s not who we’re after, right?”

  “No. He isn’t.” Nor was he. Though one day, I sensed, he might be.

  I called Mark straight after Emma had hung up. He didn’t seem to mind putting in some extra time to cover for me during the week ahead, which was one reason why I wasn’t angrier with him for shooting his mouth off to Pauline Lucas. The other reason was that her unexplained visit seemed a minor mystery I could afford to ignore.

  Emma Moresco’s arrival in my life had pushed it to the margins of my thoughts.

  I tried to speak to Pam next, in order to beg a room at Tredower House, but got no answer from the private number. The girl on reception seemed to think they could fit me in, though. She was oddly cagey about where Pam and Trevor were, but at the time it didn’t seem important; I put the matter out of my mind.

  It didn’t stay out, however. Nor did the enigmatic Miss Lucas. Just as I was preparing for an early night, Tabitha rang. And it was immediately clear she hadn’t done so for an idle niece-uncle chat.

  “What’s going on with Mum and Dad, Chris?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Mum says Dad’s gone away, but she won’t say where or when he’s due back. And she spent so long assuring me everything was all right it seemed pretty obvious it wasn’t.”

  “I’m afraid I know nothing about it.”

  “I thought she might have confided in you.”

  “What about?”

  “That’s just the point. I don’t know.”

  “Well, as it happens, I’m going down there tomorrow. How would it be if I called you when I’ve had a chance to see how the land lies?”

  “That’d be great.”

  “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, though.”

  “Yeh? Well, I wish I was.”

  I was too taken up with my own concerns to make anything of this. The greatest puzzle to me was Tabitha’s bizarre idea that her mother might have confided in me. She obviously had entirely the wrong idea about brothers and sisters probably because she was an only child. I went so far as to try the private number at Tredower House again, but there was still no answer.

  Just as I put down the telephone, it rang again, which surprised me.

  Two calls on a Sunday night were two more than I usually received, and this particular call wasn’t so much a rare species as one verging on extinction.

  “Where have you been all day?”

  “Staying out of your life, Miv. Isn’t that how you like it?”

  “Don’t be like that. It seems I might owe you an apology.”

  “You have done for years, but I never expected ‘

  “About the Lucas woman. Or whatever she calls herself. The fact is I think I could have helped her set you up. Inadvertently, I mean.

  Unintentionally. You know?”

  “No,” I said, ratcheting up my concentration. “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, I just didn’t connect her with Not at first. But when I thought about it, well, it clicked.”

  “What clicked?”

  “This girl rang me a few days ago. Said she was a freelance journalist called Laura Banks, engaged by one of the music mags to do a piece on me. Interviewed me over the phone about old times on the road. The usual stuff.”

  “You get a lot of approaches for that kind of material, I imagine.”

  “Not many, you sarcastic bastard. Now listen. I suppose I was flattered. Not that I want to go back to those days, but it’s fun to talk about them. Even about my ex-husband once in an ultramarine moon.”

  “Are you saying ‘

  “She could have been pumping me about you. She was certainly very curious about you. After you called yesterday, I rang the number she gave me. Just to check.”

  “Unobtainable?”

  The operator said even the dialling code didn’t exist.” There was a pause. Then she said, “Sorry, Chris.”

  “Never mind,” I said, steeling myself not to blame her. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know.” But I was going to find out. That now seemed to be one certainty sown among many imponderables. When I set out for Cornwall in the morning, she’d be waiting somewhere ahead. She hadn’t finished with me yet. Perhaps she hadn’t really begun. There was more than one beast, it seemed, hiding in the forest.

  “Are you in any kind of trouble, Chris?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Does this have something to do with Nicky Lanyon? I read about him in the paper.”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No. I’m hoping. Without a lot of confidence.”

  If there was anyone in Truro who doubted Michael Lanyon’s guilt, other than his own family, they kept quiet about it during the weeks following his arrest. It was easy to say as my father did that the police could be trusted to have good reasons for charging him along with Edmund Tully. It’s what I assumed myself. I wasn’t a rebellious child. I’d been raised to trust authority as well as respect it. If my parents and the police said something was so, then to me it was unquestionable.

  Why Michael had done what he’d done and what the consequences were for him and Nicky and me taxed me much more than the central issue of his guilt or innocence. Denied a friend to confide in, I wandered around Truro through the dusty days of late summer imagining all manner of crazy preludes and unlikely postludes to Uncle Joshua’s murder. I wanted to see Nicky and heal the breach between us without confronting the cause of it. But I knew that wasn’t possible. When we next met which I supposed we were bound to do when the Truro School year began, on the second Wednesday in September there was going to be some kind of reckoning. But what kind I couldn’t imagine.

  “My dad says they’re going to hang your pal’s dad,” Don Prideaux announced with a gleeful leer when I met him fishing one afternoon down by the Moresk viaduct. “He reckons they’ll string him up by the neck.”

  He added a choking noise and a roll of the eyes to his prediction.

  “Want to see how they tie a noose?”

  “It’s not a joke!” I shouted at him in protest.

  “It’s a comeuppance Don riposted. “That’s what my dad calls it. Pride goes before a fall. That’s what he says.”

  Don’s father wasn’t the only one who relished the reversal in Michael Lanyon’s fortunes. I was too young to sense it at the time but now it seems as obvious as it was cruel. Michael Lanyon had been raised from the gutter on an old man’s whim. That’s what they’d have said about him. He didn’t deserve the advantages he’d been given. So, by the same twisted logic, he deserved to have those advantages taken away. He deserved to be humbled.

  But the law had something far worse than that in store for him. He and Tully were due to have the case against them heard by the Truro magistrates early in September. Until then, they were languishing on remand in Exeter Prison, ninety miles away. While at Tredower House, Michael Lanyon’s mother and wife and son sat out the siege as best they could, seen nowhere and consoled by no-one. They too were in prison. There were no bars at their windows, no gaolers patrolling
beyond them, but for them as for Michael Lanyon, there was no way out.

  I had a single dismal sight of them at this time. It came one morning at the railway station. I’d gone down there straight after breakfast to watch whatever was coming or going from a favourite vantage point on the Black Bridge the footbridge spanning the tracks and goods yard just west of the station. It was an ideal spot from which to see the first up train from Penzance go through and that’s where I was when the eight forty to Bristol pulled in. As the smoke cleared the bridge and I looked down on to the platform, three figures hurried forward to board the train: Cordelia, Rose and Nicky.

  They were going to Exeter to visit Michael. I realized at once that was what they were about. The early start would allow them a decent stay before they had to return. Not that I knew the first thing about arrangements for visiting prisoners, nor whether Nicky was going to go in with them or be left outside. Either way, I could glimpse the mixture of dread and anticipation in his expression: pale, fixed, determined, but unequal to what lay ahead of him. I glimpsed that too.

  Slowly, he was being overwhelmed. This was just one early moment in the process, but perhaps the first moment when I appreciated what it meant to him; when I started feeling sorrier for him than for myself.

  I cried out to him, loudly and instinctively. But too many doors were slamming, too many voices shouting. They were gone in an instant, bustling into the carriage. Nicky didn’t look up as his mother pushed him aboard. He didn’t see me. He didn’t hear me. He was gone.

  I ran back across the bridge, down the steps and along the road towards the station entrance. I knew it was a hopeless effort. Their train was standing at the farthest platform, and it was already moving when I dodged in through the parcels gate. But still I ran after it, in the vague hope that Nicky would see me and know I really was trying to reach him. I stopped at the far end, where the platform chamfered down to the trackside, and stood there panting, with my hands on my knees, as the train gathered speed and moved steadily away from me, out across the city.

  I never found out if Nicky saw me. The chance to ask him was a long time coming. When it finally arrived I didn’t take it. And it’ll never come again.

  A letter from the Truro coroner arrived while I was packing a bag early on Monday morning. As Considine had told me, the inquest into Nicky’s death was to be held on 26 October and I, like him, was required as a witness. In a sense, I was pleased to have a deadline to meet. Three weeks would be enough, one way or the other.

  I gave the Stag its head and reached St. Mawes in the middle of a milk-mild afternoon. The Roseland was looking at its autumnal best: green and rolling and refulgent. The estuary had a clear blue beckoning sparkle, with the slack sails of slow-moving yachts scattered lazily across it.

  I traced George Treffry via the post office, where he drew his pension, to Tangier Terrace, a row of narrow, white, slate-roofed cottages off Church Hill, perched vertiginously above town and sea like guillemots on a cliff face. There was no answer at his door, but a keen-eared neighbour looked out and told me this was the invariable hour of “Mr.

  Treffry’s p’rambulation’. I was advised to try the road to Castle Point and to look out for an old fellow in a brown suit and battered trilby with a snow-white moustache, accompanied by an elderly bull terrier.

  It was a good description, but I’d have missed him nonetheless if I hadn’t happened to glance over the beach wall when I reached the road.

  His perambulation had evidently taken him no further than a bench in the sunny lee of the wall, where he was enjoying a quiet pipe while his dog pottered aimlessly on the foreshore. I hurried down the nearby flight of steps to join them.

  “George Treffry?” I ventured as I neared the bench. He turned a slow frown towards me. “I don’t suppose you remember me.”

  “You’re right there.” His voice had gruffened with age. He eyed me warily from beneath the brim of his trilby. Perhaps he was worried in case I was an old lag he’d once sent down. If so, he must have concluded I was too young or too respectable, because his tone softened as he added, “Should I?”

  “Chris Napier.”

  “Napier?” The frown returned.

  “Joshua Carnoweth was my great-uncle. You interviewed me after his murder. I’d have been eleven then.”

  “Good Lord.” He took the pipe from his mouth and stared at me. “So you would.”

  “Can I sit down?”

  “It’s a public bench.”

  Undeterred, I sat beside him. The bull terrier came panting over suspiciously, but his master reassured him with a pat. A wave broke idly on the beach and a gull curled past us, a shadow flicking across the sun.

  “This about the Lanyon boy?”

  “We were best friends as children.”

  “But only as children. I imagine that ended in the summer of forty-seven.”

  “I used to think so. But since Nicky’s suicide …”

  “Conscience troubling you, Mr. Napier?”

  “Yes. What about you?”

  He treated me to a lengthy glare, then smiled faintly, as if he were too old to sustain an outraged front. “Arthritis is troubling me. Old age is boring me to death. But conscience doesn’t give me even an occasional jab.”

  “Nicky thought his father was innocent.”

  “So would I. If I’d been his son. But I wasn’t. I was investigating a murder. That’s what I told your pal when he came to see me.”

  “When was that?”

  “About a week before his death.”

  “Nicky came here then?”

  “He did.”

  “What did he want?”

  , “I think he wanted me to say I regretted putting together the case against his father. Regretted seeing him hang. It was hard to be sure. He wasn’t making a lot of sense. I felt sorry for him, but I had to tell him the truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “That his father was guilty as charged.”

  “You’ve always been sure of that?”

  “Oh yes. It was a depressingly straightforward case, if you really want to know. Not much real detection involved. We apprehended Edmund Tully less than twelve hours after the murder. There were bloodstained clothes in his bag when we took him off the train and the samples later turned out to match your uncle’s blood type. There were eye-witnesses who picked out Tully in an identity parade as the man they’d seen running away down Lemon Street. Plus his fingerprints on the murder weapon. He threw the knife into a drain at the bottom of the hill, but it hadn’t rained for weeks so it was just lying down there, waiting for us. All in all, there wasn’t a lot of work for us to do.”

  “What about Michael Lanyon?”

  “Tully led us to him within hours of his arrest. He had nearly five hundred quid in his bag, and when he saw the evidence piling up against him he admitted Lanyon had paid him the money to do away with Mr.

  Carnoweth. He was to get another five hundred when the job was done.

  But he botched it so badly he panicked and made a run for it. He denied it all later. Said we’d coerced him into signing a confession.

  His barrister cobbled together a story that his treatment as a Japanese prisoner of war had made him vulnerable to the slightest pressure under interrogation. But there wasn’t any pressure. There didn’t need to be. He admitted that in the end when he changed his plea. Besides, I knew it was the truth as soon as he said it.”

  “How?”

  “Just a feeling you get in that line of work. What do you do for a living?”

  “I restore cars.”

  “So you can tell when an engine’s running sweetly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Same with the stories people tell and the way they tell them.” Treffry tapped out his pipe against the edge of the bench and inspected the empty bowl. “It all fitted together, you see. Tully and Lanyon met at Oxford. Got to be good friends. Toured Europe together. Tully had a wealthy father to pick up his bills just as Lanyon had M
r. Carnoweth.

  Then they drifted apart. Lanyon went back to Truro, Tully to the family firm up north. When the war broke out, he joined the Army and had the bad luck to wind up in Malaya. He was captured at the fall of Singapore and spent more than three years in a Japanese prison camp.

  That does something to a man. I reckon it’s what made Tully a murderer.”

  “What made Michael Lanyon a murderer?”

  “Temptation. Mr. Carnoweth was thinking of changing his will. You know that. You were with him when he went to see his solicitor.