“How do you work that out?”
“Simple, boy. I lied on oath. That’s quite a thing to stand up and do. But I did it. And not out of spite or devilment neither. I did it because I was told to.”
“Told? Who by?”
A shameful little smile played around his lips as he replied. “Your grandmother. Adelaide Napier. It was her idea. It helped hang Michael Lanyon. And now I’m wondering if it helped hang his son as well.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Eli,” Gran seemed to be saying. The word formed on her lips with a slow gathering of effort. She was dying and must have known it, despite the succession of strokes. They might have broken her physically, but behind the swimming eyes and dribbling mouth that tenacious brain of hers was working as well as ever. I could feel its determination, its refusal to accept defeat. Death would be kept waiting a little longer yet.
“Eli.” That’s what I thought she said. That’s as much sense as I could make of the slurred murmur. I could only hear by stooping over her where she lay, twitching one forefinger in what might have been an attempt to beckon me closer. A schoolfriend I’d never heard of; a sweetheart from her distant youth. That’s what I assumed. An old woman was recalling a stray fragment of the remote past in a vain attempt to hold death at bay. Nothing more. Only a few hours later, as rain beat against the windows of her bedroom at Tredower House and a February dusk blackened into night, she drew her last laborious breath.
Peacefully at home, aged ninety-two, her obituary notice would say, after a short illness, Adelaide Napier died, with her family and her secrets gathered about her.
“Eli.” I recalled the sound and the word I’d thought it was meant to be as I drove away from Sam Vigus’s bungalow that afternoon, not north to Truro, but south to the National Trust garden at Trelissick, where I could walk alone and unquestioned by the steep wooded shores of the Fal and seek for answers in the dwindling autumnal light. I could never say for sure what Gran had intended to communicate on her deathbed nine years before, but now a name was far less likely than a confession.
“He lied.” Yes. That could have been it. That could so easily have been the meaning. For Sam Vigus had lied. He’d admitted as much. And my grandmother had been responsible. That too he’d volunteered, without any way of knowing my own memory could supply a partial corroboration.
“Why did you do it, Mr. Vigus?”
“Doreen was in over her head with the fancy clothes your grandmother supplied on the never-never. We owed her precious near a hundred pound, and it was going to take me Lord knows how long to pay it off. I would have done, mark you. It wouldn’t have been easy, but I’d have done it. If your grandmother hadn’t come to me whispering about…
alternatives.”
“She wrote off the debt in exchange for your false testimony?”
That she did.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Yes you do, boy. I can see it in your eyes. You already know it’s the truth. Michael Lanyon was guilty. We both believed that. What I’d seen at the Daniell Arms was proof enough, to my way of thinking.
Your grandmother just wanted to be sure of the outcome, she said; sure of justice. And since I didn’t doubt where justice led, I didn’t mind giving it a helping hand. Not when it got me off the hook so quick and simple. Except there’s more than one kind of hook. I’ve been dangling on another kind ever since.”
“Gran told you what to say?”
“No, no. She left that to me. She knew from Doreen that I’d reported seeing Lanyon and Tully together to the police. Well, a tongue like a barn door on a windy day, my old lady had. So, your grandmother came to me and proposed that I say I’d … heard something as well as seen.
Just to … “stiffen the arm of justice” was how she put it. In return, we’d forget the debt.”
“And you agreed?”
“To my shame, I did. I went to Inspector Treffry and told him I’d held back on what I’d heard because of how bad it looked for Michael Lanyon, but conscience had got the better of me. Treffry was angry at first, but he was too pleased with the new evidence to keep that up for long.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I thought at the time your grandmother wanted to make sure her brother’s murderers didn’t wriggle out of answering for what they’d done. But later, when I heard how much came down to her from old man Carnoweth’ swill, just how much richer he’ dbeen than any of us had thought, well, I felt sicker than a whipped dog, I don’t mind admitting. I’d helped her make sure, all right, of putting more noughts on her bank balance than I ate boiled eggs in a week. For the sake of barely a hundred pound thrown away on Doreen’s glad rags.”
“You could have spoken out.”
“With Michael Lanyon dead and no-one likely to believe me? Talk sense, boy. Your grandmother could have denied the Holy Ghost without turning a hair. And there was Doreen to consider. She didn’t know, see. Not a thing. Thought I’d cleared the debt with back pay from Killigrew’s.
She was a simple soul, with no head for figures, so she never questioned it. Besides, I’d been taken for a fool right enough, but there’s worse things than that to suffer.”
“Like being hanged for a crime you didn’t commit on the basis of false evidence.”
“But Michael Lanyon did commit it. You know that sure as I do.”
“If you’re so certain on the point, why are you telling me this?”
“Cos doubts creep in here with the draughts and the unaccountable noises I hear when I lie awake at night recollecting his face as he stared at me across the courtroom. And I don’t see why I should be the only one to bear them.”
To that extent, I realized as I walked through the woods at Trelissick, Vigus had got what he wanted. I shared the burden with him now. I knew. Worse still, I suspected. Had Gran confided in any other member of the family? Dad had told Mum to ignore Vigus, to forget all about him. Why? Why so very adamant? I looked down through the trees at the King Harry Ferry and listened to the steady clanking of its chain as I wound in the thread left trailing down the years. One lie was a single crack that could become a thousand shatter-lines in the smooth mantle of my family’s past and present. It didn’t prove anything. It didn’t vindicate anyone. But it meant I couldn’t stop.
Tully still held the key, more firmly than ever. Treffry had told me, and Nicky before me, that he could never be found. But then Treffry had called Sam Vigus a reliable man. The truth was that he didn’t want to find Tully, whereas I did. Maybe, if Nicky had heard Vigus’s confession, he wouldn’t have given up so easily. Maybe he’d have done what I was now determined to do: track down Edmund Tully, wherever he might be hiding.
Trust was another victim of Vigus’s revelations. I didn’t know who I could rely on and who I couldn’t. Gran had spoken to me, no-one else.
She’d been dumb and inert for the best part of two days prior to my arrival, garnering her strength, perhaps, ordering her thoughts. But why try to tell me at all? Because she judged I’d know what best to do with the information? Or because she felt I was entitled to know what others already knew? Mum wouldn’t have sent me to see Vigus if she’
dhad any inkling of what he meant to say. She at least was ruled out.
But nobody else was. Even Pam. Which made it so much easier than it might have been to enter the flat at Tredower House under cover of darkness that night and remove the photograph from the bureau while she did her bravely smiling rounds of the tables in the restaurant. The chances were I’d be on my way before she noticed its loss. And, even if I wasn’t, it wouldn’t occur to her that I might be the culprit.
I drove down to the Trumouth Motel later and left Trevor’s keys with the receptionist in an envelope addressed to him. The man himself was out, presumably drowning his sorrows somewhere. I was grateful to be able to slip away without needing to deflect any demands of his to hand over the incriminating half of the photograph. I’d already decided to have a copy made for my use so that P
am could give the original to her solicitor if and when the time came. If a divorce was what she ultimately wanted, who was I to stand in her way?
I looked in on her when I returned once more to Tredower House and was reassured by her calmness. Nothing was amiss, other than the relatively trivial matter of her difficulties with Trevor. She already knew how Mum and Dad had taken the news, because they’d been on the telephone at some length.
“I’m sorry about Dad,” I said, working on the safe assumption that he’d offered to stand in for Trevor. “You know what he’s like.”
“Don’t worry. I think I’ve managed to persuade him I can cope alone.
Tabs is coming down for a few days, anyway, so I’ve been able to say she’ll supply all the help I need. Your flying visit’s been a real help, Chris. It’s made me face up to telling people. And Tabs has come up trumps. No hysterics, no demands for a rethink. Just level-headed practical sympathy. Where have you been since lunch, by the way? You can’t have had your head under a car bonnet in Falmouth all afternoon.”
“I called on Sam Vigus.”
“Who?” Her unawareness sounded genuine. She too was probably in the clear.
“An old customer Mum wanted me to call on. When you see her, can you tell her, preferably while Dad’s out of the way, that there was nothing to it?”
“Nothing to what?”
“She’ll understand.”
“All right. But you can tell her yourself if you like. She’ll be here tomorrow night.”
“But I won’t be, I’m afraid. I have to make an early start.”
“Business is obviously booming.”
“Well, I’m being kept busy, Pam. That’s for sure.”
Once I was back in my room, I telephoned Emma. It was a relief to hear her voice and to know there was at least one person I could be completely open with.
“Something’s happened and we need to discuss it. Not over the telephone. It’s too complicated. Could we meet somewhere?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Where and when?”
“I’m on ear lies at the supermarket this week. I finish at three.
It’s in Battersea. Why don’t we say Battersea Park at three thirty?
The benches beside the boating lake.”
“All right. I’ll be there.”
“Are you on to something, Chris?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, that sounds better than definitely not.”
“Not necessarily.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ll explain tomorrow.” “All right, but Chris “Yes?”
“Whatever it turns out to be, something or nothing, thanks. For Nicky, I mean. You know?” “I know.”
The turmoil and anonymity of my first few weeks at Truro School enabled me to forget Nicky and his father’s forthcoming trial, often for days at a stretch. Everything was new and confusing teachers, classmates, rooms, books, uniforms: all the intimidating components of senior school life. “High on the hill, with the city below,” we sang in the chapel on the first day of term, ‘up in the sunshine we live.“I Well, the sun didn’t always shine, but the sense of separation from Truro that our lofty setting imbued in us was never dearer to me than then.
Some of the pupils who’d come up with me from the prep department recalled how chummy I’d been with Nicky Lanyon, but those who hadn’t were in the majority and were determined to be unimpressed by what they thought was my bid for a dubious kind of fame. I was happy to let my connection with Nicky wither into something minor and inconsequential.
Well, not happy exactly, but willing. I knew it was disloyal. I knew it was unworthy. Yet, pulled between the necessities of day-to-day survival and the slowly fading memory of our friendship, I let it happen. Nobody seemed to think it in the least odd that Nicky hadn’t taken up his place at the school. After a while, it would have seemed perverse to suggest he’d ever been likely to. He had nothing to do with any of us. He’d become a stranger.
But the name of Lanyon was known to all. And soon it would be blazoned across the front page of every national newspaper, let alone the West Briton and the Royal Cornwall Gazette. Soon the slack-water weeks of waiting would be over. The trial of Michael Lanyon and Edmund Tully for the murder of Joshua Caraoweth was due to commence on 20 October.
Amongst the dates of long-ago battles and long-dead kings that went into my mind and out again with every passing history lesson, that date which no-one had asked me to remember lodged stubbornly and firmly. As the calendar rolled round towards it.
A few weeks beforehand, Dad’s Daily Telegraph reported the hanging at Pentonville of two armed robbers, Geraghty and Jenkins, convicted back in July, when I’d been taking no interest in such things, of the murder of a motorcyclist who’d tried to stop them escaping from a raid on a jeweller’s shop in London. Geraghty had done the shooting. Jenkins hadn’t killed anyone. That was clear. But both men hanged. I couldn’t help imagining that to Nicky, reading the same report in a lodging house somewhere in Exeter, it would seem what he least wanted it to be: an ill omen.
Battersea Park was bathed in crystalline sunlight, gilding the yellows and reds of the trees around the boating lake and etching the lines of the power-station chimneys beyond Queenstown Road. Children on their way home from school were playing with their mothers, the high notes of their carefree voices rising above the plaintive wail of the peacocks and the distant growl of the traffic.
Emma looked odd, if not downright eccentric, wearing her flying jacket over her pale check supermarket uniform. She sat beside me on a bench close to a formless Barbara Hepworth sculpture, listening patiently as I recounted what I’d learned in Cornwall.
I expected her to react with disbelief or outrage; she was entitled to both. Instead, when I’d finished, she gave me a sympathetic smile and said, “I’m sorry, Chris.”
“You’re sorry?”
“It can’t be very nice to learn your grandmother stooped to bribing a witness.”
“I’d say it was closer to blackmail than bribery.”
“Whatever you call it, it weakens the case against my father, though, right?”
“It does. But don’t get carried away.”
“Do I look as if I’m likely to?”
“Well, no.” She’d looked tired and dispirited when she arrived; the effect, I assumed, of a mind-numbing shift on the supermarket checkout.
Even now she remained subdued, saddened perhaps by the thought that Nicky had thrown away the chance to make the same discovery as me. But that wasn’t quite true, even though I felt it myself. It had taken Nicky’s suicide to flush Sam Vigus out of the undergrowth. Nicky had had to die to make my discovery possible.
“Remember, Emma. This proves my grandmother falsified some evidence.
I’d never have thought her capable of such contemptible behaviour, but there it is. What it doesn’t prove, however, is that the verdict was false. We’re still left with the fact that your father paid Edmund Tully five hundred pounds two days before the murder.”
“He said he gave Tully the money for old times’ sake.”
“Five hundred pounds. That must be several thousand at today’s prices.
It’s simply not credible.”
“You think Vigus made up something pretty similar to what they actually said, don’t you?”
“I think it’s still the likeliest explanation. But one man could tell us for certain.”
Tully.”
“Yes. And no-one’s seen him for twelve years.”
“What next, then?”
“I’ll go up to Hebden Bridge and see what I can find out. There might be a friend or relative of Tully’s there who can put me on the right track.”
“When will you go?”
“At the weekend. I’ll have to get some work done before then. You know, the kind that pays.”
She grinned. “Yeh. I know. Are you in a hurry to get back to Pangbourne? If not, maybe I could buy you a cup
of tea. There’s a cafe on the other side of the lake.”
“Thanks. That’d be nice.” We rose and started walking slowly round the perimeter of the lake. “Unless there’s somebody waiting for you at home, of course.”
I was fishing for information, as her smile seemed to acknowledge.
“Like I told you, solitude’s a habit of mine. See those flats over there?” She pointed back at the high-rise blocks that loomed like the mesas and buttes of a desert landscape beyond the red-brick Victorian terraces flanking the park. “One of those windows is mine. And, unless I’m being burgled again, there’s no-one on the other side of it.”
Beyond Recall Page 19