Ah, Nicky. How I guarded my thoughts of him as the days and weeks slipped by; how I hid my wish to help him as if it were some vice to be ashamed of. I wrote him a letter at one point, a stilted expression of sympathy that it was probably just as well I didn’t send. The lack of an address for him in Exeter was the reason, I told myself, but it was more in the way of an excuse. I saw Ethel Jago in Boscawen Street one Saturday afternoon, and could have asked her for the address if I’d really wanted to know it. But I didn’t even speak to her. Instead, I dodged down Cathedral Lane to avoid being seen, and so came to the point at the other end of the lane where I’d had my last sight of Uncle Joshua three months before. I remembered the half-crown piece he’d tossed me twinkling in the sunlight. I still had the coin in my pocket. I’d carried it about with me all that time. It was for the cinema, of course. And I hadn’t been to the cinema since. It was for me and Nicky. Now, I realized, it never would be spent. Not for its appointed purpose. So I resolved to keep it as a symbol of the ending of things.
I wonder when and how I lost it. In the confusion of a house move, perhaps, or the long careless stretch of my late twenties and early thirties, when reminders of the past, whether sweet or sour, were anathema to me. I wish I hadn’t. Not as dearly as I wish other things, but I wish it even so. “The future’s a two-edged sword,” Uncle Joshua said that day. And he was right. But he might have gone on to mention that the past is sharper, even though it’s a single blade.
The royal wedding came and went without news of a reprieve. Letters to the press went unheeded. Appeals for clemency fell upon deaf ears.
What the law had decreed it seemed determined to dispense. The appointed day dawned, mild and wet in Truro, unremarked upon in the Napier household, though filling the thoughts of every one of us as we rose and washed and ate our breakfasts and engaged in a pretence of normality. Except that the subdued tones in which we spoke, the silenced wireless and the unopened newspaper, weren’t normal at all.
Pam and I usually squabbled over the last slice of toast, but that day we left several slices untouched in the rack.
Just before eight o’clock, Michael Lanyon was marched to the scaffold in Exeter Prison. I was on my way to school at the time, trailing listlessly along Quay Street as the City Hall clock struck the hour behind me. My parents were already serving in the shop, while back at Crescent Road Gran was readying herself to join them. A few minutes later, Michael Lanyon was dead. In Truro, nothing marked his going.
The rain continued to fall, my footsteps to carry me forward. Life went on.
I headed north on Monday morning. Sunshine and showers chased me along the scarp line of the Chilterns until I hit the Ml, then fell away behind as the long grey motorway miles wound out like a reel, the sky leadening as the wind weakened, the day stretching and thinning around me.
Calderdale that afternoon looked autumn ally benign, the moors above tamely picturesque. I drove into Hebden Bridge from the east and saw it at its meekest, the chimneys smokeless, the mills silent. I saw it, indeed, as the stone and slate ghost of a dead industry. Only geographically was it the same place Inspector Treffry had come to thirty-four years before. In every other sense it was a world away.
The family firm Tully had fled must surely have been buried by history.
But history had left abundant traces, in the double-decker back-to-back houses clinging to the sheer valley walls, in the ranks of barrack-block mills crammed along the riverside. The TO LET and FOR
SALE signs were up, but Edmund Tully’s past was still here, in this town. I sensed it as much as I knew it, driving out for a mile onto the moors, then back down into the tangle of steps and streets and secret ways he’d once called home. Edmund Tully had gone. But he’d left some part of himself behind.
I booked into the White Lion Hotel, then walked out into the town as a grey evening settled over it like a shroud. A group of standard-issue youths sat on a wall in the central square, but there was nothing they could have told me, apart from how grim it was to be young in Hebden Bridge. It was their parents’ memories, and their parents’, that I needed to tap.
The bar of the Albert, a smoky Victorian street-corner local, seemed like a good place to start. “Tully, you say?” growled an old man in a grimy suit and flat cap, breaking off from glum scrutiny of the Halifax Courier. “It’s a good long while since I heard anyone asking after that firm. And a longer one since it were a going concern. When would you reckon Tully’s went bust, Bert?”
“Must be twenty years at least,” replied the man standing next to him, a marginally smarter but similarly lugubrious fellow. “Well, twenty since Henry Tully died, any rate. And that carpet-bagging son of his closed the place down within a twelvemonth.”
“Henry Tully was the original owner?”
“No, no. That were his father, Abraham Tully.” So, Henry Tully had to be the brother Treffry had spoken to back in 1947. “You remember old Abe, Wilf ?”
“I do. A hard man. And not noted as a fair one.”
“What line of business were they in?”
“Fustian,” said Bert, who was emerging as the more forthcoming of the two. “Like the rest of the mills here. Cloth for coats and trousers and such. But it all comes in from abroad now. Tully’s made good money, till foreign competition finished them.”
“The son where does he live?”
“Spain, last I heard.”
“None of the family left round here?”
“Not a one.”
“Hold up, Bert,” said Wilf. “That can’t be right. What about the old lady?”
“Oh aye. Miriam. I was forgetting her.”
“Who’s she?”
“Henry Tully’s widow.”
“And she still lives here?”
“Not in Hebden, no. Old people’s home, up Keighley way. You don’t want to see her, surely?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
The two exchanged a look. Then Bert said, “Gone in the head, son.
That’s what they reckon.”
“Do you happen to know the address of the home?”
“Can’t say I do.” Wilf gave a shrug to indicate he had no idea either.
“We’re not likely to be ha ring up there to visit her, are we? The Tullys were owners and the likes of us were workers, till the South Koreans put us all out of a job. Big bugs and littl’uns don’t mix, least not in this town. Why’d you say you were interested in them?”
“We might be distantly related.”
“You’ll be distantly related to a murderer, then.”
“Oh?”
“Henry Tully’ sbrother, Edmund, murdered a bloke down south just after the war. We thought he’d swing for it, but he wriggled out of that, just like he wriggled out of Hebden when it suited him.”
“You knew him?”
“By sight and reputation, aye. But it’s more than forty years since he buggered off and he’s not been back since. They let him out of prison a few years ago, I heard. The good Lord alone knows why. And it’s only God who’ll know what’s become of him since. He’ll not be found here in a hurry, that’s certain.”
But I wasn’t certain. Home is where you start from, and it’s the last place to forget you. I rose early next morning and walked up past the Tullys’ old house in Birchcliffe Road. It was in the middle of a row of imposing Victorian villas overlooking the town Snob Row, Bert and Wilf had called it. They hadn’t said which one had belonged to the Tullys nor which of the redundant mills clogging the valley floor below had paid for it. I’d have liked to know, but it didn’t really matter.
One was the same as another. Hebden Bridge; Oxford; Malaya; Truro: that was the route map of his life. I felt I only had to follow the arrows to find where he was hiding.
Back at the White Lion, after breakfast, I started phoning round all the residential homes with Keighley numbers. The third one I tried, Ravensthorpe Lodge, confirmed that Miriam Tully lived there. And that visitors were always welcome.
> Murder defines the murderer as well as his victim. Everything else they did and were becomes subordinate to that terminal event. No other way of dying has quite the same binding power. Joshua Carnoweth wasn’t remembered in Truro as a tinner made good, a lovelorn wanderer or a sentimental loner, but as the rich old man stabbed to death at the top of Lemon Street in August 1947. Nor was Michael Lanyon recalled as a glamorous war hero or a hard-working auctioneer, only as the avaricious schemer responsible for the stabbing, who’d gone to the gallows a few months later. The rest their lives and loves, their failures and successes was discarded as so much unnecessary detail.
I sensed the process taking hold around me as autumn became winter and all the protests and arguments and niggling inconsistencies were forgotten in the face of one pragmatic truth. Both men were dead and buried. Neither was coming back to life, any more than the Lanyons were coming back to Truro. A line had been drawn, an episode closed.
It was over.
But its consequences remained to be assimilated. I don’t know when or how I realized my family had become rich beyond their most optimistic estimates of Uncle Joshua’s wealth. Mr. Cloke no doubt dispensed his secrets with a grudging hand. And the settling of a murdered man’s estate is presumably a complicated affair. Certainly Gran and my father spent many an hour closeted in Mr. Cloke’s offices that December. Gradually, however, the awareness seeped into teatime conversation and my own limited view of the future. “This will set us up nicely,” Dad cautiously admitted one day. But at Christmas, tongue loosened by port, he was more expansive and rather more accurate.
“We’ll be able to live like kings. To think he had so much. And to think it’s all come to us.”
To be strictly accurate, it had come to Gran. And, though she was to develop a liking for extravagance, it would remain as it began: purposeful. Moving to Tredower House and fitting it out as a stylish residence would establish us as a family of substance. Expanding a small grocery shop with a one-room credit drapery business above into a regional chain of department stores would seal our reputation for acumen and industry. These ambitions of hers became the destinies of each of us, though it was a long time before I understood what they amounted to.
Meanwhile, undreamed-of luxuries were there to be enjoyed. To celebrate my twelfth birthday in March 1948, we all went up to London for a long weekend at the start of the Easter school holidays, which fell early that year. We stayed at Claridge’s, took a boat trip along the river, visited the Tower and went to see the new smash-hit American musical, Annie Get Your Gun. I can still remember the sights and sounds of the evening, its intoxicating metropolitan sense of energetic fun. It put right out of my mind as perhaps it was intended to all conscious memory of my joint birthday party with Nicky at Tredower House the year before. It was our home now, not the Lanyons’; our future, not theirs. And I was beginning to enjoy the transformation.
Ravensthorpe Lodge was one of several high-gabled Victorian residences on the north-western outskirts of Keighley, leafily tranquil and blessed with what I assumed would have been a panoramic view of Airedale and the Pennines but for the drizzly pall of cloud that had descended as I drove across the moors from Hebden Bridge.
Miriam Tully wasn’t in the lounge, where most of the residents were taking morning coffee to the booming accompaniment of a natural history documentary on the television. “Not one of our more sociable ladies,”
the nurse who greeted me confided. Which was just as well. What I wanted to talk to her about wasn’t going to be aided by having to shout over a commentary on the grazing habits of wildebeest.
She was sitting in an armchair by the window of her room, reading a large-print Dick Francis novel. White-haired, slope-shouldered and clearly in physical decline, as her clumsily buttoned dress and the walking frame standing in readiness by the chair confirmed, she nevertheless looked better and more alert than Bert had led me to expect.
“Visitor for you, Miriam,” said the nurse. “The gentleman who phoned earlier.”
“Phoned?” said Miriam, in a cracked and querulous voice. “I’ve phoned nobody. Can’t afford to at the rates you charge.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” the nurse whispered to me as she slipped out, a touch of resignation detectable in her tone.
“You from the council?” Miriam asked, looking up as I approached, her pale-blue eyes magnified alarmingly by her glasses. “High time you checked up on these people.”
“I’m nothing to do with the council,” I said, drawing up a chair and venturing a smile as I sat down. “My name’s Napier. I’m hoping you can help me.”
“Can’t think how.”
“I’m looking for your brother-in-law, Edmund Tully.”
“My brother’s dead. And his name wasn’t Edmund.”
“Your brother-in-law. I’m sure you know who I mean.”
“I don’t understand anything.” She pouted. “Matron will tell you that.”
“Come on, Miriam. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with ‘
“How dare you use my Christian name?” She glared at me. “Did I give you permission? Perhaps I forgot. They tell me I’m so very forgetful.
Or perhaps I didn’t and you’re merely displaying the presumptuousness of your generation, in which case ‘
“Sorry, sorry.” I held up my hands in surrender. “I stand rebuked.
Quite right Mrs. Tully.”
“Who did you say you were?”
“Chris Napier.”
“Never heard of you.”
“Joshua Carnoweth’s nephew.”
“Who?”
“The man your brother-in-law murdered.”
“Murder?” She grew suddenly thoughtful and carefully set her book aside. “Such an ugly deed.”
“Do you know where Edmund is?”
“He should be dead by rights. Dead. Like my poor dear Henry.”
“But he isn’t?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I can only hope so. Your uncle wasn’t his only victim. He as good as murdered Henry. Bottling up the shame he felt for what his brother had done took him to an early grave. He’d have kept the mill open, you know. He’d have found a way to make it profitable. Then Richard wouldn’t have been able to sell off the family silver and lock me up here.”
“Richard’s your son?”
“A thankless child. And therefore sharper than a serpent’s tooth.
There’s a streak in him of his uncle’s nature. He sits out there in Spain,
running that sports clinic he set up with the money he got from cashing in on two generations of sober industry. He sits there by his swimming pool, sipping Pimm’s while I have to She broke off and frowned, as if aware she might have said too much. “Well, well, I dare say this is getting us nowhere.”
“When did you last see your brother-in-law, Mrs. Tully?”
“Edmund?”
“Yes,” I said, trying to remain patient. “Edmund.”
“Oh, many years ago. Before the war. He announced one day that he was off to London to take up a job offered him by somebody he knew from Oxford. Insurance, as I recall. About which Edmund would have known less than nothing. He hated Hebden Bridge. Said it was too small, too hostile an environment for his exotic talents to bloom in. What he really couldn’t abide was working under Henry. He thought a university education entitled him to a senior position in the firm, but he wasn’t prepared to earn it. He never was prepared to apply himself to anything, come to that. A feckless boy, and a worthless man. I always knew he’d come to no good.”
“Do you remember the name of his friend in London? Or the company he worked for?”
“Gone, I’m afraid. Edmund didn’t stay there long.”
“But he didn’t come back to Hebden Bridge?”
“Not once. Even to see his mother’s grave. She died while he was a prisoner of war. You’d have thought he’d want to pay his respects when he came home, but nothing of the sort. He stayed away. We didn’t expect t
o hear from him and I don’t suppose we ever would have but for the murder.”
“You know he was released from prison twelve years ago?”
“I heard something to that effect.”
Beyond Recall Page 21