“But still no contact?”
“Not even a begging letter, I’m pleased to say.”
“Might he have approached your son?”
“Richard? He never knew him.”
“Some other relative, then?”
“I hardly think so.”
“But surely ‘
“There’s a wife, of course. I suppose he must have got in touch with her. Though if it was a handout he was hoping for ‘
“Wife?”
“Yes. Edmund married a girl down in London just before he joined the Army. We never met her, but they may have had some genuine affinity, given what we learned she was capable of, so I suppose it’s possible he crawled back to her after his release.”
“What do you mean “what she was capable of”?”
Miriam looked past me at some spot on the wallpaper that might have been an irksome stain on her memory. “It can’t do any harm to tell you, I suppose. Henry went to great lengths to keep it quiet, but he’s been gone so long and the name of Tully stands for nothing in Hebden Bridge now, so what does it really matter? If it embarrasses Richard, so be it.” She almost smiled at the thought. “They are cousins, after all.”
“Who?”
“Richard and Edmund’s child.”
“There was a child?”
“Oh yes. That was half the problem. I don’t think Henry would have agreed, but for the fact that it was his niece we were talking about.”
“Edmund had a daughter?”
“According to his wife. Though I’ve always thought she might have ‘
“How old? How old would she be?”
“The daughter? About thirty-five, I suppose.” She shook her head in wonderment. “Yes, she must be all of that by now. How time flies.”
Then she looked across at me. “Is there something wrong, Mr.
Napier?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
There was nothing wrong. There was, in fact, a great deal that was right that fitted and made a dimly perceived kind of sense about the revelation that Edmund Tully had a daughter. She’d be about thirty-five years old; more or less the age I’d have put Pauline Lucas at. Well, well, well. When all was said and done, she had to be somebody’s daughter. And she had to have some link with the murderous past of Edmund Tully. Why not more of a bond than a link, then? Why not the love of a child for her father?
I said nothing to Miriam of what I suspected. There was no point. It was easier to sit there by her drizzle-misted window, with the unappetizing foretaste of a boiled fish lunch drifting up from below, while she talked on, dipping in and out of a lifetime’s worth of regrets and resentments. I was lucky to find her so old and bored and bitter. In earlier times, when she’d had a status and a reputation to defend, she’d have been far less forthcoming. But all that was gone.
She no longer handed out the Sunday school prizes at Birchcliffe Baptist Chapel. Her husband no longer chaired meetings of the Hebden Bridge Wholesale Clothiers’ Association. And he and she no longer lived in a big house on Snob Row within sight of the smoking chimney of Abraham Tully Ltd. The chapel was closed, her husband dead, the house sold, the family firm extinct. So, with nothing to lose bar a seat in the Ravensthorpe Lodge television lounge, she was free to speak her mind. Indeed, she was glad to.
Abraham Tully set up in business at Hebden Bridge in the late 1880s, just as the town’s domination of the fustian industry was becoming apparent. Treffry had described the works to me as a linen mill, but then what would a Cornish policeman know about such things? Fustian was actually the stuff of hard-wearing working-men’s clothes. Tully’s turned out trousers, jackets, coats, overalls and boiler suits for sale throughout the Empire. It made the founder a rich man and a top dog of local society. He moved into one of the smart new houses being built on Birchcliffe Road, married the daughter of another fustian magnate and had three sons: John, destined to die of dysentery while serving in the First World War; Henry, whom his father groomed as his successor at the head of the firm; and Edmund, the youngest by some years, doted on, spoiled and ruinously indulged after his brother’s death.
That was Miriam’s version of events, anyway. Her father ran a dye works in the town, which Tully’s later took over. She married Henry while Edmund was at Oxford and came to know him as the arrogant and restless younger brother who contributed little at work, especially after old Abraham’s death left Henry in full charge, and only trouble and tension at home. His drunken escapades and unexplained absences made him notorious among the workforce and hence in the town. When he departed for the bright lights of London in the autumn of 1938, she was heartily relieved. He chose to announce his going one Sunday afternoon, when Miriam, Henry, baby Richard and old Mrs. Tully had attended the ceremonial unveiling by Sir James O’Dowd of a memorial stone to Hebden Bridge’s war dead. The fact that his own brother was among them had not persuaded Edmund to put in an appearance. When the party returned home, it was to find him packed and ready to go. The last Miriam had ever seen of him was driving off down Birchcliffe Road at a mad speed, leaving his mother in tears and herself in a state of well-concealed delight.
Word of Edmund’s subsequent activities came sporadically and was received by Miriam with indifference. His career in insurance lasted less than a year. His enlistment in the Army she saw not so much as a patriotic act, more an alternative to unemployment; his virtually simultaneous marriage not a serious commitment, but a passing whim. Of his wife, Alice Graham, nothing was heard or known. Certainly it was the War Office rather than the new Mrs. Tully who let them know he’d been captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore. The news cast his mother into a decline from which she never recovered.
When, after the war, the treatment meted out to Japanese prisoners was reported in the newspapers, Miriam concluded that Edmund was unlikely to have survived. Eventually, however, through tangled official channels, they learned he had, though there was still only silence from his wife. From Edmund himself nothing was heard. Had he come to them and asked for help, Miriam insisted, he would not have been turned away. As it was, he never came. And they for their part never went looking. Instead, in the summer of 1947, an inspector called to announce that Edmund had murdered a man in Cornwall. For money, naturally. It seemed only to confirm his irredeemability. Once again their response was to do nothing. A certain amount of gossip in the town had to be ridden out, of course. That was inevitable. But Henry was not his brother’s keeper. He declared that Edmund should answer for what he’d done. There could be no question of speaking out in his defence, since his actions were indefensible. Not that Edmund asked him to speak out. There was no grovelling note from Exeter Prison appealing for a character witness, no message passed on by his solicitor. Edmund, it seemed, wanted nothing from them.
But his wife was a different matter. Just before the trial began, she wrote to them asking for money. Not for herself, naturally, but for her daughter. Edmund’s daughter, that was, the issue of their brief post-war reunion, now a babe in arms. Alice Tully wanted to leave London and make a fresh start somewhere else, where her association with a murderer along with baby Simone’s could be forgotten. Their connection with Edmund hadn’t yet reached the ears of the press, but, if no other means of support came their way, then selling her story to the Sunday papers was something Alice would have to consider.
“It was blackmail, of course,” Miriam declared. “As bold as you like.
But it would have been awful to find ourselves portrayed in the press as letting Edmund’s widow and child live in poverty. We thought he would hang, you see. And the baby was Henry’s niece, of course. He felt an obligation of some kind towards her and never doubted Edmund’s paternity as I must admit I did. With women of that kind, you can’t be too sure, can you?”
I refrained from pointing out to Miriam that she actually had no way of knowing what kind of woman Alice Tully was. Maybe desperation had forced her hand, and maybe Edmund had portrayed his brother and sister-in-law as people more likely
to respond to threats than pleas for help.
Either way, Henry paid up, and went on paying, in the form of a modest allowance, for the rest of his life. Alice settled in Brighton, where she reverted to her maiden name and turned herself into a seaside landlady. Henry wrote to Edmund in prison some months after the trial telling him of the provision he’d made for his daughter, but received no reply. Typical ingratitude, as Miriam saw it.
Edmund was still in prison, and Alice was still living in Brighton, with Simone by then a teenager, when Henry suffered his fatal heart attack just before Christmas, 1961. When she’d recovered from the shock, Miriam wrote to Alice, making it clear that the allowance would no longer be paid. Simone wasn’t her niece, after all. And times were hard for a widow with a failing business and a rapacious son to contend with. Alice didn’t reply, accepting, Miriam supposed, that time had neutralized any threat she and her daughter might once have posed to the Tullys. And there, so far as she was concerned, the matter ended.
“I don’t know what Alice Graham told the girl about her father or his family,” said Miriam. “Whatever it may have been, the truth or rather less than it, it’s never led to any contact with me. And, as you’ve discovered, Mr. Napier, I’m not hard to find.”
“Did … Mrs. Graham … keep you informed about her daughter’s progress in life?”
Miriam snorted. “Certainly not.”
“So she could be anywhere, doing anything, for all you know.”
“Or care. Isn’t that what you really mean?” She tossed her head.
“Well, I don’t deny it. I was determined from the first not to become involved in Edmund’s life in any way. Whatever and whoever he touches tend to be…” She wrinkled her nose. “Soiled.”
“But Simone was your husband’s niece. Didn’t he ever think of visiting her?”
Miriam looked at me as if I were mad. “It never crossed his mind.
The allowance was ample recognition. More than ample, in my opinion.”
It was an opinion I had no doubt she’d favoured Henry Tully with on many occasions. “Richard was horrified when he learned what his father had paid over.” She smiled. “One of the few things we have agreed about.”
“He’s never wanted to see his cousin?”
“He doesn’t really want to see me, Mr. Napier, let alone the daughter of an uncle he can’t even remember. Besides, he has seen her, strictly speaking. Alice Graham sent us a photograph of the baby when she first asked us for help.”
“Do you still have it?” It was a long shot, but if the baby had a look of Pauline Lucas about her
“I’m afraid not. I had to dispose of most of my possessions when I moved here. As you can see, the accommodation is not exactly spacious.
I was only able to keep a few precious mementoes of happier times. A photograph of Edmund’s daughter was, as you may imagine, something I didn’t miss.”
“Do you think Alice Graham still lives in Brighton?”
“I haven’t the remotest idea.”
“It’s just that if I’m to have any chance of finding your brother-in-law …”
“You must try your luck in Brighton. My, my, you are persistent, aren’t you? From one end of the country to the other. Your energy is quite exhausting, I must say.”
“You don’t happen to remember her address?”
“I do, yes.” She arched her eyebrows as if to rebuke me for the smile of surprise that came to my face. “I believe it’s a sign of approaching senility that one’s memory is at its sharpest where matters of small consequence are concerned. Twenty years ago, you could have found Alice Graham at the Ebb Tide Guest House, Madeira Place, Brighton. As for now, who can say? But I imagine you’ll find out soon enough. In return for the information, I wonder if I could ask you one small favour.”
“Name it.”
“Take me out to lunch before you leave. I suggest the Brown Cow at Bingley. It isn’t far, and with any luck they won’t have boiled fish on the menu.”
After the taxman had claimed his slice of Uncle Joshua’s estate, Gran was left with about a million pounds in interest-bearing accounts and half as much again in bonds, shares and assorted securities, plus Tredower House and its contents. A million then probably represents ten or more now, of course. What I’m describing is the acquisition of a fortune overnight. Nobody told me or Pam, and there was no way to guess it from our lifestyle, but the fact is that early in 1948 we became a very wealthy family.
Even if Gran had been tempted to indulge in a reckless spending spree, rationing and the austerity economy were there to prevent her. There wasn’t a lot to blow money on in post-war Britain and fierce foreign exchange controls meant you couldn’t take much of it abroad either.
It’s a world that seems so remote from the present that I’m surprised it’s as recent as my own childhood.
That first summer of our relatively un trumpeted prosperity, though, Gran and Grandad did cross to New York on the Queen Mary to celebrate their sapphire wedding anniversary. It was about the only example of conspicuous expenditure an observer could have detected: an old married couple taking their first trip abroad. They returned with tales of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and dinners at the captain’s table, as well as a firm conviction on Gran’s part that the future of retailing lay in providing customers with the good things in life she’d seen so abundantly on offer in New York. She’d glimpsed that in a small way in the credit drapery business, and now she proposed to use her recently acquired capital to link the Napier name with a new concept of shopping.
Over the next few years, Napier’s Department Stores opened branches in Truro, Plymouth, Torquay, Exeter, Taunton and Bournemouth. Dad gave up slicing bacon and weighing cheese to become chairman and managing director of a large and prestigious business. In the public eye, he was Napier’s, and he took to the role with enthusiasm, acquiring a Daimler, a chauffeur, a seat on the magistrates’ bench, a taste for tailored suits, a liking for golf and, as the Fifties advanced, the jowly air of a successful entrepreneur.
Not quite a self-made entrepreneur, of course. Behind his rise to commercial eminence stood Gran. And behind her, Uncle Joshua’s money.
Ironically, taken over the long term, Napier’s was a failure. The good years never outweighed the bad. A lot of people were employed, a lot of customers served, a lot of business done. But it never made anybody’s fortune, so it was just as well that Gran’s more passive investments brought in such a healthy return.
I see all this with hindsight, but, at the time, Napier’s seemed like some sort of financial leviathan, the solidity and reliability it acquired perfectly represented by its Boscawen Street frontage. The Harrod’s of Cornwall, they called it. Well, it was never quite that, but it was the shop in Truro. And the name spelled out above the entrance in as many large gold letters as there were high decorated windows on either side was literally as well as metaphorically what Gran had hoped it would become: the biggest in the city.
It was also my future, a ready-made career that could one day see me succeed my father as chairman. As I progressed through school, National Service and university, it lay ahead, waiting for me, I sometimes thought, whether I wanted it or not. When Pam married Trevor Rutherford and he was ushered into the business while I was still leading a carefree student’s life in London, I didn’t see him as any kind of threat. I assumed I could take on as significant a role as I chose at Napier’s when the time came. The only question was whether I would choose.
I didn’t rush into the decision. I even managed to persuade Gran to fund me for a year or so of postgraduate globe-trotting to think it over. The months I spent in the States during that footloose spell, cruising down the freeways in an electric blue Chevrolet Corvette with Elvis Presley booming out of the radio, gave me a fondness for stylishly designed convertibles, not to mention rock ‘n’ roll and platinum-blond coffee-shop waitresses, but no great enthusiasm for department-store management.
The trut
h was, however, that I didn’t have any clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life, so, with an exasperated sense of inevitability, I ended up taking my place in the family firm as a twenty-four-year-old trainee manager. No longer, however, was I heir apparent; Trevor had his feet firmly under that table. With my father slowing down as Napier’s entered its second decade, Trevor had become the company’s guiding force. He greeted my arrival with thinly veiled hostility and engineered my swift departure to the Plymouth store, to be ‘knocked into shape’, as he droolingly phrased it, by the branch manager, Humphrey Metcalfe.
Miriam Tully’s description of her brother-in-law’s return from Oxford gave me an insight into what Trevor must have thought of me, an idle and pampered interloper who strayed into his kingdom in the autumn of 1960.1 suppose that’s exactly what I was. But there was no way of remaining either idle or pampered under the tutelage of Humphrey Metcalfe, a man as capable of grovelling obsequiousness to good customers as of red-faced ranting fits at back-sliding staff. The boss’s son was a phenomenon he both feared and hated, but my disenchanted semi-detached approach to working life, plus whatever hidden agenda Trevor may have set for him, gave him more to hate than fear. The result for me was a purgatory of menial tasks and stifled complaints. The Plymouth store, a stark white megalith dominating the shop fronts of Armada Way, was sometimes compared to a cruise liner by architectural students. To me it was always more of a prison hulk, where I served out a sentence of errand-running and telephone-answering for a petty dictator. “Musso’ Metcalfe, the staff called him behind his back, the reference to Mussolini implying he was beholden to a Hitler somewhere else. I was never really one of the lads and lasses, of course. I could never quite be trusted. Little did they know I was paid no more than them and treated no better, on the grounds that working my way up should mean precisely that. We were in the same boat, but it never felt like it.
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