Beyond Recall

by Robert Goddard

  “Yes,” I replied out of the corner of my mouth. “You may.”

  “Excellent. Thank you so much, Mr. Napier.”

  Then we were out in the dazzling daylight on Back Quay, where the crowds had assembled to jeer Michael Lanyon and Edmund Tully each day of the hearing. But there was no crowd waiting for us. Sergeant Collins nodded to me, then buttonholed the pathologist and walked off with him. Considine mumbled something about having to start for Clacton and quickly walked away towards the car park. I looked round for Ethel Jago, only to find she’d vanished. And realized that the event was over, the book unceremoniously closed on the life and death of Nicky Lanyon.

  That was quicker than I reckoned it would be,” said Don from close behind me. “Plenty of time for lunch, over which you can clear up a couple of minor mysteries, such as friend Considine’s hasty exit and your failure to show up at the Abbey on Friday night. What’s going on, Chris? You can tell me.”

  Don was none the wiser after an hour and a half with me in the City Inn. He’d worked his way through the same back copies of the Western Morning News as me after being stood up at the Abbey, but, not knowing what I was looking for, had come away empty-handed. Nor had the inquest enabled him to pin down his suspicions. But Considine’s behaviour “I’d have expected him to hang around, hoping I’d buy him lunch’ added to my circumspect performance in the witness box “You sounded as if you were walking a verbal tightrope’ meant they couldn’t be dispelled.

  “You’re up to something, Chris, and I want to know what it is.”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes you have, so spare me the po-faced denials. All I ask is one favour for an old friend. If this whatever it is blows up into a big story one day, give me the jump on it, will you? I could really use a nationwide front-page scoop. You know? Just one before I hang up my notebook for good.”

  That’s years away.”

  “And I’ve waited years to get this close to the real thing.”

  “How do you know you are close?”

  “Reporter’s instinct. It’s never let me down yet. Is it a deal?”

  “Yes so long as you don’t seriously expect me to deliver.”

  Don’s instinct was sound. I had to give him that. His liver was an altogether dicier proposition, though. I left him to abuse it some more and made my way back to Lemon Quay, where I’d parked the car. I wondered if I mightn’t drive straight down to Penzance and tell Emma what had happened at the inquest instead of waiting until the morning, when I’d arranged to collect her at ten o’clock for our day on the Lizard.

  I’d more or less decided to head for Penzance without delay when I caught sight of Ethel Jago walking past the West Briton offices. She was moving slowly and had a dejected look about her. Two bulging supermarket carrier bags dragged at her arms. She was making for the bus station, which surprised me, since I would have assumed she’d driven up from Nanceworthal. A bus journey seemed likely to be a tortuous affair. My conscience stricken by not having talked to her earlier, I called out and hurried to catch her up.

  “Why, Christian, ‘tis you.”

  “Haven’t you got the Land Rover, Ethel?”

  “Failed the MOT. Dennis is working on it now. He’d have come with me else.”

  “Would you like a lift back?”

  “Don’t want to put you out.”

  “It’s no problem, honestly. Let me take those bags.”

  She was too weary to protest much. I loaded her and the shopping into the Stag and we started off. She’d heard about Pam throwing Trevor out and said how sorry she was. I asked her how the farm was doing and she admitted Dennis was finding it harder to cope as he grew older, though she didn’t mention the most obvious reason: the lack of a son to help him and one day succeed him. She asked me about the classic car business and I told her about the fire without mentioning that it was arson. We were both a little wary of each other, reluctant to venture beyond superficial exchanges of news for fear of where we might stray.

  Perhaps that’s why we didn’t talk about the inquest until we were aboard the King Harry Ferry, waiting for other cars to be loaded behind us as the Fal drifted languidly past the ramp and cloud-dappled sunlight played across the autumn-tinted woodland on the Roseland shore.

  “That’s the end of it, then,” said Ethel. “The world’s finished with Nicky now, at long last. May he rest in peace.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “I miss him still, even though I never saw him from one year’s end to the next. It’s a funny thing. I suppose it’s knowing as I’ll never see him makes the difference. What with our Tommy gone as well, and Michaela …” She shook her head dismally and I resisted the temptation to tell her there and then that one tragedy at least hadn’t really happened. Her niece was living and breathing even as we sat there. I knew where she was. I’d talked to her the previous day. We’d laughed and walked together. She was all right. And soon… But I said nothing. I was sworn not to, and I was determined not to break that trust. Ethel sighed. “It makes you wonder, it really does. Poor Nicky. Such a sad and lonely boy. I don’t think he ever made another real friend after you, Christian.”

  “I’d be sorry to believe that,” I said, as the gates clanged shut behind us and the ferry started moving. “We all need friends.” Then I remembered Pauline Lucas and her description of herself. “A friend of a friend.” Considine’s ultimatum had distracted me from the search for her identity. He’d denied knowing her with something less than total conviction. If he’d been lying, for whatever reason, then it was just possible Ethel might be able to point me towards the truth. “Let me show you something, Ethel. I want you to tell me if you recognize this woman. Perhaps as an acquaintance of Nicky’s. It’s a bit of a long shot, but take a look anyway.”

  I took the photograph out of my pocket and slid it half out of its envelope so that Ethel could see the woman on the bed but not the man about to join her. Ethel squinted down at it, then fished her reading glasses out of her handbag and peered closer. She drew a sharp breath and reached out with her left hand to steady the photograph against the vibration of the ferry. But no vibration could explain the trembling of her fingers as she did so. “My Lord,” she murmured. “My dear sweet Lord.”

  “What is it? Do you know her?”

  “Where’d you get this, Christian?”

  “Never mind. Do you know who she is?”

  “Was this took recent, like?”

  “A few weeks ago, but ‘

  Then she’s alive? She’s really and truly alive?”

  “Who? Who do you mean?”

  “Michaela.” Ethel stared at me. “It’s her.”

  “Michaela?”

  “Yes. I swear it is.” She looked at the photograph again and I saw tears glistening in her eyes. “It’s Michaela come back to us.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  She must have seen me pull into the hotel forecourt from her room, because a few minutes later she came out, smiling and casually dressed in jeans, her flying jacket and a bright yellow sweater I hadn’t seen before. It suited her and I’d probably have said so, if this had been the kind of day it had promised to be. But it wasn’t. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

  “Hi, Chris,” she said as she climbed into the car. “Are you OK?”

  “Fine.”

  “You look… pensive.”

  “The inquest was a sombre business.”

  “Yeh. I read the report in the paper. It can’t have been as matter-of-fact as they made it sound.”

  “It certainly wasn’t.”

  “But it’s over now.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “So, are we going to the Lizard? Maybe some fresh air will cheer us both up.”

  “Yes. Let’s go.” I gritted out a smile and started driving, east out of Penzance and round Mount’s Bay towards Helston. The more I thought about it, the worse it became. She wasn’t Michaela. That was a lie she’d concocted
with Considine. They’d been in it together from the outset, even to the extent of planting a childhood photograph of Emma, or whatever her real name was, amongst Nicky’s possessions. I’d seen a genuine childhood photograph of Michaela since then, fetched from the attic at Nanceworthal by Ethel Jago to banish my lingering doubts about her identification of her niece. There were nearly thirty years between it and the picture of the woman on the bed, but the face was the same. The face was Michaela’s.

  Then it had all fallen into place. Emma had impersonated Michaela in order to play on my conscience and so persuade me to ferret out the family secret Considine was using to blackmail my father. Considine had supplied the information she needed to pull it off, confident in his belief that Michaela had been murdered by Brian Jakes. But their plans had gone awry. Michaela wasn’t dead. Nicky’s suicide must have touched her so deeply that she decided to punish my family for benefiting at his expense. I couldn’t really blame her. In one way, I was actually grateful to her. Without the photograph she’d used to wreck Pam’s marriage, I’d never have seen through Emma’s ploy. Until I was meant to, of course. At some point, not very far down the line, I’d have had to discover the extent of my manipulation. But by then it wouldn’t have mattered. She and Considine would have pocketed the million pounds and disappeared.

  They only needed a few more days. Just a few days, during which I could go on believing Trevor was Considine’s informant and I was the best thing ever to have happened to Michaela Lanyon. By rights, they should have got clean away with it, leaving me to carry the can. I had no proof Emma even existed. I’d done as she’d asked and told no-one about her. When Trevor finally convinced my father he’d had no part in the plot and they came to me as the only other person who could have told Considine about Tully’s murder, what was I going to say? How was I going to explain what I’d unwittingly done?

  I felt bitter and angry, bewildered by how completely I’d been deceived. If only I’d not been so pitifully eager to believe she was Michaela.

  But there was one bleak consolation. It wasn’t yet beyond recall. The location of Tully’s grave was exposed as a bluff now Trevor was in the clear. That left only the letters. If I could frighten Emma with the threat of turning her over to the police as an extortionist, maybe she’d agree to retrieve them and call it quits. What linked her with Considine I had no way of knowing, but it seemed unlikely to be a bond of trust. Maybe he’d forced her into it. Maybe he had some kind of hold over her I could offer to loosen. He’d recognized Michaela when I’d shown him the photograph. That was obvious now. But he hadn’t warned Emma of the danger it meant she was in, otherwise she’d surely never have risked coming to Cornwall for the week. And did she know just how much money he was demanding? It would have been uncharacteristic of Considine to deal fairly with anyone, even his partner in crime.

  My mind ran through ways of driving a wedge between them as I headed south-east, through Helston and out along the Coverack road past the satellite dishes of Goonhilly. I recounted what had happened at the inquest as I went, as naturally and methodically as I could, praying she wouldn’t notice the flatness in my tone or the hardness behind my sidelong glances at her. I was aiming for the long straight minor road that branches off across Goonhilly Downs towards Cadgwith, reckoning she’d have nowhere and no-one to run to if I stopped somewhere along it. The morning was cool and cloudy, with a strangely silvery quality to the light out on the wide Lizard heath-land. We were alone, unobserved and unconcealed, our destination travelling with us.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, when my account of the inquest dribbled away at last into a silence I couldn’t hold at bay.

  “It’s not far.”

  “But where? On the coast?”

  “No. Not the coast.”

  “There’s something wrong, Chris. Why don’t you tell me what it is?”

  “What could be wrong?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the point.”

  “You don’t know?” We passed a small conifer plantation and I began to slow. “Oh, I think you do.”

  “What is it? You’re talking in riddles.”

  “Riddles? Am I really?” I slowed to a crawl, pulled up onto the tussocky verge and stopped. When I turned off the engine, there was suddenly only the wind whispering in the gorse, the flat heath to either side, the ribbon of tarmac ahead and behind, the grey sky above us and the narrow space between. “Solve this one for me, Emma. If you can.” I turned and looked straight at her. “You remember Pauline Lucas? I showed you her photograph.”

  “Yeh. What about her?”

  “You didn’t recognize her, did you?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  That’s odd.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you must have known each other as children.”

  She stared at me, blinking rapidly. “Sorry?”

  “You must have done. Your aunt has a photograph of Pauline, you see, taken when she was a child.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. But like all riddles, there is an answer. It’s just not very obvious until you find out what it is. But when you do, everything else makes sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pauline Lucas is Michaela Lanyon, Emma. That’s why she’s pursuing a vendetta against my family, and why your little scheme has just gone off the rails.”

  Her face froze. There was something startled but also resourceful in her eyes. She said nothing, but I could sense her brain racing to find a solution to the problem I’d sprung on her. What was it to be? A straight denial, or some more serpentine manoeuvre? Would she go on playing her part to the end, or abandon it here and now?

  “Considine assured you she was dead, didn’t he? Then he invented that oh so plausible version of a life for her and persuaded you to pass it off as the real thing. It couldn’t go wrong, could it? Not once you’d convinced me you were Michaela and sworn me to secrecy on the grounds you were still frightened of the man who’d abused you as a child. A neat touch, that. Very neat. Based on the truth, perhaps. Considine doesn’t like to waste anything even the details of his own perversions.

  Still, nothing for you to worry about. All ancient history. Except that Michaela isn’t dead. Which makes your impersonation of her look all the sicker and means -just in case you were considering it that going on with the pretence is pointless.”

  Still she said nothing. She licked her lips and glanced out through the windscreen, then looked back at me, weighing her options carefully, seemingly too preoccupied with her predicament to show even a hint of shame.

  “I know what you’ve done and so do you. You made me trust you and like you and regard you as a friend. You exploited a dead man and a damaged woman to implement a sordid scam. And what I want to know is: why?

  Don’t tell me it was just for the money. Firstly because you’d have to be a fool to trust Considine to share it with you. Secondly because it would make this whole thing so utterly contemptible. And I’d like to believe I really would that your motives weren’t totally mercenary.”

  “They weren’t.” Her gaze fell as she spoke. “I’m sorry, Chris. God, I’m sorry.” For a moment, I thought she was about to cry.

  “It’s a bit late to be sorry.”

  “Yeh. I know. But She looked up at me. “There’s so much you don’t understand.”

  “What?”

  “Here, I’ll show you.” She leaned forward, gathered up her handbag from where it had been resting on the floor and settled it in her lap.

  “It’s all so crazy, really.”

  “Does Considine have something on you?” I asked, preparing to sound sympathetic.

  “Not exactly.” She unzipped the bag and reached inside. “More the other way round, actually.” Then she smiled and I saw the gun in her hand, pointing straight at me. She clicked back the trigger. “You’d better believe this is loaded, Chris. I’ll use it if I have to.”

  I gaped at the rock
-steady muzzle of the gun, wondering for a second if I was dreaming. But when I looked up into her cold hard eyes, I knew I wasn’t. “You wouldn’t do it,” I said, feeling less than confident of that.

  “Yes I would. I think you know that. I wouldn’t have got this far without being prepared to take drastic action if need be.” Her voice had changed. The fragile persona of Michaela Lanyon had been sloughed off like a snake’s skin. The steely calculating woman who was holding a gun on me was the real Emma Moresco. “Put your wallet on the dashboard, then get out and start walking, straight ahead. Leave the keys in the ignition. I’ll take the car. We part here, I’m afraid.”

  “Hold on ‘

  “Just do it. No debate. No delay.”