Beyond Recall

by Robert Goddard

  “For nice, pleasant, ordinary people, you mean?”

  “I suppose I do. I hope they have a great time. That’ll probably be Edmund now.” As we reached the corner at the end of the road, a boy in ill-fitting school uniform came round it, heading towards the Morrisons’ house. He had his father’s blond hair, but the slender build of his mother. He reminded me of Nicky and of myself when we were about his age, back in the summer of 1947, when his grandfather murdered an old man in Truro and with him a childhood friendship. “They don’t know, by the way,” Michaela went on. “About Tully. I tried the name on them but they just looked blank. Simone’s always styled herself Graham. Even when she was married.”

  “Do they know where she is?”

  “No. She’s become more and more elusive of late, apparently. No address, no telephone number. She contacts them. Or they can get in touch through her mother. But I had the impression they’d be in no hurry to. The divorce was a long time ago, reading between the lines, the marriage pretty brief and bruising. Neither of them would say much about Simone, but they exchanged a lot of meaningful glances. She’s someone they’d prefer to forget.”

  “So would I. If I could.”

  “Then you and the Morrisons are in the same boat. Simone exercises her right to visit her son, much as they’d like her not to, every other Sunday. Except she’s missed several in a row lately.”

  “Too busy stitching me up.”

  “Probably. But that won’t apply this Sunday, will it? Besides, she’s promised Edmund she’ll take him to the Tower of London.” Michaela glanced round at me as she waited for a break in the traffic on the main road. “With Granny.”

  “Has she indeed?”

  The Morrisons said they’d ask her to contact me when she called round to pick up the boy. I left my phone number, even though they didn’t seem confident she’d ring me. Which is just as well, since I wouldn’t be at home to take the call if she did.”

  “No.” I nodded my agreement to what she was implying. “I don’t suppose you would.”

  “She won’t let her son down.” Michaela pulled out and we headed north, some destination evidently fixed in her mind, although the only one in mine lay a short distance behind us. “And we won’t let her down.”

  Michaela drove into London through another fast-falling dusk, explaining as we went that she thought I ought to lie low at her flat until Sunday. How strange it was, I couldn’t help thinking, that after all the weeks of searching and hiding, we now found ourselves thrown together as allies. We had our reasons, as we’d had them before, but they weren’t enough to hold bemusement at bay. By the end of this, we were going to know each other better than she’ de ver intended and I’d ever have dreamed possible. But what form the end would take I had no way of foreseeing. Neither of us would have the final say.

  The flat turned out to be an elegantly furnished penthouse in a mansion block near Sloane Square. She must have seen the look of surprise on my face as she showed me in. It was a long way from Emma Moresco’s fabricated life in high-rise Battersea.

  “It didn’t start out so very differently from how you were led to believe,” she said, reading my thoughts, ‘but the rest was wishful thinking on Considine’s part. He’d have liked me to be a loser in life.”

  “Instead of which …”

  She shrugged. “I get by.”

  “How?” I smiled awkwardly. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “What if I do?”

  “It’ll seem a long time till Sunday.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel ready to bare my soul to anyone.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  “It’s strange, though.”

  “What?” The look she shot me then was pure Nicky.

  “I have the distinct impression you will be. By Sunday.”

  I was shooting a line, but I turned out to be right. Soul-baring overstates the case, but certainly by Saturday night Michaela was prepared to tell me more about herself than she’d ever told anyone else. We’d been cooped up in the flat for forty-eight hours by then and the pressure of waiting had taken its toll on both of us. She’d gone out a few times to buy food and had conducted several telephone conversations behind her closed bedroom door, but whatever normality comprised for her had made no other intrusion. I’d paced around and drunk coffee and flicked aimlessly through magazines and stared out broodingly across the London skyline, wondering if we’d get the better of Emma Moresco, enduring as best I could the nerve-stretching excess of physical inactivity and mental turmoil.

  I deliberately refrained from asking Michaela anything about her life and ignored the few clues that presented themselves: the arrival in the post of letters addressed to Miss C. A. Forbes; a book collection biased towards furniture, architecture and interior design; an accumulation on her mantelpiece of gilt-edged invitations for Caroline Forbes to attend a swish party here and a select reception there. My guess was that she had some lucrative foothold in the world of design, but I was determined to let her keep as much of her hard-won privacy as she wanted. She’d stopped hating me and I’d ceased to be angry for the harm she’d done me. But what took the place of such feelings except a shared desire to strike back at the woman who’d outwitted us was far from clear.

  On Saturday night, however, there came a sliver of an answer. We had to decide what we were going to do when we travelled to Weybridge the following morning. Yet the decision depended on the personality of Emma Moresco, somebody neither of us knew anything about beyond her capacity for deception.

  “I think she’s a little like me,” Michaela admitted.

  “How exactly?”

  “She’s used to pretending. So much so that she pretends even to herself.”

  “What does she pretend?”

  “That she doesn’t need other people.”

  “And that’s what Caroline Forbes does as well, is it?”

  “She has to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she always has. Since childhood.”

  “When did you decide to run away?”

  “Why do you want to know so badly?”

  “I don’t. But I badly want you to feel you can tell me. We’re going to have to trust each other tomorrow, and you know all there is to know about me.”

  “So you see it as quid pro quo?”

  “I see it as inevitable. Emma Moresco told me the story of your life.

  But it was a lie. Don’t you think you should set the record straight?”

  She stood up and stared out of the window, crossing her arms defensively. “Sometimes it’s better not to fill in the blanks.”

  “But not always.”

  “Always … in my experience.”

  “That’s the thing about experience, though, isn’t it?”

  She turned around and looked at me. “What do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t prepare you for the unexpected.”

  There was a silence of several seconds, during which a firework held back from Thursday performed a noiseless starburst behind her, somewhere over Belgravia. Then she said, “Let’s take a walk, Chris.”

  It was the first time she’d called me by name and the clearest indication I could wish for that her de fences were slowly coming down.

  “I need some fresh air.”

  So it was that I learned the truth about Michaela Lanyon at last, walking along Chelsea Embankment at midnight, with Battersea Park facing us darkly across the Thames. And with the truth came certainty about what I had to do. The reckoning was drawing close as we left the riverside. But I was ready for it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Sunday morning in Weybridge was still and grey, with those layers of silence only autumn and the sabbath combined can wrap around an English suburb. We parked in a cul-de-sac off Larchdale Avenue, from where the Morrisons’ drive was visible across the road, and watched the comings and goings of newspaper delivery boys and smart old men with shabby dogs on
leads and polished cars on low-gear errands. The pace was slow and aimless, the locale subdued and event less Nothing happened, nor seemed likely to happen. Until, with the stealthy suddenness of a shark’s fin, she appeared.

  A white Ford Granada drew un showily to a halt just short of the Morrisons’ house. Then, the second after I recognized the passenger as Alice Graham, her daughter the woman I knew as Emma Moresco emerged from the driver’s side of the car and walked briskly along the pavement. She was dressed in grey suede boots and a black fur-trimmed coat. Her hair was less curly than I remembered and more professionally styled. This was Simone Graham, undisguised.

  “Let’s go,” I said as soon as she’d turned down the Morrisons’ drive and vanished from sight. Michaela nodded and we climbed from the car.

  We moved fast, knowing Simone wouldn’t linger, but banking on the mystery of the message Michaela had left with the Morrisons to delay her for several minutes at least. Michaela headed for the driver’s side of the Ford, whilst I marched up to the passenger door and made Alice Graham start with surprise by rapping my knuckles on the window.

  The colour drained from her face as she looked out at me, then she jerked round to see Michaela sliding into the driver’s seat. Before she had a chance to react, I opened the rear door and climbed in behind her.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Graham,” I said quietly. “Surprised to see me?”

  She glanced round at me, her eyes darting and anxious. “You may be even more surprised to learn that my companion is the woman your daughter impersonated: Michaela Lanyon.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said hoarsely.

  “You should be denying you have a daughter, far less one who impersonates people, but I’m glad we don’t have to waste time on that.”

  “Get out of this car.”

  “Tell me, are you an accessory before or after the fact? I mean, did you know she meant to murder Considine?” There was a shocked intake of breath and a sudden frown as she turned to look at me. “Or didn’t you know she’d murdered him at all?” She was frightened now, and of something worse than the trap we’d sprung on her. She was frightened of the truth about her daughter. “Killing Considine could be regarded as a public service, but, believe me, I don’t intend to carry the can for it.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I’d be happy to, if only your daughter had left me alone. But she didn’t. She made a fool of me. OK, I can live with that, but being framed for murder is in a different league, isn’t it? That amounts to what you might call serious interference in my life.”

  “If you’re in the slightest doubt on the point, Mrs. Graham,” said Michaela, ‘let me tell you that what he’s saying is the absolute truth.

  Maybe you thought helping her to cheat the Napiers was all it amounted to, but I’m afraid it went well beyond that.”

  That’s why it has to end, here and now,” I resumed. “She has to be stopped. For her own good, and her son’s.”

  Alice Graham’s voice dropped to a defeated murmur. “What do you want me to do?”

  “We want you to stay here and help me entertain your grandson,” said Michaela. “While Mr. Napier has a chat with your daughter.”

  “And to answer one question,” I added.

  “It’ll have to wait,” Michaela put in urgently. “Here they come.”

  I looked up and saw Simone Graham and beside her little Edmund, clad in jeans, trainers and duffel coat. They were at the top of the Morrisons’ drive. As I watched, they turned towards us. Simone’s hand stiffened in the act of ruffling her son’s hair. She’d seen us. I opened the door, climbed out and slowly walked towards her.

  “Who are you?” piped Edmund as I approached.

  “A friend of your mother’s.”

  He looked up anxiously at Simone and she patted his shoulder reassuringly. “It’s all right, Edmund. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “There’s another friend in the car,” I said, smiling at him. “Why don’t you wait with her and Granny, while your mother and I… have a word?”

  He looked up at Simone again. “Yes,” she said brightly. “You do that, Edmund. We won’t be long.” But he hesitated, frowning at me suspiciously. “Go on. I expect Granny has a present for you.”

  Reluctantly, but obediently, he trailed past me, Simone watching him go while I watched her. Then I heard the car door open and close behind me.

  “What do you want?” Simone demanded, her voice and expression chilling as she returned her attention to me.

  “What do you think?”

  “Rather more than a word, I imagine.”

  ‘ Let’s walk a little way.”

  “All right.”

  We headed along the pavement side by side, past the Morrisons’ house and on at a slow matching pace.

  “How did you find me?”

  “It’s along story.”

  “Who’s the woman in the car?”

  “Michaela.”

  “I should have guessed.”

  “The real Michaela. Just like you’re the real Simone.”

  “I underestimated you. I admit that.”

  “It’s not all you’re going to have to admit.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure.”

  “This isn’t Goonhilly Downs. There are plenty of witnesses, your own son among them. Shooting me wouldn’t do a lot for your visiting rights.”

  “I don’t have a gun with me. Respectable members of society don’t carry such things on days out with their children.”

  “And that’s what you are, is it a respectable member of society?”

  “Yes. And I’m willing to prove it, by turning a wanted murderer in to the police.”

  “It won’t be that easy, I’m afraid.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s two against one. Michaela will back me up in every detail and supply me with an alibi for the night of Considine’s murder.

  We can prove who you are. We even have your birth certificate. And frankly I don’t think you can rely on your mother to withstand much in the way of interrogation.”

  “You can’t tie me to the murder.”

  “Don’t be too sure. So long as the police think I made up your very existence, fine. But they won’t now. And the chances are there’ll be something of you on Considine’s body or in his car or his house -some tiny scrap of forensic evidence you won’t be able to explain away.”

  “It’ll never be enough.”

  “I think it will. And I think you do too.”

  “No.”

  “You’re going down, Simone. Can’t you feel the ground crumbling beneath your feet?”

  “If I do, I’ll take your whole family with me the dead as well as the living.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it. My father’s an expert at damage limitation.

  He’ll wriggle out of anything you allege.”

  “The papers will crucify him. And you.”

  “Empty words, based on the false assumption that I care about him. I’m not sure I do any more, thanks to you.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “No, I’m negotiating. I admit you can give my family a very hard time a nasty taste of scandal and embarrassment, maybe worse. And I admit there’s a lot for me to talk my way out of. But the odds are heavily against you finishing in the clear. Which is why I’m prepared to make you an offer.”

  “What kind of offer?”

  “A generous one, in the circumstances.”

  We took a few paces in silence, our feet squelching faintly on the fallen leaves scattered damply along the pavement. Then she said, “Go on.”

  “You go to the police and admit killing Considine. Plead manslaughter on the grounds that he was blackmailing you with some obscene photographs he took of you as a teenager. He picked you up while you were on an off-season holiday in Clacton with your mother back in the late Fifties or early Sixties. She’ll have to corroborate that, of course. But the stuff they’ll
find at his house will corroborate quite a lot on its own.”

  “And where are these photographs?”

  “You burned them immediately after the murder.”

  “What about the tyre lever your tyre lever?”

  “You stole it from my garage. I’m a friend of yours.”

  “Which you’ll confirm, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you make a run for it?”