Beyond Recall

by Robert Goddard

  “I panicked when I realized what must have happened. Eventually, I tracked you down and persuaded you to confess.”

  “And the money? Pretty odd, surely, for a blackmailer and his victim to have a joint bank account with a million pounds sitting in it.”

  “The police have no reason to go looking for hidden bank accounts.

  Besides, it won’t be sitting in it. You’re going to instruct the bank to pay the whole lot back to my father.”

  “Am I really?” She glanced round at me.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Surely the police will smell a rat. Especially when they realize my

  “friend” and I were independently acquainted with Considine. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

  “It’s no coincidence at all. We met at his house. I was there to talk about Nicky. You were there to plead for the return of the photographs. We got together afterwards and you told me he was blackmailing you.”

  “What about the letters? I’ve still got them, you know.”

  “Do what you like with them. They don’t matter now.”

  “I see you’ve worked this all out very carefully.”

  “It’s your least worst option. I suggest you take it.”

  “Why should I? What’s in it for me?”

  “A much shorter sentence than you’ll get if the police learn the truth as I’ll make sure they do if I have to. Take your pick.”

  We’d reached a T-junction at the end of Larchdale Avenue. Crossing to the other side of the road, we slowly started back the way we’d come.

  “So, what’s your answer?”

  “First tell me how you found me.”

  “Considine had obtained a copy of your birth certificate. It was hidden at his house. Michaela knew where to look.”

  “She would, of course.”

  “Yes. You should have quit while you were ahead, Simone, you really should. Going through with the murder and the frame-up after you knew Michaela was alive was plain foolhardy.”

  “I had no choice. Considine would have tried to cheat me out of my share if I’d let him live. He didn’t squirrel away a copy of my birth certificate out of genealogical curiosity. He was preparing some devious move against me, you can be certain.”

  “But probably nothing quite so drastic as murder.”

  “He deserved to die. You know that. So does Michaela, I imagine. I had no qualms about doing it.”

  “I never thought you had.”

  “Besides, sparing him would have let you off the hook. I didn’t go into this just for the money.”

  “Why, then?”

  “To find out what happened to my father. I never met him. Not once.

  My mother said he’d deserted her while she was carrying me and vanished without trace. She never told me about the murder, or his relatives in Yorkshire. She kept the whole thing a closely guarded secret. I was out of the country when he called on her after getting out of prison, so she was able to keep that from me as well.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “Not until his name was splashed all over the papers after Nicky Lanyon’s suicide. She had no choice then but to tell me. And as soon as I heard where he’d been going the last time she saw him, I knew you Napiers had done for him somehow.”

  “And you chose me as your means of getting at the truth.”

  “No. That’s down to Considine. I went to him because I realized that, if I was right about my father’s reasons for going back to Truro, then he had a financial incentive to help me. Impersonating his supposedly dead stepdaughter in order to play on your conscience was his idea. We weren’t likely to get far without access to your family’s secrets.”

  “And who better than a family member to give you that access?”

  “Exactly. You were the weak link, Chris Nicky’s childhood friend. It made you the obvious choice.”

  “And the ideal candidate for a murder charge.”

  “That meant you all suffered. Your parents, sister and brother-in-law would be tainted by association. You’d all be given a taste of your own medicine.”

  “But your father was a murderer, Simone. He wasn’t framed. Why was he worth avenging?”

  “Because he deserved better than to be driven to blackmail when he came home from the war. He needed help and compassion, not rejection. You made him a murderer, and then you let him rot in prison for twenty-two years before you finished him off.”

  “I won’t argue with you. I don’t accept your portrayal of Edmund Tully. It sounds like an idealized vision of a father you never had the misfortune to meet. But if you want to hang on to a fantasy, fine.

  I don’t think it has much to do with your motives, anyway. I think they’re all about money. That’s why you took the risk of killing Considine. So you could have it all.”

  “And why shouldn’t I? The risk would have paid off, but for you giving the police the slip and throwing in your lot with somebody Considine had assured me was dead. I admit, the very first time you told me about Pauline Lucas, I had a nasty feeling she’d turn out to be Michaela. But I was already in too deep by then to pull out. Besides, it didn’t really seem possible. I mean, where’s she been all these years?”

  “None of your business. It’s instructive, though how much more effectively she covered her tracks than you did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s shunned every form of personal entanglement. That’s the key to it, Simone: isolation. But you have a mother, an ex-husband and a son.

  And you’re in touch with all of them. Too many connections to conceal.

  Altogether too many.”

  “So, my downfall is having a son I care about?”

  “In a sense. Without him, you could have stayed one jump ahead. But coming here today to pick him up as usual

  “Was asking for trouble.” She sighed and glanced ahead at the car.

  “That’s the thing with children, Chris. They’re hard to let go of. He was looking forward to our day out. And you know what? So was I.” She stopped, as if reluctant to reach the point, not far off, where the occupants of the car would become clearly visible: the expressions on their faces; the looks in their eyes. “I thought, with the sort of things a million pounds could buy, I might be able to establish my credentials as a mother once and for all.”

  “Why have they been in doubt?”

  “Because of a criminal record, if you must know. There are some previous convictions that might come back to haunt me in court.”

  “Convictions for what?”

  “Drug trafficking. And one or two other things. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to make a million. Or failed.”

  There’s nothing I can do about that.”

  “There’s nothing anyone can do.”

  “What’s your answer, Simone? Time’s nearly up.”

  “My answer?” She looked round at me, a cynical self-mocking smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “Oh, I think you’ve known what that would be all along, haven’t you, Chris? Before you even posed the question.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  And so the deal was done a deal I’ve had cause to regret since. Not that I can think, even now, of a better way to have played the cards I held at the time. The lies I was obliged to tell at Simone Graham’s trial for murder eleven months later seemed worth telling to avoid the public exposure of some older and much darker lies. Simone herself played her part so well I sometimes believed her imaginary teenage encounter with Neville Considine had actually taken place. She had the advantage, of course, of being able to describe the Considine-Lanyon household as it must have been twenty years previously with uncanny accuracy. A stockpile of hard-core pornography found in the garden shed at 17 Wharfedale Road and the evidence of assorted neighbours left nobody mourning for her victim. For all that, she was convicted of murder and given a mandatory life sentence. But there were so many mitigating factors that according to her solicitor who seemed to think I�
�d want to know she wasn’t likely to spend much more than five or six years in prison.

  Alice Graham told me quite a lot about her daughter before and during the trial including the answer to the question I’d tried to put to her at Weybridge. Alice’s biggest regret was that she’d not told Simone the truth about Edmund Tully from the outset. Then she’d never have been able to develop such a romanticized view of him. No doubt the lack of a father explained, at least in part, her wild and ruthless nature. Marriage tolan Morrison and the responsibilities of motherhood had only sharpened her appetite for glamour and excess. When her marriage had foundered and her unstable lifestyle had cost her custody of her son, she’d renewed the criminal contacts she’d originally made in the Brighton drugs scene and gone in pursuit of quick riches the illegal way. But in her case crime hadn’t paid.

  Not, at any rate, until her imprisonment for murder. The trial had received more and more publicity as it went on and the verdict released a deluge of sympathy for a woman portrayed in the media as a kind of heroine of our times, who’d survived sexual abuse as an adolescent and refused to give in to blackmail as an adult, only to be victimized all over again by the law. What sort of a crime was it, editorials pondered, for her to turn at last on the man who’d persecuted her? What sort of a country was it, feminist pressure groups demanded to know, where such an act was even regarded as a crime? Questions were asked in Parliament. Bishops were quizzed about it on television. Everyone had an opinion. Except those who knew the truth. We stayed silent, for our own very good reasons, while the world turned Simone Graham of the winsomely photogenic smile into a poignant symbol of social ills and legal wrongs. Don Prideaux was just about the only journalist in the country who didn’t swallow it whole. Not that even he was able to work out what had really happened. He went on hoping for his nationwide front-page scoop. But he hoped in vain.

  By the time Simone’s appeal came round, a full-scale campaign for her acquittal was under way. When it failed to sway the judges, those dedicated to the cause resorted to demands for her early release. At first they seemed to fall on deaf ears, but I had little doubt the authorities would give way in the end. It was in fact a year short of her solicitor’s most optimistic estimate that Simone was set free.

  Within weeks, she’d sold her story to a Sunday newspaper for an undisclosed sum, but strangely she didn’t offer me a share of the fee, despite my creative role in the fiction of her past. She managed to write me out of the picture almost completely for which I was duly grateful.

  I never forgot about her, of course, but she gradually slipped to the back of my mind as her name faded from the headlines. Once she was free and everything her supporters had worked for had been achieved, she was forgotten with surprising speed. The years passed and I heard no more of her.

  During those years, the real Michaela, not the false one, dominated my thoughts, for reasons I found at first disarmingly unexpected and later fulfillingly obvious. It took time and a lot of effort to lure her out of her secure anonymity, to reunite her with the Jagos and her own true identity. I told myself my devotion to the task was attributable to guilt for abandoning Nicky, but eventually I faced the fact that I was falling in love with her. And around about the same time I discovered, to my astonished delight, that she was falling in love with me.

  I remained the only person she’d ever trusted with the truth about her flight from Clacton as a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl and her subsequent triumph over a succession of miseries and misfortunes to become Caroline Forbes, an interior designer in her mid-thirties, with a considerable reputation and an expanding clientele among the chic and affluent of London. The shared secret of her past became a bond between us that time seemed to strengthen. By a series of unpremeditated transitions, we became first friends, then lovers, then husband and wife. And only later did we wonder why it had taken so long.

  Marrying Michaela raised a barrier between me and my family that I’d have regretted more if I’d loved her less. Pam had divorced Trevor by then and sailed happily into a second marriage, to the owner of a flourishing boat-building business in Falmouth. But she still held Michaela partly to blame as she undoubtedly was for her breach with Trevor and simply couldn’t come to terms with her as a sister-in-law.

  My mother shared Pam’s uncomprehending disapproval, though I think we’d have won her over if she’d lived to see the birth of her grandson. What view Trevor took of the matter I never found out. He didn’t stay long in Tenerife, or anywhere else over the next few years. According to Tabitha, the only member of the family who didn’t turn her back on me, he manages some kind of country club in Kenya these days. She and Dominic took Trevor’s grandchildren out to see him recently and returned with the unsurprising news that the climate doesn’t agree with his drinking habits. Tabitha seemed worried about him, though not perhaps as worried as she should be.

  Some part of me would have relished my father’s reaction to acquiring a Lanyon for a daughter-in-law, but he died while we were still nurturing our relationship in secret, succumbing to a massive stroke halfway through a round of golf. He’d never brought himself to thank me for retrieving the money he’d paid Considine, but turned out to have expressed his gratitude by refraining from disinheriting me. I became a wealthy man under the terms of his will and an even wealthier one when, shortly afterwards, Pam sold Tredower House, enabling me to capitalize the stake in the hotel Gran had bequeathed to me. I tried to insist on handing the whole lot over to Michaela, only to encounter her steadfast refusal to accept a penny of it. But her refusal counted for nothing in the end. What was mine and should have been hers became ours instead. And our son’s of course. He was born in the second year of our marriage, a few months after my mother’s death. We christened him Nicholas Joshua, and soon found ourselves calling him Nicky.

  We bought an old farmhouse shortly after we got married, up on the dip slope of the Chilterns near Nettlebed, and live there still, leading a happy and contented family life something neither of us ever expected to have and relish all the more as a result. Michaela gave up her interior design work when Nicky was born, but I’ve kept the car restoration business going, pursuing it now more as a hobby than from any kind of financial necessity. The farm came with enough well-spaced barns and outhouses for me to start dreaming of establishing a classic car museum to run alongside the workshop, though God knows why I’d want to share the peace and quiet I enjoy there with coach loads of visitors. Maybe it’ll remain a dream. That’s what Miv seemed to recommend when she descended from her Snowdonian fastness recently to check up on her ex-husband’s welfare.

  “I suppose, after all those years of falling flat on your face, you had to land on your feet eventually, sweetie. You’ve got it made here.

  Lovely wife and son, beautiful surroundings. I wouldn’t change a thing, if I were you.”

  But change isn’t always voluntary, or even avoidable. Our life

  -Michaela’s and mine is everything we could want it to be. Yet part of its perfection is the awareness we share of its fragility. I made a deal with Simone Graham, but I could never have said for certain that would be the end of it. I hoped and I prayed, but I knew hope and prayer wouldn’t necessarily be enough. Not in the long run. And I was right. Which is why what happened yesterday morning wasn’t entirely unexpected. This, after all, is the long run.

  We rent a small chalet in the Swiss Alps, near Montreux, where we ski in winter and walk the mountain meadows in summer. Nicky’s school had just broken up for Easter and we’d decided to slip away to Switzerland for the duration of his holidays. The weather was fine and I was planning to drive the Stag down through France, taking in the annual Avant-Hier Mobile show at Reims on the way, while Michaela and Nicky flew out to Geneva and went on by train to Montreux. I was in the workshop, putting the car in order for its long run, when the telephone rang and went on ringing. Michaela had gone into Reading with Nicky to buy him some new shoes. I had the place to myself and little inclination to
answer, but the caller was persistent, so eventually I relented.

  “Hello,” I said, on picking up the phone. And in the strange suspended second before the caller spoke, I knew whose voice I was going to hear.

  “Chris, I’m sure you know who this is. We have to meet.”

  “Why?” I asked after a lengthy pause for unavailing thought.

  “I’ll explain when we do.”

  “Explain now.”

  “No. Truro, tomorrow afternoon, at the cemetery where your great-uncle’s buried. Meet me by his grave at four o’clock. And come alone.”

  “Look, Simone, whatever you have to say can ‘

  “Just be there. Or suffer the consequences.” Then the line went dead.

  I stared into the dust-mo ted sunlight shafting through the workshop door. I could guess what she wanted. I’d had long enough to anticipate her demand. But still I couldn’t guess what my answer would be.