Losing Nicola (13 page)

‘That's stupid.'

‘Yes.' I thought for a moment. ‘We could tell Ava, I suppose.'

Orlando violently shook his head. ‘I can't face it. It'll be like the Gestapo.'

‘We can't just . . .
leave
her there.'

As it happened, when we got back, we found the house swarming with people. Louisa Stone was sitting with my mother, her eyes dark with dread. My elder brothers were with them, and the girls they'd invited down for the party, looking uneasy and embarrassed. Simon, Nicola's seldom-seen elder brother sat beside his mother, awkwardly patting her shoulder. A slim woman in police uniform arrived as we did. We followed her into the drawing room, where she began asking questions and recording them in a notebook.

‘When did you last see your daughter?'

‘I don't know,' Mrs Stone repeated. ‘I just don't know.' She turned to her son. ‘About half-past ten last night, it must have been.'

‘Did you and your daughter quarrel?'

‘We had a few words, yes. She wanted me to give her permission to go on to the Top Deck, that little dance hall down in the town.'

‘There was a do on,' said Simon, looking down at his feet. ‘Micky Monckton and his Band.'

‘Yes, a dance,' said Louise. ‘I said she couldn't go unless I knew who she was going with.'

‘I understood that there was a party here last night,' the policewoman said.

‘Yes, that's right. She wanted to go on from here.'

‘That would have made it quite late, then.'

‘Exactly.' Mrs Stone spread her hands, laced the fingers together, pressed them to her mouth. ‘That's why I wanted to know who she was going with.'

‘And she wouldn't tell you?'

‘She . . . she said she was quite capable of looking after herself. And anyway, it was perfectly safe, there'd be friends of hers from school going, and she'd be joining up with them.'

‘Anybody know any of these friends?' The policeman looked round at us all.

Simon Stone spoke up. ‘She muttered something about going out to meet someone and then walking down there. I didn't take much notice, I'm afraid. She's always . . . she was always . . .' His eyes filled with tears, and he looked down again at the space between his feet.

‘Always what?' the policewoman said gently.

‘Muttering about things. Doing things she shouldn't.'

‘A willful girl,' said Louise. She looked unutterably bleak, as though a mask had suddenly shifted to show an unfamiliar face beneath. ‘She's always been like that.'

‘She must have sneaked away when no one was looking.' Simon stared at the policewoman. ‘She . . . she used to do that a lot.'

The policewoman turned to Louisa. ‘So you went home without her?'

‘I . . . yes, I did. I mean, I'd always intended to.'

‘She certainly wouldn't have wanted to walk home with Mum,' agreed Simon.

‘Exactly. When I was ready to leave, I tried to find her to say I was going, and she wasn't to be home too late, but she wasn't around – not that I looked terribly hard, she could have been anywhere. I went straight to bed when I got home – I've had a hard couple of days – and more or less fell straight asleep. I vaguely thought I heard her come in about midnight.' She clasped her hands against her chest. ‘Oh, why didn't I get up and
check
?'

‘And you found in the morning that her bed hadn't been slept in?'

‘She does that sometimes,' Simon said. He gazed at us forlornly and added,
sotto voce
, ‘Just to give us a fright.'

‘And when we phoned round to see where she was, nobody had seen her at all. I came round here, on the off chance she'd stayed the night here, with Alice or something.'

‘Which she hadn't,' said Fiona firmly.

‘In that case, where is she?' Louise Stone looked distractedly at her watch, her face crumpling. ‘It's gone four in the afternoon. I know she can be a bit . . . a bit thoughtless, but surely she'd have let us know by now.'

‘Could she have run off somewhere?'

‘I don't think so – all her things are in her room. Besides, where would she run to? I've rung her grandparents, her aunts, nobody's heard anything. Oh God, where
is
she? For all we know, she could be lying somewhere, dead.'

I caught Orlando's eye. He looked away. I felt it again, violence, tangible as wood, the brutal sounds of death.

Fiona was watching us. She stood up. ‘I'll go and make some tea. Alice and Orlando, you can come and help me.'

We followed her into the kitchen, where she filled the kettle and set it to boil. She leaned against the big dresser and folded her arms. ‘All right, you two, what's wrong?' she said.

We stayed silent.

‘What do you know about Nicola's disappearance?' demanded Fiona. ‘There's no point lying to me, I can see that something's up.'

Orlando closed his eyes. His face was white, except for two red patches on his cheekbones, like a clown's mask.

‘Come on, both of you. Where is she?'

‘Ask Alice,' Orlando said faintly.

‘Alice? What do you know?'

‘I – we know where she is,' I said.

‘Then it's very irresponsible of you not to say. You can see how distraught Mrs Stone is.' She waited a moment. ‘So where is she? Who's she with?'

‘She's . . .' I felt sick again. I bowed my head. ‘She's . . .
dead
,' I blurted.

‘What?' My mother's eyes widened with shock. ‘Dead? Are you being serious? How do you know?'

‘We saw her, Orlando and me. We saw her when we were blackberrying this afternoon. She was – she was . . .' I couldn't finish the sentence.

‘Dead,' Fiona repeated slowly and I could see how the word spread through her head, heavy with repercussions, arrangements, horror.

‘It was terrible.' Orlando spoke slowly. ‘I shall never see anything so terrible for as long as I live.'

Fiona, about to chide us for not saying something earlier, realized that whatever we'd seen, the two of us were in a state of shock. ‘Tea,' she said briskly. ‘Orlando, get mugs down and put them on a tray. Alice, we need sugar, milk and teaspoons.' She put her arms around us and drew us close to her. ‘Don't worry, darlings. It'll be all right.'

‘How can it be? I can't stop seeing her lying there, with her face all bloody and . . . teeth showing, and her head kind of split open . . .' I gulped. ‘It was so
horrible
.'

‘Orlando,' said Fiona. ‘Go to the drawing-room and ask the policewoman if she could come here for a moment.'

A few moments later, she was repeating what Orlando and I had just told her. ‘Someone will have tell the girl's poor mother.'

The policewoman grimaced. ‘Would you do it?'

Fiona shook her head. ‘I couldn't, I'm afraid.' She bit her lip, frowned. ‘Poor, poor woman. I can't imagine anything more dreadful than losing one of your children. And there's all that appalling business with her husband. I feel so sorry for her.'

‘I'll have to call my colleagues,' said the policewoman. ‘And then I suppose I'll have to . . .' She looked grim. ‘A policeman's lot is not a happy one,' she said, after a moment. She turned to Orlando and me. ‘We'll need you to show us where . . . where you found her.'

Police work was much more fun in books than in real life. By the time we had repeated our story a dozen times, had backtracked, had answered the same questions put in a score of different ways, Orlando and I were exhausted. I wondered if the father in jail would be told that his daughter was dead. Perhaps there was a kind of poetic justice there: having deprived someone else of their daughter, he himself was facing the same loss. At least he couldn't be implicated in this second battering to death of a young girl.

The case remained on the books for years after that summer, revived from time to time by an investigative journalist, by a true-life crime writer with theories to air, or by new-broom Chief Superintendents seeking to clear up cases that had gone cold. Forensic DNA testing was still unheard of. Nicola, we discovered, had not been sexually molested. The blood on her thighs came from the mess that had once been her face. Despite intensive questioning, no motive was ever established, no suspect discovered.

Orlando and I did not tell anyone about Nicola's earlier tryst on the cliffs with Mr Yelland. Neither of us could possibly have spoken of it, even to each other, so it lay between us, ugly and unmentionable. No one appeared to have seen anything untoward. A check of the Top Deck yielded statements from various school acquaintances, all positive that she had not been there that evening. No witnesses came forward to say they'd seen her after leaving my birthday party. We were all fingerprinted, but the evidence the police were able to gather from the body and the place where it was found pointed in no particular direction. The only thing they were able to say with certainty was that she had been killed sometime between midnight and six in the morning of the day we found her.

At first, although we tried not to think about it, Orlando and I found ourselves speculating about who could have murdered her. We examined the possible suspects: Gordon the Librarian, Ava's former husband, Sasha the Piano Teacher, one of the friends Callum and Dougal had invited down, even Julian or Charles, but none of them seemed suitable murderer material. Bertram Yelland was the only obvious candidate, his motive being the fact that Nicola had put her prices up too high, or started to blackmail him, something along those lines. But though we watched him closely, he seemed to carry on just as before, no more or less unpleasant than previously, and showing no signs of any behaviour that might be attributable to a tortured conscience.

It was never mentioned again at home. Nor did we ask, not accustomed to talking to adults. Back at school, I didn't tell anyone what had happened, though a baffling kindliness from my housemistress and from Matron made me realize much later that Fiona must have informed the school. And then came half-term, when, instead of taking the train down to the coast, my father came to fetch me and drove me for the first time to the new house in a Cotswold village. New activities, new friends, finally drove Nicola to the very back of my mind. I joined the Girl Guides, started confirmation classes, learned how to knit, took and passed my piano exams grade by slow grade.

After the move to Oxford, we lost touch with everyone. Often I thought of Sasha Elias, and when I got to university, I tried in a desultory way to find out where he had gone. I telephoned Mrs Sheffield, who told me he had moved to London shortly after we left ourselves, and that she had no idea where he might be.

By the time I had finished school and university, and moved abroad, no one had been accused of the crime. We got on with the forward thrust of our lives, but we had been pushed too rapidly from innocence into experience. It changed us all. The relationship between Orlando and me became looser and more guarded. What we had witnessed among the blackberry fronds grew between us into a malevolent tree, leaves unfurling, branches spreading, until they obscured us from each other's view, and gradually we found ourselves living on a closeness that had once been, rather than in one which actually existed. Nicola had achieved in death what she never could have alive.

As I grew older, if I ever thought of her, I could see that she must have been a deeply troubled girl, for reasons I could only attribute to her father's imprisonment for murder.

It often occurred to me later, when I thought back to that day, that if Orlando and I had not pushed our way through those falls of bramble in our quest for the ultimate in blackberries, she might have lain there undetected for years, and I saw her in dreams, the flesh falling away from the skeleton, the clothes rotting, birds pecking at her, wild animals gnawing, until there was almost nothing left of the Nicola whom I had briefly known. Nothing but a few delicate bones.

I
've never believed in chance, fate, destiny. I don't want to accept that we have no control over the events that affect our lives, that we're no more than the playthings of the gods, tossed hither and yon by the fancy of an uncaring deity. But, sometimes, choices are made for us, and I am willing to concede the possibility that something more than irrational whim has brought me down to Shale this afternoon, a place I haven't been back to since I left it nearly twenty years before.

I woke this morning with plans to check out accommodation in London while I decide what to do with the remains of my life. Instead, some impulse has pulled me into a taxi for Charing Cross and pushed me into line to buy a ticket to the backwater town where I spent perhaps the most signifi­­cant years of my life. And before I can change my mind, the all-too-conveniently-waiting train is pulling out of the station, gathering speed through grimy back streets, passing crowded suburbs and settling into a steady rhythm through fields where rough grass grows tall and cows graze beside placid streams.

Freshly back in my own country, after the break-up of my marriage and the abandonment of my life in Michigan, I wonder what I am doing. For years I've scarcely given the little east-coast town a thought, though often it comes back to me in dreams when I hear again the howl of strenuous winds, the sound of salt water fretting at shingle, see drowned sailors floating, red spiders weaving webs between the brambles, the cliffs of France sitting unrealistically just offshore, almost close enough to touch. But awake, I have been far too occupied in trying – and failing – to survive my sad and busy life.

The English countryside slides past me, predictable, familiar. Spires, roofs, clumped trees, a kind of pastoral which, after eight years in the wilder, more dramatic landscapes of North America, I have half-forgotten. Travelling by train is a renewed experience; in the vast spaces of America, Allen and I used autos or planes. I'm soothed by the clickety-clack, the rise and fall of telegraph poles outside the carriage window, the dusty smell of the upholstered seats. I think of Allen with regret. And with guilt. I married my tall academic American, met while he was on sabbatical in Paris, less for love than for shelter. It was unfair of me, and his accusations that I have used him for my own purposes rang too true for me to deny them.