Losing Nicola (33 page)

‘And once she started her periods,' Louise says matter-of-factly, ‘there was the constant worry that she'd get herself pregnant.' She presses her lips together, as though trying to hold back tears. ‘As well as everything else, she was . . . horribly promiscuous.'

‘Especially with older men,' Farnham said grimly.

Louise's mouth quivers. ‘We tried,' she whispers. ‘We tried so hard to love her. To accept her. To see her as disadvantaged, rather than as . . . evil.'

Farnham takes her hand in his and holds it tightly. Both of them seem utterly spent, as though the strain of recalling those years of raising Nicola, added to her subsequent violent death, is proving to be too much for them to handle.

‘How did she . . . what happened with Valerie Johnson?'

‘Apparently the poor child had a new scarf, a very pretty silk one which her doting parents had just given her. Nicola wanted it, but for once Valerie dug her feet in and refused to hand it over.' Louise covers her mouth with her hand. ‘I hate talking about this. I hate remembering that awful
awful
time.'

‘If you'd rather I went . . .' My head feels as though it might explode with shock. I try very hard not to imagine what happened in Nicola's bedroom, but nonetheless, scraps of horrified speculation wing through my brain.

‘I hate the fact that our daughter was responsible for someone's
death
.' Louise has not heard me. Her voice has risen.

‘Calm down, darling.' Farnham gives her arm a little shake.

‘That she actually
killed
someone.' Louise is breathing hard. ‘Someone who was supposed to be her best
friend
. Over a
scarf
.'

‘As far as we were able to make out from Nicola's hysterical account of what happened,' says Farnham, ‘when none of her usual techniques of persuasion worked on Valerie, she more or less said, all right, keep your stupid scarf, grabbed at the ends and pulled it as tightly as she could round Valerie's neck.'

‘I don't think . . . I don't
want
to think that she
meant
to kill Valerie,' Louise says. ‘If I really thought
that
, I'd . . .'

‘But having done so,' continues her husband, ‘she came down the stairs from her bedroom, pretending to talk to Valerie, then pretended to see her to the front door, shutting it hard so her mother would hear her and simply assume that Valerie had gone home.'

‘Then she came into my office, lounged about a bit, as she so often did, announced that she was bored and reminded me that I'd promised to take her shopping. Which indeed I had. So the two of us went on the Tube to South Kensington.' Louisa looks at her husband.

‘Yes,' he says. ‘Yes.'

The two of them fall silent. Louise puts her drink down and closes her eyes. Farnham breathes deeply through his nose, relaxes his shoulders.

Seconds tick by. I say nothing. What is there to say? I wish I were somewhere else. Their grief and pain sit beside us in this room where once their daughter existed.

Finally, Farnham starts again. ‘When they got back, Nicola went up to her room where she “discovered” the body of her friend, and started screaming her head off.' He presses a hand to his forehead. ‘I saw some terrible sights during the war, unspeakable sights, but I have never been so shocked and appalled as when we ran up the stairs and found poor little Valerie lying dead on the floor. I went through some brutal campaigns, but the sight of that child's body . . .' He falters, ‘. . . so cold, already stiffening . . . even after all this time, it's still almost beyond belief.'

‘And Nicola went shopping . . .' I can hardly hear Louise's words.

‘Of course she tried to pretend that Valerie must have come back to the house and been killed by an intruder, or even that the poor child had strangled herself, but in the end, it all came out.'

‘And then we had to work out what to do for the best.'

‘The best,' repeats Farnham. He slowly shakes his head. ‘If that's what you want to call it.'

Louise sits up straighter, presses herself against the back of the sofa. ‘You probably think we sound heartless,' she says, ‘But I have to be honest . . .'

‘We've had a long time to face up to our feelings.'

‘And the fact is, that when Nicola died, atrocious and heart-rending as that was, it was, quite simply, a relief.'

Her husband nods. His hand grips the stem of his glass, knuckles straining against the skin that covers them.

‘I'm ashamed even to have thought it, let alone to be saying it aloud, but it
was
.' Louise looks at me directly. ‘If you really want to know, Alice, by the time she died, she'd done so much damage to us all that I . . . I almost hated her.'

‘Darling, you didn't.'

‘I did. I really did. What she did to you . . . to Simon . . . to me . . .' She chokes slightly on the words, and falls silent.

They seem so distressed that I feel I ought to leave, but before I can get to my feet, Farnham has risen and is refilling our glasses.

I try to digest what I've heard. Farnham is, of course, exonerated from any part in the murder of his own daughter because at the time he was safely incarcerated in one of Her Majesty's prisons. But it stills seems feasible that Louise could have been driven to murder, especially after what I've just been told. But she would surely not be talking so freely to me if she were guilty.

We take our fresh drinks and eye each other. Despite their apparent candour, I am still wary. After all, they've had twenty years to refine their story, to get it straight. I'd already noted that he was a man used to command. He was also a man used to winning, and he had been spectacularly defeated by Nicola. Even if he had chosen, for all the right reasons, to take the rap for her, he must have resented being a loser. Is it too far-fetched to wonder if, through connections made in prison, he could have organized Nicola's murder, taken revenge on his daughter? I see again the moonlit garden at Glenfield, Nicola's surprise as she half-turned towards the voice that had spoken to her from behind the hedge. Reckless, amoral, daring, it wouldn't have taken much persuasion for her to go off with a stranger, especially if he had mentioned her father. Perhaps money was offered, or sex asked for in exchange for a sum far larger than Bertram Yelland could afford.

My brains spools through the last half hour or so. When I arrived, Farnham had warned me that they might seem uncooperative. But they have been quite the opposite. Almost too much so. Almost too eager to tell me their story, a story which, looking back at the events of that distant summer, I find completely convincing. Perhaps that's what they want. Perhaps by appearing to be totally open with me, and also by showing themselves in a less-than-positive light, they hope to deflect me from further enquiry, persuade me that what they are telling me is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But sad though it was, Valerie Johnson's murder is not why I am here.

‘You were let out early,' I say.

‘Yes, but on parole.'

‘How come?'

‘What with Barbara-Jane Finch's statement to the police, and those letters which kept—'

Although he is not a man you would normally interrupt, I do so now. ‘Letters?'

‘Some nutter,' Farnham says. ‘After Nicola's death, these letters started arriving. Written to the police, the barrister who'd taken on my case, even me. All saying the same thing: that I wasn't guilty of Valerie's murder, that the letter writer knew who'd done it, that at the earliest possible moment the truth would be divulged. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Letters like that are always the same, full of assertions but without any solid proof to back them up.'

‘Who was sending them?'

‘Nobody knew. The police never took them seriously, just buried them in some file or other. After all, why should they bother, when they already had a clear confession of guilt?'

‘When Barbara-Jane came forward, Geoffrey's barrister wanted to push for a retrial, on the grounds of reasonable doubt, a confession made for compassionate reasons, and so on,' says Louise. ‘But Geoffrey wouldn't let him.'

‘Why not? Nicola was dead by then, she couldn't have been harmed.'

‘But Simon could. He was newly married. Can you imagine the fuss there'd have been, a father who'd served years in jail to protect a daughter who was subsequently murdered herself? Can you imagine the press on his doorstep, the notoriety? It wasn't fair on him and his wife.'

‘So you just sat there in prison?'

‘No. Although I insisted that I didn't want any kind of retrial, my barrister made representations, there was a judicial review, I gave a new statement about what had really happened. Barbara-Jane, bless her, was insistent on her own new version of the truth. They even managed to find those letters mouldering away in the police archives, not that they could be counted as evidence. In the end, they quietly let me out.'

I rise to my feet. ‘Thank you for telling me all this,' I say. It is only as I'm about to walk out of the room into the passage leading to the front door that I realize that none of this has any bearing on what I want to know.

I turn to face the two of them. ‘But who killed Nicola?' I ask.

‘Good question. Excellent question,' says Geoffrey. ‘I really wish I knew.'

Again Louise looks at her husband, as though seeking his approval for what she is about to say. ‘We thought . . .' She presses her thumb and first two fingers against her forehead. ‘God, how could we have considered such a thing? We
wondered
whether it could possibly have been Simon.'

‘Why?'

‘He resented the move down here, he hated the change in our circumstances. It was just the wrong time for him, and he never really made friends at school here, or fitted into the local teenage scene. And he never believed for a single moment that his father had killed Valerie.'

‘He's told us since then that he knew immediately – not that we ever discussed it - that his sister was responsible,' Farnham says.

‘For a while, I did wonder if she could have said or done something, the night of your birthday party, that just pushed him over the top.'

‘But in the end, it wasn't him, couldn't have been.' Farnham gives a grim chuckle. ‘He turned out to have a watertight alibi – if a whiskey hangover can be called watertight!'

‘Apparently he walked Rosemary Mitchell home,' Louise explains. ‘Her parents were out at some RAF reunion, in London, and she and Simon got stuck into Squadron-Leader Mitchell's whiskey. The two of them eventually passed out on the floor of the Mitchells' sitting room and were found there around two o'clock in the morning, dead drunk.'

I remember the hangdog expression on Simon's face the next day, as Louise talked to the police in our drawing room. The smell of him, which I now realize was whisky fumes. But if it wasn't him, it could still have been his mother. Especially after the feelings she has just confessed to.

She comes over to me as I stand hesitant, one hand on the door frame. As though she can read my mind, she says, ‘And if you're wondering whether
I
had anything to do with Nicola's death, I will tell you frankly, Alice, there were many many times – God forgive me! – that I seriously considered it. Not in anger, but in fear. What harm would she go on to do when she was an adult? What kind of a life could she expect to live in a world where she wouldn't get away with things as easily as she had so far? Wouldn't it be kinder simply to press a pillow to her face, or hold her under water when she was in the bath? But in spite of everything, she was my daughter, the darling little cherub whom we nearly lost at the very beginning of her life, the red-haired baby we all doted on. When it came down to it, I knew I couldn't possibly have committed such a grossly unnatural act.'

Sitting on the window-seat of my flat, I realize that the baggage Nicola's family drags around is far heavier than my own. They are shackled by it until the grave receives them, with no possibility of ever shedding the burden. Whereas I . . .

I am luckier than they are. Dimly I perceive a possibility of emancipation, which they can never achieve. An unaccustomed calm fills me. The events of long ago now seem less of a burden; they no longer drag me down quite so deeply. On the horizon, the very last of the daylight streaks the blazing sky with scarlet and flushes the sea crimson. In a band of blue-gold sky, a single star gleams like a promise.

From here I can see the new-built pier. So much of the post-war years has been swept away, subsumed in the bright freedoms of the Sixties and Seventies, and I can't help wondering how much effect the war had on the children who were raised in its shadow. Despite the dullness and the routine, there was so little in our lives of what could be called ordinary; the times themselves were extraordinary. Perhaps Nicola was simply more affected than most by the casual brutalities of war. We grew up inured to death and destruction, even though it was more as a concept than as something particular. We read books, saw films, looked at comics, all dealing with the ruthless elimination of the enemy. We took blood, atrocity, in our stride. The broken pier, the landmine collecting-box, Jewish refugees; we were never clear of it. By then the horrors of the concentration camps had been revealed to a revolted world. Nicola was older than I was, and far more aware, and perhaps that, rather than moral dysfunction, had helped to shape her into what she became.

O
rlando sits opposite me, his face glowing in the dusky light. The room is lit only with candles, and in the flickering glow, he seems leaner, browner, more taut than I'm used to seeing him.

He has come by his own invitation, telephoning two days ago to ask if he might stay for a day or two, until after Vi Sheffield's party. ‘And your birthday, too,' he said. ‘Is there anything you'd particularly like?'