Losing Nicola (25 page)

The moment stretches yet can only have lasted for a couple of seconds before everyone returns to what they were doing. Orlando is still at the window with his back to her, peering out into the darkness. Has he seen someone out there? Nicola moves across the room towards him, taking a sausage roll from the table and cramming it into her mouth, picking up a sandwich. What does she want from him? He can see her reflection in the dark glass, he knows she is there behind him. Even when she is standing beside him, he doesn't turn. She says something to him, one small hand gesticulating, the other lifting the sandwich to her mouth. He jerks round and looks at her, his eyes full of loathing.

He says nothing, merely walks away from her as though she weren't there and she swings round to watch him as he stops beside Sasha Elias. Fiona joins them, and Mrs Sheffield. They look down at him, their expressions soft as he speaks, this lovely boy stroking the patch of silver hair above his ear, tightening the knot of his silk tie. Pink silk. I shake my head. It's taken me all this time to realize that he must have chosen the tie from my father's wardrobe to go with my dress of Old Rose brocade.

Fiona is staring at Nicola and I sense a huge anger inside her. Gordon Parker tries to look nonchalant, as he raises his chin a little and lightly scratches the underside of his jaw. Louise Stone approaches her daughter and puts a hand on her arm. Nicola's expression is cold. Louise asks her something and she listens for a moment, then shrugs indifferently before turning away. I can tell from the angry defeated look on Louise's face as she gazes after her daughter, that whatever she has told Nicola to do, she's not going to take the slightest bit of notice.

And here is my father. He beckons me to stand beside him and puts his arm round my shoulders. He smells of tobacco and Old Spice and gin. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,' he calls. ‘Today is a very special day. Alice is twelve, and I'd like you to raise your glasses and wish her well in all her future enterprises.' He smiles down at me. ‘Happy Birthday, darling child.'

I grip the cool metal of the rail down into the garden. What happened next? At some point, we must have spilled back into the drawing room. The networks of connection between the guests blur and shift again. Vignettes slap into place like cards on a Rolodex. People dance. People chat. They step outside onto the grass in twos or groups. Light spills from the windows; the moon is huge, almost rust-coloured. I dance with Orlando, my father, Sasha, my brothers. Orlando and I chat with the mothers, except for Louise Stone who still lingers in the dining room along with Ava and Bertram Yelland. Gordon Parker tells us that a book on World War Two, which Orlando had requested, came in to the library the day before.

Did Nicola come back to the drawing room with us, or did she slip out through the front door? Am I being wise after the event when I vaguely recall seeing, later, two people walking along the seafront together, one of them Nicola?

It's no good. All I can recall are bits and pieces, not a coherent whole.

I'm shivering. Beneath my thighs, the iron steps are wet with dew. I get up and cross the lawn, go round the hedge, crunch down the gravel drive as quietly as I can. When I get back to my flat, the light is winking on my answering machine. Two messages.

The first speaker is Erin. ‘Love to come down for the weekend, sweetie,' she says. ‘Tell me what I can bring. Wine? Champagne? Something delicious from Harrods Food Hall? Tell me what you want and I'll get it. Talk later.'

The second message is from Gordon Parker. ‘If you're around tomorrow morning, come and have coffee with me around eleven. Such a coincidence – I can't wait to tell you! No need to reply, if you can't, you can't.'

I pour half an inch of single malt into a glass. Have I learned anything from my attempts at memory recovery?

There are people I can talk to in the hope of obtaining more information. I make a list of them. What worries me most is the strong possibility that the person who murdered Nicola was at my party. That it was someone whom I knew, or even loved.

On the window-seat sit Ava's scrapbooks. I've been putting off looking at them for weeks but the time now seems right. They're both bound in some kind of garish material, with leatherette spines and thick grey pages. The earlier one is almost completely full with cuttings to do with the trial of Nicola's father. The pages of the second one are mostly blank; since there was never a trial, Ava was forced to content herself with no more than the local paper's meagre coverage of the inquest on Nicola, and a four-line mention in
The Daily Mail.

Orlando and I were back at our respective schools by then, but our evidence was read out to the coroner. Fiona attended, as did Ava, and gave their accounts of the party the night before, Louise Stone's reaction to our discovery, the trauma that Orlando and I had undergone. Most of the partygoers had been interviewed extensively by the police. Despite intensive questioning, no fingers were pointed at anyone. Nor was any evidence uncovered at the scene of the crime. There was a forensic report, which established that Nicola had died of blows to the cranium, and also that she was not killed where she was found. The fact that she was not wearing underpants was explained by her embarrassed brother. A fingertip search of the area turned up no clues. There was absolutely nothing to go on. In the end, the coroner returned a verdict of Murder by Person or Persons Unknown. And that was it.

Holding the closed book on my knee, I fancy I can detect the faint odour of
Nuits de Paris
. Much-missed Ava flitters in my memory like a moth. Reading the dry prose of the inquest conclusions, I wonder whether Nicola had any inkling of what was about to happen to her. I remember the brazen way she had removed her clothes in front of Yelland, completely heedless of whether she might be seen. I remember the man emerging from among the trees higher up, only a minute or two after she was dressed again. But although she deliberately flirted with danger, I don't think she would willingly have gone with her murderer unless it was someone she knew. Somebody local. Somebody who knew about the Secret Glade.

A cold possibility clenches my heart. I shake it clear, watch it disintegrate.
Somebody I know, somebody I love . . .

I open the second scrapbook. I see Ava seated at the kitchen table with scissors and newspapers around her, a rounded triangular jar of grey paste in front of her; I recall so clearly its red top incorporating a brush, its delicious smell of almonds. Orlando and I and Bella spent many wet afternoons helping her to paste scraps into books like these. But I believe Ava had a more serious purpose: her collection of newspaper cuttings is as comprehensive as it is possible to be without access to police records.

The cuttings are yellowed now, faded where the paste affixed them to the thick card pages. Reading about it, I realize how sensational the Farnham case must have been in its day. It had all the ingredients that keep a story running for weeks. A war-hero, an only child, a glamorous wife, the victim's angelic friend. The story, as I learned it from the scrapbook, was as follows: Geoffrey Farnham, Nicola's father, had married Louise Dretter in 1935. Simon, their first child was born in 1936, Nicola Jane had been born in 1938. Until war broke out, Farnham had been the deputy headmaster of a south London school. He joined up in 1939, and had a distinguished career, being decorated several times and mentioned in dispatches. Louise, meanwhile, had taken the children to the country, to live closer to Geoffrey's parents, near Llandovery, in Wales. Louise had worked as a buyer in John Lewis's department store until she married. In Wales, with little to do, she began drawing clothes, sending the results to a friend who managed Ladies Fashions in Selfridges. After the war, this had translated into a career and then into fashion work, as she designed the paper-patterns for labels such as Simplicity and Butterick, from which women made their own clothes. Geoffrey Farnham was given his job back when he returned from the front, rising eventually to the post of headmaster, and the family lived comfortably in Battersea, on the fringes of Chelsea.

One Saturday morning in September 1951, according to the accounts of the trial, the Farnham family was going about its normal affairs. Louise was working in the room she used as an office. Geoffrey Farnham was at his school, coaching the under-thirteen football team. Simon had gone camping in the New Forest with his Scout troop. Nicola's friend, Valerie Johnson, had come round and the two girls were in Nicola's bedroom, doing their homework and listening to records. At around twelve o'clock, Louise heard the girls clattering down the stairs and Nicola calling goodbye to Valerie. She then poked her head round the door of her mother's office to remind her that she had promised to take her shopping and to lunch in the West End.

According to Louise's testimony, shortly afterwards, she and Nicola had left the house, returning home at four fifteen or so. Louise had gone to the kitchen where Geoffrey, home by now, was sitting reading the paper. Louise began to put away the groceries she had bought, while Nicola went upstairs to her bedroom to deposit the clothes they'd purchased together, to wit, a new school sweater, a pretty blouse, a pair of jeans and a necklace. Nicola began screaming hysterically. When her parents ran upstairs, they found Nicola crouched in a corner of the room and Valerie Johnson lying dead on the floor, strangled by the blue silk scarf she had been given by her parents earlier that day.

A police officer gave evidence that Geoffrey Farnham had said he had come home at about three thirty, had made a pot of coffee and sat in the kitchen to read the
Guardian
. He said that his wife and daughter had forgotten to lock the back door, and it was possible some outsider had got in. While the body was examined by the medical officer on duty, the family, minus Simon, sat huddled in their sitting room, horrified and grief-stricken. By the time the police officers had the information they wanted and the body had been removed, Geoffrey Farnham had confessed to the murder.

There seemed to be no motive for the crime. Valerie had not been sexually assaulted, her clothing was intact. A colleague of Geoffrey Farnham's testified that at five minutes to four he had telephoned and chatted to Farnham for about ten minutes; Farnham, he reported, seemed agitated and distracted.

A scared teenage girl pupil from Farnham's school, Barbara-Jane Finch, testified that although he had not touched her in any way, he had made remarks which both she and her parents considered inappropriate, given the relationship which ought to exist between headmaster and student.

Although she did not appear on the stand, Nicola had testified to the police that Valerie had gone home without her scarf and must have returned for it, only to find the house empty. Because she was intimate with the place, she must have gone round the back and let herself in through the unlocked back door, at more or less the same time as Geoffrey Farnham returned. ‘Something came over me,' Farnham said. ‘I couldn't help myself. I made a . . . a suggestion to her and when she turned me down, I grabbed the scarf she was holding and pulled it round her neck, trying to stop her screaming. I never intended to take a life. Although it was an accident, I shall never forgive myself for what I've done.'

Louise Farnham was photographed each day of the short trial, dressed in a different fashionable outfit and carrying two red roses in her hand, one of which she handed to her husband's solicitors to give to him.

I read the evidence from Valerie Johnson's father. Her mother wasn't called since she was still heavily sedated. The Johnsons were fairly elderly parents. They had tried for years to have a child and had given up hope, resigned themselves to childlessness, and then – ‘a miracle, an absolute miracle!', Mr Johnson kept saying, as tears poured down his face – Mrs Johnson found herself pregnant at the age of forty. Valerie was their pride and joy, their miracle baby, the apple of their eye. She lacked for nothing, she was bright, she was popular at school, and turned out to have a gift for drawing and painting which she'd hoped to turn into a career.

‘When she died, it was the end of our lives,' Mr Johnson whispered. According to the crime reporter, half the jury was in tears.

Farnham's defence team did their best, calling upon his war-record, his exemplary teaching career, the dangers he had faced during the war, citing an incident where he was pulled out of a burning tank with thirty per cent burns to his body, an incident which his wife testified still gave him nightmares, but in the face of Farnham's confession, there was little they could do except plead mitigating circumstances.

Counsel for the Prosecution summed up in a moving speech, which ended as follows:

You have heard how this little girl, trembling on the brink of womanhood, went back to the house where she felt entirely at home, in order to recover the scarf she had left behind. Once inside, she encountered the defendant, the father of her best friend, a man she had known virtually all her life.

Imagine her shock as he lunged at her. Imagine how helpless she must have felt as he tore at her clothing. Imagine her terror as he slowly squeezed the life out of her. Imagine how she must have scrabbled in vain at the iron band of the scarf around her neck – her own scarf, Ladies and Gentlemen. We have heard that she loved her friend, the defendant's daughter, that she loved and was loved by her parents, that she was a gifted young artist who hoped one day to turn her talent into a career. I wonder what her last thoughts were as consciousness faded. Did she think of her parents, or her friend, or of the life she would never now live, the dreams she would never fulfil? I ask you to bear in mind that only a timely phone-call from his deputy headmaster saved this child from further degradation.

Imagine the grief and shame Geoffrey Farnham has brought upon his family. The only mitigating factor in what is otherwise a senseless and appalling crime, is that the defendant has pleaded guilty in order to spare his loved ones from a long, drawn-out ordeal.