Authors: Susan Moody
Losing Nicola
Table of Contents
A Selection of Titles by Susan Moody
DOUBLED IN SPADES
DUMMY HAND
FALLING ANGEL
KING OF HEARTS
RETURN TO THE SECRET GARDEN
writing as Susan Madison
THE COLOUR OF HOPE
THE HOUR OF SEPARATION
TOUCHING THE SKY
Susan Moody
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First world edition published 2011
in Great Britain and the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9â15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
Copyright © 2011 by Susan Moody.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Moody, Susan.
Losing Nicola.
1. MurderâEnglandâKentâFiction. 2. Brothers and
sistersâFiction. 3. Kent (England)âSocial conditionsâ
20th centuryâFiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title
823.9'14-dc22
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-334-1 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8014-7 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-327-4 (trade paper)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
âOnly by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.'
T. S. Eliot
In memory of
Barnaby
All things bright and beautiful
ONE
W
hen I was four, my mother took me to see
Mrs Miniver
, because she couldn't find anyone to leave me with. The programme started with a newsreel of current events. A triumphant white cockerel crowed, then tanks moved along a road, men in tin hats with long guns in their hands leapt in and out of ruined windowless houses, there were explosions and smoke and bewildered faces. Although I was too young to understand what it all meant, the images disturbed me. In the film itself, there were more bombs, more ruins, more loss and fear, bravely faced by Greer Garson in a tweed suit which I recognized as the twin of the one hanging in my mother's wardrobe.
For a long time after that afternoon, I suffered from nightmares of soldiers pursuing me through smoke, of guns firing in my direction, the crump of bombs, people weeping.
At four years old, I didn't have the equipment to deal with something as amorphous as terror; that summer, many years later, when Nicola was murdered, I still did not.
Only desperation could have driven Fiona â my mother â to move to the little town of Shale on the coast of south-east Kent. She detested the seaside in general and this one in particular; the thick grey water, the corrosive salt air, the lumps of tar washed ashore from wrecked ships which we tracked in from the beach to ruin her worn carpets, the gales which prowled beneath the roof tiles and nightmared her sleep with the prospect of unpayable repair bills.
The war was over, and my diasporaed family should have reassembled in Oxford to await my father's return from Germany. But affordable housing in Oxford was non-existent, as students and academics crowded back from their various fields of conflict and in the end, frantic for somewhere to live, my mother persuaded my father's great-aunt into giving us temporary house room while she found somewhere more suitable. Aunt lived alone by the sea in a many-roomed house long since emptied of her naval sons and late husband, the Right Reverend Canon Lowe. According to my mother, Aunt, now an aged, humpbacked crone, had been a spy during the First World War and became a pioneering aviatrix after it, until she settled down with the Canon and took up cabinetmaking and occasional journalism.
The two women came to an agreement. Fiona would keep an eye on Aunt, in return for a roof over our heads. And Aunt enjoyed the bargain, too; life in the house again, the sound of young voices on the stairs.
Trains, buses and a Model T Ford brought us to Glenfield House one blustery afternoon. The wind was whipping up the waves, trees groaned in the garden. As we banged at the front door (the knocker had long since vanished), slates fell from the roof. We numbered eight. There was my mother with her indeterminate brood of children, plus Ava Carlton, a runaway wife, and her daughter, Arabella.
I was seven, that first year, Orlando a year older. There were two older brothers â Dougal and Callum â and a younger one, plus Bella. Orlando and I were not twins, though we shared everything except gender, but we might as well have been. Our brains moved along parallel tracks, side by side, anticipating each other's reactions as though they were our own, a single entity. Even when apart, our world consisted of each other. Orlando-and-Alice, Alice-and-Orlando
âWe're joined at the hip,' I said once.
He shook his head, touched his chest, grinned his ferocious grin. âJoined at the heart.'
For Orlando and me, there had only ever been the other. He was everything to me. My God, my companion, my hero. His eyes were the deepest blue and his over-large head was covered with thick black hair except for the area above his left ear, which was a silky silver. His eyebrows were striped black and white, like a road crossing, giving him a piebald and eccentric look. We all knew he was a genius.
Fiona may have hated our new home. We, on the other hand, loved it. In those years following the war it was an extravagant place in which to spend our holidays, a town full of drama. From the windows of our vast house we had extensive views of the sea, bounded at one end by a chalky headland crowned with a cap of bright grass, on the other by a stretch of coastline curved round a bay. Between the two was a pier broken in two halves, the damage done either by a drunken sea captain or from enemy action, depending on who was telling the story. Beyond the pier wallowed a rusting hulk, perhaps the very ship steered by the drunken sailor.
On the horizon, the spars of ships that had been wrecked on the Goodwin Sands jutted upwards, masts flung up to the heavens like the pleading arms of drowning seamen. When the light was right, you could gaze across the Channel to France, see their War Memorial, the twin of the one on the cliffs above Dover, and the sunlight reflecting on their French windscreens. On weekend mornings, white sails dotted the water, white birds soared above. Along the Esplanade, a red-painted land mine, like the shell of a giant chestnut, solicited alms for wounded servicemen. Although it was never spoken of, the war was still part of our daily lives.
Even on dull days, sea-light poured brilliantly through the windows. We loved the movement of the sea outside, its constantly changing outlook, now grey, now green, now banded into thrilling lines of turquoise and purple blending into blue. We loved too, the presence of the Royal Marines, who marched past the house on their way to Sunday parade, jingling and jangling, the sun bouncing off their brass instruments, their white pith helmets gleaming. At night, bugles from the barracks played the Last Post; every morning we were woken by Reveille.
In winter, the wind was so strong you could spread your arms and lean back on it. There was a lifeboat, too, and sometimes we would startle from sleep to hear the maroons going off, one, two, three, to call in the volunteer lifeboatmen.
Fiona, raised in the dour house of a college principal in Edinburgh, had grown up being looked after by a string of servants, and had never quite got the grasp of domesticity. Nor of motherhood. Over the years, she had even tried to give one or other of us away, though without much success. Once, a childless couple agreed to adopt Bobby, my youngest brother, then aged two. But by the time Fiona had wheeled him in his pram down an unmade-up road which ended at a cliff-top to their neat seaside villa â âThe Laurels' â and was about to open the gate and abandon him, she realized she couldn't go through with it. Despite the fact that Mrs Childless Couple had already opened the front door and was swooping towards the perambulator with small cries of welcome, Fiona turned and fled back up the road as fast as she could, the heavy black pram, which had been used for us all, bumping and lurching along the road before her.
She told us this story often, her abrupt change of heart apparently emphasizing her maternal instinct, apparently unaware that the original decision to give her youngest child away demonstrated quite the opposite. Nobody had to tell us that Ava Carlton would never have given a child away, never even have
thought
about it. Although we were originally prepared to treat with hostile caution this intruder into our family circle, we soon learned to value and love her for her steadiness, her stability and her warm heart. Instinctively we knew Ava was vital to the continued well-being of our raffish household. She habitually spoke with her head cocked, listening, listening, in case her abandoned, wife-beating husband finally caught up with her and kicked her to death, before taking Arabella back to live with him and his mother. When we first knew her, she kept a bag ready packed by the door of the room she shared with her daughter. It was, she often said, best to be prepared, because You Never Knew.
Later on, perhaps finally feeling safe, she started wearing a ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. It was a beautiful aquamarine, cold and still as the sea, water-pure and square cut, set in white gold, flanked with tiny diamonds. Peoples' eyes were always drawn to it, and Ava had only to hint at the war years, give a rueful little shrug of the shoulders, for them to get entirely the wrong picture. Instead of an Ava on the run from a brute, they saw a woman still mourning the handsome young pilot lost over the Channel, the brave soldier killed at Dunkirk, the fearless sailor who'd been torpedoed or bombed and gone like a hero to a watery grave. She played the part of a grieving widow, faithful even unto death, so sad, and yet so, I don't know, so
marvellous
really, with such aplomb, that no one, not even Orlando, was bold enough to enquire as to where the ring came from and what had happened to the wife beater.
Glenfield House was large and many-roomed, on the corner of a road of similar houses which faced the sea across a stretch of grass. There was a shrubbery to one side of it, a carriage house at the back. The house contained any number of pantries, sculleries, laundry-rooms and stone-shelved larders. Extensive cellars spread below, attics flourished above. A back staircase led up from the big kitchen to what had once been thin-walled rooms where maids slept with the tiniest of fireplaces to keep them warm.
There were outbuildings, a tumbledown greenhouse, its glass panes long since smashed and its slatted shelves rotting, a stables with wisps of straw still littering the floor of the stalls, hay in the semicircular iron baskets attached to the wall, and mildewed leather harnesses hanging from heavy iron hooks. Neglected grounds thrived beneath war-neglected roses, sagging bowers of overgrown honeysuckles, rioting clematis and Virginia creeper. Shrubs and bushes drooped heavily to the ground, creating green shelters into which we could creep, and behind a clump of bamboos, a pond green as poison sprouted water-lilies and dragonflies. It was our jungle, our rain forest, our chaparral, the secret garden where we played out every sort of adventure, from the Last of the Mohicans to Dickon and Mary.