The Perfect Daughter (2 page)

‘The thing is, Nell, she was always good about letters. When she was at boarding school and we were away in Gibraltar she wrote twice a week without fail. Wonderful letters. We used to say she could be a successful writer if she wanted…'

I'd left the key where my friends could find it, then the plan demanded that I should ostentatiously leave at first light as if for a long journey, carrying a bag. I'd improved on the plan by taking the train to Devon. If it hadn't suited me for that reason, I doubt if I'd have responded to Alexandra's increasingly urgent appeals.

‘Just to disappear. I can't believe she'd do that. She'd know how much it would worry me.'

I wondered if a man from Scotland Yard's Special Branch had followed me to Paddington. Probably not. They only had a hundred officers and we knew most of them by sight. Just five days ago our headquarters in Kingsway had been raided and taken over by the police. I dragged my attention back to what Alexandra was saying.

‘Something must have happened to her. Ben gets angry if I talk about it. I tried asking Archie for help – he has to go to London a lot – but he's so grieved, so puzzled. I'd go up there myself, only Ben would know and…'

Verona hadn't written home for three weeks. There'd been no reply to the increasingly urgent telegrams Alexandra sent to her at the student house.

‘When was the last you heard from her?'

‘I had a note on Sunday the third of May, saying she was well and working hard.'

‘I think I might have seen her since then.'

‘Where? When?'

Alexandra rocked forward, almost dislodging the cat. It mipped a protest and dug its claws in, but she took no notice.

‘Outside Buckingham Palace last Thursday.'

Alexandra said ‘Oh' and closed her eyes. Then, faintly, ‘That terrible riot, the deputation.'

Since we were getting no sense from parliament, we'd decided to send a deputation to the King. The police had other ideas. They put a cordon of 1,500 men round Buckingham Palace and manhandled any of us who tried to get through it. They backed into us with horses, hit us with truncheons, picked us up and deliberately let us fall. Or, as
The Times
preferred to report next day, ‘In the scuffle, two or three women slipped to the ground'. Altogether, it had turned into one of our most violent confrontations. It wasn't surprising that Alexandra was first shocked, then angry. Not with the police, of course; with me.

‘You let her go to a thing like that?'

‘I'd no idea that she intended to go.' (Not that I'd have tried to stop her.) ‘And I'm not quite sure it was her, even now.'

There had been a girl in a group of other people, her hair the colour of autumn beech leaves streaming down her back. She had the right colouring and build for Verona, but it had been no more than the briefest glance.

‘Didn't you make sure? Didn't you go to her?'

Just after the point when I thought I'd glimpsed Verona, a lot of other things happened. A hefty constable grabbed one of my friends by the breasts – admittedly she'd been laying about him with a dog whip at the time – and a police horse was deliberately backed into me when I went to help her. I was tempted to tell Alexandra that, but it would only have worried her more.

‘I did have other things to think about at the time.'

‘What was she doing? Who was she with?'

‘She was in a group, I think. Probably students. They were near the Victoria Memorial, not right in the thick of things.'

‘Anything could have happened to her. She could be in prison, in hospital.'

‘She's not. I can promise you that.'

One of my jobs in the days following the fight had been to keep lists of who'd been hurt or arrested. It wasn't easy, because most of the sixty-six women who appeared in Bow Street police court the next day refused on principle to give their names to the magistrates. But I was satisfied we'd got everybody accounted for, and Verona's name hadn't figured anywhere.

‘She might have dragged herself off to her lodgings and be lying there hurt, too ill to write. I think I'll come up to town with you, whatever Ben—'

‘Don't bother. She isn't there. I checked two days ago.'

I wasn't quite dead to family duty. When Alexandra began her bombardment of letters to me, I'd found time to go back to the student house. There'd been no sign of the dark-haired man or the ginger-bearded orange juggler. When I described them the other residents thought they were away somewhere, but had no idea where or for how long. As for Verona, they were pretty sure she'd moved out some weeks ago.

‘One of the girls there thought she might have gone home.'

‘Home? Here?'

It was spring, so they were all feeling migratory. Gone home, gone to roam, gone to Paris, gone to Rome. People strolled out of the door with sketch pads in their rucksacks and a few pounds in their pockets, and came back when it suited them. I'd liked their attitude, it brought back memories, but I knew it wouldn't appeal to Alexandra.

‘But it's not like her, Nell. She wouldn't behave like that.'

I was saved from having to say anything to that by the sound of the motorcar drawing up on the gravel outside and her urgent need to hide me away from Ben. The one advantage of the situation was that it gave me time to work out whether to tell Alexandra about my guess.

*   *   *

I'd been fidgety, couldn't settle on the knobbly rustic bench in the summerhouse, so had come down to this rock outcrop nearer the water. The heron still hadn't moved. When you looked closely it was standing beside a stream that showed as no more than a dark crack in the field of reeds. Where the stream joined the river there was a neat boathouse of brick and timber, probably commissioned by Ben to keep the family rowing boats and dinghies. With the tide so low, it was separated from the water by an expanse of shining mud and brown bladderwrack. I thought I might have to tell Alex, or hint at least, about what I'd guessed on that second visit to Verona, when she'd been so much happier. That woman-to-woman air had more to it than shared politics. She'd given me a smile that … well. It was the quality of that smile that I was wondering how to explain to her mother. ‘Alex, do you remember when you and Ben first…?' Not good enough. I couldn't imagine any woman ever smiling that way over anything cousin Ben might do. ‘Alexandra, when you stroke one of your cats on a wall in the sun and you can feel it practically melting with smugness…' Safer perhaps, but would it tell her what I was sure was the case, that sometime between December and March her daughter had begun her first love affair? Now I asked myself – as Alex would ask more forcefully if she knew – whether I should have done something about it. I was a relative after all, however distant, nearly twice Verona's age. She was away from the protection of her home and parents and – I could almost hear her father spluttering – ‘in moral danger'. But, looking at it another way, she was an independent and healthy young woman in the second decade of the twentieth century, in love for the first time and starting to live. She and her man – orange man, dark man or perhaps somebody else altogether – had probably run off to a warmer more southern sea than this one. They'd be back when love or money ran out. There was no point in moral cluckings even if, with my disorderly life, I'd been in any position to cluck. When I was only a little older than Verona I'd done much the same myself, in a more censorious generation. Normally, as far as I was concerned, Verona could have kept her secret and I shouldn't have dreamed of hinting at it to her mother. But wasn't my guess better than any of the horrors Alexandra was imagining? Then I looked up at the solid house and the pony in the buttercups, down at the boathouse and the estuary, thought of the ideal I'd be shattering and knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't even hint at it.

*   *   *

The heron made a sudden dive into the reeds then heaved itself into the air, beak empty. I heard the creaking of its wings as it flew over. Still no sound of a motor. Now the decision was taken there was nothing I could do for Alexandra. I wanted to be back in Hampstead, where our plan would be near its critical stage by now. If Ben wasn't gone in half an hour I'd walk the four or five miles back to the ferry across the estuary then to the railway station without bothering to say goodbye. Bored with sitting on the rock, I decided to pass the half-hour having a look at the boathouse. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I was half envying Verona her uncomplicated childhood and her present hypothetical happiness with her lover. I had the childish idea of spending the time sitting in one of the boats, seeing if the tide would come back soon enough to set it afloat. I slid down the bank under swags of wild roses and honeysuckle to the start of a wooden walkway over the reed bed. It had been newly creosoted and the smell fought with honeysuckle and seaweed. The landward end of the walkway joined a narrow path that led up through pasture and orchard to the house. The seaward end went to a small door at the back of the boathouse. I followed it across the reed bed and opened the boathouse door.

The light hit me. The narrow silver channel of water between the mud flats was blindingly bright against the darkness inside the boathouse. I was standing on a wooden platform with the masts of two dinghies in silhouette. Seagulls were swooping outside, flies buzzing inside. As my eyes adapted to the contrast of light I saw that the platform turned a right angle and went on down the long side of the boathouse to the left. There were a couple of rowing boats moored there, one long and slim, the other a little tub. I started walking towards them and turned the right angle. Concentrating on where I was stepping, I was only half aware that something was hanging over the space on my right above the mud. If I thought about it at all I probably assumed it was a fishing net or a clutch of oilskins hung up to dry. But I'm not sure I even thought about it until flies came up in my face, and the smell wasn't creosote or seaweed. I think I probably put up an arm to wave the flies away and that disturbed the air just enough to set it moving, revolving.

There was something white in the net or oilskins, as if somebody had hung a mask there. A grotesque mask with a swollen face and protruding tongue. I heard my own voice saying something. I don't know what. Then I'd got a boathook from somewhere and was hooking at the hanging thing. It was some way out from the platform. I could only just reach it with the boathook. It was the jacket belt I hooked. The thing came reluctantly to me, bottom half first, swollen mask tilted away. It was heavy, soaked. A skirt, smelling of wet wool. Then the belt came unbuckled from the weight of it and the thing was swinging out over the mud, then in again towards me, half turning as it came. I dropped the boathook, fell on my knees and grabbed a handful of the skirt. Something rattled against the platform. A plank of wood. The bottom of the thing was lashed to a long soaked plank. The feet, still in their stockings and shoes, green weed trailing over the insteps, were tied with ropes to a piece of wood. I must have let go because she swung out again, over the empty space where the tide had gone away. I called as if she'd come back.

‘Verona!'

Chapter Two

‘H
ER SKIRT WAS SOAKED,
'
I SAID.
‘
THE TIDE
must have been up at least once.' The constable didn't write that down. He'd already got most of the things they'd need for the coroner's officer. I'd been on a visit to my cousin's wife. I'd happened to wander into the boathouse. When I'd found Verona I'd gone straight up to the house and Commodore North had reported to the police by telephone. They were very considerate, these policemen. The sergeant spoke with a gentle Devonshire burr and the constable managed to write and look sad and respectful at the same time. Commodore North and his family were well known locally. I counted as family and I think they were genuinely shocked and sorry for me. It wasn't an attitude I was used to from the police. I'd answered their questions as well as I could, but with most of my mind going in and out with the tides as it had been for the twenty hours or so since I'd found her. I'd looked up the tables. I had nothing much else to do, waiting in the boarding house where I had stayed overnight behind the East Promenade. Yesterday, the day I found her, the tide had been high around eight in the morning. Its slow drag out might have been strangling her even while I was travelling down from Paddington on the train. High again at about quarter to eight the evening before, half past seven the morning before that, broad summer daylight every time.

‘When did you last see Miss North?'

I explained about the Buckingham Palace deputation. I sensed a little change in their attitude. They were surprised, even hurt, that the commodore's daughter should have been mixed up in anything like that. It made the sergeant's next question sharper than it might have been otherwise.

‘Did Miss North ever give you any indication that she was thinking of taking her own life?'

‘None whatsoever.'

‘Can you think of any reason why she might have?'

‘No.'

Silence. There was sunshine coming in at the window, a smell of fresh paint and the sea. The sergeant sighed.

‘I'm afraid we shall have to ask you to come back for the inquest, Miss Bray. We'll let you know the date.'

‘Does that mean you don't need me any more at present?'

They didn't. They asked if I'd be going back to my cousin's house and whether I needed a cab. I said no, thanked them and walked out into the sunshine.

*   *   *

I walked to the railway station, checked that the next train for London would leave in an hour and went back along the seafront towards the boarding house to pick up my bag. It was the Friday before the bank holiday weekend and Teignmouth, the resort at the mouth of the estuary, was getting ready for visitors. An ice-cream seller on a tricycle was attracting a few early customers. White cumulus was building up out to sea, and a stiff breeze was fluttering the canvas of the Punch and Judy booth. On the beach of red-brown sand, old-fashioned bathing machines were lined up on both sides of the pier on their big iron wheels, advertisements for Pears soap and Fry's chocolate painted on their sides. Some children and their parents were down at the tide line. The children's skirts and trousers were hitched up and they were playing games with the tide, advancing a few steps into shallow water as a wave bubbled away, retreating squealing when it thudded back.