The Perfect Daughter Read online

  * * *

  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

  ‘HER 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.

  I turned inland to the lawns and flowerbeds behind the promenade and watched two gardeners planting out pink begonias round the edges of a big floral clock, with the hours picked out in house leeks. More house leeks against a white background spelt out two words on either side of the clock face: HIGH TIDE. Someone would move the hands round, twice a day every day. No getting away from it anywhere. Verona would have known the tides. She grew up with them. She’d have known exactly how far each day the water rose and fell inside the boathouse. Known how long she’d stand there, feet bobbing on the plank, rope round her neck, until the tide went away and there was nothing under her but air and mud. The rope would have tightened before then, though. Tide drawing out of the boathouse, body following, feet first, until the pressure of the rope round her throat … Surely she’d have struggled? It couldn’t be in human nature not to struggle. But the commodore’s daughter was a girl of strong will, we all knew that.

  I was furious with Verona. If she’d appeared in front of me, I’d have slapped her. Of all the vain, selfish, hurtful, self-dramatising things to do. Killing herself was bad enough. Creeping home to do it, so that she’d almost certainly be discovered by her father or mother, was worse. Doing it in that horrible, self-tormenting way meant she’d put something into all our minds that would never go away. A girl, on a summer morning or evening, walking past her house, down through the paddock with the old pony nuzzling her for titbits, the walk out over the reed bed with the tide coming in and only the tops of the reeds showing. The tide draining out of the boathouse
and the woman self-pinioned, waiting for it to strangle her. She’d wanted to make an impression on the world – I’d sensed that about her. But the world, in her first few months of trying, turned out to be less easily impressed than she expected. Perhaps the love affair went sour. So she’d turned back to the place that had been kind to her, and destroyed it and the people there more surely than if she’d planted a bomb.

  Half an hour to train time. I left the beach, emptied sand out of my shoes and picked up my bag. The police had assumed that I’d stayed overnight with my cousin and his wife. It was a natural assumption, but then they hadn’t been there the day before when Verona’s body had been carried up to the house on an old door grabbed from the woodpile, covered with a tarpaulin from one of the boats. A gardener and her father did the carrying. They put it down on the gravel outside the front door, so that Ben could make sure that Alexandra was upstairs before they carried it into the house. It was at that point, just before he went inside, that Ben spoke to me for the first time since I’d told him. He turned on the step and gave me a look as blank as slate.

  ‘She was the perfect daughter before you got to her. The perfect daughter.’

  Chapter Three

  IT WAS A LONG JOURNEY BACK TO LONDON. All I had to read was the newspaper from the day before. Durbar II had won the Derby at twenty to one. The Queen had attended the Derby Ball at Devonshire House. Parliament had shut down for the Whitsun recess – in spite of the fact that everybody expected civil war to break out in Ireland within days – and most of the party leaders had gone away somewhere to play golf. Paddington in late afternoon was full of families with hampers and buckets and spades getting away for the weekend to the coast or the river. I took the tram out to Haverstock Hill, then walked up to Hampstead, telling myself that I had to put Verona out of my mind for a while and concentrate on the job in hand, otherwise a lot of other people would be in trouble. It was reassuring to see a familiar figure lounging on the corner as I turned out of Heath Street.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Gradey.’

  When I say he was lounging, I mean he was trying very conscientiously to lounge. I dare say they run classes on lounging and loitering for police officers of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard, but Gradey would never have won any prizes. The clothes were wrong too, a navy-blue suit and waistcoat, a bowler hat nicely brushed. He might as well have kept his uniform on and have done with it. I didn’t wait to see if he touched his hat to me – sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t – but I was aware of his eyes on my back as I walked along the street. That was what we wanted. It was all part of the plan.

  I kept to the pavement opposite my house, stopped and had a good look at it. Things weren’t as I’d left them the day before. The blind on the first-floor window was drawn almost all the way down. There was a narrow gap between the blind and the windowsill, just enough to show the top of a table inside and a row of medicine bottles standing on it. Although it was a warm day, a trail of smoke came up from the chimney. On the ground floor, the curtains of the living-room were drawn all the way across. Then, as I watched, one of them was twitched aside and a face looked out warily. It was a young woman’s face, round and pale, with the sort of red hair that looks as if it’s had an electric shock. Her name was Gwen Hoddy. She saw me, nodded and let the curtain drop back. I crossed to my own front door and knocked. She opened it.

  ‘Hello, Gwen. Everything all right?’

  ‘Where have you been, Nell?’

  ‘Something happened. Did things go alright here?’

  She nodded uncertainly and opened the door to let me in. I hesitated on the doorstep, giving Detective Constable Gradey time to get a good look at us.

  ‘She’s upstairs?’

  ‘Since yesterday night.’

  ‘Any callers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I passed Special Branch on the corner.’

  ‘The plump one in the bowler? He’s been prowling up and down all afternoon.’

  ‘Did anybody see the stretcher come in?’

  ‘Half the neighbourhood probably.’

  I took my hat and coat off and sprawled in the armchair. It was hot in the room with the fire going and there was already an invalid fug to the place.

  ‘You look tired. Want some tea?’

  I said yes please, though it was obvious from the violet rings round her eyes that Gwen was tired as well. She got the teapot and warmed it from the kettle on the hob, moving easily around my book- and paper-cluttered living-room in spite of the iron brace on her wasted leg.

  ‘Shouldn’t Amy be here?’

  ‘She’s on duty upstairs.’

  We were speaking in low voices, the way you do in a house where somebody’s seriously ill. We said nothing while the tea was brewing. Gwen and the others were owed an apology because I should have been back the night before, but I didn’t want to explain about Verona.

  ‘So June had a bad time?’

  She nodded, not looking at me. June Price and Gwen shared lodgings and were inseparable most of the time, except when June was in Holloway. Gwen couldn’t take part in the kind of things that got people sent to prison because of her leg, so she probably suffered worse than June did.

  ‘She’s worn to nothing, transparent nearly. Heart palpitations. And she’s got abscesses from when they broke her teeth trying to get the tube down. It’ll kill her if they get her in there again.’

  The boards creaked upstairs. Somebody was moving around in the bedroom. Gwen sighed, poured two more cups of tea, one strong, one weak and milky. I opened the door for her to take them upstairs. When she came down a few minutes later, she was looking worried.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Restless.’

  ‘Given her temperament, that was predictable.’

  ‘She says she hates being passive – hates just waiting.’

  ‘No choice at the moment.’

  ‘She expected the police to come yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday midday was when the licence ran out?’

  Gwen nodded, staring out of the gap between the curtains. I’d have liked to pull the curtains aside, open the window, let some air in, but Gradey might be watching.

  ‘Why haven’t they raided us already, I wonder.’

  ‘We’ve been discussing that. We think they may have been waiting for you to come back, Nell.’

  ‘And charge me with harbouring an escaped prisoner?’

  ‘Or obstructing the police in the course of. They can always think of something.’

  It wasn’t a comfortable thought. If that was what they were waiting for, Gradey could have telephoned a message to Scotland Yard by now. A car-full of police might be rumbling up the hill towards us.

  ‘Gwen, you’re not to attack them. Understand? Let them come in, let them search, let them take her away if it comes to it. Just don’t lay a finger on them whatever they do.’

  She turned away.

  ‘Do you understand, Gwen? It’s an order.’

  Still she wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘When I think what they did to her. You too, come to that. Let alone lay a finger on them, I could bloody kill them.’

  I put a hand on her shoulder. Her muscles were knotted like … like hemp ropes knotted around feet, swollen from seawater. Gwen flinched, so I suppose my fingers must have tightened. I said I was sorry, moved my hand.

  ‘You see, Nell. You feel just the same as I do.’

  ‘Perhaps. Only don’t do it. It wouldn’t be worth it.’

  We sat there, drinking more tea, watching the sky change from bright to dark blue through the gap in the curtains. They usually came in daylight, but they were getting more desperate these days so you couldn’t be sure. We let the fire go out. At around ten o’clock Gwen said: ‘Doesn’t look as if they’re coming today.’