I tried to get control of myself and concentrate on the work in hand.
‘Can you find number 208?’
That was the number on the map near the student house. I was expecting, half-dreading, that Verona’s name would come up. It didn’t.
‘Desperate character, 208. Hungarian anarchist.’
‘Rizzo.’
She passed the card over. The address and description fitted and there was a short list of associates in London and Paris, but none of the names meant anything to me. ‘Known anarchist’ was all the card said about his political activities but since his friends shouted that from the rooftops it hardly suggested a high level of information, any more than my own card did. The ink on Rizzo’s card was a slightly different colour from mine and there was a date on the bottom left-hand corner, ‘4 Feb. 1914.’
Bobbie was still truffling through cards.
‘There’s a whole lot of blobs on that chess place where your friend Max goes. Shall I see what they’ve got on him?’
‘No.’
* * *
I hated the place, wanted to get out. Even that wasn’t going to be easy with the door locked. I went over to the window to work out a way down, then froze.
‘Bobbie!’
She looked up from the file cards, listened and heard what I’d heard. There was somebody coming down the street.
‘Policeman?’
No, not the heavy official tread of a man on the beat. These footsteps were light, as if whoever it was didn’t want to attract attention. Bobbie grabbed the candle and blew it out. I knelt by the window and looked down. It was a man in a dark coat and flat cap coming from the King’s Road direction. At that angle, I couldn’t see his face. Probably it was just a washer of glasses and pots from one of the pubs, walking back to his lodgings in the early hours. Except there was something about him that made my hairs bristle like a cat in a dog kennel. Quietly I checked the curtain and signed to Bobbie to close the cabinet. We couldn’t see the man now, but by the sound of the steps he was just passing the shop window. Then they stopped. We looked at each other. I got off my knees and pointed silently to the door out to the landing. We went as lightly as we could, but boards creaked. I opened the door to the empty boxroom. She dived inside and I followed, pulling the door behind us. As we went, a noise came from below of a key turning in the front door lock.
‘Who’s there?’
A sharp voice, scared and trying to hide it. He’d heard something. The key turned in the lock again, this time from the inside. A match flared and the smell of paraffin drifted up the stairs. For a moment I thought he’d come to set fire to the place but he must have been lighting a lantern because a glow spread up the stairs and through a crack in the badly fitting door into the boxroom. His shadow came first. I saw it from where I was kneeling, slanting against the staircase wall. Then the man himself, just a glimpse of his face as he went past. A pale face in the light of the lamp he was carrying, nervous but determined, with a little dark moustache. He pushed open the door of the room opposite, took a step inside and stopped. I pulled the boxroom door open, got a foot on the landing then took the stairs in two jumps. Bobbie must have taken them in one because we landed hanging on to each other in the space at the bottom of the stairs. The man shouted, turned and came clattering down after us. He didn’t bring the lamp with him so was no more than a dark mass. Bobbie hit out. He gave a gasp of pain so she must have connected with something. I grabbed the front door handle, turned and pushed but it didn’t move. Locked. Then, scrabbling, I found he’d left the key in the lock. A turn, a push and I was hurtling on to the pavement, grabbing for anything I could reach of Bobbie. I got an arm and she followed. I slammed the door, turned the key in the lock from the outside. From the inside, the man was throwing himself at the door.
‘Stop! You there! Stop!’
‘Skirt! Confounded skirt’s caught.’
We both pulled. There was a tearing sound, then we were both running down the street towards Cheyne Walk. The noise coming from inside the chart shop sounded loud enough to be heard on the other side of the river, but so far there was no sign of anyone taking any notice. We got to the Embankment, ran along Cheyne Walk towards Battersea Bridge, past caring now if we woke up anybody in the quiet houses. Between Battersea and Albert Bridges we slowed to a walk. I had a stitch and Bobbie was trailing bits of torn cloth like Cinderella after midnight. A long way after midnight. The city was so quiet that we could hear Westminster chimes and the strokes of two o’clock drifting upriver from Big Ben.
‘He’ll have got out by now.’
‘Yes.’
Even if nobody heard him, which was unlikely, he could have climbed down from the window.
‘What was he doing? Do you think he owns the shop?’
I told her to hold still. I’d found a couple of safety pins in my pocket and was trying to fix her skirt. Anybody seeing two women out at this hour would draw the obvious conclusion, but I didn’t want to look as if we’d been brawling as well. It gave me a chance, too, to decide how much I wanted to tell Bobbie.
I suggested we should walk away from the river up Oakley Street. We knew a coffee stall near Sloane Square that stayed open all night for cab drivers and people going home from parties or, come to that, tired suffragettes who’d spent nights putting up posters. This part of London is never quite asleep. A man, hatless and in shirtsleeves, passed us without looking up, eyes on the ground. A hansom drove by, blinds down, a woman’s giggle bubbling from inside it.
‘Do we talk about it or don’t we?’
If I’d said no, Bobbie would have accepted it.
‘Yes.’
‘If he was the shop owner, what was he doing there at that hour of the morning?’
‘He wasn’t.’
‘Why so sure?’
‘I’ve seen him before.’
It had only been a glimpse through the crack in the door, but enough to see that it was the man I’d dubbed Yellow Boater. I explained to Bobbie.
‘So he must have followed you and waited until we were both inside.’
‘Bobbie, I’m sure neither he nor anybody else followed me.’
‘So how did he know you were there?’
‘He didn’t. Not when he came in. He knows now.’
He’d had one glimpse at the bottom of the stairs, by the faint light of a street lamp through net curtains, but that was enough for a man trained to recognise faces.
‘But if he didn’t follow you, what was he doing there?’
‘Meeting somebody, probably. Somebody who didn’t want to risk going there by daylight.’
Yellow Boater. Verona’s older lover, the man with the little moustache. Rizzo and Toby had been right about the assignations, wrong about the lover.
‘So what’s it got to do with your cousin’s daughter?’
A policeman walked past on his beat, gave us a curious glance, no more.
‘Morning, officer,’ Bobbie said, in a Cockney accent that wouldn’t have fooled a dog.
He took no notice. I waited until his footsteps had faded in the distance before answering.
‘I’m very much afraid that Verona was a spy.’
Chapter Twelve
WE FOUND THE COFFEE STALL. THE OTHER CUSTOMERS were a cab driver, a tramp and a couple of young men in evening dress trying to sober up on the way home, unsuccessfully. One of them decided to lecture the rest of us about war being inevitable – civil war this time, in Ireland. ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.’ Only he had a lisp, either from affectation or from drink, so it came out as ‘Ulcer will fight’. We didn’t argue. Bobbie was still absorbing what I’d told her on the way there and I was so angry that I couldn’t trust myself to speak to anyone else. We finished our coffee. Bobbie said she was staying somewhere not far away. These days she was always cagey about where she was living, even with her best friends, and was never in one place long. We parted in Sloane Square. It was after three o’clock by then, not f
ar off daylight, and I decided to walk the five miles or so home to Hampstead.
The sun was up by the time I was going through Regents Park, with squirrels scuttling, dew on the grass and all the signs of a fine day, but it was wasted on me. Partly, I was angry with myself for being duped. I thought of Verona, new to London, quizzing me about left-wing political groups like a student taking notes for an exam. The minute I’d gone, she’d have been scribbling it all down for transmission to Yellow Boater in that odious room over the chart shop. Look what I’ve got for you – what a clever obedient little spy I am. Another blob or two on the map, a few more cards in the index. My friends, some of them. Harmless, idealistic men and women who’d committed no crimes and would no more think of betraying their country than these self-satisfied patriots who were snooping on them. Verona had used me. Even in my anger, I acquitted her of supplying the information on my own card. Special Branch or M-whatever-it-was could have managed that mixture of truth and lies without her help. But there were friends of mine who’d have been prepared to trust her because she was my relative and she’d cold-bloodedly set about betraying them. Even that shambolic household of students looked pathetic in this new light. I supposed she’d taken Rizzo and his rantings at his own evaluation – thought she’d unearthed a nest of dangerous anarchists. Stupid, treacherous girl!
* * *
Striding up Haverstock Hill, with the milk-carts on their rounds and a few housemaids up early sweeping steps, I moved on to being angry with the person who deserved it more. My dear cousin Commodore Benjamin North. He must have known. I’d been surprised that he’d let her go to London, but he must have been part of it from the start, even volunteered her services. The brave, loyal daughter who’d wanted to join the navy like her brother. The Roman father, offering his dearest treasure to his country’s service – then blaming me when it went fatally wrong. Alexandra, I was sure, knew nothing about it. She’d been left to breed her cats, paint her watercolours and worry. This had been a secret between father and daughter – them and the men with the initials.
In Hampstead High Street the commercial day was just beginning. Smells of warm bread from the bakery, of strawberries from the pony cart delivering punnets of them to the greengrocer. Verona was dead. They’d used her courage and idealism in a dangerous game, and it had killed her. Somehow she’d stumbled on something that was really dangerous – far more so than any of the assorted idealists, political agitators and high-principled law breakers she could have discovered through me. Ironically, she must have found her way to people who really were a public danger. That was what was happening in the nineteen days of her life that were unaccounted for. Then the people she was spying on found her out and killed her. Killed her horribly on her father’s doorstep as a sign to him that they knew what had been happening. Who ‘they’ were I had no idea. Up to that point, I’d laughed at the stories of German spies and lurking saboteurs, as the creations of the popular press and would-be popular politicians. But because the Daily Mail got itself into a frenzy, that didn’t mean there weren’t such things as foreign spies. If so Verona would, by the standards of her new profession, have scored a success. Except she’d been dragged way out of her depth, and it had killed her.
I got home, drew the curtains of the bedroom to shut out the sunlight and slept dreamlessly for six hours or so. The midday post crashing through the letterbox woke me. I got up, still feeling full of sleep, went down in my dressing-gown and put the kettle on the gas ring. One of the envelopes had a Teignmouth postmark and was addressed in careful school-girlish writing. There were three pages inside, the first a note from the doctor’s daughter.
Dear Miss Bray,
I am enclosing copies of Verona’s two letters, as you requested.
I have been thinking about her all the time. My father says I must forget her and won’t discuss it, but I can’t help it. I know what her family must be suffering and I pity them from my heart, but I will never have another friend who meant to me what Verona did. I won’t believe what they said about her at the inquest. Surely even doctors can make mistakes, even though my father says they don’t in things like that. I haven’t said anything to him yet about going to train as a nurse, but I promise I will as soon as he has got over this, for Verona’s sake.
Yours with respect and sympathy
Prudence Maidment
Then the two copies of Verona’s letters. The first, dated 19 December 1913, was from the lodging where she’d stayed for her first months in London.
Dearest Prudence,
I’m sorry not to have written before, but as you can imagine, there are a world of things to do. Everything, even finding your way about, seems to take so much longer here than at home. But I am working hard and starting to meet people. Sometimes, quite often to be honest, I wish I were back in Devon, having our long talk-walks together and going up to the Ness to see the ships. But we all have to make sacrifices and I know it would be cowardly if I were to give up what I really want to do and come running home just because I get lonely sometimes and miss Daddy and Mummy and you and all the animals. I’m sorry I shan’t be coming home for Christmas, but there is so much to learn, in such a short time. Please give my love to all the puppies. (Have you found homes for them yet?)
Happy Christmas to you and your family.
From your devoted friend
Verona
The second letter was dated 3 May – the same date as Verona’s last note to her mother. It had the address of the student house at the top of it, though I knew from Toby and Rizzo that she’d left there the day before. Its tone, even down to the punctuation, was more hurried than the previous one.
Dear Prudence,
Sorry not to have written. Life here interesting – very. Lots to tell you one day – though goodness knows when that will be.
If you don’t hear from me for a while, don’t worry. I have some good friends and will be all right.
Your friend
Verona
Knowing what I knew now, that second letter didn’t read as innocently as Prudence had taken it – Verona ‘making a lot of friends and having an interesting time’. It was Verona about to plunge into whatever, before the month was out, would kill her. The good friends weren’t there when she needed them and she hadn’t been all right. I put the copies away in the only drawer of my desk that locked, made coffee and read my other mail while I drank it.
The mail was unremarkable, with one exception – a little paste-board card inviting me to attend an ‘At Home.’ Normally that would have gone straight into the wastepaper basket with a passing puzzlement as to how anybody had so much time to fritter away. The names on this one made it different. Mr and Mrs Vincent Hergest would be at home from 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday 24 June and would be delighted to have Miss Bray’s company at Mill House, near Guildford, Surrey. I assumed that Mrs Hergest must have sent it, because Vincent wasn’t due back from his researches in Paris till the weekend, which meant she must have picked up my message from the publisher. I’d never met her, but I’d heard that she acted as her husband’s secretary so that he could concentrate on his books. I’d have preferred a more private chance to speak to him. In fact, knowing what I now knew about Verona, I’d have preferred not to talk to him about her at all. But it was only fair to give him some idea what she’d been doing in case she’d put him in the card index as well. I scribbled a note saying Miss Bray would be delighted to attend and went out and posted it.
* * *
There’s a point, I suppose, when your mind has too much of grappling with serious things and flies to trivialities. That’s the only reason I can think of why, as I was walking back from the postbox, I started worrying about shoes. I had a blue silk dress and a dark blue jacket that would just about do for an author’s ‘At Home’, a straw hat that would pass muster once I’d steamed out a dent in the crown. The question was whether the blue shoes that were all I had for summer party wear would hold together through an afternoon. I was in
no mood to go shopping. When I got home I started burrowing around and getting unreasonably angry when I couldn’t find them. Then I remembered that I’d put them in a cupboard in the spare room along with some other summer things, flung open the door and found them on the floor with the rest of the clutter. The toes were scuffed and a button on one of the straps was coming loose, but with a bit of repair work, they’d do. Relieved that one thing at least was going right, I tried to close the cupboard door but couldn’t. A small raffia work basket, stuffed full of mending things and other oddments, had toppled off a pile of boxes and blocked it. I picked it up, opened it in case there was any thread inside that would do for the button.
‘Oh no.’
Thread, different colours all ravelled up together. Scraps of darning wool unwinding from cards, pins sticking out at all angles. That was normal, the way I’d most likely left it. What wasn’t normal were the other things there, nestled comfortably in the soft stuff. Four things. A small glass cylinder with a measuring scale along the side, graduated from five to twenty-five, with a brass plunger at one end. A smaller cylinder, unmarked, that looked as if it would fit inside the first one. A silver needle. A small brown envelope, folded over. I knelt by the cupboard with the work basket on my lap. Even when I was asking myself what on earth it was, I knew. ‘Yes, sir, a hypodermic syringe, in the bottom of the dinghy…’ I heard the Devon policeman’s voice saying it. Another one. I picked up the needle. It was hollow, sharp. It slipped neatly inside the smaller cylinder and stuck out from the end of it. Then if you pulled back the brass plunger on the larger cylinder, the smaller cylinder and the needle fitted inside. One syringe, clean, dry and ready for use. There’d been a trace of liquid in the one the police had found in the boathouse, none in this. But the brown envelope contained about two tablespoonfuls of white crystalline powder. I refolded the envelope, put it back in the work basket along with the assembled syringe and tried to make my mind work. All it was doing was screaming to throw the things away, now, before anyone saw them. Right, take it slowly. How did they get there? Not by my hand. I might not be domestically organised or house-proud, but I’d have remembered bringing this little lot into my home. Could it have been one of my visitors? The house was like Piccadilly Circus at times, but nobody I knew who’d been here was taking morphine – which is probably what the powder was – either medically or as an addict. Verona herself? She’d never been to my house. Not as far as I knew, but what did I know? Then I remembered the searchers. Not Verona anyway, she was dead by then. Whoever the searchers were, they’d left no traces except a mark in the dust and a reversed postcard. Those, plus these things in my lap that would link me by implication to Verona’s death. But what was the point? Unless I went running to the police with them, and I wasn’t likely to do that, nobody would know. Then it came to me that whoever it was didn’t need me to go running to the police, because sooner or later the police would come to me again. Easy enough to find an excuse. Suffragette homes were being raided all over London. This time they’d have been told what to look for, and they’d find it. When I thought of that, I started sweating. I got up in a hurry, intending to flush the powder down the lavatory, break the syringe with a hammer and throw away the pieces, before the police came back. It wasn’t rational. The things must have been there for ten days if the searchers had put them there and could have stayed for days more if I hadn’t needed the shoes.
The Perfect Daughter Page 12