I was standing over the lavatory with the envelope in my hand when some sort of sense came back. That and the syringe were evidence of something. Disposing of them would be like admitting my own guilt. But if I couldn’t take them to the police and I couldn’t just leave them around the house to be found, what could I do with them? In the end, I locked them in my desk with the copies of Verona’s letters, sat down at my Underwood and wrote a long letter to Bill. I told him about everything, the syringe, the chart shop, the file cards. If anything happened, like another police raid and arrest, I wanted my version to be out there somewhere. I couldn’t burden my suffragette friends or Max with it because they had enough problems. It did occur to me that Bill might have enough problems too, but he was a lawyer and I needed help from somewhere the way a person lost in a desert needs water. Once I’d got that sealed and posted I felt a little safer. Not much, though.
Chapter Thirteen
‘I HAVEN’T READ HIS LATEST,’ I SAID.
‘But didn’t you find the last chapters ever so slightly déjà vu? I thought he’d handled the same theme more incisively in Midday Dancing. Or don’t you agree?’
‘I haven’t read it.’
‘But then even his amazing vitality as a writer…’
I stopped listening. My blue shoes were planted on neatly mown turf. A breeze off the North Downs was fluttering the phlox and poppies in the borders, bending the plume of water from the fountain in the lily pond so that it feathered out over groups of guests. Their little exclamations and laughs blended with the overture to The Pirates of Penzance, played by a wind and string band on the lower terrace by the gazebo. I had a bowl of strawberries and cream in my hand, a glass of claret cup on the edge of the sundial beside me, a literary bore at my elbow. So far, I’d had no opportunity to get Vincent Hergest on his own, and with around a hundred people present, the chances looked as slim as the cucumber slices in the sandwiches. The train I’d caught from London had carried a dozen other people, obviously bound for the Hergests’ party. Two chauffeur-driven cars were waiting at Guildford station and carried us in relays through the lanes, joining a queue of other vehicles at the entrance to the drive of Mill House. Some of the tens of thousands that Vincent’s books earned him went on hospitality to his friends as well as on international peace. His socialism, he said, meant wanting everybody to enjoy life as much as he did and the ‘At Home’ was more of a private garden fete. He was waiting to meet us on the top terrace in a cream linen suit and soft collared shirt with a floppy purple bow tie. He was in his mid forties but his round freckled face, sandy hair and blue eyes gave him the look of a confident schoolboy. His handshake was warm.
‘So glad you could come, Miss Bray. I got your note. We must talk later.’
As I was swept strawberrywards in the tide of guests I heard him welcoming the next in line.
‘Johnny, glad they could spare you from the House. Imogen darling, such reviews! It will run for ever.’
There were quite a few people I knew in the throng and ordinarily I’d have been happy enough circulating and talking, but now I wished I hadn’t bothered. I ate the last of my strawberries (they were sweet, I had to admit) put the empty bowl on the sundial, picked up the claret cup and set about losing the bore.
‘I haven’t said hello to our hostess yet. I’ve never met Mrs Hergest. Could you point her out to me?’
‘Valerie? Down in the herb garden last I saw her. Green and white with feathers.’
By the sound of it, I should look for her perching in a tree. I was sure it wouldn’t ruin her afternoon if she never saw me, but at least it set me free to stroll round the gardens. There were several acres of them, lawns and flowerbeds near the house with views southwards over farmland, then lower down a line of white-painted beehives, a vegetable garden planted for decoration as well as use, with beet, peas and lettuces set among box hedges like a knot garden. Next to it, a wired enclosure with a few fruit trees and a muddy pond was home to a colony of Indian runner ducks. I watched them scuttling around, absurdly upright, like clockwork toys. The whole thing had a Marie Antoinette quality to it, since the Hergests could easily order their duck eggs and honey from Fortnums but I couldn’t help liking it, and liking him more because of it. I wandered on. The band, still on Pirates, was up above me now. ‘… Yet people say, I know not why, that we shall have a warm July…’ There was a low stone wall beyond the duck enclosure and a trellis with sweet peas. Chatter and laughter came from the other side of the trellis, glimpses of dresses in the same pastel colours as the flowers and a smell of crushed camomile. I went down a shallow flight of steps between lavender bushes and found my hostess, or at least the back view of her. The dress was white and mint green, draped in an oriental style that emphasised her slimness. Her dark hair was crowned with a cascade of white swan feathers. The effect, as with their garden, was odd but attractive. She was talking to a big bald man. I moved round to join them and do my social duty and waited for a gap in their conversation.
‘Mrs Hergest? We haven’t met but…’
I stopped, probably with mouth open and gaping, because what I was saying wasn’t true. Or true only in the sense that we’d never been formally introduced. Our eyes, at any rate, had met – just a week ago across a coroner’s court in Devon. The mystery woman sitting next to Bill had been Vincent Hergest’s wife. Now she was looking at me, hand out, a little smile on her lips, the perfect hostess.
‘Miss Bray, isn’t it? Vincent was so glad you could come.’
Her self-possession was total. The big dark eyes gave nothing away. To be fair, she had the advantage. She’d known from the inquest who I was, but I’d had no way of knowing her identity. She put a light hand on my wrist and managed somehow to draw us away from the bald man, so that we couldn’t be overheard. There was a rosemary bush beside us, humming with bees. Her voice was low and pleasant.
‘I was so sorry to hear about your cousin’s daughter. Vincent was quite devastated.’
‘You knew her?’
My brain was working again, but only slowly. She could have commiserated back in Teignmouth if she’d wanted to. According to Bill she’d driven away so fast that people had to jump for their lives. She nodded, setting the swan feathers quivering.
‘Yes. We met her when Vincent was researching his latest.’
‘Where?’
She looked at me, head on one side.
‘If I tell you, would you try to keep it quiet? Of course, I’d understand if you wanted to talk about it in the family, but we’d rather it didn’t get around.’
‘I assume we’re talking about something political?’
So Verona had managed to burrow her way in here as well. I wondered how many of Hergest’s idealistic schemes had found their way on to the file cards.
‘No, not that.’ She moved so close to me that a feather tickled my cheek and murmured, ‘Ju-jitsu.’
‘What?’
I must have yelped because several people looked in our direction. Valerie waved a don’t-worry signal at them with her slim white-gloved fingers.
‘There’s an academy run by this amazing woman near Oxford Circus.’
‘I know.’
‘Vincent’s decided that the girl in his next novel is going to be a ju-jitsu expert. He wants to explore how a love affair develops when a woman is physically and intellectually stronger than a man. Only if word gets round what he’s working on, by the time his book comes out half a dozen wretched scribblers will have rushed out Ju-jitsu Jane trash and his will look dated, even though he had the idea in the first place.’
She looked at me as if I should understand that this would be one of the world’s great tragedies. She was, at a guess, about ten years younger than her husband, but her pride in him seemed more like a mother’s than a wife’s. There were little lines round her eyes and on her forehead, as if she did a lot of worrying.
‘So you and he met Verona at Edith Garrud’s place? When?’
‘It wo
uld have been back in February. We were sitting in on some of the classes. I started talking to Verona and knew Vincent would be interested, so I made sure they met. Didn’t she tell you about it?’
I said something about not seeing much of Verona. I was still off balance.
‘His central character is a little like her – young, brave, wanting to change the world.’
She must have seen something in my face and misinterpreted it, because she started trying to reassure me.
‘I don’t mean that the girl in the book would be your cousin’s daughter. Vincent creates, transmutes. You know, a look or a way of speaking from one person, something else from another. It’s how he works.’
She made it sound like something holy. Her eyes were on mine, unblinking, almost commanding me to understand.
‘As I said in my note, I think I saw your husband and Verona together at the Buckingham Palace deputation.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you did. He mentioned seeing her there.’
‘Did either of you see much of Verona, apart from the ju-jitsu classes?’
‘Oh yes. We invited her down here for one of our youth weekends.’
‘Was that your idea or hers?’
‘Ours, naturally. It was obvious that she was interested in politics, but a little naïve. From the start, she was asking Vincent almost as many questions as he was asking her.’
‘What sort of questions?’
‘His ideas on world peace, the countries he visited, the people he met. She really was hungry for knowledge.’
‘Yes, I’m sure she was.’
‘Anyway, from time to time we cram this house with young people from all over the place, from as many different countries as possible, from all classes of society. They enjoy themselves together and talk in an entirely informal way about what concerns them and how they see the future.’
‘When was the one Verona came to?’
‘The last weekend in April.’
‘Can you remember who else was there?’
‘We had about twenty people. I’ve got a list somewhere. I remember there was a young man who’d been imprisoned in St Petersburg, a couple of German pacifists, a rather quiet Sinn Feiner and some Communist musicians from Paris.’
‘Tell me, was there anybody there she seemed particularly interested in?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘A few days after that weekend she disappeared. I can’t find anybody who knows where she was until your husband saw her outside Buckingham Palace. Then she just disappeared again, until I found her in the boathouse.’
‘Are you suggesting that it was something to do with our weekend?’
‘Not directly, but I’m wondering if there was somebody she met there that explains it.’
‘I honestly don’t think so.’
‘It’s possible that your husband noticed something. I’d like to ask him.’
A bee from the rosemary had settled on her gloved hand. She was looking at it as if she’d never seen one before.
‘Do you really need to talk to Vincent? All this is upsetting for him and he’s been working so hard on the book.’
‘Yes. I think I do.’
She opened her lips to ask why, decided against it and wafted her hand gently in the air to make the bee fly.
‘There’s a bench in the vegetable garden, near the water tank. If you wait there, I’ll get him to come to you.’
She started moving away.
I said, ‘Why did you come to the inquest?’
‘Vincent couldn’t go. You know, the press…’ She took a step. ‘I’m so sorry for her parents. It must be awful, wondering…’ Another step. ‘Please be careful with him. He’s so much more sensitive than people think.’
She walked slowly past her guests, up the steps towards the house. I went back to the vegetable garden and found a stone bench between the water tank and rows of carrots. After ten minutes or so there were quick footsteps on the path and Vincent Hergest appeared and sat down beside me.
‘I can’t tell you how sorry I was to hear about it.’
The words were conventional enough, but he seemed genuinely disturbed. His fingers were kneading away at his kneecaps, doing no good to the cream-coloured linen.
‘How did you hear?’
‘The place in Chelsea where she used to live. I hadn’t seen her for some time so I went round there. The fellow with the red beard told me. I should have written, I suppose, to you or somebody. But I didn’t know what to…’
Probably a literary first. If only the bore up by the sundial could have heard it – Vincent Hergest admitting he didn’t know what to write. He sighed and shook his head. ‘Valerie tells me you want to know about the weekend she was here.’
‘Yes, mostly whether she seemed particularly interested in any of your other guests.’
‘You haven’t been to one of our weekends, or you’d know. Everybody’s interested in everybody. You should see – no, you should feel this place when we have our young people here. They’re making connections that are going to change the world, I really believe that. How can you think of waging war on people, whether it’s class war or war between countries, when you’ve swum with them and had pillow fights with them, and sat up half the night talking music and books and politics?’
You could tell he was on a favourite theme, trying to cheer himself up by talking about it.
‘Did Verona talk much about herself?’
‘No. She did more listening than talking, as far as I remember.’
‘Not just at that weekend, at other times. Your wife said you were interested in her for your book.’
‘Aspects of her, yes. A young woman from a conventional background, seeing the wrongs of the world for the first time, wanting to put them right in one great heroic charge.’
‘So she told you about her background?’
He stared at his rows of carrots. ‘She said her father was a doctor in Devon.’
‘I’m afraid she lied about that.’
He darted up, grabbed a carrot by its ferny top and pulled it out of the ground. ‘Yes, I know. Valerie told me from the inquest. Naval officer, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
He sat down, still holding his carrot. ‘Perhaps she was ashamed to admit it, poor girl, meeting pacifists and so on.’
‘Why did you want Valerie to go to the inquest?’
He looked at me. The blue eyes had a glaze of tears over them.
‘I wanted to know what had happened.’
‘For the book?’
He stared at me for a moment, mouth open, as if I’d hit him unfairly.
Then, ‘What sort of a monster do you think I am? Do you think I have no feelings, just because I’m a writer? A young woman hangs herself and I’m only interested for my book?’
He hurled the carrot away. It went skittering through the air like a vegetable comet, trailing green, landed somewhere among the marrow plants. ‘Carrot fly, damn them.’
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I’m afraid there was something more important she deceived you about. All of us in fact.’
He stared. ‘What?’
‘I’m very much afraid Verona was a government spy.’
He rocked back on the seat as if I’d hit him. ‘No! What do you mean? I don’t believe it!’
I told him as much as he needed to know. I had to, not just for him but for the assorted people she’d met through him. At first he was angry, trying to interrupt, but when I got to the room with the filing cabinets and the map his head went down in his hands. From what seemed like a long way off, the band he’d hired was playing something from The Dollar Princess.
He said through his fingers, ‘I was beginning to be afraid there was something. When Valerie told me about her father being a commodore I was afraid there was something. But this…’
I waited. When he looked up at last his eyes were damp and the muscles round his mouth were quivering.
‘They must have
wanted to get me very badly. Sending her where they knew I’d meet her.’
It’s one of the funny things about being spied on – knowing you’re being watched is like appearing on stage all the time and however much people may hate that, nobody will admit to having just a walk-on part.
‘You might not have been the main target.’
‘Why else would they go to all this trouble?’
‘You know a lot of people the War Office might think of as potential enemies.’
‘For God’s sake, we create our own enemies out of our fears and weaknesses.’
‘It’s a good quote, but I’m not sure it would convince the men in the Secret Service Bureau.’
‘Is that who she was working for?’
The Perfect Daughter Page 13