‘Yes, madam.’
I nearly undid all the work there and then because I was so angry at being taken for a fool. My geography for this part of the world wasn’t the strongest, but I did know which way the sea was. Off to my right, to the east. If the engine backed on to the last two carriages of this train we’d be pointing at right angles to it, northwards. I tightened my grip on my bag, ready to whirl round and run back into the part of the train I’d just left. He wasn’t holding me. He couldn’t wrestle with me on the platform with a dozen or so people leaning out of windows to watch. Only sanity said at the last minute: ‘Well, you wanted them and you’ve got them.’ I walked on. He opened the nearest door in the two severed carriages and held it for me. When I went inside he climbed after me, opened the door to a compartment and again held it for me.
I said, ‘My ticket’s only second class.’
‘That doesn’t matter, madam.’
The last shred of doubt went. I tried to look as if I believed him.
‘We’ll be going in a minute or two, madam.’
Then he went away down the corridor. A whistle blew and I watched through my stationary window as the rest of the train moved away from the platform, turned right at a junction and headed for Harwich and the Hook of Holland ferry that would steam into the North Sea minus at least one passenger. Then steam from the backward-shunting engine clouded the window and there were the usual jolts and clankings as our two carriages were joined on to it. The ink monitor hadn’t been far out. We moved off in just over five minutes.
* * *
It was a conventionally luxurious first-class carriage, highly polished dark wood panels, three broad seats on either side with comfortable armrests in between and framed photographs of Clacton and Great Yarmouth above them, silver-grey upholstery that smelled only very faintly of soot. We drew slowly out of Manningtree then picked up speed quickly, which wasn’t surprising as the engine had only two carriages to draw. At first we went alongside the estuary with its salt flats and flocks of swans in water turned to a sheet of copper by the setting sun, then inland through deep cuttings between birch woods with the dusk gathering. It was an easy run on a summer evening. All that was wrong with it was that there was no sign of any other passengers. I got up and walked along the corridor to the front of the carriage and there wasn’t a man, woman or dog anywhere. When I walked back to where the two carriages joined, intending to check the other one, I found the ink monitor standing there in the shadows, blocking my way. If I’d asked him he might have moved but I doubted it.
‘Everything all right, madam?’
He was less anxious now, rather pleased with himself in fact.
‘When do we arrive?’
‘Soon be there, madam.’
I went back to my seat. The fields were giving way to houses, first just a scattering of them, then terraces. The train started slowing down. We were coming into somewhere, Ipswich probably, where a reception committee would be waiting. What I couldn’t understand was why they were going to so much trouble. If they’d wanted to arrest me they could have done it at any time from Liverpool Street onwards. The expense and trouble of this – the Harwich express halted, this train to ourselves – was far out of proportion to anything I’d started, like walking through an ordinary doorway and finding yourself in the ogre’s castle. We stopped for a few minutes on a raised piece of track with sidings to the left and a row of terraced houses below, soft gas-light glowing in their windows. Half past ten, the sun down, trees and buildings turning into dark shapes against the afterglow of a long summer’s day. When we started moving again we took a turn to the left and crawled slowly across a dark river on a single-track metal bridge then into a large siding with expanses of rails gleaming on either side and mountains of coal where the rails ended. We moved alongside a rough platform made of old railway sleepers that looked as if it was meant for railway mechanics rather than passengers and stopped there with a long sigh of steam from the engine. I went out to the corridor. The ink monitor was standing there and I could smell the sweat coming off him.
‘Any minute now, madam.’
He heaved the words out painfully. I moved towards the door and put my hand on the leather strap that let the window down, knowing very well I wouldn’t be allowed to get out but wanting to make something happen. There were heavy footsteps from the carriage I hadn’t been allowed to go into and when I looked round reinforcements had arrived. Two men in plain clothes were standing behind the ink monitor. One of them was Yellow Boater, dressed today in pinstripes and bowler and carrying a lamp that sent shadows darting and diving along the corridor. The other man I hadn’t seen before. He was older than the other two, tall and thin, with hair more grey than dark, and the look of a senior civil servant or a university don. He didn’t stand up straight enough to be a retired military man but crouched slightly, heron-like, looking down his nose over half-glasses.
He said to Yellow Boater, ‘Do you identify her?’
Yellow Boater nodded. ‘She’s the one. Will you leave that door alone and hand over your bag, please, Miss Bray.’
‘Who are you?’
Yellow Boater glanced at the heron, who nodded him permission to answer.
‘I’m Sergeant Stone.’
‘Police or Army?’
He didn’t reply. The heron said, ‘And my name’s Burton, from the War Office. Shall we sit down?’
He nodded towards the compartment behind me. I went in and sat down, and the two new arrivals followed. The invitation obviously didn’t apply to the ink monitor, who stayed outside in the corridor. Burton sat down opposite me, looking at me through his glasses as if I were a new sub-species of something and nodded to Sergeant Stone, alias Yellow Boater. He put down his lamp on one of the armrests opposite so that it was shining mostly on my face, pulled down the blinds on both sides of the compartment then came to sit alongside me, nearly touching.
‘Your bag, please.’
I handed it over. Stone glanced again at Burton and got another nod. It was clear that the older man was in charge. Stone took everything out of it slowly, putting each item down on the seat beside him – the papers and magazines, a purse with some small change, a notebook and pencil, a comb (I’d wondered where that comb had got to). Burton held his hand out for the notebook and looked through it. I could have told him that it contained nothing more interesting than notes from a talk I’d been to about the first eight years of women’s franchise in Finland but I let him puzzle it out for himself.
‘What’s this?’
He was frowning at a page with a scrawled pencil diagram. I held out my hand to take the book but he snatched it away and let me look from a safe distance.
‘Oh, that. I was trying to explain the printing press to somebody.’
He gave me a look as if he didn’t believe me. Oddly, I didn’t quite believe myself when I said it, though it was quite true. The business of the empty train, of keeping me isolated in a siding, was making me feel as if I had an infectious disease and that disease was guilt. Burton put my notebook in his pocket.
‘Then there’s this, sir.’
Stone was holding out the brown-paper packet, away from me at arm’s length as if scared I might make a grab for it. Burton took it in his fingertips as if picking up a soiled handkerchief and turned it over.
‘Is this your property?’
‘Of course.’
He unknotted the string, folded back the paper. It was oddly reassuring to see Three Men in a Boat with the squashed peach stain on the cover from the day I took it punting, but he didn’t seem pleased at all. He looked at me.
‘Some kind of joke, Miss Bray?’
‘Quite a lot of jokes. Haven’t you read it?’
He riffled through the pages.
‘If you’re looking for pinpricks or words underlined I don’t think you’ll find them.’
He ignored me, looked at Stone and commanded, ‘Jacket pockets.’
Even Yellow Boater seemed startled. He st
ood up. I stood up too, took my jacket off, handed it to him, sat down again. I thought he looked a little shame-faced but he rummaged through the pockets. Result, one handkerchief, a stub of pencil, a wallet with two five-pound notes and my ticket. Burton pounced on it.
‘I see you’re booked through to the Hook of Holland.’
‘I think you knew that already.’
‘With what purpose?’
‘Meeting somebody.’
‘Who?’
‘You.’
Up to then Burton had been cool. Now he was angry or perhaps he’d been angry all along and was just letting it show.
‘So you think spying’s a joking matter.’
‘If you’re accusing me of spying, yes it is a joke.’
‘Sergeant Stone has identified you as a person who broke into certain premises a week ago.’
‘If you mean the room over the chart shop, yes I did.’
The two men looked at each other. I wasn’t supposed to admit it so easily.
‘And you also admit that you’re now travelling to meet somebody on the Continent. I’m asking you again, who is it?’
‘And I’m telling you again, you. It didn’t have to be on the Continent and you needn’t have bothered with the private train. I’d have been happy to see you at your office in London if I’d known where to find you.’
‘How did you know about me?’
Just a touch of conceit there, so perhaps even people whose work is secrecy like to be famous. I had to disappoint him.
‘I didn’t even know you existed until you walked in here. When I say “you” I mean anybody who knows what’s going on. I don’t care if you call yourself Special Branch or the Secret Service or MO5.I just want to talk to whoever Verona North was working for.’
The name hung in the air. Neither of them gave any sign they’d heard it before.
‘Let’s call a truce,’ I said. ‘I’m not a spy. If you want to waste your time having me followed, that’s your decision. I want to know who killed Verona. Whoever she was working for should want to know too.’
Burton looked at me for a long time and I couldn’t read anything in his eyes. They were strange-coloured eyes, bright metallic grey like a new galvanised bath tub. He stood up.
‘Stay here.’
He was talking to Stone, not me. Then he opened the door and went out, stepping past the ink monitor, closing the door behind him. Stone too looked surprised at the suddenness of it. I stood up and put my jacket back on to prove to myself I had that much freedom at least and listened to Burton’s footsteps going along the corridor. No sound of an outside door opening, so whoever he was going to consult must be in the second carriage with the blinds drawn. Experimentally, I put my hand on the door of the compartment.
Stone jumped up. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I thought I might take a walk outside.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just shouldn’t advise it.’
I sat down. Whatever Bill might think, I could take advice sometimes.
Chapter Seventeen
I HATE BEING CLOSED IN. ONE WAY AND another I’ve had quite a lot of it but it still makes me jumpy and when the minutes dragged out into half an hour it was hard not to let Stone, alias Yellow Boater, see my uneasiness. We were a parody of any delay on any rail journey. There was I, re-reading by lamplight a magazine feature I’d read twice already. Stone was sitting opposite me with a little black-covered notebook open on his knee and fountain pen in hand like a man composing a letter of complaint to the rail company board of directors. He’d drawn up the blind enough to show the back of the ink monitor standing conscientiously outside in his railway uniform. I wished somebody would tell him he could get rid of the satchel and ridiculous cap. I wished too that I could get a closer look at Stone’s notebook. At first I thought it might be intended to unsettle me, letting me know I was under observation all the time, but when I did manage a sideways glance I saw only a column of figures before he scowled and tilted it away. Our siding between the coal heaps was peaceful but from a distance you could hear the town going on with its normal life – trains whistling from the station on the other side of the river, motor-lorries on our side, a cow mooing not far away. The cow surprised me because we were almost certainly somewhere in the middle of town, then I thought that there were docks at Ipswich, probably with cattle lairage and our sidings might be near them. After forty minutes footsteps came back along the corridor, slow and deliberate. I didn’t know why, but something told me the person on his way wasn’t in a negotiating mood. One look at Burton’s face when he came back in proved I was right. The metallic eyes were colder than ever. He sat down next to Stone, putting them both opposite me. Stone must have sensed the atmosphere had changed too because he flipped over his notebook to a clean page.
‘Not yet,’ Burton said to him, without taking his eyes off me. Then, to me, ‘You mentioned Verona North. What do you know about her?’
‘She was the daughter of my cousin, Commodore Benjamin North. She came to London about six months ago to work for the secret services. I think her task was to identify students, especially foreign ones, who might be spies or dangers to the public in some way, but you’d know more about that than I do.’
‘Go on.’
‘Am I right, so far?’
‘You’re not here to ask the questions.’
‘As far as I’m concerned that’s the main point of being here. That – and suggesting we might work together.’
Stone opened his eyes wide and looked at Burton, but the older man’s expression hadn’t changed.
‘Work together?’
‘Yes. I want to know who killed her and I assume you do too. I might know things you don’t and I’m sure you know things I don’t. Doesn’t it make sense to pool resources rather than your wasting time following me?’
It had seemed reasonable when I planned this. It even sounded reasonable to me as I said it, but when I looked at Burton I knew I might as well be preaching vegetarianism to tigers.
‘I understand the verdict of the inquest was suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed.’
So he – or the unseen person he’d gone to consult – had known something about Verona before I mentioned her.
‘Yes, but there were things the inquest jury didn’t know.’
‘Such as?’
‘Less than a month before she died she wrote to an old schoolfriend. She said she had a lot to tell her but the friend was not to worry if she didn’t hear from her for some time. For more than two weeks after that she was missing. Her friends and family still don’t know where she was. Only the people she was working for would know that.’
‘And who, in your opinion, was Miss North working for?’
‘I told you. You. Some part of Special Branch or the secret services. For goodness sake, even if there are a lot of you, somebody must know what everybody’s doing.’
Burton smiled, though it looked more like a crack in the metalwork than a smile. ‘I wonder about that sometimes, don’t you, Sergeant Stone?’ It was Stone’s turn not to react and Burton’s smile had been welded over by the time he turned back to me.
‘So you have no idea what she was doing in the weeks before her death?’
‘I don’t know, but I can guess. She thought she’d discovered a person or a group of people who were foreign spies or dangerous revolutionaries. You, or somebody like you, let her take the risk of trying to join them to find out more. And she was right – so right that they killed her.’
Silence, except for a steam engine not far away. It sounded as if this one were on our side of the river, probably coming from the docks towards these sidings. As an exchange of information this wasn’t going well. At least, that was my impression until Burton sighed, leaned forward and started talking.
‘Very well, Miss Bray. You want to know what happened to Verona North. I can’t tell you with certainty, because the
re’s probably only one person on earth who knows with certainty, but I’ll tell you what I think happened and you can tell me where I’ve gone wrong.’
I stared at him. This was too easy. Stone was looking surprised too.
‘Let’s take it that you’re right, that your cousin’s daughter was a brave and patriotic young woman who, young as she was, wanted to play a part in defending her country, as her father and brother were doing.’
I nodded. Verona deserved that tribute at least.
‘Let’s take it that you might even be right that she came to London and became a student for that purpose. After all, many anarchists and revolutionaries are young people. They’re more likely to trust somebody of their own age than a person like Sergeant Stone here.’
He waited. I said nothing. In spite of his reasonable tone I had a feeling that things were going wrong.
‘And, of course, Miss North would have an advantage. She has a relative who is already well known among – what shall we say – people who are not exactly friendly to this country’s government.’
‘What are you implying? Am I supposed to be a dangerous revolutionary, a traitor?’
‘I’m not implying anything, but you must agree you have a record that speaks for itself.’
‘I’m not a revolutionary, unless wanting the Vote and not wanting a war make me one. And if you’re thinking of that bomb in Lloyd George’s house last year, I had nothing to do with planting it.’
Which was true but I shouldn’t have said it. It was an acknowledgement I was on the defensive. I heard my voice rising, felt sweat trickling and knew he was aware of it. He raised his eyebrows and went on in the same level voice.
‘So it would be quite likely that Miss North, on coming to London, would make some contact with her father’s cousin.’
‘As you almost certainly know already we did meet and she did ask me about various political groups. None of them was dangerous and I’m sure all the details are on your wretched file cards.’
‘Ah yes, those file cards. You’ve admitted to breaking into the premises. Why?’
‘Verona had been seen going in, not by me, by one of her friends. I wanted to know what she’d been doing there in case it had any bearing on why she died.’
The Perfect Daughter Page 17