The Perfect Daughter

by Gillian Linscott

  ‘That will have to do as my fare,’ I told them. ‘I shan’t be in your way.’

  Nobody would hear me over the noise the cows were making. I found some dry straw and settled down on it feeling boneless with relief. Some light came through ventilation slats on both sides. There was a feeling of security, closed there in the dimness with the animals. My breathing and heartbeats slowed down and for a while I didn’t think about anything. Bars clanged into place on the cattle wagons. The train rocked as an engine was shunted into us and coupled on. The mooing rose to a crescendo and we were moving slowly, past the backs of the warehouses, jolting across the road then clattering back over the river on the metal bridge into sidings on the other side. We stayed there some time, more than half an hour, and from the sounds outside and occasional juddering and bumpings I guessed that other wagons were being added to our train. It was hot and the air was heavy with the smell of cow and horse dung, straw and coal dust. I’d have given pounds for a glass of water. At every shout or crunch of steps outside I expected the door to fly open, and ended up quivering and sweating worse than the pony. A lurch, a blast of steam and we were moving again. I looked out through the ventilation slats then ducked down. There was a policeman in uniform standing on the edge of the sidings. He had his back to us, but it was an odd place for a policeman to be unless they were hunting somebody. I stayed crouched in the straw until the train settled to a speed and rhythm that suggested we were back on a main line. When I looked out we were heading south through a wooded cutting that opened out on to fields, and my heart started to slow down. I should be safe now until Shenfield, which as far as I remembered was about two-thirds of the way down Essex.

  * * *

  It was a short but slow journey. We seemed to be a goods train of lowly status, because we went past stations but had long waits in between them to let faster trains through. Fields and creeks slid past. The horses dozed and nodded, shifting their weight with the jolting of the train. We passed Manningtree with no incident this time, picked up more wagons at Colchester and went on our unhurried way through Chelmsford. The calm was a mixed blessing though, because it gave me time to think about how much worse things had got since I’d travelled up this line yesterday evening. I was a murder suspect on the run. I couldn’t go home, or make contact with my friends or even get money out of a bank. It was partly my own stupidity to blame, but only partly. That syringe and morphine had been planted in my work basket before I took it into my head to turn the tables on the initials. The idea that it might be useful to accuse me of Verona’s murder must have been in somebody’s mind almost from the start. As long as the verdict of suicide was unchallenged, that wasn’t necessary. But I was challenging that verdict by asking questions, so the plan was coming into effect. Somebody in all this had a cold tactician’s mind. I didn’t know who that somebody was, but I guessed I’d been just one railway carriage away from him last night in the sidings. The puzzle was, why hadn’t he accepted my offer? If Verona had been killed by spies, surely it was in his interest to find them rather than plant the guilt on me? The only answer must be that the stakes of the game were so high that her death, or mine come to that, didn’t matter.

  ‘What have I got into? And how do I get out of it?’

  The cob turned a sympathetic eye on me. I rummaged in my bag for more mints and found an unexpected shape. It wasn’t until then that I remembered that I’d come away with one pathetic trophy – the notebook of Yellow Boater, otherwise known as Sergeant Stone. I delivered the mints then sat down on the straw for a look at it. There were stubs of pages at the front, showing that quite a lot had been torn out. The remaining ones were blank, except yesterday’s date, 26 June 1914, on the front page. I remembered Burton had stopped him taking notes of our conversation, so that made sense. Only it didn’t. While Burton was out of the compartment consulting the mystery man, I’d watched Stone writing in the notebook. I flipped to the back and found several pages covered in neat columns of dates, words and figures.

  Fri. 19 June

  Bus fares

  1s2d

  Lunch (sandwich)

  6d

  To boot boy

  (as approved)

  5s0d

  Sat. 20 June

  Woolwich

  9d

  Lunch

  1s3d

  Entrance to meeting

  6d

  And so on. No more than the wretched man’s expenses from days of snooping. I stuffed it back in my bag because the train was slowing down again and I guessed we couldn’t be far from Shenfield. This was the next danger point. Somebody would be meeting the horses there. The ramp would be let down and I couldn’t rely on burrowing in the straw to save me, particularly with the condition the straw was in by now. There was no reason to think the watchers would expect me to get out at a little country station, but a stowaway in a horse wagon would attract attention, possibly police action. The obvious solution was to leave the train by the groom’s door as it was slowing down before it got to the station. It had done so much slowing down and stopping in the course of the journey that I thought I could rely on it for a dawdling approach, but it let me down. Before I could get the door open we were coming alongside a platform and the sign said Shenfield, Change here for the Southend Line. Too late.

  * * *

  There were heavy steps outside. A man’s voice said, ‘Here’s the horse wagon, ma’am.’ Then a child’s excited babbling, ‘Is she in there? Can I ride her out?’ A woman’s voice, ‘No, darling. Giles will bring them out for us. You can ride Angelica later.’

  I looked at the Shetland. She avoided my eye. Angelica! Whether she liked it or not, for the next few minutes we were a sister act. I brushed straw off my jacket, ran a hand over my hair. My hat was probably somewhere back in Ipswich, but the lack of it would help the appearance of eccentricity. Somebody slid back the bars and started bringing the ramp down. I unhitched the Shetland’s rope from the ring and when Giles the groom walked in, there I was standing at her head. He blinked.

  ‘She’s very nervous,’ I told him. ‘I’ll lead her out if you’ll see to the cob.’

  Angelica helped by lifting her front legs off the straw and pawing the air. He left me to it.

  ‘Mummy, she’s here!’

  The child, a boy of about five, wouldn’t have noticed if it had been King George himself on the end of the halter rope. His mother was another matter. She was a pleasant-looking woman, rather too elegantly dressed for meeting horses. When she saw me leading the pony down the ramp her jaw dropped and her eyes widened. I got in quickly.

  ‘I do hope you’ll excuse me but I happened to notice them loading her. I could see she was nervous so as I was travelling this way, I offered to go in with her. She’s such a sweet little thing.’

  I stroked Angelica’s nose. She tried to bite me but I was expecting that and her teeth only grazed my sleeve. Goodness knows what I looked like, all over straw and axle grease.

  ‘You … you came all the way from Ipswich in a horse wagon?’

  Clearly she thought I was mad. Was I dangerous too?

  ‘I do hope you’ll excuse the liberty, only I am so fond of all animals, especially horses. I just couldn’t bear to think of this little one shut up in a horrid dark wagon with nobody to comfort her.’

  All the time the boy was dancing round in delight at seeing the creature. That decided her. I was daft but not dangerous and the main thing in her mind was getting the whole equipage home. Giles and the cob had joined us on the platform now, ready to move off.

  ‘Really you shouldn’t have, but I’m sure we’re all very grateful to you. Do we owe you…?’

  She had coins in her hand. I waved them away grandly. I knew I might need every penny before I was through, but it would have spoiled the act.

  ‘Not at all. Only too delighted to be of help.’

  I gave the Shetland a last loving pat and handed the rope to Giles. All the time this was going on I’d been glancing ro
und the platform. There were quite a few people coming and going, but no police and nobody I recognised. The train was getting ready to draw out. As I’d guessed, it was a hugger-mugger collection of wagons and trucks but there was one thing about it that made my blood run cold. Sandwiched between trucks were two lonely first-class passenger carriages. There was nobody at the windows and several compartments had blinds pulled right down. I had a suspicion amounting to certainty that those were the carriages used by the initials on their way back to London. Whether there was anybody on board I didn’t know. Perhaps Burton and the rest of them had stayed in Ipswich to lead the hunt. Even so, it was a reminder to be cautious. I skulked behind some cycle racks, watched the train draw out and my family group with the horses walk across the yard and out of sight down the road, the cob plodding along, the boy and the pony skipping rings round each other. There were still quite a few people around, probably waiting for the next passenger train to London. It would be easy enough to walk across to the booking office, buy a ticket and join them, but no point in that if I got straight off the train at Liverpool Street into the arms of the police. Then I remembered ‘Change here for the Southend Line’. Southend-on-Sea was out of the way to anywhere, stuck out among the mudflats at the mouth of the River Thames. I could go there, and work out some roundabout way of getting back to London. I waited until there was a queue at the ticket office and bought a second-class single to Southend from a bored clerk who hardly gave me a glance.

  * * *

  There was plenty of room in the carriage, possibly because of the smell of me by now, so I had another look at Yellow Boater’s columns of expenses. There were seven pages of them and all but the last two were scored through with a diagonal line, meaning presumably that the claims had been submitted and his money repaid. I read through the cancelled pages more from curiosity than anything, wondering if I could identify the days when he’d been following me.

  A clutch of dates struck me, in that meticulous writing in the left-hand column: Mon. 4 May, Tues. 5 May and Wed. 6 May. Then a few lines further down: Sat. 23 May and Sun. 24 May. I noticed the first three because they were at the start of the period that was haunting me – Verona’s missing nineteen days. Stone’s entries for all three days were identical: Epping ret. 3rd class 3s2d, Lunch 1s3d. The later two were similar, with two exceptions. Lunch had cost him 1s6d on the Saturday and Sunday. And, beside the Saturday entry, there were some intials in brackets (VG/YTC). It was the V that made me look twice. VN would have been neater, but that was expecting too much. I looked back over the other entries. Quite a few had other initials against them. It looked as if it might be Stone’s way of reminding himself who the quarry had been that day. VG. Not, surely, ‘very good’. There was nothing in the way of comment in any of the other entries. Then YTC. Yvonne somebody? Yacht Training Club (surely not in landlocked Epping)? One of the things that kept me worrying away at it was that the pair of entries for 23 and 24 May were during the period of Verona’s second disappearance, from when she’d been with Hergest outside Buckingham Palace to when I found her dead in the boathouse. But why, for goodness sake, a quiet little town twenty or so miles out of London like Epping? Let’s take it that my guess was right and that Verona had been spying on somebody dangerous in that lost period. For serious spies or trouble-makers, not the posturing kind, the very unlikeliness of Epping would be an attraction. If Verona joined them there, wouldn’t it be reasonable that her employers, the initials, would want to watch over her from a distance? Perhaps not even from a distance all the time because she’d have to get messages out to them somehow. Was that what Yellow Boater was doing in his five trips out to Epping? I decided to go there and have a look. With no more than five initials and a hunch to follow it didn’t make much sense, but nothing else made any sense at all. I was hunted. I couldn’t go home. Epping would do as well as anywhere.

  Meanwhile, Southend-on-Sea on a warm Saturday in June had its advantages, the main one for me being that there were crowds of happy people in such an assortment of holiday clothes that I attracted no attention at all. A lot of East Enders had come out for the day on the London Tilbury and Southend Line and even though it was still only mid-morning the promenade was already the scene of a great open-air party. A band on the pier played O dem Golden Slippers and lines of young men and girls were doing the cakewalk, arms linked together, paper hats with fluttering streamers dipping and rising as they bowed their heads and advanced towards each other’s lines then threw them back and danced away, cheerfully sweeping up pedestrians as they went, swaying round stalls selling pies, ice cream, paper windmills on sticks and vases plastered with sea shells. Wafts of warm beer mingled with the smell of hot sugar from toffee-apple booths, a tripper steamer blew blasts on its siren alongside the pier and the more decorous holidaymakers watched from the balconies of seafront hotels that were as sparkling white in the sun as the yacht sails out at sea. I found a stall selling lemonade and gulped down two glasses of it then bought a shilling’s-worth of fish and chips and strolled along eating them from the paper with my fingers, adding cheap fat and vinegar to the odours of horse and the underside of railway train already clinging to me.

  I was starting to feel better, realising I’d accidentally done something clever in coming to Southend. The Tilbury and Southend line that had brought the day-trippers out from the East End had its terminus at that most obscure of London stations, Fenchurch Street. The initials might have men waiting at Liverpool Street but they’d have no reason to expect me there. I strolled to the station, sorry to leave the security and cheerfulness of the crowds on the promenade, bought a single ticket and dozed all the way back to London.

  Near Fenchurch Street station I found a second-hand clothes shop and spent eight shillings and sixpence on a complete outfit, navy blue skirt and jacket, matching straw hat and white cotton blouse. The shop owner let me change in her back room. The skirt was on the short side and the hat was beginning to unravel a bit round the brim but the general effect was more or less respectable. I left my old clothes in the shop for the rag bundle.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I GOT ON A TRAM TO HACKNEY, THEN another tram and then the train to Epping. Probably I convinced myself that this eccentric progress was to confuse the initials, but that was no more than superstition because they must have lost track of me a long way back. The truth is, I was half-dazed from all that had happened the day before and more than half-asleep. Several times I dozed and woke up when the tram or train stopped, without any idea where I was and in no hurry to get anywhere. In spite of the notebook in my bag, I wasn’t greedy to go on finding things out. So far it had only brought more problems and no answers. Meanwhile it was soothing, this slow progress through a warm Saturday lunchtime, with people about their normal business, shopping or chatting, men going home in clerks’ dark suits and stiff collars after their half-day’s work in banks and offices. I was letting it drift me, in there but not quite part of it, watching myself from a distance. Then it struck me that this was, in its smaller way, like Bill’s description of the effect of morphine ‘… watching yourself from a distance, calm and easy as if it had nothing to do with you’. I hadn’t wanted to think about morphine, or Verona or Bill, but that made me wake up and think. Not that thinking did much good. By the time the train drew into the station at Epping, I still had no clear idea where to start or much hope that I was doing anything that made sense.

  Step one, walk out of station. Stone would have had to do that, at any rate. I got his notebook out of my bag and had another look at it. He’d kept his expenses carefully and on the rare occasions that he took a cab he wrote it down. There was no record of bus or cab from Epping, so he’d probably travelled to wherever he was going on foot. In his job he’d have to be a good walker, but he was there to observe, not to hike. If his target was more than an hour’s walk away he’d probably have found some other way of getting to it. That put it, possibly, within a three-mile radius of the station. I strolled uphil
l to the centre of the little town. Most of its life was going on in the High Street. Some elegant buildings and a couple of comfortable-looking inns held memories of a time when this had been the first coaching stop out of London and highwaymen roamed in Epping Forest. It wasn’t a big place, so new arrivals there would be noticed, whether Verona and a group of revolutionaries or Yellow Boater in pursuit of them.

  When I bought a local paper and a map at a grocer’s and general store and sat down on a bench under a chestnut tree to look at them, it became clear that Epping itself was only part of the picture. The area round the town, edging on to the Forest or farmland, was sprinkled with villages or clusters of houses – Great Gregories, Ivychimneys, Copthall Green and so on – and any of them could have been full of spies, anarchists or secret police. Still, even spies and anarchists have to buy their groceries somewhere. I could have gone into the shops and asked if they remembered anybody of Verona’s description, but that would draw attention to myself. For whatever reason the initials had sent somebody here five times at least and there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t come again. I looked at the advertisement page in the paper and found the half column that advertised properties to rent, reasoning that my hypothetical group of suspicious people would have to live somewhere as well as buy groceries. They’d hardly have stayed there after Verona’s death, so if they’d rented a property it would have become vacant again in the past month. Pinpoint a recently vacated property within a three-mile walk of the station and I just might have the place that Stone had been watching.

  I found a pencil and started working my way down the column. I ruled out furnished rooms because they tended to have landlords and landladies on the premises which would be the last thing you’d want if you were involved in suspicious activities. That left seven properties, and in the cases of four of those you were invited to contact Mr Cyril Jones at a local address and telephone number for more information. I asked a boy for directions and found he operated from a little office just off the High Street. The window was hung with net curtains and a sign painted on the front of it said Cyril Jones, Building and Architectural Services, High-class Properties for Long or Short Rentals. Surprisingly on a Saturday afternoon the office was open. A bell on the door tinged when I went in and a bald middle-aged man at the desk looked up with a hopeful smile that faded a little when he saw my clothes.