The Perfect Daughter

by Gillian Linscott

  ‘I knew you’d try to go without me. Haven’t I got a right?’

  She had, if only for what it must have cost her to walk into the boathouse. I couldn’t have done it in her place. She even managed to unknot the painter as calmly as if for a picnic outing and took her shoes off to help me drag the boat down to the water, wading thigh deep in mud. When we’d got it afloat we washed the mud off our legs in the river then took an oar each and rowed side by side, letting the falling tide take us back towards the mouth of the estuary. Even the salmon fishermen weren’t out so early, only herons watching from the banks and a cormorant winging upriver like a black arrow, straight over our heads. Alex rowed calmly, more easily than I did and hardly said a word. All the madness of the night before seemed to have gone from her.

  It was full light by the time we got among the sandbanks near the mouth of the estuary, with our bow pointing out to sea, between the harbour on one side and the red headland of the Ness on the other. We rounded a sandbank and steered for the Shaldon bank, pulling hard to get out of the grip of the current. The boat came to rest on a beach of red sand under the Ness. It was hard work pulling it up the beach. Alex stumbled in the sand and turned her ankle but still wouldn’t leave it to me. Near the cliff red boulders had flung themselves down like a handful of marbles. Between the boulders a landing stage stuck out, left high and dry by the tide, with bladderwrack and limpets clinging to the posts. There was a flagpole on the landing stage. Beyond it a lawn edged with roses and blue hydrangeas sloped steeply up to the little white house. From the landing stage I saw that even at this early hour the French windows were open on to the lawn.

  ‘His bosun keeps sea hours,’ Alex said.

  We wiped sand off our feet, put our shoes on – Alex gasping from the pain of the ankle but insisting that she was all right – and walked up the lawn towards the smell of coffee.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  THE BOSUN HAD THE COFFEE-POT IN HIS HAND when Alex and I walked in through the French windows. He’d been going to put it down on the breakfast table neatly laid for one person with a blue plate and a cup the size of a pudding basin on a clean white cloth. There were white rosebuds in a blue pottery bowl, newly picked with the dew still on them. Alex went first and when he saw her the smile on his suntanned face was wide and genuine.

  ‘Mrs North. The admiral will be pleased.’

  A hint of deference in his voice as well as pleasure. If he’d noticed her wet and muddy skirt and untidy hair he gave no sign of it. No sign either of noticing another person behind her.

  Alex said, ‘Good morning, Pilcher. Where is he?’

  The coffee-pot looked heavy and he was holding it awkwardly in his left hand. There was a bandage round his right hand, padded at the palm.

  ‘Up on the Ness looking out at the traffic, Mrs North. Been there since before daylight. Sit down and I’ll pour you a coffee and nip straight up and let him know you’re here. Your friend will take coffee?’

  He looked over her shoulder at me and nearly dropped the coffee-pot.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You didn’t offer me coffee on the train.’

  He was bare-headed now, grizzled hair neatly combed, but my memory gave him back the ticket collector’s cap that had been too small for him and the smell of the raw leather satchel was stronger in my nose than coffee. He stared at me, opened and shut his mouth, put down the coffee-pot and went out. Alex sat down on a dining chair.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Somewhere at the back of the house, a door slammed.

  ‘Did the admiral take Pilcher with him on his trips to London?’

  ‘Sometimes. Nell, what … what train? The one you told me about…?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The unseen man. The head initial.

  ‘Pilcher’s gone to warn him. He’ll run away.’ She stood up, staggered on the hurt ankle and sat down again.

  ‘Why? If you’re on the side that always wins and the rules don’t apply to you, why run away?’

  I poured coffee into the big cup, loaded it with cream and sugar from the blue jug and bowl.

  ‘Go on, drink it.’

  She wouldn’t take it. ‘His. It would poison me.’ I put it back on the table. ‘Or maybe we could poison it, Nell. He keeps morphine in the house somewhere, I know that, for when the pain from his wound gets bad.’

  ‘You might have told me before.’

  ‘How was I to know, Nell? You don’t think that way. Until yesterday, I didn’t think that way. Do we do it?’

  ‘No. Just wait.’

  I left her sitting there and went through the door Pilcher had used. A short corridor ended in a half-open doorway to the kitchen. I opened another door on my left and a wash of blue light hit me from sky and sea. A bay window looked out over the estuary. There was a padded seat in the window, white-painted bookcases all round the room, a light oak desk, all remorselessly tidy. The top of the desk was loaded with framed photographs. Some were of men on ships, but most of them were of Verona, copies of the ones I’d seen in Alex’s room. In the very centre, in an ornate frame encrusted with silver scallop shells, was the picture of Verona and her brother in sailor suits, signed across the bottom in schoolgirl handwriting ‘To “Uncle” Archie, with fond regards from your Little Midshipmen’. The brother had his eyes half-closed and his head turned partly away from the camera but Verona beamed out, confident of the world and of her place in it. The desk wasn’t even locked. Inside it, among other things, was a red leather case with a syringe inside and little brown packets of powder. I didn’t bother to look at the letters and papers but I did notice the book, because it was an old battered thing in such a tidy desk. A pocket edition of Three Men in a Boat, edges rounded and furred from frequent handling, with the squashed peach stain from when I’d taken it punting. I left it where it was and closed the desk. Back in the other room, Alex was still sitting at the table.

  ‘Where is he, Nell? He’s taking a long time.’

  ‘I’ll go and see what’s happening.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ She took a step and her ankle gave way.

  ‘Stay there. I’ll bring him.’

  * * *

  There was a narrow terrace behind the house then the cliff rose steeply with ferns and brambles clinging to it. A flight of worn steps led from the side of the terrace to a path of packed earth that wound in and out of thickets of dark-leaved holm oaks. Sometimes the path would come close to the edge of the cliff on the left with views down over the estuary and the town on the opposite bank. You could see the pier and the beaches on either side, almost deserted this early in the morning. The sun was well clear of the sea and the tide had turned and was creeping up the sandbanks. About halfway to the top I heard footsteps and there was Pilcher coming down. He looked worried, even more so when he saw me.

  ‘The admiral’s compliments and he’ll be down below in a minute.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m going up.’

  I stepped past him and went on up the path. There were fishing boats near the sandbanks and, further out, two grey warships. A few more turns of the path and suddenly there was nothing but sea and a platform of trodden earth with an iron rail and a fringe of bushes marking the cliff edge. Either he didn’t hear me coming or he pretended well because he was standing there with his telescope, looking down, the bright scar on his face shining in the sun.

  I said, ‘Watching the warships, Uncle Archie? Like your little midshipman used to?’

  It was the only thing I could think of that might begin to hurt him as much as he deserved. At first there was no reaction, then he pivoted to face me, the arm with the telescope coming slowly down to his side as he turned like the movement of a wind-up toy. His face was blank, apart from the pink pulled-down corner of his eye that twitched to a rhythm of its own, faster than heartbeats. It looked like the quivering tendon of a newly killed frog, pinned out in a laboratory.

  ‘You’ve no right…’ The three words came out slowly,
his lips hardly moving. I thought he was trying to say I had no right to be up there, but after a long pause he added two more words, in the same mechanical voice: ‘… to pry.’

  ‘She used to enjoy coming up here to watch the ships, didn’t she? Remember her climbing up the path carrying the basket with the lemonade and ginger biscuits and your telescope? That telescope, was it?’

  A nod. His fingers tightened round the telescope as if he expected somebody to take it away from him. The twitch of pink flesh had become a constant fluttering and moisture was gathering there, running down the track of the scar, the wrong side of his eye to be a tear.

  ‘You’ve no right…’ The same words, in the same mechanical, squeezed-out voice, the pause, then ‘… to talk about her.’

  ‘But you had a right to kill her?’

  He pivoted back, looking down at the sea.

  ‘More than a right. A duty.’ His voice was stronger now that he was talking to the sea. ‘I was her godfather. I’d watched over her all her life. She was pure, straight, honourable. I gave the dearest thing I owned to my country’s service. She made it a tainted sacrifice. She betrayed her country and me.’

  ‘You pushed her into a dirty little schoolboy spying game. Then she grew up and told you what she thought of it. That was the only way she betrayed you – by growing up.’

  I hoped he might turn and attack me. As it was, I could have pushed him over while he was standing against the railing looking down. He knew that and knew I wouldn’t, or thought he did. His sort didn’t just use people’s weaknesses against them – they used their decencies too.

  ‘What about the other murder? Was he a traitor as well?’

  No response. He had his telescope to his eye, as if it mattered what the fishing boats were doing.

  ‘A man came to talk to you on Sunday. Musgrave, his name was. What happened to him?’

  Still no response. I moved and grabbed him by the shoulder, ready to shake an answer out of him, but he was so intent on whatever he was looking at, or pretending to be, that I couldn’t help looking down too. It wasn’t even the fishing boats he was watching. They were further out. From the angle of the telescope it must be something near the base of the cliff, but the only thing there was a sandbank half-uncovered by the tide and perched slantwise on the edge of it, just where the waves were lapping, the lost bathing machine. It looked ridiculous without its wheels, no more than a little wooden shed with a rounded top and steps sticking out from one end. From the crazy angle it was perched on the edge of the sandbank, high tide might have floated it off and landed it back there again. Sooner or later – if nobody caught it in time – the tides would take it away, right out to sea. The bosun had hurt his hand. Why did that matter? A crowd of people round bereaved wheels on the beach – ‘… what those boys get up to. Hacked it right off its wheels…’ That was Monday, so Sunday night was when it went out to sea. A bag unclaimed, a dent in a pillow. I think I intended to push Pritty over. Maybe in the part of his mind that was fatalistic and left the final decision to the sea, he even wanted me to. The only reason I didn’t was that if he’d struggled it would have wasted time. As I ran back down the path, sliding on wet earth, cannoning into trees, I didn’t even care if he was following me down or not.

  At the house, Pilcher tried to stop me getting back into the admiral’s study, but I remembered a telephone there and he had to stand watching while I told the operator to ring the police. It wasn’t easy to convince them that somebody must, at all costs, get to the bathing machine because – alive or dead, probably dead by now – there was a man inside it.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  THE LIFEBOAT GOT HIM OFF, JUST AS THE sea was nudging the bathing machine away from the sandbank. I heard later – in the way your mind will keep taking in irrelevancies when only one thing matters – that a fishing boat caught the bathing machine on its way out to sea and towed it back to harbour. I didn’t see it. By then I was sitting on one side of a bed behind screens in the Victoria ward of the cottage hospital, with Alex on the other side of the bed and Bill unconscious in between. His head was wrapped in a turban of bandages, his lips cracked from dehydration. Every now and then he’d start shivering so violently that the hand I was holding jerked itself out of mine. The pyjamas they’d found were too short in the arm for him and you could see, between wrist and elbow, a puncture mark with yellow and purple bruising round it. I’d told the doctor when they brought him in that he’d had a near lethal dose of morphine as well as everything else. He thought I was raving at first. Nurses came and went through the screens with fresh hot-water bottles. They were kind and efficient but wouldn’t meet my eyes. At some point Alex had to go, limping on a borrowed walking stick, because Ben was coming home. Goodness knows what she’d say to him.

  * * *

  The lifeboat must have been busy that morning. Soon after bringing Bill back it had to go out again to recover a body from the rocks under the Ness. The buzz that went round the town when it turned out to be Rear Admiral Archibald Pritty reached the cottage hospital and even penetrated the screens round Bill’s bed. I imagined him standing there with his telescope, watching as Bill was carried from the bathing machine to the lifeboat. Perhaps he thought the sea had turned against him at last in not taking Bill away as it was supposed to do, and if the sea wasn’t on his side then all the powers of the initials couldn’t help him any more. At the time I didn’t care. I was only glad that he was dead as I’d never been glad about the death of any creature before.

  When the police came to ask me questions, in the matron’s office, I told them the whole story. It took two hours because the sergeant wrote it down slowly and carefully, and kept wearing down his pencil and having to sharpen it. I could have told him we were all wasting our time. All I wanted was to get back to Bill. I’d have been right too. I never heard another word about my statement from that day to this. Perhaps it’s there somewhere in a file in the War Office stamped ‘No Action Recommended’.

  * * *

  There’s a superstition that sick people die when the tide’s at its lowest. But sometimes they come to life too. I know that because the first low tide on the first day of July was around five in the morning, as the light was beginning to creep round the screens that surrounded Bill’s bed. Perhaps I’d been dozing because suddenly Bill was awake and looking at me.

  ‘Nell?’ His voice came painfully from a salt-rasped throat.

  I don’t know what I said.

  He said, ‘I hate…’

  His fingers clenched round my hand. Hate what? Pritty? The initials? Me?

  ‘I hate to be obvious but…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where the bloody hell am I?’

  * * *

  It still took a week for him to be well enough to travel. I spent a lot of that time by his bed and when he could speak without pain he confirmed most of the things I’d guessed. Pritty had agreed to meet him for a talk but said because of other engagements he couldn’t manage it until late on Sunday night. Perhaps Bill would be kind enough to meet him on the beach by the pier, where he was accustomed to walk his dog. Whether there really had been a dog Bill didn’t know. He was knocked out by a blow on the head from somebody who came from underneath the pier. The bosun, at a guess, with Pritty waiting behind him with the needle. I still shook with anger when I thought about it, but Bill was more philosophical. He even enjoyed reading Admiral Pritty’s obituary in The Times about a lifetime of service at sea and, in later years, valuable contributions behind the scenes co-ordinating the work of various committees at the War Office. They buried him at sea, I gathered, with full naval honours. At least Commodore Benjamin North was not among those present.

  * * *

  I stayed with John and Margaret at the fish-smelling house and, between hospital visiting times, did a lot of walking up and down the seafront. The holiday season was in full swing, with bands playing most of the daylight hours, children riding donkeys and eating ice creams, bego
nias blazing from beds along the promenade, trips round the bay. Only if you looked past the bathers and the tripper boats, further out to sea, there were always the grey warships steaming out on the horizon. There was a terribly purposeful look about them, like huge animals obeying some instinctive call to muster.

  Also by Gillian Linscott

  A Healthy Body

  Murder Makes Tracks

  Knightfall

  A Whiff of Sulphur

  Unknown Hand

  Murder, I Presume

  And featuring Nell Bray

  Sister Beneath the Sheet

  Hanging on the Wire

  Stage Fright

  Widow’s Peak

  Crown Witness

  Dead Man’s Sweetheart

  Dance on Blood

  Absent Friends

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  THE PERFECT DAUGHTER. Copyright © 2000 by Gillian Linscott. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  ISBN 0-312-27296-0

  First published in Great Britain by Virago, a division of Little, Brown and Company