The Perfect Daughter (15 page)

‘Looks quite efficient anyway.'

Bobbie had produced her own candle and was looking at the cabinets.

‘Efficient for what? You wouldn't need all this to keep a run-down little chart shop.'

‘Perhaps it does most of its business by post. Probably what the map's for.' She took her candle over to it. ‘Can't be much of a business, though. It's only London.'

I went to look. It was London and the surroundings, from Greenwich out to Hammersmith, down to Herne Hill and up to Highgate. The whole map was freckled with little blobs in red ink, dozens of them. Each blob had a number beside it, in black ink.

‘There you are,' Bobbie said. ‘Customers.'

‘For nautical charts in Paddington?'

I looked at the Chelsea area, wondering if this place itself was marked with a blob. It wasn't, but there were a few red blobs not far away. The scale was so large that blocks of houses as well as streets were identifiable. One of them was familiar.

‘What's up?'

‘I think it's where Verona lived before she went missing.'

The student house, either that or very near it. Bobbie was looking at the top part of the map.

‘There's one for you, Nell.'

‘What!'

She pointed. The candle flame wavered over the familiar network of streets off Hampstead High Street. I saw my own street and about halfway along it, much where my house would be, a red blob and the number: 191. It scared me, and what scared me most was that I didn't know why it did.

‘Nell, what's happening?'

Even Bobbie sounded concerned.

‘I don't know. I promise you, I don't know any more than you do.'

I felt as if I had to convince her, as if the red blob was accusing me of something although I didn't know what.

‘Why the number?'

‘I don't know. It's not my house number. It's not anything.'

‘It must be something.'

Bobbie walked over to the cabinet, pulled at a drawer.

‘Locked.' She took a small screwdriver out of a pouch belted to her waist, signed to me to hold the candle close. ‘Never travel without one.'

The wood round the lock splintered, the draw came open. Empty. She pulled open some other drawers, all released by the same lock.

‘Ah.'

File cards, quite new, held upright by a spring arrangement in the drawer. It was the sort of system an efficient librarian might keep. Bobbie picked out a card at random and showed it to me. It had a number on the top right-hand corner in the same careful hand as on the map. This one was 52. A name, address, then a few lines in a different hand. ‘Approx 5ft 7, swarthy complexion, dark hair, wears glasses. Schoolmaster. Holidays walking in Austria. Writes regularly to young woman in Vienna whose brother works in interior ministry.' I stared at it.

‘I don't seem to be on the map.' Bobbie sounded regretful about it. ‘I wonder what they've got on you, Nell. What was the number? 191.'

She rummaged in the file. I wanted to stop her, but couldn't think of a reason. She looked at a card and laughed.

‘What does it say?'

She handed it over. I read: ‘Eleanor Rebecca Bray (Nell). Dark hair, thin build, height 5ft 9 approx. WSPU. Communist. Travels frequently on Continent. Fluent in most European languages. Corresponds with associates Germany/ Austria/Hungary. Three prison terms, most recent for attack on Rt Hon. David Lloyd George.'

‘Attack, for heavens sake! All I did was throw stink bombs at him. And I'm not a communist.'

‘Somebody seems to think you're dangerous anyway. Why you and not me?'

I ripped up the card, shaken and angry.

‘Don't do that!' Bobbie said. ‘They'll know who's been here.'

‘They? Who? And I don't care.'

‘In that case, we might as well take some of them with us – see who's on them and warn them.'

She picked handfuls of cards out of the drawer and stuffed them in her pouch.

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

W
E FOUND THE COFFEE STALL.
T
HE 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 far 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.