The Perfect Daughter (16 page)

In Hampstead High Street the commercial day was just beginning. Smells of warm bread from the bakery, of strawberries from the pony cart delivering punnets of them to the greengrocer. Verona was dead. They'd used her courage and idealism in a dangerous game, and it had killed her. Somehow she'd stumbled on something that was really dangerous – far more so than any of the assorted idealists, political agitators and high-principled law breakers she could have discovered through me. Ironically, she must have found her way to people who really were a public danger. That was what was happening in the nineteen days of her life that were unaccounted for. Then the people she was spying on found her out and killed her. Killed her horribly on her father's doorstep as a sign to him that they knew what had been happening. Who ‘they' were I had no idea. Up to that point, I'd laughed at the stories of German spies and lurking saboteurs, as the creations of the popular press and would-be popular politicians. But because the
Daily Mail
got itself into a frenzy, that didn't mean there weren't such things as foreign spies. If so Verona would, by the standards of her new profession, have scored a success. Except she'd been dragged way out of her depth, and it had killed her.

I got home, drew the curtains of the bedroom to shut out the sunlight and slept dreamlessly for six hours or so. The midday post crashing through the letterbox woke me. I got up, still feeling full of sleep, went down in my dressing-gown and put the kettle on the gas ring. One of the envelopes had a Teignmouth postmark and was addressed in careful school-girlish writing. There were three pages inside, the first a note from the doctor's daughter.

Dear Miss Bray,

I am enclosing copies of Verona's two letters, as you requested.

I have been thinking about her all the time. My father says I must forget her and won't discuss it, but I can't help it. I know what her family must be suffering and I pity them from my heart, but I will never have another friend who meant to me what Verona did. I won't believe what they said about her at the inquest. Surely even doctors can make mistakes, even though my father says they don't in things like that. I haven't said anything to him yet about going to train as a nurse, but I promise I will as soon as he has got over this, for Verona's sake.

Yours with respect and sympathy

Prudence Maidment

Then the two copies of Verona's letters. The first, dated 19 December 1913, was from the lodging where she'd stayed for her first months in London.

Dearest Prudence,

I'm sorry not to have written before, but as you can imagine, there are a world of things to do. Everything, even finding your way about, seems to take so much longer here than at home. But I am working hard and starting to meet people. Sometimes, quite often to be honest, I wish I were back in Devon, having our long talk-walks together and going up to the Ness to see the ships. But we all have to make sacrifices and I know it would be cowardly if I were to give up what I really want to do and come running home just because I get lonely sometimes and miss Daddy and Mummy and you and all the animals. I'm sorry I shan't be coming home for Christmas, but there is so much to learn, in such a short time. Please give my love to all the puppies. (Have you found homes for them yet?)

Happy Christmas to you and your family.

From your devoted friend

Verona

The second letter was dated 3 May – the same date as Verona's last note to her mother. It had the address of the student house at the top of it, though I knew from Toby and Rizzo that she'd left there the day before. Its tone, even down to the punctuation, was more hurried than the previous one.

Dear Prudence,

Sorry not to have written. Life here interesting – very. Lots to tell you one day – though goodness knows when that will be.

If you don't hear from me for a while, don't worry. I have some good friends and will be all right.

Your friend

Verona

Knowing what I knew now, that second letter didn't read as innocently as Prudence had taken it – Verona ‘making a lot of friends and having an interesting time'. It was Verona about to plunge into whatever, before the month was out, would kill her. The good friends weren't there when she needed them and she hadn't been all right. I put the copies away in the only drawer of my desk that locked, made coffee and read my other mail while I drank it.

The mail was unremarkable, with one exception – a little paste-board card inviting me to attend an ‘At Home.' Normally that would have gone straight into the wastepaper basket with a passing puzzlement as to how anybody had so much time to fritter away. The names on this one made it different. Mr and Mrs Vincent Hergest would be at home from 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday 24 June and would be delighted to have Miss Bray's company at Mill House, near Guildford, Surrey. I assumed that Mrs Hergest must have sent it, because Vincent wasn't due back from his researches in Paris till the weekend, which meant she must have picked up my message from the publisher. I'd never met her, but I'd heard that she acted as her husband's secretary so that he could concentrate on his books. I'd have preferred a more private chance to speak to him. In fact, knowing what I now knew about Verona, I'd have preferred not to talk to him about her at all. But it was only fair to give him some idea what she'd been doing in case she'd put him in the card index as well. I scribbled a note saying Miss Bray would be delighted to attend and went out and posted it.

*   *   *

There's a point, I suppose, when your mind has too much of grappling with serious things and flies to trivialities. That's the only reason I can think of why, as I was walking back from the postbox, I started worrying about shoes. I had a blue silk dress and a dark blue jacket that would just about do for an author's ‘At Home', a straw hat that would pass muster once I'd steamed out a dent in the crown. The question was whether the blue shoes that were all I had for summer party wear would hold together through an afternoon. I was in no mood to go shopping. When I got home I started burrowing around and getting unreasonably angry when I couldn't find them. Then I remembered that I'd put them in a cupboard in the spare room along with some other summer things, flung open the door and found them on the floor with the rest of the clutter. The toes were scuffed and a button on one of the straps was coming loose, but with a bit of repair work, they'd do. Relieved that one thing at least was going right, I tried to close the cupboard door but couldn't. A small raffia work basket, stuffed full of mending things and other oddments, had toppled off a pile of boxes and blocked it. I picked it up, opened it in case there was any thread inside that would do for the button.

‘Oh no.'

Thread, different colours all ravelled up together. Scraps of darning wool unwinding from cards, pins sticking out at all angles. That was normal, the way I'd most likely left it. What wasn't normal were the other things there, nestled comfortably in the soft stuff. Four things. A small glass cylinder with a measuring scale along the side, graduated from five to twenty-five, with a brass plunger at one end. A smaller cylinder, unmarked, that looked as if it would fit inside the first one. A silver needle. A small brown envelope, folded over. I knelt by the cupboard with the work basket on my lap. Even when I was asking myself what on earth it was, I knew. ‘Yes, sir, a hypodermic syringe, in the bottom of the dinghy…' I heard the Devon policeman's voice saying it. Another one. I picked up the needle. It was hollow, sharp. It slipped neatly inside the smaller cylinder and stuck out from the end of it. Then if you pulled back the brass plunger on the larger cylinder, the smaller cylinder and the needle fitted inside. One syringe, clean, dry and ready for use. There'd been a trace of liquid in the one the police had found in the boathouse, none in this. But the brown envelope contained about two tablespoonfuls of white crystalline powder. I refolded the envelope, put it back in the work basket along with the assembled syringe and tried to make my mind work. All it was doing was screaming to throw the things away, now, before anyone saw them. Right, take it slowly. How did they get there? Not by my hand. I might not be domestically organised or house-proud, but I'd have remembered bringing this little lot into my home. Could it have been one of my visitors? The house was like Piccadilly Circus at times, but nobody I knew who'd been here was taking morphine – which is probably what the powder was – either medically or as an addict. Verona herself? She'd never been to my house. Not as far as I knew, but what did I know? Then I remembered the searchers. Not Verona anyway, she was dead by then. Whoever the searchers were, they'd left no traces except a mark in the dust and a reversed postcard. Those, plus these things in my lap that would link me by implication to Verona's death. But what was the point? Unless I went running to the police with them, and I wasn't likely to do that, nobody would know. Then it came to me that whoever it was didn't need me to go running to the police, because sooner or later the police would come to me again. Easy enough to find an excuse. Suffragette homes were being raided all over London. This time they'd have been told what to look for, and they'd find it. When I thought of that, I started sweating. I got up in a hurry, intending to flush the powder down the lavatory, break the syringe with a hammer and throw away the pieces, before the police came back. It wasn't rational. The things must have been there for ten days if the searchers had put them there and could have stayed for days more if I hadn't needed the shoes.

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.