The Perfect Daughter (27 page)

‘She wanted somebody she knew. I knew her a bit from the ju-jitsu classes.'

‘So she asked you to stay with her?'

‘No, he did.'

‘He being Vincent Hergest?'

‘Yes. I knew him because of helping with his book. He came to me one day and said would I spend the nights down there because she was nervous on her own. So I said I would.'

‘Was Verona happy about that?'

She shrugged. ‘Yes, she seemed to be.'

‘How did you get on together?'

‘All right. I was away in London some of the time. When we were there together she was mostly reading or writing. I'd bring food in and we'd cook it. We'd talk a bit, sit out in the garden. We got on all right.'

‘What did you talk about?'

‘The kind of things you do talk about. What food to buy, next door's cat, the baby.'

‘Her baby? The one she was expecting?'

‘Yes.'

‘She was quite open about that?'

‘Yes.'

‘How did she feel about it?'

Kitty hesitated, looked at me. ‘To be quite honest with you, she got on my nerves.'

‘Why?'

‘You'd have thought no woman in the history of the world had fallen pregnant before.'

‘Pleased, you mean?'

‘As if she'd won an Olympic medal.'

‘Did you ever know her to take drugs, like morphine?'

‘No. She even gave up tea because she'd read somewhere it wasn't good for babies.'

‘There was morphine in her body when she died.'

‘Well, I didn't put it there and I don't know who did, so don't blame me.'

That was a mistake on my part. She'd started talking more easily, but now the fear and hostility were back.

‘These people she thought were watching her – did she say who they were?'

‘No.'

‘You must have asked her.'

‘We didn't talk much about it.'

‘Why not? That's why you were there, wasn't it?' Silence. ‘Well, wasn't it?'

‘That was why she wanted someone there.'

‘So you talked about it?'

‘At first I did. I asked her why she thought she was being watched.'

‘What did she say?'

‘To be honest, she didn't make a lot of sense. She didn't know why anybody would be watching her, she didn't know who they were and she didn't even know what they looked like.'

‘So how did she know she was being watched?'

Kitty's shoulders gave an exasperated little shudder. ‘God knows. One day, I got back and she said there'd been this walker come out of the Forest, looking over the hedge. Young man with dark hair. But you get walkers all over the place, don't you, and everybody stares over hedges.'

‘So you didn't believe her?'

‘Not really, no. I thought maybe it was the sort of idea women get into their heads when they're expecting.'

‘But you were content to take the money.'

‘Why not? If there had been anybody, I'd have dealt with him. Besides, I think she quite liked having me there.'

‘Did you report to Vincent Hergest?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Tell him how she was getting on.'

‘I'd see him every week at Argyll Place, yes.'

‘Why was he doing this? Why was he keeping her out of the way in his cottage, paying you to be with her?'

She stared at me, honestly puzzled. ‘Well, what else was he supposed to do? He could hardly walk down Piccadilly with her on one arm and his wife on the other, could he? He was just doing what everybody else does in the circumstances if they've got the money.'

‘Circumstances?'

‘Well, it was his baby she was expecting after all.'

Chapter Twenty-one

W
ATERLOO STATION IS TWO STOPS UP ON THE
underground from Elephant and Castle. I got there in time to jump on a train for Guildford just as it was leaving. Another set of London suburbs, another lot of woods and fields, went past in the evening light. Just twenty-four hours, almost exactly, since the boat-train had pulled out of Liverpool Street and so many things turned upside-down since then that I was beyond giddiness. The one thing that mattered was getting to the house facing the North Downs with its lily-pond and its ducks and its neat little knots of vegetables. As far as I had any plans, I'd intended to start walking from the station but it was after nine by the time I got there and the Hergests' house was around half an hour by motorcar out of town, which probably meant seven miles or so along country lanes. No cabs, of course, and with my money down to seven pounds and some small change that was probably just as well. I was tempted to press on but had just enough sense left to see that there was no point in getting lost in country lanes in the dusk.

The landlady of a mean-looking boarding house near the station gave me an odd look when I asked for a room but landladies tend to do that to single women without luggage arriving as they're about to lock up. She charged me over the odds and agreed to leave the key on the inside of the front door so that I could leave early in the morning. Seven days after midsummer, it hardly got dark at all. I lay there with the net curtains pulled back and watched the sky change from gold to blue-black, then to the near transparent white of pre-dawn. The stairs creaked as I went down in stockinged feet and the first sparrows were chirping as I put my shoes on outside. Nobody about, but it was only just after five. I walked out of town and found the road southwards towards the Downs. There were wild roses in the hedges, a lark overhead, all the trimmings of an early summer morning and I wanted to tell them they were in the wrong play. I'd thought that the walk would give me time to think what to say to him, but my mind wouldn't work and, after all, it didn't seem to matter. I remembered the way well enough from being driven out there in his motorcar and by eight o'clock I was in the lane that led to the gates of Mill House. There was a church not far away, sending out the first peal of a peaceful Sunday morning, a smell of honeysuckle in the air, their ducks quacking behind the mellow brick walls. I guessed he'd be at breakfast already, although it was a Sunday. He wasn't a man to waste time. Whether Valerie would be with him I couldn't guess, but I hoped so. She'd been at the inquest; she'd known.

The gates were open, the gravel newly raked. I ignored the front door, with its neat columns of bay bushes on both sides, and went up the steps to the terrace, between urns of pink geraniums and blue-flowered sage. The doors of a French window were opened on to the terrace and there they were, just the two of them, having breakfast inside. It was a perfect picture. They were sitting opposite each other, sideways on to me. He had two brown eggs in a double egg cup in front of him but had paused with his spoon in the air to read her something from a magazine. She was sipping coffee as she listened, barefoot in a wonderful Chinese silk dressing-gown with red and blue dragons, hair as tidy as if she'd just come from the salon. For a moment, I almost pitied them. I took another step. He was the first to see me. In a few seconds his expression ran through surprise and annoyance then settled in the little-boy smile that his admirers found so attractive.

‘Well, if it isn't Nell Bray. Have you come to join us for breakfast?'

She turned and saw me as he spoke. Her expression started annoyed and stayed that way. I took another step and stopped just outside the French windows, so that I could talk to them without raising my voice.

‘I was at Yew Tree Cottage yesterday,' I said.

The smile stayed on his face but the light died away from behind it. He said ‘Oh'. The sound was gentle and regretful, as if a child had punched him in the stomach or an animal he'd been petting had bitten him. Valerie stood up and put a hand on his arm.

‘I think you should disappear into your study, darling. I'll talk to Miss Bray.'

From the tone of her voice I might have come to sell clothes pegs, and not particularly good ones at that. At first I thought he might do as she told him. He looked at the egg spoon that he was still holding poised in the air, then down at his two brown eggs and seemed to despair of the mental effort of bringing it into contact with them. The spoon clattered on the table and his head went down in his hands.

Valerie said, ‘You might have warned us.'

‘What about? This isn't a social visit.'

‘You'd better come in.' Vincent said it from behind his hands, small square hands with clean neat nails. The hair at the back of his neck, freshly trimmed, looked as soft as a boy's. I walked in and Valerie shifted so that she was protecting him from me.

‘You needed to come to the inquest to see how much evidence would come out,' I said.

‘Yes.'

‘Did he tell you what he'd done?'

‘I'm not answering any questions until I'm ready. You must give us time to think.'

‘Why? You're a quick thinker.'

Vincent had raised his head and was watching us. His expression was different now, with nothing of the little boy in it. He looked ten years older than when I'd walked in and his face was grey.

‘We'll tell her, Val. It's all we can do.'

‘I want an undertaking from her first that she won't tell anybody else.'

‘You won't get it. I might have gone to the police without talking to you first. I could still do that.'

‘Police?' He sounded bewildered, fighting to get a grip on what was happening. ‘Let's … let's go and sit down, over there.'

It was a big, sunny room, with cream fleece rugs on a pale parquet floor. There were comfortable chairs arranged round the hearth and a big copper jug full of Shirley poppies in the fireplace. Vincent sank into an armchair, she sat beside him and I chose a chair opposite them.

I said, ‘It was your baby Verona was expecting, wasn't it?'

He nodded.

‘She was two months pregnant when she died, so you were lovers before the end of March.'

Another nod.

‘You pretended you didn't know what she was doing in those missing days in May. She was at your cottage in Epping all the time.'

He didn't answer.

‘I suppose you put her there while you decided what to do about her. You seduce a girl nearly young enough to be your daughter and she's flattered because a famous man is taking notice of her. You make notes on her for your wretched book then when she tells you she's expecting your baby you hide her away so that she can't tell her friends and spoil your precious do-gooding reputation.'

‘No.'

The protest came from Valerie, not Vincent. He was staring at me as if I'd been speaking a language he didn't understand. I'd been so angry that I'd forgotten what this might be doing to her feelings, but her face and her voice were terribly calm.

‘I'm trying to make allowances for you being grieved and angry, Miss Bray, but you're as wrong as you can be.'

‘Wrong about Verona being pregnant by your husband?'

‘No, that's true. Wrong about everything else. I don't suppose you have any idea of the attitude of young girls to my husband. You've accused him of seducing her. I've known about this almost from the start and I can tell you almost the reverse was true.'

‘That she seduced him? She was hardly out of school.'

‘Believe me, she wasn't the only one. I've sat there at public occasions and seen girls no older than she was going to almost any lengths to get him to notice them. Vincent enjoys the company of young people. He's a kind and generous-hearted man, and I'm afraid there's a certain type of girl who'll take advantage of that.'

‘And I suppose he's not taking advantage of them?'

‘No, I'm not denying that. He's a man with normal feelings. If a young woman makes it clear that she is, let's say, available to him and understands what she's doing – well, is it so surprising?'

She looked me in the face. I hated them both but couldn't help respecting her toughness. He was staring at the poppies, head bent.

‘And if we're talking about taking advantage, Miss Bray, your young woman scarcely out of school was doing one of the most cruel and cynical things I've ever heard. Vincent's told me what you said at the garden party. She was spying on him. Every moment they were together, when she was letting him think she cared for him, she was going home and writing down what he'd said in her nasty little notebook and selling it to a government department that's got nothing better to do than spy on people who are trying to make this a slightly less awful world. I've talked to women who were selling themselves for five shillings in public houses who had more morals than your precious Verona.'

‘Are you saying she deserved to be killed?'

‘She deserved something. It almost destroyed Vincent when you told him how she'd been using him. He hasn't written a word since then.'

She said it as if it were the worst calamity of all and put her hand protectively over his, lying inert on the chair arm.

He said, ‘Thank you, Val,' on a long sighing note. Then he pushed himself upright in the chair and looked at me. ‘Valerie's nearly right, but there are some things even she doesn't understand. Forgive me, darling.' He raised his hand with hers on top of it to his lips, kissed her fingers then, very gently, disengaged his hand from hers. ‘I'm going to be completely honest with you, Miss Bray. I'm going to try to make you understand things that I haven't even explained to Valerie.'

She shifted her position slightly in the chair so that neither of us could see her face. She'd clasped her other hand over the fingers he'd kissed. He looked at her, took a deep breath and turned to me.

‘Miss Bray, have you any idea of the desperation of young women these days?'

‘Of course I have.' Our movement was full of women ten years younger than I was who couldn't wait to get out with matches and cans of paraffin.