The Perfect Daughter (33 page)

‘John, just tell her what he said.'

My mind made the connection at last.

‘Was he by any chance talking about a boat that rowed itself?'

His jaw dropped. ‘How in the world did you know?'

‘He was?'

‘Yes.'

‘The boat the girl hired?'

‘Yes. The day he let her take it, she didn't bring it back. He wondered at the time whether to alert the police or the coastguard, but then he thought probably she'd rowed over to stay with friends and left the boat tied up somewhere. He wasn't sure whether to be worried or annoyed, so he went off to the New Quay to have a drink and think it over. Well, one drink led to another and he's ashamed of himself for this, but he forgot all about it. He wakes up at first light, remembers and rushes down to the quay and there's the boat come back, tied up with the others, the oars neatly stowed and everything shipshape.'

‘But no sign of the young woman?'

‘No. That puzzled him, because he'd taken ten shillings deposit off her for the boat. He thought she might come back during the day, but she didn't and he forgot all about it until a few days later.'

‘What happened then?'

‘I don't suppose you've heard of a man named Commodore Benjamin North?'

Margaret said, ‘Of course she won't have. She doesn't live round here.'

I had to trust them, a little at least. ‘He's my cousin.'

A silence.

John said, looking more troubled, ‘Then you know about…?'

‘His daughter? Yes.'

‘Well, a small place like this, you can understand that everybody was talking about it. As far as Matt was concerned, he'd never seen her but some of the other fishermen had and they started talking about her, what she looked like and so on, then it gradually dawned on poor Matt. She was the girl who hired his boat. And naturally it struck him that she'd used it to row herself upriver to the boathouse and…'

‘But the boat came back.'

‘That's what I meant about him being a bit other-worldly about it. He thinks a commodore's daughter would see that a boat got back, even if…'

‘Did he go to the police?'

‘That was his other worry. He thought if he did they'd blame him for not raising the alarm. Anyway, he struggled with his conscience a few days, then decided to make a clean breast of it and went off to the police station. He told them his story, they wrote it down and said he'd probably be called to give evidence at the inquest.'

‘But he wasn't.'

‘No.'

‘And he might have been the last person to see Verona alive.' Or the second-to-last, but I didn't want to go into that.

‘Anyway, about a week after he'd gone to the police station a policeman came to his house, a man Matt knows. He told Matt he wouldn't be called at the inquest after all but Matt must be careful not to talk to anybody about the girl or the boat.'

‘Did he say why?'

‘No, and Matt didn't ask. He was just relieved not to have to stand up at the inquest. All above his head, he says. Not his business. But it's still on his mind all the same.' He looked at me. ‘But it doesn't help with your friend, does it?'

‘I don't know.'

I felt cold. I don't know why, but I hadn't expected the watchers here. They belonged in London, except when I'd decoyed them away from it. But even down here they had influence over the police. Since I'd heard Bill was missing I'd been too concerned about him to worry about being followed. Now I looked at the window and wondered who'd seen us talking to Matt on the quay.

‘I'll have to go.'

Margaret said, ‘At nine o'clock at night? No, you won't.'

She was worried, I could tell that. I'd have been worried in her place.

‘I'm sorry to have got you involved in this.'

‘Why? You haven't done anything wrong, have you?'

‘No, but some people think I have.'

John said, ‘You can stay here tonight and go to the police about your friend in the morning.'

He was a straightforward man. If a person was missing, you went to the police. I imagined standing at the duty officer's desk, reporting Bill like a stray dog. The questions: ‘Are you related to the gentleman, ma'am?' Describing Bill as I'd done dozens of times already – just under six foot tall, early forties, dark-haired, clean-shaven. (Perhaps not very clean-shaven now, as his kit was in the bag upstairs.) And I thought of the things you couldn't say in a description to hotel receptionists or police. Like Bill's voice that could make any disturbed thing, animal or human, became calmer. Like his nervy, long-fingered hands and the slow way he smiled.

Margaret said gently, ‘You're tired. Why don't you go to bed and I'll bring your cocoa up?'

Bill's well travelled bag on the floor. The pillow with the dent of his head still in it. I wanted to lie my own head there, let what was left of his presence sink through skin and skull into my mind.

‘Thanks, but no.'

John said, ‘There won't be anybody at the police station now. Better wait till morning.'

‘There's somebody else I have to see. Do you know when the tide turns?'

‘High tide in just over an hour.' He said it automatically then, ‘Why?'

Margaret said, ‘Can't we do anything?'

‘You've done a lot already. Thank you.'

‘Do you know when you'll be back? We'll leave the back door unlocked.'

I thanked them and went out. It was dusk, with the last of the swallows and the first of the bats flying loops round each other over the water. The tide was well up, only a few yards of the back beach above the waterline and the hire boats bobbing beyond wading distance. The windows of the New Quay were lamplit, voices and laughter drifting out, but there was nobody on the back beach to see me going round unlatching boatmen's store sheds, searching until I found a pair of oars. I carried them one at a time to the tide edge, opposite the post where the boats were moored, left my shoes and stockings with them, waded thigh deep, then plunged, grabbed the nearest boat by the stern and scrambled on board, battering my knees and elbows. The noise sounded like sea monsters wallowing and I waited for a shout from the beach, but there was nothing apart from the noise from the New Quay. The knot on the painter was swollen but it came undone at the cost of a few fingernails. I flopped back into the sea, guided the boat to the beach, threw my shoes and stockings into it, shipped the oars, got in and pushed off. It was a long time since I'd rowed a boat on my own and it was a hard pull out from the shelter of the sand bar to mid-channel, but once I'd got there the push of the incoming tide pointed the bows up the estuary. I settled to a rhythm of rowing, looking back towards the dark line of the open sea, the flashing of the lighthouse that marked the sand bar at the harbour entrance and the smaller lights on the sandbanks under the Ness. The layer of salt water between skin and clothes got warm from the rowing until it was almost comfortable to be there, as if nothing existed but the movement of arm and stomach muscles, and the tide carrying the boat along as if this had been the only possible decision.

Chapter Twenty-five

F
URTHER UP THE ESTUARY THE TREES CAME DOWN
close to the river and lights from scattered houses showed in clearings. The water held the last of the afterglow from the sunset. I tried to keep as close as I could to the south bank, where Ben's house was, and kept glancing over my shoulder for the boathouse. It showed up quite suddenly as a darker rectangle against the dark. I think the tide might have turned by then because rowing had got more difficult and the boat seemed to resist being driven out of the current towards the boathouse. As I came nearer the dark rectangle opened out to show the gleam of water inside, gaping like a whale's jaws. Another few strokes would take me in and now that I'd got there, I didn't want to do it. One stroke, and there was the dinghy's mast. Two more, then the bump of a moored rowing boat against the bows. An oar struck a post. I dropped the oar in the rowlock, reached out and grabbed the post. Inside, there was no glow on the water, only liquid dark and solid dark.

‘Anybody there?'

My voice echoed. Something was dripping into the water, the oar probably. Apart from that, nothing. I waited, then fumbled around the post and found a mooring ring. My struggles to tie the painter to the ring set the boat rocking and made the water slap and gulp against the walls. I hoisted the oars and my shoes up on to the wooden walkway then followed them, arms trembling from cold or effort. Let your eyes get used to the dark. Don't try to see yet. Nothing to see. But my eyes had already gone to that patch of the darkness where I'd found Verona and were making shapes in it.

‘Bill?'

I stood up, walked a few steps along the wooden platform, reached out into the dark. There was nothing there, nothing hanging, just space and water. For a moment I didn't know which was water and which was space so I must have come near to somersaulting in. I went down on my knees on the planks, gasping and shivering and it felt like a long time before I got back upright. By then my eyes had got used to the dark and there really was nothing there but the boats. I found my shoes and put them on, not bothering with stockings, and went shakily out of the little door at the back on to the walkway over the rushes, through the gate and up the paddock.

*   *   *

From the lawn the house was a blaze of bright, raw light. Naturally, Ben would have electricity. The back downstairs rooms and some upstairs windows were all lit and uncurtained. I scrunched on the gravel to the back door. It was unlocked and opened at a touch into the garden room. I went through the door on the far side, along a corridor to the front hall.

‘Alex?'

There was water running somewhere upstairs. I called again, got no answer, and went up the stairs, deep carpet underfoot. The sound of water was coming from a room off the first-floor landing. I rapped it with my knuckles.

‘Alex, it's Nell. Are you in there?'

No answer. I pushed open the door, walked in. Through drifts of steam I saw a bathroom almost comfortable enough to be a sitting room. There were piles of white towels on shelves, a rattan chair, an aspidistra on a stand. The bath was mahogany-sided, big enough for two. Gleaming taps were cascading water into it, but there was nobody in sight. Then a hand came down on my shoulder and nails dug in, sharp even through my jacket. I yelled and spun round.

‘Alex, for heaven's sake!'

She was wearing a sea-green dressing-gown, belted at the waist. Her hair was down her back and beaded with condensation, her eyes bright and her face white as the soap on the washbasin. She let go of my shoulder.

‘Did I scare you, Nell?'

‘Yes. You have your bath. I'll wait for you downstairs, then we can talk.'

‘Oh, it's not for me.'

She walked over to the bath, moving self-consciously as if in an amateur play, turned the taps off and dabbled her hand in the water.

‘It shouldn't be warm, should it? But Ben had the boiler put in and perhaps it would have been – all those slaves and so on.'

‘Alex, what are you talking about?'

‘Mrs Tell's gone to bed. She sleeps very soundly.' She sat on the edge of the bath, legs crossed, and looked at me.

‘Did you know the door's unlocked and all the lights are on?'

‘Rows of torches, welcoming him home.' Steam was condensing on the big oval mirror on the wall, making our reflections look like under-sea things. ‘Ben's coming back. They put in at Devonport for repairs yesterday and he'll be home tomorrow.'

‘Good.'

‘Do you think so? You haven't been quite honest with me, Nell, but then nobody has. Scented water, do you think?'

‘I don't … yes, yes why not.'

It had come to me that she was preparing this bath for her daughter, that she expected Verona to come back out of the sea and the night. Perhaps it had been a ritual every night since she died.

‘That bottle there, the pink one. But I expect you think I'm not very clever. Ben does, he's said so. I think probably Verona did as well.'

The bottle was on a shelf in an alcove, pink-tinted milky glass. I gave it to her, she poured, and the steam round us turned rose-scented.

‘It makes me angry when I think of it. The two of them, their precious secret and me, the poor stupid wife and mother not allowed to know about it. I guessed, guessed something at least. But if they didn't want me to know, it was … it was, well, a kindness not to. Can you understand that?'

‘Yes.'

‘Only they weren't kind to me, were they? What happened wasn't kind to me?'

‘No.'

‘When you were here the day before yesterday, you told me she didn't kill herself.' I waited. ‘Did you know who did?'

‘Not then, no.'

‘Not then?' She looked at me, then jumped up, listening. ‘What was that?'

‘Somebody upstairs.'

‘Probably Mrs Tell going to the lavatory.'

Alex took two strides to the door, locked it and dropped the key in her dressing-gown pocket then went back to sit on the side of the bath.

‘Why don't you sit down, Nell? Sit down and be comfortable.'

It was a command. I sat in the rattan chair. The rest and the rose-scented warmth should have been welcome, but I wished I were miles away. There was something like a long black stick propped against the side of the bath. In the steam, I couldn't make out what it was.

‘Not then, but you know now?'

‘Verona came back here of her own free will to put something right. She hired a boat and rowed out into the estuary.'

Verona hadn't been driven back here drugged with Valerie Hergest at the wheel. Her letter had meant what it said. She'd come of her own free will to put something right, she was fit and confident enough to hire a boat and row it on her familiar estuary. And the boat had come back. Bill would have known that from the boat-hire man. He'd always been good at getting people to talk to him. He must have had some idea in his head when he'd come to talk to Alex. I should have pressed her, made her be more specific about the questions he'd asked, but how could I do that to a woman half-mad with grief? Quite easily, now it was too late. Quite easily.