The Perfect Daughter (8 page)

The reason why my watchers were getting so much time to improve their minds in libraries was that I'd managed to get a useful piece of freelance translation work. That's my job, nominally, though what with one thing and another it had got neglected – to the point where many people who'd sent me work in the past diverted it to translators who were less likely to be in prison or tied up with murder investigations. Just when my finances were at their lowest, a friend recommended me to a children's publisher who wanted translations of German fairy tales. It was the most interesting professional work I'd had in a long time, and a welcome distraction from everything else.

Now and then, between work and the demands of being an enemy of the state, I thought of Bill. To be honest, I thought of Bill quite a lot. I hadn't heard from him since he'd driven away in the cab and I wasn't surprised. There he was, turning up for a day out, with his bunch of flowers and his expensive tickets and what had I given him in return? A police raid, a minor riot and a fight. On top of that, when I should have been taking pity on him, I'd gone in for some pointless boasting about my own student days that probably convinced him I was no fit company for a man with a career to think about. Not that Bill was a conventional ambitious barrister. We'd met because he'd been desperately trying to save a client from the gallows. We managed it, but he'd had to take some risks along the way. He'd known from the start that I was often on the wrong side of the law. What he couldn't have known, until he turned up on my doorstep at the wrong time, was what that meant in practice. He'd done well, magnificently well, but I couldn't blame him if he decided that was more than enough. Still, I cared about not hearing from him more than seemed reasonable and wished the day could have turned out as he'd wanted. I craved ordinariness. I wanted to do what other people did – what I'd done myself in days that seemed now a lifetime away. I wanted to go for walks in the country, eat meals with time to enjoy them, go to concerts and walk down streets without wondering if anybody was following. Bill wasn't ordinary in himself, but for a while he'd seemed to open a door back to that kind of life. Well, the door had closed again, just as I should have closed my door on him and kept him out of trouble. Stop fretting about it. Get on with work.

*   *   *

So I got on with work, until something else happened. It was two days after the police turned us out of Tothill Street. We'd had to set up another emergency headquarters all the way out in Notting Hill, knowing it would only be a matter of time before they pounced on us there. Somebody, I remember, sang two lines of a music-hall song to the stony-faced constables, ‘I've been thrown out of better joints than this before, so you won't hurt my feelings if you chuck me out again.' I'd had to put aside my translation work yet again. It was a long day and nearly midnight when I got home, only wanting to make a cup of tea and collapse for an hour or two. I turned my key in the lock and, even before I lit the gas, realised that somebody had been in while I was out. I'm not sure what it was that gave me the first warning, maybe no more than a smell or some sort of animal instinct. I lit the gas mantle, curious but not too worried. My neighbour and a dozen or so friends knew I kept a spare key under the back doormat. It was useful for making sure the cats were fed if I had to go away in a hurry or if a friend in trouble needed a refuge.

I said: ‘Anybody at home?'

I wouldn't have been surprised – though not pleased, as I wanted to sleep – if Bobbie or somebody had called from upstairs. Nothing. The gas flame steadied and light spread round the room. No sign as far as I could see that anybody had been in, but since the living-room hadn't been tidied for months, it wouldn't be easy to tell. Bill's lily-of-the-valley, faded now, were still in their vase on the piano. The place really was a mess – dust thick as a mouse's fur on the piano top – except for a few inches. There was a narrow fan shape with no dust at all, just clear varnished wood. It was alongside some sheet music, Schubert, that had been lying on the piano since goodness knows when. Very recently, too recently for dust to settle, somebody had picked up the sheet music and put it down again. Who? I hadn't played the piano since my New Year's Eve party more than five months ago, or given even a passing thought to Schubert. There was a chair that might have been moved back from the table. A line of dictionaries on the bookcase that I thought had been level with each other now had one sticking out. The piles of letters waiting for answers beside my typewriter were tidy, which was a bad sign. They usually weren't. Even so, I wasn't totally sure that something was wrong until I sat down at the table and looked at my work in progress. Because everything else round me is usually in chaos, I'm ridiculously orderly about my translation work. I like to have my pad and pencils, my dictionaries and the book I'm working on placed so that I can sit down and pick up work exactly where I left it. This was all wrong. The pencils were on the left side of the pad, the dictionaries at right angles to it, not parallel. The postcard of Venice I was using to keep my place in the book was address-side uppermost, when I knew I'd left it photo-side up. I sat there, still in my coat, and shivered.

Why? After all, almost everybody I knew had been raided. The police had been through the house only eleven days ago. We were all suspected criminals under observation. The simple fact that somebody had been in and searched my house quite thoroughly while I was away shouldn't have rated as much more than the normal course of events. The trouble was, I knew it was anything but that. The normal course of events was police coming in loudly and mob-handed, opening doors and cupboards, carrying crates of papers away. It was a rough but quite open business, a world away from this expert and surreptitious search that might easily have gone unnoticed. What made me shiver, what I couldn't understand, was why anybody had gone to all the trouble. There was very little in my life that was secret – sometimes I'd felt I was living all of it on a public platform – but somebody believed there was and that it mattered.

I slept. I was too tired to do anything else. In the morning I asked the neighbour who fed my cats if she'd noticed anybody going into my house the day before.

‘I try not to be nosey, dear.'

Which was true. She was on my side personally, if not politically, and was good at ignoring the goings-on next door.

‘Police?'

‘Oh no, nothing like that.'

With some prompting, she thought she might have seen two men in the street outside in mid afternoon, ordinary working men in caps and rough jackets. Thinking of the men who'd collected Verona's possessions from the student house, I asked if one of them had been wearing a red muffler. She hadn't noticed. It was going to be another day with no progress on the fairy tales.

I did what I'd done before when sorely perplexed and made my way to a little low building a few hundred yards from Liverpool Street Station. It has a cross over its corrugated iron porch and a faded mural of Jesus teaching the children on the wall inside. It was built as a Sunday school but now the sign outside, in neat white letters on a blue board, reads Archimedes J. Stuggs Chess Forum. It's the haunt of some of the best chess players in London and – coincidentally or not – some of the most left-wing political desperadoes in Europe. Since my old friend the journalist Max Blume is passionate about both chess and politics, it's usually a safe bet that I'll find him there and I was lucky. He was standing by the tea urn, looking out over a room dotted with small tables. Three of them were already in use for chess games and he was probably following all three. Max looked even thinner and more worried than usual. He's capable of being depressed about the political situation in places most of us could hardly find in an atlas.

‘What's wrong, Nell?' He didn't waste any time in conventional chat. He guessed it wasn't a social visit.

‘I'm being followed. My home's been searched.'

His eyebrows went up. He wasn't shocked at what I'd said, only that I was making a fuss about something as obvious as rain being wet.

‘I don't mean in the usual way, Max. Followed most of the time and a secret search I wasn't supposed to know about.'

I told him about the escape coup and what had happened since. He listened, still apparently absorbed in the three chess games.

‘Have you been consorting with revolutionaries?'

‘No more than usual.'

‘Suspicious foreigners?'

‘Not particularly … oh God, yes. But surely…'

I hadn't told him about the Verona business at first, partly because I didn't want to, partly because I couldn't see that it was relevant. Now I remembered the student house and the man they called Rizzo. If Germany was the big bogey of the spy scares then Austria-Hungary came a close second. I explained what had happened, from finding Verona's body to the disorderly household in Chelsea.

‘But they were just artists and students, Max, trying to be important. I can't imagine that even Special Branch would waste time watching a crowd like that.'

But now I came to think of it the first time I'd noticed Yellow Boater was when Bill and I left the student house.

Max said: ‘It might not be Special Branch.'

‘Who else would be that stupid?'

‘Have you heard of something called MO5?'

‘No.'

‘It hasn't been going long. War Office department, supposed to be spying on the spies. Then there's the SSB.'

‘Must we talk in initials?'

‘Secret Service Bureau. Probably War Office as well, but they work with Scotland Yard's Special Branch sometimes.'

I was going to ask how Max knew about them, but decided not to.

‘What are they for?'

‘Tracking German spies, anarchists, saboteurs, Sinn Feiners. Also other dangerous elements like trade unionists and Labour MPs.'

‘Seriously?'

‘Ask Keir Hardie next time you see him.'

‘And you think they're being used against us now?'

He took his eyes off the chess games and looked at me.

‘No, I don't. You people should come under Special Branch. If MO5 or the SSB are really taking an interest in you personally, that's for something else.'

‘For heaven's sake, what else could there be?'

‘Contacts with Germany?'

‘I'm a
translator
, Max. It's what I do. Do they think witches and wood sprites are some kind of code, for goodness sake?'

I must have raised my voice because one of the chess players looked round. He had dark greasy hair down to his collar, a drooping moustache, face yellowish from cigarettes.

Max smiled. ‘It might not be a bad one.'

‘You can't seriously think…'

‘No, of course I don't. But it's a question of what
they
think.'

‘They can't be investigating all the people in London who know German on the off-chance they might be spies.'

‘No, so if it is MO5, they think they have some other reason to suspect you. You genuinely can't remember anything except those art students?'

‘No. Surely they're not under observation?'

‘From what you say, I shouldn't have thought so. I agree with you, they don't sound worth the trouble. And yet…' His eyes were back on the chess players, but most of his mind wasn't. Max was worried. ‘This cousin of yours…'

‘Cousin's daughter.'

‘You say her father's a commodore. Would she have talked about that?'

I started saying I didn't know Verona well enough to have any idea what she'd talk about, then I saw where he was heading.

‘You mean, somebody might have taken up with her because…?'

‘I'm trying to make sense of this. There's this naive young woman, by your account, on her own in London, probably thrilled to be among more exotic people than she'd meet down in Devon. Supposing somebody noticed her and thought she might be a useful source of information.'

‘Rizzo?'

‘Or somebody else using him. His friend told you he's a count. Suppose he has powerful friends back in Budapest?'

‘Max, this is worse than the
Daily Mail.
It's pure spy fantasy.'

‘Yes. But just because there are spy fantasies, it doesn't mean there aren't such people as spies.'

‘You're trying to tell me that Verona was taken up by a spy ring?'

‘No, I'm not. I'm trying to see why the secret service people are taking an interest in you – if they are. It's like trying to get into your opponent's mind when you're playing chess. Look at it from the opposition's point of view.' I tried and didn't like it.

Max said, looking across the room, ‘It's a pity we can't ask him what he thinks.' He was staring at the long greasy hair of the chess player who'd turned to look at us.

‘Why?'

‘He's one of them. An MO5 man, we think. One of the initials anyway.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Sticks out a mile. Calls himself Weaver.'

Weaver seemed to be intent on the game now, under the unimpressed eye of his opponent, a cadaverous man with a grey beard.

‘The man he's playing comes from Prague. He has a reputation worldwide as a lepidoptericide.'

I was so keyed up that it took me longer than it should have to work it out.

‘Kills butterflies?'

‘One of Europe's foremost collectors. Naturally he corresponds with people all over the place in several languages. Weaver's convinced he's a master spy.'

‘Why don't you throw Weaver out?'

‘Why? He's doing no harm here and he might elsewhere. Anyway, we're getting a lot of enjoyment out of him. Everybody wants to challenge him to a game.'

‘You mean he's a good player?'