The Perfect Daughter (34 page)

‘Alex, when Bill Musgrave came to see you on Saturday…'

‘Who?' She stared.

‘For goodness sake, my friend. He was asking you about Verona, before she went away. There was somebody in particular, wasn't there, somebody he asked about?'

‘Yes. I didn't realise at the time but I've been thinking … since you told me.'

‘Told you what?'

‘That she didn't kill herself. I can see what he meant now, what you meant.'

She swirled her hand in the water. I looked at the black thing beside the bath. It had a hilt, ornate and silver-plated with a tasselled cord threaded through it. A sword. The kind of sword a naval officer would wear on ceremonial occasions, sheathed in its black scabbard. She stood up, came over and stood behind me, a hand on each shoulder.

‘I'm doing it wrong, aren't I? It would be easier in the bath, no struggle. Act as if there's nothing the matter – kind, silly Alex. Water nice and warm, and big soft towels ready. You must be tired from all that travelling. Relax, just relax, my dear.' Her voice was a parody of seduction, curling round me like the scented steam. I kept my eyes on the sword, ready to grab her hands if she made a move towards it. ‘You'd drowse in the water probably, wouldn't you, if you'd been travelling all day? Head back against the bath, throat stretched out. Easy. Easy for both of you.'

Her right hand shifted from my shoulder. She was making her move. I twisted in the chair, grabbed both her wrists. She yelled with pain and went down on her knees.

‘Alex, I didn't kill Verona. I can guess who told you I did, but it's not true. I didn't kill her.'

She looked up at me, hurt and puzzled. ‘I never thought you did, Nell. I never thought you did.'

I let go of her wrists and made her sit down in the chair. She'd started shivering in spite of the warmth of the room so I draped towels over her shoulders and lap.

‘But if you didn't think that, why…?'

‘What was her name, Nell?'

I really thought then that she'd gone mad and forgotten her own daughter's name.

‘Verona?'

‘The girl they had to kill before a war could start, the Greek one.'

‘Iphigenia?'

The name floated as a whisper in the rose-scented steam. Agamemnon's virgin daughter, sacrificed to the gods to get a fair wind to sail and make war on Troy. But Iphigenia had a mother as well as a father. When Agamemnon came home from the war Clytaemnestra ran a bath for him and …

‘Ben? You think Ben killed his
own
daughter?'

‘She came home, Nell, came back here. You told me that.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘She'd done things he'd never forgive and she came back to tell him so. She was brave, Nell, always too brave.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘I wouldn't have done it, Nell, not killed him, at least I don't think I would. Only after you'd gone, after I'd understood, I was so angry I … I wanted to know what it would feel like, if I could … Do you think I could?'

‘No. But Ben didn't kill her! I thought he might have, but he didn't.'

Ben waiting by the boathouse for his daughter to row back, syringe and ropes ready. I'd never liked my cousin, but I'd found it hard to believe. Alex had believed it. In the last few weeks I'd been learning a lot about marriages among other things.

‘Are you trying to tell me she killed herself after all?'

‘No.' I didn't fancy perching on the edge of the bath, so I sat down on the floor beside her chair. ‘We know Verona came back because she wanted to put something right. What she wanted to put right was that they'd made a spy of her. It was a great adventure, until she fell in love with one of the people she was supposed to be spying on and knew she was expecting his baby.'

‘That was terrible, Nell. When they told me—'

‘She didn't think it was terrible. It was what she wanted.'

(Would it have turned out well for them, Verona with her London flat and her career, visiting the Hergests and the baby at weekends? Possibly. Stranger things had turned out well.)

‘And, as you say, she was brave. She wanted to start her new life without any lies or secrets. But she was still loyal to the old life in a way – loyal enough to want to hand in her notice as a spy. That was what she'd come back here to do, but not to her father.'

‘But if it was here, how did you know it wasn't Ben?'

She wanted to believe me, but there was no great surge of relief. I suppose once you've worked your way to believing your husband killed your daughter, there's no way back to where you were before.

‘Because something else has happened that couldn't have anything to do with Ben. My friend Bill's missing. I think he's probably dead too.' There were some gurgles in the pipes, creaking of the rattan chair as Alex moved. She said nothing. ‘Bill had guessed. He got there ahead of me. I was meant to follow the ghost boat – come here and walk into a trap. But Bill got there another way and walked into it instead. He was trying to protect me. If only I'd talked to him, hadn't been so sure I was right, it wouldn't have happened.'

I think we stayed there for a long time, Alex in the chair, me kneeling on the mat. The steam settled and the room went cold. Condensation drops ran down the mirror in long wavering lines. Alex started shivering again.

‘You should be in bed.'

‘What shall we do, Nell?'

‘Tomorrow. Go to bed now.'

I saw her to her room, walking and talking quietly so as not to wake Mrs Tell, and sat beside her until she fell asleep. It was past two in the morning by then. When I went into the bathroom and opened the window everything was so still I could hear the suck of the waves miles away at the mouth of the estuary. Tide on the way out now. Verona's murderer had let the tide be the executioner – as if the rise and fall of the water were an instrument of justice, even justice itself. I let myself quietly out of the back door, over the lawn and down through the paddock to the rock where I'd sat watching the heron or another rock like it – I couldn't be sure in the dark. An hour later the sky was turning from black to blue-black and a shine had come back on the water, a pewter channel between mudflats. I went along the walkway into the boathouse and found that, stupidly, I'd tied the boat to the ring too tightly so that the falling water had left it with bows pulled upward, stern in the mud. While I was struggling with the painter the door at the back of the boathouse opened. Yellow lantern light came in, dazzling so that I couldn't see who was behind it and for a few heartbeats I almost hoped, but it was only Alex.

‘I knew you'd try to go without me. Haven't I got a right?'

She had, if only for what it must have cost her to walk into the boathouse. I couldn't have done it in her place. She even managed to unknot the painter as calmly as if for a picnic outing and took her shoes off to help me drag the boat down to the water, wading thigh deep in mud. When we'd got it afloat we washed the mud off our legs in the river then took an oar each and rowed side by side, letting the falling tide take us back towards the mouth of the estuary. Even the salmon fishermen weren't out so early, only herons watching from the banks and a cormorant winging upriver like a black arrow, straight over our heads. Alex rowed calmly, more easily than I did and hardly said a word. All the madness of the night before seemed to have gone from her.

It was full light by the time we got among the sandbanks near the mouth of the estuary, with our bow pointing out to sea, between the harbour on one side and the red headland of the Ness on the other. We rounded a sandbank and steered for the Shaldon bank, pulling hard to get out of the grip of the current. The boat came to rest on a beach of red sand under the Ness. It was hard work pulling it up the beach. Alex stumbled in the sand and turned her ankle but still wouldn't leave it to me. Near the cliff red boulders had flung themselves down like a handful of marbles. Between the boulders a landing stage stuck out, left high and dry by the tide, with bladderwrack and limpets clinging to the posts. There was a flagpole on the landing stage. Beyond it a lawn edged with roses and blue hydrangeas sloped steeply up to the little white house. From the landing stage I saw that even at this early hour the French windows were open on to the lawn.

‘His bosun keeps sea hours,' Alex said.

We wiped sand off our feet, put our shoes on – Alex gasping from the pain of the ankle but insisting that she was all right – and walked up the lawn towards the smell of coffee.

Chapter Twenty-six

T
HE BOSUN HAD THE COFFEE-POT IN HIS HAND
when Alex and I walked in through the French windows. He'd been going to put it down on the breakfast table neatly laid for one person with a blue plate and a cup the size of a pudding basin on a clean white cloth. There were white rosebuds in a blue pottery bowl, newly picked with the dew still on them. Alex went first and when he saw her the smile on his suntanned face was wide and genuine.

‘Mrs North. The admiral will be pleased.'

A hint of deference in his voice as well as pleasure. If he'd noticed her wet and muddy skirt and untidy hair he gave no sign of it. No sign either of noticing another person behind her.

Alex said, ‘Good morning, Pilcher. Where is he?'

The coffee-pot looked heavy and he was holding it awkwardly in his left hand. There was a bandage round his right hand, padded at the palm.

‘Up on the Ness looking out at the traffic, Mrs North. Been there since before daylight. Sit down and I'll pour you a coffee and nip straight up and let him know you're here. Your friend will take coffee?'

He looked over her shoulder at me and nearly dropped the coffee-pot.

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘You didn't offer me coffee on the train.'

He was bare-headed now, grizzled hair neatly combed, but my memory gave him back the ticket collector's cap that had been too small for him and the smell of the raw leather satchel was stronger in my nose than coffee. He stared at me, opened and shut his mouth, put down the coffee-pot and went out. Alex sat down on a dining chair.

‘What's going on?'

Somewhere at the back of the house, a door slammed.

‘Did the admiral take Pilcher with him on his trips to London?'

‘Sometimes. Nell, what … what train? The one you told me about…?'

‘Yes.'

The unseen man. The head initial.

‘Pilcher's gone to warn him. He'll run away.' She stood up, staggered on the hurt ankle and sat down again.

‘Why? If you're on the side that always wins and the rules don't apply to you, why run away?'

I poured coffee into the big cup, loaded it with cream and sugar from the blue jug and bowl.

‘Go on, drink it.'

She wouldn't take it. ‘His. It would poison me.' I put it back on the table. ‘Or maybe we could poison
it
, Nell. He keeps morphine in the house somewhere, I know that, for when the pain from his wound gets bad.'

‘You might have told me before.'

‘How was I to know, Nell? You don't think that way. Until yesterday, I didn't think that way. Do we do it?'

‘No. Just wait.'

I left her sitting there and went through the door Pilcher had used. A short corridor ended in a half-open doorway to the kitchen. I opened another door on my left and a wash of blue light hit me from sky and sea. A bay window looked out over the estuary. There was a padded seat in the window, white-painted bookcases all round the room, a light oak desk, all remorselessly tidy. The top of the desk was loaded with framed photographs. Some were of men on ships, but most of them were of Verona, copies of the ones I'd seen in Alex's room. In the very centre, in an ornate frame encrusted with silver scallop shells, was the picture of Verona and her brother in sailor suits, signed across the bottom in schoolgirl handwriting ‘To “Uncle” Archie, with fond regards from your Little Midshipmen'. The brother had his eyes half-closed and his head turned partly away from the camera but Verona beamed out, confident of the world and of her place in it. The desk wasn't even locked. Inside it, among other things, was a red leather case with a syringe inside and little brown packets of powder. I didn't bother to look at the letters and papers but I did notice the book, because it was an old battered thing in such a tidy desk. A pocket edition of
Three Men in a Boat
, edges rounded and furred from frequent handling, with the squashed peach stain from when I'd taken it punting. I left it where it was and closed the desk. Back in the other room, Alex was still sitting at the table.

‘Where is he, Nell? He's taking a long time.'

‘I'll go and see what's happening.'

‘I'll come with you.' She took a step and her ankle gave way.

‘Stay there. I'll bring him.'

*   *   *

There was a narrow terrace behind the house then the cliff rose steeply with ferns and brambles clinging to it. A flight of worn steps led from the side of the terrace to a path of packed earth that wound in and out of thickets of dark-leaved holm oaks. Sometimes the path would come close to the edge of the cliff on the left with views down over the estuary and the town on the opposite bank. You could see the pier and the beaches on either side, almost deserted this early in the morning. The sun was well clear of the sea and the tide had turned and was creeping up the sandbanks. About halfway to the top I heard footsteps and there was Pilcher coming down. He looked worried, even more so when he saw me.

‘The admiral's compliments and he'll be down below in a minute.'

‘Don't worry, I'm going up.'

I stepped past him and went on up the path. There were fishing boats near the sandbanks and, further out, two grey warships. A few more turns of the path and suddenly there was nothing but sea and a platform of trodden earth with an iron rail and a fringe of bushes marking the cliff edge. Either he didn't hear me coming or he pretended well because he was standing there with his telescope, looking down, the bright scar on his face shining in the sun.