The Perfect Daughter (7 page)

‘Did you know Verona North?'

‘No. I've got her room, but I never met her. Are you looking for her?'

I explained. She was apologetic, introduced herself as Janie, asked us in. It was just like Toby's bleak little room opposite, except it had a skylight in the roof that gave good light. Janie had a table exactly under the skylight with a box of watercolours, a jar of fine brushes and a spray of marsh marigold in a vase. There was a half-finished picture of it on an easel, done with beautiful precision.

‘There's nowhere to sit but the bed, I'm afraid.' The accent was Home Counties. She seemed a world away from the chaos downstairs. ‘You won't mind if I go on with this? I'm supposed to have it done by tomorrow.'

The bed was a pallet against the wall, narrower than in a prison cell. She must have trained herself to sleep without turning over. I sat on it and after a moment's doubt, Bill joined me. I asked if she was at the Slade too.

‘Yes. Was Verona? We don't tend to socialise much with the first-year people and I've been busy. First commission.'

‘You say this was her room?'

‘That's right. I was sharing with somebody, but when I got this commission I needed somewhere to work on my own. I heard on the grapevine that this was vacant so in I came. Serious mistake. It's like trying to work in the middle of Trafalgar Square.'

‘On the grapevine? Can you remember how exactly?'

‘Not sure. I think I heard about it from a woman who went to life class with somebody who knew the man they call Rizzo…'

‘The aristocratic Hungarian anarchist?'

She snorted. ‘Egoist, you mean.'

Bill said unexpectedly, ‘I thought his painting was good.'

‘Oh he
paints
well enough. He'd be even better if he stopped posturing and did some work.'

I asked, ‘And Toby?'

Another snort. ‘No talent whatsover. He should go home and be a vicar, which is what his father is, wouldn't you have guessed.'

‘Did you get the impression that Toby was in love with Verona?'

Janie looked at me as if I'd asked about the habits of warthogs.

‘Not interested. Even if I were, there wouldn't be any point in this house.'

Bill asked why.

‘Like trying to draw a map of a desert in a sandstorm. Always people coming and going, shouting at each other, drunk or worse half the time.'

‘Worse?'

Janie picked up another brush and drew an outline of a leaf.

‘Smoking. Going to China, Rizzo calls it. First time I heard it, I said would he bring me back some calligraphy brushes.'

I said, ‘Opium, you mean?'

She nodded.

Bill said, ‘It seems a funny sort of place for a vicar's son.'

Or for a commodore's daughter, come to that.

‘Oh, I'm sure Toby thinks he's seeing life. He'll grow out of it.'

Grow out of life, did she mean? Which brought us back to Verona. I was going to ask another question, but Bill got in first.

‘The man they call Rizzo had done a drawing of her. Do you think he was attracted to her?'

‘What's the connection? He spent days at a hospital once painting a gangrenous foot.'

Bill persisted. He was good at that. ‘Do you think he's the kind of man women find attractive?' (Had he picked up that rogue thought in me? I hoped not.)

‘Perhaps, if they've got no sense. Rizzo thinks love is a bourgeois affectation. I expect he offered to deflower her.'

Bill blinked, but rallied. ‘Why do you think so?'

‘He did it to me the first time we met – offered, that is. He says any virgin over fifteen years old is an offence against nature.'

‘What did you do?'

‘Poured a bottle of turps over him. I shouldn't have reacted like that. Waste of good turps.'

She went on calmly painting the flower. Bill seemed to have run out of questions, so I came in with mine.

‘You say you moved in here three weeks ago. That would be near the start of May?'

‘Monday May the fourth.'

Janie was as precise about dates as in her painting. As far as I could remember, Verona had last written to her mother the day before, May the third, saying she was well and working hard. There'd been nothing said about moving.

‘And you got the impression that Verona had moved out for good, not just gone away for a while?'

‘Nobody's that definite about anything here, but I certainly got the impression it was vacant for the foreseeable future or I shouldn't have taken it. I must say I was annoyed, though, to find she'd left some of her things here.' Bill glanced at me. I asked, ‘What sort of things?'

‘An old jacket, some books, a not particularly good landscape.'

‘Of an estuary?'

‘Yes.'

‘Anything else?'

‘A flag of some kind, a few seashells, a pair of shoes.'

‘What did you do with them?'

‘Put them in a box and shoved it in the corner, out of the way.'

I looked round the room. No sign of a box. I said, ‘If you can find them, we'll take them away with us and return them to her family.'

‘No need. They've come for them already.'

‘When?'

‘Yesterday. I didn't know she was dead then, or of course I'd have said something. I thought they were just collecting them for her.'

‘They?'

‘Two men.'

‘What sort of men?'

‘Pretty standard bi-pedal hominids, I'd say. One thin with a bowler, one fat with a cap and red muffler.'

‘Working men?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘What did they say?'

‘I can't remember too clearly because I was working and they were a nuisance. I think the thin man said something like was this Miss North's room? I suppose I said it had been and he said they'd come to take away her things.'

‘Did they say who they were?'

‘No, and I didn't care. I just pointed to the box and said there they were and they took it away.'

‘Nothing else said?'

‘The thin one said was there anything else of hers in the house? I said I didn't suppose so, but if she'd left anything lying around downstairs it wouldn't have lasted long.'

*   *   *

She didn't raise her eyes from the painting as Bill and I let ourselves out. There was no sound coming from Toby's room across the landing, no sign of anybody on the other two floors. When we got outside we turned without saying anything to the embankment and stood looking down at the river. There was a steam tug pulling a long line of empty barges against the current.

I said, ‘We didn't find her body until Thursday. On Friday, two men arrive to collect her things?'

‘Some people react like that. Get it over with.'

‘Ben and Alexandra were in a state of shock. Besides, those two sound more like removal men than family.'

‘The coroner's officer will have to find out if there were letters.'

‘In a room she hadn't lived in for three weeks? Besides, it would be a job for the police.'

We started walking towards Albert Bridge. There was a man in a striped blazer and yellowish straw boater on the other side of the street, looking as if he'd got separated from his friends. After a while Bill said, ‘She does seem to have got in with a rum crowd.'

‘They're students!' For some reason, I needed to defend Verona.

‘Opium smoking and seducing virgins?'

‘More talk than anything, I expect. I went to an opium den in Limehouse when I was about their age.'

Bill gave me one of his looks that I hadn't learned to interpret yet. I suppose at that stage I was still trying to find out where his limits were.

‘On your own?'

‘A little group of us – thought we were terribly modern and daring. To be honest, it was a bit of a disappointment. It was this big room with white walls and a lot of cubicles like coffins with people sleeping in them. And two very neat and polite Chinamen preparing the pipes.'

‘Did you smoke?'

‘A few puffs. So as not to lose face.'

The man in the yellowish boater still hadn't found his friends. He was walking slowly, taking a great interest in front gardens. A horticulturalist perhaps.

Bill said, ‘She does seem to have plunged into student life quite quickly.'

‘That's the only way to do it. Weren't you like that?'

I really wanted to know. Bill and I had spent an intense few weeks working on a case together back in the autumn, but I still hardly knew him.

‘I think maybe it was different in Manchester.'

He sounded not resentful exactly but I did have the feeling that my youthful frivolities – mostly modest enough on the whole – were being put firmly in their place.

‘You think it happened because she plunged in too rapidly?'

‘Look, Nell, by your account, up to about six or seven months ago she was the model daughter, with nothing in her head except ponies and dinghies.'

‘That's what her mother thought. There must be more to any nineteen-year-old girl than that.'

‘Still, she was an ordinary girl with a conventional upbringing.'

‘Certainly conventional. Ordinary? Is anybody?'

‘Let's say, nothing remarkable about her that we know of.'

‘No.' Nothing remarkable. Except that she'd put a noose round her neck, lashed her feet to a plank and waited for the tide to go out. Perhaps.

‘Yet within those six or seven months she's stopped writing to her parents, taken an interest in radical politics and moved in with a household of drug-takers and anarchists.'

‘Are you implying I should have looked after her better?'

‘You
know
I'm not. Still…'

He left it. We came to Albert Bridge, strolled to the middle of it, watched a steamer full of trippers going underneath, strolled back again. The man in the yellowish boater strolled too, on the opposite side of the bridge. I didn't draw Bill's attention to him. After all, I might have been wrong.

Chapter Six

W
E WENT TO BORIS GODUNOV AFTER ALL, BUT
if you want a detailed critique of Chaliapin's performance you'll have to find somebody who stayed awake. From the clamour of cheers and bravos that jerked my head up from Bill's shoulder, I assume it was up to standard. Going home afterwards in a cab, I couldn't stop apologising.

‘Honestly, I've never done that before.'

‘Then I'm sorry my company is so uniquely unstimulating.'

‘Oh God, I didn't mean that, you know I didn't. Only…'

‘It has been quite a day. Or is that normal with you?'

At least he didn't seem offended. We were close together on the hansom seat and I'd have liked to rest my head on his shoulder again, but didn't have the excuse of going to sleep. In the traffic, we were stopping and swerving too much to make it plausible.

‘I assume it didn't end happily.'

‘Correct.
Macbeth
without the jokes.'

He saw me to my front door, I said thank you for everything, he said to let him know if he could help. Then he took the cab on to the friends he was staying with in Camden. He had to get the train back to Manchester in the morning. That was it.

*   *   *

For the next ten days or so I tried to put it all out of my mind and just get on with work, both the kind that got me into trouble and the other kind that paid the rent. The first category was getting grimmer all the time. It wasn't just a case of demonstrating and window-smashing. These went on but they were almost echoes from an age of innocence compared to what was happening now. This summer, the conflict between ourselves and the authorities was so bitter and violent that neither side could see a way out of it short of a catastrophe worse than anything that had happened before. We weren't just a nuisance to be shrugged off: we were enemies of the state. The police searched homes, arrested some of our people on suspicion of bomb-making, stayed in occupation of our headquarters and seized our incoming mail. We moved to our Westminster offices in Tothill Street, almost within the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, then they raided us there as well.

One of the immediate consequences for me was that plain clothes observation of my movements became almost constant. I thought Special Branch must have been doing some hasty recruiting because though some of the old familiars like Gradey were still around, there were people I hadn't seen before hanging about on the corner of my street or loitering in libraries I happened to be using. Gradually, they too became a part of the landscape. Then, glimpsed two or three times on street corners or on the far side of cafés, was the man I always thought of as Yellow Boater. Not that he wore the boater after that first day. I assumed it must be the plain clothes' idea of how to be inconspicuous on a bank holiday weekend. Sometimes he was in a bowler, sometimes in a flat cap. Under the varying headgear was the face of a man in his thirties, clean-shaven apart from a neat dark moustache, with a dutiful, melancholy air.

The reports on my movements, from Yellow Boater and the rest of them, must have been monotonous reading for somebody. Subject left home in the morning at eight o'clock. Spent morning either in libraries, usually the London Library in St James' Square, or in police courts observing cases involving suffragettes, or at homes of known associates, most of them with police records. Consumed lunch of tea and Chelsea bun in ABC café (the amount of Special Branch petty cash spent on tea and buns in the course of duty would soon need its own column in their accounts), spoke at meetings in evening at which various derogatory things were said about Prime Minister, tram to Haverstock Hill and walk home, arriving 11 p.m. approx. What they couldn't record, because it wasn't happening, was any more evidence that I was assisting the escape of prisoners on licence. The spiriting away of June had been a coup for us, but it meant we couldn't use my house again. I was surprised the watchers hadn't worked this out for themselves, then I decided I might be overestimating the average intelligence of Scotland Yard.