The Perfect Daughter (9 page)

‘No, the game is to make as many deliberate mistakes as you can and still beat him. Thirteen's the record at present.'

We watched as Weaver hesitated, moved a piece, sat back to watch the grey-bearded man.

Max shuddered. ‘If that's the best the War Office can do, we'd better pray even harder for peace.'

*   *   *

Back at home that evening, I found an official letter with a Devon postmark among the mail. My presence as a witness was required at the opening of the inquest on Verona North at 11 a.m. on Wednesday 17 June.

Chapter Seven

W
HEN DID YOU LAST SEE VERONA? THEY MIGHT
reasonably ask me that at the inquest and I'd have to reply that I wasn't sure. There could have been any number of young women with reddish-brown hair outside Buckingham Palace on 21 May, and even if I could have identified her for certain, that still left a larger question unanswered. Where had she been during the rest of the twenty-five days from the time she left her room at the house in Chelsea to when I found her in the boathouse? Unless somebody could answer that, nobody could even make a guess at her state of mind. There was no reason why I should be the one to provide the answer, but I felt belatedly – and uselessly – responsible. Over the next few days I worked on the Buckingham Palace angle and found it as difficult as I'd expected. There'd been around twenty thousand people there in a constant eddying battle between our side trying to get to the palace and the police hellbent on stopping us. Everybody I spoke to had her own story of the day, but none of them included a girl answering Verona's description until the Sunday before the inquest when myself and a few others were having a quarrel with a flat-bed printing press in an old coach house in Clerkenwell. Two days before, the inevitable had happened in the shape of yet another police raid on our makeshift headquarters in Notting Hill. This time they'd taken away boxes of posters and pamphlets. We needed more in a hurry and a nervous supporter had volunteered the use of his press, provided he wasn't present. The coach house was paved with flagstones and plastered with cobwebs, and the press looked and behaved as if it dated from Caxton's time and had been put together in a bad mood by one of his less promising apprentices. Add to that spiders the size of coffee saucers scuttling out of dark corners and a cataclysmic thunderstorm outside with rain pouring in gallons through holes in the roof, and you have one of the low points of our campaigning experience. Still, we got some posters printed at the cost of a lot of wasted ink and paper and several crushed thumbnails. One of the team was a woman called Cecily who'd been in the crowd around the Victoria Memorial. She remembered seeing a girl with long reddish-brown hair down her back.

‘I noticed the hair, because it struck me she must be new to all this. For goodness sake, wearing your hair down like that's a positive invitation to the police to grab you by it. They were pushing us back and some of us were getting crushed against the railings. You either had to break out somehow or get over the railings on to the grass.'

Cecily had taken the more aggressive option and broken out through a gap in the police cordon, but before that she'd noticed a little group of about half a dozen people helping each other climb the low railings to the comparative safety of the grass island round the monument. The girl who looked like Verona had been one of them.

‘Around nineteen?'

‘Could have been anything from sixteen to mid twenties. Do you want these in that box?'

‘Leave them, they're not dry yet. Did she look as if she was with friends?'

‘I don't know. You just help if you can, don't you, whether you know somebody or not? There was one person I recognised though.'

‘Who?'

‘Vincent Hergest. That was the other thing that made me remember her, that and the hair.'

Distinguished company. Vincent Hergest was one of the best-known novelists in the country. He was in his early forties but still had a reputation as an interpreter of modern youth, particularly of independent-minded young women. People who worried about modern youth read Vincent Hergest to have their worst fears confirmed. Young people who hoped they were modern read him to find out what the qualifications were. He was a socialist in politics and, naturally, a firm supporter of the suffragettes. His great line was campaigning for peace by bringing the youth of the world together. He used some of the profits from his books to finance weekends and summer camps where students and workers from all over Europe held high-minded debates, and went swimming and hiking together. It was no surprise that Vincent Hergest had been at the deputation. No surprise either – to me at any rate – that he'd managed to keep out of the worst of the trouble. To be honest, I liked him less than a lot of my friends did. I had to acknowledge his financial generosity to us and I enjoyed his angry, witty letters to papers, but to me there was the whiff of opportunism about him. He managed to support risky causes in a way that ensured his reputation and sales figures didn't suffer and he could go safely home to his mansion out Guildford way, to his wife, his collection of paintings and his little fleet of motorcars.

‘You didn't see what happened to any of them after they climbed over the railings?'

‘Of course not. Did you know you've got purple ink on your nose?'

That night I wrote a note to Vincent Hergest, care of his publishers, explaining about Verona and asking if he remembered meeting a girl like her on the day of the deputation. I wasn't hopeful. Events like that throw complete strangers together for a few minutes, then they get separated again. Even if he did happen to remember a girl like Verona, his description would probably be no more conclusive than Cecily's. I delivered the note to his publishers on Monday morning. The clerk in the post-room promised to forward it but warned me that it wouldn't get to Mr Hergest for some days. He'd just left for Paris to do research on his latest book and wasn't expected back before next week. Then I walked to Oxford Circus, jumping gutters still flooded from yesterday's storm. Thinking back to my last conversation with Verona in March, I had another idea for trying to fill in those blank twenty-five days. She'd informed me, rather smugly, that she was studying ju-jitsu and confirmed that it was at one of Edith Garrud's classes. Just beside Oxford Circus, in Argyll Place, the sign over the door, painted in vaguely oriental lettering, read ‘Garrud's Academy of Ju-jitsu'. From upstairs, regular thudding sounds and a female voice – ‘One, two, three and
swing
' – indicated that class was already in progress. I opened the door and walked up the stairs. There were photographs on both sides of the stairway showing men and women in martial poses, mostly Edith Garrud and her husband. When I opened the door at the top of the stairs the familiar smell of sweat, wintergreen oil and coconut matting came out at me.

‘And three and swing, and four and swing. Miriam, you're letting your shoulder drop. Concentrate. One and swing…'

Indian club exercise. Edith believed in a thorough warm-up routine before letting anybody practise ju-jitsu. She was wearing a white sleeveless tunic that ended at mid-calf and had a club in each hand. There were ten women swinging clubs in the bare mirrored room dressed in various versions of sportswear. Nine faces were red and sweating already. Edith turned as the door opened without breaking rhythm.

‘You're late, Nell. Get changed quickly and remember what I told you about keeping your shoulders relaxed. Supple joints, supple mind.'

I hadn't been to one of her classes for six months at least. Edith never forgot. She'd stopped swinging the clubs but flexed her knees and shoulders as she talked.

‘I'm afraid I'm not here for the class.'

‘Police after you again? Strip off quickly, then.' Some time ago, Edith had saved several of us from arrest when the police were chasing us after some window-smashing in Oxford Street. We'd dashed into her studio, stripped off our outer clothes and when the officers came in she assured them that we were just there for the ju-jitsu.

‘No. Not directly at any rate. I want to know if you remember somebody. Verona North.'

She nodded. ‘What's wrong with her?'

‘I'm afraid she's dead.'

Her face changed, but her knees and shoulders went on moving. She called, without turning round. ‘Look up, Erica, look up. Eyes down, heart down.' Then to me, ‘Accident?'

‘Of a kind.'

‘Take over, Kitty. Put the clubs away and get them down on the floor.'

As we went through to the office the tenth woman – the only one who wasn't red in the face – moved to face the class. She was not much taller than Edith herself, and looked as lean and fit as a ferret. Her hair was dark and cut almost as short as a man's. Even in the office, grieved at the news I'd brought, Edith couldn't stop exercising. She signalled to me to take the only chair, kept standing and swung one foot in its white tennis shoe up to the corner of the desk.

‘What happened?'

‘They think she might have killed herself. I found her. I've got to give evidence at the inquest.'

I couldn't see her face because it was turned away from me, resting against her knee but the shudder she gave was enough. Violence against your own body went against all that Edith believed.

‘I'm trying to find out what happened to her in the last few weeks. When I saw her in March she said she was coming to your classes.'

‘In March, yes, not in the last few weeks.'

The fingers of both hands were laced behind her instep. Kitty's voice came through the closed door, commanding the class to stretch, really stretch. It was an Irish accent, harsh north of Ireland, not soft south.

‘When did you last see her?'

‘April. She stopped coming here in April. I can give you the date if you want.'

She returned her leg to the floor, opened the desk drawer and took out a big diary. Every page in it had lists of names in columns.

‘Here we are. She came to my Tuesday classes. The first one was back here in February, through to 14 April, then she just stopped coming.'

‘No letter? No explanation?'

‘No, but then it's like that with some of them. All enthusiasm at first, then when they find they're not going to learn how to throw twenty-stone ruffians over their shoulders in the first few weeks they get impatient and give up.'

‘You thought that was what had happened?'

‘Yes. To be honest, she had struck me as an impatient type, only…' She closed the book and put it away, ‘… I liked her. I thought she had something about her.'

‘For ju-jitsu?'

‘Not necessarily for that. It was too early to tell. I liked her because she was serious about it and she worked hard, as if she needed it.'

‘Needed to defend herself?'

‘Needed to be strong.'

‘Strong for what?'

‘I don't know. I'd assumed it was for the cause but…'

I waited. It wasn't usual for Edith to hesitate about anything.

‘… Thinking back, I don't know. I said she was impatient, but it wasn't quite like the others. It was … well, it was as if she was expecting something to happen and thought she might not have enough time to get ready for it.' Her head was up against her knee again, her voice muffled.

‘But she didn't say anything to you about what it was she expected to happen?'

‘No. What I've just said to you – I'm not sure I realised it at the time. Just, as I said … thinking back.'

‘And then, in April, she just stopped coming without any explanation?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you never saw her after that?'

‘No.'

*   *   *

When we went back to the studio, Kitty was kneeling on the mat, knee to knee and palm to palm with one of the pupils. The girl looked heavier and more muscular than Kitty and was pressing with all her strength but getting forced back on her heels, panting.

‘Stop that, Kitty. You're not on stage now.' Edith explained as we went downstairs: ‘I'm training Kitty as my assistant, but she does a strong woman act in the halls and I'm afraid she's got into some bad habits.'

Outside the sun had come out and the pavements in Oxford Street were steaming. I'd done nothing to fill in the blank of Verona's last twenty-five days, only added another reason to be worried. ‘As if she was expecting something to happen…'

Chapter Eight

T
HE NEXT DAY
I
WENT BACK TO TEIGNMOUTH
and stayed overnight at a guesthouse, ready for the inquest. It was held in a meeting-room next to the town hall, behind the big hotels that lined the street nearest the sea. I got there too early and found the door locked so had to kill time looking in shop windows and watching the traffic. It consisted mostly of carts loaded with barrels of fish on their way to the railway station, tradesmen's carts and a few smarter gigs. There weren't as many motorcars as in London, so it wasn't surprising that the big black one nosing its way among the fish carts had people turning to look at it. But the murmuring from the people near me, low and respectful, wasn't from admiration for the car. It was the shivery mixture of curiosity, sympathy and the thank-God-it's-them-not-me you get at accidents.

A woman said, ‘Poor things.'

The man driving the car, wearing a black peaked cap, was the gardener who'd helped carry Verona's body up to the house. In the back seat, straight-backed and looking directly ahead, was my cousin Commodore Benjamin North, in civilian clothes with bowler hat and black armband. The bowed figure beside him, face hidden under a heavy black motoring veil, must be Alexandra. I turned away quickly, glad they hadn't seen me. It was bad enough for them to have to be in the same room as me at the inquest. I knew logically that Ben was unjust in blaming me, but at a time like this he was entitled to be unjust, and since I'd arrived the night before, guilt had been getting a tight hold on my mind. It was to do with being in Verona's home territory. She'd have come in to town as a child, bought bull's-eyes at the sweet shop and ice cream from Antonucci's near the harbour. Her family was known and respected here. (Some old men were actually touching their hats as the motorcar drove past.) And in the end, she'd come back here to die.