The Perfect Daughter (20 page)

Chapter Fifteen

T
HE BOAT TRAIN DIDN'T LEAVE UNTIL
8.30
ON
Friday evening. With the day to fill and in no mood for hobgoblins and fairy-tale forests I decided to try to talk to Kitty Dulcie. ‘A rather peculiar young woman,' Valerie had called her. Ju-jitsuing fellow guests into ponds was unconventional, but not necessarily a bad thing. She'd met Verona and was around the same age. It was just possible she'd picked up things other people had missed. But when I went to the ju-jitsu school in Argyll Place to enquire after her, the response wasn't encouraging.

‘Miss Dulcie won't be coming here again,' Edith Garrud told me.

I'd caught her between classes. There was a smell of sweat in the air, sounds of people changing behind curtains at the far end of the room.

‘Why not?'

‘Because I threw her out.'

‘Literally?' I had visions of bodies flying across Oxford Circus.

‘No, though I was sorely tempted.'

‘What had she done?'

‘Quite a lot of things. For one thing, I found she'd been giving private lessons here in the evening after I'd gone home.'

‘Was that so bad?'

Edith gave me a look. ‘Mostly to gentlemen.'

‘You mean…'

‘I don't mean anything, but there's enough prejudice against physical women in any case. I'm not giving anybody a chance to gossip.'

‘What else?'

‘I tolerated the music-hall demonstrations but I never cared for them. She does a double act with her brother. I told her, ju-jitsu's not a circus act, it's a sacred art developed by monks centuries back, not something to get the gallery whistling at the Metropolitan.'

‘She sounds enterprising at any rate.'

‘Too enterprising.' Edith took hold of her ankle with one hand and bent her leg up behind her back. ‘The last straw was, I found she and her brother had opened a so-called martial arts academy without saying a word to me about it. That young woman's altogether too fond of money.'

‘Perhaps she's always been short of it.'

‘Not recently, judging by the clothes she's been buying.'

‘This martial arts academy, do you know where it is?'

Unwillingly, she gave me an address near the Elephant and Castle.

‘But I'd leave her alone if I were you, Nell. There's something not straight about Kitty Dulcie.'

*   *   *

As far as I could tell the watchers weren't following me but I made no efforts to check that on my way out to Elephant and Castle, not wanting to discourage them if they were. Elephant and Castle isn't an area I know well and once out of the underground I had to ask for directions. It was a little street off Walworth Road, or rather half a little street because all one side of it was being knocked down and rebuilt. The surviving side was a gappy mixture of terraced houses, small workshops and locked wooden gates, with no numbers on any of them. There was a smell of brick dust from the demolished houses and of bad drains, with a lot of flies zigzagging around and a dog tearing at a bone in the gutter. As I stood looking for somebody to ask for more directions, a wooden gate opened from the inside and a man came out trundling an empty handcart. Through the gate I got a glimpse of a scrap metal yard.

‘Excuse me,' I said, ‘do you know where the martial arts academy is?'

He jerked a thumb into the yard behind him and rolled on his way. I went through the gate, shutting it behind me. It was an ordinary enough scrapyard, quite tidy as these things go, with bits of corrugated iron and railings, wheel rims, cooking pots, even the crushed carcass of a motorcar piled into heaps against walls of old railway sleepers. A black-and-white notice, newly painted, was nailed to one of the sleepers: ‘Dulcie's Academy of Martial Arts'. An arrow pointed to a newish single-storey red-brick building at the far end of the yard. It had big uncurtained windows and when I got near it I heard the patter of steps from inside and saw two figures moving in what looked like an angular kind of dance.

The door was round the side. There was another notice beside it. ‘D. and M. Dulcie. Lessons in Fencing, Shooting and Ju-jitsu for Ladies and Gentlemen'. I knocked and waited. When there was no reply I opened the door and walked in. At the far end of the bare room a man and woman, both barefoot and wearing suits like white flannel pyjamas, were performing a cross between a fight and a ballet. The man lunged forward, like a fencer but empty-handed, with a sideways chopping movement that seemed to be making straight for his partner's head until she pivoted sideways on the ball of her foot and aimed the other foot in a kick that could have taken his kneecap off if it had connected. Only it didn't because his knee moved back and his hand came round in a scything arc that would have caught her across the eyes, except she ducked below it so that the edge of his hand did no more than ruffle her short dark hair like a dragonfly wing over a pond. It wasn't like ju-jitsu or anything else I'd ever seen but it took the breath away just watching. Part of the beauty was the intense concentration the two of them gave it, like Max's chess players. I don't think they even noticed I was there until by mutual agreement but without a word said they stopped, looked at each other and laughed the way people do when something's satisfied them. Then the woman, Kitty Dulcie, glanced in my direction, said something to the man and disappeared behind a screen. He came walking towards me, light as a lizard on his bare feet. Her brother, the other half of the music-hall act. He was a few inches taller and a few years older than Kitty but had the same dark hair and eyes, and an intensity about him that made the air hum. When he spoke, it was a North-of-Ireland voice like hers, quiet but hard-edged.

‘Good morning. Were you wanting lessons?'

From the way he said it, embattled already, he knew I wasn't. Whatever she'd said to him had been a warning.

‘I'd like to speak to Kitty Dulcie.'

‘What do you want with her?'

‘I believe she knew a relative of mine, Verona North.'

Something happened in those dark eyes. I wasn't sure what it was, but I didn't like it.

‘Is that so?'

He just stood there, not moving. It was like trying to talk to a slab of slate.

‘So, if you'll excuse me, please…'

I stepped past him, towards the screen. He probably knew a dozen different ways of sending me flying through the window and when I heard his bare footsteps padding behind me I thought it might happen. But I made it to the screen.

‘Miss Dulcie, could you spare me a few minutes, please.'

She'd taken off the trousers of her pyjama suit and replaced them with a white pleated skirt. When she came out from behind the screen her face was expressionless and she gave no sign she'd seen me before.

‘Do you remember a pupil at Argyll Place named Verona North?'

‘Why are you asking?'

‘She was my cousin's daughter. She's dead.'

Surely Edith Garrud would have told her that after my visit, but there was no reaction.

‘I don't remember any of their names.'

‘About your age, red-brown hair, a beginner.'

‘They mostly were.'

‘She was one of the people Vincent Hergest talked to.'

‘He talked to a lot of people.'

No sign there of being impressed by the great man.

‘You went to his party on Wednesday.'

‘So did a lot of people.'

Her voice stopped just short of being insulting, the way that her brother, standing a few steps behind me, stopped just short of being threatening.

‘She stopped going to classes in April. Do you know why?'

She shrugged. ‘A lot of them give up when they're afraid they might get hurt.'

‘That doesn't sound like Verona.'

‘I told you, I don't remember her.'

‘I think you do.' Silence. ‘Well, if you do remember anything at all, I'd be grateful if you'd get in touch with me.' I gave her my card and, remembering what Edith had said about her liking money, added, ‘I'd pay you for your time.'

‘She's told you, she doesn't remember.'

The brother, from behind me. Kitty had taken my card between her fingertips. Now she opened them and let it fall to the floor. I turned and walked over what felt like a long expanse of bare boards to the door, opened it and stepped out into the yard. Why should Kitty bother to lie about somebody who should have been no more than a passing acquaintance? Some people panicked at the thought of being associated with an inquiry into a suspicious death, but that didn't apply here. Kitty had no reason to think Verona's death was suspicious and she didn't strike me as a type who panicked. She liked money, but she'd thrown away the chance of earning some. If she'd known … A bang and a crash of metal stopped me in my tracks. I was in the middle of the scrapyard, alongside the remains of what looked like a corrugated-iron chapel. At first I thought a piece of metal had fallen against another, and stopped and looked around, simply curious. Another bang. It's funny how the mind can be so reluctant to acknowledge that inexplicable things are happening. Probably a workman dropping something on a building site, lots of them round here. But an instinct quicker than the mind made me turn and, as I turned, something flew past my ear and punched a hole through a rusty corrugated-iron sheet, so close to me that little flakes of rust landed on my jacket. The brother was standing outside the red-brick building, with what looked like a Winchester rifle on his shoulder.

I shouted, ‘Are you shooting at me?' Which was admittedly not one of the more intelligent questions of my career, but my mind was still trying to catch up. For answer he sent another shot into the corrugated iron, this time about an arm's length above my head.

‘Leave my sister alone. Kitty doesn't want to talk to you, understood?'

The voice wasn't loud, but it carried.

I said, ‘If this is meant to be an advertisement for your music-hall act, I'm not interested.'

The gate at the end of the yard opened and the man I'd asked for directions came through it. He looked at me, then at Kitty's brother standing there with the rifle and went back through the gate before I could ask him for help. I couldn't blame him. I was capable, just, of standing there, even talking to Kitty's brother without my voice shaking. What I couldn't do was turn my back on him and walk to the open gate. Then there was a rumbling of wheels and the man came back through the gate, this time pushing his handcart loaded with bits of broken guttering. If they'd been gold bullion I couldn't have been happier to see him. He trundled the cart towards me, seemingly not in the least put out.

‘Found them then, miss? He been showing you his trick shooting?'

‘Yes, something like that.'

‘Good shot, he is. Put a hole through a cigarette card blindfold.'

‘Good thing I'm not a cigarette card.'

‘What was that, miss?'

I glanced round. The brother and his rifle had disappeared, presumably back into the studio.

‘Nothing.'

‘Lucky, you were.'

‘Lucky?'

‘I mean, most people have to pay to see him, don't they?'

I agreed I was lucky, wished him good morning and walked to the gate. The dog was still worrying its bone. The workmen opposite were unloading scaffolding poles from a cart with a noise very like rifle shots. And that was meant to be the easy bit of the day.

Chapter Sixteen

L
IVERPOOL STREET HAS NEVER BEEN ONE OF MY
favourite places to start a journey. Stations seem to take on the characters of their destinations. At Victoria, for instance, you can almost catch the whiff of coffee from the street cafés in Paris or pines by the Mediterranean. Liverpool Street, even on summer evenings, always feels to me as if a blast from the cold and foggy North Sea has found its way down the lines and into London to mix with soot and pigeon droppings. All it can promise you on the journey are views of the flatlands and slow rivers crawling between muddy banks to a grey sea. The boat connections link to serious northern places – The Hook, Rotterdam, Antwerp – nowhere to make your heart beat faster. The passengers too have a grey, dour look to them. You know they're mostly travelling for business or, if not, then for a very sober kind of pleasure.

I got there soon after seven, nearly an hour and a half before the train left, with no luggage but a shoulder bag, and my mind still going round in circles. I was at least half-persuaded that Bill was right, that the answers I wanted were somewhere else and I was wasting my time. When in doubt, go on. The smell of cheap pies from the buffet made me glad I wasn't hungry but I went in, sat at a conspicuous table in the middle of the room and lingered over a coffee. As far as I could see, nobody was at all interested. I strolled over to the W.H. Smith stall and collected an armful of papers and magazines. When I paid and stowed them away in my bag, I made a point of letting it flap open to show the brown paper package inside because there was a man in a trilby hat loitering near the counter. He didn't react which wasn't surprising because a few minutes later a plump woman with three children, a porter and about a dozen suitcases collected him and took him away. I was already feeling like the girl in the song who took her harp to a party and nobody asked her to play.

By that time a queue was already forming at the barrier. There were a group on a weekend excursion to Holland in the care of a Thomas Cook courier; two or three families with armfuls of babies; an invalid in a Bath chair with uniformed nurse and valet in attendance; a German husband and wife with what looked like all their worldly goods, down to kettle, cushions and a picture in a frame almost as tall as they were; and a few young sailors in uniform, probably on their way to join their ships at Harwich and Ipswich. Apart from them, the queue included just six men on their own. Two of them were elderly so I ruled those out, as most of the watchers had been in their thirties or forties. One was plump and too prosperous, with a rolled umbrella and dispatch case, another in his early twenties, so thin and languid that it seemed only a matter of time before somebody came and grew beans round him. The two remaining were both possibles, although I'd seen neither of them before. One, in his late forties, had a retired sergeant-major look and a waxed moustache. The other was dark, in his twenties and twitchy, definitely waiting for something besides the train. I joined the back of the queue and kept an eye on both of them. A couple more sailors and a pale girl who'd been crying arrived just after me. We all of us waited glumly while the babies yelled, the girl gave an occasional sniff and pigeons scavenged round our feet for non-existent crumbs. I thought how nice it would be to see someone I knew, like Weaver or Yellow Boater or even our homely Detective Constable Gradey.