The Perfect Daughter (24 page)

‘Will you stop that, you daft bitch. Stop that!'

The voice, in a strong Suffolk accent, was coming from outside the gate. Then the man came through the gate, wearing a tweed jacket, gaiters and flat cap, leading a grey cob by the reins. She was behaving sedately enough, so the problem must be whatever was on the end of the halter rope in his other hand. He tugged, swore some more and a thing about the size of a German Shepherd dog came bucking and whinnying through the gateway. If I'd any sympathy to spare the man would have had it. Shetland ponies can be little devils.

A voice very near me, from somewhere along the line of wagons, said, ‘Shall I take the other one then?'

He must have come from the direction of the cattle lairage while I was watching the first man. I ducked down behind the partition. No chance of running for it now. The man with the cob and pony had to cross the tracks to get to the side with the loading ramp and the second man walked over to help him. There was a skittering of hooves on ballast, some calming words, more cursing. Only the cob and the Shetland as far as I could make out and three stalls in the wagon. If I were the groom, I'd put a horse at either end and leave the middle stall empty as a buffer between them. I grabbed my bag and burrowed under the straw in the middle stall. The hooves came to a halt by the ramp.

‘We'll get her in first, then the little bugger might go in quietly. Hold on while I loosen the girth.'

‘You travelling with them?'

‘Nah, thank god. They're only going as far as Shenfield and being met there.'

Two lots of good news. Shenfield had a railway station and was back in the direction of London. A heavy hoof hit the bottom of the ramp. Squinting through the straw I saw four feathery grey fetlocks, a pair of dusty boots and the bottoms of trousers tied with binder twine.

‘Put her at the end, shall I?'

They went past me into the far stall. A ring clinked as the man tied a halter rope to it then the boots went away and down the ramp. The grey cob whinnied then urinated in a steady ammoniac stream that ran under the partition and over the floor where I was lying. The sounds from outside suggested that the Shetland wasn't coming quietly. It took the two of them to haul it up the ramp then, blessedly, into the stall at the other end. By that time, I don't think they'd have bothered if a baby rhinoceros were in the middle stall. The boots and the gaiters went back down the ramp, the ramp went up, the horizontal bars that held it in place banged home. As the two walked away the one who'd brought the horses into the yard was asking where a man could get a drink at this time of the morning because he reckoned he bloody well deserved it. So did I.

Soon after that the cows were loaded into the cattle wagons. The jolting and mooing made even the quiet cob fidget and sent the Shetland diving backwards and forwards on its halter rope like a horizontal yo-yo.

‘All right, Molly. All right, Devil.'

I had to call them something. More to the point I'd found some more mints inside the torn lining of my bag. I offered them one each. They took them and crunched, the cob delicately, the pony with a snatch that nearly had the skin off my palm.

‘That will have to do as my fare,' I told them. ‘I shan't be in your way.'

Nobody would hear me over the noise the cows were making. I found some dry straw and settled down on it feeling boneless with relief. Some light came through ventilation slats on both sides. There was a feeling of security, closed there in the dimness with the animals. My breathing and heartbeats slowed down and for a while I didn't think about anything. Bars clanged into place on the cattle wagons. The train rocked as an engine was shunted into us and coupled on. The mooing rose to a crescendo and we were moving slowly, past the backs of the warehouses, jolting across the road then clattering back over the river on the metal bridge into sidings on the other side. We stayed there some time, more than half an hour, and from the sounds outside and occasional juddering and bumpings I guessed that other wagons were being added to our train. It was hot and the air was heavy with the smell of cow and horse dung, straw and coal dust. I'd have given pounds for a glass of water. At every shout or crunch of steps outside I expected the door to fly open, and ended up quivering and sweating worse than the pony. A lurch, a blast of steam and we were moving again. I looked out through the ventilation slats then ducked down. There was a policeman in uniform standing on the edge of the sidings. He had his back to us, but it was an odd place for a policeman to be unless they were hunting somebody. I stayed crouched in the straw until the train settled to a speed and rhythm that suggested we were back on a main line. When I looked out we were heading south through a wooded cutting that opened out on to fields, and my heart started to slow down. I should be safe now until Shenfield, which as far as I remembered was about two-thirds of the way down Essex.

*   *   *

It was a short but slow journey. We seemed to be a goods train of lowly status, because we went past stations but had long waits in between them to let faster trains through. Fields and creeks slid past. The horses dozed and nodded, shifting their weight with the jolting of the train. We passed Manningtree with no incident this time, picked up more wagons at Colchester and went on our unhurried way through Chelmsford. The calm was a mixed blessing though, because it gave me time to think about how much worse things had got since I'd travelled up this line yesterday evening. I was a murder suspect on the run. I couldn't go home, or make contact with my friends or even get money out of a bank. It was partly my own stupidity to blame, but only partly. That syringe and morphine had been planted in my work basket before I took it into my head to turn the tables on the initials. The idea that it might be useful to accuse me of Verona's murder must have been in somebody's mind almost from the start. As long as the verdict of suicide was unchallenged, that wasn't necessary. But I was challenging that verdict by asking questions, so the plan was coming into effect. Somebody in all this had a cold tactician's mind. I didn't know who that somebody was, but I guessed I'd been just one railway carriage away from him last night in the sidings. The puzzle was, why hadn't he accepted my offer? If Verona had been killed by spies, surely it was in his interest to find them rather than plant the guilt on me? The only answer must be that the stakes of the game were so high that her death, or mine come to that, didn't matter.

‘What have I got into? And how do I get out of it?'

The cob turned a sympathetic eye on me. I rummaged in my bag for more mints and found an unexpected shape. It wasn't until then that I remembered that I'd come away with one pathetic trophy – the notebook of Yellow Boater, otherwise known as Sergeant Stone. I delivered the mints then sat down on the straw for a look at it. There were stubs of pages at the front, showing that quite a lot had been torn out. The remaining ones were blank, except yesterday's date, 26 June 1914, on the front page. I remembered Burton had stopped him taking notes of our conversation, so that made sense. Only it didn't. While Burton was out of the compartment consulting the mystery man, I'd watched Stone writing in the notebook. I flipped to the back and found several pages covered in neat columns of dates, words and figures.

And so on. No more than the wretched man's expenses from days of snooping. I stuffed it back in my bag because the train was slowing down again and I guessed we couldn't be far from Shenfield. This was the next danger point. Somebody would be meeting the horses there. The ramp would be let down and I couldn't rely on burrowing in the straw to save me, particularly with the condition the straw was in by now. There was no reason to think the watchers would expect me to get out at a little country station, but a stowaway in a horse wagon would attract attention, possibly police action. The obvious solution was to leave the train by the groom's door as it was slowing down before it got to the station. It had done so much slowing down and stopping in the course of the journey that I thought I could rely on it for a dawdling approach, but it let me down. Before I could get the door open we were coming alongside a platform and the sign said Shenfield, Change here for the Southend Line. Too late.

*   *   *

There were heavy steps outside. A man's voice said, ‘Here's the horse wagon, ma'am.' Then a child's excited babbling, ‘Is she in there? Can I ride her out?' A woman's voice, ‘No, darling. Giles will bring them out for us. You can ride Angelica later.'

I looked at the Shetland. She avoided my eye. Angelica! Whether she liked it or not, for the next few minutes we were a sister act. I brushed straw off my jacket, ran a hand over my hair. My hat was probably somewhere back in Ipswich, but the lack of it would help the appearance of eccentricity. Somebody slid back the bars and started bringing the ramp down. I unhitched the Shetland's rope from the ring and when Giles the groom walked in, there I was standing at her head. He blinked.

‘She's very nervous,' I told him. ‘I'll lead her out if you'll see to the cob.'

Angelica helped by lifting her front legs off the straw and pawing the air. He left me to it.

‘Mummy, she's here!'

The child, a boy of about five, wouldn't have noticed if it had been King George himself on the end of the halter rope. His mother was another matter. She was a pleasant-looking woman, rather too elegantly dressed for meeting horses. When she saw me leading the pony down the ramp her jaw dropped and her eyes widened. I got in quickly.

‘I do hope you'll excuse me but I happened to notice them loading her. I could see she was nervous so as I was travelling this way, I offered to go in with her. She's such a
sweet
little thing.'

I stroked Angelica's nose. She tried to bite me but I was expecting that and her teeth only grazed my sleeve. Goodness knows what I looked like, all over straw and axle grease.

‘You … you came all the way from Ipswich in a horse wagon?'

Clearly she thought I was mad. Was I dangerous too?

‘I do hope you'll excuse the liberty, only I am
so
fond of all animals, especially horses. I just couldn't
bear
to think of this little one shut up in a horrid dark wagon with nobody to comfort her.'

All the time the boy was dancing round in delight at seeing the creature. That decided her. I was daft but not dangerous and the main thing in her mind was getting the whole equipage home. Giles and the cob had joined us on the platform now, ready to move off.

‘Really you shouldn't have, but I'm sure we're all very grateful to you. Do we owe you…?'

She had coins in her hand. I waved them away grandly. I knew I might need every penny before I was through, but it would have spoiled the act.

‘Not at all. Only too delighted to be of help.'

I gave the Shetland a last loving pat and handed the rope to Giles. All the time this was going on I'd been glancing round the platform. There were quite a few people coming and going, but no police and nobody I recognised. The train was getting ready to draw out. As I'd guessed, it was a hugger-mugger collection of wagons and trucks but there was one thing about it that made my blood run cold. Sandwiched between trucks were two lonely first-class passenger carriages. There was nobody at the windows and several compartments had blinds pulled right down. I had a suspicion amounting to certainty that those were the carriages used by the initials on their way back to London. Whether there was anybody on board I didn't know. Perhaps Burton and the rest of them had stayed in Ipswich to lead the hunt. Even so, it was a reminder to be cautious. I skulked behind some cycle racks, watched the train draw out and my family group with the horses walk across the yard and out of sight down the road, the cob plodding along, the boy and the pony skipping rings round each other. There were still quite a few people around, probably waiting for the next passenger train to London. It would be easy enough to walk across to the booking office, buy a ticket and join them, but no point in that if I got straight off the train at Liverpool Street into the arms of the police. Then I remembered ‘Change here for the Southend Line'. Southend-on-Sea was out of the way to anywhere, stuck out among the mudflats at the mouth of the River Thames. I could go there, and work out some roundabout way of getting back to London. I waited until there was a queue at the ticket office and bought a second-class single to Southend from a bored clerk who hardly gave me a glance.

*   *   *

There was plenty of room in the carriage, possibly because of the smell of me by now, so I had another look at Yellow Boater's columns of expenses. There were seven pages of them and all but the last two were scored through with a diagonal line, meaning presumably that the claims had been submitted and his money repaid. I read through the cancelled pages more from curiosity than anything, wondering if I could identify the days when he'd been following me.

A clutch of dates struck me, in that meticulous writing in the left-hand column: Mon. 4 May, Tues. 5 May and Wed. 6 May. Then a few lines further down: Sat. 23 May and Sun. 24 May. I noticed the first three because they were at the start of the period that was haunting me – Verona's missing nineteen days. Stone's entries for all three days were identical: Epping ret. 3rd class 3s2d, Lunch 1s3d. The later two were similar, with two exceptions. Lunch had cost him 1s6d on the Saturday and Sunday. And, beside the Saturday entry, there were some intials in brackets (VG/YTC). It was the V that made me look twice. VN would have been neater, but that was expecting too much. I looked back over the other entries. Quite a few had other initials against them. It looked as if it might be Stone's way of reminding himself who the quarry had been that day. VG. Not, surely, ‘very good'. There was nothing in the way of comment in any of the other entries. Then YTC. Yvonne somebody? Yacht Training Club (surely not in landlocked Epping)? One of the things that kept me worrying away at it was that the pair of entries for 23 and 24 May were during the period of Verona's second disappearance, from when she'd been with Hergest outside Buckingham Palace to when I found her dead in the boathouse. But why, for goodness sake, a quiet little town twenty or so miles out of London like Epping? Let's take it that my guess was right and that Verona had been spying on somebody dangerous in that lost period. For serious spies or trouble-makers, not the posturing kind, the very unlikeliness of Epping would be an attraction. If Verona joined them there, wouldn't it be reasonable that her employers, the initials, would want to watch over her from a distance? Perhaps not even from a distance all the time because she'd have to get messages out to them somehow. Was that what Yellow Boater was doing in his five trips out to Epping? I decided to go there and have a look. With no more than five initials and a hunch to follow it didn't make much sense, but nothing else made any sense at all. I was hunted. I couldn't go home. Epping would do as well as anywhere.