The Perfect Daughter (25 page)

Meanwhile, Southend-on-Sea on a warm Saturday in June had its advantages, the main one for me being that there were crowds of happy people in such an assortment of holiday clothes that I attracted no attention at all. A lot of East Enders had come out for the day on the London Tilbury and Southend Line and even though it was still only mid-morning the promenade was already the scene of a great open-air party. A band on the pier played
O dem Golden Slippers
and lines of young men and girls were doing the cakewalk, arms linked together, paper hats with fluttering streamers dipping and rising as they bowed their heads and advanced towards each other's lines then threw them back and danced away, cheerfully sweeping up pedestrians as they went, swaying round stalls selling pies, ice cream, paper windmills on sticks and vases plastered with sea shells. Wafts of warm beer mingled with the smell of hot sugar from toffee-apple booths, a tripper steamer blew blasts on its siren alongside the pier and the more decorous holidaymakers watched from the balconies of seafront hotels that were as sparkling white in the sun as the yacht sails out at sea. I found a stall selling lemonade and gulped down two glasses of it then bought a shilling's-worth of fish and chips and strolled along eating them from the paper with my fingers, adding cheap fat and vinegar to the odours of horse and the underside of railway train already clinging to me.

I was starting to feel better, realising I'd accidentally done something clever in coming to Southend. The Tilbury and Southend line that had brought the day-trippers out from the East End had its terminus at that most obscure of London stations, Fenchurch Street. The initials might have men waiting at Liverpool Street but they'd have no reason to expect me there. I strolled to the station, sorry to leave the security and cheerfulness of the crowds on the promenade, bought a single ticket and dozed all the way back to London.

Near Fenchurch Street station I found a second-hand clothes shop and spent eight shillings and sixpence on a complete outfit, navy blue skirt and jacket, matching straw hat and white cotton blouse. The shop owner let me change in her back room. The skirt was on the short side and the hat was beginning to unravel a bit round the brim but the general effect was more or less respectable. I left my old clothes in the shop for the rag bundle.

Chapter Nineteen

I
GOT ON A TRAM TO HACKNEY, THEN
another tram and then the train to Epping. Probably I convinced myself that this eccentric progress was to confuse the initials, but that was no more than superstition because they must have lost track of me a long way back. The truth is, I was half-dazed from all that had happened the day before and more than half-asleep. Several times I dozed and woke up when the tram or train stopped, without any idea where I was and in no hurry to get anywhere. In spite of the notebook in my bag, I wasn't greedy to go on finding things out. So far it had only brought more problems and no answers. Meanwhile it was soothing, this slow progress through a warm Saturday lunchtime, with people about their normal business, shopping or chatting, men going home in clerks' dark suits and stiff collars after their half-day's work in banks and offices. I was letting it drift me, in there but not quite part of it, watching myself from a distance. Then it struck me that this was, in its smaller way, like Bill's description of the effect of morphine ‘… watching yourself from a distance, calm and easy as if it had nothing to do with you'. I hadn't wanted to think about morphine, or Verona or Bill, but that made me wake up and think. Not that thinking did much good. By the time the train drew into the station at Epping, I still had no clear idea where to start or much hope that I was doing anything that made sense.

Step one, walk out of station. Stone would have had to do that, at any rate. I got his notebook out of my bag and had another look at it. He'd kept his expenses carefully and on the rare occasions that he took a cab he wrote it down. There was no record of bus or cab from Epping, so he'd probably travelled to wherever he was going on foot. In his job he'd have to be a good walker, but he was there to observe, not to hike. If his target was more than an hour's walk away he'd probably have found some other way of getting to it. That put it, possibly, within a three-mile radius of the station. I strolled uphill to the centre of the little town. Most of its life was going on in the High Street. Some elegant buildings and a couple of comfortable-looking inns held memories of a time when this had been the first coaching stop out of London and highwaymen roamed in Epping Forest. It wasn't a big place, so new arrivals there would be noticed, whether Verona and a group of revolutionaries or Yellow Boater in pursuit of them.

When I bought a local paper and a map at a grocer's and general store and sat down on a bench under a chestnut tree to look at them, it became clear that Epping itself was only part of the picture. The area round the town, edging on to the Forest or farmland, was sprinkled with villages or clusters of houses – Great Gregories, Ivychimneys, Copthall Green and so on – and any of them could have been full of spies, anarchists or secret police. Still, even spies and anarchists have to buy their groceries somewhere. I could have gone into the shops and asked if they remembered anybody of Verona's description, but that would draw attention to myself. For whatever reason the initials had sent somebody here five times at least and there was no guarantee that they wouldn't come again. I looked at the advertisement page in the paper and found the half column that advertised properties to rent, reasoning that my hypothetical group of suspicious people would have to live somewhere as well as buy groceries. They'd hardly have stayed there after Verona's death, so if they'd rented a property it would have become vacant again in the past month. Pinpoint a recently vacated property within a three-mile walk of the station and I just might have the place that Stone had been watching.

I found a pencil and started working my way down the column. I ruled out furnished rooms because they tended to have landlords and landladies on the premises which would be the last thing you'd want if you were involved in suspicious activities. That left seven properties, and in the cases of four of those you were invited to contact Mr Cyril Jones at a local address and telephone number for more information. I asked a boy for directions and found he operated from a little office just off the High Street. The window was hung with net curtains and a sign painted on the front of it said Cyril Jones, Building and Architectural Services, High-class Properties for Long or Short Rentals. Surprisingly on a Saturday afternoon the office was open. A bell on the door tinged when I went in and a bald middle-aged man at the desk looked up with a hopeful smile that faded a little when he saw my clothes.

I said, ‘I'm enquiring for my brother. He's thinking of moving to the area and I wonder if you have anything that might suit him.'

I don't like lying but the truth would have made him very unhappy. As it was he cheered up again, probably hoping that my brother would be more prosperous than I looked.

‘Has your brother a family?'

‘A wife and three children.'

True, at least, though a long way from Epping. Mr Jones cheered up even more.

‘What kind of thing has he in mind?'

‘I was wondering about these.' I showed him the properties I'd marked in the paper.

‘Yes indeed. Four of those I can thoroughly recommend for a family and there's another one come in since we put the advertisement in.'

‘My brother's quite particular about some things. It must be no more than three miles away from the station and reasonably private. He does so hate nosy neighbours.'

‘I'm sure he wouldn't have any trouble with those in our class of property.'

‘And he wouldn't want to take anywhere that's been standing vacant for a long time. Places do deteriorate if they're left empty, don't they?'

‘Our properties never get the chance to try it, ma'am. They're snapped up very quickly. If your brother is seriously interested in any of these, I'd advise him to move quickly.'

Not half so quickly as I might be moving. ‘I thought I might walk round and look at some of them – draw up a short list for him.'

‘Certainly, certainly.'

He took a piece of paper from his desk and started drawing a sketch map of the area, putting crosses where the houses were.

‘Rosedene, Rosebank and Rosemount are all completely new properties in the same road within two minutes' walk of the station. They're very high-class family developments and I'm sure they'd suit your brother down to the ground.'

‘Not lived in at all?'

‘Not at all. The builders are just out of them.'

That ruled them out.

‘The Firs is about a mile out towards Epping Bury, very secluded with a nice garden for the children to play in.'

‘I like the sound of that one.' True again.

‘Then there's the one only just come in, Tomintoul. That's a mile out on the edge of Wintry Wood, backing on to the Forest. Very secluded, but the garden is a little overgrown.'

‘I think I'll look at the Firs and Tomintoul.'

‘Not our nice new Roses?'

He was disappointed and went on for some time about fireplaces, fully fitted gas appliances and plumbing, but gave in at last.

‘Would you like to borrow the keys to the two you're interested in? You could post them through the letter box if the office is closed when you get back.'

Feeling mean because he was being so helpful, I said yes please to the keys. As he was looking for them in a desk drawer I said, ‘I don't suppose my cousin has been to you. She was helping him look too, but that would have been a few weeks ago. Young, quite tall with red-brown hair.'

‘Nobody of that description, ma'am. Most of our clients tend to be more mature ladies.'

I left with the two sets of keys, the sketch plan and a headful of directions. I chose the lane leading to The Firs first because it looked shadier and the afternoon was hot. The house turned out to be medium-sized with a lot of fancy brickwork, a gravel drive almost as wide as it was long, rhododendrons in the front. There was a similar house next door to it with enough shrubbery in between to make things difficult for nosy neighbours, then nothing else but fields and some buildings half a mile away that looked like a farmhouse and barns. I used the keys and wandered upstairs and downstairs through empty rooms, footsteps echoing on bare boards. The place had been thoroughly cleaned out and there wasn't as much as a hairpin to show who had lived there or what they'd done. I wasn't even sure what I was looking for, only that whatever it was, it wasn't there. As I let myself out and was bending to lock up a man's voice said, ‘Good afternoon, ma'am. I'm from next door. I wondered if you needed any help.'

So much for shrubbery deterring them. He was an elderly brown-faced man in a Panama hat, leaning on a stick. I explained I'd got the key from the agent and was looking on behalf of my brother.

‘What does your brother do for a living?'

By the sound of it, you'd have to pass a viva voce examination before they let you come and live here.

‘He's a doctor.'

A nod, conceding that doctors might be acceptable. ‘It was a professor who had it before.'

‘What kind of professor?'

‘A retired one. Classics, I think it was, but retired a long time.'

It didn't sound like a nest of anarchists.

‘Did he have a big family?'

‘Only a daughter who kept house for him.'

‘What happened to them?'

‘He died two months ago. His daughter's gone to live with her sister's family in Crawley.'

‘And nobody's been living there since?'

‘No. I keep an eye on it of course, make sure that everything's as it should be.'

‘I'm sure you do.'

No need of the watchers, with this one around. He raised his Panama to me, I wished him good afternoon and walked back to where I started.

*   *   *

The way to the other place, Tomintoul, was along the main road northwards. The scenery was nice enough, a wide expanse of town green, then the cool forest on the right. I looked at it longingly as I trudged because the sun was hot and the road dusty and infested with motorcars. Five of the brutes swept past me before I got to the opening of the lane that Mr Jones had marked on my map – one of them close enough to send me diving into the hedge. The lane at least was too narrow to attract them, no more than a track between the trees, rutted by carts and dented with hoofprints. After a few hundred yards it broadened out into a little clearing with three houses in it and forest all round, like a set for
Babes in the Wood.

Tomintoul would have been trundled in from a different stage set. It was a rambling bungalow in the style of the Indian Raj, behind a green-painted fence brimming over with climbing roses and honeysuckle. A path led from the rickety gate through a front garden so overgrown that I had to unwind myself from trails of perennial sweet peas fighting a losing battle with rampaging brambles. There was a wide verandah at the front of the house. The back garden was a space carved out of the forest, with an expanse of overgrown lawn, a children's sandpit with an abandoned tin bucket in the middle of it, a swing with a broken seat, all framed in tree branches hanging over a sagging fence. I went back to the verandah and unlocked the door. Like the other house, it had been well tidied, but there were indications that its last inhabitants had been a large and easy-going family. The wallpaper was scuffed, the skirting boards scratched and dented. A room that looked as if it had been the nursery had a line of horizontal pencil marks on the walls, probably recording the family's growth, and grooves in the linoleum that might have been made by a rocking horse. All disappointingly innocent.

I locked the door behind me, chalking it up as another blank, and walked back up the path. Opposite Tomintoul was a less ambitious bungalow with a tidier garden. Next to it, the top of a thatched roof was just visible behind a high yew hedge. I was being watched again, or rather the young woman dead-heading roses in the garden of the bungalow was trying hard not to watch. The child with her, holding a garden trug for the rose heads, was less polite and I could see she was telling him it was rude to stare. We exchanged good mornings over her neat hedge and I explained I was house-hunting and felt mean again when I saw how pleased she was.