The Perfect Daughter (35 page)

I said, ‘Watching the warships, Uncle Archie? Like your little midshipman used to?'

It was the only thing I could think of that might begin to hurt him as much as he deserved. At first there was no reaction, then he pivoted to face me, the arm with the telescope coming slowly down to his side as he turned like the movement of a wind-up toy. His face was blank, apart from the pink pulled-down corner of his eye that twitched to a rhythm of its own, faster than heartbeats. It looked like the quivering tendon of a newly killed frog, pinned out in a laboratory.

‘You've no right…' The three words came out slowly, his lips hardly moving. I thought he was trying to say I had no right to be up there, but after a long pause he added two more words, in the same mechanical voice: ‘… to pry.'

‘She used to enjoy coming up here to watch the ships, didn't she? Remember her climbing up the path carrying the basket with the lemonade and ginger biscuits and your telescope? That telescope, was it?'

A nod. His fingers tightened round the telescope as if he expected somebody to take it away from him. The twitch of pink flesh had become a constant fluttering and moisture was gathering there, running down the track of the scar, the wrong side of his eye to be a tear.

‘You've no right…' The same words, in the same mechanical, squeezed-out voice, the pause, then ‘… to talk about her.'

‘But you had a right to kill her?'

He pivoted back, looking down at the sea.

‘More than a right. A duty.' His voice was stronger now that he was talking to the sea. ‘I was her godfather. I'd watched over her all her life. She was pure, straight, honourable. I gave the dearest thing I owned to my country's service. She made it a tainted sacrifice. She betrayed her country and me.'

‘You pushed her into a dirty little schoolboy spying game. Then she grew up and told you what she thought of it. That was the only way she betrayed you – by growing up.'

I hoped he might turn and attack me. As it was, I could have pushed him over while he was standing against the railing looking down. He knew that and knew I wouldn't, or thought he did. His sort didn't just use people's weaknesses against them – they used their decencies too.

‘What about the other murder? Was he a traitor as well?'

No response. He had his telescope to his eye, as if it mattered what the fishing boats were doing.

‘A man came to talk to you on Sunday. Musgrave, his name was. What happened to him?'

Still no response. I moved and grabbed him by the shoulder, ready to shake an answer out of him, but he was so intent on whatever he was looking at, or pretending to be, that I couldn't help looking down too. It wasn't even the fishing boats he was watching. They were further out. From the angle of the telescope it must be something near the base of the cliff, but the only thing there was a sandbank half-uncovered by the tide and perched slantwise on the edge of it, just where the waves were lapping, the lost bathing machine. It looked ridiculous without its wheels, no more than a little wooden shed with a rounded top and steps sticking out from one end. From the crazy angle it was perched on the edge of the sandbank, high tide might have floated it off and landed it back there again. Sooner or later – if nobody caught it in time – the tides would take it away, right out to sea. The bosun had hurt his hand. Why did that matter? A crowd of people round bereaved wheels on the beach – ‘…
what those boys get up to. Hacked it right off its wheels
…' That was Monday, so Sunday night was when it went out to sea. A bag unclaimed, a dent in a pillow. I think I intended to push Pritty over. Maybe in the part of his mind that was fatalistic and left the final decision to the sea, he even wanted me to. The only reason I didn't was that if he'd struggled it would have wasted time. As I ran back down the path, sliding on wet earth, cannoning into trees, I didn't even care if he was following me down or not.

At the house, Pilcher tried to stop me getting back into the admiral's study, but I remembered a telephone there and he had to stand watching while I told the operator to ring the police. It wasn't easy to convince them that somebody must, at all costs, get to the bathing machine because – alive or dead, probably dead by now – there was a man inside it.

Chapter Twenty-seven

T
HE LIFEBOAT GOT HIM OFF, JUST AS THE
sea was nudging the bathing machine away from the sandbank. I heard later – in the way your mind will keep taking in irrelevancies when only one thing matters – that a fishing boat caught the bathing machine on its way out to sea and towed it back to harbour. I didn't see it. By then I was sitting on one side of a bed behind screens in the Victoria ward of the cottage hospital, with Alex on the other side of the bed and Bill unconscious in between. His head was wrapped in a turban of bandages, his lips cracked from dehydration. Every now and then he'd start shivering so violently that the hand I was holding jerked itself out of mine. The pyjamas they'd found were too short in the arm for him and you could see, between wrist and elbow, a puncture mark with yellow and purple bruising round it. I'd told the doctor when they brought him in that he'd had a near lethal dose of morphine as well as everything else. He thought I was raving at first. Nurses came and went through the screens with fresh hot-water bottles. They were kind and efficient but wouldn't meet my eyes. At some point Alex had to go, limping on a borrowed walking stick, because Ben was coming home. Goodness knows what she'd say to him.

*   *   *

The lifeboat must have been busy that morning. Soon after bringing Bill back it had to go out again to recover a body from the rocks under the Ness. The buzz that went round the town when it turned out to be Rear Admiral Archibald Pritty reached the cottage hospital and even penetrated the screens round Bill's bed. I imagined him standing there with his telescope, watching as Bill was carried from the bathing machine to the lifeboat. Perhaps he thought the sea had turned against him at last in not taking Bill away as it was supposed to do, and if the sea wasn't on his side then all the powers of the initials couldn't help him any more. At the time I didn't care. I was only glad that he was dead as I'd never been glad about the death of any creature before.

When the police came to ask me questions, in the matron's office, I told them the whole story. It took two hours because the sergeant wrote it down slowly and carefully, and kept wearing down his pencil and having to sharpen it. I could have told him we were all wasting our time. All I wanted was to get back to Bill. I'd have been right too. I never heard another word about my statement from that day to this. Perhaps it's there somewhere in a file in the War Office stamped ‘No Action Recommended'.

*   *   *

There's a superstition that sick people die when the tide's at its lowest. But sometimes they come to life too. I know that because the first low tide on the first day of July was around five in the morning, as the light was beginning to creep round the screens that surrounded Bill's bed. Perhaps I'd been dozing because suddenly Bill was awake and looking at me.

‘Nell?' His voice came painfully from a salt-rasped throat.

I don't know what I said.

He said, ‘I hate…'

His fingers clenched round my hand. Hate what? Pritty? The initials? Me?

‘I hate to be obvious but…'

‘Yes?'

‘Where the bloody hell am I?'

*   *   *

It still took a week for him to be well enough to travel. I spent a lot of that time by his bed and when he could speak without pain he confirmed most of the things I'd guessed. Pritty had agreed to meet him for a talk but said because of other engagements he couldn't manage it until late on Sunday night. Perhaps Bill would be kind enough to meet him on the beach by the pier, where he was accustomed to walk his dog. Whether there really had been a dog Bill didn't know. He was knocked out by a blow on the head from somebody who came from underneath the pier. The bosun, at a guess, with Pritty waiting behind him with the needle. I still shook with anger when I thought about it, but Bill was more philosophical. He even enjoyed reading Admiral Pritty's obituary in
The Times
about a lifetime of service at sea and, in later years, valuable contributions behind the scenes co-ordinating the work of various committees at the War Office. They buried him at sea, I gathered, with full naval honours. At least Commodore Benjamin North was not among those present.

*   *   *

I stayed with John and Margaret at the fish-smelling house and, between hospital visiting times, did a lot of walking up and down the seafront. The holiday season was in full swing, with bands playing most of the daylight hours, children riding donkeys and eating ice creams, begonias blazing from beds along the promenade, trips round the bay. Only if you looked past the bathers and the tripper boats, further out to sea, there were always the grey warships steaming out on the horizon. There was a terribly purposeful look about them, like huge animals obeying some instinctive call to muster.

 

Also by Gillian Linscott

A Healthy Body

Murder Makes Tracks

Knightfall

A Whiff of Sulphur

Unknown Hand

Murder, I Presume

 

And featuring Nell Bray

Sister Beneath the Sheet

Hanging on the Wire

Stage Fright

Widow's Peak

Crown Witness

Dead Man's Sweetheart

Dance on Blood

Absent Friends

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

THE PERFECT DAUGHTER.
Copyright © 2000 by Gillian Linscott. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

ISBN 0-312-27296-0

First published in Great Britain by Virago, a division of Little, Brown and Company

First St. Martin's Minotaur Edition: April 2001

eISBN: 9781466826373

First eBook edition: August 2012