‘Nobody there,’ Toby said, unnecessarily.
I looked in the window, which clearly hadn’t been altered since its days as a bread shop. Two wooden shelves at waist level and eye level slanted back into the shop. There were a few books, some small framed pictures, folded maps. Somebody had tried to make the pathetic display more enticing by spreading out a couple of maps and tacking them between top and bottom shelf, where they’d faded so that you could hardly make out the detail on them. I tried out of habit, pressing my eyes against the cobwebbed glass.
‘Oh, God!’
Toby jumped forward, all consideration. ‘Are you all right? What is it?’
‘They’re not maps. They’re charts. Sea charts.’
They both stared at me, puzzled, but then they hadn’t seen Verona hanging, didn’t have sea and the rise and fall of tides on their minds. The books, too. Some of them were tide tables. And what I’d taken for pictures were miniature seamen’s knots, fancy splices and Turk’s heads and so on, mounted on cards and framed.
Toby said, ‘I hadn’t noticed. We’re quite near the wharves, after all.’
Which was true, except I couldn’t imagine the most desperate mariner finding his way to this tatty collection.
Rizzo said, ‘Why worry what they had in the window? It was what went on upstairs that mattered.’
True too, but of all the things to choose as window-dressing, why those? Toby had turned away, not rising to Rizzo’s taunt. I believed him. I probably even believed Rizzo, but it didn’t help much. We walked back together up the King’s Road without saying anything. When we parted at a tram stop Rizzo walked on, but Toby lingered for a while.
‘Please, when you find him, tell me. I want to know.’
I didn’t promise.
* * *
I spent most of next day, Friday, looking for Bobbie Fieldfare. If you were sensible, Bobbie was the last person you’d think of asking for help. But what I was planning to do wasn’t sensible.
Chapter Eleven
MIDSUMMER’S A BAD TIME FOR BURGLARY. LONDONERS QUIT the streets as reluctantly as light leaves the sky. At eleven at night, with the horizon beyond the chimney stacks towards Fulham still smoky-pink from the last of the sunset, trams and motorbuses were more than half-full, couples walked the pavements hand in hand, conscientious constables on their beats returned slurred ‘goodnights’ from drinkers rolling peacefully homeward. Meanwhile the ones who, even stone-cold sober, had reason not to attract the attention of conscientious constables, skulked in side streets and passageways and killed time while they waited for the few hours of darkness to hide them. The ones like me. It wasn’t my first burglary. A mental search of my curriculum vitae put the score so far at four, though I might have missed one. The difference was that in the other ones I hadn’t been under observation already by a set of shadowy initials who had me tagged as an enemy of the state. Even the most outlandish things become part of the landscape in a surprisingly short time, and I was already taking it for granted that wherever I went a man would come trailing along behind. Admittedly, since I’d got back from Devon I hadn’t spotted one of them, but that might mean they were getting better or I was getting careless. I’d taken a lot of trouble, that Friday evening, to make sure that if there had been one, I’d lost him – leaving a meeting through the kitchens instead of the main entrance, stopping to stare into shop windows all the way along Oxford Street. I’d smashed a few of those plate-glass windows in the past, but tonight I was grateful for the way they mirrored the street behind me. I’d jumped on a motorbus at the last minute while it was moving away, jumped off a few stops later, also at the last minute, and seen nobody trying to follow. Now that my zigzag progress had brought me back to Chelsea and an alleyway just off the King’s Road, I was sure I was on my own.
The next step was meeting up with Bobbie. We’d agreed on half past midnight, by the river wall at the western end of Cheyne Walk, upriver from Battersea Bridge. I was there by the time the clocks all over west London were striking midnight. The place was a few minutes’ walk away from the chart shop at World’s End, the less prosperous end of Cheyne Walk, a dip of comparative darkness between two stretches of light. Downriver, lines of lamp standards glowed along the Embankment between Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge. Just upriver the four great towers of Lots Road power station hummed in a glow of their own electricity, and down at the water line bright electric lamps lit the wharves for barges bringing coal for the generators up from the Pool of London. A steamboat surged downstream along the middle of the river, sparks from the funnel and red port light glowing against the dark water. On one side of the street white house fronts and irregular roof lines stood out against the sky, with lights on in some upstairs windows. The side where I was standing had just an erratic line of small plane trees and a few street lamps, then solid London fell away to water. At night the smell from the sewer pipes that run under the Embankment seemed stronger than by day. There were big posts sticking out of the water with sailing barges moored to them, survivors from an older and slower river life. Their copper-coloured sails, trussed in untidy bundles against the masts, looked black in the lamplight. The scent of fresh hay rose from the nearest one and mingled with the sewage smell. I watched and waited, not even daring to walk in case my footsteps disturbed people going to bed in the quiet houses opposite. A clock struck a single note. Half past midnight and no sign of Bobbie, but when had she ever been on time for anything?
* * *
‘Nell.’
Her voice. I spun round and still couldn’t see her. It seemed to be coming from the river.
‘That you, Nell?’ A dark shape was standing on the Embankment wall alongside the hay-scented barge. It flew through the air and landed beside me.
‘Oh, that was so comfortable. I went right off to sleep.’
There was hay in her hair, clinging to her skirt and jacket. I started brushing it off to try to make her look halfway respectable, then remembered that we weren’t and gave up.
‘Where are we going, Nell?’
I’d told her only that I needed her help to break into somewhere. She’d agreed unhesitatingly. Now as we walked up a narrow street from the river I told her about Verona and the missing days.
‘Nineteen days, from when she left the student house to when I think I saw her outside Buckingham Palace. I want to know where she was and what she was doing.’
Bobbie didn’t argue about that, or make any pointless regretful noises about Verona. Her concentration was entirely on the job in hand.
‘Have you thought about how we’re getting in?’
‘Depends if there’s a back entrance. I don’t think there is.’
Toby hadn’t found one.
‘You should have made sure when you were there.’
She was right, of course. No point in explaining to Bobbie the shivery feeling the knots and charts had given me. I concentrated on finding our way to the chart shop by the back streets. Before the clocks struck one we were standing in front of it. There was no sound except a late cab clip-clopping down the King’s Road, only dim light from the one gas lamp on the corner. The drab window display was just as I remembered it from the night before.
‘Back to back,’ Bobbie said. ‘We’ll have to climb in.’
She sounded quite happy about it. I told her to hang on a minute and stooped down at the keyhole. I’d brought half a dozen assorted keys with me, some of my own from home and a few borrowed from friends. The place looked so decrepit that it seemed possible the lock would be no more than a formality, accessible with anything that fitted more or less. That was my first miscalculation. As far as I could tell in the dim light, the lock was the newest thing about the premises. You could even make out a wedge of new unpainted wood where it had been fitted into the door quite recently. While Bobbie waited impatiently I tried all my keys twice over, but none of them was any good. We stood back and looked at the front of the building and the single net-curtained window on th
e first floor. Just below it a course of brick stuck out from the rest, the builder’s one concession to decoration. Under the brick course was the wooden housing for the shop window blind. The blind itself projected by about six inches. It was part of the general dilapidation of the place that it wouldn’t roll all the way back into its housing. Metal support struts angled down from the edge of the blind into the window frame at about eye level. A drainpipe came down to the left of the shop window but it looked tinny and insubstantial. Slum builders have no consideration for burglars.
Bobbie said, ‘If you make a back for me, I can stand on that strut and get up on top of the blind.’
‘The whole thing’s probably rotten. It could pull away.’
‘What do you suggest then?’
We were talking in low voices and I’d been as quiet as I could with the keys, but we were already taking too long. Rotten or not, the blind looked like the best chance. Before Bobbie could get in there first I got a foot on the narrow sill at the front of the shop window, grabbed the strut and brought my other foot up to join it. By changing hands on the strut and leaning out, I could get a grip on the top of the window-blind housing with one hand. Getting the other hand up to join it meant taking a jump off the narrow sill. No point in standing thinking about it, especially with Bobbie panting to have her turn if I failed. I jumped and grabbed, scrabbled with my feet against the drainpipe. At the critical moment I felt Bobbie’s hand against my buttocks, giving me a hearty shove upwards. I transferred my left hand cautiously to the drainpipe, tried to get my left foot on to the top of the blind, cursing skirts. Something ripped. I wasn’t sure if it was my skirt or the old canvas of the blind. My chin was grazing the windowsill of the upstairs room. At least here the builder hadn’t skimped. It was a good substantial slab and I threw myself at it, ending up with my right hand clasping it and my body sprawled on the top of the wooden blind housing, with six inches of unreliable canvas between me and a fifteen-foot drop to the pavement. From somewhere just below me Bobbie breathed, ‘Well done.’ I squirmed round so that I was kneeling on top of the blind, facing the window. Everything depended on the window catch. If it was as new as the lock on the door, we were finished. When I saw the tail end of a metal lever on the inside of the dark glass I felt grateful after all to the slum builder. It was more what you’d expect in a place like this, a fastening of the simplest kind that swivelled into a notch on the window frame. And, even more blessedly, there was a gap between window and frame you could put a knife through. Which was what I did. I’d brought from home a blunt thick-bladed knife. I’d wrapped it in a duster, but that hadn’t stopped it digging into my thigh on the way up. A little pressure from underneath lifted the catch. I swung the window open and went headfirst over the sill and into the room.
* * *
Carpet. A thin, dusty-smelling carpet that ruckled up under my hands and knees. I crouched, waiting for my heart to stop thumping, listening. If there’d been people in the house, they’d have been awake and yelling by now. After twenty or so heartbeats I rummaged a candle and matches out of my pocket, lit the candle but kept it at floor level so that it wouldn’t be too obvious outside.
‘Nell, are you there?’ Bobbie’s voice.
‘I’ll come down and let you in.’
The candle was throwing shadows on to the walls – cupboards, a chair, a table. I got up and walked over to the door. It opened on to a narrow landing with another door opposite and a flight of steep boxed-in stairs, uncarpeted. The lock on the inside of the front door was, as I’d guessed, new and from the look of it would have cost a month’s rent for a place like this. There was no key. Bobbie, from the other side of the door, told me to hurry up.
I said, ‘I can’t open it. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait outside. Cough if you hear anybody coming.’
That suited me, though I knew it wouldn’t please her. There was just one inside door downstairs. When I opened it, it led into the shop. There was a counter, with tracks of rat feet in the dust and a few droppings, a ball of string, some old flour bins, three empty tea chests. One shelf held a dog-eared collection of maps and charts, but apart from that the shop’s entire stock seemed to be on show in the window. Bobbie was pressing her face against the glass like a child locked out. I waved to her and went back upstairs.
The other door from the landing opened onto a room that was hardly more than a cupboard, windowless and entirely empty with distemper flaking off the walls. I went back into the main room, closed and latched the window and made sure the net curtain was pulled right across. It was a double layer of net, newer and of better quality than the rest of the place, like the lock on the door. Now my eyes were used to the candlelight I could make out more details. Two new filing cabinets stood on either side of the door that led to the staircase, a kitchen table and an office chair against the wall on the left. The wall opposite the window had no furniture against it and was entirely covered by what looked like a large map. I was taking the candle over for a closer look when there was a desperate tapping at the window. I drew the curtain back and there was Bobbie kneeling on the outside sill with one hand braced against the brickwork, mouthing curses at me. When I opened the window she came tumbling in, still cursing.
I said, ‘I thought I told you to keep watch outside.’
‘Have you found anything?’
‘Only disproved something. Wherever Verona stayed for those missing nineteen days, it doesn’t look as if it was here.’
There wasn’t a sign about the place that it had been lived in recently, not a bed, a blanket, a washstand. It didn’t have the feel of a room where anybody stayed. And yet according to Toby and Rizzo she’d come here, twice at least, and had her own key.
‘Looks quite efficient anyway.’
Bobbie had produced her own candle and was looking at the cabinets.
‘Efficient for what? You wouldn’t need all this to keep a run-down little chart shop.’
‘Perhaps it does most of its business by post. Probably what the map’s for.’ She took her candle over to it. ‘Can’t be much of a business, though. It’s only London.’
I went to look. It was London and the surroundings, from Greenwich out to Hammersmith, down to Herne Hill and up to Highgate. The whole map was freckled with little blobs in red ink, dozens of them. Each blob had a number beside it, in black ink.
‘There you are,’ Bobbie said. ‘Customers.’
‘For nautical charts in Paddington?’
I looked at the Chelsea area, wondering if this place itself was marked with a blob. It wasn’t, but there were a few red blobs not far away. The scale was so large that blocks of houses as well as streets were identifiable. One of them was familiar.
‘What’s up?’
‘I think it’s where Verona lived before she went missing.’
The student house, either that or very near it. Bobbie was looking at the top part of the map.
‘There’s one for you, Nell.’
‘What!’
She pointed. The candle flame wavered over the familiar network of streets off Hampstead High Street. I saw my own street and about halfway along it, much where my house would be, a red blob and the number: 191. It scared me, and what scared me most was that I didn’t know why it did.
‘Nell, what’s happening?’
Even Bobbie sounded concerned.
‘I don’t know. I promise you, I don’t know any more than you do.’
I felt as if I had to convince her, as if the red blob was accusing me of something although I didn’t know what.
‘Why the number?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not my house number. It’s not anything.’
‘It must be something.’
Bobbie walked over to the cabinet, pulled at a drawer.
‘Locked.’ She took a small screwdriver out of a pouch belted to her waist, signed to me to hold the candle close. ‘Never travel without one.’
The wood round the lock splintered, the draw ca
me open. Empty. She pulled open some other drawers, all released by the same lock.
‘Ah.’
File cards, quite new, held upright by a spring arrangement in the drawer. It was the sort of system an efficient librarian might keep. Bobbie picked out a card at random and showed it to me. It had a number on the top right-hand corner in the same careful hand as on the map. This one was 52. A name, address, then a few lines in a different hand. ‘Approx 5ft 7, swarthy complexion, dark hair, wears glasses. Schoolmaster. Holidays walking in Austria. Writes regularly to young woman in Vienna whose brother works in interior ministry.’ I stared at it.
‘I don’t seem to be on the map.’ Bobbie sounded regretful about it. ‘I wonder what they’ve got on you, Nell. What was the number? 191.’
She rummaged in the file. I wanted to stop her, but couldn’t think of a reason. She looked at a card and laughed.
‘What does it say?’
She handed it over. I read: ‘Eleanor Rebecca Bray (Nell). Dark hair, thin build, height 5ft 9 approx. WSPU. Communist. Travels frequently on Continent. Fluent in most European languages. Corresponds with associates Germany/ Austria/Hungary. Three prison terms, most recent for attack on Rt Hon. David Lloyd George.’
‘Attack, for heavens sake! All I did was throw stink bombs at him. And I’m not a communist.’
‘Somebody seems to think you’re dangerous anyway. Why you and not me?’
I ripped up the card, shaken and angry.
‘Don’t do that!’ Bobbie said. ‘They’ll know who’s been here.’
‘They? Who? And I don’t care.’
‘In that case, we might as well take some of them with us – see who’s on them and warn them.’
She picked handfuls of cards out of the drawer and stuffed them in her pouch.
The Perfect Daughter Page 11
