The Perfect Daughter Read Online Free

either side of the clock face: HIGH TIDE. Someone would move the hands round, twice a day every day. No getting away from it anywhere. Verona would have known the tides. She grew up with them. She’d have known exactly how far each day the water rose and fell inside the boathouse. Known how long she’d stand there, feet bobbing on the plank, rope round her neck, until the tide went away and there was nothing under her but air and mud. The rope would have tightened before then, though. Tide drawing out of the boathouse, body following, feet first, until the pressure of the rope round her throat … Surely she’d have struggled? It couldn’t be in human nature not to struggle. But the commodore’s daughter was a girl of strong will, we all knew that.
    I was furious with Verona. If she’d appeared in front of me, I’d have slapped her. Of all the vain, selfish, hurtful, self-dramatising things to do. Killing herself was bad enough. Creeping home to do it, so that she’d almost certainly be discovered by her father or mother, was worse. Doing it in that horrible, self-tormenting way meant she’d put something into all our minds that would never go away. A girl, on a summer morning or evening, walking past her house, down through the paddock with the old pony nuzzling her for titbits, the walk out over the reed bed with the tide coming in and only the tops of the reeds showing. The tide draining out of the boathouse and the woman self-pinioned, waiting for it to strangle her. She’d wanted to make an impression on the world – I’d sensed that about her. But the world, in her first few months of trying, turned out to be less easily impressed than she expected. Perhaps the love affair went sour. So she’d turned back to the place that had been kind to her, and destroyed it and the people there more surely than if she’d planted a bomb.
    Half an hour to train time. I left the beach, emptied sand out of my shoes and picked up my bag. The police had assumed that I’d stayed overnight with my cousin and his wife. It was a natural assumption, but then they hadn’t been there the day before when Verona’s body had been carried up to the house on an old door grabbed from the woodpile, covered with a tarpaulin from one of the boats. A gardener and her father did the carrying. They put it down on the gravel outside the front door, so that Ben could make sure that Alexandra was upstairs before they carried it into the house. It was at that point, just before he went inside, that Ben spoke to me for the first time since I’d told him. He turned on the step and gave me a look as blank as slate.
    â€˜She was the perfect daughter before you got to her. The perfect daughter.’

Chapter Three
    I T WAS A LONG JOURNEY BACK TO LONDON . All I had to read was the newspaper from the day before. Durbar II had won the Derby at twenty to one. The Queen had attended the Derby Ball at Devonshire House. Parliament had shut down for the Whitsun recess – in spite of the fact that everybody expected civil war to break out in Ireland within days – and most of the party leaders had gone away somewhere to play golf. Paddington in late afternoon was full of families with hampers and buckets and spades getting away for the weekend to the coast or the river. I took the tram out to Haverstock Hill, then walked up to Hampstead, telling myself that I had to put Verona out of my mind for a while and concentrate on the job in hand, otherwise a lot of other people would be in trouble. It was reassuring to see a familiar figure lounging on the corner as I turned out of Heath Street.
    â€˜Good afternoon, Mr Gradey.’
    When I say he was lounging, I mean he was trying very conscientiously to lounge. I dare say they run classes on lounging and loitering for police officers of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard, but Gradey would never have won any prizes. The clothes were wrong