Free The Perfect Daughter by Gillian Linscott

became almost constant. I thought Special Branch must have been doing some hasty recruiting because though some of the old familiars like Gradey were still around, there were people I hadn’t seen before hanging about on the corner of my street or loitering in libraries I happened to be using. Gradually, they too became a part of the landscape. Then, glimpsed two or three times on street corners or on the far side of cafés, was the man I always thought of as Yellow Boater. Not that he wore the boater after that first day. I assumed it must be the plain clothes’ idea of how to be inconspicuous on a bank holiday weekend. Sometimes he was in a bowler, sometimes in a flat cap. Under the varying headgear was the face of a man in his thirties, clean-shaven apart from a neat dark moustache, with a dutiful, melancholy air.
    The reports on my movements, from Yellow Boater and the rest of them, must have been monotonous reading for somebody. Subject left home in the morning at eight o’clock. Spent morning either in libraries, usually the London Library in St James’ Square, or in police courts observing cases involving suffragettes, or at homes of known associates, most of them with police records. Consumed lunch of tea and Chelsea bun in ABC café (the amount of Special Branch petty cash spent on tea and buns in the course of duty would soon need its own column in their accounts), spoke at meetings in evening at which various derogatory things were said about Prime Minister, tram to Haverstock Hill and walk home, arriving 11 p.m. approx. What they couldn’t record, because it wasn’t happening, was any more evidence that I was assisting the escape of prisoners on licence. The spiriting away of June had been a coup for us, but it meant we couldn’t use my house again. I was surprised the watchers hadn’t worked this out for themselves, then I decided I might be overestimating the average intelligence of Scotland Yard.
    The reason why my watchers were getting so much time to improve their minds in libraries was that I’d managed to get a useful piece of freelance translation work. That’s my job, nominally, though what with one thing and another it had got neglected – to the point where many people who’d sent me work in the past diverted it to translators who were less likely to be in prison or tied up with murder investigations. Just when my finances were at their lowest, a friend recommended me to a children’s publisher who wanted translations of German fairy tales. It was the most interesting professional work I’d had in a long time, and a welcome distraction from everything else.
    Now and then, between work and the demands of being an enemy of the state, I thought of Bill. To be honest, I thought of Bill quite a lot. I hadn’t heard from him since he’d driven away in the cab and I wasn’t surprised. There he was, turning up for a day out, with his bunch of flowers and his expensive tickets and what had I given him in return? A police raid, a minor riot and a fight. On top of that, when I should have been taking pity on him, I’d gone in for some pointless boasting about my own student days that probably convinced him I was no fit company for a man with a career to think about. Not that Bill was a conventional ambitious barrister. We’d met because he’d been desperately trying to save a client from the gallows. We managed it, but he’d had to take some risks along the way. He’d known from the start that I was often on the wrong side of the law. What he couldn’t have known, until he turned up on my doorstep at the wrong time, was what that meant in practice. He’d done well, magnificently well, but I couldn’t blame him if he decided that was more than enough. Still, I cared about not hearing from him more than seemed reasonable and wished the day could have turned out as he’d wanted. I craved ordinariness. I wanted