Free The Perfect Daughter by Gillian Linscott Page A

to do what other people did – what I’d done myself in days that seemed now a lifetime away. I wanted to go for walks in the country, eat meals with time to enjoy them, go to concerts and walk down streets without wondering if anybody was following. Bill wasn’t ordinary in himself, but for a while he’d seemed to open a door back to that kind of life. Well, the door had closed again, just as I should have closed my door on him and kept him out of trouble. Stop fretting about it. Get on with work.
    *   *   *
    So I got on with work, until something else happened. It was two days after the police turned us out of Tothill Street. We’d had to set up another emergency headquarters all the way out in Notting Hill, knowing it would only be a matter of time before they pounced on us there. Somebody, I remember, sang two lines of a music-hall song to the stony-faced constables, ‘I’ve been thrown out of better joints than this before, so you won’t hurt my feelings if you chuck me out again.’ I’d had to put aside my translation work yet again. It was a long day and nearly midnight when I got home, only wanting to make a cup of tea and collapse for an hour or two. I turned my key in the lock and, even before I lit the gas, realised that somebody had been in while I was out. I’m not sure what it was that gave me the first warning, maybe no more than a smell or some sort of animal instinct. I lit the gas mantle, curious but not too worried. My neighbour and a dozen or so friends knew I kept a spare key under the back doormat. It was useful for making sure the cats were fed if I had to go away in a hurry or if a friend in trouble needed a refuge.
    I said: ‘Anybody at home?’
    I wouldn’t have been surprised – though not pleased, as I wanted to sleep – if Bobbie or somebody had called from upstairs. Nothing. The gas flame steadied and light spread round the room. No sign as far as I could see that anybody had been in, but since the living-room hadn’t been tidied for months, it wouldn’t be easy to tell. Bill’s lily-of-the-valley, faded now, were still in their vase on the piano. The place really was a mess – dust thick as a mouse’s fur on the piano top – except for a few inches. There was a narrow fan shape with no dust at all, just clear varnished wood. It was alongside some sheet music, Schubert, that had been lying on the piano since goodness knows when. Very recently, too recently for dust to settle, somebody had picked up the sheet music and put it down again. Who? I hadn’t played the piano since my New Year’s Eve party more than five months ago, or given even a passing thought to Schubert. There was a chair that might have been moved back from the table. A line of dictionaries on the bookcase that I thought had been level with each other now had one sticking out. The piles of letters waiting for answers beside my typewriter were tidy, which was a bad sign. They usually weren’t. Even so, I wasn’t totally sure that something was wrong until I sat down at the table and looked at my work in progress. Because everything else round me is usually in chaos, I’m ridiculously orderly about my translation work. I like to have my pad and pencils, my dictionaries and the book I’m working on placed so that I can sit down and pick up work exactly where I left it. This was all wrong. The pencils were on the left side of the pad, the dictionaries at right angles to it, not parallel. The postcard of Venice I was using to keep my place in the book was address-side uppermost, when I knew I’d left it photo-side up. I sat there, still in my coat, and shivered.
    Why? After all, almost everybody I knew had been raided. The police had been through the house only eleven days ago. We were all suspected criminals under observation. The simple fact that somebody had been in and searched my house quite