Free The Perfect Daughter by Gillian Linscott Page B

thoroughly while I was away shouldn’t have rated as much more than the normal course of events. The trouble was, I knew it was anything but that. The normal course of events was police coming in loudly and mob-handed, opening doors and cupboards, carrying crates of papers away. It was a rough but quite open business, a world away from this expert and surreptitious search that might easily have gone unnoticed. What made me shiver, what I couldn’t understand, was why anybody had gone to all the trouble. There was very little in my life that was secret – sometimes I’d felt I was living all of it on a public platform – but somebody believed there was and that it mattered.
    I slept. I was too tired to do anything else. In the morning I asked the neighbour who fed my cats if she’d noticed anybody going into my house the day before.
    â€˜I try not to be nosey, dear.’
    Which was true. She was on my side personally, if not politically, and was good at ignoring the goings-on next door.
    â€˜Police?’
    â€˜Oh no, nothing like that.’
    With some prompting, she thought she might have seen two men in the street outside in mid afternoon, ordinary working men in caps and rough jackets. Thinking of the men who’d collected Verona’s possessions from the student house, I asked if one of them had been wearing a red muffler. She hadn’t noticed. It was going to be another day with no progress on the fairy tales.
    I did what I’d done before when sorely perplexed and made my way to a little low building a few hundred yards from Liverpool Street Station. It has a cross over its corrugated iron porch and a faded mural of Jesus teaching the children on the wall inside. It was built as a Sunday school but now the sign outside, in neat white letters on a blue board, reads Archimedes J. Stuggs Chess Forum. It’s the haunt of some of the best chess players in London and – coincidentally or not – some of the most left-wing political desperadoes in Europe. Since my old friend the journalist Max Blume is passionate about both chess and politics, it’s usually a safe bet that I’ll find him there and I was lucky. He was standing by the tea urn, looking out over a room dotted with small tables. Three of them were already in use for chess games and he was probably following all three. Max looked even thinner and more worried than usual. He’s capable of being depressed about the political situation in places most of us could hardly find in an atlas.
    â€˜What’s wrong, Nell?’ He didn’t waste any time in conventional chat. He guessed it wasn’t a social visit.
    â€˜I’m being followed. My home’s been searched.’
    His eyebrows went up. He wasn’t shocked at what I’d said, only that I was making a fuss about something as obvious as rain being wet.
    â€˜I don’t mean in the usual way, Max. Followed most of the time and a secret search I wasn’t supposed to know about.’
    I told him about the escape coup and what had happened since. He listened, still apparently absorbed in the three chess games.
    â€˜Have you been consorting with revolutionaries?’
    â€˜No more than usual.’
    â€˜Suspicious foreigners?’
    â€˜Not particularly … oh God, yes. But surely…’
    I hadn’t told him about the Verona business at first, partly because I didn’t want to, partly because I couldn’t see that it was relevant. Now I remembered the student house and the man they called Rizzo. If Germany was the big bogey of the spy scares then Austria-Hungary came a close second. I explained what had happened, from finding Verona’s body to the disorderly household in Chelsea.
    â€˜But they were just artists and students, Max, trying to be important. I can’t imagine that even Special Branch would waste time watching a crowd like that.’
    But now I came to think of it the first time