The Perfect Daughter by Gillian Linscott Page A

An MO5 man, we think. One of the initials anyway.’
    â€˜How do you know?’
    â€˜Sticks out a mile. Calls himself Weaver.’
    Weaver seemed to be intent on the game now, under the unimpressed eye of his opponent, a cadaverous man with a grey beard.
    â€˜The man he’s playing comes from Prague. He has a reputation worldwide as a lepidoptericide.’
    I was so keyed up that it took me longer than it should have to work it out.
    â€˜Kills butterflies?’
    â€˜One of Europe’s foremost collectors. Naturally he corresponds with people all over the place in several languages. Weaver’s convinced he’s a master spy.’
    â€˜Why don’t you throw Weaver out?’
    â€˜Why? He’s doing no harm here and he might elsewhere. Anyway, we’re getting a lot of enjoyment out of him. Everybody wants to challenge him to a game.’
    â€˜You mean he’s a good player?’
    â€˜No, the game is to make as many deliberate mistakes as you can and still beat him. Thirteen’s the record at present.’
    We watched as Weaver hesitated, moved a piece, sat back to watch the grey-bearded man.
    Max shuddered. ‘If that’s the best the War Office can do, we’d better pray even harder for peace.’
    *   *   *
    Back at home that evening, I found an official letter with a Devon postmark among the mail. My presence as a witness was required at the opening of the inquest on Verona North at 11 a.m. on Wednesday 17 June.

Chapter Seven
    W HEN DID YOU LAST SEE VERONA? THEY MIGHT reasonably ask me that at the inquest and I’d have to reply that I wasn’t sure. There could have been any number of young women with reddish-brown hair outside Buckingham Palace on 21 May, and even if I could have identified her for certain, that still left a larger question unanswered. Where had she been during the rest of the twenty-five days from the time she left her room at the house in Chelsea to when I found her in the boathouse? Unless somebody could answer that, nobody could even make a guess at her state of mind. There was no reason why I should be the one to provide the answer, but I felt belatedly – and uselessly – responsible. Over the next few days I worked on the Buckingham Palace angle and found it as difficult as I’d expected. There’d been around twenty thousand people there in a constant eddying battle between our side trying to get to the palace and the police hellbent on stopping us. Everybody I spoke to had her own story of the day, but none of them included a girl answering Verona’s description until the Sunday before the inquest when myself and a few others were having a quarrel with a flat-bed printing press in an old coach house in Clerkenwell. Two days before, the inevitable had happened in the shape of yet another police raid on our makeshift headquarters in Notting Hill. This time they’d taken away boxes of posters and pamphlets. We needed more in a hurry and a nervous supporter had volunteered the use of his press, provided he wasn’t present. The coach house was paved with flagstones and plastered with cobwebs, and the press looked and behaved as if it dated from Caxton’s time and had been put together in a bad mood by one of his less promising apprentices. Add to that spiders the size of coffee saucers scuttling out of dark corners and a cataclysmic thunderstorm outside with rain pouring in gallons through holes in the roof, and you have one of the low points of our campaigning experience. Still, we got some posters printed at the cost of a lot of wasted ink and paper and several crushed thumbnails. One of the team was a woman called Cecily who’d been in the crowd around the Victoria Memorial. She remembered seeing a girl with long reddish-brown hair down her back.
    â€˜I noticed the hair, because it struck me she must be new to all this. For goodness sake, wearing your hair down like that’s