The Perfect Daughter by Gillian Linscott Page B

a positive invitation to the police to grab you by it. They were pushing us back and some of us were getting crushed against the railings. You either had to break out somehow or get over the railings on to the grass.’
    Cecily had taken the more aggressive option and broken out through a gap in the police cordon, but before that she’d noticed a little group of about half a dozen people helping each other climb the low railings to the comparative safety of the grass island round the monument. The girl who looked like Verona had been one of them.
    â€˜Around nineteen?’
    â€˜Could have been anything from sixteen to mid twenties. Do you want these in that box?’
    â€˜Leave them, they’re not dry yet. Did she look as if she was with friends?’
    â€˜I don’t know. You just help if you can, don’t you, whether you know somebody or not? There was one person I recognised though.’
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜Vincent Hergest. That was the other thing that made me remember her, that and the hair.’
    Distinguished company. Vincent Hergest was one of the best-known novelists in the country. He was in his early forties but still had a reputation as an interpreter of modern youth, particularly of independent-minded young women. People who worried about modern youth read Vincent Hergest to have their worst fears confirmed. Young people who hoped they were modern read him to find out what the qualifications were. He was a socialist in politics and, naturally, a firm supporter of the suffragettes. His great line was campaigning for peace by bringing the youth of the world together. He used some of the profits from his books to finance weekends and summer camps where students and workers from all over Europe held high-minded debates, and went swimming and hiking together. It was no surprise that Vincent Hergest had been at the deputation. No surprise either – to me at any rate – that he’d managed to keep out of the worst of the trouble. To be honest, I liked him less than a lot of my friends did. I had to acknowledge his financial generosity to us and I enjoyed his angry, witty letters to papers, but to me there was the whiff of opportunism about him. He managed to support risky causes in a way that ensured his reputation and sales figures didn’t suffer and he could go safely home to his mansion out Guildford way, to his wife, his collection of paintings and his little fleet of motorcars.
    â€˜You didn’t see what happened to any of them after they climbed over the railings?’
    â€˜Of course not. Did you know you’ve got purple ink on your nose?’
    That night I wrote a note to Vincent Hergest, care of his publishers, explaining about Verona and asking if he remembered meeting a girl like her on the day of the deputation. I wasn’t hopeful. Events like that throw complete strangers together for a few minutes, then they get separated again. Even if he did happen to remember a girl like Verona, his description would probably be no more conclusive than Cecily’s. I delivered the note to his publishers on Monday morning. The clerk in the post-room promised to forward it but warned me that it wouldn’t get to Mr Hergest for some days. He’d just left for Paris to do research on his latest book and wasn’t expected back before next week. Then I walked to Oxford Circus, jumping gutters still flooded from yesterday’s storm. Thinking back to my last conversation with Verona in March, I had another idea for trying to fill in those blank twenty-five days. She’d informed me, rather smugly, that she was studying ju-jitsu and confirmed that it was at one of Edith Garrud’s classes. Just beside Oxford Circus, in Argyll Place, the sign over the door, painted in vaguely oriental lettering, read ‘Garrud’s Academy of Ju-jitsu’. From upstairs, regular thudding sounds and a female voice – ‘One, two, three and swing ’