The Bad Sister (26 page)

Mara, proud of her ‘docudrama', says that without her ever-present Video 8 camera we'd have no idea of the talk or mood of the dinner in the flat that night; and that this is true is borne out by the abrupt cessation of Jean Hastie's journal after she returned to No. 19. Her last recorded thoughts are on the beauty of the winter evening and the distressing mess of the garden that lies between the fine houses of Nightingale Crescent and the back of Ladbroke Grove, making a sort of squalid courtyard between the two. So – Jean breaks off here, which is the greatest pity, as far as our investigations are concerned – and, for this evening at least, Mara takes over.

The sound on her loaned camera is working this time, and after the regulation tour of the table (gravadlax with dill sauce on mother-of-pearlized plates, French bread piping hot, fine china and slender white candles in silver candlesticks) we see first the hired help as he comes out of the tiny kitchenette at the side of Eliza's elegant room. ‘That's what they do these days, the high-fliers,' Mara says as we watch the man in a spotless tuxedo unload stores in the mirrored hall. ‘They get the whole thing sent round, staff and all, on a credit card!'

The guests, as Mara then points out gleefully, could have come as some package offer as well. Sir James Lister, proprietor of the Shade Gallery and much else, looks, in his smoking jacket of plum velvet with satin facings, like an ad on TV for port or some expensive liqueur. Lady Lister, in black beaded chiffon and lace, with hair as thin spun as the strawberry meringue the hired help is at this moment unpacking from a hamper, looks as if she were herself advertising a marriage bureau of the more discreet type. Then, in trousers and leather jerkin and bottle-green dress respectively, Monica Purves and Carol Hill come into focus. A small, almost hairless man – an art critic, Mara explains – is next. They all stand near the table, for the room, despite its painted avenues, is very small; and then
with a maddening deliberation that Mara speeds up for fun, they sit down.

Yes, it does seem that Eliza wants to talk to her friend Jean Hastie. She has Sir James Lister on the other side, it's true – and we hear on a loud and sighing soundtrack the tycoon's proposition that Eliza should meet him for a ‘Valentine's Day lunch in that little place in Holland Park Avenue?' and see her frown and then smile and agree. But it's to Jean she turns – as soon as the marinated salmon has been cleared away and magret de canard, with its exotic bilberry and cardamom sauces has been served – and it's on her face that Mara now trains her lens, so that she is in close-up, like stars in the movies used to be: Ingrid Bergman in
Casablanca
perhaps: appealing, mysterious.

Maybe one makes that comparison because Eliza Jekyll is not only looking quite outstandingly beautiful tonight, but young and – with which even Mara has to agree – surprisingly soft and vulnerable. ‘High-flier' she may be, but butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. Mara would say that this is because the butter, along with every other damn thing, is brought to the door, care of American Express. (Which means, she adds, c/o Sir James Lister, who is perfectly clearly paying for all this.) ‘Look,' Mara says as the camera hovers low and shows Sir James's hand on Eliza's knee. ‘And look at Lady Lister's face. She's none too pleased, if you ask me!'

Despite the booming conversation conducted by Monica Purves and the art critic on the subject of
glasnost
and the future of Soviet art, it is possible to hear Jean Hastie and Eliza talk; and if Mara cannot at times resist changing the camera angles in a fanciful way, it's still possible to get the gist of what they're saying.

Here we are shown the look of amazement on Jean Hastie's face. She must ask further – she has seen this unworthy recipient of Eliza Jekyll's charity in a light which, surely, Eliza should be told about: she mentions the visit to the betting shop, the children's allowances gambled away. Eliza, misty-eyed, shakes her head. She knows it looks bad … but doesn't Jean herself speak and act as she does now from feelings of an old loyalty? Imagine – so much this woman needs – life's impossible in London now, for the poor, the single mother – how can Jean Hastie refuse to help her?

She shall have the flat, Eliza says, and as she speaks she flinches away from the pressure of the hand under the table – looking, as she does so, like a bird caught in a net, fluttering, beseeching on either side. (‘They all look like that,' Mara says. ‘It's the post-feminist trick. Using the wiles of Marilyn Monroe to achieve the aims of Stalin.')

It must be said that a kind of basic decency in Jean Hastie does make itself discernible here. Worried, no doubt, by the kind of translucent quality Eliza seemed to project that evening (‘She was like – I can't describe it – something like the sky at home before a storm,' Jean told Robina Sandel) the Scots solicitor decided against pressing her case any further. Suggestions that a London conveyancing firm would be more suitable than herself for the drawing up of a lease brought only a violent shake of the head and
something very like tears forming in exquisitely made-up eyes. Jean, by the time the meringue and compôte of Caribbean fruits have arrived, has agreed to Ms Eliza Jekyll's request. And conversation becomes general, with property prices (an indignant Monica Purves) and a sale in Somerset of netsuke daggers (Sir James) which he and his wife will visit the next day, taking precedence as topics on this occasion over the Notting Hill rapist. No doubt this is because Mara Kaletsky, wandering out into the hall to get a long shot of the dinner table, has found a door among the panels of age-stained Venetian glass and opened it to go through.

Robina Sandel tells me it took her niece some time to shake her awake, the morning after the murder.

It was the thirteenth of February – ‘Friday the thirteenth', as Robina says with that wry smile which both discounts and accepts old superstitions. She'd been dreaming – tropical birds and jungles, the dream had been. Maybe it reflected the terror that stalked them each night, she said, ready to pounce like a wild beast through carelessly open window, or ventilation shaft: maybe, again, the brightly coloured birds she saw were prophetic, omens of the bloody murder to come. For Tilda was sure of one thing, when her aunt was finally propped up on a pillow, eyes wide open with the shock of Tilda's screams. It was a parrot that had killed the man – deep into his throat, with its beak.

It took some time to make sense of Tilda's story. She was sleeping upstairs now – and sleeping better than she had been when down in the basement, with the door straight out to the shrubbery Robina never got round to trimming. She, unlike her aunt, had dreamed of war; and this time there was no need for magical beliefs to trace the origins of the dream. Twice she had woken and heard the very real sound of a police helicopter overhead. Perhaps because she
felt safe in the attic she'd dozed off again without much difficulty. Everyone knew the sound was a sign of another ineffective hunt for the rapist (some said he must be a member of the police force, to evade them so often) and yet, at an unconscious level, Tilda didn't care enough to wake up or go downstairs. It was something else that had woken her finally – and she and Robina had to laugh later about ‘ze birds', as Mrs Sandel termed the nocturnal visitants to her and her niece's sleep that night – it had been the cry of an owl.

Tilda got up and went over to the mansard window in her tiny, sloping-walled room. She felt cold all over, she said: was it because the owl's hooting had come after the sound of the chopper had died away, thus showing the criminal uncaught and triumphant? Or was it, as the gullible Tilda was only too prone to believe, because the ‘bad karma' of that evil woman Mrs Hyde in the gardens had floated up to her in her perch above the trees and told her of the approaching crime? Poor Tilda, whichever way it was, she was the last person who should be subjected to witnessing such a scene.

Mrs Hyde was visible – when Tilda had crawled out on to the ledge by her window and looked down – because something had set off the electronic security light in the Tollers' garden, several doors down.

She caught the man round the neck with her left arm. She'd come up behind him, as if she were about to overtake and wham! she'd hooked him with the left while the right brought this instrument down on the man's head. The spotlight had shown up, in its unblinking white light, the blood of the man as it spurted on the grass by the side of the path.

And the instrument – Tilda was sure of this because the scarlet paint of the beak had shown up strong in the beam – was one of those umbrellas you can get in the posh shops by Mr Christian's delicatessen at the end of the Crescent where it meets Portobello Road. An umbrella with a long, elegant handle and a parrot's head.

Jean Hastie took the train north later that day. She was too shaken, she told Robina Sandel, to stay on at No. 19. She wanted to see her husband and children.

The atmosphere of jubilation in the gardens was more than she could stomach, too. ‘I suppose I can just about understand,' she wrote to Mara, once safely ensconced in the noon express to Waverley, with tray-table, pen and a folder of notes on the Gnostic Gospels arranged in front of her. ‘If you've been at the mercy of this man for so long you must feel some sense of overriding relief that he won't trouble you any more. But surely a murder is still the taking of the life of a human being? And it frightens me that you – and those such as Monica Purves – don't seem to consider men to belong to the human race any more. This can never be the route to a saner world. And remember: it is always a case of freedom of choice. None of us (other than the criminally defective) lacks the opportunity to refuse evil. As you will discover, important new knowledge on the origins of sin and the thinking of early Christians is coming to light. The message of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is that we are responsible for the choices we freely make, good or evil, just as Adam was.

Mrs Hyde is a killer and must be punished for her crime.

You speak of compassion for such as she. But she is where she is as a result of choices freely made by none other than herself.

Mara, I won't go on preaching at you. I want to tell you how pleased I was to see you again. But then of course this whole thing came along and overshadowed our reunion – my work – everything.

And now I must tell you of my last, hurried meeting with Eliza before I went off to catch the train.

I felt more and more apprehensive, as you might well imagine, at the contract Eliza had requested for transfer of her apartment to Mrs Hyde.

After the appalling and violent murder in the early hours
of this morning, I knew one thing at least: that neither heaven nor hell would move me to do this ‘favour' for her now. And I decided to go along there and tell her, face to face.

Mara, I myself feel a great sense of relief.

If one good thing has come out of this lawlessness, it is the end of the relationship between Eliza Jekyll and Mrs Hyde.

Eliza came to the door in a lovely frothy pink
peignoir
. She'd obviously been asleep and looked a little haggard, I thought, but still perfectly beautiful – in a way, quite honestly, that I don't remember in her young days at the Ruskin. She had been warned earlier, she said, by the doorbell ringing and ringing, so she knew something must be wrong, but by the time she'd reached the front door, all she saw was the back of Roger Poole as he went at speed up Ladbroke Grove. “I called him,” Eliza said, “but with all that din from the roadworks, he couldn't hear me.”

It had been Mrs Toller who told her of the crime.

By that time there were policemen pouring into the gardens and a TV camera crew had tried to push their way through her flat. “I told them to use the gate in Ladbroke Grove,” Eliza said. She'd been quite annoyed by the intrusion, I could see.

“They tried next door?” I said – I don't know why.

Eliza flushed. Now she was getting really angry. “They think they can walk in anywhere, these people.” Then suddenly she burst into tears and came to put her arm round me. “Oh, Jean,” Eliza said. “I was such a fool, to allow that woman to trick me. Please forgive me for wasting your valuable time!”

I must say, I was only too pleased to hear all this, but I pretended to be very severe. “Eliza,” I said, “can you give me your word that you'll never have anything further to do with Mrs Hyde?”

A sort of convulsion seemed to run through poor Eliza – I really can't describe it, except to say I suppose it's the first time I've seen a shudder like that. It was, truthfully, like
witnessing someone meeting death coming towards them – and what's so terrible, they say, is that you see yourself walking towards you before you die. It was as if she was fighting something, Mara – she didn't turn round again (for now she'd gone to stand by her french window looking out on the garden in the gloom – so unlike yesterday!) but she said, in a low altered voice: “I've had a letter from her, Jean. I'll never see her again. Look, here!”