The Bad Sister (27 page)

She held the letter out behind her back. She was ashamed that I should see her crying, I suppose. And I must confess I'm not too good with over-emotional women. I went and took it.

Eliza asked me to leave, and read it at home. By which she meant Robina's, no doubt – but I just didn't have the heart to tell her that I was really going home, in under an hour. So I took the letter and left.

Oh, Mara, this is a frightful thing.

I was so relieved at first, when I sat for just a wee minute to read the letter, on Robina's fender in the club room. It's written in a childish hand, like someone who's barely learned to write or read. And it uses childish language, too, when it thanks Eliza Jekyll for all the kindness she has shown – quite honestly I wouldn't have been surprised if it had gone on to say “thank you for having me”, like children are taught to write when they've been to a party! But then she went on to say that she knew she had done something wicked. That she must run. And that she would be safe, for she was going far away to a place where she would never be discovered. Nor would she ever “trouble” Eliza again – I was reminded of the language of an old-fashioned servant, just as much as a child.

I admit that, although I was sorry that Mrs Hyde might never be brought to justice, I was too happy that Eliza should be removed from her influence to care over much about it. Whatever Eliza had done in her youth, she surely didn't deserve as heavy a yoke as this woman round her neck for the rest of her life.

Robina Sandel came in and I showed her the letter.

She in turn told me about the murder weapon.

My blood runs cold as I write this. Thank God we have now crossed the border and are home. But the Christmas trees they have planted on the hills make me think of Germany – and of Robina's distinctly unpleasant laugh when she handed me back Eliza's letter.

Robina, working for the Resistance, became an expert on calligraphy. And just as much as the umbrella with the parrot's head is Eliza's – I remember it in the hall of her flat when I went looking for her that day – so is the letter from Mrs Hyde no more than a disguised form of Eliza's writing, writing known to Robina, who received a letter from her regarding a garden committee decision only the other day.

What has that wretched girl got herself into?

She must be deeper in with Mrs Hyde than ever before. Did she know her umbrella had been taken quite coolly from the hall, to commit murder?

Presumably. In which case she is doing her best to cover up for Mrs Hyde, who had killed a man and must answer for the crime.

We've crossed the border now and soon I'll be home.

When I've finished my book on the origins of sin I shall work on the Enlightenment in Edinburgh, that most wonderful of cities; and I shall study the works of Henry Cockburn, the judge whose happiness came from a childhood in these hills.

It's dark already, and I want light.'

IT IS AUGUST
, and half a year has passed since the scandalous killing of a man in the communal gardens in what
Newsweek
referred to as ‘West London's Yuppie Paradise'.

In the six months since the crime, there have been no less than 230 sightings of Mrs Hyde, from as far afield as Rio de Janeiro and Reykjavik, and – more frequently – Dieppe and the Costa Brava. Descriptions of the case as an inverted Lord Lucan are inevitable – or so the tabloids claim, painting a picture of the ‘murderess' as a wronged woman, somewhere between an abandoned mistress and an underpaid drudge, who wrought her revenge on a member of the aristocracy.

For the victim was none other than Jeremy Toller, younger brother of Lord Pilsdon. A businessman, local magistrate and connoisseur of fine arts, Toller was soon removed from any suspicion of having been the Notting Hill rapist by the simple fact of the rapist's arrest while breaking in and attacking the landscape gardener Carol Hill only a few days after Toller was found dead.

Such an outbreak of violence in the gardens brought, not surprisingly, a flood of reporters and grisly crime-fans, eager to relish the atmosphere of the well-kept private park where a woman had battered a man to death. Some of these made their way to Robina Sandel's house at No. 19 Nightingale Crescent – and, in the case of the more wily and unscrupulous among them, they dressed up as Austrians, ‘old friends' of Tilda's anxious to see her on their visit to London.

Robina, however, kept all callers at bay. And Mara Kaletsky left the country on the day after the crime – too deeply shocked, it was rumoured, by the reality of Mrs Hyde's act (though championing her cause energetically in the days before it took place) to stay in the neighbourhood. And there was another reason, as became clear when it was finally possible to glean information on those confusing days round the time of the murder: on February the fourteenth, quite unexpectedly, Sir James Lister closed down the Shade Gallery and announced plans to develop the site as a club/restaurant, with multi-level cinema and health facilities. Mara had, after all her work and preparation, lost her exhibition and suffered damage to her reputation as a painter and photographer. But that, as Robina Sandel commented grimly, is what England has now become – a ‘quick-change artist', is the expression she used, I think, meaning that everything this country had once represented is liable overnight to be turned into its opposite.

Apart from Robina's further comments on the recognizable tide of Fascism she saw engulfing us all, there is little else of importance concerning events on the gardens, their precursors and consequences. This is partly because Jean Hastie's brief return to London in May did not take her to Robina Sandel's but to the Bay Hotel in West-bourne Grove. As Mara was abroad, there was probably little to persuade her to revisit the scene of the tragedy. Jean's fleeting visit and return to Scotland have dictated, however, my own journey north, to see Mrs Hastie and obtain from her, if possible, an account of those days in May. Her information, unless it consists exclusively of researches concluded at the British library, can hardly fail to shed some light on the sudden decline of Dr Frances Crane.

I leave for Fife tomorrow, August the twelfth. Six months to the day, indeed, since the killing of The Honourable Jeremy Toller by Mrs Hyde. 

I should have guessed, on the ‘Glorious Twelfth', that a good housewife and mother such as Jean Hastie would be out on the moors with sandwiches and flasks of soup for the guns – that is, those like her husband and other worthies of the neighbourhood whose one desire is to return with a brace of grouse for the larder. I hadn't counted on the fact of Jean Hastie's being one such herself; and I must say it came as something of a shock, after reading all the morbid details of the Notting Hill case, to find her – I'd been directed from their farmhouse to a heatherclad stretch of hill, where estate waggons and Land Rovers could be seen, parked by a ruined cottage and a small burn – looking straight down the barrel of a gun at me.

That the shoot in progress was elsewhere was Jean Hastie's first assurance; less reassuring, I thought, was her statement that she hadn't seen me coming up the hill (though I'd been only too painfully aware of the foolishness of leaving my hired Ford Sierra at the bottom and tackling a steep ascent, even causing shouts of annoyance as I put up some birds), and the succession of thoughts that then came to me, I must admit, were quite a bit to do with the likely veracity of a witness who is both shortsighted and – presumably – hard of hearing. Ask I did, all the same, first introducing myself as a friend of Dr Frances Crane; and soon I was settled in the heather next to Mrs Hastie's picnicking site. While waiting for the next drive, she told me what she remembered of the days she had spent in London in May.

‘Yes, it's a terrible thing,' Jean Hastie said. A cloud of pollen rose around us as I settled myself and I saw her for a moment through a brownish haze: she looked like a woman in an old sepia photograph, distinctly Victorian then, or so I thought; and I wondered if I would ever get the whole truth from her. She could easily, for reasons of discretion, hold something vital back: she could, I reflected with some irritation, have long ago decided to see life permanently through a sweet-scented, enveloping haze.

‘I certainly did go and see Frances.' Jean offered me a
drink of home-made lemonade from a stoppered bottle. ‘I knew we were destined to become friends – as soon as we met at Robina Sandel's in February. It was the tension, I suppose, in the atmosphere then, that stopped us hitting it off immediately.'

‘The tension caused by the rapist being at large?' I asked.

‘Certainly. In my view some people had got the whole thing out of proportion.' Jean Hastie sighed, as if she alone were in possession of the secret of the important things in life, the threat to life itself – or, at the very least, to self-confidence – posed by an attack from a multiple rapist not being one of them. ‘Mara Kaletsky for one. I honestly don't believe that an innocent man would have been killed if she and her – her friends hadn't incited that terrible woman to acts of violence. She'd already tried it once before, you know.'

‘Who? You mean Mrs Hyde?'

‘Yes. Mara told me she'd gone for Sir James Lister. He was walking down the street – to the corner of Ladbroke Grove, I think she said – and Mrs Hyde came charging at him and nearly broke his leg. With a wheeled shopper, or so Mara said.'

‘Really?' I was beginning to see the vanishing murderer of Jeremy Toller in a new light; but what it was I couldn't at that moment quite tell.

‘At least she's gone for good.' It was evident that Jean had pursued her quarry with the same tenacity her journals were to show. It occurred to me, slightly uncomfortably, that evil women like Mrs Hyde have a fascination for women such as Jean Hastie: as if a whole buried side to their nature, coming alive for a moment or so at the mention of the crime or whichever wicked deed, stirs pleasurably in them before subsiding again. It may account for the gigantic popularity of murder mysteries in England, I thought, and their huge female readership – for all the ‘liberation' of the past couple of decades. And as for Scotland … we weren't far, it occurred to me, on this lonely hill, from the scene of many murders in border keeps
… and tales, too, of
doppelgängers
and people metamorphosed to beasts or three-legged stools, somewhere in the depths of the woods.

‘What
is
good about the whole thing,' Jean Hastie said, ‘despite the infuriating slowness of the police in catching Mrs Hyde, is the marked improvement in Eliza Jekyll since the terrible woman has stopped battening on her. Yes, we all had dinner together – at her place – in May; and the other good thing is that Frances Crane was there. They'd fallen out over something, apparently – at least, in February they clearly weren't on speaking terms – yet in May, the seventh, I think it was, they were getting on like a house on fire. Monica Purves was there, too.'

‘And Frances Crane seemed perfectly well then?' I said.

‘Oh yes.' Jean Hastie shook her head in disbelief. A shout went up and a group of beaters appeared, signalling that the guns should return to their butts. Jean rose. I asked if I could go with her.

‘Ye'll have to keep very quiet.' A schoolmistressy tone was employed to deliver this, and a markedly Scottish accent. I began to wonder if Mrs Hastie considered Frances Crane's misfortune to be mostly of her own making. Yet I was all the more determined to discover what Jean – possibly the last person to see her sane – had picked up in their final meeting.

The dinner had been so pleasant, Jean said, that she decided to forfeit a morning at the British Library and go and call on Dr Crane instead. She went first to the practice, in Walmer Road, where one of the two partners, Dr Bassett, said Dr Crane hadn't come in or phoned yet – and that this, while being most inconvenient for a line of waiting patients, was also most unusual. ‘Then I went to her flat,' Jean said. ‘No answer when I rang the bell. Of course I thought nothing of it. In fact I was quite glad to get back to the Library.'

This was the pattern of events on the eighth, ninth and tenth of May. Once the front door had been opened by a woman who said she came in to clean twice a week and that
Dr Crane wanted to see no one. On the eleventh of May (and here, I must say, I had to feel grateful for Mrs Hastie's perseverance) at seven in the evening, Jean stopped in Rudyard Crescent on the way back from completing her researches and banged once more on the door.

‘The shock,' Jean said. ‘I'll never be able to forget it.' We were crossing the burn on a small ford of flattish stones as she spoke, and for a moment Mrs Hastie looked as if she were going to lose her footing. Instead, with nothing worse than a wet brogue to contend with, she pulled herself up on the bank, where sheep's pellets lay thick in grass entwined, at the water's edge, with wild nasturtiums. Out of breath, we panted on to the summit of the first hill, where the men had already taken up their positions in shallow dug-outs in the heather.

‘She looked, literally, forty years older!' There was something eerie about the way Jean Hastie spoke, as if the memory had indeed been of seeing a ghost. The breath-lessness added to the sudden, shaming sense of panic which seemed to have overtaken us both, on this calm hillside with nothing but the curlew swooping over harebells and ling.

‘She was … well, she was obviously dying,' Jean said in a matter-of-fact tone that belied her real feelings. ‘She couldn't speak. She was white – and lined – and her hair – I suppose it must have been dyed or something and I'd never noticed it was growing out at the roots – was half-way grey so she looked – well, she didn't look like herself at all!'

I didn't know what to say at this point. We watched a flight of birds go over and heard a volley of shots, but Jean didn't so much as put her gun to her shoulder. When she did resume her tale, it was only to describe her terrified rush to Robina Sandel's – ‘and thank God the woman was in' – and a phone call to Dr Crane's partner and then to the hospital.

‘They – they came and took her away,' Jean said, ‘with Robina and myself there to try and help her. But she wouldn't let us near her, you know. She was like a wild cat, hissing and scratching when we tried to come close. It
took two ambulance men and Dr Bassett to pacify her. But – in the end – she went.'

I couldn't help shuddering myself. But I suppose Jean Hastie must have recovered quite a bit since then. It was four months ago, after all, and she had never known Dr Frances Crane well. It seemed, as she returned to telling me about the delightful summer party Ms Jekyll had given on that evening just a few days before the collapse of Dr Crane, that she was definitely more interested in the ‘pink candlesticks on the chestnut trees – about a month ahead of the time they come out up here, I can tell you' and the real candles in art nouveau candlesticks that had adorned Eliza's table – than in the mysterious and horrible fate of the doctor. Maybe she's not so callous as she seems, I told myself as I saw Mrs Hastie, now fully composed after her tale, swing the heavy twelve-bore sky high and bring a bird whacking to the ground. Or, even if she is, this is no moment to antagonize her.

So I tried my most deferential manner, while congratulating her on being an excellent shot; and then just happening to ask if Dr Crane had been able to communicate anything at all to her new-found friend.

‘Yes, indeed.' Jean Hastie reloaded with care and deliberation. ‘She handed me an envelope.'

‘An envelope?' I felt like the stooge in a comedy turn. And, I reflected, there would be nothing to laugh about if only I could extract this envelope from Jean Hastie and take it to London with me.

‘I'm here on behalf of Frances Crane's family and friends,' I said. ‘It comes as a very great relief to learn that you have some kind of document which will clear this extraordinary matter up. Their gratitude, I can assure you …'

Again, I felt my words drying up. Jean was waving to a plus-foured man, her husband, presumably, who was strolling down through the hummocks of moss and heather towards us. The drive was over, then; and this was soon borne out by a posse of beaters appearing from over the top of the hill.

‘I'm afraid it's out of the question for me to show it to you,' Jean Hastie said. ‘Nor have I been apprised of the contents myself, I may say.'

‘You haven't …'

This time the husband (as indeed he was) had come near enough to call out a greeting and obscure my stumbling incomprehension following a repeated request to look at the material.

‘Written on the envelope,' said Jean Hastie with a cool, almost contemptuous glance over her shoulder at me, ‘are the words “Not to be Opened Unless the Disappearance of Ms Eliza Jekyll makes this Imperative”. I have, of course, complied with Dr Crane's wishes to this matter.'