The Bad Sister (3 page)

I found myself giving a little grunt of satisfaction. ‘And did she introduce you to a woman named Margaret?' I asked in a voice as soft as Stephen's. He fiddled with his dog collar (it seemed more and more strange that he should be a friend of these Wild women, but then nowadays one must accept new mixtures, such as radical gay clergymen or the like) and frowned before answering, more tentatively than usual: ‘Do you mean Meg? How could you know about
her
?'

I explained there had been a women's commune in Scotland, and the ringleader had been a fierce woman by the name of Margaret. Looking back through Luke Saighton's letter, I realized she had never been properly described, and was therefore unable to get corroboration from Stephen, except that he agreed the woman Meg was also indescribable. ‘I didn't meet her often, but she always seemed to look different,' was how he put it. I thought for a moment of jokingly remarking that the days were long past when this changeability of appearance was known as being ‘journalière' – you'd more likely get reported to the Sex Discrimination Board if you remarked on a woman's looks in this way. But I decided against it: he was of the protest generation despite his mild Church of England looks, and might decide to stop confiding in me. It was enough that this stranger had walked into my study and described what sounded very like the ‘corbies', only grown in number – for he went on to say that Jane's mother was Mary, that she was Irish, and that ‘Meg' was very much in control of the place.

‘Did Jane ever refer to the name Dalzell then?' I asked.

‘No. No, she didn't. Her name was Wild like the others, of course. But she did say she had met her father once, when her mother had taken her to his new home in
London, demanding money. He wouldn't give it, but he offered to send Jane to a boarding school, which she accepted.'

‘A private school?'

‘Yes, the commune was up in arms about it but Jane escaped and went there for a couple of years. She hated the set-up by then, I think, and wanted an ordinary…'

‘Bourgeois,' I put in, trying to keep a straight face.

‘Exactly. She would have liked the childhood Michael Dalzell's legal daughter was having. Ponies, coming-out parties, everything. She was sick of the rhetoric and of being on the wrong side of the police. But in the event, the boarding school sickened her too. By the end, I mean. She found the girls limited and the teachers snobbish. So she returned to the fold. This meant that Meg's influence over her increased considerably.'

‘And what was that? What did she do to her?'

Stephen laughed as if he was surprised, and then gave a loud sigh.

‘I'm sorry. I lived for so long worrying about what Meg would do to Jane that it's difficult to imagine that you know so much about the whole background and yet you don't know that. Well, to go back to that first meeting with Jane and the evening in the women's house, the atmosphere there was absolutely terrifying. The room I was allowed to sit in, I remember, was dark red, and although it was very much out of context, I couldn't help thinking of the front parlour of a grim Victorian brothel. While we sat and talked, several women flitted in and out, and they all had the same expression on their faces – self-contained and dedicated, eyes to the ground, like nuns but with very different, striding movements. Jane's mother brought us some coffee. She looked tired and strained, and I had the feeling she had been taken over there without knowing what she was letting herself in for, and now couldn't get out. Then Meg came in. All the women present turned to her automatically, as if waiting for orders: the strangest thing was the way they turned, though, like votaries in a temple,
swinging around, eyes half-closed and then standing completely still, waiting for Meg to speak. I'll never forget it.'

‘And Jane?' I said, privately wondering if Stephen had gone into the Anglican Church as a reaction against all this. ‘Did she swing round too?'

‘No. Not really. She'd been away at school until fairly recently, I suppose, and hadn't got back into the habit of complete obedience to Meg. But I could see it was Jane that Meg was most interested in. Little did I know then, of course, what she wanted me
for
.'

‘And did Meg give any orders?'

‘Yes. Her voice was surprisingly light – almost chatty. It was her eyes that were frightening: grey and prominent and when they were fixed on you you felt it was your duty to do exactly as she said. She told them some place they were all to go to the next day – I wasn't really listening but I do have a vague memory of Islington being mentioned, and then seeing in the papers the next evening there'd been a bank hold-up there. I wondered if it could possibly be them. The atmosphere was like that, you see, nervous and evil, with a tremendous wall of control imposed from above by Meg.'

‘Poor Jane,' I said after a while. ‘Did she get away again?'

‘Oh yes. She was fond of her mother, I think, and sometimes stayed for her sake. But she ran off a short while later, got a job and found a room…'

‘What kind of job?'

‘I think she started as a reporter. She went up quickly. She wrote about cinema, and in the last couple of years, before the … the relapse she had, she was film critic for a big magazine. Yes, she was doing well.' Stephen shook his head, like a disapproving uncle. I wondered how much he
did
know, whether he had known all along that Jane had gone to kill Dalzell and then his daughter, rather than coming to the conclusion only now, on receiving the document. He must have read my thoughts then, for he leaned even further over my desk, and said in his soft voice, ‘Until I read this journal of hers, I can assure you I had no idea of what Meg was doing to Jane. I knew she had
influenced her a great deal in the past, but I thought Jane was a long way from all that by then. She was living with a boyfriend too. It was tragic.'

Stephen and I sat for a while in silence. He was clearly upset, remembering the gruesome events of ten years back, and I too was thinking of the evening, in March 1976, when Michael Dalzell lost his life. I opened the clippings file, and looked again at the photograph of the outside of his Hampstead House. I looked once more at a news picture of Michael Dalzell – he had grown plump and middle-aged by 1976, had taken on the features of a prosperous banker, which indeed he was – and then I flipped the photographs over until I came to the ones of him dead. There was a neat bullet wound over his left eye, which was open and round under it. He looked aggrieved and resigned at the same time. A black tie, sign that he had been at a formal dinner party, was tied very straight under his chin.

‘The extraordinary thing is,' Stephen said, ‘in this journal of hers Jane doesn't mention the affair of Mr Dalzell at all. It was the distorted version of getting the girl that made me first think …'

I looked up and nodded at Stephen, then went back to glancing through the clippings from the newspapers and reconstructing the night of the parricide. Michael Dalzell and his guests were halfway through fillet of veal with wine and mushrooms when the butler went to answer the front door bell. Louise Dalzell, who had died a few years before, had been replaced by a succession of girlfriends, and one of these was in the hostess's chair, sipping wine and remaining quiet during the business conversation. (She announced later that she had thought of going out to answer the bell herself because she was so bored, and her decision not to had probably saved her life.) The butler returned and told Mr Dalzell that his daughter was outside, and had a gift for his birthday. She would like to give it to him personally if possible, and was sorry to come at an inconvenient hour.

Now Michael Dalzell knew it was nowhere near his birthday, but in his slight drunkenness he became easily
sentimental and imagined the visitor to be his legal daughter, who lived on her own now, much to his disappointment, as he had hoped she would stay on in Hampstead and care for him after her mother's death. He rose to his feet with a beatific smile. One of the guests said he tripped, but quickly corrected himself, on the rug by the dining room door. The next thing they heard was a shot. By the time they had run out into the hall, there was no sign of anyone – the front door was open, and Michael Dalzell was lying half in and half out – and they dragged him into the hall and closed the door (not that it would have made any difference to him), for it was a cold March night.

The butler was at first suspected of being mixed up in the Dalzell killing. He was a temporary, and therefore, having never met ‘the real Miss Dalzell', could hardly be blamed for letting another woman convince him she was Dalzell's daughter. But his descriptions were very odd and contradictory and he was watched for some time, although it was obvious he would have been unable to commit the crime (after he had answered the door and called his employer, he had gone to the pantry and stayed with the parlour maid). He said at first that two women had come to the door, but one had been standing so much in the shadows behind the one who said she was Dalzell's daughter that he hadn't been able to make her out at all clearly. Then he said that as he had gone to inform the banker of the visit he had looked back and only the second woman was standing there, the first having disappeared. He described her as tall and brown-haired. When he was questioned as to why he went ahead to the dining room leaving the front door open and a total stranger standing there, there were no satisfactory answers. He only said the ‘gift was now in the other woman's hands' and he thought ‘Miss Dalzell must be behind her for some reason'. That was all.

I handed Stephen the clippings and asked him if this made sense now there was a chance that it had indeed been Jane, and Meg standing in front of her. Stephen shrugged. ‘I don't think you were listening just now when I said it's
odd there's no mention of the event in the journal. Jane could have been hypnotized, you know – either when she was there, and shooting her father, or afterwards into forgetting she had been there at all. God knows what new powers Meg had over her by then.'

‘But you didn't know that Jane had been seeing Meg again? And what “powers” do you mean?' (I was conscious of feeling slightly uncomfortable: was Stephen going to try to persuade me that the killer of the Dalzells had been suffering from diabolic possession? That he had tried to exorcize the demon and had failed?) I felt this was going a bit too far, and said so.

‘I did suspect that Jane was seeing Meg again,' Stephen replied. ‘But you must understand that she was very much in two minds about the whole thing. On the one hand, Meg and her mother had brought her up to fight capitalism, to be in a state of perpetual war with the society they lived in, and she was a radical by temperament, and on the other she wanted peace and harmony, which it seems she could never find. As for the diabolic qualities of Meg, I don't know how else you would describe them. Have you never felt real evil?'

‘Well, what were these powers,' I said again. No doubt Stephen wanted to protect his friend, whether she was dead or alive, and by believing she had been ‘possessed' at the time of the crimes he could condone them.

‘I began to grasp them when I went to see Meg shortly after the murder of Mr Dalzell,' Stephen said after a short pause. ‘Jane had recently seemed very agitated and confused and all the newspaper reports of his Scottish background, etc. made me uneasy. I knew she had seen Meg again and I wanted to try to have it out with her. But – and whether you believe this or not is up to you – Meg threw me off course from the beginning. I rang the bell and one of the small (female – the boys were sent away) children let me in. It was quite dark in the hall and there were rows of bicycles stacked there. Then the door of the red room, the visitors' room, opened. I saw Jane quite clearly standing against the
light. One of the bicycles was in the way and I couldn't see her legs and feet, but from the waist up it was definitely Jane. The only snag was that I knew Jane was at a film showing on the other side of London. I'd spoken to her just as she set off, so as to make sure I
wouldn't
bump into her when I went to see Meg. Then she turned and went back into the room, and Meg's voice called to me to come in. I went – and there was Meg and no one else. I remember it was a very windy day, and cold, but the window was open at the top and some white blossom was blowing in. It had settled on Meg's hair, like confetti. But I can't think of a less likely bride! Well it's possible she was up to that kind of trick at Michael Dalzell's house and Jane wasn't there at all. It all depends on what you believe.'

‘It certainly does,' I said. I knew I sounded cold, but I was beginning to feel that Stephen wouldn't be the ideal witness, as I had hoped.

‘So what did Meg say?' I went on.

It was terrible. I realized that she had spun a web round Jane from which she would never be able to extricate herself. There was nothing, no method of persuasion she hadn't used. She'd persuaded Jane, I think, that if she killed her father and her half-sister, the Dalzell money would go to her, as the natural child – and if there was any trouble she, Meg, would see to it that there'd be a big court case, and all the women out in force. (All this I worked out afterwards, wondering about Meg's motives, but once I saw it was the money that was wanted for the group, it was simple.) I don't know how she convinced Jane she wouldn't be found out but, after all, none of them ever was. It was only since the second killing that I began to realize all this and then they'd all disappeared. It was an extraordinary gamble, for Jane coming forward and claiming the fortune would certainly have made her a suspect. But there was no proper evidence against her for either crime. The butler in Hampstead saw either two women, or one woman, and was so upset by the disguise, or change, or whatever it was, that he refused to swear to anything. In the case of the second
killing, the girl was found in a street bleeding to death from a neck wound, at the time where there were plenty of witnesses who saw Jane at a party. They would have pulled it off if the vital ingredient hadn't vanished into thin air.