Hitler's Girls (3 page)

“Yes yes,” Jim is saying with the perfunctory manner of a man who is trying hard to hide a lifelong lust. “Mel… don’t you think you should look at the video now, Dr. Hastie?”

There, I had to admit, Jim Graham was right. Squeamishness, pity—whatever the mixture amounted to, I’d not been able to bring myself to witness on film the brutal murder of a woman I’d grown up with—even, in the long, lonely summers in that Borders mill town, loved. It was repulsive to me that bossy Mrs. Walker, from the recesses of her over-furnished semi, had been so cool as to take out a video camera and record the brutal death of a respectable, kind-hearted neighbour. Come to that, Jim had been quick enough to insist on copying the film. It was
even more repellent to imagine that the whole of Bandesbury Road, snug with cups of tea and crumpets, were right now sitting back and watching the assault on Monica Stirling. This was a land of Crimewatch—even Jim’s “virtual” grief seemed to fit in with the life-at-one-remove-ness of it all.

“There’s Mel, Dr. Hastie,” Jim said, pointing at the screen and placing his whisky on a little table already well-rimmed with the bases of highball glasses. “Just in case—well, if you hadn’t seen her for a while, as you said…”

A posse of girls comes down the street—the street I recognise in the video as Bandesbury Road. The girls are like aliens. Shaved heads. Bulging muscles. Tattoos everywhere—I see a swastika, a green bug-eyed serpent, and Celtic crosses on every inch of exposed skin.

The gang increases speed and starts to close the gap on its prey. A woman in a donkey-brown coat. Big shopping bag. Shoulder bag tucked under chin and strapped across the stomach: a careful woman. Shoes are clearly pinching: she stops and moves the weight of her shopping bag from right to left hand. As she stoops, her profile is visible. Monica—older, but definitely, recognisably Monica.

Now the gang closes round her. Jim’s house is in the background. Monica breaks away and runs up to her own gate. Hunted. Prey without hope of escape. Fifteen girls, tall, some
with chains. It’s hard to realise I’m only seeing a picture now: maybe because it’s here, it’s right outside in the street.

“I’ll rewind,” Jim says in that matter-of-fact way he has. I’m convinced this ex-journalist would rewind footage from the stitching together of Frankenstein without a qualm. And I understand I’m badly thrown by the experience of watching the tape. I pray for the frozen tableau to remain like that, stable, unmoving: the only way to ensure I miss out on the actual bloody details of poor Monica’s struggle and death is to concentrate on the girl.

“Yes, I wasn’t sure which was Mel,” I say a little over-eagerly—but Jim appears not to notice my blatant lie.

For of course I’d recognised Mel. My heart sinks to my shoes as the backwards dance of the rewind commences. Like figures in a nightmare receding, the gang races away from Monica along the dull stretch of Bandesbury Road. The girls pass a blond young man, who is staring up at a “For Sale” board outside a red, gabled house on the corner. I do indeed see Mel amongst them. She looks much as she did in the school photos Monica used to send me. She has a pudgy face, but she’s prettier now than she was. Though that’s not a word you’d use: her head is shaved even more closely than the other girls’ and her face, neck, and shoulders are so covered with tattoos you might believe her an ancient Briton, covered in woad.

“Your goddaughter,” Jim says. “With her friends Kim—she’s the Afro-Caribbean one—and Dev, the bottle blonde.” He rises and goes to the drinks tray. I find I’m shaking. I appear to have drunk my gin and tonic. Why do I allow Jim Graham to put his hand on the back of my neck, to take my glass from my hand, and to fill it up? I must go now—back to Monica’s house to lock up with the key she sent me” just in case” and make my way back to the Avondale Club.

I realise I haven’t found the answer to even one question. They’ve all been banished by the spectacle of Monica’s murder—for, of course, Jim hasn’t spared me. As I turned to take the proffered drink, the fast forward button propelled us into the climax of the scene. A hand on a long white arm, horribly firm… gripping the knife, knuckles white with the strain. The silent scream of the quarry, the spouting blood, the sudden dispersal of the gang down Bandesbury Road, leaving only a startled-looking estate agent turning away from the camera, mobile clamped to ear—calling the police, talking in short bursts into his phone—then the switch to the BBC, the evening news. All of this made it impossible for me to ask what I now do ask, very urgently: “Why do the police consider Mel to have been… to have been the one who killed Monica?”

Jim explains. He’s back on the settee beside me, and his knees are clamped against mine as if we are forced to endure a
ride on the seat of a bus that is too small to take both of us. “The knife, Dr. Hastie. Jean.”

I knew what this former investigative journalist and Foreign Correspondent was going to say. I didn’t want to hear it.

But Jim surprises me. I see he is a man of dull surprises—not unlike the crossword clues he and Monica used to pore over, word games contrived and unnecessary to life. I wait to hear his enthusiastic description of Monica’s barbecues, of the casseroles made from strips of meat, of the preparation of her
boeuf en daube
(she’d written to me about that, excited all those years ago by the
cuisine
of Elizabeth David). I waited, in vain, for the amateur theatricals of the knife.

“The knife is missing. The police think it came from Monica’s kitchen,” Jim says briskly. “But, as you have noticed, Jean, the whole place is in a bit of a mess. Doesn’t give the impression of a regular venue for—well—eating, relaxing, asking in the neighbours for a spot of chow. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I take the opportunity, as the mixed image of Mel on the screen begins to jump and flicker, to rise from the sofa and demonstrate, as only the British can, that I am preparing to leave. But Jim, after his sudden lapse into Colonial lingo, pays no attention whatsoever and adjusts the video control before leaning further back in his seat. Mel is framed fully once more: she resembles a Fayoum painting of a head, impossibly distant,
a representation of an unknowable woman from a pagan, forgotten shrine.

“You see, Jean, Monica hadn’t been keeping her house too clean, as perhaps you perceived.” I bristled here—did Jim suggest I was not one to notice gross disorder in a home? For a moment I was about to remark crossly that I had, of course, seen the gap in the arrangement of knives on the wall of Monica’s kitchen. I almost informed this pompous and self-important man that the fine set of knives had been a gift from none other than myself—several Christmases back, when Monica wrote that she was thinking of taking up Chinese cooking. Had even gone so far as to buy herself a wok. Then I reflected that to boast of buying the murder weapon used on one’s childhood best friend would render Jim the less crass one out of the two of us. The memory of my jovial phone call to Monica that Christmas Day brings tears to my eyes: “Now you can chop to your heart’s content,” I said. Why on earth did I never come to London and visit Monica when she was still alive?

Why, for that matter, had I not known she had let herself go—and the house along with her? Had she gone to pieces at the death of her mother and her husband, Ian? I began to feel sorry for Mel—until the dreadful evidence of the knife raised its blade in the mind. But was it strange that a fifteen-year-old girl would run away from a home so neglected and sad?

“Dr. Hastie!” Jim says. He uses the formal address but he makes it sound like the first move in a serious, possibly sexual attack. “There is more to all this than you think. May I suggest you come and sit down again and hear it?” And the neighbour of Monica Stirling pats the vacated sofa seat with his hand—as if, I cannot help thinking, I am a child or a pet dog. “You see, when Monica came to see me on Saturday night she was frantic with fear. I confess, I was astonished to see her at my door. She’d let her house slip—well, I put that down to grief at her bereavement, even if it was quite a while ago. Women can be affected that way when they live alone, it’s a well-established fact.”

I have tried to eliminate my responses to Jim Graham and his frequent offensive remarks while editing the account he gave me on the night of Monday, March 4th, the account of the last time he saw Monica Stirling. I did not, however, accept the invitation to join Mr. Graham on the settee in front of the permanently renewed image of Mel. I stood where I was, coat still in hand, by the door.

“You won’t mind if I’m frank with you, Jean.

“The sight of Monica Stirling in a housecoat was the opposite of a big treat. I want to get rid of the idea there was anything between us—OK? People talk. Mrs. Walker next door is the chief of the tittle-tattles and the last thing I wanted was a whip-around for a wedding as a result of poor Monica turning up on my doorstep at eight on a Saturday night with her housecoat unbuttoned. Flimsy nightie underneath, you know the kind of thing.

“‘Come on in, Monica,’ I said. We’d had a bit of a falling-out a few weeks previously—and then I’d been away, to see my brother in the Lake District—that’s how come I missed Kilburn’s latest murder this year on Saturday night. Condemned to live in flashback forever, that’s Jim Graham—sorry, poor taste, Dr. Hastie.

“Monica was crying. I took her in, mopped her up, gave her a G and T, that type of thing. It did occur to me the wretched woman might have been crying over that granddaughter of hers. She got me to go down to the school a couple of years back,
but for me it was too much like playing Mamas and Papas. It’s a lousy school—what can you say? Kim and Dev—those are Mel’s chums, tough gansta girls if you get my meaning. Monica wouldn’t let them in the house and Mel took it out on her gran by running off and going to live in a squat in Harlesden with
them
.

“No, Jean, you won’t find them in the same place now. The kids move on all the time, only way they can survive. You’d think the going was rough unless you’d been in a Bangkok brothel and seen the lives of the young girls kidnapped in rural areas.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those do-gooders. Just a spot hard-bitten—I’ve seen enough cruelty to sink SS
Globe
and life in Kilburn is a giggle in comparison with most places. Didn’t stop Mel and pals from bearing a terrific grudge, naturally.

“‘I’m being followed, Jim.’ Monica has insisted on taking off that housecoat of hers (it’s a wet night) and I go double quick to close the shutters. Not before I catch sight of Mrs. Walker staring straight in from next door. ‘Hey, Monica, thinking someone’s following you is the first sign of madness,’ I say, trying to laugh it off. I fetch a poncho from the hall—one of those llama numbers from the Andes—my, was that a journey to the evil heart of man: human sacrifice, the whole deal! I gave Monica a resounding slap on the sit-upon as I wrapped it round her—often quietens a woman down. Like a horse.

“No, Dr. Hastie, please don’t leave yet. I’m now convinced Monica was being followed. She was in terrible danger. I’m not the kind of guy who misses out on that death-smell—pardon me—and I picked it up that night off Monica. Yes, after she began to tell me. First—you know how it is, I just tried to make the wench feel better—about herself, her house, her sad life, the whole package.

“‘You look glam, dear,’ I told Monica. And wrapped in that llama number I must say she didn’t look bad. ‘No wonder they’re following you, eh?’

“Like, she went through the roof, Jean. If anyone can be described as murderous—well, it was Monica then. Makes me think poor little Mel might’ve inherited it. Violent streak—hate—deeply buried in Monica’s case if you know what I mean, but I’m no psychologist.

“Yes yes, I’m getting there. You won’t believe this, Dr. Hastie. Any more than I did.

“‘You see,’ Monica said when I’d apologised—and topped her up, Monica never minded a drink. ‘The people who I thought were my parents—’

“‘Yes, dear,’ I said. I really thought she was gone, then. How many times in the past few months had Monica told me she was adopted? Come to think of it—lots of times but only in the past few months. When I realised that—after she told me—it
all began to make sense. ‘They adopted me from—from that woman who was a member of the Wilsford family,’ Monica said and she burst into tears. ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ I said. I went over to the settee and put my arm round her. Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Hastie. But as luck would have it, there was just then a knock at the door—Mrs. Walker was calling out that I’d left the garage light on. I often do—they’ll take the steering wheel and the seats out of a car round here if they can get away with it.

“‘Don’t cry, dear,’ I said to Monica. ‘Nothing wrong with finding you’ve a bit of blue blood in the old veins. Which of the Wilsfords was it?’

“‘Jim, Jim!’ Mrs. Walker started shouting through the door. To punish me for not replying she’ll cut down the laurel hedge to an eighth of its former size and I’ll be left staring at her garden shed.

“As I was thinking all this I suddenly thought ‘Oh, no. Not
that
one’—but the very thought had me laughing. While Monica was crying, if you get me.

“‘Not the Honourable Clemency Wilsford,’ I said. ‘I thought she’d been shut up on that Scottish island all those years. How’d she manage to have you?’

“Again, as I said the words a dreadful—a really laughable thought came my way. Someone was pulling poor Monica’s leg. It just couldn’t be—

“‘Clemency Wilsford went to Germany—you know, before the War—’ said Monica through her sniffles.

“‘Puhlease!’ I said. ‘I can read the Sunday supplements as tirelessly as the next man—joke, joke.’ But actually I couldn’t help thinking what snobs we all are, our British race. Why couldn’t Monica settle for being ordinary—like anyone else? OK, she’s adopted: does that mean she has to have titled relatives, the lot? Next thing she’ll say she’s descended from mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.

“‘Clemency was in love with Adolf Hitler,’ Monica said. She was using her ‘tiny’ voice—there’s something very old-fashioned, fifties if you like, about Monica. You’ll never find that type of carry-on with Mel. Lives for now, old Mel.