Hitler's Girls (9 page)

“Monica certainly did start to throw it around at the end,” said Jim. “It was very unlike Monica to buy a drink, for instance. But she was happy to do so, at the end. She paid; she paid! Irish coffees all around, for instance.”

“Lady Ray?” I said patiently. Jim and his Irish coffees were nearly bringing the whole thing down. “The stipend?”

“Go and see Maitre Paul.” The very old woman rose from her chair. Her whole frame shook. I thought for a moment of a frail tree, a birch perhaps, bending in the face of a gale.

Then the nurse reappeared, descending the staircase, walking with a squeaky-shoed formality through the Long Hall and into the library where she stood beside Lady Ray with quiet authority.

I should have realised it before: Lady Ray was a seriously ill woman. The medication was for her. She had escaped from the upper room against orders from a doctor and was using our conversation as a pretext to momentarily evade the implicit orders of this silent attendant.

Lady Ray took a malacca cane from the side of the pear-wood Récamier chaise longue by the side of the tea table and leaned on it heavily as she left the library. The nurse took her employer’s arm, guiding her down the length of the Hall and up the staircase to the upper floors of Amesbury House, leaving us alone without another word.

It was eight in the evening when I arrived at the Burnside council estate on a hunt for Kim.

Leaving the Underground Station at Banesbury Grove, I entered a different world indeed from Amesbury House. Jim Graham did not join me.

Here in the “estate”—which has so little to do with the country estates purchased with City bonuses and kept up by trust funds administered from Guernsey—the aura of fear and sadness is palpable, in very stark contrast to the manicured meadows and mossy woods of Lady Ray’s demesne.

Burnside is a brisk ten-minute walk from Banesbury Grove, and not a pleasant one. The towers of a misconceived utopia from thirty years back loomed out of the dirty air and light rain. I stopped by the entrance to a collection of redbrick buildings, tall and forlornly covered in graffiti. It was already dark. Lights were either broken or unprotected by glass and ready for the next vandals to attack.

There is no room for poetic expression regarding what happened next. Just the bare facts.

A man has been killed. A man lies dead on the asphalt, under a sodium lamp which shows blood spilled on rough ground and the faint flesh tones of an outstretched palm. His eyes, wide under the ugly glare of the lamp, stare up unseeing.

The man is Chris Bradley, and he lies dead and alone in the main forecourt of Burnside.

Who named such a place “Burnside”? I suddenly saw a real burn, in my native land. Trout in a brown pool. Nasturtiums in summer, a joyous yellow and orange in the dim colours of the Scottish hills.

The shallow brown pools are Chris’s eyes as he looks up so trustingly at me. The bright colour comes from the lamp, with its deadening effect.

They wanted him dead. They killed him after he came to see me at Monica’s house.

But, be calm, Jean Hastie, I told myself. Who knew about his visit?

Now I hear the wail. The girl runs from Burnside House, the first house on the estate (now my eyes are becoming acclimatised to the dark) but she stops when she sees me. I clamber from my kneeling position, to say:

“You’re Kim, aren’t you? Oh Kim I am so—”

A shot rings out.

I, Jean Hastie, have never been a courageous person. I fear and detest violence, any form of aggression, any reminder of war. I have not even attended Edinburgh’s military parade: the sight of the muskets and bayonets, the Ghurkas and Highlanders, fills me with a strong antipathy to man and his martial instincts.

But this evening I stood my ground.

A silence as complete as that which had greeted me on my first arrival at the estate followed the gunshot. Kim disappeared into the first house, with its ramp and gloomy walls, slashed and obscenely larded with impenetrable words, a testimony to poverty and a final lack of hope.

The silence went on. Why, I found myself thinking, does one shot always seem to demand another? The movies perhaps: the quick, casual delivery of death which satisfies audiences with its staccato repetition.

In that silence—fanciful though this may sound—I heard the first heartbeat of an ineradicably changed and changing England. (England, yes, but not the country north of the Border, where justice may, if we claim autonomy, be served.)

I heard the birth cry of a people who had hoped against hope for justice, and, in its refusal, had turned first to anarchy and then to something infinitely dark, evil, and persistent,
something which had lain dormant for all these many years and which had now returned to haunt and inhabit the land.

I could have sworn that when I looked away from Chris and up again to the orange blaze of the lamp, I saw a figure there. Diaphanous, scarlet-haired, as ugly and ferocious as a demon’s mask at a children’s Halloween festival. Then she was gone. Someone from within the barricaded flats had rung the police at last and the sirens sounded along Banesbury Grove before turning into the maze of one-way streets with which the Council presumably tried to discourage quick getaways.

I waited for the police, feeling like a ludicrous target in the white mac I’d taken down to Lady Ray’s “just in case,” and with my shoulder bag (like Monica’s, I thought with pain) swinging against my side.

Then the alarm was screaming. The blue lights flashed.

I agreed to accompany the police to Banesbury Grove Police Station.

Here, I was given tea, and an apology for the absence of anywhere to sit.

Would I mind standing over at the desk and telling them why I had been at Burnside and what I knew of Chris Bradley?

But of course I could only tell them I knew almost nothing at all.

The Avondale Club is bustling today. The Women’s University Challenge Tournament is to take place, televised, in our main Hall. Unsuitably to my mind, a male compère will preside.

I have declined to take part. Events of the past two days have been chilling, gruesome—I cannot help but take some of the responsibility for the death of Chris Bradley. And I feel a chain of evil happenings, as yet unknown and unpredicted, are about to unfold.

“This is most decidedly not like you, Jean.”

The woman who sits opposite me at the table by the window overlooking the tennis courts and camellia bushes is Jennifer Devant, Edinburgh QC and a friend of thirty years’ standing.

At any other time, I would have been delighted to see Jennifer. But her quick mind and shrewd ability to derive insight from the slightest hesitation or inflection of the voice are not welcome at present. I must ponder the fact that Monica’s
hysterical visit to Jim Graham the night before she died was caused by truth rather than a sick mind’s fantasy.

She was indeed the daughter of Adolf Hitler and Clemency Wilsford. I gaze over the grapefruit segments and tea and coffee pots on our breakfast table. What could that have possibly been like for her?

And Mel. To what fate has she now succumbed? At the police station, I kept everything I knew about Chris Bradley to myself. Why? Because Mel is my goddaughter perhaps. I cannot help reflecting that all this is becoming absurdly Mafia-like and unreal.

But the unreal does happen; and nowhere more often than in this city of a thousand tongues and a million identities; this crossroads of crime and subterfuge; of inequality and lies.

I remember Lady Ray’s last words to us, her sudden air of capitulation as she suggests that we “find Maitre Paul.” When Jennifer, spreading Old Oxford marmalade onto her toast, looks across at me, I recognise the gaze. Jennifer knows something, as she would put it, is “up.”

I begin to talk, to tell Jennifer Devant of the improbable—the absurd!—discovery I have made about my friend Monica Stirling since coming south after her death. I tell her about the ransacked house; the incredible revelations of Jim Graham; the visit to Lady Ray. I unleash a tale wilder than any madwoman’s.
Duly, Jennifer’s eyebrows rise, her slight smile fades away. But I do not stop until I am finished.

It’s hard to describe my wounded feelings when it becomes clear that Jennifer Devant, QC doesn’t believe a word I’ve said. When I reach the killing of Chris Bradley, I stop dead. Jennifer waves me to go on. Downstairs, an audience applauds at the Cambridge graduates. I recognise the voice of Mary Worsley, the Newnham don who makes mincemeat of her opponents on talk shows. A quotation in Greek from
The Iliad
comes floating up the stairs to us.

“Go on, Jean,” Jennifer says quietly.

So I describe the walk from Banesbury Grove Underground Station down Banesbury Road after leaving the police station.

I knew somehow I had to go back to Monica’s house, after what happened at Burnside. Some clue would come to me there.

It was about ten at night by then and I didn’t like the knowledge that this was the route poor Monica had taken, with her shopping in one hand and her shoulder bag across her shoulder and strapped across her stomach. But I told myself I owed it to her to go back to 109.

It was the least I could do. I had never been there for Mel or Monica when they needed me most. I would be there for them now.

The car coming along Banesbury Road seemed to be coming straight at me. I had the sudden instinct that it would leave the road and mount the pavement when it reached the right angle to run me down.

I jumped. There was no alternative. I crashed through a low, neatly trimmed hedge and brought down a rickety bird table. A window opened; a light came on.

The driver and his passenger accelerated and drove on.

But I saw them.

Here I was glad for the presence of Jennifer Devant at the Avondale Club. For it was almost too nerve-wracking to recapture what I saw one more time.

“Peter Miller—that’s the estate agent I told you about—was at the wheel. Beside him—well, she had long blonde hair—it could have been a wig, but if so a very expensive one—a fur coat, white—a lot of make-up—you know, what they call drop-dead gorgeous, Jennifer—”

“From your state of agitation, my dear Jean, I believe you saw Mel in the car,” said Jennifer Devant.

“Yes, yes,” I said, grateful to the point of tears for the speed of my friend’s thought processes.

I had fallen into the yard of Mrs. Walker, the neighbourhood Watchwoman.

“I went on to Monica’s house,” I said, “and I found the place had been ransacked, all over again.”

All my neatly-packed bin liners had been torn open, their contents all over the place. Mrs. Walker’s astonishment at the scene had not been welcome, either.

“Mr. Miller and your goddaughter Melissa were looking for the same thing that Monica searched for in vain,” said Jennifer, even quieter than before. A waitress came up to clear away our Continental breakfast.

“What?” I said.

“On your first arrival at Monica’s house, a fairly large sum of money was left untouched. You concluded that Monica herself was responsible for the mess.”

“Yes,” I said, uncertain now in the face of Jennifer’s sharp, professional manner.

“If Mel is being held captive, then the people who have her must be the searchers. You must find what they were looking for.”

“BUT WHERE?” I said. My voice came out louder than I’d intended and the gaffe was greeted by laughter from one of the contestants in the hushed and tense Main Hall.

“Maitre Paul, of course,” Jennifer said briskly. She rose, showing she had a full day ahead.

“But—but where is he?” I stammered.

Jennifer Devant slipped on the jacket of her neat Harris Tweed suit and started to pick up briefcase and handbag.

“Maitre Paul, originally German, was the lawyer for most of Hitler’s top brass. A visitor, along with Bormann and Speer, to the Bunker in the last days of the Third Reich. A close friend of Magla Goebbels. She must be quite old by now.”

“Who?”

“Leni Paul,” said Jennifer Devant. “I can find her for you. She lives in Paris.”

Dear Jean
,

It is late—I have lost your number. Oh Jean, for God’s sake come down from Scotland and help me. I am in danger—and so, Jean, is the globe—the world—the planet—you will think me mad, Jean, but was I ever like this with you?
Please believe me
—

I am on board the Dover to Calais ferry. The letter, with its envelope postmarked Mar 2nd, the day after Monica was killed (she must have walked on that Saturday all the way to Banesbury Grove post office), is secured against the gales by my haversack, which is slung across the front of my body and is holding the frail paper in place on my knees.

From time to time I pick up the sheet of cheap paper, already yellowing. It has journeyed from Edinburgh to the Avondale Club to my lap. The words dance before my eyes. Malodorous newspaper cuttings are held together by a
half-broken paper-clip and are poking from the top of the office envelope. A window of see-through material, intended for the recipient’s name and address, shows snippets from the press: “No-go zones in East Germany,” reads one; “British neo-Nazi Party in …” reads another.

Behind them, a bundle of similar reports: fires in immigrant hostels; clubs “liberated” from “foreigners”; ex-prison inmates, convicted for racial incitement, addressing the cream of Germany’s military. Denmark, Italy, Le Pen’s France: Monica’s collection grows in length and prominence as the dates become more recent. Since she learned who she was. Poor Monica. She did the devil’s homework, all right. And for her pains she was killed.

I am not one to indulge when it comes to travel. The idea of luxury seating, obsequious attendants, and all the rest, makes me uneasy: I would frankly prefer to donate this money to the poor of the country I am about to visit. The children who cannot find enough to eat in the slums of Naples, for instance. The wretched, exploited AIDS sufferers in Africa. As for those who dress up in costume, taking the Orient Express to Paris and Venice: why, it is quite repellent to contemplate. The beaded dresses from the thirties, the pearls, the false elegance—