The Bad Sister (20 page)

For Karl Miller

A MAN LIES DEAD
in the gardens of Rudyard and Nightingale Crescents.

The gravel path, which was raked only this morning by residents and members of the garden committee, is disarranged at the point where it curves round to run alongside Ladbroke Grove, to the east: the hair of the dead man, brown-grey and thin, lies across it like a weed.

As night grows deeper and the noise band of the City drops, leaving a pink glow in a sky that seems permanently overheated, lamps go off in houses either side of the gardens. Chandeliers snap out, like dead stars. In apartments and private dwellings, frosted glass dims softly, children in nurseries turn in their cots and look out through freshly painted bars at the moon.

Below the moon and shining just as bright, the naked light bulb in Mrs Hyde's kitchen stays on until all hours. It sends a white blade of light over the body of the dead man – and comes into the bedrooms of the Crescents' children, so that they reach out to pull their curtains closer together.

In the morning, the residents will decide to complain about Mrs Hyde's light, in the tatterdemalion house that shouldn't be part of the gardens at all, butting as it does the thronging, littered thoroughfare of Ladbroke Grove. But by the time they have grumbled to each other on the telephone Roger the gardener will have seen the corpse. Skirting the new saplings, in crinolines of wire netting to protect them from Mrs Hyde's children – and others on the ‘wrong end' of one of Notting Hill's most desirable quarters – he will run through Nightingale Passage and bang on Ms Eliza Jekyll's door in the Crescent. Ms Jekyll is kindness itself,
and always up early to work on her accounts: Roger has used her telephone before, when his wife was at the hospital.

Today no one comes to the door. As it is mid-February – 8 a.m. on the twelfth, to be exact – the only sign of daylight is the fading of the bar of filmy red across the sky and its replacement by an all-pervading, mottled grey.

Roger rings the bell twice and when he gets no answer he crosses Nightingale Crescent and starts to make his way up Ladbroke Grove, past the vandalized callbox, to the police station. An owl hoots in the gardens as he goes.

The brokers and interior decorators and solicitors and architects who live in these Crescents frown as they reverse their cars from off-street parking areas and set off for work. The cry of the owl, feared by their wives – feared by young, single women who live in basements of elegant mansions – feared by old women in unheated rooms – is no sweet, rural dream here. It is the cry of the prowler, as he makes his way through trees and shrubs to his next victim. Today, under clouds that are like bruises on the dirty, tender pink of a London sky, he will strike again.

Roger the gardener, however, knows better. Going slowly on legs bent from years mowing the lawns of the gardens – and leaving swathes as neat and straight as the lines in a bank book, deposits of grass regularly spaced – he reaches the top of the Grove and begins to make his way down the other side. The crenellations of Notting Hill Police Station come into sight. Roger will report the murder of a man in the Rudyard/Nightingale Crescent gardens.

All day excitement will spread. From the police themselves, who have spent so long trying to track this man down. From the press, who will interview past victims; from TV which takes the victims and sits them blindfold in the studio to make them talk of rape and violence. And in all the streets and crescents of the neighbourhood excitement makes women throw open doors into back gardens and stretch up to unsnib windows locked for so long
against possible invasion that they give grudgingly when tried.

Everyone knows the dead man is the Notting Hill prowler. It is strange that this as yet unidentified man – in track shoes, jeans and a battered sports jacket – is more intimately known than any neighbour or acquaintance. Nobody knew his face; and yet, as the police vans arrive and the TV cameras beam their hot, white light in the February darkness, those who run out and catch a glimpse of him as he lies there on the path seem to feel they have lived closely with him for years. And, mixed with uneasy jubilation, is a sense of loss. The man had inspired fear; and to some there is a sudden vacuum now it has gone.

Yet no one fears for Mrs Hyde, who killed the man and must answer for the crime.

WHEN I WAS
asked by the Executors of the late Dr Frances Crane to try and come up with some kind of an explanation for her sudden illness and death in the summer of 1988 – her peers in the medical profession seeming all equally baffled by the rapid demise of a GP both happy and successful in her career and showing no signs of incipient mental instability – I can say in all truthfulness that if I had had an idea of the frustration (and sheer horror) of the task, I would not have taken it on.

We are surrounded daily by evidence of violence, poverty and misery in this city. The media leave us in no doubt that rapaciousness and a ‘loadsamoney' economy have come to represent the highest values in the land. Crime and unrest are on the increase – as, so it seems, are fear and insecurity, which go hand in hand with great wealth and its companion, deprivation.

For all this – and the sad and shocking stories which arise from a society in thrall to greed are many – I would find it hard to believe in the existence of an example stranger or more alarming than the case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. And I would go so far as to say that it was by delving too deep into the facts of this distressing episode that Dr Frances Crane met her death. Not physically – no, the cause of her death was coronary thrombosis – but (un-proven though it must remain) psychologically: it was as if, on the last occasion before her hospitalization and collapse, she was unable herself to believe what she had discovered and was still, as she admitted, ‘in two minds about the possibility of the whole thing'. Her heart gave out, I think, under the strain of trying to reconcile opposites; and, just as
we have been told that the holistic approach to medicine may well be our only hope of survival on this earth, so we may find ourselves to blame when it comes to the treatment – manifestly unsuccessful – of the late doctor. No one understood the mental agony she suffered in her last weeks.

Perhaps I am beginning to understand that torment now. I will complete the task of attempting to reconstruct the terrible history of that summer in West London, the summer of '88. Where possible – and for reasons of speed and economy – I have ‘described' events – see above – as a writer (presumably) would. Otherwise, in the many significant areas which were, as my friend Robina Sandel of Nightingale Crescent, put it, ‘a closed book' to me, I have borrowed extensively from the journals, taped interviews and even, in one case, video film of witnesses and participants in the crime and its consequences.

I think it right, also, to give a list of the ‘cast' of this perverse drama. These people have made their names available from a sense of public duty, and in the strong hope that mass hysteria, wrong judgements and other only too human failings may be, if not corrected, at least understood. Let it be remembered, too, that the neighbourhood in which these characters live and work had at the time of the act – Murder? Manslaughter? Execution? – been five years under the threat of a rapist's random violence.

ROBINA SANDEL,
fifty-six

Lives at No. 19 Nightingale Crescent, which has been her home for over twenty years. Came to Britain from Austria at the outset of war. Runs her house as a boarding-house-cum-club for women. Her ‘Mondays' have long been famous for the conversation, wit and good companionship of women – lawyers, doctors, architects, sometimes a visiting researcher with a Ph. D. thesis – and if some bear a grudge against Robina it's because the club is considered too exclusive and ‘middle-class'. Those who do gain admittance speak highly of the Viennese
torte
– and of Robina's niece
TILDA
, who brings in Hock and seltzer just when it's needed. 

MARA KALETSKY
,
thirty

Artist, film-maker, poet. Has an itinerant way of life, spending much of her time travelling (South America mostly, with troupes of actors and film crews) but at the time of events related here is staying at No. 19 Nightingale Crescent:
ROBINA
is an old friend, responsible some years before for saving
MARA
from a drugs bust in the notorious All Saints Road.

JEAN HASTIE
,
thirty-four

Was at school (Holland Park Comprehensive) a decade and a half ago with
MARA
and the two have kept in touch ever since. Latterly a practising solicitor,
JEAN
retired to look after husband and two small children in Scotland in 1984. At
MARA'S
invitation she is spending a short time in London, at
ROBINA'S
. She has research to do on the Gnostic
Gospels, at the British Library and the Fawcett Museum, for an illustrated book due for publication in 1989. She has also received a missive from a woman she knew slightly when she lived and worked in London after leaving school. 

ELIZA JEKYLL
(
age uncertain
)

Lives at No. 47 Nightingale Crescent. Has had various jobs (researcher for BBC, art publisher's assistant, etc.) and has now been appointed manageress of the Shade Gallery at 113a Portobello Road. The Shade Gallery has recently opened, and its first show, of photo-montage and oil-onboard artworks, is by
MARA KALETSKY
. 

DR FRANCES CRANE
,
forty-two

Was a paediatrician at Great Ormond Street Hospital, now a GP. Specializes in diseases of the throat. Lives in a garden flat in Rudyard Crescent, on a long lease,
DR CRANE
is a frequent visitor to
ROBINA SANDEL
's house at No. 19 Nightingale Crescent. For an evening visit she is inclined to cut across the communal gardens and bang on robina's back door, rather than go the long way round, via Ladbroke Grove. 

MRS HYDE
,
fifty-ish

Lives in 99f, Ladbroke Grove, at a noisy junction, in a flat (basement) for which she has paid and continues to pay rent of
£
26.50 per week. The flat gives out on a small garden of its own, much neglected, which in turn gives out through a narrow passageway on to the gardens of Rudyard and Nightingale Crescents.

SIR JAMES LISTER
,
forty-eight

Financier and, amongst many other interests, proprietor of the Waldorf Gallery in Bond Street – and, latterly, the Shade Gallery, Portobello Road. 

LADY LISTER

His wife. 

TILDA

Niece of
ROBINA SANDEL
and working as a part-time
au pair
at No. 19 Nightingale Crescent while also attending an English course in South Kensington. She has recently arrived from her parents' home in Austria. 

ROCK BOLT

Ex-rock star and recent purchaser of the freehold of 99 Ladbroke Grove. 

ROGER

Gardener to the Rudyard/Nightingale Crescent gardens. Despite twenty-five years' work there, the residents take very little interest in him – with the exception of
MS JEKYLL
, who sometimes asks him in for a cup of tea and has given him permission to use her telephone.

THE FOLLOWING RECONSTRUCTION
of events must begin on Monday 9th of February, at the Shade Gallery in the Portobello Road.

Mara Kaletsky has been kind enough to let me view her video of the gallery opening party at noon on that day. The camera used is a Video 8, which has sync sound; unfortunately, though, as the camera was not functioning properly (a friend had lent it to her) Mara was not always able to obtain sound successfully, and some – possibly crucial – speeches are inaudible. The film, nevertheless, is worthy of inspection for two reasons:

1. It is one of the rare occasions when Eliza Jekyll can be seen without knowing she is seen, and may lead, therefore, to some insights into her personality useful to the examination demanded by the Executors of the late Dr Frances Crane.
   
2. The ensuing footage of Mrs Hyde may well prove invaluable to the case.
   

Mara Kaletsky's taped comments on her film are included here
.

MARA KALETSKY'S VIDEO
(
Voice-over
)

At first you'd think it was the wrong film.

Mahogany book-cases … pillars of something that looks like Roman marble … a fireplace wide and high enough to burn a Yule log … all Heritage stuff in fact, and the funny part is that it's not two hundred yards from the most nefarious drugs den in all London, as well as the no-go area of All Saints Road, where the police have been clamping down on the blacks since anyone can remember.

Looks as if it's been there forever, doesn't it? But you could unclip that fireplace off the wall and stick it up in the hallway in any one of the new ‘period' developments: it's a sort of instant respectability. Underneath … there's just a hole in the wall and on the other side of it the Indian shop where the incense smell is so strong it seeps through and turns Sir James Lister's face quite purple with rage.

That's Sir James over there. He owns the gallery. He owns the massive new supermarket up by Kensal Road. He has houses all over the world and has just bought a country estate in Dorset. Yes, he is that colour, naturally, and there's nothing wrong with the film. Maybe it's port: he's limping slightly, as you can see, and perhaps he's got a simulated Heritage disease like gout from drinking it.

That's not the reason, though. I know why Sir James Lister limps. Now look at my canvases. I shoot film of all the women and I intercut the stills so I get the ultimate woman. You don't like that one? Who is it? It's the Face of Revenge. Look in the catalogue. No. 41. Two hundred and fifty pounds. Dirt cheap at the price and Sir James takes thirty per cent of that!

Very well, then, here's Eliza Jekyll herself. Here's the official version, as the gallery is declared open by Sir James.

She looks lovely, doesn't she? If you fell for nothing else you'd fall for Eliza's hair. Thick … glossy … shining black hair. But everything about Eliza is pretty lovely. Her figure, for one thing … and her beautiful mouth with that cherub's bow taken straight from the old movies and those Ingrid Bergman eyebrows. Here she is, smiling up at Sir James. And she hardly stiffens at all when the dirty old man slides his arm round her waist … in that crêpe de Chine dress from Ungaro … and keeps it there for the remainder of his speech. He looks like a toad opening and shutting his mouth like that, doesn't he?

Here's Robina Sandel, whose house I'm staying in.

Robina says she doesn't like my pictures. ‘Mara!' (imitation of a German accent) ‘Why you put so much
hate
in
your work? A pretty girl like you …' And I say, ‘But Robina, I'm only showing what so many women feel. Under the designer décor, if you know what I mean …'

And this is her niece Tilda. Poor Tilda, who actually witnessed the dreadful deed. And worse, later. Don't these women understand that unless something is done, any man can feel free to be a rapist? How can she speak of love and hate, when things have got as bad as this?

Here the tape of Mara, as I recorded her on the subject of her film, breaks off. The camera, hand-held and wobbling violently, zooms in on a woman who looks distinctly out of place here: she's of medium height, wears a fawn mackintosh and has very short, curly hair that looks as if it's put into rollers at night. She's talking, surprisingly, to Eliza Jekyll – and they seem to have something very earnest to say to each other, as even without sound it's clear they're whispering with a good deal of urgency.

The camera, as if impatient of this acquaintanceship, veers off now to the main panel of pictures at the far end of the gallery. As it goes, there's a lurch and a sudden close-up of a red patch of fabric – and then it pulls back, having been handed to someone else to control while Mara grabs a bit of the limelight for herself. The woman in red, clearly no expert with this type of machine, succeeds in filming the skirt of her scarlet dress for several seconds before the exhibition and the gallery opening become once again the focus of the film.

Immediately it's easy to see why Mara ‘puts people's backs up' – as I have heard Robina Sandel, loyal but disapproving, say. There's something provocative about her – it's almost as if she wants to invite some scandalous action and then draw attention to it. Though at this moment it's clear she's doing her best to show off – to attract any of the meagre number of men at the opening: perhaps she thinks Eliza Jekyll's immersion in conversation with Jean Hastie (as the curly-haired woman turned out to be) will leave the field free for her.

Not for the first time one is reminded of how frail – and how vulnerable – very small women like Mara can be. Possibly some of that vulnerability accounts for her pictures. They have a quality that is mesmerizing because it is, literally, indescribable: no single woman has those cheeks, that Cyclops eye, the turned-up nose that adds a note of macabre humour to the Face of Revenge. And the unknown woman is herself spread over multi-panels so that a portion of her brooding, bruised face looks out with sudden ferocity from a corner of the gallery – or, again, a curtain of gold-silk hair with a gash of red torn flesh for a mouth looms from a suspended raft. There is too much pain to allow for an easy judgement – but two art critics (male) are staring up at the pictures with something very like fear and scorn – while Mara pirouettes, desperately craving attention.

Eliza Jekyll comes into frame here. She's laughing, stimulated by the party – though her manner does seem rather artificial – and on leaving her companion she comes up to Mara, smiles down at her small, twirling head and walks on, to disappear through a door marked Private at the rear of the room.

And now the film takes on a surreal tone of its own. Just as the camera is handed back to Mara – or she seizes it, impatient with the party (and thus, paradoxically, disappears from it, as far as the viewer is concerned) – the glass door into the Portobello Road is flung open and a crowd of women push in.

A flash; the sight of a plate-glass window smashing silently. Shards on the floor, large and bright like the tears frozen on the cheek of Mara's ‘Madonna of the Gardens'. Chaos: a waitress drops a tray. Triangles of ham and smoked trout lie like skin debris after a bomb attack.

Then there's a burst of sound. I suppose at that point Mara, quite accidentally, must have got it to operate on the Video 8; and as the camera is wobbling all over the place by now, the screams of the guests make the scene all the more disturbing.

Now a voice, louder than the rest, authoritarian: Sir James Lister trying to control the mob. To no avail, though. It takes a woman's voice, quiet with a Scottish burr, to restore order to the gallery. ‘I ask you all to stand by the door, please,' Jean Hastie says. ‘And wait until the police arrive.'

A groan goes up. While the lens, uncertain still after the sputter of glass into the room, wanders over the faces of the women, it's possible to make out a feature here, a turn of the head there, an incline of the neck, which seem suddenly recognizable. Mara, who is by now leaning over to switch off the set, laughs at my perplexed expression. ‘That's right,' she says. ‘That was the Face of Revenge.'

The women were each one a part of her composite portrait, she said. And each had been a victim of rape.

‘By the same man?' I asked.

‘Oh yes.' Mara got up to stroll across my sitting room to french windows leading to the patio garden. She stood looking out at the white-washed walls and hanging baskets of geraniums and then moved restlessly away again. ‘They were protesting … but not about my pictures, you understand. About the police and their attitude to the rapist. About a rich man like Sir James Lister and his ownership of their image …'

I interrupted to ask if the women had planned the smashing of the window of the Shade Gallery in advance, or if it had been a spontaneous action. Mara burst out laughing again. ‘What difference does it make? She was there … she always knew she was going to do it, probably.'

‘She,' as Mara Kaletsky explained as she picked up her equipment and slung everything into a dark blue bag, was Mrs Hyde. ‘I saw her running away from the scene,' Mara reported, with another of those flirtatious laughs which seem to sum up her contradictory and puzzling character. ‘She told me – she'd go and get the rapist herself next!'

Robina Sandel was in the third-floor walk-in linen cupboard in her house in Nightingale Crescent when reports started to filter in about the gallery opening smash-up. Jean Hastie had come up the stairs and asked her some questions – mainly about Mrs Hyde, Robina remembers, who had apparently been the perpetrator of the outrage. ‘I didn't know Jean Hastie before – she's an old friend of Mara Kaletsky's and Mara asked if she could come and stay here for a week while she was doing some research work or other – but what I do know is that she seems a bit too interested for my liking in what's going on round here. You'd think she was researching Communal Gardens rather than Original Sin!'

This reference to Jean Hastie's academic work (she is indeed preparing a book on Gnostic interpretations of the Garden of Eden) is typical of Robina Sandel's sharp, scathing sense of humour. People say it's a pity she didn't do as so many of her compatriots did – go to America – Hollywood – and make movies about contemporary mores, dressed up as comedy or melodrama. ‘Like Billy Wilder – or Douglas Sirk,' says Mara, a passionate admirer of these directors. ‘But, of course, as a woman, how could she?'

All of which is probably true; but for my own purposes Robina, with her combination of voyeurism and Brechtian indignation, makes a perfect witness to the horrifying events of that February. Her inner eye, accustomed from childhood to the art of Grosz and the Expressionists, was the first to see, I believe, the logical outcome of an impossible political and psychological situation and its manifestation in one individual; and all that seems strange in retrospect is that an onlooker – more, a participant in these events, such as Jean Hastie – should have been oblivious to the underlying dangers of the situation.

Robina said she'd hardly known any two friends more unalike than Mara and Jean. It wasn't just that one was big – plump, even – and with those tight curls that were just
about as far from Mara's rough, shaggy mane of dark hair as Jean's ‘court' shoes were from the espadrilles Mara wore night and day on her small feet; it was the manner of thinking: the approach to life. ‘Mara is sorry for everyone, you know.' (Robina does have a German accent, but not nearly so pronounced as Mara makes out in her mimicry.) ‘Mara would take any lame duck that comes up in front of her. And – my God – there are plenty of those around nowadays.' Jean Hastie, on the other hand, seemed unmoved by the obvious changes in London since she had last come south of the border, several years ago. ‘She's got a happy family life, I suppose,' Robina said, with a sigh that was immediately succeeded by a warm, enigmatic smile – most of Robina Sandel's family had been lost to Nazi Germany; and she had never married. ‘But they've nothing in common – she and Mara. Funnily enough, they seem simply to like each other's company.'

That this was the case was proved by Mara's and Jean Hastie's late return from the gallery opening. Jean Hastie calmed Mara when she was in one of her ‘states' – Robina Sandel conceded that – and after the smashing of the window and the arrival of the mob of angry women, Mara had certainly needed a gentle touch. ‘She's torn both ways,' Robina said shortly. ‘On the one hand, Mara wants people to buy her paintings – and to appreciate her as an artist. On the other, she's chosen to paint a very sensitive subject: the victims of the local Ripper. She wants the approval and patronage of such as Sir James Lister. Yet she would like to send him to the guillotine.' Robina chuckled in a manner, I thought, that would irritate Jean Hastie intensely, if she was truly lacking in pity and indulgence for others as had been described. Friendship, however, is an imponderable thing; and certainly, when the two women came back from a walk round Holland Park, Mara had recovered herself and was able to laugh at the whole thing quite good-naturedly.

‘I was just sorting the sheets,' Robina said. ‘I'd told Tilda to give Frances Crane – who'd just come across the gardens for a drink and a chat – she visits us about three times a
week – a malt whisky from our supply. I had to make the bed up for Jean Hastie in a hurry because the other spare room has a young architect friend of mine – she's been in Brasilia for the past six months and she needs a good rest here and some nice food …'

Robina Sandel is inclined to get side-tracked in this way when it comes to domestic arrangements. It's almost as if, Mara pointed out, she has made the running of the house, the serving of meals, and the secrets of the linen cupboard a whole State, with all the importance and changes of policy which Government requires. Whether this was really the ‘tragedy' that Mara claims, of the loss of a brilliant talent – so common a fate among women – and its submersion in the mundane details of everyday life, I wouldn't be able to say; I only know that it took some time to return Robina to the subject of the evening of Monday, 9th of February. It wasn't, as she was eager to explain, because there had been so many guests since then that the occasion had dimmed in her mind. ‘No – if anything, that week burns itself all the time more deeply in my memory,' Robina said.