The Bad Sister (28 page)

‘But why should Eliza Jekyll want to disappear?' I cried. A pitch of frustration had been reached, I knew, which would reflect badly on me with these cool, canny Scots. And sure enough, Paul Hastie and his wife exchanged quick glances ‘Those are the instructions,' Jean said quietly. ‘I represent Ms Jekyll – at least I was about to until such time as, happily, she no longer required me to perform a certain conveyancing service for her – and I shall of course guard her privacy as her friend Frances Crane would have wished.'

‘But where
is
the … paper?' I faltered.

‘From the size and weight of the envelope it would seem to be a cassette,' Mrs Hastie said, with some return of conviviality. ‘And it is, of course, in the safe in my firm's office in Edinburgh.'

August is dry and lifeless, with most of the residents of Nightingale and other Crescents in the area away in Scotland – or Italy or Greece. They won't return until the school terms begin and the leaves on the chestnut trees in the communal gardens begin to go yellow and fall.

I am disappointed, I must confess, by my lack of success
so far with information on Dr Frances Crane. Robina Sandel, who kindly asked me to visit her at No. 19 Nightingale Crescent pending my researches, has this to say on the matter: ‘Mrs Jean Hastie is a stubborn one, and she'll never let you have the tape. Why don't you go and see Eliza Jekyll yourself and confide in her? For all you know, this is some trick being played on her by Jean Hastie – some kind of revenge, perhaps, from student days – and she'll be able to clear the whole matter up.'

I didn't relish the idea of going to call on Eliza Jekyll on my own and I said so. After all, we'd never met: surely she'd think it pretty out of order if I just went and banged on her door?

‘Well, she's a friendly enough sort,' Robina said. ‘Mara's coming back next Thursday, but no doubt you don't want to wait till then.' And seeing I didn't, she called her niece Tilda to walk down the street with me and introduce me to Ms Jekyll. Tilda had gone to help there with dinner parties in the past, Robina said; and although the girl had a horror of that end of the street, and particularly the garden side where she had witnessed Mr Toller's murder, she would understand my concern over my old friend Dr Frances Crane and would take me along. I thanked both Sandels for their kindness and understanding and Tilda and I set off.

Although it was only a week ago that we walked side by side down the Crescent, under heavy late-summer leaves and by the side of the now-silent road repair machines, it seems immeasurably longer – as if what was revealed to me in that time had a duration of its own, like a play, or a film – and could only exist in the memory by assuming quite different proportions. For though there seemed, on that tired August evening, to be no beginning, middle or end to the strange story of the murder in the gardens and the subsequent disappearance of Mrs Hyde and madness of Dr Frances Crane, all these components came neatly together in the days succeeding my walk with Tilda, like a spool on a tape unwinding – like the voices of two women as I was to
hear them before long, speaking not to each other but into the air.

Tilda, like a horse shying away from a sudden noise, stopped all at once outside a door and refused to go on, her pale eyes and braided hair giving her the look of a lifesize German doll that someone has left propped up on the pavement. Then, with a rush and a bound, as if spirits guarded that stretch, she raced ahead; and it was as much as I could do to keep up with her.

‘But, Tilda, you've gone past Eliza Jekyll's door,' I said when I managed to catch up with the girl on the corner of Ladbroke Grove; and then, having to sprint again as she ran to the gate into the communal gardens and took out a key which she fitted quickly into the lock. ‘Wait a minute, that's not right, Tilda. You're going to the wrong place!'

Tilda showed no sign of answering, and was by now some way down the path on the southern side of the communal gardens, the flat, dark leaves of the big chestnut at the back of the Tollers' house almost obscuring her head as she went. If she wanted to take me out here, why didn't she go out of Robina's back garden, I thought – irritated by now, I must admit, at the air of urgency and secrecy the girl had assumed. If she's trying to tell me something, why doesn't she do so in the ordinary way?

The answer, as I now see, was plain – to Tilda, at least. She did want me to see with my own eyes – see the connection of the houses on Ladbroke Grove and Nightingale Crescent, the adjacent flats of the wicked, murderous, sluttish woman and the lovely Ms Jekyll. She wanted me, as I was to discover shortly after we had paused at the foot of Ms Jekyll's exquisite wrought-iron staircase, entwined at this time of year with geraniums and a small wall of sweetpeas, to understand how close – how dangerously close – the women had always been.

Ms Jekyll was sitting in the window of her flat. There was no doubt in my mind that it was she: Frances Crane had described her often enough – saying, with a laugh, that she was glad to be her friend but not her doctor (Dr Bassett
fulfilled that function) as there always came a time in doctor-friend relationships when you have to refuse a request for something or other. And I wondered, remembering this, if, had Dr Crane been alive, she would have found something to be worried about in her friend's appearance today.

It's hard to define: just that, beautiful as I had expected her to be, Eliza Jekyll was even more perfect – almost impossibly perfect, with that tilt of the head and set of the neck that seem to go with beauty – and yet she seemed irredeemably sad. That old word melancholy came into my mind as I stood, half hidden by the chestnut tree at Tilda's side, and looked up at her. I remembered the photographs of Victorian madwomen incarcerated for ‘eroticism', ‘melancholy', even in one case ‘intense vanity'. Ms Jekyll, as she sat staring at nothing in the window of her flat – she was on a sofa that had been pulled across the french windows, giving a further impression of someone barricaded in – looked as if she were badly in need of fresh air – or company.

Tilda put a foot on the first of the steps of the white iron stairs. ‘Eliza!'

The face in the window turned; eyes sparkled; a charming smile appeared. ‘Come out and see us!' Tilda pushed me a little forward. ‘Someone here wants to meet you!'

Ms Jekyll rose, smiling and waving. (I was surprised to see that behind her, in the room, a pile of what looked like unwashed clothes and sheets threatened to topple from the table – and as if my glance in that direction had reminded her, she swung sharply round.)

I saw the back of her shoulders – we both did – convulsed with what must have been a sudden sobbing fit, or, worse, an attack of some kind that must surely need rapid medical attention. But with one hand the thick, interlined curtains were pulled to and the hunched trembling figure disappeared from our gaze. like children at a conjuror's party, we stood, mouths open, for several seconds longer by the side of the chestnut tree.

‘You know, I am very anxious for Miss Eliza,' Tilda said as we walked back slowly along the path of Robina's scruffy garden bordered by dark, unclipped shrubs. ‘That woman is back – I know it. She will kill Eliza next!'

And Tilda wept, in the ragged long grass of her aunt's back garden. I thought, at first, of Jean Hastie and of summoning her down to deal with this. Jean, surely, had been here at the time of the murder. Jean alone had evidence of Dr Crane's last meeting with Eliza. Again, I realized I needed evidence myself if I were to risk calling her in her Scottish shooting party and asking her to come south and prevent further loss of life.

‘I heard that woman Mrs Hyde in there the other day,' Tilda said, as if waiting for me to ask for proof. ‘It was her voice. I know! She was shouting at poor Eliza!'

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long to discover the truth of what Tilda said (Robina was sceptical about this, I have to say, and argued that if Mrs Hyde had indeed come back, the police of fifty countries would have been on her trail by now).

It was the following evening. Mara Kaletsky had just returned from a summer spent in gypsy caves in Hydra, and looked tanned and well; as if the whole nightmare of the killing in the gardens, and the hysteria over the rapist, had long ago gone from her mind. Robina had been kind enough to ask me round again; it was a fine evening, the gold sunlight as it poured into the long club room making even the dull of the old brass fender shine; and soon, when Monica Purves and her friend Carol Hill joined us, I saw that, for everyone, with the exception of Tilda, of course, the nightmare of the past was indeed over. I confess I had to wonder whether the girl's inflamed imagination hadn't been responsible for some of the unease I'd felt myself. It was true that Eliza Jekyll had turned away from us with a
convulsive shudder; on the other hand it was possible that Tilda, who was quite an outspoken and annoying young woman, might have offended her at some dinner party to which she had been asked to come as a helper, and Eliza, with possible serious things on her mind, had turned away with a touch of intended melodrama, so as to warn us away from her window.

Whatever the truth was, an evening as pleasant as the one we were enjoying made one glad the rest of the Crescent was so empty; and a walk was soon suggested. Robina went to fetch the key to the back-garden door and we all strolled out, only Tilda muttering an excuse and running upstairs to her room.

We hadn't gone far along the path when we saw the figure hurrying towards us. Monica Purves was the first to recognize the woman: Mrs Poole (for such it was) came sometimes to clean for her as she did, evidently, for Ms Jekyll. ‘Oh, Miss Purves!' Mrs Poole seized hold of the stockbroker's sleeve, as if in need of something to help her keep her balance. ‘There's been a terrible accident! That woman's come back and she's done away with Ms Jekyll, I know she has!'

I have to say at this point that I am now in possession of Jean Hastie's journals – and also the tape which Dr Frances Crane entrusted to her.

Jean may be a somewhat self-satisfied woman, but she left her family and house party as soon as she heard of the disappearance of Ms Eliza Jekyll and came south, stopping only at her firm's offices to retrieve the envelope sealed permanently unless there was a case of such a disappearance. She came straight to Robina's, after a bad night on a sleeper – and I must say she found us all as haggard as herself, sitting, as we had been all night, in the club room.

I won't go too far into the scene of chaos in Ms Jekyll's
flat, once Monica had forced the french windows and we went in. Squalor needs no describing: what was worse were the evident signs of struggle, pointing almost inevitably to an attack – not dissimilar to the rapist's, as Carol Hill remarked with a grimace of strong distaste as she relived her own ordeal – and to the attacker having disposed of Eliza's body before making a getaway.

A door through the mirrored hall was open and there seemed little doubt – as dirty linen, spilled remains of junk-food meals, etc., trailed from the (now equally filthy) apartment of Ms Jekyll into the run-down quarters of Mrs Hyde – of the identity of the murderer.

One mystery (for we had all learnt at the time of the Toller killing that the Hyde children had been placed in care) was irrefutable evidence of the recent presence of children. A potty had been used; and probably not all that long ago. Half-eaten fish fingers lay under a pile of broken Lego under the kitchen table. A small gym shoe, laces hopelessly knotted, had been kicked off by the door through to Ms Jekyll's Venetian-glass-panelled hallway.

‘I don't know if they was back or not,' Mrs Poole said (having already given what evidence she possessed to the police she had returned to tell Jean what she had seen). ‘I only know I heard a woman wailing like a banshee when I went round to give Miss Jekyll a hand with the flat. She'd not been in touch for – oh, it must have been near on eight weeks – but don't tell me that mess in there was her who done it.' Mrs Poole shook her head firmly. ‘She was got at by that Mrs Hyde – wasn't she?'

‘But you saw her?' Jean Hastie asked in that quiet, dry way that reminds you of her training as a solicitor.

‘Oh no, love. I just heard that terrible wailing sound. Reminded me of a siren going off in the blitz, I can tell you!'

After this unexpected piece of imagery, we all fell silent.

‘So you didn't see Mrs Hyde either?' Jean prompted the woman.

‘I sees the kids,' Mrs Poole said. ‘They was playing out by that dreadful old pianola-thing in the back garden, that
the Council won't take, and I can't think why she couldn't get rid of it herself. “Funny, how'd they come to be here?” I remember thinking to myself. If I'd just gone into Miss Jekyll's that day – if I hadn't just waited one day more, but with my aunt in hospital—'

‘It's not your fault,' Robina said, standing up so that we could all feel released to go in the direction of hot baths, breakfast, bed. The police will be searching for Eliza Jekyll everywhere. They'll find her in the end.'

‘They'll have to find Mrs Hyde first,' said Tilda, appearing from her eyrie after a loud clattering down the stairs. 

After a day of rest, renewed speculation and unanswered questions, Jean Hastie took the night train back to Scotland, to be with her husband and young family. She told me she had no desire to listen to the tape; and that as I had been given the brief by Dr Crane's solicitors to try and fathom the cause of the doctor's ‘mystery illness' and death, she would prefer me to be its sole audience.

Mara Kaletsky invited me to come to her room at No. 19 Nightingale Crescent whenever I wanted, as home movies she had made of the opening of the Shade Gallery, etc. might be useful to me in my researches.