The Bad Sister (19 page)

‘About power, as all his movies are,' says the film critic. ‘I thought you'd be there, actually.'

I grin at him – he is too polite to make reference to my ridiculous
tutu
– and press on, pulled by Gala. I look round once. Horror! There is Mrs Marten already, prancing in her Pierrot costume in front of Miles Alton at the door. The little gold bells on her cap are jigging with her. I can see three of her, positioned as she is within the loom of three mirrors. In each she grimaces and gesticulates and turns her head wildly, as if searching, like me, for someone in the room. Stephen is behind her. He must have gone home in order to dress up in purple ecumenical robes: it seems strange that he should parody his faith in this way. And Tony, of course, has made no concession at all. But he looks just as irritating in his suede jacket and white polo neck as the other guests in their wild gear.

‘Come on! If you go on looking at them you'll lose her for good!'

Gala is right. And now I find, as I reach the far end of the room by the big candelabra, that she has disappeared too, losing faith in me perhaps as I stood gaping in fear at Mrs Marten and her son and my friend hung with his gold crucifix. Gala is nowhere to be seen. I know none of the people standing round me. There seems to be a prepon-derance
of beauty patches, and a scarcity of witches. One of the men had decided to come as a vampire: he has fangs of white card down to his chin, and strokes of black eye pencil on his face to suggest wickedness. He looks at me and then quickly away, as all the men do when they see the obscenity of my ballerina dress. If he could know … My mouth, which had been dried, revolted, by the horrors of the garlic in the flat, is rosy and juicy inside as freshly killed beef and my teeth, which will be so urgently needed tonight, are beginning to grow. They ache slightly, but not painfully, as they descend over my lower teeth into my jaw. How am I to find her? It must be soon. Yet this end of the room seems to be a dead end. The walls are covered with plum silk and oil paintings of men in breeches and long coats.

One more glance over my shoulder. A waiter passes and I nearly knock him over. I take a glass of champagne. I can see Mrs Marten making her way towards me. Her white face looks more of a mask than the real ones, some of which are on sticks, as I dreamed, and waving animatedly in their owners' hands. Her face is blind and intent and terrible. A smile is set on it. She is threading her way through the crowd, horrifying in her harlequin suit. I back up against the wall at the end of the room … my glass swills round and the champagne spits out on the ground … three beauties turn their backs.

It's then that I see the hairline crack in the plum silk, neat as an incision and following the contours of a low door, but where … without daring to turn and face the wall I seek the handle under a long picture of a lady in a crinoline dress. There … my hands are sweating so that they slip from it as soon as it is found. A protuberance of metal on the silk … my fingers close over it again, and twist and push.

Mrs Marten is nearly on me. First a red leg and then a blue prances forward, like an illusionary army. Some way behind, I see Stephen's face, very flushed over his purple robe. There is no sign of Tony. I duck down under the picture and go backwards, half on my back, through the
hidden door. I land on my bottom, on a parquet floor, and kick the door shut with my ballet-slippered foot. I crawl forward, see the gold bolt on the door and pull it across. There! She can't get me now! But someone must have slid the bolt the other way to let me in here at all.

The room is just as I imagined it would be. It is small and square, and empty except for two small tapestry settees and a tall mirror framed with antlers of gold. The curtains are dark velvet and are tightly drawn although it is a summer night. There are candles, in a glass chandelier. And Miranda is standing in front of the mirror quietly contemplating herself. Her dress is grey and fragile. Her eyes are grey. She has added a Spanish comb to her dark hair now: it is studded with moonstones which are too dim to shine much in the light from the candles. Her expression is serious. Has she seen Tony yet? Or did they plan to meet in here? Was it for him that the door was left unbolted? What a disappointment for her that I should come instead!

I come up behind her. Did she ever keep a photograph of me? Does she know, secretly, what
I
look like? Or will she guess at once, and turn as if she's been struck in the back?

But she can't see me. I'm not there! I stand so close to her now that the slightest movement of my hand would touch her back … I look up and into the mirror … my terrible absence is there in the glass, which shows the trim settees and the bottom half of the chandelier with the candles burning fierce and upright without a flicker. My non-existence there is almost concrete … unreflected I feel heavier, as abandoned as a new corpse. My limbs are paralysed. I keep on staring at her. Her eyes are dim as the moonstones in her hair. And though neither of us can see me she senses me there. Her mouth opens to call out in fear.

I close in on her … My teeth go into her smooth neck. Miranda … these are my hours … when it's so dark outside that I can fly the streets without dread of the stake, ravenous, insatiable! You knew I was coming! You welcomed me almost. You give me your blood!

It was strange to hold Miranda in my arms like that, while Tony and his mother battered on the door behind the picture, and Stephen called to me to come out in the name of God. The blood gushed from her neck like a spring. As I drank she paled. And when the grey irises of her eyes went up into the whites and she fell backwards into my arms, I knew she was ready to take to Meg. I knew, too, how I could escape the room without going back the way I came. I pulled open the velvet curtain nearest to me, pushed up the window with one hand, and stepped out onto the parapet. There were iron stairs, just like the fire escape at home. And Gala was waiting at the foot of the stairs, with a black cab. How easy it was! I carried Miranda down without difficulty, and together Gala and I laid her on the back seat. We sat facing her on the way to Meg's, in the bucket seats.

As we travelled I looked at Miranda, and I saw the cupboard and Ishbel, and the stairs and Marie, and I saw the small, square room fill suddenly with hiding children, and the iron stairs of the fire escape, which dripped with Miranda's blood, turn to the wooden stairs in the servants' quarters of the mansion. I saw myself, in Mrs Marten's sister's ballet dress, sisterless now and ready to go. Poor Miranda! I felt sorry for her. In her own way she enjoyed life, and she made Tony happy. But in the end I was the more important of the two.

And now … after taking her to the red house… Meg delighted with me … I've changed to my other clothes and I walk or fly to the port. I can see the green glow from the port long before I arrive there … and for sentimentality's sake I take the route past the hoardings and the supermarket in the main street at the end of my road. Yes … as I go past so much higher than they, I see the women crowding into Paradise Island … husbands hanging about outside the home … cardboard cut-out women holding their painted Lil-lets aloft in the sodium glare. I don't look back at the flat where I live, or the glowing rooms of the
Persian students opposite … I'm pulled by the moon, although it's small and new.

There are the sailors, there is the ship. The gangway is down. I go straight on board. And as soon as I'm there we begin our voyage. There is music, and the green lights are reflected in the oily sea.

We go out into a night that is quite black and starless, with even the moon gone. I think of Meg, as I strain my eyes in the darkness. She was so happy! I gave her what she needed! I turn to go down into the ship. But they've put the lights out here too. And that's best for me … for in the absence of the light I can begin to see him … I know he is there … as we sail on, with the music silenced and the waves hardly more audible than the sighing of grass on a hill, I see him standing there, by my mother's cottage on the hill …

Gil-martin comes towards me. The ship sails through the deep folds of the hills. I knew he would be there waiting for me!

A FEW WEEKS
after reading this ‘journal', some interesting new discoveries were made as to the whereabouts of Jane. In the interim, however, I had shown the document to the chief psychiatrist at the —— hospital in London, and he and his colleagues prepared the following report. If the new discoveries seem to go rather against the findings printed here, the latter may still be of some worth to students.

So how are we to sum all this up? The psychiatrists went on at some length about the nature of Jane's illness – I have omitted to print this as I feel the combination of the recent discoveries, with the fact the psychiatrists showed little
interest in the ‘political' factor involved in her conversion (or coercion), largely invalidates the report. Is she a victim of the modern resurgence of the desire for the old magic of wholeness, for unified sensibilities? Is she really an example, as some women would have it now, of the inherent ‘splitness' of women, a condition passed on from divided mother to divided daughter until such day as they regain their vanished power? As the reader will have gauged, this is not my territory, though as a field of study it appears to be expanding fast. I can only marvel at the cleverness of Margaret, or Meg, who appears, to borrow the words of a friend of mine to whom I recently showed the journal, to have ‘used Freud and Jung to achieve the aims of Marx'. (In the event, of course, she lost out, and the Dalzell fortune is now in the hands of a second cousin, another Michael Dalzell. I sometimes wonder even, if Stephen was correct in his conjecture that it was the money only that she was after, but it does seem the most likely motive.) The odd fact that there is no mention of the killing of the father must keep the identity of Jane as his killer uncertain; but I am now more of the opinion of Stephen than I was: that a state of hypnotism prevented her from remembering that evening in March 1976.

After my failure to find Stephen, subsequent to reading the ‘journal' – and on my trip to London in July I made exhaustive and unrewarded enquiries in the Notting Hill area as to the existence of a community of women by the name of Wild, I returned north convinced that if only I could find Jane and Meg (Gala too was untraceable: it seemed she had left shortly before for Egypt and had no plans to come back) I would be able to solve the crimes and demonstrate to the public the increasing dangers of fanaticism. But when, three weeks ago, I saw the following announcement in the
Scotsman
, Thursday, September 4th, 1986, I sensed that my searches might well have come to an end. It ran as follows:

Two days later, on the Saturday, I was walking up the steep hill above St Mary's Loch with the Mr B. Elliot mentioned
in the newspaper report. He refused any remuneration, and when I said I knew probable relatives of the deceased he became very sympathetic, and after his wife had packed up some sandwiches for us we set off.

It would be hard for me to describe the effect that lonely walk had on me after all the long months of searching for my quarry. The purple heather, which gave off puffs of a dusty pollen as we went along, and the rather dark, low clouds which were occasionally broken by an early autumnal sun, seemed all the more dramatic for being concentrated on what was formerly the Dalzell estate. Mr Elliot wasn't much of a talker, and after he'd told me he hadn't even seen the girl who, ten years before, had come in such a wild state to the village, we walked on in silence.

The clearing was right on the edge of a young pine forest, which the Forestry Commission must have planted within the last ten years. On the other side, though, was a great stretch of moor – on a clear day you might be able to see as far as Peebles – and a circle of ancient silver birches, probable remains of the Forest of Ettrick. One of the biggest trees had been felled, and there was a strong smell of the sawdust in the damp air. Some instinct led me to the far side of the clearing where the men had been too frightened to penetrate, evidently, for the fine green grass, so unnatural an occurrence in rough heather terrain, was untrampled; and there, hardly discernible in the uneven ground, was the long mound I had been half-hoping and half-dreading to find. The only sign that some hand had sculpted the mound rather than the shifting earth was the presence of a stick, a simple ash such as shepherds use, driven deep into the hardly noticeable protuberance. I motioned to Mr Elliot –I had asked him to bring a spade – who came over to my side and, after throwing me a quick, perplexed glance (I think he knew, too, what kind of thing we would find there), we started to dig. Below us, on the outskirts of the man-made forest, was the drilling machinery, out of use now at the weekend. There was a good deal of sphagnum moss growing on the mound, and the stubborn
roots of heather, before we could get down to the soil.

The first surprise was to discover that the stick wasn't, as would normally be supposed, at the head of the grave. It appeared to go right through the centre of the body which, as we lifted it carefully from the shallow trough, was in good condition still and was clothed, strangely, in blue denim trousers and a pink top, strapless, such as ballet dancers wear. The stick – or stake I suppose one might call it – had pierced the body just above the ribs on the left-hand side.

We laid the body on the heather, and stood back to see it better. I must say, I felt a strong discomfort in the air which I think came from that unease experienced in the face of a sudden realization of the uncanny in ordinary people – amongst whom I count myself, of course. There was no way (and the uncertainty was not caused by the results of decomposition) in which it was possible to tell the sex of the corpse. There was something completely hermaphroditic about it, but I can't explain what that quality was. The face was completely blank and smooth, and the eyes were closed. A small bosom seemed to be discernible under the pink top, but the shoulders and upper arms, although small, were muscular. The hair added to the anomalies of the body. It was black for about three inches – it had grown that length in the grave, I suppose – and yellow for another three, suggesting the wearer, at the time of death, had had extremely short dyed blonde hair. As all these facts tallied with the facts in the ‘journal', I began to grow excited. I said nothing to Mr Elliot, of course, other than I thought this person was almost certainly the missing relative of these friends of mine and that I would apply directly for permission for the body to be moved to a morgue where they might identify it.

We replaced the body in the ground with care, and covered it with the earth again, in the event of rain. Then we went back down to Tibbieshiels to phone the police and report the discovery of the body. On reaching base, we realized that our sandwiches were still uneaten. I think Mr
Elliot had been shaken by the apparition, as I had been. I thanked him, and drove back to Edinburgh.

It was only when I was safely in my flat that the significance of the stake through the body came to me. Jane had surely not done this to herself. I am in no way psychic or superstitious, but the suggestion of my psychiatrist friends, that there had never been any such people as Meg or Gil-martin (I knew better than they on the first score, anyway, as Meg must certainly have been Margaret), seemed to me more than inadequate. I was forced to wonder: if Meg did indeed have these powers, had she perhaps summoned up a certain personage, well known in the Ettrick area for many hundreds of years, called Gil-martin, who, if I remember, had plagued a young man in the seventeenth century, and whose memoirs were discovered by James Hogg. Once she had called him up, to give her the powers she needed to coerce Jane, he had become too strong for her. And he had claimed another soul … But these were of course the over-tired and agitated wanderings of my mind after the drama of the day on the hill above St Mary's Loch. Some passing shepherd had thrust the stick into the mound, unaware of what was beneath. I decided to make an early night of it, and went to bed.

By Monday the body had been identified by Mr Tony Marten and his mother, and ‘Jane' was lying in Selkirk morgue. I went to see her frequently, with the kind cooperation of the police. Although they listened with some show of interest to my tentative theories on the long-unsolved Dalzell murders, I believe they were more intrigued by the TV programme which I would shortly be presenting and in which they would appear.

I am now practically convinced that Jane Wild killed Michael Dalzell and his daughter. But it seems I will never furnish enough proof. For a time I was so taken in by Jane's jealous descriptions of Miranda as her boyfriend's past love that I felt the woman who had written this could in no way have been describing her half-sister. The psychiatrists say,
though, that this type of transference is perfectly common in such cases.

There is nothing further to report, except that I went south last weekend, three weeks after the discovery of the grave, to discuss the programme and I decided to ask Tony Marten for an interview. He has of course been interviewed many times on this subject. He is now forty-five, and lives with his mother in Surrey. With some weariness he agreed to my going down to see him. Only one coincidence – and one finds plenty of those in this type of research – came up, and this was supplied by Mrs Marten, whose mind is beginning to wander, I think. I was talking of the discovery of Jane's body in the borders, and she gave a little laugh and an odd look. ‘Yes, poor Jane wasn't terribly well. She'd spoken to me sometimes of her love for the Scottish hills, you know, and in the end it was me who had to get her a ticket and a sleeper north. She seemed to have become quite incapable of managing things, you know!'

I could get nothing more out of her. Neither the date, nor the circumstances of the visit. Perhaps by then I was becoming superstitious and irrational myself. But as I turned to leave, she came with me to the gate and waved goodbye. She was wearing a small white petal hat, and as it was windy outside, the petals ruffled in the breeze. I don't know why, but I couldn't help remembering Stephen's description of his visit to Meg, and the white petals blowing in from the window onto her hair.

Edinburgh, October 21st, 1986