Hitler's Girls (2 page)

That Monica Stirling should have (presumably) found the early-nineteenth-century building as worthy of refurbishment and care as my fellow members of the Trust and I found it, was moving indeed. The link with the preservation of an edifice such as St Ronan’s, coupled with a sense that our childhood friendship had bred a shared love of the old, the historic, brought me to London. I stay at the Avondale Club, for Scottish University Women. It is as quiet and well run as I remember it.

I shall add here that this is the worst case I have ever known. It is scandalous that a respectable woman such as Monica should be assassinated—there is no other word for it—while her killer goes free. I am able only now to release notes, diary entries, interviews, and interrogations, regarding my tentative exploration of the inexplicably vile end of a gentle woman.

The most unpleasant shock came on arrival at Monica’s West London house today. A brief visit to the police reveals they have dismissed all other suspects in the “girl gang” of which TV news made so much. They claim they need the whereabouts of only one of Monica’s attackers: they wish to interview Monica’s granddaughter, the child she had brought up from infancy, after the deaths of both parents. The police are looking for my goddaughter. Mel.

I intend to collect all I can, concerning the murder of Monica Stirling. The disappearance of Monica’s fifteen-year-old granddaughter subsequent to the brutal murder of the woman I had known as a childhood friend in the North is of course my main concern. I informed the police that I had no idea of the whereabouts of Mel.

“Leave it to us,” said the young dog-faced inspector, who had just spent half an hour questioning me on my knowledge of Monica’s habits (I knew virtually nothing). Finally, I had to suggest it was time to end our interview, and he appeared as relieved as I was when I went out the door.

Here I am in the neat semi in West London where Monica lived until yesterday. The house isn’t as neat now as she must have kept it, of course, since the gang came in and ransacked it. What had they wanted?

“Money,” the neighbour Mrs. Walker said after I let myself in with the key Monica sent me all those years ago in case I wanted somewhere to stay if I came South.

I never did. Now it’s too late. “Five murders this year so far in Kilburn,” Mrs. Walker said before I shut her out onto the suburban tiled path. “Money for drugs. That’s what they want.”

But I’m not so sure. I need time, to find who killed Monica Stirling. Mrs. Walker’s bossy, ingratiating manner has guaranteed her a role as star witness. She claims Mel would have no qualms in killing her mother, in order to obtain this revolting drug. But I find I cannot agree with her. Mel—little Melissa Stirling—a matricide?

The street where Monica lives is long and straight. There are rowan trees planted along the pavement on both sides. In late summer they will be covered in red and orange berries—and I can’t help thinking of the little town in Scotland where we grew up and went to the same school, Monica and I. I try to remember what we did to amuse ourselves, in the steep granite town where the women worked at the wool mill and the men were either unemployed or worked on land belonging to the local lairds. How did the long rainy summers and cold winters go by?

The answer is simple. I studied, for I knew I wanted to teach and to understand history.

Monica read
Woman’s Own
and then looked embarrassed when she confessed to it.

Monica wanted only to get married. “Kinder, Küche, Kirche,” I used to tease her, quoting the aims for women of the man who had just tried—and failed—to destroy us all and bring Europe under his control.

But Monica had no idea what I meant. She said her stars told her she would marry soon. And she did, she married Ian Stirling when she was eighteen years old and he was little more. He’d come North fruit-picking. I can see him now, standing by the raspberry canes in a sodden mac. Ian went on to work in an accountancy firm and they later relocated to London.

About that time their daughter Janet was born. After they’d tried for ages. And then, the tragedy: Janet and her husband killed in a road accident. The baby, Mel—Melissa—strapped behind them in a carrycot, alive and well. Ian and Monica, then sixty, took the baby.

I did what I could for my godchild, though evidently it wasn’t enough. I didn’t come South and use the key: I sent books at Christmas and a card with a note folded in it for her birthday. The notes increased from £1 to £10 as the years went by—I don’t approve of older people who don’t keep up with the times. Her last birthday in June I sent £20 and—though Monica dropped me a line and said Mel had been “overjoyed”—she,
Monica, thought it was too much. They didn’t need money at Bandesbury Road now. And she folded the note back in the envelope to me.

I admit I was a little offended at first. Now I wonder: why did Monica send the money back to me? She’d been widowed three years and I hadn’t heard that her circumstances had improved. Was she too proud to let on that her pension wasn’t enough?

Or—least likely of—had she suddenly come into money? If she had, it wouldn’t have been from her parents. The doctor and his wife weren’t well off. Besides, they had three sons, children of their own.

Then I remembered. Monica was adopted. She’d told me when we were out in the playground of the school at break. I can see—just as clearly as I saw Ian, fingers blue from cold as he pulled fruit from the tall, prickly bushes—the time she spoke about herself and her family. A light drizzle was falling and the chimney from the mill sent up a plume of very white smoke into the sky.

Perhaps in those days the fact that the identity of the biological parents was kept permanently concealed made conjecture and wishful thinking less prevalent than they are today.

Monica showed no interest whatsoever in her true parentage. We took pandrops from a bag that was already damp from
the insistent drizzle and we sucked and then crunched at the same time, which made us both burst out laughing.

To this day I never thought of the subject again.

But then I thought of Monica very little. And now everyone thinks of her: her plump face on TV, dark hair neatly set, typical suburban housewife. Murdered—another statistic for Kilburn. No close friends. Had Mel antagonised everyone round here?

I look round the house but I see nothing of value. Nothing to show that Monica had suddenly found herself heir to a fortune.

But then I wouldn’t know what had been there for the taking. Monica’s house had clearly been ransacked.

And I come near to smiling as I walk across the cork tiles of the kitchen (muddy still from trampling feet at the time of Saturday’s crime). For it occurs to me that Monica, who loved historical romances, would have revelled in a lurid plot such as the one I had just concocted about heirs and a fortune. “What happens next, Jean?” Monica would say when we were young, her eyes wide. “What does it mean, inheritance?”

But I fear there will be no romance in this compilation of memories, records, and observations surrounding the murder of Monica Stirling. I have taken pains to assure the accuracy of the facts I present here.

And I, Jean Hastie—who am now, as it transpires, the only remaining friend of Monica Stirling, after all these years—I,
Jean, will attempt to find Monica’s daughter. It is impossible to believe she killed—and robbed—her mother, and then ran away.

First, the kitchen must be thoroughly cleaned. Then the stairs, bedroom, and sitting-room of Monica’s house, so she need feel no shame, even in death.

This is where she and I were alike, even when we were very young. I was tidy. I liked to organise. I kept my filing cabinet immaculate.

Monica would scrub and polish until the doctor’s house on the outskirts of Eddleston shone and gleamed.

Which makes it all the odder that there are practically no cleaning agents to be found here at 109 Bandesbury Road.

Just a moth-eaten duster, an abandoned tin of furniture polish, and a half-solidified bottle of Jif.

My name is Clemency Wilsford. I am sixteen years old and I am English, although Nanny says I am growing more German every day. We come each summer to the house Uncle Leader has built especially for his friends. “If you are naughty,” Nanny says, “Uncle Leader won’t invite you any more. Putzi will not be your friend, there will be no dancing after tea in the barn.” So I must be good, I must pretend that I am happy in this house in the mountains where I want to run away and die
.

Uncle Leader’s big friend is a woman who talks about him all the time. “Isn’t the Führer wonderful,” she says and when she sees me she says it in a loud whispery voice—“hasn’t he marvellous eyes? Marvellous cruel eyes… but he’s not cruel, is he Clemmie? He wants to look after you, just like Nanny does… he loves us all, Clemmie, and you’re going to be good while we play our little game, aren’t you my
armes kind.”

What I hate most of all is the game. They played it last year at Berchtesgaden and I was told to stand in a corner and
not look round until Putzi called out to me to move. “It’s just like a game of statues,” the big woman says and I can smell her breath on my neck, so I scream. “Now halt,” the big woman insists—and I look round because I know I must. But they’re just where they were before. “How does the magic work?” Uncle Leader says in a funny babyish voice and they all burst out laughing. “Show us again, Magda”—and the big woman who is very
chic,
that is Putzi’s word for her, jumps forward and right onto the thin green lawn where the grown-ups play if it isn’t raining. I hate the game because I know it’s for making people do something they wouldn’t normally do
.

But nothing is normal here. Putzi said I may never go home, and I say I don’t care if I go or not, I refuse to sing the songs and say how much I love Uncle Leader. I hate playing statues too
.

I didn’t like Jim Graham. The minute I laid eyes on him I felt sorry for Monica, as if she were still alive and didn’t want me to know she had no-one better to spend an evening with when her teenage daughter was stuck up in her room on the phone or out making trouble with other youngsters. There is something just a little too friendly about Jim—and now, after letting me in to 119 Bandesbury Road, he’s growing friendlier by the minute.

Which is odd, considering we’re sitting side-by-side on a collapsed old settee in his front room and staring at a video of the murder of Monica Stirling.

I have a gin and tonic in my hand. Jim has a whisky. We might be viewing the Lord Mayor’s show or horse-jumping, for all the effect the spectacle is having on Jim Graham. “I made a copy of Mrs. Walker’s video-tape,” Jim said to me as he let me in to the little semi which is as untidy as Monica’s must in usual circumstances have been neat. “Our Neighbourhood Watch in person. You met her for a moment I believe, Mrs. Hastie?”

I won’t permit this type of address. I’ve never been married and the assumption that the prefix Mrs. is a compliment to a single woman is, I find, deeply offensive. I corrected Mr. Graham—and couldn’t help enjoying the moment of panic when he visibly couldn’t decide whether “Dr.” was medical or academic. As I explained that I was a part of the Edinburgh University history faculty, his eyes appeared to flicker in relief.

Monica had told me about Jim. He’d drop in on her from five doors down and they’d do the crossword together—a very useful friend, Monica’s letter had said, but somehow there was a tone of desperation. Jim had been a journalist—a Foreign Correspondent, I think she described him. Retired now. A faint hint of a re-marriage vanished after the first letter and thereafter Jim was hardly referred to at all.

At the time, I thought nothing of Monica’s silence on the subject of Jim. But here he is—on my little cassette recorder I take to historic houses in Scotland when I want to record the owners’ descriptions of their properties and the relationship of those properties to the Scottish National Trust.

“Oh yes, Dr.—Dr. Hastie, Monica Stirling and I were very good friends. It was great to call round there—she preferred that to coming here—one can see why, I’m afraid!”

A loud, self-deprecating laugh. Jim Graham is clearly one of those bachelors who considers that his living in a pigsty must
be attractive to women. Did I mention: Graham has balding dark hair and very deep-set eyes? He may have been handsome once—now he has let himself go, and so he resembles the unfortunate condition of his house and furnishings more closely perhaps than he can realise. The friendly, almost familiar manner sits ill with an inbred arrogance: Jim’s look is one of superiority and self-righteousness masked by a desire to appear modern and trendy. Hence the frequent Americanisms. I have heard colleagues at the Faculty, freshly over from the USA, refer to this type of parlance as “guy.”

Now Jim is speaking of Monica in what I’ve come to think of as his “forensic” voice. “It was the night before last. We’d agreed to meet. I went up to 109. She was great company, Monica, really great!”

I cannot say precisely why, but I had a strong feeling at this point that Monica’s death, far from being a tragedy to Jim Graham, is actually providing him with some excitement. I must have looked away, because he goes on: “Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Hastie! This type of thing doesn’t turn me on. I was horrified to hear—I detest violence as much as any man who’s been up against it all those years. Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda…”

“Mr. Graham, I have to ask you these questions because it’s a long time since I last saw Monica. Fifteen years, to be precise. I was godmother to—to Janet’s daughter. Mel had never been
christened. Monica thought it important. The christening was in Edinburgh.”

“Yes, yes.” Jim Graham swivels round in his chair, pressing the “pause” button on the controller at the same time. Now I feel him tensing: I’d been wrong in thinking Monica’s dreadful end had been a titillation to him: it’s the mention of the girl’s name that gets him on the move. I conceal a smile, thinking of the time the old Laird of Melquhane had given away his knowledge of a secret hiding place for the Casket letters, all because my assistant at the time, provocatively named Mary Seton after one of the Scottish Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, had come with me on the case. But I digress.