Page 40

Everything was quiet at the Savoy Hotel when I arrived a few minutes before seven o’clock on a warm evening, leaving the Strand and some of my troubles behind me. The revolving doors spun me into another world that began with the entrance hall and its black-and-white tiled floor, the black-and-white columns and the brilliant flower displays on black marble tables. I asked for at the concierge desk and was directed to the American Bar. I’d only met her for a minute and a half, but somehow all this suited her. I could imagine her in a feathered hat with a cigarette in an absurdly long holder and could easily see why Eliot had turned her into the actress Lola Chalfont in his book.

She was waiting for me at a table near the bar, dressed in a mauve two-piece suit with an oversized black silk flower on one lapel and a floppy black hat. She got up as I came in and embraced me.

‘Susan, I’m embarrassed about what happened at the party. You were treated badly. I’m so glad you’ve come.’

I hadn’t been sure she would turn up. When she had followed me out to the lift following Eliot’s outburst, she had sounded desperate, but his death that same evening might have given her second thoughts, particularly if she thought I was involved. I was glad to see that she had decided to give me the benefit of the doubt.

We sat next to each other. Leylah had arrived early. She already had a flute of pink champagne. She handed me the cocktail list and I ordered a Jabberwock Sour because it was gin-based and I liked the name. There was a pianist in black tie playing Broadway favourites, the music occasionally overwhelmed by the rattle of ice in a cocktail mixer behind the bar. The room was huge, divided by fat columns, the waiters swerving round them in black trousers and nifty white jackets. Those two colours seemed to be the theme of the hotel.

‘I’m broken-hearted about Eliot,’ Leylah said. ‘He wasn’t just my nephew. I knew him from the day he was born. He was such a sweet, strange little boy and from the very start I was always afraid that he’d come to a bad end. He was unhappy at Marble Hall, of course, and I hoped that his talent and his good nature would be the saving of him, especially after Miriam died. But everything just got worse and worse. I don’t know how Edward and Amy could have taken off like that, leaving him behind. How could they have done that to their own son? They should have recognised that he needed their support, and it’s no surprise that as soon as they were gone he fell into the wrong company. I heard about the drinking and the parties and the drugs, but what could I do? He didn’t want to speak to me. When he met Gillian, we all hoped he would turn a corner. I only met her a couple of times – we weren’t invited to the wedding – but I thought she was a lovely girl. And now I hear that’s all gone wrong too. You know she met him in hospital. She was his nurse, but that didn’t last long, did it.

‘And now this! The police are saying he was killed deliberately, that it wasn’t just a drunk driver or something like that. And according to my husband, Jonathan, you’re the one they suspect. Of course, I don’t believe that for a minute, my dear. That’s not the reason I wanted to see you. But tell me – how did you get to the party? Did you drive?’

‘No. I came by tube.’

‘Of course you did. So maybe this whole business will go away and the police will leave you alone. Jonathan said you were going to be arrested. I didn’t tell him I was seeing you, by the way, and I hope you won’t tell him either. I expect you’re wishing you’d never heard of the Crace family. You won’t be the only one, I can tell you. They’re cursed. They always have been. If I’d known what I was getting myself into when Jonathan proposed to me, I think I’d have thrown myself overboard into the Nile and hoped that a crocodile would gobble me up. I’d have been better off for it.’

Leylah had a strange way of talking. She didn’t seem to stop, not even for breath, but at the same time her speech was unhurried, her faint Egyptian accent like oil, lubricating the chain of words. I got the sense that she felt liberated being here. She had chosen the venue and it suited her. She could say anything she wanted without being overheard. She had already been indiscreet. I was sure there was more to come.

The waiter arrived with my cocktail. By now, I needed it. Leylah drained her glass and signalled for another. I took a sip of mine. The Jabberwock Sour was ice-cold, very dry, golden-coloured, with a twist of lemon.

‘I don’t love Jonathan, you know. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. You’ve met him. You’ve seen for yourself what sort of man he is. I know he’s been unfaithful to me many times – he and Roland are just the same – but I don’t care. I don’t have any feelings for him. I’ve thought about leaving him, but I ask myself, what’s the point? I’m sixty years old. It’s far too late to think I’ll find happiness on my own. And there are advantages to being part of the Crace family, as long as I don’t lose my temper one day and murder him. Have you ever been married?’

‘I was in a relationship for a while, but it’s over.’

‘Men are just so ghastly. That’s why we girls have to stick together. How’s the cocktail?’

‘It’s very good, thank you.’

‘They do a wonderful martini. I come here all the time. I’m telling you, darling, I’m halfway to becoming an alcoholic. That’s why I stick to champagne. It’s the only drink you can have any time of the day and people won’t think you’re a lush.’

‘You were telling me about Jonathan …’

‘Oh, yes. It’s been a long time since there were any feelings between us. He has such a high opinion of himself. You wouldn’t believe it! Just because his mother wrote those books and made all that money, he thinks he’s the one everyone should look up to. You should hear him when he’s meeting people … Netflix, the publishers, anyone who has anything to do with The Little Bastards . That’s my name for the books – my private joke. They all get on their knees when Jonathan comes into the room. He’s the big businessman, the brilliant negotiator, when really he’s just his mother’s son and they’re all laughing at him behind his back.

‘We had a daughter. I’m sure you know that. He was so desperate to ingratiate himself with Miriam, he named her after one of his mother’s characters.’

‘Jasmine,’ I said.

Leylah flinched. ‘I never called her that. I used to call her Jazz, just to annoy him. And I tried to protect her from him, from all of it. She and I were a team when we were at Marble Hall. We looked after each other.’

The waiter arrived with the second (or maybe third) flute of champagne and she had swept it up and drunk half of it before it had even settled on the table.

‘You know, to this day, Jonathan insists that her death at Sloane Square tube station was an accident, that she slipped and fell. How do you slip on a perfectly dry, half-empty platform and just when the tube is racing in? But he has to keep telling himself that to avoid taking responsibility. It was all too much for her. That was the truth of it. Jazz was a beautiful girl, but of course she had issues. She partied. She drank. She took drugs. Eliot used to get them for her, and can I say something very wicked, Susan? I’m glad someone ran him over. If I met them, I would give them a medal. He was Jazz’s supplier and not for one single minute did he think of her welfare or the consequences of what he did.

‘Jazz couldn’t cope with life. The paparazzi were always after her. And the headlines! “Little Girl Lost … Little Woman Arrested … Jasmine’s Little Drug Problem …” She couldn’t bear to hear that word when she was alive and she’d have hated seeing it all over the newspapers after she’d gone. But Jonathan wouldn’t hear a word of it. He never accepted his part in it, taking away the one thing in my life that mattered to me.’

Huge tears welled up in her eyes but refused to fall, as if she had spent half her life keeping them in.

I was both appalled and fascinated by . I don’t think I’d ever met anyone so broken and Eliot had set the bar pretty high. She was as beautiful as her daughter might have been and here she was in a deluxe hotel, expensively dressed, swigging champagne at twenty pounds a glass, but I’d met trauma victims who were stronger and more stable than her.

‘Tell me about Miriam Crace,’ I said, moving the conversation forward. ‘Did you get on with her?’ I already knew the answer to my question. Roland had told me that Miriam had never approved of her son marrying an Egyptian woman. But I wanted to hear it from her.

This time she surprised me. ‘I never had any problems with Miriam,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it helped that we weren’t living in the main house. You know we had a place in the grounds? We still had dinner with her two or three times a week and she could be quite difficult, complaining about the food or the conversation or the weather. It’s funny. For someone who had done so well in life, she was a miserable old bag. She was sixty when I met her, but the way she behaved, she could have been much older. I felt quite sorry for her, really. But she never did any harm to me.’

‘I heard she was racist.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Eliot.’ In fact, it had been Roland, but I didn’t tell her that because I didn’t want to be dragged into any further confrontations with the Crace family. One wrong word and I might have Jonathan and his posse of lawyers coming after me.

‘Well, darling, it’s not true. Or maybe it is, but it’s more complicated than that. She made jokes about me being from the land of the pharaohs and belly dancing and things like that, but she thought she was being funny. I didn’t find her at all amusing, but I never got the sense that she was picking on me for my heritage or any other reason.’

‘But – forgive me, Leylah – I thought she fell out with Jonathan because he made her put two ethnically diverse characters in her books.’

‘Njinga and Karim. Yes. But it wasn’t their colour that bothered her. She just didn’t like being bullied and told what to do. You know what, Susan? I think when that happened, she saw Jonathan for the complete bastard that he was. She realised he was already planning to take control of the estate and that was why she threatened to sell everything to one of the big American publishers – just to spite him. And she might well have gone ahead if she hadn’t had a heart attack and died. But racist? I don’t think so. She was a patron of the St Ambrose Orphanage, which looked after kids of every creed and colour, and as you know, she adopted Freddy. Have you spoken to him?’

‘Yes.’

‘And …?’

I remembered that Frederick Turner had referred to Miriam Crace as the woman who saved his life. ‘He didn’t make any complaints,’ I admitted.

‘Think about it. A racist with a mixed-race child? Seriously? She had a Black chauffeur too. Bruno – she adored him. He’d gone years before I arrived, but there was a photograph of the two of them on the piano standing in front of her Bentley. And there was a Nepalese gardener.’

‘But why would Eliot lie to me?’

‘Because they are all liars, Susan. Every one of them. Jonathan lied about his own daughter and how she died. Gillian lied to Eliot. That girl! Looks like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but she was having an affair with his brother, and of course Roland was lying too. The baby’s his and he knows it.’

‘Did she tell you?’ I was amazed to hear this coming from her.

‘She didn’t need to, my dear! I’ve seen the two of them together, the way they try to avoid each other’s eye. I’m not a fool. And then there’s Freddy.’ Once Leilah had started, nothing would stop her. ‘He lied about his car accident – you should ask Julia what really happened. She was in the car! Kenneth lied about his marriage to Miriam. He pretended he loved her, but they’d been sleeping in separate rooms for years before I came to Marble Hall and that hobby of his – all those grisly stuffed animals – was just his way of escaping from her.

‘And all of us were lying about Miriam – every one of us. She may not have been a racist but she was a dreadful woman and we had to make sure that the public never found out. Every public event, every time anyone asked us anything about her, we had to say anything except the truth.’

Roland had said the same thing when he’d described his work. ‘ My job is to lie to them. I spend every day of the week keeping alive the big lie. ’ What Leylah was telling me fitted in with what I already knew.

‘Can I give you a word of advice, Susan?’ Leylah had finished her third glass of champagne but there was no sense of celebration or pleasure about her.

‘What’s that, Leylah?’ I asked.

‘The police aren’t going to arrest you for the death of Eliot. I mean, that’s ridiculous. How stupid can they be?’

‘Who do you think killed him?’

‘I think it was an accident. He was drunk. He didn’t know where he was going. But this is my advice. Stay away from the Crace family. Just forget about them. They are the Little People! But they don’t save the world – they do the exact opposite. They hurt everything they touch. They took my daughter from me. Really, they took my whole life. I’d walk away from them while you still can, keep going and don’t look back. It’s too late for me now. But you seem like a good person. Don’t let them do the same to you.’