15

Hildegard lay in her bath trying to trace back the source of a slightly disconsolate and disagreeable sensation that lingered over from the day. It was 6:30 P.M. The best feature of the hotel was its constant, really hot water; Hildegard profited by it frequently before dinner: soothing power of a hot bath. What was her feeling of uneasiness due to? She had left the hotel that morning at ten and taken a bus to Marble Arch. From there she went to several department stores in a leisurely way all along Oxford Street. Hildegard had brought few clothes with her, and now she was beginning to need a change. Gradually, that morning, she had acquired a woollen jacket, a pair of suede boots, four pairs of nylon tights, a pair of brown jeans, a brown cotton shirt and a bottle of English toilet spray called Amours de Boudoir. It was here that Hildegard’s pondering in the bath was arrested. Walking along the ground-floor aisles of the shops that afternoon, she was reminded of her days as a student, earning a poor living from a part-time job at the handbag counter of a department store in Munich. At the cosmetic counter, Hildegard had stopped to try the toilet-water samples being offered by a young woman. It seemed to Hildegard that this woman looked away, and looked again and looked away. Hildegard was taken back to the store of her youth. It was the cosmetics girl who had unwittingly given her the idea of assuming the false stigmata. The cosmetics girl, Ursula, could make up and transform the most ordinary faces. Hildegard had been fascinated. Ursula did a romantic scar, one day, on the left cheek of a young man who happily said he was going to pose as having been involved in a duel.

Ursula, when the time came, made a deep, false indentation in the palm of Hildegard’s hand. Hildegard, then Beate Pappenheim at the height of her success, would get Ursula to come around each month at the time of her menstruation and put the touches of reality on her “five wounds so that they could be photographed.”

Could that young woman in the department store in Oxford Street be really Ursula? She looked so like Ursula, it was incredible, and then her furtive glances at Hildegard, her look, her look away, her look again, her look away . . . Did she recognize me? Hildegard asked herself.

And then she realized how perfectly ridiculous her idea had been. Ursula twelve years ago must have already been over thirty. Now she would be in her mid-forties, much older than the young woman in the department store of today. Hildegard, pulling her thoughts together, apprehended how she herself must have looked strangely at the girl in order to provoke the strange looks she returned. Hildegard had allowed herself to be sprayed by the scent, had bought some and left. Amours de Boudoir—oh, well . . .

All the same, Hildegard was aware that she could still be discovered, exposed. She felt more vulnerable in London than she had ever felt in Paris, perhaps because she looked very French with her dark short-cut hair clinging to her egg-shaped head? She had lost her German look simply by living in France, eating French food, breathing French air. Her skin was still pale, but her waistline small, which had not been so much the case when she had first fled from Munich. She mingled well in Paris, but in London?

“If you want to hide a pebble the best place is the beach”—an old and true maxim. Hildegard—or as she was, Beate—when the scandal broke took eventual refuge in Spain, at Avila, birthplace of two famous Catholic visionaries, St. Theresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross. Nobody thought of looking for her in that atmosphere of heated romantic ecstasy. She was considered to be a fraud. Nobody was looking for her at Avila where a truly holy stigmatic would be likely to linger. In fact she stayed in a convent at Avila for six months, impressing the nuns with her devotion and goodness, her daily visits to the cathedral, to the house of St. Theresa, to the birthplace of St. Theresa, and with her meditative walks in the shadow of Avila’s great and ancient walls. After all, she had mused then (and, in her bath in her London hotel, mused now), I did apparently effect a number of cures, perhaps by the power of suggestion, it’s true. But people were cured by me in my stigmatic days. I felt the part.

She wondered, then, if she would change her hair to fair. If one of the Lucans in fact caught up with her, she had better disguise herself a little.

Among the names of Lucan’s friends published in newspapers in those days after the murder was that of Maria Twickenham, now a widow. Her interview with the police was one of many; it obtained prominence largely through Maria’s glamour and beauty. Her picture was a good accompaniment to the sensational articles. All the articles were by the nature of the case sensational. A peer was wanted for a brutal murder. He had bashed his children’s nanny to death with a length of lead piping, specially prepared to deaden the thuds. Had there been a relationship with the nanny? No, there hadn’t. Far from it, he had meant those thuds for his wife. Having removed the lightbulb on the basement staircase, he had mistaken the young nanny descending the stairs for his young wife. On discovering his blunder, he then attacked the wife, reported the papers. She was now in the hospital with severe head wounds.

That night Lucan, in a panic, visited some of his friends. The main one in London was Maria Twickenham. Hildegard knew that all Lucan’s other friends were either still in the country and no doubt not accessible to enquirers, or dead.

Hildegard in her anxiety to defend herself from Lucan and Walker with their threatening knowledge, and in an increasingly neurotic state from her confinement to a small London hotel, had still plenty of courage to make a decision. Apart from having her hair dyed a mild beige color, she wanted to do more than just hide. Looking through the books that had been written on the Lucan case, all of them were generously illustrated by photographs: Lucan at Eton, Lucan’s engagement portrait, Lucan with his friends in his favorite gaming clubs: oh, look at these people, look close. Hildegard was looking close: Doris McGuire, said the subtitle, Charles McGuire—Maria Twickenham. Yes, it was Maria Twickenham, who, according to the telephone directory, still lived in the same house in Lennox Gardens as she had occupied at the time of the murder.

Hildegard, with her talent for summoning up new fighting energy, was already on the offensive. She would hunt Lucan, threaten him if absolutely necessary; not he, her.

She would chase Lucan, she would hunt him down, confront him, challenge him, dare him to reveal her secret. “You are charged with the crime of murder and attempted murder,” she could say, “and I am not. You haven’t a chance, given the state of the evidence; you have no extenuating arguments to support you; I have.” And she thought: not to speak of my personal documents so carefully prepared in Marseilles.

It was a question, perhaps, of getting to know Maria Twickenham. That for a start.

Hildegard had not sat in her hired car near the house in Lennox Gardens frequently enough to realize that it was no longer the smart one-family residence of twenty-five years ago. It was still verging on smartness but it was broken up into flats. There had been a coming and going of men and women in their thirties, businesslike and attractively dressed; they largely left home around 9 A.M. and returned around 6 P.M. Some passed in and out about lunchtime. A white-haired, large woman of about sixty, who might well have been an older version of Maria’s photograph, dressed in a woolly jacket and trousers, emerged every morning and returned with at least one full shopping bag. She must be Maria Twickenham, thought Hildegard. But no, on following her with some difficulty to the nearby supermarket, Hildegard managed to squint at the name on her credit card. It wasn’t Twickenham, Maria’s name, the name in the phone book. It was Louise B. Wilson.

At least this waiting and watching and surreptitious stalking was more to Hildegard’s taste than the boring, very boring, daily brood in her hotel room. She set forth once again to sit near the white front door of the Twickenham house with its shining brass door-plates. It was Hildegard’s fifth wait when a taxi pulled up, and a tall, thin woman in her sixties emerged from the house under the evening lamplight. She stepped into the cab. Hildegard followed as best she could, but lost it at a traffic light. She felt sure it contained Maria.

Next morning, about 11 A.M., out stepped the large white-haired Louise B. Wilson again. Hildegard leapt out of her car and approached her. “Excuse me,” she said. “I wonder if you can tell me, are there any rooms or flats available in this house?”

“I wouldn’t know really,” said the woman. “I’m just the home-help for Mrs. Twickenham. You’d have to ask her.”

“Is she in now?”

“Well, if you have any references. Do you have a reference—who sent you, I mean?”

“Yes, of course. I got the name and address from someone in Paris, where I live. I’m only here doing a university course for some months.”

The ground-floor flat had been reserved for Maria’s own use, and Hildegard was asked in to wait while Louise B. Wilson went to make enquiries. In a warm, upholstered sitting room Hildegard thought she saw in the large mirror over the mantelpiece another woman behind her. But on looking back, there was nobody. Of course, my blonde hair, Hildegard remembered. But this fragmentary episode put Hildegard in an ever more guarded and inventive frame of mind, so that when tall Maria came smiling into the room, Hildegard was ready with her plausible tongue.

“I was given your name by an old schoolfriend of yours in Paris.”

This is a tactic in the con business that usually works. The mention of a schoolfriend one doesn’t remember generally gives rise to a slight feeling of guilt rather than suspicion. Instead of a reaction like: “This person is probably a fake. I don’t know or remember any such schoolfriend,” it is more likely to be: “My God, have I become so forgetful? or so grand? or so detached from my youth? Don’t I remember who got married? Well, I don’t really care about their fate.”

Maria said, in fact, “I vaguely remember the name. What was her maiden name?”

“I think it was Singleton, but maybe not. She got married as you probably know into Carters’ Publications, tall, brown-haired, extremely athletic. After her divorce, of course, she married someone else, I think. She remembered you so well and knows all about you here in London braving it out as you do. I’m sure you can recall . . .”

Hildegard had an address in Paris ready on her tongue, but it wasn’t necessary. “Yes, of course,” said Maria. “Of course I remember her. And you’ll have some coffee, won’t you? I’m about to make some. Let’s go into the kitchen.”

There she told Hildegard, yes, there would be a two-room flat on the fourth floor available from the week after next. The tenant was out at his job at the moment, and wouldn’t mind her showing it to Hildegard. “Will you be staying long in London?”

“I have to complete some research. I’m a psychiatrist.”

“How fascinating!” (They always said that.)

Like most people, Maria was intrigued by the thought of having a psychiatrist at hand to talk to, without actually taking the plunge of consulting one. There was nothing wrong with Maria, but she herself thought there was; in reality her problem was boredom.

This problem was about to be solved. Maria, although she really had quite a number of friends, had not for many years met anyone quite like Dr. Wolf. Hildegard Wolf was the name on her passport and her fake birth certificate. She had not changed it while hiding in London, so that she would not appear to be hiding, if discovered. And it was much easier to deal with people under a name to which she was accustomed. So she was Dr. Wolf (“call me Hildegard”) to the enchanted landlady, Maria.

As they talked, Maria almost felt she could recall Hildegard’s apocryphal Fay Singleton, so like was she, in any case, to the girls of her day.

“And, of course,” said Hildegard boldly, as the morning wore on, “you knew Lucan, didn’t you? Fay told me. It must have been a shock to find that someone you knew so well was wanted for murder.”

By now, they were in Maria’s living room, drinks in hand. “At one time, well, we couldn’t believe it. Of course, I was away at the time. My late ex-husband and I believed it, yes, and yet we didn’t. Now that we know more . . . And, after all, times have changed, and after all, Lucky Lucan failed to show up, which was really lowering our standards, we all feel different. Or nearly all of us who knew him of old. Most of my friends who knew Lucan now have a poor opinion of him. He might at least have stood trial. And we all feel, now, for poor Sandra Rivett’s son, who was deprived of her so tragically without ever knowing her as a mother; she was supposed to be a sister. Poor girl. Of course, you know Lucky Lucan was a very great bore. I was too young to notice that he was a bore, if you know what I mean. He was just one of the chaps. Very good looking. But I know someone who was at school with him, at Eton. He sat beside him in the choir. My dear, what a bore he thought Lucan was. And the same in the Guards.”

“Is he alive?” said Hildegard.

“I think so. Personally, I think so. Very few people do. But my daughter, Lacey, is actually trying to trace him. She’s going to write a book. She’s in Paris just now with Lucky’s old friend, Joe Murray—he’s the zoologist you’ve probably heard—trying to track him down.” She took up a photograph and handed it to Hildegard. “That’s Lacey,” she said.

“How lovely,” said Hildegard quite justly.

“And intelligent, too,” said Maria.