A La Carte

by Jeffrey Archer

  Silence fell between them. Then Zillah said quite conversationally: ‘By the way, how did you know?’

  ‘A historical inaccuracy was your first mistake,’ replied Jemima. They might have been analysing a game of bridge. ‘It always struck me as odd that a woman called Catharine Parr, and an educated woman to boot, would not have known the simple facts of her namesake’s life. It was Catharine Howard by the way who lost her head, not Catharine Parr.’

  ‘Oh really.’ Zillah sounded quite uninterested. ‘Well, I never had any education. I saw no use for it in my work, either.’

  ‘But you made other mistakes. The sleeping-car attendant: that was a risk to take. He recognised you because of all the drinking. He spoke of you being third time lucky, and at first I thought he meant your quick journey up and down from London to Inverness and back. But then I realised that he meant that this was your third journey northwards. He spoke of you “going north” the second time and how you weren’t so drunk as the first time. She went up first, didn’t she? You killed her. Then faked your own death, and somehow got down to London secretly, perhaps from another station. Then up and down again under the name of Catharine Parr.’

  That was unlucky.’ Zillah agreed. ‘Of course I didn’t know that he’d met the real Catharine Parr when I travelled up under her name the first time. I might have been more careful.’

  ‘In the end it was a remark of Elspeth Maxwell’s which gave me the clue. That, and your expression.’

  ‘That woman! She talks far too much,’ said Zillah with a frown.

  ‘The dyes: she showed me the various dyes you had used, I suppose to dye Mrs Parr’s hair blonde and darken your own.’

  ‘She dyed her own hair,’ Zillah sounded positively complacent. ‘I’ve always been good at getting people to do things. I baited her. Pointed out how well I’d taken care of myself, my hair still blonde and thick, and what a mess she looked. Why, I looked more like the children’s mother than she did. I knew that would get her. We’d once been awfully alike, you see, at least to look at. You never guessed that, did you? Kitty never really looked much like her, different nose, different-shaped face. But as girls, Catharine and I were often mistaken for each other. It even happened once or twice when I was working for her. And how patronising she was about it. “Oh no, that was just Zillah,” she used to say with that awful laugh of hers when she’s been drinking. “Local saint and poor relation.” I think that’s why he – the children’s father – first fell in love with me. I was like her but not like.’ Zillah hesitated and then went on more briskly.

  ‘I showed her the bottle of Goldilocks, pretended I used it myself and she grabbed it. “Now we’ll see who the children’s real mother is,” she said, when she’d finished.’

  The bottle did fool me at first,’ admitted Jemima. ‘I thought it must be connected somehow with the children’s hair. Then Elspeth gave me the key when she wondered aloud who would ever use Brown Leaf if they had fair hair: “It would only hide the colour.” ’ She paused. ‘So you killed her, blonde hair and all,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I killed her,’ Zillah was still absolutely composed. She seemed to have no shame or even fear. ‘I drowned her. She was going to take the children away. I found out that she couldn’t swim, took her out in the boat in the morning when I knew Johnnie Maxwell wasn’t around. Then I let her drown. I would have done anything to keep the children,’ she added.

  ‘I told the children that she’d gone away,’ she went on. That horrid drunken old tramp. Naturally I didn’t tell them I’d killed her. I just said that we would play a game. A game in which I would pretend to fall into the lake and be drowned. Then I would dress up in her old clothes and pretend to be her. And they must treat me just as if I was her, all cold and distant. They must never hug me as if I was Zillah. And if they played it properly, if they never talked about it to anyone, not even each other when they were alone, the horrid mother would never come back. And then I could be their proper mother. Just as they had always wanted. Zillah, they used to say with their arms round me, we love you so much, won’t you be our Mummy forever?’ Her voice became dreamy and for a moment Jemima was reminded of the person she had known as Catharine Parr. ‘I couldn’t have any children of my own, you see; I had to have an operation when I was quite young. Wasn’t it unfair? That she could have them, who was such a terrible mother, and I couldn’t. All my life I’ve always loved other people’s children. My sister’s. Then his children.’

  ‘It was the children all along, wasn’t it? Not the money. The Parr Trust: that was a red herring.’

  ‘The money!’ exclaimed Zillah. Her voice was full of contempt. The Parr Trust meant nothing to me. It was an encumbrance if anything. Little children don’t need money: they need love and that’s exactly what I gave to them. And she would have taken them away, the selfish good-for-nothing tramp that she was, that’s what she threatened to do, take them away, and never let me see them again. She said in her drunken way, laughing and drinking together: “This time, my fine cousin Zillah, the law will be on my side.” So I killed her. And so I defeated her. Just as I defeated her the last time when she tried to take the children away from me in court.’

  ‘And from their father,’ interposed Jemima.

  The judge knew a real motherly woman when he saw one,’ Zillah went on as though she had not heard. ‘He said so in court for all the world to hear. And he was right, wasn’t he? Seven years she left them. Not a card. Not a present. And then thinking she could come back, just like that, because their father was dead, and claim them. All for an accident of birth. She was nothing to them, nothing, and I was everything,’’

  And Jemima herself? Her mission?

  ‘Oh yes, I got you here deliberately. To test the children, I was quite confident, you see. I knew they would fool you. But I wanted them to know the sort of questions they would be asked – by lawyers, even perhaps the Press. I used to watch you on television,’ she added with a trace of contempt. ‘I fooled that judge. He never knew about their father and me. I enjoy fooling people when it’s necessary. I knew I could fool you.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ said Jemima Shore coldly. She did not like the idea of being fooled. ‘There was one more clue. An expression. The expression of triumph on your face when I told you I was satisfied about the children and was going back to London. You dropped your guard for a moment. It reminded me of a woman who had once scored over me on television. I didn’t forget that.’ She added, ‘Besides, you would never have got away with it.’

  But privately she thought that if Zillah Parr had not displayed her arrogance by sending for Jemima Shore, Investigator, as a guinea pig she might well have done so. After all, no one had seen Catharine Parr for seven years; bitterly she had cut herself off completely from all her old friends when she went to Ireland. Zillah had also led a deliberately isolated life after her husband’s death; in her case she had hoped to elude the children’s mother should she ever reappear. Zillah’s sister had vanished to Canada. Elspeth Maxwell had been held at arm’s length, as had the inhabitants of Kildrum. Johnnie Maxwell had met Zillah once but there was no need for him to meet the false Mrs Parr, who so much disliked fishing.

  The two women were much of an age and their physical resemblance in youth, striking: that resemblance which Zillah suggested had first attracted Mr Parr towards her. Only the hair had to be remedied, since Catharine’s untended hair had darkened so much with the passing of the years. As for the corpse, the Parr family lawyer, whom Zillah had met face to face at the time of her husband’s death, was, she knew, on holiday in Greece. It was not difficult to fake a resemblance sufficient to make Major Maclachlan at the Estate Office identify the body as that of Zillah Parr. The truth was so very bizarre: he was hardly likely to suspect it. He would be expecting to see the corpse of Zillah Parr, following Johnnie’s account, and the corpse of Zillah Parr, bedraggled by the loch, he would duly see.

  The unkempt air of a tramp was remarkably easy to ass
ume: it was largely a matter of externals. After a while the new Mrs Catharine Parr would have discreetly improved her appearance. She would have left Kildrum – who would have blamed her? – and started a new life elsewhere. A new life with the children. Her own children: at last.

  As all this was passing through Jemima’s head, suddenly Zillah’s control snapped. She started to cry: ‘My children, my children. Not hers, Mine —’ And she was still crying when the police car came up the rough drive, and tall men with black and white check bands round their hats took her away. First they had read her the warrant: ‘Mrs Zillah Parr, I charge you with the murder of Mrs Catharine Parr, on or about the morning of August 6 … at Kildrum Lodge, Inverness-shire.’

  As the police car vanished from sight down the lonely valley, Tara came out of the rhododendrons and put her hand in Jemima’s. There was no sign of Tamsin.

  ‘She will come back, Miss Shore, won’t she?’ she said anxiously. ‘Zillah, I mean, not that Mummy. I didn’t like that Mummy. She drank bottles all the time and shouted at us. She said rude words, words we’re not allowed to say. I cried when she came and Tamsin hid. That Mummy even tried to hit me. But Zillah told us she would make the horrid Mummy go away. And she did. When will Zillah come back, Miss Shore?’

  Holding Tara’s hand, Jemima reflected sadly that the case of the Parr children was probably only just beginning.

  ROMANCE 1988

  Doris Lessing

  Two young women sat on opposite sides of a table in the cafeteria in Terminal Three, Heathrow airport. They were in the raised part, which is like a little stage. Sybil had gone straight to this area though there were places empty in the lower, less emphasised, part of the room.

  They were sisters, both large-boned, stocky, with broad sensible faces. But Sybil refused to be ordinary, wore dramatic makeup, short yellow hair, clothes you had to look at. She was a dazzler, like a pop star. No one would particularly notice Joan, and she sat admiring Sybil and giving London full credit, at least for this: they were from northern England, and they valued this sound inheritance, so much better than anything the frivolous and spoiled south could produce. They were in the old tradition of two sisters, the pretty one and the clever one, and so they had been cast in their childhoods – Joan, clever, and Sybil, pretty. But they were both clever attractive hard-working girls who pursued their chances with skill.

  Joan was saying, ‘But you’re only twenty-two. I thought you were going to take your time?’ She was the older sister, twenty-four.

  Sybil said in her loud careless voice that everyone had to listen to, always, ‘But my dear, I’ll never find anyone like Oliver, I know that.’

  Joan smiled. Deliberately. She raised her brows.

  Sybil grinned at her, acknowledging the older sister act.

  They did not need to hurry this conversation. Joan was on her way to Bahrain where she had got herself a job as secretary in a part-American, part-English firm. She had just flown in from Yorkshire, and there were three hours before her flight out. Sybil had said that of course she would come out to Heathrow to be with her sister, no, it didn’t matter, she just wouldn’t go to work that day. She had arrived in London two years before and had at once taken possession of it, getting herself – God only knew how – a secondhand car, and she thought nothing of driving out to the airport at six in the morning or eleven at night to have a chat with friends who were always on their way through, or of dropping in on several parties in one night, in places as far apart as Greenwich and Chiswick. She had come to London as a secretary, but had decided that ‘temping’ was a better bet. Thus one sampled all kinds of different work, met a lot of different men, and when she was offered a job that suited her she would stay put. At least, that was what she had said until recently.

  You said all that about Geoff, remember,’ said Joan, not unpleasantly, but putting the case.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Sybil, ‘but I was only an infant then.’

  ‘Eighteen,’ said Joan.

  ‘All right! Granted! And I know it doesn’t sound likely, but we are made for each other, Oliver and I.’

  ‘Has he said so?’

  ‘I think we’re in for it – marriage, kids, a mortgage, the lot.’ The loud confident voice was attracting attention, and Joan was embarrassed. As she had been, all her life, by her sister.

  She said in a pointedly low voice, ‘Sybil, you told me it was all off with Oliver.’

  ‘Yes, I know I did,’ said Sybil loudly. ‘He said he didn’t want to marry again. He liked being free. And off he went. I didn’t see him for months. He broke my heart. When he came after me again I said to him, You’ve broken my heart once, so this time you’re going to have to make the running, I’m not coming after you. Not the way I did when I first met him,’ she explained. And she cast a glance around to make sure her audience was still rapt.

  Joan considered all this. Then she asked, ‘When you’re married, are you going to travel abroad with him when he’s on his trips?’

  Oliver travelled a great deal for his firm, was more often away than in London.

  ‘No. Oh well, I’ll go with him sometimes, if it’s somewhere interesting, but I’ll make a home for him in London. No, I’m going to be a real wife,’ she insisted, to her sister’s quizzical smile.

  ‘You always have to go to extremes.’

  ‘What’s extreme about that?’

  “If you can’t see it’s over the top! Anyway, last time you said whenever he went abroad he took a different girl.’

  ‘Yes, I know. He was in Rome last week and I knew he had slept with someone though he didn’t say and I didn’t ask. Because it was not my business …’ Joan was looking so humorous that it was with an effect of shouting against noise that Sybil went on, ‘Yes. But then he confessed he had slept with someone and he felt guilty about it. Because of me. And I’ve been feeling guilty if I slept with anyone but him right from the very first time I slept with him.’

  ‘Well,’ sighed Joan, I suppose that’s pretty conclusive.’ ‘Yes, I think it is. And what about you and Derek? Is he going to wait until you get back from Bahrain?’

  ‘He says he will, but I have my doubts.’

  They smiled at each other.

  ‘Plenty of fish in the sea,’ said Sybil.

  “He’s all right. But I reckon I’ll have saved up thirty thousand out there, that is if I stick it out. There’s nothing to spend anything on.’

  ‘And then you’ll be independent.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll buy a house the moment I get back.’

  ‘Makes sense. And Oliver and I are looking for a house. We were looking last Sunday. It’s fun looking at houses. There was one I think he would settle for, but I said to him, No, if we are going to be Upwardly Mobile, then let’s do it. That house isn’t good enough. You’re doing better and better all the time, I said to him. Because he is. He’s shooting up in his firm, and he gets more and more eligible every day.’

  ‘You always did say you would marry for money.’

  ‘Yes, I did. And I am. But I wouldn’t marry him if I didn’t feel like this about him.’

  ‘But do you feel like this about him because he is so eligible?’ enquired Joan, laughing.

  ‘Probably. But what’s the matter with that?’

  ‘Would you marry him if he was poor?’

  The sisters were now leaning forward, faces close, laughing and full of enjoyment.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. I’ve got to have money. I know myself, don’t I?’

  ‘I hope you do,’ said the older sister, suddenly sober.

  Meanwhile people nearby were smiling at each other because of the two young adventurers, probably feeling that they ought to be shocked or something.

  There was a pause, while they attended to coffee, croissants, fruit juice.

  And then, suddenly, Sybil announced, ‘And we are both going to have an AIDS test.’ Now the people listening stopped smiling, though they were certainly attending. ‘We both decided, at the same
time. I mentioned it first, and found he had thought of it too. He slept around a lot after his divorce, and I have too, since I came to London. And you never know. But the trouble is, I’m going to have it done privately, because if it’s on the National Health then it’s in the records for everyone to see. Because then it would look as if you were worried.’

  ‘And it’s expensive.’

  ‘Yes. Well, I can’t afford it, I don’t have the money, but Oliver can and he’ll pay for me.’

  Joan smiled. ‘Certainly one way of making him responsible for you.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘What will you do if either of you is positive?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure we won’t be! We’re both as hetero as they come. But you never know. We want to be on the safe side. No, we’ll have the tests done and then we’ll give each other our certificates.’ Her face was soft and dreamy, full of love. For the first time she had forgotten her audience.

  ‘Well,’ said Joan, taking neat little sips of coffee, I suppose that’s one way of doing it.’ ‘It means much more than an engagement ring, I mean, it’s a real commitment.’

  ‘And he is going to have to be faithful to you now, isn’t he?’

  ‘But I’ll have to be faithful to him!’

  Joan’s face was suggesting this was not the same thing. Then she asked, teasing, ‘Faithful for ever?’

  ‘Yes …well …for as long as we can, anyway. We don’t want to sleep with anyone else, not the way we feel now. What’s the point of risking it, anyway?’

  She glanced around, but her audience no longer attended to her. They were talking to each other. If this was their way of showing disapproval, then …

  Two and a half hours to go.

  Sybil raised her voice. ‘We tried condoms, too, but God knows how people get them to work. We laughed so much that in the end we simply had to settle for going to sleep.’