Page 110 of Marble Hall Murders

I hadn’t been sure she would turn up. When she hadfollowed 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 oftimes – 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 tooka 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 withThe Little Bastards. That’s my name for the books – my private joke. They all get on their knees whenJonathan 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 andshe’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 Leylah Crace. 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.’

---