Murder in Le Grand Hôtel de Paris

At 2:47 on a Tuesday afternoon in September, the Eurostar from St Pancras slid into the Gare du Nord eleven minutes late, and my sister did not thank the man who lifted her cases down to the platform. She never did. It was not rudeness, exactly, or not only rudeness. Skye had decided, somewhere around her first million followers, that gratitude was a currency she spent only on camera, and that the rest of us — porters, drivers, half-sisters — were the fixed cost of being adored. She stepped down onto the concrete in white trousers that had survived two hours and a Channel without a crease, tilted her chin at the vaulted iron roof, and said, ‘God, it smells of diesel and disappointment,’ to nobody, or to the four hundred thousand people who would watch her say it later. Somewhere a phone was already up, catching her against the light. There was always a phone. She lived the way other people rehearsed. I carried the cases. There were five of them, four of hers and one of mine, and the heaviest held not clothes but product: serums, creams, patches, a battery-lit mirror, three shades of a foundation she had been paid a great deal of money to prefer. I had learned the exact angle at which the trolley would tip and the exact number of steps I could take before my shoulder gave its small betrayed sound. People who have never done it imagine that assisting a beautiful woman is a soft occupation. It is a haulage job with a smile bolted on, and the smile is the heavier of the two. Skye was twenty-nine and looked, in the flattering wreck of a station’s afternoon light, both younger and older than that — younger in the untouched skin she sold by the jar, older in the way her eyes moved. She had a habit of scanning a crowd the way a cashier counts a till, quickly, without pleasure, checking. I had put it down for years to vanity, to the constant search for a lens or a stranger who might become one. That afternoon I saw it do something else. A man near the ticket barriers turned his head. An ordinary man in an ordinary coat, the kind of man a station manufactures by the thousand. And Skye stopped. Simply stopped, one case-length ahead of me, her whole calibrated body gone still, the performance falling off her like a dropped coat. For a second she was nobody’s idea of anything, just a woman who had seen a shape she knew. Then the man kept walking and became nothing again, and Skye laughed, too high, and told me we would be late. We were not late. We were never late; I saw to that. But I had seen the still moment, and I filed it, because filing was the other half of my job, the half nobody paid for. My name is Eleanor Ashford. Skye called me Nell when she wanted something and Eleanor when she wanted to wound, which meant I was Eleanor most weekends. I am four years older than my sister and, by every measure the world now keeps, immeasurably her inferior. Once I had been going to be someone. There had been a doctorate at the Sorbonne, half-written, on the iconography of Parisian funerary sculpture — the angels and the veiled women that lean over the tombs of people no one now remembers. I had loved that subject with an ardour I have never managed to feel for a living thing. I had loved a city where a whole afternoon could be spent reading a single carved word. Then our mother died, and the money that had never quite been there turned out to have never quite been there in a more permanent way, and Skye’s little videos began, improbably, to pay. I told myself I would help her for a year, until she found her feet, until the thing steadied. That had been six years ago. I have a talent, it seems, for the temporary arrangement that hardens, while you are looking the other way, into a life. The car took us west along the grands boulevards, and I watched Paris arrange itself in the window while Skye answered messages with her thumbs and told me, without looking up, three things she needed done before the gala.