The Marx Sisters

17

Kathy had a disturbed night. Vague and uneasy images haunted her shallow sleep, and in the waking intervals her brain kept returning to insignificant incidents of her past work which now seemed ominous and foreboding. When the alarm clock beside her bed showed five o’clock, she was glad to abandon the attempt to sleep further and got up. With the lights on and a mug of hot tea beside her bed, the sense of unease evaporated. Brock had warned her that the incident room set up at Jerusalem Lane was cold, so she pulled on layers of warm clothing, relishing the prospect of returning to the place which she had not been able to forget during the six months since Meredith Winterbottom’s death.

She broke her tube journey to call in at ED Division, where she left some messages and picked up her files on the abortive Winterbottom investigation of the previous September. She skimmed through these, as she waited for the tube to Jerusalem Lane.

When she arrived, she found the main Underground exit sealed off. It was only when she reached street level through the alternative exit on to Welbeck Street that she realized why. Looking across at the near corner of the Jerusalem Lane block, she saw in the dawn light that the tube station and its surrounding buildings no longer existed. She felt a jolt of shock, like the survivor of a night air-raid returning to the surface and discovering a ruined and alien wasteland where the day before had been the intimately familiar landscape of home. A smell of burning hung over the place. Irrationally, she wondered if the man who had been protecting his newspapers with plastic sheeting on that corner had survived, and then noticed him further along on her side of the street.

Crossing over, she came to the north end of Jerusalem Lane and saw through a high chain-link fence that almost the whole of that half of the block lying on the east side of the Lane had gone. Witz’s Cameras and Kowalski’s Bookshop, Dr Botev’s surgery, Brunhilde Capek’s flower shop-all had gone. Only the synagogue, its north wall raw and exposed by the surrounding demolition, remained at the far end of a huge hole which dropped away beyond her feet. From the darkness of its depths, where unfamiliar frameworks of scaffolding were already climbing up towards the surface, came flashes of blinding white light, the whine and growl of machinery, and the clanking of metal-tracked vehicles, as if the panzers of an invading force were rousing themselves for another day of action.

At first sight the west side of the Lane appeared intact, but as Kathy walked down towards the south end she saw that most of the doorways and windows were boarded up against the entry of vandals. The doors to the office of Hepple, Tyas amp; Turton and the flat of Sylvia Pemberton had four-by-twos nailed across their frames, and the windows of the Balaton Cafe and Boll’s Coffee and Chocolates were covered with plywood panels on which cheaply printed posters for rock and jazz concerts were already beginning to look tattered. The two remaining shop windows at the south end-Mrs Rosenfeldt’s deli at 22 and Stwosz’s newsagency at 24-looked fragile and threatened. The shop front of number 20 had also not been boarded up, for now it served as the police’s temporary incident centre. The light glowing through its window was the only one on this side of the Lane. A uniformed constable stood at the door, talking to a couple of newspaper reporters whom Kathy recognized.

Inside, the incident centre was remarkably spacious and well-appointed for an on-site facility. The front shop counter served as a reception point, with the area in front used as a waiting area and for press conferences. The room at the rear served as a general office, with telephone and computer links to Scotland Yard, and there was a small kitchen, stocked and operational. Upstairs was Brock’s office and an interview room. Brock wasn’t expected till after 8, and Kathy decided to use the time to take a look next door, at number 22, where the scene-of-crime crew had finished on the previous day.

The uniformed man opened the front door for her, switched on the hall light, and then closed the door again, leaving her to climb the stairs of the silent house alone. There was a smell of damp and mould which she hadn’t noticed six months before, as if winter had been more successful this year in penetrating the cosy sanctuary of the old ladies’ home. In Eleanor’s flat there were further signs of this: a damp green stain in the corner of her sitting room and paper peeling from the wall in the small bedroom. The frugal simplicity of her taste now made her home seem forlorn and cold, the cell of an ascetic nun. Only the wall of books in her sitting room retained a sense of having belonged to an individual rather than an institution. Kathy went carefully through the flat, trying to compare it in her mind with her memory of the place six months before.

When she returned next door, Brock was emerging from the rear kitchen with a mug of coffee. He waved her upstairs and she followed him a moment later with a cup of her own. The lights of his office were on against the gloom of the morning, and a fan heater was humming in a corner.

‘Well, this is pretty good, isn’t it?’ Brock beamed, leaning back in a battered old steel chair. ‘I reckon this is the most luxurious incident centre I’ve had for years. They had no room at the nearest nick and all these empty buildings around here seemed too good to waste.’

Kathy’s eyes had fixed on the colour photographs taped across one wall.

‘Yes, have a look.’

Her attention had been taken by a series of pictures at one end showing the top of a woman’s body. The head was wrapped in a crumpled plastic bag, but it was difficult to identify the face because part of the inside surface of the bag was red with blood. Eleanor had been wearing a plain white cotton nightgown, and her shoulders and arms were almost as white as the material.

Like a bride, the thought came unwelcome into Kathy’s head.

‘What does the pathologist say?’

‘Probably suffocated, then bashed on the forehead with proverbial blunt instrument just to make absolutely certain.’

Whacked on the head, she thought. Who was it said that?

‘Most of my manpower yesterday had to be wasted looking for the damn thing.’

‘No luck?’

Brock shook his head. There was a tap at the door and Brock spun round.

‘Come in, Bren! Meet DS Kathy Kolla. This is DS Brendon Gurney. Have you met?’

Sergeant Gurney shook his head and smiled at Kathy, shaking her hand. ‘You were in charge of the sister’s murder, Kathy?’ He was a big man like Brock, though twenty years younger, with a deep, slow, West Country voice which Kathy immediately trusted.

‘Yes, although at the time we couldn’t be sure it was murder.’

‘Well, this surely makes it look more certain, unless someone is just trying to make it seem that way.’

She nodded. The two men looked as if they could have been father and son, and she had a momentary mental image of two large furry creatures, bears perhaps, or badgers, ambling through the wild wood, immensely dependable and strong. Bren Gurney actually made Brock seem quite agitated and quick in comparison with the figure she remembered from the earlier case. Or more likely, she thought, he’s taking this one seriously. At any rate, he was rubbing his hands, pacing up and down, and shouting down the stairs to a couple of DCs, telling them to come up for a review of the previous day’s progress.

Sergeant Gurney began with a summary of the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body. As significant points were mentioned, he noted them with a blue felt pen on a white board propped against the wall. Brock sat back on his metal chair with his feet up on the desk, his head propped on his hand, fingers spread across his face, occasionally clawing his beard.

‘Mrs Peg Blythe discovered the body of her sister, Eleanor Harper, at around 7.30 yesterday morning. Although they had separate flats, they were in the habit of having breakfast together, usually at Eleanor’s. Since their sister Meredith had been killed six months ago, they had kept their front door locked, and Peg opened Eleanor’s with her key, after there was no reply to her knock. She found her sister in her bed’-he waved at the photographs-‘screamed, phoned the police. ED Division responded, and they asked for our assistance as soon as the link with the earlier death was recognized.

‘The pathologist doesn’t think he’ll be much help with the precise time of death. It was obvious she had been dead some time, but her electric blanket was on, making the normal signs unreliable. So far he can only say five to fifteen hours before 8 a.m. Peg says she and her sister spent the evening together in Peg’s flat, reading, after she’d cooked supper-toasted cheese with tinned spaghetti on top, her favourite. They parted to go to bed at around 9.30 p.m.

‘Yesterday we concentrated on trying to find the hammer or whatever was used to hit the old lady, and on door-to-door inquiries. As you’ll have seen, almost nobody lives around here any more, and we haven’t had any results so far with either line of inquiry, but I assume we’ll continue today, sir? Yes.

‘Two further circumstances which came to light yesterday, which may or may not be relevant. First, local CID tell us that there have been fourteen separate reported incidents at 22 Jerusalem Lane over the past five months, reported either by the sisters or by Mrs Rosenfeldt downstairs.’

He picked up a print-out.

‘Brick thrown through window, water main cut off, super-glue in the front door lock, an intruder tapping on the windows in the middle of the night, and so on. No actual break-ins. Minor damage, but terrifying for elderly ladies in a place like this. That doesn’t include the nasty phone calls. They went on until British Telecom started intercepting the calls a week or so ago. CID sent a crime prevention officer round here to talk to the sisters, and they put security catches on the windows, but not an alarm system. However, Eleanor’s bedroom window was open when Peg found her yesterday morning.’

‘It’s an old vertical sliding sash window, isn’t it, Bren?’ Kathy said.

‘That’s right. The security fixture was one of those bolts drilled through the side frame of the lower window, meant to slot into a hole in the other window’s side frame a few inches up so you can have a little bit of ventilation without anyone being able to get in. But the bolt was hidden by the curtains, and it’s possible she just opened the window a crack without remembering to push it home. Outside is the metal fire-escape stair down to the rear yards below. No indication yet of prints or other signs of an intruder.’

‘We checked both flats for signs of forced entry, didn’t we, Bren?’

Gurney nodded. ‘Nothing obvious.’

‘All right,’ Brock said. ‘You mentioned that there were two things that came to light yesterday, Bren?’

‘Yes. The other was a couple of phone calls yesterday for the sisters from people who wouldn’t identify themselves. The phone used to be downstairs, I understand, in the first sister’s flat while she was alive, then it was moved up to Peg’s. Well the first call was from a woman who asked for Eleanor, but then hung up when the WPC asked who she was. An hour later there was a second call, from someone who didn’t speak, and rang off after listening to the WPC’s voice.’

‘Didn’t British Telecom intercept the calls?’

‘No, we needed the line so we told them not to.’ Gurney wrote the words ‘anon phone calls’ on the board.

‘OK, let’s move on to lines of inquiry, then,’ said Brock, easing himself upright in his chair. ‘Kathy, why don’t you give us a summary of what your investigation threw up last autumn?’

Kathy got to her feet and went over to the board while Sergeant Gurney sat down. ‘The most promising line then, and obviously more so now, concerns the redevelopment of this area and the refusal of Meredith Winterbottom to sell out to the developer, Derek Slade of First City Properties plc. According to Slade he didn’t really need number 22 in order to proceed with his development, but I don’t think we know the full story. The fact that Meredith was the one person in the whole block refusing to sell surely had to be more than a coincidence.

‘Then there was her son, Terry Winter. He seemed to be living beyond his means and on the verge of facing an expensive divorce. At first he’d tried to persuade his mother to mortgage her house, then he suggested that she sell it. Slade said that First City had offered Meredith a quarter of a million, but that if the development went ahead without her property it would eventually be worth next to nothing. Whether or not that was just a negotiating ploy, if Winter had believed it he would have had a strong incentive to get his mother out of that house quickly. Terry’s alibi for the afternoon his mother died depended on his mistress, Geraldine McArthur. Although he inherited his mother’s house when Meredith died, she had arranged it so that her sisters could remain there, rent-free, for as long as they wanted, so his motive remains, and in fact becomes stronger as time passes.

‘There was also the architect, Bob Jones. He was the last person we knew of to enter Meredith’s house before her body was discovered by her sisters. At first we assumed his visit must have had something to do with the redevelopment, but when we tracked him down he claimed not. Instead he came up with this strange story about valuable historical documents which Meredith owned, and which a friend of his, Judith Naismith, was anxious to get hold of. At first he lied to us about Meredith being asleep when they called, and later admitted he knew she was dead, but we had nothing to corroborate his story. We didn’t even know if Judith Naismith existed, and a letter written by Karl Marx, which Jones claimed was the start of their treasure hunt, was conveniently stolen just before we arrived at his flat.

‘Incidentally, sir, when I went into Eleanor’s flat just now, I looked for the old books which Jones claimed they saw in her bookcase and which Judith got so excited about. There was one title he mentioned…’ She thumbed through her notes.

‘Proudhon’s Confessions,’ Brock said. ‘Yes. I looked for the same thing yesterday, Kathy.’

She looked at him in surprise. He hadn’t taken notes during the case and hardly seemed to be paying much attention.

‘I had a DC check the whole bookcase, and then go through the rest of both Eleanor and Peg’s flats. There are no nineteenth-century editions in the house, and no books with handwritten dedications by Karl Marx.’

‘Well, that just makes the whole of Bob Jones’s story more implausible, then,’ she said.

‘Quite possibly.’ Brock scratched his chin.

‘You were worried by Jones, weren’t you, sir?’

‘Yes. The property motive is obviously a powerful one, and a murderer within the family makes sense in statistical terms. But this other story of his is so much more intriguing. How on earth would these old ladies, improbably extreme Marxists themselves apparently, living in a street where Marx himself once lived-how would they have original letters and books and belongings from the great man in their possession? Would anybody invent a story like that? It seems so implausible. But if you did come upon such an improbable treasure, and you had just set up in business on your own, short of cash, and if you knew that the whole area would soon be redeveloped, and the treasure probably gone…’

‘I remember I had the feeling that we had caught him on the hop,’ Kathy said. ‘He took ages to tell his story, almost as if he was feeling his way through it without having had time to plan it.’

‘Well, there are certainly things about it that we should check. If only to give you a trip to New Jersey, Kathy.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Kathy smiled. ‘And then there’s the Kowalskis and the Croatia Club, and their feud with Meredith Winterbottom. I suppose Eleanor’s murder makes their involvement less likely now. It always seemed an unlikely motive for murder.’

Brock nodded. He went over to the board and drew two overlapping circles, one with a bold line, the other dotted.

‘Two fields of inquiry,’ he said. ‘One, the property matter. Very plausible.’ In the solid circle he wrote the names ‘Slade’ and ‘Winter’. ‘The other, the Marx papers. Very tenuous.’ In the dotted circle he wrote ‘Naismith’ and ‘Kowalskis’. ‘And where they overlap, Mr Jones, who seems to be involved in both.’

They spent the next half-hour brainstorming possible lines of attack on these areas, before Brock and Kathy left to drive down to Chislehurst, where Peg had been taken to stay with the Winters. Sergeant Gurney remained at Jerusalem Lane to supervise the area teams there.