The Marx Sisters

2

Kathy came running down the stairs to the mortuary feeling like a school kid late for classes. This is ridiculous, she thought, it’s my case, and stopped to get her breath. She pulled her sweater straight over the pleats of her skirt and ran a hand across the fair hair pulled to the back of her head, then stepped forward and pushed open the plastic swing doors.

There were half a dozen people in the room. She recognized the pathologist, Dr Mehta, standing by an open filing cabinet, writing on a clip-board, while his assistant, green-overalled and already kitted out with rubber gloves and cap, was sorting through nasty-looking tools on a stainless-steel tray. The anxious woman in the dark suit was probably from the coroner’s office, and a photographer sat near her, looking bored and hung-over.

In front of Kathy, and with his back to her, a big man in a surprisingly smart suit was leaning forward, peering at the table in the centre of the room. His hands were clutched behind his back, and from their fingers hung the straps of a Polaroid camera. Less like a Legend of the Yard, she thought, than an overdressed tourist. He straightened as the doors flapped closed behind her, and turned, peering at her over the top of the half-lens glasses perched on the end of his nose. She hadn’t expected the almost boyish thatch of hair, and the beard. Both hair and beard were grey, almost bluegrey in the cold fluorescent light.

‘Detective Sergeant Kolla,’ she said brightly, extending her hand, expecting some put-down for being late, knowing his reputation among the junior officers at Division. But he just beamed at her, a big bear of a man, twice her weight, and took her hand, introducing himself disarmingly without rank. ‘David Brock,’ he said in a low growl.

They both turned their attention back to the body.

The old woman looked smaller and more frail here, naked on the table, than when Kathy had seen her yesterday, lying peacefully on her bed in her woollen cardigan and skirt and thick stockings. Now her face was tinged grey on one side, and her eyes seemed to have sunk back into their sockets behind the wrinkled lids. Her dowager’s hump was quite pronounced, forcing her shoulders forward as she lay on her back on the stainless-steel surface. Kathy’s eyes skipped quickly down her body, over the withered breasts, the pubic hair ginger unlike the silver hair on her head, to the feet gnarled with arthritis.

Dr Mehta broke the silence. ‘You’ll make the identification, Sergeant?’

‘Yes. This is the same woman I saw yesterday at 22 Jerusalem Lane, WC2, at’-she consulted her notebook-‘16.56.’

‘How do you spell your name?’ he asked. She told him, watching Brock bend lower again until his nose was within a few inches of the old woman’s face.

‘I’m damned if I can see any spots, Sundeep,’ he muttered.

‘On the scalp, just inside the hair line, Chief Inspector. In any case,’ he continued, addressing himself to Kathy in his precise, formal manner, ‘petechial haemorrhages don’t prove anything. They can be a sign of smothering, but they’re also seen in other conditions of terminal lack of oxygen and congestion, such as heart failure, so they’re not diagnostic of asphyxia in the forensic sense.’

He returned to filling in his form.

‘Her skin is pretty tough,’ Brock remarked.

‘Yes. I’d say she spent some years out in the sun, in a warmer climate than we are blessed with in these blighted shores.’

‘Oh now, it hasn’t been a bad summer,’ Brock murmured absently, continuing his detailed inspection of the corpse. ‘What about these faint bruises on the upper arms? Could somebody have held her down?’

Dr Mehta shrugged. ‘Perhaps she got so excited watching the gee-gees on TV she gripped her own arms too tightly. They bruise very easily, these old dears.’

‘But you’ve got the bag?’ Kathy broke in, and turned to Brock. ‘We found a plastic bag in her kitchen rubbish bin which had moisture inside, and a couple of silver hairs.’

‘Oh yes, I’ve got it,’ said Dr Mehta, ‘and of course we’ll test it against the swabs. Anyway, we’ll have a good look at blood fluidity and, of course, the condition of the heart, dilatation of heart chambers, oedema of the lungs, congestion of organs, et cetera, et cetera, but, I’m not in the least sanguine, Sergeant, that in the end I’ll even be able to establish the cause of death, let alone provide you with clues.’

He turned to Brock. ‘As you know, Chief Inspector, evidence of asphyxia is often uncertain, and if it was a plastic bag…’ He shrugged. ‘And to tell you frankly’-he lowered his voice and switched off the tape recorder that had been running at his elbow-‘I find it difficult to have much confidence in the judgement of her doctor, whatever his name was, who called us out, although I couldn’t say that at the time.’

‘He was a bit of a character.’ Kathy smiled and the pathologist rolled his eyes, returning to his paperwork.

After a while he put the clip-board down and pulled a packet of rubber gloves out of a drawer. Kathy knew the procedure-first the Y-shaped incision on the front of the body, from shoulders to crotch, and the taking of blood from this cut for alcohol analysis before opening the body cavities; then the systematic opening of skull and body cavities and inspection of organs in place, and their removal in turn for individual examination. Just thinking about it seemed to drain the thing on the table of what was left of its humanity, as if its soul were shrinking from the approaching knife.

‘You all right?’

Kathy started, then nodded at Brock. ‘Yes, sir. I was in Traffic for two years.’

‘Ah, yes. Blood enough for a lifetime. All the same, not much point in our hanging about, eh?’

He waited for her to agree before speaking to Mehta. ‘We’ll leave you to it then, Sundeep. Anything occurs to you, we’d appreciate an informal opinion.’

‘I always oblige when I can, Brock. But this time, I would not hold my breath.’

They left, closely followed by the woman from the coroner’s office.

It was a fine September morning, and after the chill of the mortuary the city seemed soaked with warmth and life by the glittering sunlight, although the leaves of the plane trees were already curling yellow and showering down with each gust of breeze. Traffic was heavy, and Kathy made slow progress across town.

Her passenger said nothing for a while. She wondered what she had done to deserve this; there was enough to think about in running a murder investigation without having a Detective Chief Inspector from Scotland Yard’s Department SO1-the Serious Crime Branch-following your every move, let alone one with Brock’s reputation. Inspector McDonald had been evasive when he had called her in this morning, and that wasn’t like him. She had heard detectives at Division discussing Brock in the past. People who made a practice of remaining studiously unimpressed by senior officers apparently had difficulty doing so in his case. He was good, it was said, but difficult, often secretive, ferociously cranky and impatient. He didn’t look that way now, she thought, as she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, slumped comfortably in his seat, a benign look on his face, enjoying the sun through half-closed eyes and sniffing at the autumn smells through the open window.

‘So you feel convinced it’s murder?’ he said suddenly.

‘Not yet.’ Kathy was cautious. ‘But I could be. The whole set-up was rather odd. I had the same reaction as Dr Mehta to the woman’s doctor-Dr Botev.’

‘He called the police in the first place?’

‘Yes. She was found by her two sisters who live in rooms upstairs in the same house. They called Dr Botev and he then phoned us after he had examined her. A patrol car responded, and they called in CID. I arrived with DC Mollineaux about twenty-five minutes later-maybe threequarters of an hour after she was found.’

‘That would have been soon after 4, then.’

‘Yes. The sisters had been out since about 2 on a Sunday afternoon outing to the cemetery to visit departed relatives. Apparently they did that quite often. They’d said goodbye to their sister Meredith when they left, and when they got back they looked in on her and found her lying on her bed, not breathing. They called their doctor. When I got there, one of the sisters had gone upstairs to her room to lie down-in shock, apparently. The other was with Botev and quite coherent, although upset of course. The doctor insisted there was nothing wrong with Mrs Winterbottom’s heart-she’d had a thorough check-up only recently. He was quite stroppy about it, and I thought a bit unnecessarily so in front of the sister. It must have been upsetting for her to hear him demanding a post-mortem, and telling me to get on to the coroner’s office, although she stayed quite calm. Actually she was rather good. Seemed a lot more sensible than he did. I asked her to make sure her sister was all right, and then argued a bit with him, about people dropping with coronaries ten minutes after being told their heart was perfect, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Eventually I did as he asked.’

‘You had no choice.’

‘That’s what I thought. Dr Mehta arrived at 5.40.’

‘Between one and a half and three and a half hours after she must have died.’

‘Right. He took her temperature straight away, and he did seem surprised that it was as high as it was. But it was a warm afternoon, and she was well wrapped up.’

‘Do you know what the temperature was?’

She shook her head.

‘It’ll be in his report. After asphyxia the body temperature can actually rise for a while before it begins to drop.’

‘He didn’t tell me that.’

‘Sundeep enjoys being a sceptic-and keeping his cards close to his chest.’ He growled at the car in front trying to make an illegal right turn and blocking their lane. ‘You checked the place over, of course.’

‘Yes, Mollineaux and I had a look round, and then the scene-of-crime crew arrived and did it properly. There was no sign of forced entry, but there wouldn’t need to be-the place was wide open. The sisters habitually leave the front door on to the street on the latch apparently, and Meredith’s door to her apartment was the same. Also there’s a fire escape at the back, and the window on to that was open, too. A couple of drawers in her bedroom were open, but apart from that nothing looked disturbed. It all looked so peaceful, as if she’d just lain down for a nap after lunch with a glass of her favourite tipple, and then passed away. Dr Mehta will analyse the drink of course, but it was hardly touched.

‘Apart from the plastic bag in the kitchen, there was one other thing that made me begin to wonder if Botev was right. Meredith’s shoes were on the carpet at the foot of the bed, toes pointing away. There’s an end-board, so she couldn’t have sat on the edge and taken them off. They would have to have been taken off somewhere else and placed there. But if she’d done that, she would have held them by the heels and put them down with the toes pointing towards the bed, most likely. On the other hand, if she lay down with her shoes on, and someone tidied things up afterwards, that person might reach across the end-board, slip them off, toes pointing towards them, and set them down that way on the floor.

‘At least,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘it seemed a possibility at the time. Maybe it’s a bit far-fetched.’

‘Hmm,’ Brock grunted non-committally, ‘worth bearing in mind, anyway. SOCO’s printed the shoes?’

‘Yes, and the glass of port beside the bed, and the rubbish bin in the kitchen, and all the usual places.’

Brock smiled. ‘Sorry.’

Kathy flushed and was quiet as she turned the corner into Marquis Street and pulled up on to the pavement against the bollards that closed the south end of Jerusalem Lane.

Barely a dozen paces wide and a hundred long, the Lane crossed a city block, from Marquis Street through to the tube station on Welbeck Street to the north. Because of its skew angle however, and because its alignment gave a little kick to the right halfway along its length, it wasn’t possible to see directly through from one end to the other. Like most of the buildings around the perimeter of the block, those facing on to Jerusalem Lane were built of yellow London stock bricks, faded and stained black by over a century of smog and soot. But whereas the terraces around the perimeter formed orderly rows with uniform roof lines, the buildings on the Lane were much more varied in height, as if no two neighbours had been able to agree on whether they should have two storeys or four, or even whether their plots should be laid out to the line of the surrounding streets or to the angle of the Lane. Despite this they were packed together as tightly as the perimeter terraces, and the sense which this gave of jostling anarchy beneath the common surface of blackened brickwork was confirmed by the explosion of chimneys, parapets and cross-walls which burst through the dark slate roofs against the sky. Glancing casually at this disorder, someone passing the end of the Lane might assume that it had been built as a service alleyway or mews, yet a second look would show that the shop fronts at the base of every building were original, and that it had always functioned as a thoroughfare. It was in recognition of this that a local by-law was enacted in 1893 to erect the bollards at the south end of the Lane to close it to wheeled traffic, and to repave it in York stone slabs. That was the last, unsuccessful attempt to gentrify Jerusalem Lane.

‘It must be twenty years since I was last in this street,’ Brock said as he got out of the car. ‘And it doesn’t seem to have changed at all. I’m sure that was there then. Just what I need in fact.’

He was gazing at the window of Rosenfeldt’s Continental Delicatessen, which stood a few metres up the Lane on the left.

‘Yes. That’s number 22. The sisters live upstairs.’

‘I’ll interrogate Mrs Rosenfeldt after we’ve seen upstairs, then.’

‘She was closed yesterday. She lives on the other side of the block.’

‘About her sausages, I meant.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Kathy smiled as Brock strode purposefully to the shop front, pulled out his glasses and peered through the window. After a moment’s inspection he turned regretfully and grunted, ‘Come on, then, let’s visit the scene of the alleged crime.’

They pushed open the front door, a bright pillar-box red, and climbed up to the first-floor landing. The carpet was threadbare in places, and there was an old-fashioned, homely smell in the air, a mixture of teak oil, lavender and fried onions. A very young uniformed constable stood by the door to Meredith Winterbottom’s flat.

‘Everyone’s finished up here, sir. DC Mollineaux told me to wait here for you, case you needed anything. He’s with the door-to-door team. The two old ladies are upstairs if you want them. And Dr Boter left a message that he can see you after his morning surgery at 10.30. His rooms are just down the street at number 11.’

‘Botev,’ Kathy corrected him. ‘All right, we won’t need you. We’ll lock up after we’re done.’

He handed her some keys and left with a salute aimed tactfully at neutral ground between the two of them.

The flat was as Kathy had described, cosy, peaceful and unruffled, and immediately improbable as the scene of a violent crime. It was tidy, but not obsessively so, and the two half-opened drawers in the main bedroom might easily have been left that way by Meredith. The clothes inside had not been disturbed, and there were no empty cash boxes or purses hidden among them. The furniture dated mostly from the fifties and sixties, with a few more recent things such as the large TVs and videos in both the main bedroom and the living room. There was no sign that anything was missing. In the small spare bedroom a filing cabinet contained only household accounts and personal papers. There were no books.

‘She liked German sausage too, sir,’ Kathy called from the kitchen.

‘Perhaps Mrs Rosenfeldt did it,’ Brock grunted. He was leaning out of the living room window and taking a photograph of the synagogue which stood facing on to Marquis Street on the other side of the entrance to the Lane. Although built of white Portland stone, it had turned the same grey-black colour as the brick buildings around. It was surrounded by a narrow yard fenced in by stone pillars and iron railings.

Brock came in and settled himself at the kitchen table.

Kathy sat opposite him. ‘I don’t know. I’d half convinced myself yesterday, but coming back again today, it doesn’t feel much like a murder scene. I’ve heard of fatal accidents with plastic bags, and suicides too, but no plastic bag murders.’

‘It was a favourite murder weapon of the Khmer Rouge,’ Brock said. ‘Very cheap. Well now, I suppose she might have had a pile of cash or something hidden somewhere, that someone knew about, let’s say in her bedroom, and let’s say she wakes up while they’re taking it. But then there would have been signs of a struggle, and bruising, and surely they would have used the pillow, say, or thumped her on the head, or strangled her. Where would the plastic bag have come from?’

Kathy opened her mouth to speak, but Brock continued.

‘Yes, all right, the money was in the plastic bag… And maybe she just began to wake up, and they panicked, tipped the money or whatever it was out and slipped the bag over her head before she could begin to struggle.’ Brock screwed his eyes up at the ceiling and scratched his beard.

‘How long would it take, I wonder? We’d better speak to Sundeep.

‘Alternatively,’ he continued, ‘there was no secret treasure, and the killer came specifically for her. Someone who knew her, maybe. In which case again, why a plastic bag? And why not make it look more obviously like someone had broken in, someone without prior knowledge? In fact that applies in both cases.’

Brock nodded and got to his feet. ‘All the same, I wouldn’t give up yet, Kathy. Dr B may just be right. Let’s go upstairs.’

One door on the landing on the top floor had a neat label Peg Blythe, and the other Eleanor Harper. Kathy picked the latter.

With her dark hair, straight posture and bright, attentive eyes, she looked younger than her sixty-nine years. Her flat was much smaller than Meredith’s, occupying only the rear half of the building, and it was simply and economically furnished so as to make full use of the space of the main room, which served as a living, dining and study area. One wall was completely lined with bookshelves. Books and papers were piled on the desk against the window which looked out on the jumble of outbuildings, fire escapes, brick walls and ramshackle extensions which had grown up in the rear court of this west side of Jerusalem Lane. Kathy noticed that the room hadn’t been dusted for some time, and that Miss Harper too looked in need of a scrub. Her hair was dull, and Kathy had the thought, of which she was slightly ashamed, that the old lady’s underwear probably wasn’t all that clean.

The women sat on two ancient leather armchairs, stuffed hard with horsehair, which stood on each side of the gas fire, while Brock pulled over an upright chair from the small dining table by the door to the kitchenette. Eleanor sat stiffly upright, her hands clasped on the lap of her dark wool skirt.

‘Peg is lying down at present, officers, but I’ll wake her if you wish. She didn’t sleep last night.’ She spoke with a low, firm voice and articulated the consonants precisely.

Kathy answered, ‘We’d prefer to speak with you first, Miss Harper. Perhaps we can see her later. I’m sorry to have to disturb you again so soon. You must be very tired, too.’

They could both see the dark shadows under her eyes.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Brock here is from Scotland Yard. He’s an expert…’-she hesitated a moment-‘from the Serious Crime Branch.’

Her expression didn’t change, but the hands twitched on her lap. ‘I find it so hard to believe,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know what to make of Dr Botev’s notion. Are you certain that he’s right?’

‘No, we’re not. We want to be sure, one way or the other, so to begin with we’ll look into it as if it’s a real possibility.’

‘Poor Meredith. On her own… There’s no point in it, I know, but I keep thinking over and over that if only we’d stayed home with her yesterday.’

‘You saw her just before you went out?’ Brock asked.

‘Yes. The three of us had lunch together in Meredith’s flat-we usually do on a Sunday. Meredith likes to cook a roast, and afterwards apple sponge and custard. She’s been making the same Sunday lunch for years. First for her husband, Frank, and then, when he died, for us.’ She frowned, then shook her head and continued, in a voice quieter and more strained than before. ‘Afterwards Peg and I often like to go for a walk, and Meredith likes to watch the races on the television. Yesterday she said she was very tired. She hadn’t been sleeping very well lately.’

‘Had she complained of feeling tired before this?’

‘Yes, because of not sleeping well, you see. That’s why we insisted Dr Botev give her a complete check-up. He gave her some medicine, but said she was basically quite fit.’

‘Could she have been worried about something?’

‘She had been unsettled. I believe she had got herself into a pattern of broken sleep, waking up after a few hours and not being able to get back again, and then feeling tired all day-you know. So yesterday she said she would rest after lunch, and she looked so drained we insisted she take one of Peg’s sleeping pills to make sure she had a good rest.’

‘You didn’t mention that yesterday, Miss Harper,’ Kathy said.

‘Didn’t I? It was all such a shock yesterday.’

‘Did she not have sleeping pills of her own?’ Brock asked.

‘No, she was like me. She didn’t really like the idea of them. But she did take one yesterday, and took her glass of port with her to lie down. We closed the door of her flat behind us, got our coats from up here, and went straight out. Oh dear.’ She looked at them suddenly. ‘How rude of me. I should have offered you something. Would you like a cup of tea, Chief Inspector, or coffee?’

‘Coffee would be splendid, thank you, Miss Harper.’

While she was in the kitchenette, Brock got to his feet and peered at the book titles. The fiction was grouped at one end, a mixture of classics-Hardy, Dostoevsky, Blake-and more recent writers-Isabel Allende, John Fowles and Gunter Grass. The rest of the wall, about two thirds of the shelf space, was taken up by non-fiction titles on socialism, economic history and politics.

They heard a noise of breaking china from the kitchen, and Kathy went to investigate.

‘I dropped a cup. It doesn’t matter.’

Close up Kathy could see the tension lines around her eyes and the working of the muscles in her jaw.

When they returned with the tray of coffee cups, Brock was examining a framed photograph on the wall. It was a portrait of a young woman with the same strong, almost masculine, features as Eleanor Harper, with dark hair pulled back from her face in a similar simple style. She was wearing a dark velvet dress with a white lace collar, and a pair of spectacles was hanging from a cord round her neck. She was smiling gently at someone off to the left of the frame.

‘A relative, Miss Harper? I thought I could see a family resemblance there.’

Her tired features relaxed with pleasure. ‘Do you think so, Chief Inspector? She was our great-aunt. A wonderful woman. I would consider it a very great compliment to be compared to her.’

‘Miss Harper,’ Kathy asked, ‘can you think of anyone who might want your sister dead?’

She looked shocked.

‘Certainly not! Meredith was a wonderful person, full of life and vitality. She was interested in everyone in the neighbourhood, always trying to help people who needed it. No one would want to harm her.’

At that moment the door from the landing opened and the Queen Mother entered the room, or so, for a moment, it appeared to Brock. She was shorter and plumper than Eleanor, dressed in a pale pink silk blouse and angora cardigan, her silver hair recently permed, and with a gracious, if somewhat vague, smile upon her lips. She paused in the doorway as if to orient herself, and Eleanor got up quickly and went to her side.

‘Come in, dear. I thought you were still asleep.’

‘I heard voices. Who is it, Eleanor?’

‘It’s the police, dear. You remember Sergeant Kolla from yesterday, don’t you?’

It was evident that she did not. Eleanor led her to the armchair and fetched her a cup of coffee, while Brock brought another of the dining chairs over for Kathy.

‘Are you all right, dear? Would you like the fire on?’ Eleanor looked at her sister with concern.

‘No, no.’ Peg smiled regally at the visitors. ‘I just had a little rest. I feel much better, thank you.’

‘We won’t bother you for long, Mrs Blythe,’ Kathy said. ‘We were just talking about yesterday afternoon. You said yesterday that you returned from your walk about 4.15, Miss Harper?’

‘Yes, I suppose it must have been around then. We came upstairs and called through the door to Meredith when we reached her landing.’

‘The door was open?’

‘No. Closed, but on the latch. That’s how we usually leave our doors during the day, so we can call in on each other. When she didn’t reply we thought she must be asleep, so we went in to check. At first, when I saw her lying down on her bed, I assumed she was asleep, but then, I don’t know what it was, she was so still…’

Eleanor bowed her head for a moment. Peg was sitting with the same vague smile upon her face, gazing benignly at the sunlight gleaming on a wall outside the window, and then, suddenly, she closed her eyes and gave a moan.

Eleanor looked at her with concern. ‘Are you all right, Peg?’ She got to her feet and went to her sister’s side. ‘Peg?’

‘I don’t think I want this coffee, Eleanor,’ the old lady whispered at last, and held up the cup. Eleanor nodded and took it away, while her sister pulled out a small embroidered handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan and pressed it to her nose.

There was silence for a minute, then Kathy spoke again, gently.

‘I am sorry. Only a couple more questions and then we’ll leave. Do you remember touching her shoes?’

Eleanor looked perplexed. ‘Her shoes? I don’t remember her shoes.’

Peg sniffled noisily.

‘No, that’s all right,’ Kathy said. ‘And how about the drawers in her room, or the window, do you remember touching them?’

They both shook their heads.

‘Did you touch Meredith?’

‘Yes, I did,’ Eleanor said. ‘I shook her shoulder, gently. Her head… was loose. It didn’t seem natural. I couldn’t see or hear her breathing.’

‘So you called the doctor?’

‘Yes. Peg was upset’-a sob of confirmation came from Peg-‘so I sat her down and I waited on the landing for Dr Botev to arrive. He lives just up the Lane, at number 11.’

‘All right.’ Kathy looked at Brock, who shook his head. ‘We won’t need to disturb you any more just now. Would you like us to call someone to be with you?’

‘No,’ Eleanor said firmly. ‘No, thank you.’ She drew herself up straight and led them to the door. ‘You will get to the bottom of this, won’t you?’ she said. ‘I would hate to think that Dr Botev was right.’

‘We should know more by tomorrow.’

‘What about the funeral? When can we bury poor Meredith?’

‘The coroner’s office will be in touch with you, Miss Harper. They will be as quick as they possibly can, I know.’

She smiled gravely at them and let them out.