The Marx Sisters

30

He was there, reading, when she looked up.

‘What time is it?’

‘Two in the afternoon. You’ve been here thirty-six hours.’

‘God, I’m beginning to hurt now.’

‘You will. At least they’ve removed the tube and the drip.’

‘Yes. They did that this morning. I just seem to keep dropping off. Could I have some water, please?’

He helped her, and now she was able to keep it down.

‘Did you get him, then?’

‘Kowalski? Yes. Danny Finn had arranged with two men from the security firm to keep an eye on Eleanor’s box through the night. They turned up just after Felix attacked you. Lucky for you they got the medics to you so quickly. They held him and handed him over to us. He’s been charged with the attempted murder of you, and the murder of Meredith and Eleanor. You know, you were crazy to go in there unarmed and without telling anyone.’

‘I know. I only meant to observe. It wasn’t until I got in there that I realized it wasn’t going to be so easy.’

‘Well, it had the desired effect. Flushed him out. Funny, I hadn’t really got my sights on him. Should have spotted his anger, I suppose. And the evasiveness of his parents.’ He scratched his beard.

‘He was at the funeral apparently, wrapped up in a scarf. Drew the same conclusion you did from Peg’s announcement. So did Judith. She’s been going berserk trying to stop them pouring the concrete.’

‘Did she have any luck?’

Brock shook his head. ‘Danny Finn wouldn’t hear of it. If Peg wants it buried unopened then he will make sure that’s exactly what will happen. I think he sees it as a sort of obligation to his class roots. If the manuscript is down there, it’s due to be buried under a hundred tons of wet concrete any moment now. They couldn’t do it yesterday because of the cold and snow, but with the mild change today they said they’d probably go ahead this afternoon. When asked, Peg smiles vaguely and says she doesn’t understand what everyone’s going on about. As far as we’re concerned, what’s important isn’t what actually is in the box, so much as what Kowalski thought was there. I couldn’t see us getting a warrant to open it up if Peg didn’t want us to. She’s returned home to Jerusalem Lane now that Kowalski’s been charged.’

Brock stopped talking as a nurse came in to give Kathy more painkillers.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’ she asked him when she had got the pills down.

‘A biography of the first Eleanor, Eleanor Marx. I’d got it out of the library to do a bit of background reading. Won’t need to now, I suppose. I’ll leave it with you if you like. You’ll have the time for it over the next few days.’

‘Days?’

‘Oh yes, they want to keep you here a while for observation. To make sure your side starts to heal up properly. And they’re a bit worried about concussion, too.

‘Best thing.’ He smiled at her kindly. ‘Now, never do this again, Kathy, but everyone sends their congratulations. You got the result.’

Kathy looked out through a tall window at the grey afternoon sky, breathing in the smells of the hospital and listening to its background noises-the rattle of a trolley, an exchange between two cockney women walking past the door of her room, the squeak of rubber soles on the plastic flooring. Everything was hurting in a dull way that discouraged movement. She thought to herself, Yes, I did get the result. Without Brock or Gurney, I found the bastard. But all she felt was anti-climax. Her exposure of Kowalski was nothing like the triumph of the intelligent imagination which Bob had described in his ‘stage three’. Her achievement seemed uncertain, a foolhardy exercise in dumb detection, throwing herself into a dangerous situation and seeing who came out of the shadows to hit her down. There was no flash of inspiration, no euphoria. She even felt mildly guilty that what she had discovered disappointed whatever theories Brock had been forming on the case.

She closed her eyes wearily and drifted off to sleep.

In her mind Peg was staring at her with shining eyes, just as she had on the day before the funeral. She said the words she had used to Brock that day, speaking with intensity, as if her words contained a central truth. At first Kathy couldn’t hear what she said. Then she heard it clearly.

‘Eleanor lived as noble a life, and died as noble a death, as the great-aunt she adored.’

Kathy’s eyes blinked open with a start.

Her room was in darkness, although from the lights in the corridor and the sounds of activity elsewhere she could tell that it wasn’t late. She saw people walk past the open door carrying flowers. Visiting time.

The picture of Eleanor came into her mind, lying on her bed, dressed in white, a bloody plastic bag pulled over her head. What was noble about a death by smothering with a plastic bag? Cut-price, perhaps-disposable, hygienic, but hardly noble. How did great-aunt Eleanor die? Kathy had got the impression from what Judith had said that it was sudden.

She reached to the pendant light switch on the pillow beside her and put on the light overhead. Brock’s book was on top of the bedside cabinet, and with a wince she reached over for it. It was called Eleanor Marx: a Socialist Heroine’s Tragedy. She turned towards the end and found the passage she was looking for, which described the circumstances of Eleanor’s death.

For some years beforehand, Eleanor had been living with Edward Aveling, a socialist activist with an interest in education and the theatre. Although not legally married, Eleanor considered their union a true marriage of free love. Aveling, however, was not a popular figure among her friends, who saw that he took advantage of Eleanor’s generosity, spending extravagantly on his theatrical friends the legacy from Engels which was her only capital, while she immersed herself in the hard work of Marxian scholarship, socialist politics and the development of the trade-union movement. On the morning of Thursday 31 March 1898 Eleanor received an anonymous letter revealing that Aveling had secretly married an actress some months before, changing his surname to that of the woman, but continuing to live with Eleanor in order to relieve her of the last of her savings.

Eleanor’s reaction was remarkable. She called Aveling and told him calmly that she proposed to commit suicide, and invited him to accompany her into death. While Aveling prevaricated, Eleanor sent her maid round to the chemist with a note requesting chloroform and prussic acid so that they could put down their dog. The maid duly returned with two ounces of chloroform and enough prussic acid to kill several people, together with the book which the chemist kept for purchasers of poisons to sign. Eleanor took the book into the room where Aveling was, and a little later brought it back, signed ‘E. M. Aveling’, for her maid to return to the chemist. Seeing that Eleanor was determined to go through with it, Aveling announced that he was ‘going up to town’, and promptly left.

Eleanor then went upstairs and wrote several letters and prepared certain packages, among them, presumably, one containing Marx’s manuscript on which she wrote her message to Rebecca Demuth. She gave all these with instructions to her maid, had a bath, dressed herself in white, and retired to bed. By eleven o’clock that morning she was dead.

Kathy let the book drop on to the bedcovers, as she tried to imagine Aveling’s reaction to Eleanor’s calm demand that he join her in suicide. If her death was noble, it was also impossibly implacable and remote. Suddenly Caroline Winter’s reaction to her husband’s infidelity, to go out and order a new kitchen, or that of her own lover’s wife, whose price had been a week in a luxury hotel in Grenada, seemed comfortingly practical and sane.

What happened to Aveling? She read a little further and discovered that Eleanor’s tragedy had had one final twist, when Aveling himself had died no more than a month after her, from a cancer which had been growing all the while in his side. She winced, conscious again of the throbbing pain in her own side.

Eleanor was dressed in white.

And something else. Kathy went back to the beginning of the account and read again until she found it. Eleanor Marx died on 31 March. So also did Eleanor Harper.

Something crawled up Kathy’s spine, the adrenalin beginning to feed into her system. Her heart thumped. The thought, blindingly obvious now, flashed into her head. If Meredith was expecting to meet with Bob Jones and Judith Naismith at 3, why did she take a sleeping pill at 2 that would knock her out for the whole afternoon?

She lay for a while, thinking, then rang for the nurse and asked for a telephone.

The woman on switch at New Scotland Yard was no help at all. There was no reply on Brock’s line, nor on two others she tried. Paging him produced no results. Similarly with Gurney.

‘I’ve already tried Chief Inspector Brock’s home number but there’s no reply. It’s really very important I speak to one of them immediately! I don’t have Sergeant Gurney’s home number. Could you let me have it, please?’

‘I’m sorry. We can’t give that sort of information over the phone. They both must have left for the night.’

Kathy’s brain was racing. She reached for the buzzer and got hold of the nurse again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped, the exertion of small movements draining her absurdly.

‘Don’t worry, dear. What can I do for you?’

‘My clothes. Are they around somewhere? There’s a telephone number I need in one of the pockets.’

The nurse nodded. A few minutes later she returned with a carrier bag. She grinned. ‘Anything else?’

‘No. that’s great. Thanks a lot.’

Kathy found her trousers at the bottom of the bag, rolled up in a ball, and fished out the screwed-up note which Bren had given her with the address and telephone number of Suzanne Chambers. She hesitated, then dialled the number.

‘Yes?’ A woman’s voice.

‘Er, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m trying to contact Detective Chief Inspector Brock on a very important police matter. Is he there by any chance?’

‘Who is this?’

Kathy felt a trickle of sweat run down her back.

‘I’m a colleague of his. I really am most sorry to disturb you, but this is a matter of life and death.’

‘He’s not here. Did he give you this number?’

‘Thanks. Sorry again.’ Kathy put down the receiver. ‘Shit!’ She bit her lip with embarrassment.

She didn’t know what to do, although she knew she had to hurry. She lay helpless, drumming the fingers of her left hand on the white bed linen.

At last she clenched her teeth and reached across her body with her comparatively good left hand and pulled the bedclothes back. With a grunt of effort she eased herself up into a sitting position, then swung round so that her feet could fall off the side of the bed. She saw her bandaged left knee under the hem of the white cotton gown they had given her. Her side was aching more insistently now as she began to shift into position to stand on her wobbly legs. She waited until her head was clear, then tried to stand. A wave of nausea flooded through her, and she put her weight on the side cabinet, ready to reach for the stainless-steel bowl. The feeling passed and she sat again on the side of the bed. Very slowly she bent her trunk forward and pulled the plastic carrier bag towards her, emptying it on to the bed. Inside were the clothes and shoes she was wearing yesterday. Her coat wasn’t there.

It took a painful, exhausting age to work her aching body out of the gown and into her underwear and trousers. Then she slipped her polo-neck sweater over her head. She had to stretch the right arm out of shape to get it around the plaster cast, and ease it carefully down over the pad of dressing around her right side. The laces on her shoes were the biggest problem. When she stretched forward to do them up, she gave a stifled yell as an agonizing pain shot through her side. She closed her eyes, gasping, then tried again, controlling the pain just long enough to tie the laces clumsily.

She scribbled a short note for the nurse. The pain seemed to help her to focus. She got to her feet, swayed towards the door, then stumbled down the corridor, blindly following a knot of visitors on their way out. She sensed that people were staring at her. She didn’t understand why until she passed a nurses’ station with a mirrored panel facing into the corridor, as if for visitors to fix up their smiles before facing the patients. Who is the weird woman who looks as if she’s been hit by a bus? She examined the mirror more closely. Tufts of fair hair sprouted through a swathe of bandages. The visible part of her face was mottled black and blue.

She found herself in a lift. Someone spoke to her and she mumbled a reply. Then she came to a bright foyer area, passed through swing doors and out into the cold night air. A couple got out of a taxi in front of her. She stumbled past them and collapsed into the back seat, her side on fire.

The man’s eyes in the driving mirror looked concerned.

‘What you say?’

‘Jerusalem Lane.’

‘Where’s that, then? I dunno it.’

‘Marquis Street,’ she said urgently. ‘Corner with Carlisle Street. East Bloomsbury.’

When they reached the end of Jerusalem Lane, the man had to open Kathy’s door and help her out. She screwed up her eyes with pain as she straightened her back to stand on the pavement.

‘There’s some money in the right pocket of my trousers,’ she gasped. ‘Can’t get it. My arm.’ She swung the cast helplessly.

He looked doubtful as he came round behind her right side and reached towards her pocket. Suddenly he pulled away his hand and held it up under the light that illuminated the gates to the building site.

‘Jesus! You’re bleedin’! Oh gawd!’ His mind leapt to the risk of AIDS. ‘You need an ambulance, not a bleedin’ taxi!’ He thought of the blood on his seats.

‘Please,’ she said struggling to reach into her right pocket with her left hand.

‘Forget it.’ He was already back in his cab and pulling away.