The Marx Sisters

Part II
16

He stood in the doorway of the canteen, watching the four women detectives sitting together over by the window. The air was thick with the smell of fried sausages and chips, and he was reminded that he hadn’t eaten that morning. Kathy was sitting with her left profile towards him, the April sunlight from the window reflecting off her fair hair. The women were laughing, and Kathy with them, looking happy and fit, her slender fingers brushing her hair back from her brow as she shook her head at some outrageous story.

Suddenly she turned and looked across the room towards him, as if she had sensed him watching her. She smiled with recognition, pointed a finger at herself and raised an eyebrow. He nodded and she got up from the table, saying something to the others as she left.

‘Hello, sir. This is a nice surprise!’

‘Kathy. It’s good to see you again.’

They shook hands formally, Brock slightly awkward.

‘That was terrific about North,’ Kathy said, filling the momentary silence. ‘Your picture looked good in all the papers.’

‘Thanks. Look, you remember Meredith Winterbottom?’

‘Of course I do. It was only six months ago.’

‘Her sister Eleanor was found dead this morning. No doubts this time. She was murdered.’

‘Oh no!’ Kathy looked stunned. ‘Poor Eleanor,’ she whispered. ‘That’s terrible. I remember so clearly the last time I saw her. I told her that we’d decided that Meredith hadn’t been murdered after all, and she was so relieved. Oh, that’s awful.’

‘I’ve been given the case, and I’m on my way over there now. I want you to work with me on it, Kathy, if you’d like to. McDonald says it can be arranged at this end.’

Kathy nodded fiercely. ‘Of course I would!’

They got into Brock’s car. He didn’t start the engine immediately, but instead turned to her.

‘You’re looking really well, Kathy. Life must be agreeing with you.’

‘Oh well,’ she said, smiling, ‘more or less under control, you know.’

‘What about that man you were seeing?’

‘No. That didn’t work out. We decided to call a halt.’ She shrugged, puzzled by his question.

‘Good. He wasn’t right for you.’

She frowned. Still he made no move to start the car. There was silence for a moment, and she decided to change the subject. ‘Well, I was thrilled to see your plan worked with North. That was really great. I didn’t see any reference to drugs, though. He tried to make a break for it, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, he heard that he was going to be arrested, so he tried to leave the country. We were waiting for him when he landed in Lisbon.’

‘Oh gosh, so he nearly slipped away again, like the last time.’

‘Not really. He was never going to be arrested on drugs charges. We just got him to believe that, through the same source that tipped him off before. His solicitor, Martin Francis Connell.’

Kathy froze. ‘Martin!’

Then, carefully, ‘Martin wasn’t his solicitor, he said he wasn’t

…’

Brock sat with his head bowed, letting her work it out.

‘How would Martin have been able to know about the police investigation?’ she asked.

‘There were two possible sources, both detectives in ED Division who helped with the original case. One was Detective Sergeant Andrew Rutherford.’

‘Andy Rutherford. He was suspended last month.’

‘The same day North was arrested.’

A pause. ‘And the other one was me?’

Brock said nothing, waited.

‘The Winterbottom case,’ Kathy said slowly. ‘You were never part of it, were you? You were still working on North. It always seemed so odd to me. And you were so casual about the investigation. Not at all how I’d heard you were. I thought you’d mellowed!’ Her face was to the side window, her voice gradually hardening with anger. ‘But I was working on the case and you were working on me. Martin used me, and so did you. God!’ She turned to face him, eyes blazing. ‘Couldn’t you have told me?’

‘I’m telling you now, Kathy,’ he said softly, eyes fixed on the foot pedals.

She stared at him, her anger flowing, breathing hard.

‘Well, too late!’ She reached for the door handle.

‘Think about it, Kathy. That’s over now. There’s no doubt about trusting you any more.’

‘Oh, is that right, sir? And how do you think I’d ever be able to trust you again?’

At around 8 that evening Brock was caught in a thunderstorm as he stepped out of his car. Both lifts in Kathy’s block were out of action, and he had to climb the twelve floors. It was like a steam bath inside his coat by the time he arrived, chest heaving, at her door.

She took so long to answer that he was on the point of turning back when at last her door opened. Her face was pale, without make-up, her hair pulled severely back from her forehead. She was wearing faded jeans and an old sweatshirt. She stared coldly at him, saying nothing.

‘Ah, Kathy. Glad you’re in.’ His amiability sounded strained, especially since he was still gasping to recover his breath. ‘Just thought I’d have another word with you… about this morning.’

‘I’d rather not if you don’t mind, sir.’ She started to close the door, but he stuck out his foot. She stared at it for a moment, then looked him in the eye. Embarrassed, he withdrew it and raised his right hand. In it was a bunch of blue cornflowers, gift-wrapped with a pink ribbon.

‘Did you buy those for me?’ she asked slowly.

‘Yes, I… er…’

‘If I had been a male officer, would you have bought them for me? Or did you think that, being a woman, I’d just go all gooey at the sight of a bunch of flowers?’ Her voice had a terrible calm. ‘If I may say, sir, I think it would be best if you didn’t give me those flowers, because I’d just have to waste five minutes feeding them down the sink garbage grinder. I’d have to do that, because if I put them in a vase I’d spend even more time cleaning up the floor, on account of my throwing up every time I saw them. So on balance I think it would be best if you just took them home and gave them to your mother or sister or whoever it is you live with.’

Brock’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times. For a moment he was utterly at a loss as to what to say. He was saved by a small voice behind him.

‘Everything all right, dear?’

Kathy looked past his shoulder, ‘Yes, Mrs P. Everything’s fine.’

She looked back at the bulky figure of the Chief Inspector, steaming, dripping and wilting in front of her, and some momentary instinct of generosity overcame her.

‘Oh, come in, then,’ she said, and turned back into her flat.

He didn’t like to remove his coat, nor was he invited to do so. The place was simply and frugally furnished, and he sat himself on an old plastic chair beside an oval timber dining table. The curtains were open, and the window was filled with the blackness of the night, criss-crossed by chains of streetlights on the ground far below, trailing off to the horizon.

He laid the flowers on the table.

‘You’re right, they were a bad idea. The woman in the shop suggested them. Roses would have been wrong, and the irises and chrysanthemums seemed too assertive somehow. I haven’t got a mother or a sister as a matter of fact. I live on my own. Have done for a long time now. I quite like it, really. Got used to getting home to an empty house, going to sleep in an empty bed, and now I enjoy it. The main problem is the food, having to cook for one. I like to cook, but the quantities are too small, and after a while the freezer just fills up with stuff I’m never going to eat. Do you find that? I was married for a while, but it didn’t last very long. I think, being a copper, the hours, I don’t know. We had one child, a boy. Yes, I know I told you I didn’t have any children. I usually do, it’s easier. We never kept in touch much. And now I’m not sure where he is. Canada, the last I heard.

‘I try not to let the hassles of the job get to me, on a personal level, more than they should. But I feel bad about this, with you. I don’t blame you for feeling the way you do, and I just wanted to say sorry. Sorry because I liked you, and sorry because I like to work with the best, and I thought you were a good officer. So, I’ll take these and go.’ He picked up the bunch of flowers and started to get to his feet.

‘Oh, put them down,’ Kathy said. He subsided into the chair again. She stood facing him, a hand on her hip.

‘Tell me how you knew it was Andy Rutherford and not me.’

Brock shrugged. ‘We gave each of you the same information about the drug raid, but then we gave each of you something else. We told Rutherford that we were about to do a deal with the Swiss Government to get at the assets which serious criminals were holding in Swiss banks. North shifted his money out of Switzerland just before he ran. We told you about his son having leukaemia. It was clear when we caught him that he had no idea about that.’

Kathy nodded. She remembered with relief how close she had been to telling Martin, and the thought of him brought the usual sharp stab, smaller now but still there. She shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of resignation and sat down opposite him. ‘Martin was very special for me. I know all the reasons why he was wrong, but I can’t deny him that. I’ve got over him now, more or less. Although I wish the bastard hadn’t taken his wife to Grenada. I’d offer you a drink, but I’m out of everything.’

‘Well now,’ Brock said, ‘in the faint chance that the flowers didn’t work, I did take the liberty of bringing this too,’ and he drew a bottle of Scotch from his coat pocket. Kathy laughed and went to the kitchen for glasses and a jug of water.

They stood by the window looking out over the city, sipping the whisky.

‘After those five days in Jerusalem Lane last year I became quite discontented here for a while,’ she said. ‘They have no views like this, nothing except of the street, but they don’t need them. They’re in a place. Here you’re on the outside. There’s no place here. No one knows anyone else. Mrs P only speaks to me occasionally because she needs me sometimes for help with the shopping. People like the anonymity, of course. I did until I spent that time in the Lane, then I realized what we missed.

‘They were a real family, the three sisters, weren’t they? You could tell, from the way they talked. They were talking in a family code that was sometimes hard for an outsider to follow. What they believed was a reflection not just of the kind of people they were, but of the part they played in the family. You know, the practical one who put the food on the table, the principled one who kept them on the straight and narrow, the tease who got them over the humps. I was brought up in what passed for a family of three, too-father, mother and daughter. But I reckon the three sisters were able to share more in one afternoon than we managed in fourteen years.’

Brock looked at her in surprise. ‘You didn’t get on with your parents, Kathy?’

‘I don’t think it was a matter of me getting on with them. Mum was all right, but her sole mission was to look after Dad. And Dad was, well…’ She thought for a moment and then smiled. ‘I remember Bob Jones used a phrase, when he was describing Judith Naismith: the north face of the Eiger. That was my dad. You don’t get on with the north face of the Eiger. You either affront it, or you don’t exist.’

‘Do you still see them?’

She shook her head. ‘They’re both dead. My father was a civil servant. He entered the Civil Service Commission in 1953, and transferred to the Department of Trade and Industry in 1962. In 1971 he was promoted to Under Secretary.’ She spoke as of a stranger she had once investigated. ‘He had this one vanity, a large Bentley. I found it excruciatingly embarrassing when I was a little girl, the way all the other kids used to stare at this huge posh car, and I’d try to slide down in the seat so I couldn’t be seen, which annoyed him no end. One day, when I was fourteen, he drove it into the pillar of a bridge on the M1. We thought it was an accident until things began to come out about his financial affairs. Apparently he had been involved in some kind of fraud, I don’t know exactly what. I have the idea that it was to do with the sale of surplus government land. That was the same year that the Home Secretary had to resign because of corruption investigations, do you remember? Reginald Maudling. I remember the Fraud Squad interviewed my mother a couple of times, and she didn’t handle it very well. I’ve sometimes thought about trying to have a look at Dad’s case file, just to find out what it was he did. But then, I’m not sure that I really want to know.’ Kathy paused, sipped at her glass.

Brock cleared his throat. ‘If you do decide you’d like to find out, let me know.’

She nodded. ‘Thanks. After a bit we discovered he’d been speculating large sums of money with some shonky developer who had just collapsed. We had lost everything. The house, the furniture, his pension, everything went. We moved up north to Sheffield, where my mother’s sister and her husband took us in to their two-up, two-down terrace.’

‘Was that your red uncle?’ Brock said. ‘The one you told the sisters about?’

Kathy laughed. ‘You’ve got a good memory. Yes, Uncle Tom, the red terror of Attercliffe. He was a bus driver, retired early with a bad back. He thought that what had happened to us was providential retribution-my father’s bourgeois greed attracting the proper consequences of the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system, or some such. He couldn’t resist reminding us at every opportunity of how far we’d come down in the world. Aunt Mary knew how to deal with him. She could put him in his place with a couple of words. But my mother couldn’t cope at all. She sank into a kind of despair. I suppose it was depression.’ Again she lapsed into silence, staring out of the window at the lights in the darkness.

‘It must have been very difficult for you,’ Brock said.

‘I’m sorry. You’ve probably had a hard day. I don’t know how we got on to this. I can’t remember when I last thought about it.’

‘It was talking about Jerusalem Lane, and families. So what happened, Kathy? I’d like to hear the rest of the story. You were, what, fifteen at this stage?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. I was getting much the same from the other kids at school as Mum was getting from Uncle Tom. I talked funny, and I didn’t know how to stand up for myself. God, why would I? My only experience of physical aggression up to that point had been a clip on the ankle with a hockey stick. I had a lot to learn.

‘Mum was a worry. She’d just given up, turned in on herself. I went to the Council, and pestered the social workers and the housing people until they gave us a flat on our own. I thought if I could get her to make her own home again, she’d begin to come round. It was a high-rise, like this. I liked it because all the rooms faced south, and always caught any sun that was going, unlike at Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary’s, which was dark and damp. But I don’t think Mum even noticed. She never went out on her own all the time we were there. Aunt Mary had to come and visit her, as if she was an invalid, and pretty soon she was. She lost weight and began to pick up infections, which got more and more persistent. Just before I reached sixteen she caught pleurisy. She died of pneumonia within a couple of weeks.

‘As soon as I could leave school, I told Aunt Mary I was going back to London. She gave me fifty quid and the address of the Y. It took me quite a few years before I found my way into the police.

‘Yes, I can remember when I last thought about this. It was with you, Brock. We were coming back from interviewing the Kowalskis at Eastbourne. You pointed out how their whole life had been changed by one moment in the war, and at the time I thought, yes, that had happened to my mother and me. My father turned his steering wheel a few degrees and everything changed.’

‘Well,’ Brock said at last, ‘I’d say it was the making of you, Kathy, wasn’t it?’

She smiled. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’ Then her brow creased in a frown. ‘How did Eleanor die, Brock? You didn’t tell me.’

‘She had a plastic bag over her head.’

‘Oh God.’

‘And just to make sure, they’d bashed her head in.’