The Marx Sisters

4

They stepped out into the little square which was formed where Jerusalem Lane changed alignment halfway along its length. Across the way the proprietor of the Balaton Cafe was taking advantage of the warm morning sun to set a couple of tables outside on the stone flags. A powerful rich smell of roasting coffee beans came from Boll’s Coffee and Chocolates next door, and on the near corner of the square, tubs of cut chrysanthemums and roses stood outside the front of Brunhilde’s Flower Shop.

Brock’s nose twitched at the smell of the coffee. ‘We’re early for the solicitor,’ he said, ‘let’s have a break,’ and set off with his big rolling strides towards the cafe. Kathy stopped to speak to two detectives making house-to-house inquiries before she followed him, and when she got to the table he was already deep in conversation with the owner about the Hungarian lake after which he had named his business. They ordered short blacks.

‘This is very civilized.’ Brock stretched back in his chair expansively. ‘I could live here quite easily. There’s everything you’d need on your doorstep: Mrs Rosenfeldt’s bratwurst, Mr Boll’s fresh ground coffee, the Balaton Cafe, and Dr Botev to prescribe Plustranil if it all gets too much. Shame about Kowalski’s bookshop, though.’ He nodded at the empty window up towards the north end of the lane.

‘Mind you, I see there are other services available here to compensate.’ He indicated a small handwritten card taped discreetly to a corner of the cafe window, offering ‘Swedish massage’ and an escort service. ‘Probably the same old dear who was giving “French lessons” here twenty years ago.’

‘Yes,’ Kathy nodded, ‘this is a real place, isn’t it? I’ve never been here before, and yet it all seems quite familiar, homely.’

‘It’s real, all right. Not like that yuppie tourist kitsch they’ve turned Covent Garden into,’ Brock grumbled. ‘That used to be real once, too.’

‘Although…’ She hesitated.

‘What?’

‘There’s an element of strangeness about this place, too. Maybe that’s part of what makes it real. I noticed it yesterday. There are odd things that are difficult to interpret. Over there’-she waved her hand towards a shop window beyond the door of the doctor’s surgery-‘there’s a framed photograph in the window of some elderly gent, edged in black, and draped with a flag I’ve never seen before. And that enormous empty flagpole on the top of this cafe building! And there’s a poster or sign up in that window on the second floor next door, which you can hardly see from down here, as if it’s aimed at the house across the street. Or’-she looked around with a frown-‘that building over there with all the window boxes of geraniums, as if you were in Austria or something, except that they’re all dead, except for just that one window. It’s almost as if the people who live here are all frantically signalling to one another, without letting on to the people passing through on the street.’

Brock laughed. ‘Yes, I like that. And you don’t think the signals are friendly?’

‘I don’t know. I feel I don’t know the code.’

Brock looked up at the aggressive Gothic lettering on the sign for the Balaton Cafe, and the unlikely clashes of colour on some of the front doors.

‘Whatever it is, I suspect it’s not in English,’ he said. Then, changing the subject, ‘I can see how Sundeep didn’t hit it off with Dr Botev.’ He smiled, thinking of the distaste with which the dapper, fastidious Indian had referred to the Slav.

‘He’s a rough diamond, isn’t he?’ Kathy said. ‘Those hands! But this time I thought he was rather sweet.’

‘Sweet wasn’t exactly the word that sprang to my mind.’

Kathy smiled. ‘I think he was in love with Meredith. His voice softened a little each time he mentioned her name.’

‘Yes, now you mention it, that could be. But that just makes his opinions about her death all the less reliable. He didn’t really give us anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a theory, but he wasn’t game to try it on us. Not yet, anyway.’

The offices of Hepple, Tyas amp; Turton were next to the Balaton Cafe, above a small tailor’s shop which appeared to have closed down some time ago. The solicitors’ brightly polished brass nameplate was set beside a door which opened on to a staircase leading straight up to the first floor.

A large woman in her mid-fifties was sitting at the reception desk, opening mail. She beamed at them through ornately framed glasses and invited them in to an inner office.

‘I’m Sylvia Pemberton,’ she said, ‘Mr Hepple’s secretary. He hasn’t arrived yet, I’m afraid, but he shouldn’t be long. I spoke to him myself about your appointment at 12. Probably stuck in the traffic-his other office is in Croydon.’

Her manner was confident and jovial, and gave the impression that she was much more likely to know what was going on in the office than Mr Hepple. There weren’t many indications, however, that much was going on. The photocopier and typewriter in the front office were both ancient, and the general air of tidiness seemed to owe as much to a lack of activity as to Ms Pemberton’s efficiency.

‘Can I get you coffee?’

‘Thank you, no,’ Brock said. ‘We’ve just had a cup at the cafe downstairs.’

‘Yes, I think they pay Mr Boll to fill the Lane with the smell of freshly ground coffee. I’ve become a passive coffee drinker just living here-I live in the flat upstairs.’ She gave a hearty chuckle and then frowned. ‘But look, that was terrible about Mrs Winterbottom. So sudden. I was shocked to see the ambulance there yesterday, and the police. People are saying there’s some doubt about how she died.’

‘Too early to say yet,’ Kathy replied. ‘We’re just checking things.’

‘Oh dear. She was so much a part of everything around here. It’s difficult to imagine the place without her. She just… I don’t know… kept everyone up to scratch, in touch with the latest. Always ready to step in and help if things went wrong. She really was

… well, the life and soul of the place. Mind you, the way things seem to be going around here-’

The sound of the street door stopped her.

‘That’ll be Mr Hepple now. I know he’ll have a coffee. Are you sure?’

Kathy shook her head, but Brock relented and she went out to meet her boss.

They heard his voice as he came puffing up the stairs. ‘Ah, Sylvia! Traffic was terrible, terrible! Visitors here? Mr Boll has given me a terrible thirst for one of your splendid coffees.’

He burst into the room, a diminutive round figure in a pinstripe suit, thinning dark hair plastered down over a pink cherubic face, tossed a briefcase on to the empty desk, and shook their hands.

‘Sorry, sorry. I only get over here once a week now, and each time it seems to take a little bit longer to get through.’ He threw himself onto the chair behind the desk and took a deep breath. ‘Terrible business about Mrs Winterbottom, terrible. And I understand you suspect foul play. Appalling. The Lane has been quite untouched by all the burglaries and muggings one finds elsewhere. And now this.’ Suddenly his mouth opened and a look of revelation lit up his face. ‘Brock! The famous Inspector Brock!’ he cried. ‘The Manchester Poisoner! The South London Granny Killer! And that most recent thing-the murder of those two young policemen. Oh, most unfortunate. What was it? The “City Securities Slayings”, the press called it. Oh, indeed, we are honoured to have you on this case, sir. The authorities must view Mrs Winterbottom’s death with considerable disquiet!’

‘We’re not sure of the cause of death at this stage, Mr Hepple,’ Brock answered. ‘An autopsy’s in progress at present.’

‘Quite so, quite so. But one must be extremely concerned for the others who live here now if there is some violent murderer on the loose. Miss Pemberton, for example.’ His eyes widened in alarm at the thought of Miss Pemberton in danger.

‘There were no signs of violence.’

‘Ah!’ His eyes widened further as this sank in. He continued in a hushed voice, ‘You mean, she may have known the culprit? Oh dear.’ They could see his mind running over the possibilities. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’

‘We really can’t say yet. But we’d like to get some background information on the lady. You’ve been the family solicitor for some years, I believe.’

‘Indeed, yes. Hepple, Tyas amp; Turton have been here in this office since my father founded the practice sixty years ago, in the same month as the Wall Street Crash. A propitious beginning!’ Despite his concern over Meredith Winterbottom’s death, it was apparent that Mr Hepple was unable to resist the telling of a good anecdote. ‘I have been acting for Mrs Winterbottom and her family ever since she moved here with her husband in 1967. Well, earlier actually, because I did the conveyancing on the house when Eleanor bought it earlier in that year.’

‘Eleanor?’

‘Yes. Meredith and her husband Frank Winterbottom were in Australia at that time. They went out there as soon as they got married, after he was demobbed at the end of the war. Twenty years later they decided to come back and asked Eleanor to choose a house for them in London. He had made a bit of money in Australia-import and export, I think-and I imagine he had in mind a comfortable suburban villa in Sevenoaks or Amersham. Instead Eleanor bought them number 22 Jerusalem Lane, WC2. It was a bit of a shock at first. Frank’s first words to me when they arrived were to put the place on the market again because they weren’t stopping.’

Mr Hepple chuckled at the memory. ‘However, it was an extraordinary thing. The house didn’t attract any buyers for a while, and by the time one came along they didn’t want to sell any more. Meredith was the first to fall for the place. She started to get to know the people living here, and soon found herself caught up in it. Frank discovered that it was quite convenient for doing business in the city, and then gradually he started to feel part of it, too. It is an extraordinary little corner of London, this. I always feel I’m coming home when I walk down the Lane. Are you familiar with it, Chief Inspector?’

Brock shook his head and Mr Hepple beamed, heaped two spoonfuls of sugar into the cup which Sylvia Pemberton placed on his desk, selected a ginger crunch biscuit from the plate she offered round, and leaned back in his chair.

‘It looks quite scruffy, wouldn’t you say? No buildings of great architectural merit. The scene of no great historical events. A bit of a shambles. Yet it is unique, and, to my mind at least, a place redolent of the sort of history which we tend all too often to ignore.

‘The area which we know as Jerusalem Lane is really the whole of this city block, which is divided into two irregular halves by the line of the Lane itself, apparently all that remains of a rural track which once ran from somewhere around what is now King’s Cross down to Holborn. Do you know that the peculiar kink in the middle of the Lane is probably a corner where four fields met and the track had to change direction round them? I think that’s rather wonderful, isn’t it, that we should still have to walk along the boundaries of odd-shaped fields that disappeared hundreds of years ago.

Now although the block lies in the middle of thriving commercial districts-the City to the south and the railway termini at Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross to the north, and in the other direction, Bloomsbury to the west and Clerkenwell to the east-despite this, Jerusalem Lane has remained largely untouched by development since it was first built up, in a haphazard fashion, by small builders and speculators in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.’

Kathy tried to catch Brock’s eye, wondering how she could return the solicitor to the present, but Brock, attentive and contentedly munching on a chocolate digestive biscuit, seemed happy to let him continue.

‘This lack of attention from developers was due not to its location or potential, you understand, but rather to the confusing complexity and multiplicity of freeholds, lease-holds and tenancies which established themselves within the block, and which frustrated the most determined attempts to replace the warren of small buildings with something more coherent and profitable. There is that one row on the west side of the block, where an Edwardian developer managed to buy up about half of the street frontage and build that rather flamboyant red brick and stone trimmed office building seven storeys tall (thanks to the recent introduction of Mr Otis’s patent safety lifts), but the rest of the block remained as we see it, a jumble of fragmented ownerships, uses, floor levels and building forms.

‘Now’-Mr Hepple leaned forward over the desk and looked intently at them, as if he was getting to the point of his story-‘because of this, rents in Jerusalem Lane have remained low throughout its history, and within a generation of its construction it had established itself as a small haven for poor newcomers to the city, and in particular immigrants and refugees from Europe. The first such wave was of Russian Jews, fleeing the pogroms of the 1830s, and we can still see the traces of their early occupation of the area in the synagogue at the south end of the Lane, opposite Mrs Winterbottom’s house, and by the name of the public house, The Wandering Jew, across the road in the next block to the north, and of course by the name of Jerusalem Lane itself.

‘After the disturbances in the year of revolutions, 1848, political refugees from Germany, France and half a dozen other European countries found their way to the Lane. Did you by any chance notice the engraving over there by the door?’

‘I did,’ Brock said. ‘It looks like a Dore.’

‘Quite right, Chief Inspector! It is one of Gustave Dore’s scenes of Victorian London, and it is actually a view of Jerusalem Lane as it was in the decades after that influx of refugees from the continent.’

Brock and Kathy got up and had a look at the drawing hanging in its black and gold frame. It showed a narrow street teeming with hawkers, beggars, handcarts and ragged children.

‘Among those refugees, and the most famous of our former residents, was Karl Marx, who lived for most of 1850 with his family in the house of a Jewish lace dealer at number 3 Jerusalem Lane, which most recently has been Adam Kowalski’s home and bookshop. You can see a plaque, mounted in the wall outside the shop a few years ago to record the fact that the Marxes lived there.’ Mr Hepple chuckled and a twinkle came into his eye. ‘It was not a period which the Marx family was to look back on with much nostalgia. They lived in great poverty in two rooms on the second floor, one of which was shared by the whole family: Karl, his pregnant wife Jenny, their three small children, and their maid. The other room was used by Karl alone as his study, chaotically untidy and invariably filled with a fog of tobacco smoke so thick that it stung the eyes of anyone who ventured in. There he worked late into the night on his researches into British capitalism and composing his Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League.’

Mr Hepple beamed as he showed off his knowledge. He paused to gulp down some more coffee, and Kathy, seeing that Brock was showing no sign of wanting to interrupt him, made to speak. Hepple sensed this, however, and got in first.

‘Cramped, cold and spartan as their accommodation was, it at least had the advantage of being only a short walk to the British Museum, for which Marx gained a reader’s ticket in the June of that year, and where he spent the next three months immersed in back numbers of the Economist. Soon after they moved into Jerusalem Lane, Jenny became ill and, fearful of losing her as they had lost their fourth child not long before, Karl sent her to stay with friends for over a month. It was during this period that the maid became mysteriously pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy towards the end of that year. Soon after, around Christmas time, the family was evicted for not paying their rent, and, with the help of Marx’s friend Engels, moved on, firstly to lodgings in Soho, and later, when they inherited money, out to the new suburbs of Kentish Town and Hampstead.

‘A hundred years later, in the period after the Second World War, Jerusalem Lane was largely unchanged, and was still providing shelter to refugees from European upheavals, as waves of Latvians, East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and Poles made their way westward. For most it was, as for the Marxes, a temporary stage on their route to prosperity in the suburbs of the Home Counties, but others stayed, setting up small businesses in the buildings which had once housed the Russian-Jewish clog maker, butcher and lace trader. The key to the success of these small businesses (and I would count my father’s practice among them) was Jerusalem Lane itself, which provided a short cut for people travelling from the tube station at its north end to the northern parts of Holborn and to the hospital of Great Ormond Street. Each day the ebb and flow of these travellers have irrigated the cash registers of Witz’s Cameras, Kowalski’s Old and New Books, Brunhilde’s Flower Shop and all the rest, while the Balaton Cafe and Boll’s Coffee and Chocolates have tempted people to linger before moving on to the noise and traffic of the surrounding streets, where a somewhat greyer style of trading-office supplies, photocopy services and travel agencies-has taken over.

‘However, none of the children of these refugees of the 40s and 50s have remained in the Lane; they have moved out to the suburbs, returning occasionally to visit their now ageing parents, still living above the shop, still without cars (for there is nowhere to put them), and still performing their good-natured, if sometimes fiery and increasingly eccentric, revue of Central European politics of a generation ago.’

Brock roused himself. ‘Mrs Winterbottom had children?’

‘A son, yes.’ But Mr Hepple hadn’t quite finished the broad picture. ‘The Winterbottoms didn’t really fit this pattern. They weren’t refugees, unless from Australia,’ and he gave a self-deprecating little laugh to avoid the possibility of offence. ‘They weren’t Central Europeans or Jews. They were simply Londoners returning almost by accident to this area. But they became, and Meredith especially, the linchpins of the place.’

‘I met the son yesterday evening, sir,’ Kathy said. ‘Terry Winter. Lives in South London. Eleanor phoned him and he came to the house.’

‘Winter?’ Brock queried.

‘Yes, he was particular about that.’

‘He dropped the “bottom”,’ the solicitor interjected, anxious to resume his role as principal storyteller. ‘Meredith was rather annoyed when he did it. Quite disgusted in fact. I rather gathered it was his wife who was behind it, so to speak.’ They all showed their appreciation of his little joke.

‘No other children, then?’ Brock asked.

The solicitor shook his head.

‘And the sisters? How do they go in ages?’

‘Now, let me see. Meredith was the oldest certainly, and would have been in her mid-seventies. Peg was next and Eleanor youngest. There are only a couple of years between each of them, so Eleanor must be sixty-nine or seventy, although I must say she doesn’t look it, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Have they all been living there since 1967?’

‘No, no. In those days Peg was a buyer for one of the big department stores-I’m not sure which one-and Eleanor was an assistant librarian at the British Museum. They were both single ladies, and had their own flats somewhere.’

‘Wasn’t Peg married?’ Kathy asked.

‘Only briefly. She was widowed before Meredith and Frank returned to England.’

‘So, they came back.’

‘Yes, and lived together at number 22 for ten or twelve years. In those days it was an ironmonger who rented the ground-floor shop. Terry only lived with them for a year or so, because he was nineteen or twenty at that stage and went off to technical college or something, and got a place of his own.

‘Then Frank died. Cancer of the bowel. That would have been about ten years ago. By this stage Peg had retired, and Eleanor was coming up to it as well, and so Meredith had the alterations done to the top floor and made them their own flats for them to come and live at 22 with her. I must say that I was very doubtful about it. They’re so different the three of them, I thought they’d never get on living together.’

‘In what ways different?’

‘Well, in every way. Their personalities, their tastes, and above all in their politics.’

‘Politics?’

‘Oh dear me yes. Meredith, well she didn’t really have any politics; I mean she might have voted Tory, but there again it might have been Liberal or Labour if it suited. She was a business woman, like Frank. They rented the newsagent’s on the corner next door-what’s now Stwosz’s-just for something to occupy Frank when he wasn’t doing business with his stockbroker. And they made a real go of it, too. Special pipe tobaccos and cigars ordered for individual customers, special deliveries of the foreign financial papers to the offices around here, you know. They were really entrepreneurs-what the other two sisters would call petite bourgeoisie, I dare say.’

‘They were of a pinker persuasion, I take it?’ Brock said.

‘Pink? Oh dear me no. Red! And very red at that. Eleanor is what she calls a “scientific socialist”, which I think is some form of extreme Marxist, and Peg is a Stalinist.’

‘Stalinist?’ Brock and Kathy gaped at the solicitor, trying to reconcile this information with the vision of the Queen Mother they had met at number 22.

‘Indeed!’ Mr Hepple beamed, delighted at the effect of this titbit. ‘Staunch member of the Party. Used to go every summer to East Germany and other delightful parts of the workers’ paradise, at the invitation of the comrades. And still believes in it all. Quite unyielding. She was telling me only the other day. “They’ve lost all sense of discipline,” she said. “You’ll see what a mess there’ll be now they’ve abandoned the Party.” And I said, “You must be the very last Stalinist left in Europe,” and she said yes, she thought she might donate her body to the British Museum to be stuffed and displayed as the last member of an extinct species, when they decided to do away with her.’

The smile slowly faded from his chubby pink cheeks as he registered his own words. ‘Oh dear,’ he murmured, ‘oh dear, oh dear.’

‘Mr Hepple,’ Brock said, taking advantage of his moment of confusion, ‘I wonder if you would be able to help us in the matter of Mrs Winterbottom’s will.’

‘Well, I am her sole executor, so I don’t see why not, under the circumstances. She made it out some time ago, but I can recall the gist.’

‘She didn’t alter it recently, or talk of doing so?’

‘No, no. In fact I hadn’t really seen her for a while. As I say, I don’t get up here so often now. The main beneficiary of Mrs Winterbottom is her son, with small legacies for his two daughters-some pieces of jewellery and a little cash. Unless her circumstances changed substantially in the last year or so, her estate really amounts to some shares and other savings left by her husband, which she had been gradually eating into for her income over the past ten years, together with the property, number 22. However, she had me establish a trust to administer the property after her death for the period that either or both of her sisters survive her, to allow them to continue to remain there for as long as they wished, rent-free. Once they leave or pass away, the property reverts unobstructed to the son.’

‘Could he challenge that?’ Kathy asked.

The solicitor examined his fingernails. ‘No, I think that’s unlikely.’ From his tone Kathy felt he had considered this possibility quite carefully. She suddenly wondered if he was more devious than he looked.

‘And is he aware of the terms of his mother’s will?’ she asked.

‘I believe so,’ he said vaguely, then suddenly looked worried. ‘You’re surely not suggesting…’

‘These are just standard lines of inquiry in these sorts of circumstances, Mr Hepple,’ Brock said soothingly. ‘I’m sure you understand.’

‘I see.’ He still looked worried. ‘I must say my familiarity with murder investigations is somewhat limited. The last time I came up against such a thing was many years ago. A client in Southwark, I believe…’

‘We’d best be getting along, sir,’ Kathy broke in hurriedly, and rose to her feet.

‘Of course, quite so.’ The solicitor got up and hurried round his desk to show them out, making a particular point of shaking Brock’s hand. ‘If there’s anything you want to know about the people around here, Miss Pemberton is the person to speak to. She’s been living here for some years now, and she does the books and VAT returns for quite a few of them. We shall be very sorry to part company with her.’

‘She’s leaving?’

‘Well, we both are in point of fact.’ He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands in regret. ‘We do so little business here,’ he said, lowering his voice to a discreet whisper. ‘It really doesn’t make much sense-hasn’t for several years now. So we’re selling the property, and Miss Pemberton has her own plans to retire.’