Authors: Barry Maitland
‘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.
Kathy was preoccupied as she drove herself and Brock down the Old Kent Road through South London. ‘Isn’t Peg staying with Terry Winter a bit like Little Red Riding Hood boarding with the wolf?’ she said eventually.
‘Yes.’ Brock had been thinking about the same thing. ‘There wasn’t much we could do yesterday when Winter arrived. The old lady was very shaken up, and they both decided she should go home with him. At that stage we hadn’t heard about all the harassment the sisters had been suffering. I must admit I don’t like the fellow any more than you do, and she’s now the only thing between him and a quarter of a million.’
‘I know. It must have been horrific for them in that house with everyone leaving and the demolition going on around them, and then the phone calls, the attacks . . . I’m surprised they held out for so long. At best Winter will only put more pressure on Peg to move. At worst she might have an accident on the stairs, or take an overdose or something.’
‘But until we’re prepared to arrest Winter . . .’
Winter opened the door, looking fleshier than Kathy remembered. He was unshaved, with greasy hair and crumpled clothes. He looked uneasily at Kathy and led them into the lounge room, where she noticed a roll of blankets and a pillow pushed into a corner behind the sofa.
‘My aunt’s upstairs in bed. She’s not well. The doctor’s said she has to rest.’
‘We’ll see if she’s awake, then,’ Brock said, turning to the door. ‘We’ll speak to you when we come down, Mr Winter.’
‘I want to be there when you talk to her.’
‘Why?’
‘To make sure you don’t upset her, that’s why!’
‘That’s not necessary. We’d prefer to see her alone. You wait down here. Is your wife in?’
‘Not at the moment. She had to go out.’
Peg was sitting up in bed, propped up against a mountain of Laura Ashley pillows. Her cherubic face was pale and drawn, and her body appeared to have shrunk inside her quilted satin bed jacket, so that the wrists and hands which emerged from its hot pink cuffs and clutched a large tapestry bag seemed made to a different scale. She peered at them, looking vague, clearly not recognizing Brock from the day before. He introduced himself and Kathy, and she smiled bravely up at them, nodding her head.
‘Do sit on the bed, Inspector, and you too, dear. I don’t take up much room.’ Her voice was disturbingly weak and on a distinctly higher pitch than Kathy remembered it.
‘How are you feeling today, Mrs Blythe?’
‘How could I feel, Inspector?’ Her eyes grew watery and a large tear swelled against a lower lid. ‘It’s been such a nightmare.’ The tear trembled on the lashes a moment, then tumbled down her cheek. She sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with a tiny lace handkerchief.
‘I didn’t appreciate when I saw you yesterday what you and your sister had been going through these past months, what with the vandalism and the telephone calls and the like.’
‘Oh yes.’ Her voice was a whisper. ‘They’ve told you about that.’
‘It must have been very worrying for you both.’
She nodded. ‘Eleanor was so brave, but it was upsetting us both. Each night, we just didn’t know what . . . I really don’t know whether I can cope with it now, on my own.’ Her lip trembled in a sob.
‘Do you have no idea who might have been responsible? You didn’t recognize a voice on the telephone or a face at the window?’
She shuddered and shook her head.
‘Could it have been children perhaps, or men from the building site, or even someone you knew?’
‘Someone we knew?’ She stared at him in horror.
‘Perhaps someone who wanted you to leave Jerusalem Lane?’
‘Oh . . .’ She clutched the bag and pulled it to her face, moaning quietly, as if trying to hide from something.
‘What is it, Mrs Blythe?’
After a moment she lowered her hands and spoke in such a quiet whisper that they had to bend their heads to her. ‘Eleanor said . . . but I never liked to think about it.’
‘She said what?’
‘She said that
the parasite
. . .’—she looked at them with wide eyes, pointed downwards with a finger and mouthed Terry’s name silently—‘wanted to get us out, so that he could sell the house. She thought he might have something to do with the things that were happening. It made her more determined to stay—to spite him, you see. But I didn’t believe he would do such a thing, dear little Terry, he was such a sweet boy. And then I saw him at the window that night.’
‘You saw Terry at your window in Jerusalem Lane?’
‘No, no. I don’t know that it was him. It was in the middle of the night.’ Her fingers fiddled in agitation with the handle of the tapestry bag as she remembered. ‘Eleanor woke up with the noise of something tapping at her bedroom window. She got up, pulled back the curtains, and there . . . there was a creature at the window!’
‘A creature?’
‘Yes! A monster! With hideous eyes and huge teeth and blood running from its fangs!’ She shuddered. ‘At least, that was how Eleanor described it, and later, when we told the policeman, we realized it must have been a man in a horrid mask.’
‘What did Eleanor do?’
‘Oh, she was very brave. I would have hidden under the bedclothes, but she ran out of her flat and rang my doorbell until I woke up and let her in. After a little while we went back into her flat and put on all the lights and looked out of the windows, but we could see nothing. I insisted that Eleanor spend the rest of the night in my flat, and we turned the lights off again. Eleanor went to get something from her bathroom and I waited for her in her sitting room. I looked out of the window again, and there, in the yard at the bottom of the fire-escape stair, I saw a man standing in the moonlight, staring up at me. I nearly died of fright. I closed my eyes tight and opened them again, and he was gone. Then I wasn’t sure I really had seen him, or if it was just a trick of the light, or my imagination. But when Eleanor said that about . . .’—she mouthed the name again—‘I thought suddenly, yes, that was him, the same build, the same way of standing.’