The Marx Sisters bak-1

by Barry Maitland

  ‘I gave her the usual check-up here, and sent her down the road for blood tests, but I was fairly sure what it was. My diagnosis was depression. She claimed she wasn’t worried or upset about anything in particular, that nothing had happened to make her anxious in the past few months, but to me she was presenting the symptoms of depression.

  ‘When the results of the tests came back I had her in to see me again and told her I was going to give her some pills to help her. She didn’t like the idea. She said she wouldn’t take sleeping tablets or tranquillizers because she believed they were addictive-she’d seen something on TV about it. So I told her these were like iron tablets, only more modern.’

  ‘What did you prescribe?’

  Dr Botev consulted his card again. ‘Plustranil, 200 milligrammes a day. It’s a tricyclic antidepressant.’

  ‘It worked?’

  ‘Yes. It took a week or so before she started to feel better, but after three weeks she came back to thank me. She had all her old bounce again, and said she felt much better and had stopped taking the pills. I told her she had to keep taking them for a couple of months and gave her a repeat prescription.

  ‘A couple of weeks later she came back to say she was getting new symptoms-palpitations, occasional dizziness, and the constipation had returned. These are quite normal side-effects for this type of drug, but from her remarks I could see she was worried there might be something wrong with her heart. Well, postural hypotension can be a side-effect of Plustranil too, and that can be a problem for someone with a bad heart, so I suggested she had a thorough check-up and she seemed quite relieved. I also reduced the Plustranil to 150 milligrammes a day.

  ‘She attended the cardio-vascular unit at the hospital on… August 12th. I got the report three weeks ago. She had a complete set of tests, and she was absolutely in the clear. There is no history of heart disease in her immediate family.

  ‘So’-he glared at Kathy through his lenses-‘while it is not impossible for someone to walk out of their doctor’s surgery with a clean bill of health and to drop dead with a heart attack ten minutes later, it is highly unlikely. Also, she didn’t look as if she’d suffered a heart attack. No warning chest pains, no signs of distress.’

  ‘What about a “silent coronary”, while she was asleep on the bed?’ Brock persisted.

  Botev turned his glare back to Brock. ‘I don’t believe it. Come back when your police doctor has something to persuade me to change my mind.’

  ‘But do you know of any reason why someone should want to kill her?’

  Botev didn’t reply, but only glared more defiantly over Brock’s head.

  ‘Or have any suspicion who it might be?’

  Again no reply.

  ‘What about Eleanor? Have you been treating her?’

  He shook his head. ‘She never needs a doctor. She is strong, too. Quite different from Meredith. But a fine woman.’

  As Brock and Kathy got to their feet the doctor spoke again. The tone of abrasiveness had gone, and the curiously high pitched voice suddenly sounded plaintive.

  ‘I will never forget how good she was to me when my wife died. I was helpless… like a baby. She saved my life then. You must find who killed her.’

  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 mu
ch 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 18
30s, 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.’