The Marx Sisters bak-1

by Barry Maitland

  Kathy spluttered into her tomato juice, laughing. ‘Oh, I thought you were saying yesterday that you couldn’t understand how anyone could be bothered to have an affair. Now you’re conceding that it might be a good idea in some circumstances.’

  ‘Not really.’ Brock toyed with the pint mug on the beer mat. ‘I believe that things badly begun end badly.’

  ‘Oh golly.’ Kathy stared at him, still smiling. ‘That’s a bit Old Testament, isn’t it? Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Yes, I do. But then, first marriages are doomed these days, anyway. And so are people who get tangled up in them.’

  ‘You really are a cynic, aren’t you, sir?’

  ‘A realist, I think. Do you know any first marriages you’d want to be in?’

  ‘Yes… All right, no.’

  ‘Too inexperienced, taking too much for granted, held together by the kids. Mind you, that can blow up in your face, too.’ He was now gloomily drawing small patterns with beer slops on the shiny table top.

  ‘Is that what happened to you?’

  ‘Me?’ He looked up. ‘No… No kids in my case. No, I was thinking of Mr Gregory Thomas North again, my former quarry. Sorry, it’s difficult to forget about old enemies sometimes.’

  ‘He has children?’

  ‘One boy. Six years old. North dotes on him. His only redeeming feature. We assumed that he would try to get Mrs N and junior to follow him out, but it seems the wife doesn’t fancy a life on the pampas. Delighted to see the back of him in fact, because she has other arrangements in hand and a homicidal husband doesn’t figure in them. Only the little boy has just been diagnosed as having leukaemia. Three months to live. The missus is keeping it quiet in case North tries to come back to see him.’

  ‘Oh God, how awful.’

  ‘Yes. I almost feel sorry for the animal. However, he may find that he gets to see his little boy after all.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Mm. We’ve been having unofficial discussions with our friends over there-exchanging information on things generally, you know, the best buy in data banks, thumb screws, flashing blue lights, the things coppers like to talk about when they’re together. I was over there last month, as a matter of fact. Private visit, of course. It seems they don’t like villains who kill coppers any more than we do, whatever their politicians say. The politicians are, however, very sensitive about foreigners who import drugs.’

  ‘Is North doing that? He must be crazy.’

  ‘Of course not. He doesn’t need to with all that money in the Swiss bank accounts. However, it’ll be difficult for him to explain that to them when a large stash of heroin is found in his cellar in a couple of weeks’ time, him not even having learnt the language yet.’

  ‘Wow. And you’ll be waiting for him at the airport.’ ‘ Moi? ’ Brock raised his eyebrows in mock innocence. ‘I know nothing.

  ‘Anyway,’ he added with a weary sigh, ‘how wonderful to have no part in the whole dreary mess-scheming wives, unfaithful husbands, desperate plans leading nowhere. How wonderful to be like you, Sergeant Kolla, young, beautiful, single and free.’ He raised his empty glass. ‘And if you’re sticking to tomato juice, you can drive us back to Meredith Winterbottom’s funeral, and I can have another pint before we go.’

  11

  Just as at the end of her remembered childhood holidays, the sky was clouding over and becoming darker as Kathy drove them back towards the familiar urban landscapes. On the way they phoned Felix Kowalski and arranged to meet him at his father’s former bookshop at 4.

  Traffic was heavy in central London, and when they reached the crematorium the service for Meredith Winterbottom had already begun. They waited in the car, parked so that they could view the front of the chapel. A faint smell of smoke permeated the air. Heavy drops of rain began to fall.

  After five minutes the chapel doors were opened by a man in a dark suit, and people filed out under the portico, forming stiff little groups beneath its shelter. Most were elderly, and Kathy recognized a number from Jerusalem Lane. The members of Meredith’s family remained by the chapel doorway, as mourners came up to offer their condolences. The figure of Eleanor was distinctive, dressed in black, erect and sombre, her face pale against her dark hair. Beside her and a head shorter, Peg struck a considerably brighter note, in a scarlet coat with a pink scarf, matching gloves and wide-brimmed hat. From the car they could see the hat tilt graciously this way and that to acknowledge the sympathetic words of friends. On the other side of the chapel doorway, the Winter family formed an awkward group. Terry looked uncomfortable accepting the condolences of those who approached them, and his wife Caroline’s smiles of acknowledgement seemed thin and unconvincing. Kathy recognized the elder daughter, Alex, hovering in the background, morose, her shoulders stooped. Her teenage sister stood beside her, scuffing her feet impatiently.

  No one was wearing a bow tie.

  ‘Do we go out and ask them?’ Kathy inquired doubtfully. The rain was falling steadily now, and one or two people were beginning to hurry out from the shelter of the portico towards the car park.

  ‘Not here.’ Brock wrinkled his nose. ‘Let’s try a long shot. Have you got the developer’s number?’

  Brock dialled, and was passed from the receptionist to Slade’s secretary and finally to the man himself.

  ‘Hello, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘Sorry to bother you again, Mr Slade. A quick one. The architect for your project, does he wear a bow tie?’

  ‘Herbert Lowell? Never seen him in one. Why?’

  ‘We have to trace everyone who was in the area when Mrs Winterbottom died. Someone thought they’d seen a man in a bow tie, possibly an architect, youngish man.’

  ‘Not Lowell. Sounds more like Bob Jones. He used to work for The Lowell Partnership, on this project actually. But they parted company a couple of months ago, so I don’t know why he’d have been around the place.’

  ‘Probably not him, then, but we may check. Do you know where we could reach him?’

  ‘He set up on his own. You could try Lowell’s, or the Institute of Architects would have his address.’

  ‘Yes, fine. Thanks for your help.’

  ‘No problem. And thanks again for the autograph. My boy was over the moon. Goodbye.’

  Kathy smiled. ‘He’ll be even more delighted when he sees your picture on the front page arresting North. You should start a fan club, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Kathy. Just concentrate on getting us to Jerusalem Lane, would you, while I track down our phantom in the bow tie.’

  He placed three more calls-one to directory inquiries, one to the Royal Institute of British Architects, and the third to the office of Concept Design, off Tottenham Court Road, less than half a mile west of Jerusalem Lane. Bob Jones agreed to meet them at his office at 5.30 that evening.

  Through the empty shop window they could make out a light at the back of the bookshop. Eventually Felix Kowalski answered their knock, but not before they had become thoroughly wet waiting at the door. He led them through a succession of cramped rooms, their walls lined with empty shelves, the pages from old books scattered on the floor like the detritus of autumn. The musty smell of the departed books permeated the place. Without them the building looked forlorn, like the old lady’s body on the mortuary slab, a form abandoned by its content.

  At the back of the shop was a tiny kitchen, with a small table and three rickety bentwood chairs. A green plastic shade hung over the light bulb suspended above the table, the electric light a welcome contrast to the dim greyness of the sky beyond the kitchen window, through which a small walled yard was visible.

  At first Felix Kowalski was civil in his offers to take their wet coats and make them comfortable, but beneath the words Kathy soon began to feel the same bristling antagonism that had surprised her in his mother. His references to the meagre facilities of his father’s shop were scornful, and soon this bitter edge to his voice hardened into a constrained anger. He had, it seemed, a nu
mber of things to complain about, and it wasn’t long before he began to air them.

  ‘Yes, I work at the Polytechnic, for what it’s worth these days. Although it’s difficult to see the point sometimes when a lecturer with seven years’ fulltime study and a PhD behind him is paid little more than an eighteen-year-old police constable on his first day on the beat.’

  He glared at Kathy, as if challenging her to provoke him further. His eyes, disconcertingly, didn’t quite look in the same direction, so that it was difficult to be sure whether the intensity of his stare was due to aggression or an attempt to focus. He was about forty. Damp black hair was pushed back from his forehead, his face puffy and flushed. She thought she caught the sweet smell of whisky on his breath.

  ‘Do you work in the same field as your father did when he was a professor?’

  His lips pursed and he twitched his head back and forward in a gesture that might have been meant to indicate scorn.

  ‘Yes, I rather thought it might come round to that. My father isn’t well, you know. It’s a pity you found it necessary to bother him the way you did this morning. He found it very stressful.’

  ‘Really? That wasn’t the impression we got. He seemed quite happy to help us.’

  ‘And I resent you raking up things from his past that have nothing whatsoever to do with the case you’re supposed to be solving. Your approach just seems to be to charge in and stir up the mud and then grab at whatever comes up. Hardly scientific method, I should have thought.’

  Kathy found his angry sarcasm all the more irksome because there was an element of truth in what he said. She imagined how devastating it would be to be one of his students faced with this choleric venom.

  ‘I take it,’ she said, as icily calm as she could make herself sound, ‘you’re referring to the dispute which your family had recently with Mrs Winterbottom, who, in case your mother didn’t mention it, we believe may have been murdered on Sunday afternoon last.’

  ‘If you’re suggesting that I or either of my parents had anything to do with Mrs Winterbottom’s death,’ he exploded, ‘you’d better come right out and say it now, so that I can get a solicitor down here straight away.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ Brock, who had taken no notice of this exchange, was stooping in a corner of the room. He straightened with a grunt and turned toward the table, adjusting the glasses on the end of his nose and squinting at the spine of a small red-covered book which he’d picked up from the floor.

  ‘A Baedeker!’ He opened the cover. ‘Southern France and Corsica, 1914.’ He flicked through the pages. ‘Maps still there, quite good condition. You don’t want to lose this, Mr Kowalski. They’re worth a few bob these days, aren’t they?’

  ‘What?’ Kowalski turned to Brock, a look of irritation on his face, as if he was having to deal with some imbecilic first-year student who had lost track of the argument. ‘I wouldn’t know. Second-hand books aren’t my field.’

  ‘So you’re not in the business with your father? We rather thought, when you were helping him to sell his stock, that you might have been involved.’

  ‘No… I was simply giving him and my mother a hand. Look-’

  ‘Tell us exactly what your movements were on Sunday, would you, Mr Kowalski?’

  With bad grace he began to do as Brock asked. The three of them had left Enfield after breakfast, catching the train into central London-‘because my wife decided at the last possible minute that she needed the car’. Once in London, his parents went to the shop, while he took a bus to Camden Town, where he had arranged to rent a van for a few hours. He drove it to Jerusalem Lane, into the yard behind the bookshop, and helped his mother and father pack and load the last of the books into the van. They finished soon after 1, and ate a packed lunch his wife had made for them.

  ‘That was after your father had the accident with his foot?’

  ‘Yes. We were nearly finished when that happened. My mother knocked the box off the back of the van on to his foot.’ He shook his head. ‘Typical. Anyway, after that I drove to the dealer in Notting Hill who had bought the last of the stock.’

  ‘You drove alone?’

  ‘No. My father had to come too, to conclude the sale with the man, but there wasn’t room for my mother. She stayed at the shop.’

  ‘And you returned when?’ Kathy asked.

  Kowalski looked her in the eyes and answered calmly, ‘2 o’clock, I should think. Yes, 2.’

  ‘Was your father not in pain with his foot? It seemed pretty bad when we saw him.’

  ‘It wasn’t so bad at first, after he got over the initial shock. The corner of the box seemed to land on the ground, taking most of the impact, and then the edge caught him. When we set off he said he was all right, but by the time we got back he was pretty uncomfortable.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  Kowalski shrugged impatiently, ‘My mother was doing some last-minute sweeping, and I helped for a bit. Then I took the van back.’

  Kathy opened her mouth, but he anticipated her question, ‘Mum came with me. We left Dad to rest his foot. He could hardly walk by this stage.’

  ‘Times?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, I don’t know. We weren’t away long. We got the tube back from Camden Town on the Northern Line to the station round the corner. We stayed a bit, to finish up. Then I went back to the tube station to call a cab for my parents from the phones there, and when it arrived we all left. I walked back to my station. It must have been around 4.’

  They put on their coats and went outside briefly to see the yard in the failing light. By the time they came back inside, Kowalski had stoked up his anger once more.

  ‘I just want it to be understood that I resent this intrusive pressure on elderly people who, God knows, have had enough to put up with. One shudders to think how you lot would behave if we’d actually done something wrong.’

  ‘We have to speak to everyone who may have seen something of significance on Sunday last,’ Brock said smoothly to him. ‘It’s a little difficult to see why you seem to feel so threatened by that, Mr Kowalski. If everyone we spoke to was as defensive, we might end up having to pay our constables even more extravagant wages than we do at present. Anyway, thanks for your help, and don’t forget your Baedeker.’

  It was dark outside as Brock and Kathy ran back through the rain to their car, which was parked beneath a no-waiting sign at the north end of the Lane.

  ‘Sorry,’ Kathy said as Brock got the heater going on the steamed-up windscreen. ‘I didn’t seem to be able to get anywhere. You were much better with him than I was.’

  ‘I wonder if he’s like that with all women. His girl students must get a hard time.’

  ‘Yes, I thought that. But it was my fault, too. I just found it impossible not to be riled by him. All that anger and self-pity-his job, his little digs at his wife, his rudeness…’

  ‘And his lies.’

  ‘Yes. The only time he sounded half civil was when he was obviously lying-about the time they returned from Notting Hill. He said 2, whereas his father this morning said 2.30. We can check that, but I’ll bet the father was right. Which means that the mother was on her own in the Lane for half an hour during the period the sisters were out.’

  ‘And the father was on his own for most of the following hour, lame or not. And we don’t really know for sure that the son didn’t find some time on his own that afternoon either, say when he went out to call the cab. We’ll have to go back over it all again, and talk to Sylvia Pemberton about when she saw Adam Kowalski that afternoon. But it’s interesting that Felix Kowalski should have felt it necessary to lie about the period that his mother was on her own.’

  12

  The office of Concept Design stood at the end of a culde-sac, off a narrow rear access street in a block behind Tottenham Court Road. It occupied a two-storey brick building which had been built in the twenties as a warehouse at the rear of a retail store. On both sides were pre- and post-war commercial buildin
gs about eight storeys high. Behind a large plate-glass window the name of the firm was spelled out in miniature red neon letters. Stepping inside, Kathy and Brock found themselves on a steel bridge, which spanned a large hole in the ground floor and offered a view of the main draughting area in the basement below. Ahead of them, suspended over the draughting floor, was a reception area with glass walls screened by narrow grey venetian blinds.

  ‘Hello.’

  A figure climbed up a spiral steel staircase from the level below.

  ‘Secretary’s gone home. My name is Bob Jones.’

  He was in his late thirties, of medium height, with a mop of tousled black hair. He wore a black sweater, grey trousers, red shoes, and a spotted black and white bow tie. He smiled at them and held out his hand. Then, seeing it was covered with black ink, apologized and withdrew it.

  ‘Pens always play up at the worst moment. At least it’s not all over my shirt this time. Come through into the conference room, will you?’

  They passed the empty reception desk, made of charcoal-grey laminate, and went through into a room behind the louvred screens. It was lined with grey pinboard, to which a number of coloured free-hand sketches had been attached. Track-lighting overhead threw spots of light on to the walls and on to a grey table that stood in the middle of the room.

  ‘How can I help?’ He offered them seats. ‘Has there been another break-in next door?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Kathy said. ‘Nothing like that. Could you tell us if you were in the vicinity of Jerusalem Lane, over on the other side of Bloomsbury, on Sunday last?’

  Jones’s expression changed abruptly. He blinked a couple of times and swallowed.

  ‘Oh.’ He stared at the table.