The Marx Sisters bak-1

by Barry Maitland

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Yes, yes, I was there, on Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘No, with a friend.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘We’d gone to visit someone we knew.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘A Mrs Winterbottom. Look, could you tell me what this is about?’

  ‘Mrs Winterbottom is dead, sir-you don’t look surprised.’

  ‘No.’ Jones’s voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘No. I read about it in the paper last night, a short report. I only noticed it by accident. It said her funeral was today. I… half wondered if that was what this was about.’

  ‘The newspaper report also said that the circumstances of the death were suspicious and that the police wanted to speak to anyone who had been in the neighbourhood on Sunday afternoon. Why didn’t you get in touch, Mr Jones?’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Jones muttered. They could see that he was breathing in short shallow breaths, like someone in mild shock, keeping his hands pressed to the table so that they wouldn’t shake. ‘I know I should have. I wasn’t sure if it was… necessary. Whether it would achieve anything at this stage. But I think I would have.’ He looked at them anxiously. ‘But how did you get hold of me?’

  ‘Someone answering your description was seen entering Mrs Winterbottom’s house at about the time she died.’

  ‘Really? It was about then she died, was it? Oh God. I didn’t actually see her, but Judith said she was asleep. I felt really we shouldn’t have gone in, but we had arranged to see her at 3, and when she didn’t answer our ring at the front door bell, and we saw it was open, Judith said, well, let’s make sure she hasn’t just taken a snooze after lunch. So we went upstairs, and again her front door was open.’

  ‘When you say open…?’

  ‘On the latch. She usually left it like that when she was at home.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She’d told us.’

  ‘So you just walked in?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t feel right about it, but Judith had a plane to catch back to the States later that afternoon, and she was so keen to see the old lady. I waited in the living room, and Judith put her head around the bedroom door. She said that she was asleep.’

  ‘Did either of you actually step into her bedroom?’

  ‘No… I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why can’t you be sure?’

  ‘Well… We weren’t sure what to do. We were talking in hushed voices, you know. We didn’t know whether to go away for a bit and come back, or wake her, or just forget the whole thing. Then Judith suggested I go upstairs and knock on her sisters’ doors, to see if they were in. I tried, but there was no reply at either.’

  ‘And Judith stayed in Mrs Winterbottom’s flat while you did that?’

  Jones nodded.

  ‘What is Judith’s full name please?’

  ‘Dr Judith Naismith.’

  ‘A medical doctor?’

  ‘No, PhD.’

  ‘And she’s an American?’

  ‘No, but she works there, at Princeton University. Has done for

  … oh, fifteen years.’

  ‘And why were you visiting Mrs Winterbottom?’

  ‘Oh gosh… Do you want the short answer or the long one?’

  ‘We’ve got all night, Mr Jones. Tell us the whole thing.’

  ‘Well, in that case I’m going to need a cup of coffee. There’s a percolator next door going all the time. An intravenous drip would be easier, but it gets in the way when you’re drawing.’

  He winced at his own attempt at humour, seeing the stony look on both their faces. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered, and got shakily to his feet.

  Jones left the room and came back a little later with a tray of coffee mugs.

  ‘I’m really not sure whether any of this is relevant, you see,’ he began.

  ‘Just tell us the whole story and we’ll decide.’

  ‘Where to begin?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Well, I suppose… One morning, it would have been three or four months ago maybe, about the end of June, I think-I could check my diary-there was a meeting here with a client of ours. He’s a developer, called Derek Slade, Managing Director of First City Properties in Mayfair. That would be the first time I was aware of Jerusalem Lane, except I didn’t realize it was Jerusalem Lane then. Sorry, I’m not explaining this very well.’

  Jones ran his ink-stained hand through the mop of his hair and took a sip of coffee. He was calmer now as he concentrated on his account.

  ‘You knew Mr Slade well, did you?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘Yes, we’d done a few jobs for him in the past. Nothing big, but he’s a very well-respected developer, and we’d always hoped for something more substantial. The thing was, we’d recently done a number of speculative designs for them, sketch designs to explore the potential of a site, without charging a fee, and our senior partner, Herbert Lowell, was getting a bit impatient that none of them had come to anything. He was the other person there at the meeting that morning. He’d come up specially from the main office in Basingstoke to see Slade, and he made it clear right at the start of the meeting that there was a lot of other work around at that time, and what he called “no hay, no pay” jobs weren’t very high on our priorities. He’s a pompous twit, actually, and he seemed to have got out of bed on the wrong side that morning, I remember. I wasn’t much better, to tell the truth. We’d been doing a competition for a big project in Paris, and I had been up most of the previous night finishing it off.

  ‘Anyway, Slade is a very cool operator, and he just gave his little smile at Herbert’s blustering and said he mustn’t worry, this time what he had was certain to come off, and it was big, very big indeed. That silenced Herbert. When it comes to architectural judgement, “big” is Herbert’s bottom line. Slade explained that over a period of time First City Properties, his company, had been buying small buildings in an old city block in central London. He said his father, who founded First City, had actually bought the first one over thirty years before. Recently the company had been stepping up their acquisitions, and they were now getting close to consolidating their ownership of the whole block. When that happened, he wanted to be in a position to act fast, to have a preliminary development proposal ready to go out immediately for planning permission, and to fast-track the project from then on. He had already organized substantial finance for the scheme, and some likely pre-lets to a big institution of some kind.

  ‘The thing was, though-and he kept returning to this-until all the acquisitions were complete, the essence was secrecy. Apparently the ownership pattern was such a tangle that it had been an enormous effort to get as far as he had. He’d been buying through intermediaries, and in a very low-key way, and he was paranoid that it could still fall apart. For that reason he couldn’t tell us where it was, but he did say that completion on the final key contracts was very close, and it was going to be a very significant project indeed-a “landmark” development, he said, one of the most important in central London.

  ‘Herbert was very alert by this stage, and his eyes lit up at the word “landmark”. He promised that Slade would have all the resources of the practice behind him when the time came. He was getting quite excited.’

  ‘Weren’t you?’ Kathy said. ‘It must have sounded like a great opportunity.’

  Jones hesitated. ‘No, not really, to tell the truth. I was pretty jaded after the competition, I suppose. But, anyway, the thought of doing a big office development for First City didn’t fill me with much enthusiasm. They’re a solid company, but their work is very run-of-the-mill. Dead dull, actually. I quite like Slade, and in many ways he’s an ideal client-he’s straightforward and pays his bills on time. It’s just that he’s not interested in architecture. If you try to talk about it, you get the feeling he’s indulging you. Which is a bit sad for someone putting up buildings all over the place.

  ‘Anyway, Slade then said that he
didn’t want us to wait, he wanted us to start work designing the buildings straight away, which knocked Herbert off his perch a bit. “How can we, Derek, if we don’t know where they’re going to go?” he said, which seemed to me a pretty reasonable question. “Why not?” Slade came back at him. “People design cars and ships and aeroplanes that way all the time, don’t they?” ’

  Bob Jones laughed and shook his head as he remembered.

  ‘It was preposterous, but he meant it. He opened his briefcase and produced a drawing which his surveyors had prepared, of the outline of the site. It was really nothing more than a rough rectangle, about ninety metres in one direction and a hundred and twenty in the other. In one corner was a tube station, which he said would give an opportunity for some underground specialty shopping levels. The predominant use was to be commercial offices, about a million square feet in all, mostly in central core towers preferably, with net floor areas of ten thousand square feet per level. He didn’t want any housing of course, but he could accept a small amount of non-commercial space as a sop to the planners if there was some convenient corner for it.

  ‘The words “a million square feet” did something to Herbert’s synapses, and he went quiet at this point, so I chipped in that it really would be impossible to do anything worthwhile without more information. Buildings aren’t like ships and planes, they’re rooted to the spot, they impact on one specific place, they sit alongside, overlook, cast shadows on, generate traffic around, a specific set of neighbours. To tell the truth, I still wondered if he was pulling our legs, but he was studying his fingernails in that very patient way he has, so I tried again. I explained we had to consider the context of our buildings right from the first concept stage as much as later on in the details. They have to take their place in their streets in a civilized way. Apart from anything else, the planners would insist on it.

  ‘Slade let me finish, then let silence fall. I’d seen him do this before. It’s his most reliable and effective technique, to let the opposition talk itself out, show its arguments, run out of steam, and then to wait for a moment in tense silence before he finally utters his verdict.

  ‘“The site is in central London, Bob,” he said at last. “You know central London. The present buildings on the site are all rubbish, with the possible exception of a small synagogue which I’m currently getting heritage advice on. The surrounding buildings are a mixed, undistinguished lot. You design your ideal solution to the brief I’ve just outlined for you-God knows it’s loose enough, I should have thought. I always thought you architects were begging for a chance like this, with so few constraints. However, if you feel you can’t do it…”

  ‘That was the clincher, of course. Herbert practically jumped out of his seat. Of course we could do it! He loved the analogy to a ship! And, after all, the new project would establish a new scale and indeed language for the whole neighbourhood.

  ‘So we agreed I’d prepare sketch drawings showing three alternative design approaches for another meeting two weeks later.’

  Jones shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘I’m getting a bit cold,’ he said. ‘How about you? It’s the air-conditioning in here. Always gets it wrong.’ He got to his feet and fiddled with a thermostat on the wall. Kathy and Brock watched him, saying nothing as they waited for him to settle again.

  ‘I didn’t feel any happier at the end of the two weeks. It was clear they were trying to get a very intensive level of development on the site. A million square feet on that area would give a plot ratio in excess of ten to one, which was more like Manhattan than London. The idea of trying to fit that amount of building in without any idea of what lay around it was just ludicrous, and I didn’t really take it seriously. I went through the motions, though, and Slade seemed pleased enough when we met the second time. He brought his agent, Quentin Gilroy, with him, which is always a sign he’s getting serious. They agreed I should develop the ideas a bit further and we’d meet again in another couple of weeks. But he still wouldn’t tell me any more about the location.

  ‘Well, I was finding this a bit hard to take. And when I thought about it, I realized it really wouldn’t be too hard to find a central London synagogue that was on the list of buildings of historic or architectural interest, and that was also in the same city block as an Underground station. It took me a couple of hours to trace it, and on the way home that evening I paid my first visit to Jerusalem Lane.

  ‘My first reaction was one of relief. There really wasn’t any strong architectural character to the surrounding streets, and the buildings within the block were a mixed bag of structures that seemed to range from scruffy to downright dangerous. I didn’t think the synagogue would be any great loss, and on the whole I was inclined to think that wholesale redevelopment would be the best option, although the Lane itself intrigued me-it was such an odd thing.

  ‘A couple of days later I went back at lunchtime for another look. I sat in the Balaton Cafe, looking out into the Lane. There were two old men in the cafe having an argument about whether it was Chopin or Liszt who was kissed by Beethoven-apparently it was Liszt. Then that rather formidable woman who runs the flower shop on the other side of that little square in the centre of the Lane came over and they had a discussion with her about whether she could find them a black rose for some anniversary that was coming up. Other people called in, taking up conversations with each other they must have started the day before, or maybe twenty years before in some cases. And gradually I began to get an idea of what an extraordinary crowd they were. There was a doctor, I remember, an odd-looking bloke-at least, I assume he was a doctor, because he practically set up surgery in the corner table. People would wander over and show him something and he’d shove his soup to one side and pull out his pad and give them a prescription!’

  Jones laughed. ‘Do you know them? Do you know what I mean?’ And Kathy smiled, recognizing them immediately from his description.

  ‘After lunch I had a closer look at the buildings along the Lane. They were every bit as eccentric as the people who lived in them really, but it was interesting how, in their arrangement, how they all fitted together to form this compact little place right in the middle of the city-part of the city, but also private and protected. And what went on inside the buildings was so varied too, little businesses that had probably been running on a shoestring for years all mixed up with flats and offices and a couple of small workshops.’

  Kathy nodded, responding to the enthusiasm which lit up his face. Then abruptly it passed and he frowned.

  ‘When I got back to the office and saw again the drawings I’d made, I began to feel very uneasy. The existing buildings might be inconvenient, impossible to modernize, an underdevelopment of a prime site. But to replace them with acres of dead standard office floors seemed somehow obscene. Talk about monoculture! After a couple of hours in the real Jerusalem Lane, the idea of trying to breathe life into those dead drawings seemed just hopeless.’

  Out of the corner of his eye Jones saw Brock glance at his watch.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I called in at the Lane a couple of times over the next week or so, trying to figure out what to do, and one of those times I found myself outside the second-hand bookshop up at the top end of the Lane. It would have been the seventeenth of July, because I remember it was the first anniversary of my divorce. It’s funny, isn’t it, that I can remember that date when I could never remember our wedding anniversary. Anyway, I thought I might find an architectural book as an anniversary present to myself. I didn’t have much success. The place was a jumble, and even the bloke who owned it-Kowalski was his name, a Pole-didn’t seem to have much idea of what he had, or where it was. I worked my way back through the rooms of the shop, all piled with books in shelves and boxes, the way you do in old bookshops-you know, imagining you’re going to turn up an old Wendingen edition of Wright or something-until I came to the back room. There was a whole stack of old music scores in there, I remember, and books were heaped anyhow on the floor,
and above them there were a few framed prints. One of them caught my eye. It was the frame I noticed first, quite an ornate thing. It contained what at first I thought must be an abstract drawing, a bit like a Paul Klee perhaps, made up of a grid of lines scribbled in black ink on dirty white paper.

  ‘Mr Kowalski took it down from its nail on the wall and brought it through to the window at the front of the shop, to let me see it more clearly in the light. He used his handkerchief to wipe the glass on the front, I remember, and I saw that the scribbled lines were in fact lines of writing, done in a hurry with an old-fashioned steel pen, with spots and splashes of ink in places. Kowalski pointed to a date in the top corner, which we were able to decipher as “30 April 1867”. The word beside it might have been “Hanover”, but the script was so untidy and illegible that it was impossible to make anything else out. Kowalski explained that it was a letter, written in a way that was sometimes done in those days, to economize on paper. Its author had written first in one direction in the normal way, and then turned the page through ninety degrees to cover the sheet with a second layer of writing, which, if the script itself had been more intelligible, would have been quite readable against the first.

  ‘I was rather taken with it. I liked the strong abstract grid pattern and also the puzzle of a text that might be decoded. I bought it from Mr Kowalski for a tenner, which I thought was probably a lot less than the frame would have been worth on its own.

  ‘That evening I sat down with a magnifying glass and tried to decipher the letter. Some phrases were legible and it seemed that the writer was suffering from “carbuncles”.’ Jones grinned. ‘I rather liked that. A couple of names were clear as well. There was a “Dear Fred” at the beginning, and a “Gumpert”, who seemed to be advising the writer to take arsenic for the carbuncles. There didn’t seem to be a signature, so I guessed the letter continued on the other side. I opened the back of the frame, and found I was right. I suppose I’d been hoping it might have come from someone famous, and I was a bit disappointed to find it signed by someone called “Mohr”. I still couldn’t make much sense of what the letter said, anyway, because at least half of it was in German.