The Marx Sisters bak-1

by Barry Maitland

  Winter nodded. His ash fell on the carpet.

  ‘He’s smoking again, isn’t he?’ Caroline Winter spat out. ‘I warned him I wouldn’t have him smoking in here again. The place stinks for days afterwards.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Kathy nodded. ‘The new kitchen looks terrific, Mrs Winter.’

  ‘Oh yeah, do you like it? I thought I’d get it done right before I finally threw the bastard out.’

  ‘Yes, he mentioned you were having a trial separation.’

  ‘Trial nothing!’ she laughed. ‘This is it, baby. Finito. Kaput. The end. I put up with Mister Wonderful playing around with those tarts he employs for long enough. God, it used to make me physically ill going into one of his bloody salons with him, you know what I mean? The way he talked to them and teased them and touched them up. He thought he was God’s bloody gift he did. A heat-seeking dick. He thought he’d found fucking paradise, prancing around from one salon to the next. Well’-her eyes glittered with malice-‘now’s the time to pay, lover boy.’

  ‘He did seem rather chastened today, compared with when we saw him last.’

  ‘He doesn’t know the half of it, luv. I’ve ’ad a solicitor and an accountant working on this for months. I’d never have let him through the door today except for Peg. When he phoned, I told him he’d have to bring her here-he’d never be able to look after her in that pigsty he’s got in Peckham. But once she’s out of here, so’s he.’

  ‘We thought we might take care of that, Mrs Winter,’ Kathy said. ‘We’re going to look after her for a few days. Just to be on the safe side.

  ‘Has he stopped hitting you, then?’ Kathy added.

  Caroline looked sharply at her.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Nobody told me. I thought I saw some marks on your face the last time we met. Is he a very violent man?’

  Caroline took a deep breath and stared out of the window. A family of thrushes was splashing innocently in a birdbath on the terrace outside. She watched them for a minute, then said, ‘What’s “very”?

  ‘Anyway,’ she shrugged, ‘like a few other women in my situation, I’ve discovered the ultimate revenge. It’s called money.’

  ‘And he has been worried about money for some time, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, I see what you’re getting at. Well, I’d like to help, believe me. Nothing would suit me better than to have him put away for twenty years-after I’ve stripped him clean, that is. But I’m not sure I can. He’s always been a chancer with money, you know, wanting it all, borrowing, leasing, gearing. Yeah, I suppose the last year has been worse for him, though. I think he was hoping to set up that bitch Geraldine whatsit in a nice little love nest at one point, and then when I told him he could clear off as soon as the kids had had their Christmas, he must have seen the writing on the wall.’

  ‘One thing you can do for me, Mrs Winter, is to go through this list of dates, and see if you can vouch for his whereabouts on any of them.’

  Caroline’s lip, its scarlet outline defined with the precision of a razor, curled with amusement. ‘Will it get him in more trouble if I say I can or I can’t?’

  ‘Just the truth, please, Mrs Winter.’

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Caroline laughed. ‘You know I couldn’t tell a fib.’

  She glanced down the list.

  ‘You ’aven’t got the 8th of March down here.’

  ‘A week ago? Why should we?’

  ‘That’s when I had my break-in.’

  ‘This house was broken into?’

  ‘Yeah. And it was that bastard what did it. I changed the locks when I kicked him out, and this was him having a go at me. He pinched things of mine. Some jewellery he’d given me, stuff like that. He made it look like a burglary, broke a window downstairs, but I knew it was him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was a Thursday afternoon, and he knows I always go and see my mum on a Thursday afternoon. The answering machine was on when I got back, and there’d been a couple of calls with no messages. You know, he was just checking.’

  ‘Anyone could have done that.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it was him, all right. I smelled him, didn’t I, in the loo.’

  ‘What, his aftershave?’

  Caroline laughed. ‘No, dear. His piss. He’d gone to the lavatory and not flushed it. And he’d been drinking. I could smell his stink. That was him all over, Prince bloody Charming.’

  ‘Did you report this?’

  ‘Yes. The coppers came round and took a list of the things that were missing, and fingerprints and everything.’

  ‘They fingerprinted the bathroom?’

  ‘Yeah. But then he’d been round the previous evening, hadn’t he, so his prints would be everywhere. After they’d gone I thought about it. I phoned up the coppers and told them not to bother. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking I was worried.’

  ‘If he’d wanted things, couldn’t he just have taken them when he called round?’

  ‘I’d never have let him, or I’d have got the solicitors on to him. Also, he wanted to frighten me. I know him.’

  ‘What about your alarm system?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I never turned it on, did I? It was raining and so I left the cat inside, and she would have set it off. But Terry knew I did that, you see.’

  Kathy nodded, thinking. ‘Was there a lot of mess?’

  ‘Not really. I hardly noticed it at first. And nothing electrical taken. That’s what made me suspicious.’

  ‘What about in here?’

  ‘The kitchen?’

  ‘Yes. Where do you keep your freezer bags, Mrs Winter?’

  Caroline stared at her for a moment, stunned. Then, without a word she went over to a cupboard. She opened it and stepped back. There were half a dozen different types and sizes of packets of plastic bags inside. Kathy took out a green bin liner and dropped a number of the packets inside.

  When she straightened up, she saw Brock standing by the kitchen door.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Can I have a word, sir?’

  They went out into the hall and she quickly told him about Caroline’s break-in.

  ‘Right,’ Brock said. He led her back into the living room where Winter was still poring over the list Brock had given him. ‘You have a set of keys to 22 Jerusalem Lane, don’t you, Mr Winter?’

  Winter looked at him warily. ‘My mother’s keys, yes. Why?’

  ‘Where are they?’

  Winter shrugged. ‘Upstairs. I’ve got a drawer of odds and ends in my… in the bedroom.’

  ‘Shall we have a look?’

  It was a small drawer in the dressing table by the window. He opened it and stared. It was quite empty. He turned angrily to his wife, standing by the door. ‘What have you done with my stuff? There was a gold cigarette case in here.’

  Caroline shook her head, her mouth turned down in exaggerated disbelief. ‘ I haven’t touched it, Terry.’

  He turned to appeal to Brock. ‘This is where they were, Inspector. This drawer was full of stuff.’

  There was a moment’s heavy silence as they stared at him.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Brock said at last, ‘I’ll get my Sergeant to come down here straight away. He can take you back up to town. Save any problems.’

  19

  From the front garden of the Kowalskis’ house the Channel was invisible in the fog which shrouded Sussex south of the Weald. Foghorns sounded from the white blanket, mournful and threatening.

  At first Mrs Kowalski seemed the same as before, determined to be as obstructive as possible, but as they talked to her in the narrow hallway of her house Kathy began to notice a weariness, as if the woman were condemned to play a part she had grown tired of. She kept repeating things she had said only a short time before. And when Brock told her that Eleanor Harper had been found murdered on the previous day, the news literally knocked her flat. For a moment she stared blankly at his face, and then abruptly crumpled at the
knees. They lifted her through into the downstairs sitting room, and Kathy fetched a glass of water from the kitchen. Brock told Kathy to stay with her while he went upstairs to see her husband.

  Adam Kowalski was sitting in the same chair and in the same position as when they last saw him, but looked as if he had aged six years rather than six months. His face had no more colour than the fog beyond the window pane.

  ‘Your foot recovered, Mr Kowalski?’ Brock said heartily.

  ‘Thank you, yes.’ His eyes were watery-pink and his voice hoarse.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve been travelling much lately, though. To London, say.’

  Kowalski frowned and shook his head slightly. ‘Are you alone, Inspector?’ he whispered. ‘Where is my wife?’ He looked beyond Brock towards the door, confused.

  ‘She’s downstairs with Sergeant Kolla. She fainted when we told her the news about Eleanor Harper.’

  ‘News?’ His eyes widened, apprehensive.

  ‘She was murdered yesterday, Mr Kowalski.’

  The old man gasped, his eyelids closed and his head went back, and for a moment Brock thought that he too had passed out. But one attenuated hand, scrawny as a chicken’s claw, crept up over the blanket on his lap and made a long and difficult journey up to his face, where it scrabbled awkwardly at his eyes.

  ‘Who… was responsible?’ he finally gasped.

  ‘Perhaps you can tell me, Mr Kowalski.’

  The eyes flicked open again, fearful, anxious. ‘Me? No… no.’ His head shook.

  ‘But you can help me, can’t you? You were less than helpful when we spoke the last time I was here.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘The man with the bow tie, for example. You seemed to be able to remember almost nothing about him. You didn’t even mention the lady he was with. Nor did you mention the connection between him and Meredith Winterbottom.’

  When he heard the name, Kowalski’s eyelids fluttered as if he were in pain. ‘Ah…’ He stared at Brock for a moment through his watery eyes and then sighed softly. ‘It was in the weeks before we moved here

  … There were so many things to think about. I had forgotten. Since you came here,’ he added hesitantly, ‘I have recalled their visit a little better.’

  ‘This was the man’s second visit. When would that have been?’

  Kowalski thought. ‘A month or so before we moved, which was the 26th of August.

  ‘The man wanted to know if I had any more material like the thing I had sold him on his first visit. I couldn’t remember what it was, but when he described it I realized it was something I had bought with some children’s books from Meredith Winterbottom… oh, perhaps a year before. He had a woman with him, Scandinavian-looking, very striking. She was quite impatient, I remember, and they searched through the shop for some time, although I knew they wouldn’t find anything that Meredith had sold me. In any case, I was puzzled because they weren’t interested in children’s books and kept asking about old books on politics and history. Then the lady demanded to know who had sold me the framed letter. I thought that Meredith wouldn’t want to be disturbed by these people, so I said I would speak to her first.’

  ‘You were the dealer after all.’

  Kowalski acknowledged this point with a little tilt of his head. Then he turned to stare out of the window, a long, stick-like forearm propping up his head. His pale skin was cracked with pink fissures, and a number of clear-plastic adhesive dressings on his hand looked as if they were holding the skin together. There was silence for an age. Brock thought the old man must have fallen asleep, but then his voice, distant and tired, began again.

  ‘After I closed the shop, I decided to call on Meredith. I could tell that she was surprised to hear my voice on the intercom, in view of the unpleasantness which had arisen between our two families, but she let me in.

  ‘“Well, Adam Kowalski,” she said when I was seated in her lounge, “have you come to apologize for the rudeness of that wife of yours?” This was the way she spoke. She was very… straightforward.

  ‘I explained that Marie only wanted to protect me. I reminded her how some people still felt about the old days, and I begged her that we should forget all that.

  ‘She acted as if she was still annoyed with Marie, but she had a good nature really, and I think she accepted what I said. Then she asked why I had come, and I reminded her how she had sold me some books a year or so before, and I wondered if she had any more, historical perhaps, or political.

  ‘She asked why I was asking, so I explained about the customer who had bought the old letter in the frame, and how he’d come back looking for anything similar, old documents or books. She asked me what sort of price they might fetch, and I said I might be able to get five or ten pounds each for such things.’

  He paused, gathering strength to continue.

  ‘She promised to have a look. Then she said that it would be best if she could discuss directly with the customer exactly what he was looking for. She said I should give her his name, and in exchange she would forget all about Marie’s rudeness.’

  Kowalski sighed and spread his long fingers.

  ‘This was not what I had intended, but I couldn’t refuse her the name and telephone number. I just wanted some peace. Both women were quite… implacable.’

  He raised his eyebrows to Brock guiltily. There was another long pause, and again Brock was on the point of giving up when Kowalski’s faint voice resumed his story.

  ‘Some while later, just before we moved, Meredith came to me again. It was the last time I ever saw her. She had a book. She wanted to find someone who could value it for her. I gave her the name of a friend. Later I spoke to him. He told me what he had told her.’

  More silence. Brock waited patiently for him to continue.

  ‘It was a first edition of a book by Karl Marx: The Fourteenth Brumaire. In itself that was something. But inside there was a dedication from Marx himself, to “Tussy”, his youngest daughter, which made it worth much more than it would have been otherwise. He thought she might get four or five thousand for it. She had told him there were others. A dozen.’

  ‘It’s as if they’d been cast adrift,’ Kathy said as she drove slowly back through the fog. ‘Apparently he just sits up there all the time staring out of the window, wasting away. She said he was like a plant that’d been pulled up by the roots and left to wither. It was about the only thing I could get her to talk about.’

  ‘He’s sick,’ Brock grunted. ‘She didn’t look her old self, either.’

  ‘I think she’s declining in response to him. She’d probably be lost without his life to screw up and protect. She’s still very bitter towards Meredith, though.’

  ‘Difficult to see why.’

  ‘It seems the people who held out longest got the best price for their properties. The rumour was that Brunhilde Capek got a hundred thousand more for her place, which was the same size as the Kowalskis’, because she held out for another six months. Marie Kowalski feels they could have done the same if the fuss Meredith started up over Adam’s past hadn’t driven them to sell when they did.’

  The incident centre at 20 Jerusalem Lane was humming when they returned, its illuminated shop front the only light shining in the dark street. From the front counter where they took off their coats Kathy could see Sergeant Gurney in the back room, moving among his officers and a couple of civilian staff, checking, chatting, pondering. He had the build of a prop forward, and a face that looked as if it had been squashed in a scrum. His hair was slicked back as if still wet from the changing-room showers. She noticed that he had a nice smile and a twinkle in his eye when he spoke to the women. He had been a Navy pilot before joining the force, flying Harriers from Invincible.

  Gurney was evidently pleased with the results of his day, and they settled in the upstairs room with coffee to hear his news. A partial report had come in from the pathologist, confirming that Eleanor Harper could have been smothered by the plastic bag. T
he two blows to the forehead had come after death, and were of token force, barely fracturing the front of the skull. There were no other signs of violence to the body. The time of death couldn’t be placed more precisely than somewhere between 6 p.m. Tuesday and 4 a.m. Wednesday.

  There was a possible lead in the search for the weapon used to inflict the two blows. That morning an old hammer had been handed in by the scaffolding crew to the office on the construction site across the Lane. It was possible that it had been thrown into the site from the Lane and might have been there for some time before it was found. The pathologist was now examining it.

  ‘This is a summary of the results of door-to-door inquiries so far.’ Gurney handed Brock a couple of sheets. ‘Actually I think we’ve just about exhausted the possibilities there. The blokes on the site were the most useful, I’d say. We’ve interviewed them all now, including the drivers of the concrete mixers and other delivery trucks. You’ll notice that they seem to remember women more than men, and young women more than older women. An interesting gestalt phenomenon, I’d say.’

  ‘That’s one way of describing it,’ Kathy said dryly.

  ‘You’ll notice the attractive blonde who appears twice there at the beginning of the week, Monday or Tuesday. Then we’ve got the list of the employees of First City Properties and all the people from other organizations involved in the development project here. Mr Slade spoke to me on the phone about it after I’d left the request with his secretary. He insisted on knowing why we wanted the list, so I told him about Miss Harper. He sounded shocked-hadn’t read it in the papers this morning. Said he’d cooperate in any way. He offered his congratulations on catching North, by the way, sir. So much for that.’

  Gurney set the documents to one side and reached for another set of typewritten sheets with the look of an amateur magician moving on to a much more interesting trick. ‘Now, Mr Terence Winter.’ His eyes scanned the sheet with satisfaction. ‘Transcript of interview with his alleged girlfriend, Ms Shirley Piggott. She claims she didn’t spend last Tuesday night with him. In fact claims she’s never slept with him.’