The Marx Sisters bak-1

by Barry Maitland

  ‘We’re conducting a murder investigation. We’d appreciate your co-operation.’

  Maureen’s eyes lit up with curiosity. ‘You think Felix has murdered someone?’

  ‘He’s helping us with our inquiries,’ Brock said. ‘Do you remember her?’

  ‘Of course I do. She’s been writing to him every week since she went back.’

  ‘To him here?’

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose he wants her to write to him at home!’ She smiled grimly.

  ‘Did you know he went over there last September?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ She shook her head. ‘But, I do remember a call from a travel agent for him, which I thought was a bit funny. Sometime in the middle of last year.’ Her eyes wandered away in the direction of the corridor leading to Felix’s room. ‘What exactly are you looking for?’

  ‘Some old books. Are there other places we should look?’

  ‘Only…’ She hesitated, then shrugged. ‘He left a box in my store cupboard last year. Just before Christmas term started. I told him to move it somewhere else because I’ve got little enough space as it is to keep the stationery and departmental records and so on, but he never did.’

  She showed him a door in the corner of the office, opening into a small storeroom with shelves crammed with boxes, files and papers. On the floor at the back they found an old box for photocopy paper, sealed with brown plastic tape. Bren lifted it out on to Maureen’s table and took the scissors she offered him. From the look of the tape the box had been opened and resealed several times. He folded back the flaps of the box and brought out a wad of Canadian airmail envelopes held together with a rubber band. Then he began carefully to pull out the books. Brock reached for one with a frayed black leather spine. ‘Proudhon’s Confessions,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘We seem to have found our dealer, Bren.’

  ‘Will he be away long?’ Maureen called after them as they left, Bren carrying the box under his arm. ‘Only we’ll have to rearrange his classes.’

  They called in at the hospital on the way back. Kathy was conscious, gazing through half-open, bruised eyelids at the snow falling past the window against the grey of the morning sky. A tube was in her nose. She creased her eyes in a smile, the unbruised parts of her face as pale as the pillow and the bandages around her head.

  ‘A little better?’

  She nodded and wiggled the fingers of her left hand, which Brock, sitting beside her, took in his own. Bren remained standing at the end of the bed, unable to keep the concern out of his eyes. She looked towards the plaster cast on her right arm.

  ‘Haven’t told me,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘What’s the damage?’

  Brock cleared his throat. ‘Three fingers of your right hand are broken,’ he said.

  ‘Anything else?’ she asked faintly.

  ‘One of the reinforcing bars went through your right side. Hell of a job to get you out of there. You’d appreciate it, having been in Traffic. Seems some of the bars down there were high tensile steel, and the steel cutters couldn’t get through them without making too much of a mess of you. Eventually had to lift you straight off. Lost a lot of blood. Missed the vital organs, though. They operated and stitched you up. It’ll be all right.’

  She drifted away for a while, then suddenly lurched back into consciousness. ‘And?’

  ‘Another bar scraped your left knee. No great problem, but it’ll be sore for a while. You were very lucky.’

  ‘How?’ she whispered.

  ‘Lucky you weren’t a man, that is. The middle bar, in between those two, would have been very unpleasant.’

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘Your left shoulder was dislocated and badly bruised.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And you banged your head. Possible concussion.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘That’s about it, really. Pretty good under the circumstances. You could have been killed.’

  She closed her eyes and slipped into unconsciousness.

  Felix Kowalski did not seem to have benefited by the break and a hot breakfast. On the contrary, he crouched in his seat with the air of someone suffering from a very bad hangover. He eyed them truculently as they took their seats, Brock in front of him, Gurney to the side.

  ‘You must release my mother,’ he said, before they could speak. ‘At once. She is not in any way responsible for the death of Meredith Winterbottom. She has only confessed in order to protect me.’

  ‘Really?’ Brock said noncommittally, turning the pages of one of the two files he had brought in with him. ‘Are you confessing to that murder, then?’

  ‘No, of course not. But my mother obviously thinks I had something to do with it. Her confession, as you call it, is absurd.’ He was struggling with impatience and seemed slightly feverish.

  Brock flicked the file shut and sat back. He stared at Kowalski and then nodded. ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘When…’ Kowalski hesitated and gave a little groan.

  ‘Are you all right? Would you like a doctor to have another look at you?’

  ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘When my father and I returned from delivering the last of his books to Notting Hill, my mother was waiting for us in the shop. It was about 2.30. She was upset. She told us what that old crone Mrs Rosenfeldt had said to her, and said she’d gone round to see Meredith Winterbottom. She was on her bed asleep, she said, and the thought had gone through my mother’s head, upset as she was, to strangle the woman. She even imagined putting on the rubber washing-up gloves she saw in the kitchen, so she wouldn’t leave any fingerprints. That’s what she told us. Of course she did no such thing. My father was shocked at the idea, and we calmed her down and gave her a cup of tea from the flask we’d brought. Then I left to return the van. When she heard later that someone had killed Mrs Winterbottom, she must have naturally been worried that I might have done it while I was away, to save them further distress. Of course I didn’t, but the idea will have been preying on her mind. She’s not been well lately. Neither of them have.’

  By the time he got to the end of this his voice had sunk to a monotone. There was silence.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Gurney snorted contemptuously from across the room. Kowalski looked from one man to the other. ‘What else should there be?’

  ‘What about the books, Felix?’ Brock spoke very quietly.

  Kowalski kept his face blank, his eyes unblinking.

  ‘Books?’

  ‘Mmm, books. Your mother had quite a bit to say about books.’

  He appeared to rack his brains, then said slowly, ‘I think… she did mention something about some books. Under Mrs Winterbottom’s bed, I think it was, in a plastic carrier bag. My mother looked inside and saw that it contained some old books. When she mentioned them, I seem to remember that my father said something about them probably being ones that he had valued for her.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s about all I can remember.’

  ‘So your mother didn’t have the books with her when she returned to the shop?’

  ‘With her?’ He looked startled. He stared at Brock for a moment, searching rapidly for clues in his expressionless face, then groaned and covered his eyes with his hand. ‘She said that? She said she took them?’

  ‘Felix,’ Brock said, his voice still deadly quiet, ‘you don’t seem to have taken in what I told you last night.’ He leaned forward across the table. ‘I will not be lied to. I will discover the truth. You are just making things a hundred times worse for yourself and your mother.’

  Kowalski lowered his head. His shoulders rose and fell with his breathing. When he began to speak again, his head still down, his voice came deep, from the back of his throat.

  ‘When I left them, I drove the van round the block to the lower end of Jerusalem Lane. I went in to number 22. I wanted to tell Meredith to lay off my parents, but she was asleep. Lying peacefully on her bed. So I looked at the carrier bag with the books. There were about a dozen of them. The
ones I looked in had inscriptions from Karl Marx, just as my father had described. He had said they were worth four or five thousand each. So I quietly put them back in the bag and walked out with them. I took them for my parents’ sake. I reckoned she owed them at least that.’ A note of anger infiltrated the resignation in his voice. ‘I had a duffle bag at the shop to carry the sandwiches my wife had made us, and I slipped the carrier bag into that when I got back. I suppose my mother must have seen. That’s why she thinks I killed Meredith Winterbottom. But I didn’t.’ He looked up to face Brock. ‘I swear to God I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes,’ Brock replied flatly. ‘Go on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell us about what you did with the books.’

  ‘Oh… I waited for a while till I thought things would be quieter. Then I told my father a friend of mine had some old architectural books to sell, and asked for the name of the architect he’d mentioned in connection with Meredith Winterbottom’s books. I remember now how my mother looked at me when I raised it. He still had the man’s business card, and I copied the phone number and rang it later. The architect said it was really a friend of his who was interested, an academic in the States. I contacted her, and it was she who told me about the other documents.’

  He looked up at Brock, and for the first time there was a note of supplication in his voice. ‘I only stole the books for my parents. That’s all I wanted the other papers for. For them.’

  ‘No.’ Brock shook his head. ‘You needed money, didn’t you, Felix? For yourself. To escape. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘I’d call it a kind of escape. Someone else might just call it a fantasy. Running away. Digging a tunnel out of the prison, to freedom. To Canada. A fantasy.’

  A look of panic formed on Kowalski’s face.

  Brock leaned forward and spoke intently to him. ‘I’d like you to appreciate just how impossible that fantasy now is, Felix. I’d like you to acknowledge the truth of the matter with me. There’s really nothing left to be angry about. It’s not a matter of other people stopping you any more. You’ve stopped yourself.’

  Brock fished his half-lens spectacles out of his jacket pocket and made a bit of a play of examining a page of the file while he let that sink in.

  ‘What about her family, Felix? What’s her name? Jenny, that’s it, isn’t it, the girl in Toronto? What about her parents, her friends? What do they think of her infatuation for a bad-tempered, frustrated, middle-aged, married Englishman, twice her age, who has no funds and no prospects? Pretty daunting for them, I should think. Or do they think it’s laughable, that it will all blow over with time? Or do they not even know yet?’

  Felix’s face had become blotched red.

  ‘She…’ he began, then stopped himself, clenching his jaw tight shut.

  ‘She what?’ Brock prompted mildly. ‘She loves you? She’s pregnant? I found it rather difficult to decide about that from her letters-whether she was just fantasizing, or whether she really was pregnant. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Because you were so taken with your fantasy, Felix, so hungry for it, for the money you needed to make it happen, that you killed two old ladies and nearly killed a police officer. And I don’t think that even Jenny’s love can survive the knowledge of that.’

  ‘I…’ He seemed to have difficulty forcing the words through his throat. ‘I didn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘Really? Hard on your wife. And your little boy. How long will they bother to come to see you inside, I wonder? Not the full twenty years, that’s for sure. Probably better if there’s a clean break now.’

  Then, as if changing the subject completely, ‘She’s a meticulous woman, your wife, isn’t she? I noticed that when I visited your house last night. Everything in its place. Obsessively so. Is that part of the cause or the effect, I wonder? Is she so obsessive about the little things because she knows the big things are so askew, or was her obsessiveness one of the things that made you come to hate her so much? She’s the sort of woman, I’d say, who would insist that a man lower the seat of the toilet after he’s had a pee. Some women are like that, I believe. They find a raised toilet seat offensive because it signifies something about the male member. That’s what they say in women’s magazines, I’m told. Does your wife do that?’

  Felix stared at him as if he were mad.

  ‘Humour me, Felix. I’m all you have now. Does your wife do that?’

  He swallowed with difficulty. Finally he nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, I guessed that. Because when you broke into the Winters’ house in Chislehurst and needed the toilet-nerves, I suppose, and you had been drinking beforehand, hadn’t you?-you naturally took off your gloves to undo yourself, and when you finished you automatically lowered the seat, as your wife had drummed into you, before you put the gloves back on. You left a beautiful set of prints’-Brock peered at the second file he had brought in-‘which until today we had been unable to identify.’

  Felix’s shoulders gave a little convulsive jerk. A sob came from his bowed head. And then he let go. The tears started to stream down his face and his whole body began to shake.

  30

  He was there, reading, when she looked up.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Two in the afternoon. You’ve been here thirty-six hours.’

  ‘God, I’m beginning to hurt now.’

  ‘You will. At least they’ve removed the tube and the drip.’

  ‘Yes. They did that this morning. I just seem to keep dropping off. Could I have some water, please?’

  He helped her, and now she was able to keep it down.

  ‘Did you get him, then?’

  ‘Kowalski? Yes. Danny Finn had arranged with two men from the security firm to keep an eye on Eleanor’s box through the night. They turned up just after Felix attacked you. Lucky for you they got the medics to you so quickly. They held him and handed him over to us. He’s been charged with the attempted murder of you, and the murder of Meredith and Eleanor. You know, you were crazy to go in there unarmed and without telling anyone.’

  ‘I know. I only meant to observe. It wasn’t until I got in there that I realized it wasn’t going to be so easy.’

  ‘Well, it had the desired effect. Flushed him out. Funny, I hadn’t really got my sights on him. Should have spotted his anger, I suppose. And the evasiveness of his parents.’ He scratched his beard.

  ‘He was at the funeral apparently, wrapped up in a scarf. Drew the same conclusion you did from Peg’s announcement. So did Judith. She’s been going berserk trying to stop them pouring the concrete.’

  ‘Did she have any luck?’

  Brock shook his head. ‘Danny Finn wouldn’t hear of it. If Peg wants it buried unopened then he will make sure that’s exactly what will happen. I think he sees it as a sort of obligation to his class roots. If the manuscript is down there, it’s due to be buried under a hundred tons of wet concrete any moment now. They couldn’t do it yesterday because of the cold and snow, but with the mild change today they said they’d probably go ahead this afternoon. When asked, Peg smiles vaguely and says she doesn’t understand what everyone’s going on about. As far as we’re concerned, what’s important isn’t what actually is in the box, so much as what Kowalski thought was there. I couldn’t see us getting a warrant to open it up if Peg didn’t want us to. She’s returned home to Jerusalem Lane now that Kowalski’s been charged.’

  Brock stopped talking as a nurse came in to give Kathy more painkillers.

  ‘What’s that you’re reading?’ she asked him when she had got the pills down.

  ‘A biography of the first Eleanor, Eleanor Marx. I’d got it out of the library to do a bit of background reading. Won’t need to now, I suppose. I’ll leave it with you if you like. You’ll have the time for it over the next few days.’

  ‘Days?’

  ‘Oh yes, they want to keep you here a while for observation. To make sure your side starts to heal up properl
y. And they’re a bit worried about concussion, too.

  ‘Best thing.’ He smiled at her kindly. ‘Now, never do this again, Kathy, but everyone sends their congratulations. You got the result.’

  Kathy looked out through a tall window at the grey afternoon sky, breathing in the smells of the hospital and listening to its background noises-the rattle of a trolley, an exchange between two cockney women walking past the door of her room, the squeak of rubber soles on the plastic flooring. Everything was hurting in a dull way that discouraged movement. She thought to herself, Yes, I did get the result. Without Brock or Gurney, I found the bastard. But all she felt was anti-climax. Her exposure of Kowalski was nothing like the triumph of the intelligent imagination which Bob had described in his ‘stage three’. Her achievement seemed uncertain, a foolhardy exercise in dumb detection, throwing herself into a dangerous situation and seeing who came out of the shadows to hit her down. There was no flash of inspiration, no euphoria. She even felt mildly guilty that what she had discovered disappointed whatever theories Brock had been forming on the case.

  She closed her eyes wearily and drifted off to sleep.

  In her mind Peg was staring at her with shining eyes, just as she had on the day before the funeral. She said the words she had used to Brock that day, speaking with intensity, as if her words contained a central truth. At first Kathy couldn’t hear what she said. Then she heard it clearly.

  ‘Eleanor lived as noble a life, and died as noble a death, as the great-aunt she adored.’

  Kathy’s eyes blinked open with a start.

  Her room was in darkness, although from the lights in the corridor and the sounds of activity elsewhere she could tell that it wasn’t late. She saw people walk past the open door carrying flowers. Visiting time.

  The picture of Eleanor came into her mind, lying on her bed, dressed in white, a bloody plastic bag pulled over her head. What was noble about a death by smothering with a plastic bag? Cut-price, perhaps-disposable, hygienic, but hardly noble. How did great-aunt Eleanor die? Kathy had got the impression from what Judith had said that it was sudden.