The Marx Sisters (7 page)

‘Oh, this is one of our two girls, Sergeant. Alex, say hello to the Sergeant—I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Kolla. Kathy Kolla. Hello, Alex. How are you?’

The girl muttered something indistinct and ducked her head. Kathy judged her to be hardly out of her teens. Beneath thick spectacle lenses her eyes looked red and blotchy, and her mother went over to her, crooning sympathetically.

‘All right, luv?’ She turned to Kathy as she put an arm round her daughter’s shoulder. ‘She was really cut up about her gran, weren’t you, luv?’

Kathy saw the girl wince under her mother’s grip. She seemed the most unlikely of offspring for the Winters, physically awkward, socially uncomfortable and apparently uninterested in her appearance. She stood for a moment, ungainly and morose while Caroline dug her long painted nails into her arm, then pulled away and ran back across the hall and up the stairs.

‘She’s upset.’ Caroline screwed up her cute little nose. ‘You don’t need her, do you?’

In the living room, Terry got to his feet. At first it didn’t look as if he knew why, then he pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Brock, who shook his head. Terry pulled out a small gold lighter and lit up, inhaling deeply on the first drag.

‘This ain’t easy,’ he said. ‘You can understand how someone feels when their mother’s just died. Especially if people are suggesting she might have been murdered.’

‘Of course,’ Brock said. ‘I remember when my mother died. She was in hospital. When I left I got on a bus to go home, and it reached the depot before I realized I’d gone in the opposite direction.’

Terry nodded.

‘The Sergeant wasn’t trying to be intrusive about her will,’ Brock said, his brows knitted with concern. ‘But it was a natural thing to wonder, when we heard the conditions. I suppose I might have been a bit annoyed with my old mum if she’d left me something, but then said in effect I couldn’t have it for, well, who knows? Twenty, thirty years?’

Terry looked at him suspiciously. ‘My aunts are entitled to feel some security at their time of life. I don’t begrudge them that.’

‘They’re quite a formidable pair, your aunts, aren’t they?’ Brock said.

‘Mad as hatters,’ Caroline replied, bringing in the tea, and then, seeing the expression on her husband’s face, corrected herself. ‘No, they’re sweeties really. I get on well with them, especially Peg. I think Eleanor disapproves of me sometimes.’

She giggled and poured out the tea.

As they were driving back into London against the evening tide of traffic, Dr Mehta came on the phone. ‘I thought you might like a preliminary report, Brock.’ The disembodied voice of the pathologist filled the car interior.

‘How does it look?’

‘Well, lots of nothing, frankly. First the heart. No significant narrowing of the coronary arteries, heart muscle healthy and no inflammation, no lesions of the heart valves, aortic valve in good shape.

‘Then the brain. No arterial blockage, no intracerebral haemorrhage, no brain artery aneurysm, no subarachnoid haemorrhage, and no tumours, abscesses or other brain lesions.

‘I’m still waiting for the chemical analyses, so some form of poisoning can’t be ruled out at this stage, but I don’t think it’s likely.

‘Of course there are other natural causes of sudden death. Anaphylaxis for instance. She could have had an acute reaction to some antigen she was sensitive to. There was no marked swelling of the lining of the larynx, however, or oedema of the lungs. I’ve spoken to her doctor again, and there’s no history to suggest anaphylaxis, or for that matter epilepsy, asthma or insulin medication.

‘Then there’s smothering, say with the plastic bag your Sergeant found, if the tests match the swabs. All right, there were petechial haemorrhages on the lungs and the
pericardial sac—Tardieu’s spots—which certainly suggests terminal lack of oxygen, but not necessarily asphyxia—heart failure produces the same result. Again, the fluidity of the blood and some blue discoloration of the skin were also consistent with asphyxia, but blood fluidity and cyanosis aren’t certain tests, either.

‘So, as things stand, I couldn’t say that she died of asphyxia, only that the evidence is consistent with it. As you know, Brock, in about ten per cent of cases we see we simply cannot establish a cause of death from the forensic evidence. I think this may be one of those.’

‘Ten per cent!’ Kathy exclaimed.

There was a momentary pause while Mehta identified her voice, and then he crackled back, ‘Yes, Sergeant. Any experienced pathologist will tell you the same: no cause of death can be demonstrated either anatomically or by toxicological analysis in approaching one in ten cases. If they tell you otherwise, then they’re making guesses not justified by the evidence.’

‘Sundeep,’ Brock said, ‘if she was smothered by the plastic bag, how long would she take to die, and wouldn’t she have shown signs of a struggle?’

‘Not necessarily. Do you have Jaffe’s
Guide to Pathological Evidence for Lawyers and Police Officers
in your office?’

‘Yes, I’m sure we do.’

‘Well, there’s a photograph in there of a young woman who died by accident, while she was on the phone, when a plastic bag accidentally slipped over her face. A simple lack of oxygen isn’t distressful. If it’s sudden, unconsciousness comes very quickly. What is distressing in choking, say, or smothering, is when the exhalation of carbon dioxide is prevented. That’s what causes the panic we imagine with that kind of death. I’ll get back to you when the test results are available, but I think the coroner will have to reach a decision on this one without me.’

‘Thanks, Sundeep.’

When he’d rung off, Brock added, ‘Cagey as always. Still, it looks as if you were right, Kathy.’

‘Yes.’ She sat in silence for a moment and then said quietly, ‘I’d like to phone DC Mollineaux, sir. Get him to check that Terry Winter had a cup of coffee in the café next to his salon in Deptford, as he said. Then he can start interviewing the managers of each of the salons to see whether they can produce any of the paperwork Winter’s supposed to have done over the weekend.’

‘You didn’t like him?’

‘No, I didn’t. I thought he was full of himself. But worse than that, I thought he was the sort of man who expected to get his own way with women, and wouldn’t think twice about lying, or if necessary using violence, to make sure he did.’

She spoke quietly, but with an intensity which made Brock glance across at her.

‘Can you tell?’

‘His wife had what looked to me like bruising around her left eye.’

‘Really? I didn’t notice.’

‘She’d pretty well covered it up with her make-up, and the swelling had mostly gone down, but when I was near her in the kitchen I spotted it.’

‘Hmm. You may be right. Anyway, you can relax tonight and feel reasonably satisfied.

‘I hope he’s taking you somewhere nice,’ he added.

She looked sidelong at him and said nothing at first. Then, as she picked up the phone and started to press in the numbers she replied, ‘I’m taking
him
somewhere nice, actually. It’s his birthday.’

‘Ah, lucky chap,’ Brock murmured, switching on the windscreen wipers and apparently concentrating on weaving through the traffic on the approaches to Waterloo Bridge.

He dropped her off outside Charing Cross Station and continued on down Whitehall towards the Yard. Kathy
went into the entrance to the station and took the stairs down to the tube. They had got back into town earlier than she had expected, and the corridors were crowded with home-going commuters. She took the Northern Line northbound, but instead of continuing all the way to her home stop at Finchley Central, suddenly changed her mind after Tottenham Court Road and got off the train at the next stop. It was dark when she reached the street, the shop lights reflecting from wet pavements. By the entrance to the Underground a news vendor was pulling a clear plastic sheet down over one end of his stall to protect it from the cold drizzle which was beginning to blow in earnest from the east.

Jerusalem Lane was deserted. The two lamps which served as street lighting for its length had just switched on, giving an ineffectual dim white light as they struggled to warm up. The shop fronts at this north end of the Lane were all in darkness, and any lights in occupied upstairs rooms were heavily curtained against the night. Kathy thought of the Doré etching in Hepple’s office, with its teeming mass of humanity seething down this street. All ghosts now.

She walked towards the door of Hepple’s office, and was rewarded by the reflected glow of the windows of the Balaton Café, facing into the little square ahead, and the smell of cooking. There were two front doors beside the brass plate, one for the solicitor’s office, and the other for Sylvia Pemberton’s flat. Kathy pressed the buzzer beside the second. After a moment an unrecognizable squawk came from a small speaker on the wall.

‘It’s Kathy Kolla, Miss Pemberton, from the police. We met this morning. Could I trouble you again for a minute?’

Another squawk came from the box and the front door gave a click. Kathy pushed and went in. The stairs rose in front of her in two straight flights to the second floor, where Sylvia Pemberton stood waiting for her.

She left her wet coat in the hall and they went into a snug sitting room, filled with furniture as ample as their owner.

‘I’d just settled down with my usual G and T, wondering whether to chance the Balaton’s goulash or put up with frozen chicken in front of the TV, so I’m very pleased to be intruded upon. I’ll call you Kathy, shall I? Sergeant seems rather formal in front of your own gas fire, don’t you think? And I’m Sylvia. Let me pour you one. It doesn’t taste the same if you’re with someone who isn’t drinking, and you’re not going to arrest me, are you? Not yet, anyway.’ She roared with laughter. Relaxed, her cheeks rosy with the heat of the fire and the gin, she seemed larger than life.

‘It was something you started to say this morning, Sylvia,’ Kathy began, easing back into the plump cushions carefully so as not to spill anything from the generously filled glass. ‘Just as Mr Hepple arrived. Something about the way the neighbourhood was going downhill or something. I just wondered what you meant.’

‘Ah, yes. It’s been in the back of my mind for months, and poor Meredith Winterbottom going like that just seemed to bring it all into focus. The place is changing, and the weird thing is that nobody seems to have noticed it. I mean normally the slightest thing happening in the Lane would go round like wildfire. But over the past year things have been going on that seemed . . . well, reasonable enough on their own, but taken together . . .’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Well, the most obvious were the Kowalskis selling up and moving away, and then Mr Hepple deciding to sell this place too. They both have long connections with the Lane, and two of them closing down is a big change for this area, which has really been very stable in the past. Then there’s Konrad Witz going too, and on top of all that, lots of smaller things I noticed. I do the books for several businesses around here, so I get to know how things are going,
and everyone has been doing reasonably well lately, certainly no worse than before. But I noticed odd things.

‘First, Brunhilde Capek cancelled her plans to renovate her flower shop. Now she’d been going on about it for so long, and at last had actually got a builder ready, that I couldn’t believe she’d changed her mind. She said she’d run into some problems with the council over the drains, but I didn’t see how that would stop the whole thing.

‘A bit later I noticed that a couple of places seemed to be running down their stock. And then when I did Stwosz’s books last year I saw he’d started paying rent, even though he owned the place before. When I asked him, it turned out he’d sold his shop, and was leasing it back. But he didn’t really want to discuss it. Like Mr Hepple or Adam Kowalski, when you ask why, they explain it in terms which make sense for them, which is fair enough, because they’re all getting older. But so many, all at once . . .’

‘I see. Yes, that is odd. Mr Hepple did mention that he was closing down here, but he didn’t say anything about the others.’

‘No, well . . .’ Sylvia Pemberton hesitated, then said, ‘Actually, he’s not all that keen to talk about it, I’ve found. He even told me at one point not to discuss the matter with anyone in the Lane. But they’re all the same. Everyone’s been so secretive, keeping it all to themselves, and even more peculiar, they’re not much concerned at what the others are up to, and that just isn’t like the Lane at all. It’s almost as if everyone had just suddenly lost interest in the place.’

‘What about Mrs Winterbottom, was she considering selling?’

‘Not as far as I know. I didn’t do her books—she still goes to the accountant her husband had when he was alive. But she often used to have a chat to me about things she was considering, and ask my opinion.’

‘What would have been the most recent things she talked to you about?’

Sylvia Pemberton sipped her drink, thinking, and then suddenly chuckled.

‘Oh well, I remember one day, maybe six months ago, or perhaps longer, we stopped and had a chat in the street. I asked how her son and his family were. She was ever so proud of them. The older granddaughter, Alex, was doing very well at university, and Louise getting ready for her O levels. And Terry, her son—oh, he was doing so well, running five hairdressing salons in South London, and he and his wife were going off for a wonderful holiday to some place in the Indian Ocean, or something. Only Terry has cash-flow problems, Meredith explains, like all successful businessmen do, because they’re maximizing their resources. This is what she tells me, and it’s obvious they’re Terry’s words. So Terry has suggested to his old mother that it would be an excellent idea all round if she would mortgage her house in the Lane, and lend him the money so as to ease these temporary cash-flow problems.’

Sylvia roared with laughter.

‘She looks at me carefully after she’s told me this, and says what do I think? Well, I told her. Let Terry look after his own cash-flow problems, and keep the house free of debt, the way her husband left it to her. She seemed quite relieved, I think. It had been worrying her.’