constable stood at the door, talking to a couple of newspaper reporters whom Kathy recognized.
Inside, the incident centre was remarkably spacious and well-appointed for an on-site facility. The front shop counter served as a reception point, with the area in front used as a waiting area and for press conferences. The room at the rear served as a general office, with telephone and computer links to Scotland Yard, and there was a small kitchen, stocked and operational. Upstairs was Brock’s office and an interview room. Brock wasn’t expected till after 8, and Kathy decided to use the time to take a look next door, at number 22, where the scene-of-crime crew had finished on the previous day.
The uniformed man opened the front door for her, switched on the hall light, and then closed the door again, leaving her to climb the stairs of the silent house alone. There was a smell of damp and mould which she hadn’t noticed six months before, as if winter had been more successful this year in penetrating the cosy sanctuary of the old ladies’ home. In Eleanor’s flat there were further signs of this: a damp green stain in the corner of her sitting room and paper peeling from the wall in the small bedroom. The frugal simplicity of her taste now made her home seem forlorn and cold, the cell of an ascetic nun. Only the wall of books in her sitting room retained a sense of having belonged to an individual rather than an institution. Kathy went carefully through the flat, trying to compare it in her mind with her memory of the place six months before.
When she returned next door, Brock was emerging from the rear kitchen with a mug of coffee. He waved her upstairs and she followed him a moment later with a cup of her own. The lights of his office were on against the gloom of the morning, and a fan heater was humming in a corner.
‘Well, this is pretty good, isn’t it?’ Brock beamed, leaning back in a battered old steel chair. ‘I reckon this is the most luxurious incident centre I’ve had for years. They had no room at the nearest nick and all these empty buildings around here seemed too good to waste.’
Kathy’s eyes had fixed on the colour photographs taped across one wall.
‘Yes, have a look.’
Her attention had been taken by a series of pictures at one end showing the top of a woman’s body. The head was wrapped in a crumpled plastic bag, but it was difficult to identify the face because part of the inside surface of the bag was red with blood. Eleanor had been wearing a plain white cotton nightgown, and her shoulders and arms were almost as white as the material.
Like a bride, the thought came unwelcome into Kathy’s head.
‘What does the pathologist say?’
‘Probably suffocated, then bashed on the forehead with proverbial blunt instrument just to make absolutely certain.’
Whacked on the head, she thought. Who was it said that?
‘Most of my manpower yesterday had to be wasted looking for the damn thing.’
‘No luck?’
Brock shook his head. There was a tap at the door and Brock spun round.
‘Come in, Bren! Meet DS Kathy Kolla. This is DS Brendon Gurney. Have you met?’
Sergeant Gurney shook his head and smiled at Kathy, shaking her hand. ‘You were in charge of the sister’s murder, Kathy?’ He was a big man like Brock, though twenty years younger, with a deep, slow, West Country voice which Kathy immediately trusted.
‘Yes, although at the time we couldn’t be sure it was murder.’
‘Well, this surely makes it look more certain, unless someone is just trying to make it seem that way.’
She nodded. The two men looked as if they could have been father and son, and she had a momentary mental image of two large furry creatures, bears perhaps, or badgers, ambling through the wild wood, immensely dependable and strong. Bren Gurney actually made Brock seem quite agitated and quick in comparison with the figure she remembered from the earlier case. Or more likely, she thought, he’s taking this one seriously. At any rate, he was rubbing his hands, pacing up and down, and shouting down the stairs to a couple of DCs, telling them to come up for a review of the previous day’s progress.
Sergeant Gurney began with a summary of the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body. As significant points were mentioned, he noted them with a blue felt pen on a white board propped against the wall. Brock sat back on his metal chair with his feet up on the desk, his head propped on his hand, fingers spread across his face, occasionally clawing his beard.
‘Mrs Peg Blythe discovered the body of her sister, Eleanor Harper, at around 7.30 yesterday morning. Although they had separate flats, they were in the habit of having breakfast together, usually at Eleanor’s. Since their sister Meredith had been killed six months ago, they had kept their front door locked, and Peg opened Eleanor’s with her key, after there was no reply to her knock. She found her sister in her bed’-he waved at the photographs-‘screamed, phoned the police. ED Division responded, and they asked for our assistance as soon as the link with the earlier death was recognized.
‘The pathologist doesn’t think he’ll be much help with the precise time of death. It was obvious she had been dead some time, but her electric blanket was on, making the normal signs unreliable. So far he can only say five to fifteen hours before 8 a.m. Peg says she and her sister spent the evening together in Peg’s flat, reading, after she’d cooked supper-toasted cheese with tinned spaghetti on top, her favourite. They parted to go to bed at around 9.30 p.m.
‘Yesterday we concentrated on trying to find the hammer or whatever was used to hit the old lady, and on door-to-door inquiries. As you’ll have seen, almost nobody lives around here any more, and we haven’t had any results so far with either line of inquiry, but I assume we’ll continue today, sir? Yes.
‘Two further circumstances which came to light yesterday, which may or may not be relevant. First, local CID tell us that there have been fourteen separate reported incidents at 22 Jerusalem Lane over the past five months, reported either by the sisters or by Mrs Rosenfeldt downstairs.’
He picked up a print-out.
‘Brick thrown through window, water main cut off, super-glue in the front door lock, an intruder tapping on the windows in the middle of the night, and so on. No actual break-ins. Minor damage, but terrifying for elderly ladies in a place like this. That doesn’t include the nasty phone calls. They went on until British Telecom started intercepting the calls a week or so ago. CID sent a crime prevention officer round here to talk to the sisters, and they put security catches on the windows, but not an alarm system. However, Eleanor’s bedroom window was open when Peg found her yesterday morning.’
‘It’s an old vertical sliding sash window, isn’t it, Bren?’ Kathy said.
‘That’s right. The security fixture was one of those bolts drilled through the side frame of the lower window, meant to slot into a hole in the other window’s side frame a few inches up so you can have a little bit of ventilation without anyone being able to get in. But the bolt was hidden by the curtains, and it’s possible she just opened the window a crack without remembering to push it home. Outside is the metal fire-escape stair down to the rear yards below. No indication yet of prints or other signs of an intruder.’
‘We checked both flats for signs of forced entry, didn’t we, Bren?’
Gurney nodded. ‘Nothing obvious.’
‘All right,’ Brock said. ‘You mentioned that there were two things that came to light yesterday, Bren?’
‘Yes. The other was a couple of phone calls yesterday for the sisters from people who wouldn’t identify themselves. The phone used to be downstairs, I understand, in the first sister’s flat while she was alive, then it was moved up to Peg’s. Well the first call was from a woman who asked for Eleanor, but then hung up when the WPC asked who she was. An hour later there was a second call, from someone who didn’t speak, and rang off after listening to the WPC’s voice.’
‘Didn’t British Telecom intercept the calls?’
‘No, we needed the line so we told them not to.’ Gurney wrote the words ‘anon phone calls’ on the board.
‘OK, let’s move on to lines of inquiry, then,’ said Brock, easing himself upright in his chair. ‘Kathy, why don’t you give us a summary of what your investigation threw up last autumn?’
Kathy got to her feet and went over to the board while Sergeant Gurney sat down. ‘The most promising line then, and obviously more so now, concerns the redevelopment of this area and the refusal of Meredith Winterbottom to sell out to the developer, Derek Slade of First City Properties plc. According to Slade he didn’t really need number 22 in order to proceed with his development, but I don’t think we know the full story. The fact that Meredith was the one person in the whole block refusing to sell surely had to be more than a coincidence.
