‘Then there was her son, Terry Winter. He seemed to be living beyond his means and on the verge of facing an expensive divorce. At first he’d tried to persuade his mother to mortgage her house, then he suggested that she sell it. Slade said that First City had offered Meredith a quarter of a million, but that if the development went ahead without her property it would eventually be worth next to nothing. Whether or not that was just a negotiating ploy, if Winter had believed it he would have had a strong incentive to get his mother out of that house quickly. Terry’s alibi for the afternoon his mother died depended on his mistress, Geraldine McArthur. Although he inherited his mother’s house when Meredith died, she had arranged it so that her sisters could remain there, rent-free, for as long as they wanted, so his motive remains, and in fact becomes stronger as time passes.
‘There was also the architect, Bob Jones. He was the last person we knew of to enter Meredith’s house before her body was discovered by her sisters. At first we assumed his visit must have had something to do with the redevelopment, but when we tracked him down he claimed not. Instead he came up with this strange story about valuable historical documents which Meredith owned, and which a friend of his, Judith Naismith, was anxious to get hold of. At first he lied to us about Meredith being asleep when they called, and later admitted he knew she was dead, but we had nothing to corroborate his story. We didn’t even know if Judith Naismith existed, and a letter written by Karl Marx, which Jones claimed was the start of their treasure hunt, was conveniently stolen just before we arrived at his flat.
‘Incidentally, sir, when I went into Eleanor’s flat just now, I looked for the old books which Jones claimed they saw in her bookcase and which Judith got so excited about. There was one title he mentioned…’ She thumbed through her notes.
‘Proudhon’s Confessions,’ Brock said. ‘Yes. I looked for the same thing yesterday, Kathy.’
She looked at him in surprise. He hadn’t taken notes during the case and hardly seemed to be paying much attention.
‘I had a DC check the whole bookcase, and then go through the rest of both Eleanor and Peg’s flats. There are no nineteenth-century editions in the house, and no books with handwritten dedications by Karl Marx.’
‘Well, that just makes the whole of Bob Jones’s story more implausible, then,’ she said.
‘Quite possibly.’ Brock scratched his chin.
‘You were worried by Jones, weren’t you, sir?’
‘Yes. The property motive is obviously a powerful one, and a murderer within the family makes sense in statistical terms. But this other story of his is so much more intriguing. How on earth would these old ladies, improbably extreme Marxists themselves apparently, living in a street where Marx himself once lived-how would they have original letters and books and belongings from the great man in their possession? Would anybody invent a story like that? It seems so implausible. But if you did come upon such an improbable treasure, and you had just set up in business on your own, short of cash, and if you knew that the whole area would soon be redeveloped, and the treasure probably gone…’
‘I remember I had the feeling that we had caught him on the hop,’ Kathy said. ‘He took ages to tell his story, almost as if he was feeling his way through it without having had time to plan it.’
‘Well, there are certainly things about it that we should check. If only to give you a trip to New Jersey, Kathy.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Kathy smiled. ‘And then there’s the Kowalskis and the Croatia Club, and their feud with Meredith Winterbottom. I suppose Eleanor’s murder makes their involvement less likely now. It always seemed an unlikely motive for murder.’
Brock nodded. He went over to the board and drew two overlapping circles, one with a bold line, the other dotted.
‘Two fields of inquiry,’ he said. ‘One, the property matter. Very plausible.’ In the solid circle he wrote the names ‘Slade’ and ‘Winter’. ‘The other, the Marx papers. Very tenuous.’ In the dotted circle he wrote ‘Naismith’ and ‘Kowalskis’. ‘And where they overlap, Mr Jones, who seems to be involved in both.’
They spent the next half-hour brainstorming possible lines of attack on these areas, before Brock and Kathy left to drive down to Chislehurst, where Peg had been taken to stay with the Winters. Sergeant Gurney remained at Jerusalem Lane to supervise the area teams there.
18
Kathy was preoccupied as she drove herself and Brock down the Old Kent Road through South London. ‘Isn’t Peg staying with Terry Winter a bit like Little Red Riding Hood boarding with the wolf?’ she said eventually.
‘Yes.’ Brock had been thinking about the same thing. ‘There wasn’t much we could do yesterday when Winter arrived. The old lady was very shaken up, and they both decided she should go home with him. At that stage we hadn’t heard about all the harassment the sisters had been suffering. I must admit I don’t like the fellow any more than you do, and she’s now the only thing between him and a quarter of a million.’
‘I know. It must have been horrific for them in that house with everyone leaving and the demolition going on around them, and then the phone calls, the attacks… I’m surprised they held out for so long. At best Winter will only put more pressure on Peg to move. At worst she might have an accident on the stairs, or take an overdose or something.’
‘But until we’re prepared to arrest Winter…’
Winter opened the door, looking fleshier than Kathy remembered. He was unshaved, with greasy hair and crumpled clothes. He looked uneasily at Kathy and led them into the lounge room, where she noticed a roll of blankets and a pillow pushed into a corner behind the sofa.
‘My aunt’s upstairs in bed. She’s not well. The doctor’s said she has to rest.’
‘We’ll see if she’s awake, then,’ Brock said, turning to the door. ‘We’ll speak to you when we come down, Mr Winter.’
‘I want to be there when you talk to her.’
‘Why?’
‘To make sure you don’t upset her, that’s why!’
‘That’s not necessary. We’d prefer to see her alone. You wait down here. Is your wife in?’
‘Not at the moment. She had to go out.’
Peg was sitting up in bed, propped up against a mountain of Laura Ashley pillows. Her cherubic face was pale and drawn, and her body appeared to have shrunk inside her quilted satin bed jacket, so that the wrists and hands which emerged from its hot pink cuffs and clutched a large tapestry bag seemed made to a different scale. She peered at them, looking vague, clearly not recognizing Brock from the day before. He introduced himself and Kathy, and she smiled bravely up at them, nodding her head.
‘Do sit on the bed, Inspector, and you too, dear. I don’t take up much room.’ Her voice was disturbingly weak and on a distinctly higher pitch than Kathy remembered it.
‘How are you feeling today, Mrs Blythe?’
‘How could I feel, Inspector?’ Her eyes grew watery and a large tear swelled against a lower lid. ‘It’s been such a nightmare.’ The tear trembled on the lashes a moment, then tumbled down her cheek. She sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with a tiny lace handkerchief.
‘I didn’t appreciate when I saw you yesterday what you and your sister had been going through these past months, what with the vandalism and the telephone calls and the like.’
‘Oh yes.’ Her voice was a whisper. ‘They’ve told you about that.’
‘It must have been very worrying for you both.’
She nodded. ‘Eleanor was so brave, but it was upsetting us both. Each night, we just didn’t know what… I really don’t know whether I can cope with it now, on my own.’ Her lip trembled in a sob.
‘Do you have no idea who might have been responsible? You didn’t recognize a voice on the telephone or a face at the window?’
She shuddered and shook her head.
‘Could it have been children perhaps, or men from the building site, or even someone you knew?’
‘Someone we knew?’ She stared at him in horror.
‘Perhaps someone who wanted you to leave Jerusalem Lane?’
