‘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. The 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.
