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.
‘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…’