‘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?’
‘Oh…’ She clutched the bag and pulled it to her face, moaning quietly, as if trying to hide from something.
‘What is it, Mrs Blythe?’
After a moment she lowered her hands and spoke in such a quiet whisper that they had to bend their heads to her. ‘Eleanor said… but I never liked to think about it.’
‘She said what?’
‘She said that the parasite…’-she looked at them with wide eyes, pointed downwards with a finger and mouthed Terry’s name silently-‘wanted to get us out, so that he could sell the house. She thought he might have something to do with the things that were happening. It made her more determined to stay-to spite him, you see. But I didn’t believe he would do such a thing, dear little Terry, he was such a sweet boy. And then I saw him at the window that night.’
‘You saw Terry at your window in Jerusalem Lane?’
‘No, no. I don’t know that it was him. It was in the middle of the night.’ Her fingers fiddled in agitation with the handle of the tapestry bag as she remembered. ‘Eleanor woke up with the noise of something tapping at her bedroom window. She got up, pulled back the curtains, and there… there was a creature at the window!’
‘A creature?’
‘Yes! A monster! With hideous eyes and huge teeth and blood running from its fangs!’ She shuddered. ‘At least, that was how Eleanor described it, and later, when we told the policeman, we realized it must have been a man in a horrid mask.’
‘What did Eleanor do?’
‘Oh, she was very brave. I would have hidden under the bedclothes, but she ran out of her flat and rang my doorbell until I woke up and let her in. After a little while we went back into her flat and put on all the lights and looked out of the windows, but we could see nothing. I insisted that Eleanor spend the rest of the night in my flat, and we turned the lights off again. Eleanor went to get something from her bathroom and I waited for her in her sitting room. I looked out of the window again, and there, in the yard at the bottom of the fire-escape stair, I saw a man standing in the moonlight, staring up at me. I nearly died of fright. I closed my eyes tight and opened them again, and he was gone. Then I wasn’t sure I really had seen him, or if it was just a trick of the light, or my imagination. But when Eleanor said that about…’-she mouthed the name again-‘I thought suddenly, yes, that was him, the same build, the same way of standing.’
‘Could you swear now that it was him?’
‘Oh no!’ She looked up at them with terrified eyes. ‘I don’t know, you see, I don’t know.’ She gave a few more sobs and looked at Brock. ‘I wonder sometimes if I’ve imagined everything… like the other night.’ She screwed up her eyes and shuddered.