‘They fingerprinted the bathroom?’
‘Yeah. But then he’d been round the previous evening, hadn’t he, so his prints would be everywhere. After they’d gone I thought about it. I phoned up the coppers and told them not to bother. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking I was worried.’
‘If he’d wanted things, couldn’t he just have taken them when he called round?’
‘I’d never have let him, or I’d have got the solicitors on to him. Also, he wanted to frighten me. I know him.’
‘What about your alarm system?’
‘Yeah, well, I never turned it on, did I? It was raining and so I left the cat inside, and she would have set it off. But Terry knew I did that, you see.’
Kathy nodded, thinking. ‘Was there a lot of mess?’
‘Not really. I hardly noticed it at first. And nothing electrical taken. That’s what made me suspicious.’
‘What about in here?’
‘The kitchen?’
‘Yes. Where do you keep your freezer bags, Mrs Winter?’
Caroline stared at her for a moment, stunned. Then, without a word she went over to a cupboard. She opened it and stepped back. There were half a dozen different types and sizes of packets of plastic bags inside. Kathy took out a green bin liner and dropped a number of the packets inside.
When she straightened up, she saw Brock standing by the kitchen door.
‘Ready?’
‘Can I have a word, sir?’
They went out into the hall and she quickly told him about Caroline’s break-in.
‘Right,’ Brock said. He led her back into the living room where Winter was still poring over the list Brock had given him. ‘You have a set of keys to 22 Jerusalem Lane, don’t you, Mr Winter?’
Winter looked at him warily. ‘My mother’s keys, yes. Why?’
‘Where are they?’
Winter shrugged. ‘Upstairs. I’ve got a drawer of odds and ends in my… in the bedroom.’
‘Shall we have a look?’
It was a small drawer in the dressing table by the window. He opened it and stared. It was quite empty. He turned angrily to his wife, standing by the door. ‘What have you done with my stuff? There was a gold cigarette case in here.’
Caroline shook her head, her mouth turned down in exaggerated disbelief. ‘ I haven’t touched it, Terry.’
He turned to appeal to Brock. ‘This is where they were, Inspector. This drawer was full of stuff.’
There was a moment’s heavy silence as they stared at him.
‘Tell you what,’ Brock said at last, ‘I’ll get my Sergeant to come down here straight away. He can take you back up to town. Save any problems.’
19
From the front garden of the Kowalskis’ house the Channel was invisible in the fog which shrouded Sussex south of the Weald. Foghorns sounded from the white blanket, mournful and threatening.
At first Mrs Kowalski seemed the same as before, determined to be as obstructive as possible, but as they talked to her in the narrow hallway of her house Kathy began to notice a weariness, as if the woman were condemned to play a part she had grown tired of. She kept repeating things she had said only a short time before. And when Brock told her that Eleanor Harper had been found murdered on the previous day, the news literally knocked her flat. For a moment she stared blankly at his face, and then abruptly crumpled at the knees. They lifted her through into the downstairs sitting room, and Kathy fetched a glass of water from the kitchen. Brock told Kathy to stay with her while he went upstairs to see her husband.
Adam Kowalski was sitting in the same chair and in the same position as when they last saw him, but looked as if he had aged six years rather than six months. His face had no more colour than the fog beyond the window pane.
‘Your foot recovered, Mr Kowalski?’ Brock said heartily.
‘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.’