‘So, one way or another our people decided not to take it any further. I understand, though, that she has recently been applying for big funding from foundations-well, big for historians, anyway, six figures-but I don’t know what for exactly. So maybe she has some new project on the blocks. That’s about it.’
‘That’s terrific, Nigel. Most obliged. Fills us in nicely.’
‘Oh, by the way, that student who OD’d was a girl.’
Judith seemed slightly flustered when she opened the door to them. ‘You’re early,’ she said. The bed was unmade and articles of clothing scattered across the floor. ‘Would you mind sitting over there by the window? I’ll be a sec.’
They sat together on a grey settee and looked at the tastefully vapid lithographs in gold frames bolted to the wall, while Judith rapidly swept some order into the other end of the room. Finally she came over and sat in an armchair facing them. She crossed her legs, lit a cigarette, and took a deep breath.
‘This is very difficult for me,’ she began.
‘I understand,’ Brock said. ‘You’ve talked things over with your friend?’
‘No. It’s not that.’ She frowned and flicked the ashless cigarette impatiently in the direction of the glass table. ‘You probably passed her in the corridor just now.’ She shrugged. ‘She was splitting up with her husband, anyway.
‘Look, supposing… supposing you had some case where there were industrial secrets involved. Something like that. You could understand, couldn’t you, how difficult it might be for someone involved to talk about it, without giving out information that might find its way to a competitor?
‘In a way, for me, source materials are a bit like that. I know a professor over here, an economic historian, who was walking home one afternoon thirty years ago, and he passed a site in South London where they were demolishing old buildings. He noticed a pile of old books scattered about on the floor of a half-demolished building and went in to investigate. They turned out to be the complete account books for the building company which had had its offices there for an unbroken period of a hundred and ten years. That find totally changed his life.’
She stared intently at them, willing them to understand.
‘His whole subsequent academic reputation and career grew out of his work on the nineteenth-century economy of South London based on the interpretations and computer analyses of the figures contained in those ledgers. They were his private gold mine, which he spent the rest of his life excavating. If somebody else had noticed them first, and another historian had got hold of them, he might now be just another embittered lecturer in a minor department, instead of the internationally revered father of studies in the economy of Victorian cities.’
‘And you’ve found something similar here?’ Brock asked.
‘Maybe. I’m not sure. If… if I tell you about it, is there any way I can guarantee it won’t get passed on…?’
‘To one of your academic competitors? Dr Naismith, if your information is relevant to this murder investigation, there’s no way you are going to be able to keep it to yourself.’
She nodded, took another shallow drag on the cigarette and flicked it.
‘It began with that letter that Bob Jones found.’
‘We were beginning to doubt its existence when it couldn’t be found in his flat.’
‘Oh, it existed, all right. I saw it. The mystifying thing is what it was doing there. You have to understand that when Marx died, all his papers and books were gathered together, and carefully preserved. They called the complete collection the Nachlass- you know, the Estate , almost like the shroud, or the grail, or the true cross or whatever. It was in the care of Engels at first, who continued working on his friend’s papers and preparing the second and third volumes of Das Kapital for publication in the period up until he died in 1895, twelve years after Marx. Now Engels gathered together the correspondence he had had with Marx over forty years, and, so we’re told, preserved all but a few excessively intimate letters from his friend. They take up nine volumes, each about four or five hundred pages, in the collected edition of Marx and Engels’ works.
‘How then had this one solitary letter gone astray? And was it in fact solitary? At first I thought it an amusing puzzle, but when we met Meredith and she showed me the books in Eleanor’s bookcase, I began to take it seriously. There were maybe ten or a dozen books that really interested me-I could give you most of their titles. The thing about them was that they all seemed to have belonged to Eleanor Marx, the youngest of Marx’s children, and his favourite. I am very interested in her. She was a significant figure in the development of socialism at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as being important for the work she did on her father’s manuscripts. Some of the books were hers, inscribed with her name, and some had been given her by her father with handwritten dedications from him to “Tussy”, the pet name he gave her.
‘I was intrigued by how these could have come into the possession of Eleanor Harper, who not only had the same first name as Eleanor Marx, and actually looked rather like her, but also had a picture of Eleanor Marx hanging in her living room.’
‘Her great-aunt,’ Kathy said.
‘That’s right. It took me some time to work it out, because the connection wasn’t through any of Marx’s six legitimate children. But in 1850 the Marxes’ maid, Helene Demuth, whom they called “Lenchen”, or sometimes “Nimm”, had a baby boy, Frederick Demuth, who was assumed at the time to be Friedrich Engels’ illegitimate son.’
‘Yes, he was born in Jerusalem Lane,’ Kathy said, recalling the account which Mr Hepple the solicitor had given of the history of the Lane.
Judith Naismith stared at her, astounded, ‘You know, then?’
‘Not everything,’ Brock interjected. ‘Please, go on.’
‘Well, the baby wasn’t brought up in the Marx household, and he became a manual labourer when he grew up. But just before Engels died, he revealed that Marx had been the father of the child, not himself. Eleanor was shocked that her beloved father could have first deceived her mother and then abandoned the child, but she got over it and became quite attached to her half-brother, and helped him in various ways before she died in 1898.
‘The year before that, Frederick Demuth married a young woman, Rebecca Jacobs, who was a friend and acolyte of Eleanor’s. They had a daughter, Mary, who married one George Harper, and they had three daughters, Meredith, Eleanor and Peg.’
‘So they were the great-granddaughters of Karl Marx,’ Kathy said.
‘Yes. Even so, it was puzzling that they should have inherited books and papers from Eleanor Marx. She didn’t have any children of her own, but still, there were others to whom she would have been more likely to have given things like that than to the labourer Frederick-her sister Laura, for instance. It was the other papers which Meredith gave me that made me begin to suspect the reason.’
Judith got abruptly to her feet and lit another cigarette. She strode over to the window and stood for a moment, arms folded, exhaling smoke. They waited, and after a while she said, without looking back, ‘Would you like a coffee or something? I wouldn’t mind one. There’s a kettle and cups over there.’
She made no move, and Kathy said to Brock, ‘Shall I?’
‘Would you mind, love?’ Judith said from the window, still not turning round.
Kathy glared at her back and got up. No one spoke until she returned to the glass table with three cups of black coffee, together with some small tubs of long-life milk and packets of sugar. Judith then sat down again and continued her account.