‘At least,’ he smiled shyly, ‘that’s how it can be, when you’re very lucky.’
Kathy nodded. ‘Brock was trying to tell me to relax this weekend and put it out of my mind. Maybe that’s what he meant. He went off gliding or something. Maybe he’s decided to move on to stage two. This isn’t another of your silly chat up lines, is it, Bob?’ she said suddenly. ‘To persuade me the only way I can progress this case is by forgetting all about it and going out and getting drunk with you or something?’
‘Good heavens.’ He looked at her, wide-eyed with innocence. ‘I never thought of that. What a brilliant idea.’
‘Anyway, you didn’t say what stage four was.’
‘Ah yes. Very important. Architects sometimes forget it. Stage four is checking that your brainwave really does work, and isn’t some seductive chimera that doesn’t quite fit.’
‘Well, look,’ Kathy said. ‘This is what we’ll do. If stage three strikes, we’ll go out and get wonderfully drunk together. A deal?’
Then she added, ‘Provided you don’t turn out to be the killer, that is.’
Bob dropped a forkful of masman curry down the front of his trousers. ‘A deal,’ he said.
28
Kathy insisted on saying goodnight to Bob at the restaurant, then drove back to Jerusalem Lane. The whole block was in darkness, silent. Ice crystals crackled under her feet as she walked down the deserted Lane to the incident centre. It was locked, abandoned for the night, and she used her key to open the front door, fumbling in the blackness for a light switch inside.
The sense of emptiness, of the absence of Brock and Gurney and their teams, pervaded the building, bringing back the feelings of loss and despair which she had felt at Eleanor’s funeral. Unprofessional feelings, she felt, a sign of personal involvement which was dangerous. Underlying them was the sense of the intimate presence of death, of Meredith’s death, and Eleanor’s, of the death of Jerusalem Lane, and, deeper still, of the other deaths, more distant and less easily acknowledged, of her father and her mother. She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep if she went home, so she went upstairs and turned on the heater, pulling off her hat and gloves, unwinding the scarf around her neck, and opening the front of her coat.
Slowly, with the rising temperature of the room, her mind began to focus on the case again. Her eyes travelled once more over the ugly colour photographs on the wall, the white board, the sheaves of notes and typed pages on the table.
Out of her coat pocket she pulled the Polaroid photographs she had taken at the crematorium, a dozen of them, and spread them across the table. As she’d suspected, they weren’t very clear. She recognized a few people she had noticed at the time, and saw several more she hadn’t.
Among these was a tall slender woman in a headscarf and dark glasses who might conceivably have been Judith Naismith. It occurred to Kathy that most of the potential suspects for the murder of Eleanor Harper had been at her funeral, and she recalled Martin Connell’s gibe that they were making a hash of the case. The thought of their conversation made her throat tighten and brought on the shakes again. She was shocked to find that he could still affect her this way, and she tried systematically, calmly, to trace the source of her reaction. It wasn’t just his betrayal of her over North. That had made her angry, but what she felt now wasn’t predominantly anger. It was fear. She took a deep breath and forced herself to continue the line of thought.
What is the source of the fear?
It was his manipulation of her which made her afraid.
Why does that make me afraid?
And so she continued, an interior, silent interrogation, knowing always where it must lead, and pressing on until she had admitted the answer to herself, as she had been taught she should. For within Kathy there still lived a young girl, unresolved, unassimilated, misused, still haunted by a dark figure, a man as powerful, as cold, as manipulative as Martin Connell. And the fear was not just the fear of him, but also of the possibility of her own failure to survive without him.
On the other hand, she thought as she shook herself, shivering from head to toe, Martin may just have wanted to warn me that we are making a mistake. It was an unsettling thought. And unsettling that it was so difficult to think straight where he was concerned.
She picked out the figure of Danny Finn in one of the photographs, and returned to the question that must have passed momentarily through the minds of everyone at the funeral. What treasures was Peg burying along with her sister’s ashes? What would fill an oak box two feet by two feet by one foot six? What did a scientific socialist want to take with her to the other side? Her childhood teddy bears? Her postcards of Moscow? Or the manuscript of the genuine fourth volume of Das Capital? But why would she do that? ‘Look what I’ve brought for you, Great-grandad. We kept it safe for you all those years.’
But perhaps it didn’t really matter what was in the box. What mattered was what someone who had murdered once, or even twice, for the Endziel might imagine was there. And perhaps it was a message from Peg to that person, an irresistible message, that she was getting rid of the thing they were after, and they must now leave her alone. And if that were the case, tonight would be the only opportunity for that person to retrieve it before it disappeared beneath twenty-five storeys of concrete office block.
She didn’t really believe it. But there was nevertheless a reason why she must act upon it, as an act of good faith with herself that, despite the fact that Winter had Martin as his solicitor, she would still pursue any reasonable possibility that he was innocent, and that someone else was responsible for Eleanor’s death.
She sighed, hesitated for a moment over whether to have a mug of coffee before deciding against it. She buttoned up her coat again and went downstairs. In the general office she found a heavy torch which she stuffed into a pocket of her coat before locking up the building and stepping out into the cold darkness.
She first walked north up the Lane to the spot where the Kowalskis’ bookshop had been, with its plaque commemorating its famous former resident. Here she found a viewing hole in the plywood panels that screened the site. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she was able to make out a tower crane rising on the far side of the site, and a light in the street beyond it. As a double check she counted the number of viewing holes along from the corner at the top of Jerusalem Lane, so that she could count back from the other side of the hoarding to establish this spot.
There was no break in the screens, and, short of trying to climb over them, she could see no way into the site from here. She walked down to the south end of the Lane, where the synagogue was now almost entirely demolished, and where a site entrance for vehicles opened on to Marquis Street. Lights which had been rigged up on poles overhead formed a pool of brilliance in the surrounding darkness. The chain-link gates were secured by a large padlock, and a printed sign warned that the site was patrolled by guard dogs and security personnel.
She returned to have another look at what was left of the synagogue. In one corner she recognized the battered remains of Sam’s cardboard box. Her eyes were again adjusting to the dark after the lights of the entrance gates, and she could make out the name of the German dishwasher manufacturer on its side. She checked to make sure it was no longer inhabited. Behind the box the demolition team had fixed up a temporary site fence using chain-link panels attached to a timber framework with loops of twisted wire. Kathy untwisted two of the loops and eased the panels apart. She slipped through and reattached the wire loosely. It was only when she had done all this and felt her fingers numb with cold that she realized that she had left her gloves behind in Brock’s office. She swore and hesitated for a moment, then turned and moved on into the site.