Brock stopped talking as a nurse came in to give Kathy more painkillers.
‘What’s that you’re reading?’ she asked him when she had got the pills down.
‘A biography of the first Eleanor, Eleanor Marx. I’d got it out of the library to do a bit of background reading. Won’t need to now, I suppose. I’ll leave it with you if you like. You’ll have the time for it over the next few days.’
‘Days?’
‘Oh yes, they want to keep you here a while for observation. To make sure your side starts to heal up properly. And they’re a bit worried about concussion, too.
‘Best thing.’ He smiled at her kindly. ‘Now, never do this again, Kathy, but everyone sends their congratulations. You got the result.’
Kathy looked out through a tall window at the grey afternoon sky, breathing in the smells of the hospital and listening to its background noises-the rattle of a trolley, an exchange between two cockney women walking past the door of her room, the squeak of rubber soles on the plastic flooring. Everything was hurting in a dull way that discouraged movement. She thought to herself, Yes, I did get the result. Without Brock or Gurney, I found the bastard. But all she felt was anti-climax. Her exposure of Kowalski was nothing like the triumph of the intelligent imagination which Bob had described in his ‘stage three’. Her achievement seemed uncertain, a foolhardy exercise in dumb detection, throwing herself into a dangerous situation and seeing who came out of the shadows to hit her down. There was no flash of inspiration, no euphoria. She even felt mildly guilty that what she had discovered disappointed whatever theories Brock had been forming on the case.
She closed her eyes wearily and drifted off to sleep.
In her mind Peg was staring at her with shining eyes, just as she had on the day before the funeral. She said the words she had used to Brock that day, speaking with intensity, as if her words contained a central truth. At first Kathy couldn’t hear what she said. Then she heard it clearly.
‘Eleanor lived as noble a life, and died as noble a death, as the great-aunt she adored.’
Kathy’s eyes blinked open with a start.
Her room was in darkness, although from the lights in the corridor and the sounds of activity elsewhere she could tell that it wasn’t late. She saw people walk past the open door carrying flowers. Visiting time.
The picture of Eleanor came into her mind, lying on her bed, dressed in white, a bloody plastic bag pulled over her head. What was noble about a death by smothering with a plastic bag? Cut-price, perhaps-disposable, hygienic, but hardly noble. How did great-aunt Eleanor die? Kathy had got the impression from what Judith had said that it was sudden.
She reached to the pendant light switch on the pillow beside her and put on the light overhead. Brock’s book was on top of the bedside cabinet, and with a wince she reached over for it. It was called Eleanor Marx: a Socialist Heroine’s Tragedy. She turned towards the end and found the passage she was looking for, which described the circumstances of Eleanor’s death.
For some years beforehand, Eleanor had been living with Edward Aveling, a socialist activist with an interest in education and the theatre. Although not legally married, Eleanor considered their union a true marriage of free love. Aveling, however, was not a popular figure among her friends, who saw that he took advantage of Eleanor’s generosity, spending extravagantly on his theatrical friends the legacy from Engels which was her only capital, while she immersed herself in the hard work of Marxian scholarship, socialist politics and the development of the trade-union movement. On the morning of Thursday 31 March 1898 Eleanor received an anonymous letter revealing that Aveling had secretly married an actress some months before, changing his surname to that of the woman, but continuing to live with Eleanor in order to relieve her of the last of her savings.
Eleanor’s reaction was remarkable. She called Aveling and told him calmly that she proposed to commit suicide, and invited him to accompany her into death. While Aveling prevaricated, Eleanor sent her maid round to the chemist with a note requesting chloroform and prussic acid so that they could put down their dog. The maid duly returned with two ounces of chloroform and enough prussic acid to kill several people, together with the book which the chemist kept for purchasers of poisons to sign. Eleanor took the book into the room where Aveling was, and a little later brought it back, signed ‘E. M. Aveling’, for her maid to return to the chemist. Seeing that Eleanor was determined to go through with it, Aveling announced that he was ‘going up to town’, and promptly left.
Eleanor then went upstairs and wrote several letters and prepared certain packages, among them, presumably, one containing Marx’s manuscript on which she wrote her message to Rebecca Demuth. She gave all these with instructions to her maid, had a bath, dressed herself in white, and retired to bed. By eleven o’clock that morning she was dead.
Kathy let the book drop on to the bedcovers, as she tried to imagine Aveling’s reaction to Eleanor’s calm demand that he join her in suicide. If her death was noble, it was also impossibly implacable and remote. Suddenly Caroline Winter’s reaction to her husband’s infidelity, to go out and order a new kitchen, or that of her own lover’s wife, whose price had been a week in a luxury hotel in Grenada, seemed comfortingly practical and sane.
What happened to Aveling? She read a little further and discovered that Eleanor’s tragedy had had one final twist, when Aveling himself had died no more than a month after her, from a cancer which had been growing all the while in his side. She winced, conscious again of the throbbing pain in her own side.
Eleanor was dressed in white.
And something else. Kathy went back to the beginning of the account and read again until she found it. Eleanor Marx died on 31 March. So also did Eleanor Harper.
Something crawled up Kathy’s spine, the adrenalin beginning to feed into her system. Her heart thumped. The thought, blindingly obvious now, flashed into her head. If Meredith was expecting to meet with Bob Jones and Judith Naismith at 3, why did she take a sleeping pill at 2 that would knock her out for the whole afternoon?
She lay for a while, thinking, then rang for the nurse and asked for a telephone.
The woman on switch at New Scotland Yard was no help at all. There was no reply on Brock’s line, nor on two others she tried. Paging him produced no results. Similarly with Gurney.
‘I’ve already tried Chief Inspector Brock’s home number but there’s no reply. It’s really very important I speak to one of them immediately! I don’t have Sergeant Gurney’s home number. Could you let me have it, please?’
‘I’m sorry. We can’t give that sort of information over the phone. They both must have left for the night.’
Kathy’s brain was racing. She reached for the buzzer and got hold of the nurse again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped, the exertion of small movements draining her absurdly.
‘Don’t worry, dear. What can I do for you?’
‘My clothes. Are they around somewhere? There’s a telephone number I need in one of the pockets.’
The nurse nodded. A few minutes later she returned with a carrier bag. She grinned. ‘Anything else?’
‘No. that’s great. Thanks a lot.’
Kathy found her trousers at the bottom of the bag, rolled up in a ball, and fished out the screwed-up note which Bren had given her with the address and telephone number of Suzanne Chambers. She hesitated, then dialled the number.