‘But to murder her… her own sister.’
‘I know, dear. It was quite terrible. Terrible.’ A single tear ran down Peg’s cheeks, leaving a tiny trail of reflected firelight. ‘But Eleanor said Meredith simply couldn’t be trusted. When she realized that the things were worth a lot of money, she insisted that they must be sold. She said she would get lawyers to take them from Eleanor. She was the eldest sister, and said they were rightfully hers. So like her to say that, just as she did when we were little girls.’
‘I don’t understand, though, why Eleanor wouldn’t be happy to sell them to Judith Naismith’s university.’ Kathy was feeling much more comfortable. The tension in her body had been replaced by a warm glow. The alcohol had gone to her head a little, and her tongue slurred over the last words of her sentence.
‘Oh dear me, no,’ Peg clucked her tongue. ‘Dr Naismith is an academic. She sees the papers as simply some kind of valuable historical relic, like the Dead Sea Scrolls or something.’
‘Well, they are, aren’t they?’
‘Oh no!’ Peg’s voice dropped to a whisper. Her eyes shone with the same inner light that Kathy had seen before. ‘Do you know what is written on the monument on our great-grandfather’s grave? Beneath his famous words “Workers of all lands, unite” is a second quotation from his writings. It says, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” ’
Kathy stared blankly at her, uncomprehending.
‘Eleanor said that the papers belonged to the future, not to the past. Not even to the present, when the works of Karl Marx are so universally misunderstood and misrepresented. You see, our great-grandfather maintained that the revolution could only be achieved in the most advanced societies, not in the backward peasant countries where so-called Marxist revolutions have occurred in the past seventy years. That is logical, you see, because he understood that it was only by passing through the complete cycle of capitalist development that a society would experience its inner contradictions to the full, and thus be capable of transforming itself and achieving the final goal of true socialism.’
Peg was reciting the phrases in a cosy, familiar manner, as another elderly lady might discuss the strategies of contract bridge, or growing roses.
‘Now if you understand this, then you can see that the whole history of socialist revolutions in this century, in Russia and in even less developed countries, has been a dreadful mistake, a misguided attempt to take a short cut from feudalism to socialism. Our great-grandfather foresaw that such an attempt would be doomed, and he wrote his final book to describe the true path. His book is a map of the future, but it cannot be used to take a short cut to that future, as were his other books. That is why it cannot be published until the time is ready. And just imagine how people would sneer at it now, when all the world believes that the failure of those false experiments of the past seventy years has proved that Marxism is a path only to poverty, oppression and despair. We must wait, twenty years or thirty, until the memory of these mistakes has faded, and a new generation is ready to understand the true path to the final goal.’
Kathy found it difficult to reconcile this grand vision of human history with the reality of the elderly lady huddled in front of her gas fire, explaining why one of her sisters had pulled a plastic bag over the head of another. The mismatch was too silly to be taken seriously. She felt her weary brain lose focus, and her stricken body withdraw into itself.
‘Am I explaining it to you, dear?’
‘Not really,’ she mumbled in reply. She really was desperately tired, and could hardly remember any more why it had seemed so urgent to leave her hospital bed for this nonsense. She couldn’t imagine how she was ever going to get out of this armchair again.
‘Oh dear. Well, that was how it seemed to Eleanor, anyway. She was so bright, so dedicated. The papers weren’t just something given to us by our mother. They were a sacred trust which our family had inherited.’
Kathy tried to rouse herself. ‘Why did Eleanor wait so long before killing herself?’
‘She was drawn to the anniversary of Tussy’s noble suicide, of course, and then she wanted the new buildings to be at the stage where we could put her safely away, where she wouldn’t be disturbed, at least for a couple of decades.’
‘So that wasn’t Danny Finn’s idea?’
‘No, dear man. He thought it was. I helped him to think of it.’
‘And the Endziel is down there with Eleanor?’
Peg gave a coy smile, ‘Perhaps, my dear, perhaps.’
‘Why the hammer?’
‘Eleanor thought we should distract you. To give us more time. We saw it at Terry’s house one day when we were invited to admire the new work being done to their kitchen. Eleanor thought of it. We knew it would make things worse for Terry for a while, but it served him right. Stupid boy. It was a hateful thing to do to poor Eleanor. But she was already gone, and sometimes one must do hateful things.’
An interval occurred which Kathy couldn’t account for. One minute Peg was a few feet away, the next right beside her, her face very close.
‘Are you all right, dear?’
‘Must have dropped off. Very sleepy.’ Kathy’s eyelids simply refused to open, but some corner of her brain that was still working reminded her that Meredith must have felt like this, having been given a sleeping pill before she was killed. She made herself speak. ‘ We. You said just now, we.’
‘Of course, dear. We both killed dear Meredith. Why ever would you imagine otherwise?’
Kathy forced her weary lids open a crack and saw the old lady standing over her. In her hands she held a plastic bag.
32
The site workers arriving in the pre-dawn darkness found Marquis Street half blocked with police cars and ambulances, their blue and red emergency lights whipping across the scarred remains of Jerusalem Lane. A crowd of police officers and men wearing donkey jackets and hard hats huddled around the entrance to Mrs Rosenfeldt’s Sandwich Bar, sipping steaming mugs of tomato soup.
Upstairs Brock picked his way round the ambulance crew as they strapped Kathy’s body into the stretcher. He conferred for a moment with Bren Gurney before going over to Dr Mehta who had emerged from Peg’s bedroom.
‘My guess would be two or three sleeping pills in the drink to make her sleepy. Then the plastic bag,’ the pathologist said. ‘There’s a foil of Somatone in the kitchen with half a dozen pills missing.’
Brock nodded. He turned back to Sergeant Gurney. ‘Have a good look for the manuscript here when the scene-of-crime people are done, Bren. I don’t think you’ll find anything, but better check.’
Gurney nodded, then indicated to Brock where one of the ambulance men behind him was trying to attract his attention.
‘Yes?’ he said to the man, a stocky figure with an expression on his face which suggested that he had long since stopped being impressed by disasters.
‘We’ll get going with this one now, squire.’
‘All right.’ He looked down at the bandaged head visible at the top of the red blanket. Her eyes were open, staring in the direction of the bedroom, where the photographer’s flash gun kept throwing the figure of the old lady on the bed, with the crumpled transparent plastic bag over her head, into brilliant focus.