Barry Maitland: The Marx Sisters

He turned to Brock. ‘As you know, Chief Inspector, evidence of asphyxia is often uncertain, and if it was a plastic bag…’ He shrugged. ‘And to tell you frankly’-he lowered his voice and switched off the tape recorder that had been running at his elbow-‘I find it difficult to have much confidence in the judgement of her doctor, whatever his name was, who called us out, although I couldn’t say that at the time.’

‘He was a bit of a character.’ Kathy smiled and the pathologist rolled his eyes, returning to his paperwork.

After a while he put the clip-board down and pulled a packet of rubber gloves out of a drawer. Kathy knew the procedure-first the Y-shaped incision on the front of the body, from shoulders to crotch, and the taking of blood from this cut for alcohol analysis before opening the body cavities; then the systematic opening of skull and body cavities and inspection of organs in place, and their removal in turn for individual examination. Just thinking about it seemed to drain the thing on the table of what was left of its humanity, as if its soul were shrinking from the approaching knife.

‘You all right?’

Kathy started, then nodded at Brock. ‘Yes, sir. I was in Traffic for two years.’

‘Ah, yes. Blood enough for a lifetime. All the same, not much point in our hanging about, eh?’

He waited for her to agree before speaking to Mehta. ‘We’ll leave you to it then, Sundeep. Anything occurs to you, we’d appreciate an informal opinion.’

‘I always oblige when I can, Brock. But this time, I would not hold my breath.’

They left, closely followed by the woman from the coroner’s office.

It was a fine September morning, and after the chill of the mortuary the city seemed soaked with warmth and life by the glittering sunlight, although the leaves of the plane trees were already curling yellow and showering down with each gust of breeze. Traffic was heavy, and Kathy made slow progress across town.

Her passenger said nothing for a while. She wondered what she had done to deserve this; there was enough to think about in running a murder investigation without having a Detective Chief Inspector from Scotland Yard’s Department SO1-the Serious Crime Branch-following your every move, let alone one with Brock’s reputation. Inspector McDonald had been evasive when he had called her in this morning, and that wasn’t like him. She had heard detectives at Division discussing Brock in the past. People who made a practice of remaining studiously unimpressed by senior officers apparently had difficulty doing so in his case. He was good, it was said, but difficult, often secretive, ferociously cranky and impatient. He didn’t look that way now, she thought, as she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, slumped comfortably in his seat, a benign look on his face, enjoying the sun through half-closed eyes and sniffing at the autumn smells through the open window.

‘So you feel convinced it’s murder?’ he said suddenly.

‘Not yet.’ Kathy was cautious. ‘But I could be. The whole set-up was rather odd. I had the same reaction as Dr Mehta to the woman’s doctor-Dr Botev.’

‘He called the police in the first place?’

‘Yes. She was found by her two sisters who live in rooms upstairs in the same house. They called Dr Botev and he then phoned us after he had examined her. A patrol car responded, and they called in CID. I arrived with DC Mollineaux about twenty-five minutes later-maybe threequarters of an hour after she was found.’

‘That would have been soon after 4, then.’

‘Yes. The sisters had been out since about 2 on a Sunday afternoon outing to the cemetery to visit departed relatives. Apparently they did that quite often. They’d said goodbye to their sister Meredith when they left, and when they got back they looked in on her and found her lying on her bed, not breathing. They called their doctor. When I got there, one of the sisters had gone upstairs to her room to lie down-in shock, apparently. The other was with Botev and quite coherent, although upset of course. The doctor insisted there was nothing wrong with Mrs Winterbottom’s heart-she’d had a thorough check-up only recently. He was quite stroppy about it, and I thought a bit unnecessarily so in front of the sister. It must have been upsetting for her to hear him demanding a post-mortem, and telling me to get on to the coroner’s office, although she stayed quite calm. Actually she was rather good. Seemed a lot more sensible than he did. I asked her to make sure her sister was all right, and then argued a bit with him, about people dropping with coronaries ten minutes after being told their heart was perfect, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Eventually I did as he asked.’

‘You had no choice.’

‘That’s what I thought. Dr Mehta arrived at 5.40.’

‘Between one and a half and three and a half hours after she must have died.’

‘Right. He took her temperature straight away, and he did seem surprised that it was as high as it was. But it was a warm afternoon, and she was well wrapped up.’

‘Do you know what the temperature was?’

She shook her head.

‘It’ll be in his report. After asphyxia the body temperature can actually rise for a while before it begins to drop.’

‘He didn’t tell me that.’

‘Sundeep enjoys being a sceptic-and keeping his cards close to his chest.’ He growled at the car in front trying to make an illegal right turn and blocking their lane. ‘You checked the place over, of course.’

‘Yes, Mollineaux and I had a look round, and then the scene-of-crime crew arrived and did it properly. There was no sign of forced entry, but there wouldn’t need to be-the place was wide open. The sisters habitually leave the front door on to the street on the latch apparently, and Meredith’s door to her apartment was the same. Also there’s a fire escape at the back, and the window on to that was open, too. A couple of drawers in her bedroom were open, but apart from that nothing looked disturbed. It all looked so peaceful, as if she’d just lain down for a nap after lunch with a glass of her favourite tipple, and then passed away. Dr Mehta will analyse the drink of course, but it was hardly touched.

‘Apart from the plastic bag in the kitchen, there was one other thing that made me begin to wonder if Botev was right. Meredith’s shoes were on the carpet at the foot of the bed, toes pointing away. There’s an end-board, so she couldn’t have sat on the edge and taken them off. They would have to have been taken off somewhere else and placed there. But if she’d done that, she would have held them by the heels and put them down with the toes pointing towards the bed, most likely. On the other hand, if she lay down with her shoes on, and someone tidied things up afterwards, that person might reach across the end-board, slip them off, toes pointing towards them, and set them down that way on the floor.

‘At least,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘it seemed a possibility at the time. Maybe it’s a bit far-fetched.’

‘Hmm,’ Brock grunted non-committally, ‘worth bearing in mind, anyway. SOCO’s printed the shoes?’

‘Yes, and the glass of port beside the bed, and the rubbish bin in the kitchen, and all the usual places.’

Brock smiled. ‘Sorry.’

Kathy flushed and was quiet as she turned the corner into Marquis Street and pulled up on to the pavement against the bollards that closed the south end of Jerusalem Lane.

Barely a dozen paces wide and a hundred long, the Lane crossed a city block, from Marquis Street through to the tube station on Welbeck Street to the north. Because of its skew angle however, and because its alignment gave a little kick to the right halfway along its length, it wasn’t possible to see directly through from one end to the other. Like most of the buildings around the perimeter of the block, those facing on to Jerusalem Lane were built of yellow London stock bricks, faded and stained black by over a century of smog and soot. But whereas the terraces around the perimeter formed orderly rows with uniform roof lines, the buildings on the Lane were much more varied in height, as if no two neighbours had been able to agree on whether they should have two storeys or four, or even whether their plots should be laid out to the line of the surrounding streets or to the angle of the Lane. Despite this they were packed together as tightly as the perimeter terraces, and the sense which this gave of jostling anarchy beneath the common surface of blackened brickwork was confirmed by the explosion of chimneys, parapets and cross-walls which burst through the dark slate roofs against the sky. Glancing casually at this disorder, someone passing the end of the Lane might assume that it had been built as a service alleyway or mews, yet a second look would show that the shop fronts at the base of every building were original, and that it had always functioned as a thoroughfare. It was in recognition of this that a local by-law was enacted in 1893 to erect the bollards at the south end of the Lane to close it to wheeled traffic, and to repave it in York stone slabs. That was the last, unsuccessful attempt to gentrify Jerusalem Lane.