Barry Maitland - The Marx Sisters

‘I wouldn’t say anything against the departed’-Mrs Kowalski’s thinking had evidently moved on while she had been in the kitchen-‘but it doesn’t really surprise me.’

‘Oh?’ Brock prompted mildly.

‘She could drive you mad, that woman.’

Her husband opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off. ‘Oh, Adam won’t say it, but she nearly drove him into the grave last year, spreading vicious stories about him. He nearly had a break-down. Our friends tried to persuade her to stop. Felix spoke to her. But she was so stubborn! Wouldn’t be told. It was one of the reasons we began to think about leaving the Lane. Oh yes, I can quite imagine she could have driven somebody to do something desperate!’

‘Your family had a serious quarrel with her, then?’ Kathy asked.

‘No, no,’ Adam Kowalski broke in anxiously. ‘She had meant to help me. It was all most unfortunate. She dragged up things from the past which were best forgotten. She didn’t understand what she was doing.’

‘She wouldn’t be told! She was a stubborn old busybody who liked to organize other people’s lives.’

‘Marie!’ her husband protested. ‘She’s dead!’

Mrs Kowalski snorted and lifted her coffee cup to her mouth. When she returned it to the saucer, she raised her chin defiantly, her pose of righteous indignation somewhat spoiled by a skin of milk sticking to her upper lip.

‘When was the last time either of you had any contact with Mrs Winterbottom?’ Kathy asked.

Mr Kowalski shook his head. His wife said, ‘It was months ago. I don’t think we could have exchanged words since Easter.’

‘Didn’t you say goodbye to them when you left the Lane?’

‘No. There was a little farewell party for us in the Croatia Club, but they didn’t come.’

‘What is the Croatia Club, Mrs Kowalski?’

‘Oh, it’s just a social club which people started years ago, when we first came to the Lane. It wasn’t only for Yugoslavs-that was just a name. It was for anyone in the Lane who wanted to have a chat or play a game of cards. It has a room over the Balaton.’

‘Does everyone in the Lane belong?’

‘No, no. In recent years not so many people go any more. People have left or passed away, you know.’

‘Who came to your party?’

‘Oh, the Bolls, Mr Witz, Brunhilde Capek, Dr Botev for a while. I don’t know, people came and went.’

‘Mrs Rosenfeldt?’

‘No, she wasn’t there.’

‘Did Mrs Winterbottom discuss you selling your property, or talk about selling her own?’

Both the Kowalskis looked surprised. ‘Oh no,’ Adam said. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t do that.’ He smiled confidentially, modestly pleased with himself. ‘We were approached to sell, along with Konrad Witz, by someone who wanted to combine our two properties into one. We got a good price, you know, but the buyer asked us to keep it to ourselves, about selling, for as long as possible. We didn’t tell anyone we were going until a month or so ago. Certainly not Meredith.’

Kathy put her half-finished cup down. ‘Well, we’ve taken up enough of your time. If you remember anything else, you will call us, won’t you? Here’s my card. And we’ll need to talk to your son. Can you give us his address and telephone number?’

Adam Kowalski wrote down his son’s details on Kathy’s pad. ‘He’s a lecturer at the London Polytechnic. Probably he could speak to you after work. Maybe in the shop. He still has the key.’

‘Yes, we’ll arrange something. It must have been difficult for you moving books with your hurt foot.’

‘Fortunately we had nearly loaded the van.’ Kowalski smiled ruefully. ‘Felix was inside, pushing the boxes around to make room, and one of them fell off the back on to my foot. It was very painful, but I thought it was just bruised until I went to the doctor on Monday and he made me get an X-ray and they found one of the little bones was broken. So, I shall be stuck here for a few days.’

‘Weeks more likely, old fool,’ his wife muttered.

Kathy took a deep breath of fresh air when they reached their car. Seagulls wheeled in the sun overhead, the air pungent with salt and seaweed.

‘What a bitch. “Don’t stir it, then”!’

Brock laughed and turned the car to take the road inland to the A27.

‘He must have spent fifty years regretting that he hadn’t handed her over to the Gestapo,’ she went on. ‘In her case at least they probably would have done the right thing.’

‘It’s appalling, isn’t it, how the Kowalskis’ whole life has been controlled by that moment, the decision to protect her. What else could he have done?’ Brock scratched his beard. ‘But then follow the years of betraying his students, losing his career, being forced out of Poland, and now being forced out of Jerusalem Lane. And odd too that it was she who let the secret out to Meredith.’

‘Yes, I must say that if I were Adam Kowalski and I were thinking of bumping somebody off, it would have been Marie Kowalski who wound up with a plastic bag over her head, not Meredith Winterbottom.’

They turned off the main road on the way back and stopped at a pub for lunch. Brock ordered pate, green salad and a tomato juice for Kathy, a pint of bitter and a ploughman’s lunch for himself. He poked at it when it arrived. ‘No ploughman ever survived on these scraps,’ he grumbled, pushing a lettuce leaf to one side. ‘Still, the beer’s quite good.’ He took a big gulp and licked his lips.

‘Yes, and I don’t suppose old Adam’s ever even had the opportunity to get a few brief moments of relief with some lady hairdresser in New Cross or whatever. Wife living over the shop, never letting him out of her sight. They probably developed the siege mentality back in Cracow and have been cultivating it ever since. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was responsible for dropping the box on his foot, to stop him straying out of her sight.’

Kathy spluttered into her tomato juice, laughing. ‘Oh, I thought you were saying yesterday that you couldn’t understand how anyone could be bothered to have an affair. Now you’re conceding that it might be a good idea in some circumstances.’

‘Not really.’ Brock toyed with the pint mug on the beer mat. ‘I believe that things badly begun end badly.’

‘Oh golly.’ Kathy stared at him, still smiling. ‘That’s a bit Old Testament, isn’t it? Do you really believe that?’

‘Yes, I do. But then, first marriages are doomed these days, anyway. And so are people who get tangled up in them.’

‘You really are a cynic, aren’t you, sir?’

‘A realist, I think. Do you know any first marriages you’d want to be in?’

‘Yes… All right, no.’

‘Too inexperienced, taking too much for granted, held together by the kids. Mind you, that can blow up in your face, too.’ He was now gloomily drawing small patterns with beer slops on the shiny table top.

‘Is that what happened to you?’

‘Me?’ He looked up. ‘No… No kids in my case. No, I was thinking of Mr Gregory Thomas North again, my former quarry. Sorry, it’s difficult to forget about old enemies sometimes.’

‘He has children?’

‘One boy. Six years old. North dotes on him. His only redeeming feature. We assumed that he would try to get Mrs N and junior to follow him out, but it seems the wife doesn’t fancy a life on the pampas. Delighted to see the back of him in fact, because she has other arrangements in hand and a homicidal husband doesn’t figure in them. Only the little boy has just been diagnosed as having leukaemia. Three months to live. The missus is keeping it quiet in case North tries to come back to see him.’

‘Oh God, how awful.’

‘Yes. I almost feel sorry for the animal. However, he may find that he gets to see his little boy after all.’