Barry Maitland - The Marx Sisters

‘How can I help?’ He offered them seats. ‘Has there been another break-in next door?’

‘No, sir,’ Kathy said. ‘Nothing like that. Could you tell us if you were in the vicinity of Jerusalem Lane, over on the other side of Bloomsbury, on Sunday last?’

Jones’s expression changed abruptly. He blinked a couple of times and swallowed.

‘Oh.’ He stared at the table.

‘Sir?’

‘I’m sorry. Yes, yes, I was there, on Sunday afternoon.’

‘On your own?’

‘No, with a friend.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘We’d gone to visit someone we knew.’

‘Who was that?’

‘A Mrs Winterbottom. Look, could you tell me what this is about?’

‘Mrs Winterbottom is dead, sir-you don’t look surprised.’

‘No.’ Jones’s voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘No. I read about it in the paper last night, a short report. I only noticed it by accident. It said her funeral was today. I… half wondered if that was what this was about.’

‘The newspaper report also said that the circumstances of the death were suspicious and that the police wanted to speak to anyone who had been in the neighbourhood on Sunday afternoon. Why didn’t you get in touch, Mr Jones?’

‘Oh my God,’ Jones muttered. They could see that he was breathing in short shallow breaths, like someone in mild shock, keeping his hands pressed to the table so that they wouldn’t shake. ‘I know I should have. I wasn’t sure if it was… necessary. Whether it would achieve anything at this stage. But I think I would have.’ He looked at them anxiously. ‘But how did you get hold of me?’

‘Someone answering your description was seen entering Mrs Winterbottom’s house at about the time she died.’

‘Really? It was about then she died, was it? Oh God. I didn’t actually see her, but Judith said she was asleep. I felt really we shouldn’t have gone in, but we had arranged to see her at 3, and when she didn’t answer our ring at the front door bell, and we saw it was open, Judith said, well, let’s make sure she hasn’t just taken a snooze after lunch. So we went upstairs, and again her front door was open.’

‘When you say open…?’

‘On the latch. She usually left it like that when she was at home.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She’d told us.’

‘So you just walked in?’

‘Yes. I didn’t feel right about it, but Judith had a plane to catch back to the States later that afternoon, and she was so keen to see the old lady. I waited in the living room, and Judith put her head around the bedroom door. She said that she was asleep.’

‘Did either of you actually step into her bedroom?’

‘No… I don’t think so.’

‘Why can’t you be sure?’

‘Well… We weren’t sure what to do. We were talking in hushed voices, you know. We didn’t know whether to go away for a bit and come back, or wake her, or just forget the whole thing. Then Judith suggested I go upstairs and knock on her sisters’ doors, to see if they were in. I tried, but there was no reply at either.’

‘And Judith stayed in Mrs Winterbottom’s flat while you did that?’

Jones nodded.

‘What is Judith’s full name please?’

‘Dr Judith Naismith.’

‘A medical doctor?’

‘No, PhD.’

‘And she’s an American?’

‘No, but she works there, at Princeton University. Has done for

… oh, fifteen years.’

‘And why were you visiting Mrs Winterbottom?’

‘Oh gosh… Do you want the short answer or the long one?’

‘We’ve got all night, Mr Jones. Tell us the whole thing.’

‘Well, in that case I’m going to need a cup of coffee. There’s a percolator next door going all the time. An intravenous drip would be easier, but it gets in the way when you’re drawing.’

He winced at his own attempt at humour, seeing the stony look on both their faces. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered, and got shakily to his feet.

Jones left the room and came back a little later with a tray of coffee mugs.

‘I’m really not sure whether any of this is relevant, you see,’ he began.

‘Just tell us the whole story and we’ll decide.’

‘Where to begin?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Well, I suppose… One morning, it would have been three or four months ago maybe, about the end of June, I think-I could check my diary-there was a meeting here with a client of ours. He’s a developer, called Derek Slade, Managing Director of First City Properties in Mayfair. That would be the first time I was aware of Jerusalem Lane, except I didn’t realize it was Jerusalem Lane then. Sorry, I’m not explaining this very well.’

Jones ran his ink-stained hand through the mop of his hair and took a sip of coffee. He was calmer now as he concentrated on his account.

‘You knew Mr Slade well, did you?’ Kathy asked.

‘Yes, we’d done a few jobs for him in the past. Nothing big, but he’s a very well-respected developer, and we’d always hoped for something more substantial. The thing was, we’d recently done a number of speculative designs for them, sketch designs to explore the potential of a site, without charging a fee, and our senior partner, Herbert Lowell, was getting a bit impatient that none of them had come to anything. He was the other person there at the meeting that morning. He’d come up specially from the main office in Basingstoke to see Slade, and he made it clear right at the start of the meeting that there was a lot of other work around at that time, and what he called “no hay, no pay” jobs weren’t very high on our priorities. He’s a pompous twit, actually, and he seemed to have got out of bed on the wrong side that morning, I remember. I wasn’t much better, to tell the truth. We’d been doing a competition for a big project in Paris, and I had been up most of the previous night finishing it off.

‘Anyway, Slade is a very cool operator, and he just gave his little smile at Herbert’s blustering and said he mustn’t worry, this time what he had was certain to come off, and it was big, very big indeed. That silenced Herbert. When it comes to architectural judgement, “big” is Herbert’s bottom line. Slade explained that over a period of time First City Properties, his company, had been buying small buildings in an old city block in central London. He said his father, who founded First City, had actually bought the first one over thirty years before. Recently the company had been stepping up their acquisitions, and they were now getting close to consolidating their ownership of the whole block. When that happened, he wanted to be in a position to act fast, to have a preliminary development proposal ready to go out immediately for planning permission, and to fast-track the project from then on. He had already organized substantial finance for the scheme, and some likely pre-lets to a big institution of some kind.

‘The thing was, though-and he kept returning to this-until all the acquisitions were complete, the essence was secrecy. Apparently the ownership pattern was such a tangle that it had been an enormous effort to get as far as he had. He’d been buying through intermediaries, and in a very low-key way, and he was paranoid that it could still fall apart. For that reason he couldn’t tell us where it was, but he did say that completion on the final key contracts was very close, and it was going to be a very significant project indeed-a “landmark” development, he said, one of the most important in central London.

‘Herbert was very alert by this stage, and his eyes lit up at the word “landmark”. He promised that Slade would have all the resources of the practice behind him when the time came. He was getting quite excited.’

‘Weren’t you?’ Kathy said. ‘It must have sounded like a great opportunity.’