Barry Maitland - The Marx Sisters

‘Well, Eleanor’s stay maybe won’t be in perpetuity,’ he added. ‘I did explain tae Peg that the kind of things we’re building now will almost certainly be obsolete and ready for redevelopment in twenty or thirty years, anyway, but she wasn’t worried about that. In fact she seemed rather taken with that idea.’

‘What about her rent?’

‘Hen, she’s seventy-two and not that strong. We’ll work something out in the purchase price of number 22 with Terry Winter, so she doesn’t have tae worry.’

‘You’re a cunning old bugger, Finn,’ Bob laughed. ‘Anyway, I’m glad she’s going. Jerusalem Lane is no place for her now. What exactly is she going to do with Eleanor’s remains, then?’

‘Well, I had the contractor’s joinery shop make up a nice wee oak chest tae her specification, two feet by two feet by one foot six, and into that she’ll put the ashes and so on, and this evening she and I and a couple of the contractor’s men will lay it tae rest precisely under the spot where number 3 Jerusalem Lane used tae stand, and which just happens tae be the position for the main lift core of tower A, on which the big concrete pours start in the mornin’. The timing was perfect, ye see.’

Kathy and Bob lingered in the pub after Danny left, reluctant to exchange its warmth for the freezing night outside.

‘Why did you come to the funeral, anyway, Bob?’ she asked.

‘In the hope of seeing you,’ he said with a lopsided leer.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she said, glumly drawing patterns with her finger on the table top.

‘What?’

‘Try that stupid patter on me.’

‘Oh.’ He rocked back in his seat and blinked. ‘Sorry.’

She gave a little frown. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I like you, when you’re being yourself. But you’re hopeless at chatting up women.’

He sighed. ‘Yes, you’re absolutely right. Always have been. And I haven’t had much practice for a long, long time. Apart from a disastrous attempt on Judith Naismith.’

‘Well,’ she smiled, ‘your patter would have had to be miraculous to have got you anywhere with her.’

‘The stupid thing is, I meant it.’

‘What?’

‘About coming here in the hope of seeing you.’

‘It’s not a very good time…’ And then, seeing him blush and begin to stutter, she added, ‘I mean that I’m sort of preoccupied at the moment with this bloody case. But I wouldn’t mind something to eat. Why don’t we go somewhere?’

They found a Thai place which had recently opened. Kathy ploughed hungrily into the peppery tom yum soup. When she finally lifted her head, she saw Bob staring thoughtfully at her.

‘What?’

‘Yes, you look like someone who’s stuck at the end of stage one.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The French mathematician Poincare said that there are four stages to the creative process. First is the gathering and absorbing of the data. I don’t just mean finding out the facts and making lists, but actually getting your brain to soak the information up and get a feel for it. Towards the end of this stage you’re trying to make sense of it-in Poincare’s case trying to devise a theorem, I suppose, for me trying to get a design concept for a building, and for you reconstructing the murder. But the solution is very elusive. You just can’t get an answer that feels right. And you get to look like you look now.’

Kathy smiled. ‘Go on.’

‘OK. So you put it out of your mind. You go out to the movies, or go for a run, or get drunk, or whatever. You let your brain get on with it in its own time, and you stop trying to worry the problem to death. This is stage two, the mulling stage.

‘Then, one night you wake up with a start at three o’clock in the morning with the answer staring you in the face. Or maybe it hits you in the bath, like Archimedes, or while you’re on the loo. This is the eureka stage, stage three, and it’s wonderful, pure euphoria. You can’t understand why you couldn’t see it before, it’s so obvious, and so beautiful. That’s the important thing, the answer doesn’t just work, it’s also elegant and economical and beautiful.

‘At least,’ he smiled shyly, ‘that’s how it can be, when you’re very lucky.’

Kathy nodded. ‘Brock was trying to tell me to relax this weekend and put it out of my mind. Maybe that’s what he meant. He went off gliding or something. Maybe he’s decided to move on to stage two. This isn’t another of your silly chat up lines, is it, Bob?’ she said suddenly. ‘To persuade me the only way I can progress this case is by forgetting all about it and going out and getting drunk with you or something?’

‘Good heavens.’ He looked at her, wide-eyed with innocence. ‘I never thought of that. What a brilliant idea.’

‘Anyway, you didn’t say what stage four was.’

‘Ah yes. Very important. Architects sometimes forget it. Stage four is checking that your brainwave really does work, and isn’t some seductive chimera that doesn’t quite fit.’

‘Well, look,’ Kathy said. ‘This is what we’ll do. If stage three strikes, we’ll go out and get wonderfully drunk together. A deal?’

Then she added, ‘Provided you don’t turn out to be the killer, that is.’

Bob dropped a forkful of masman curry down the front of his trousers. ‘A deal,’ he said.

Kathy insisted on saying goodnight to Bob at the restaurant, then drove back to Jerusalem Lane. The whole block was in darkness, silent. Ice crystals crackled under her feet as she walked down the deserted Lane to the incident centre. It was locked, abandoned for the night, and she used her key to open the front door, fumbling in the blackness for a light switch inside.

The sense of emptiness, of the absence of Brock and Gurney and their teams, pervaded the building, bringing back the feelings of loss and despair which she had felt at Eleanor’s funeral. Unprofessional feelings, she felt, a sign of personal involvement which was dangerous. Underlying them was the sense of the intimate presence of death, of Meredith’s death, and Eleanor’s, of the death of Jerusalem Lane, and, deeper still, of the other deaths, more distant and less easily acknowledged, of her father and her mother. She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep if she went home, so she went upstairs and turned on the heater, pulling off her hat and gloves, unwinding the scarf around her neck, and opening the front of her coat.

Slowly, with the rising temperature of the room, her mind began to focus on the case again. Her eyes travelled once more over the ugly colour photographs on the wall, the white board, the sheaves of notes and typed pages on the table.

Out of her coat pocket she pulled the Polaroid photographs she had taken at the crematorium, a dozen of them, and spread them across the table. As she’d suspected, they weren’t very clear. She recognized a few people she had noticed at the time, and saw several more she hadn’t.

Among these was a tall slender woman in a headscarf and dark glasses who might conceivably have been Judith Naismith. It occurred to Kathy that most of the potential suspects for the murder of Eleanor Harper had been at her funeral, and she recalled Martin Connell’s gibe that they were making a hash of the case. The thought of their conversation made her throat tighten and brought on the shakes again. She was shocked to find that he could still affect her this way, and she tried systematically, calmly, to trace the source of her reaction. It wasn’t just his betrayal of her over North. That had made her angry, but what she felt now wasn’t predominantly anger. It was fear. She took a deep breath and forced herself to continue the line of thought.

What is the source of the fear?