Barry Maitland: The Marx Sisters

It was his manipulation of her which made her afraid.

Why does that make me afraid?

And so she continued, an interior, silent interrogation, knowing always where it must lead, and pressing on until she had admitted the answer to herself, as she had been taught she should. For within Kathy there still lived a young girl, unresolved, unassimilated, misused, still haunted by a dark figure, a man as powerful, as cold, as manipulative as Martin Connell. And the fear was not just the fear of him, but also of the possibility of her own failure to survive without him.

On the other hand, she thought as she shook herself, shivering from head to toe, Martin may just have wanted to warn me that we are making a mistake. It was an unsettling thought. And unsettling that it was so difficult to think straight where he was concerned.

She picked out the figure of Danny Finn in one of the photographs, and returned to the question that must have passed momentarily through the minds of everyone at the funeral. What treasures was Peg burying along with her sister’s ashes? What would fill an oak box two feet by two feet by one foot six? What did a scientific socialist want to take with her to the other side? Her childhood teddy bears? Her postcards of Moscow? Or the manuscript of the genuine fourth volume of Das Capital? But why would she do that? ‘Look what I’ve brought for you, Great-grandad. We kept it safe for you all those years.’

But perhaps it didn’t really matter what was in the box. What mattered was what someone who had murdered once, or even twice, for the Endziel might imagine was there. And perhaps it was a message from Peg to that person, an irresistible message, that she was getting rid of the thing they were after, and they must now leave her alone. And if that were the case, tonight would be the only opportunity for that person to retrieve it before it disappeared beneath twenty-five storeys of concrete office block.

She didn’t really believe it. But there was nevertheless a reason why she must act upon it, as an act of good faith with herself that, despite the fact that Winter had Martin as his solicitor, she would still pursue any reasonable possibility that he was innocent, and that someone else was responsible for Eleanor’s death.

She sighed, hesitated for a moment over whether to have a mug of coffee before deciding against it. She buttoned up her coat again and went downstairs. In the general office she found a heavy torch which she stuffed into a pocket of her coat before locking up the building and stepping out into the cold darkness.

She first walked north up the Lane to the spot where the Kowalskis’ bookshop had been, with its plaque commemorating its famous former resident. Here she found a viewing hole in the plywood panels that screened the site. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she was able to make out a tower crane rising on the far side of the site, and a light in the street beyond it. As a double check she counted the number of viewing holes along from the corner at the top of Jerusalem Lane, so that she could count back from the other side of the hoarding to establish this spot.

There was no break in the screens, and, short of trying to climb over them, she could see no way into the site from here. She walked down to the south end of the Lane, where the synagogue was now almost entirely demolished, and where a site entrance for vehicles opened on to Marquis Street. Lights which had been rigged up on poles overhead formed a pool of brilliance in the surrounding darkness. The chain-link gates were secured by a large padlock, and a printed sign warned that the site was patrolled by guard dogs and security personnel.

She returned to have another look at what was left of the synagogue. In one corner she recognized the battered remains of Sam’s cardboard box. Her eyes were again adjusting to the dark after the lights of the entrance gates, and she could make out the name of the German dishwasher manufacturer on its side. She checked to make sure it was no longer inhabited. Behind the box the demolition team had fixed up a temporary site fence using chain-link panels attached to a timber framework with loops of twisted wire. Kathy untwisted two of the loops and eased the panels apart. She slipped through and reattached the wire loosely. It was only when she had done all this and felt her fingers numb with cold that she realized that she had left her gloves behind in Brock’s office. She swore and hesitated for a moment, then turned and moved on into the site.

She passed slowly through a forest of scaffolding poles decorated with icy stalactites, and had to take her hands out of her pockets in order not to slide on the furrows of ice which traced the vehicle tracks across the frozen ground. On the other side she found a path of scaffolding boards which appeared to follow the site boundary northward towards the area she wanted. After twenty metres or so she felt a springiness in the boards beneath her feet and guessed that she had left the ground, but it was only when she stopped and stared into the darkness beyond the scaffold rail and made out the dim outline of a dumper truck a long way below her that she realized that she was now five or six storeys in the air above the excavated pit.

Her fingers were aching with cold now, but she had to keep reaching to the freezing steel scaffolding tubes to steady herself on the treacherously slippery boards, upon which her shoes seemed to have very little grip. Over to her right she could make out the silhouette of the tower crane and the street light gradually shifting position behind it as she worked her way closer to the spot, until at last they seemed to be aligned pretty much as she had seen them from the other side of the screen.

She stopped and breathed deeply, lifting her painfully stiff hands to her mouth and blowing into them, willing her pounding heart to slow down. The walk across the icy scaffolding in the dark had been much more difficult than she had anticipated, her eyes and hands and feet straining to pick up every subtle, threatening shift in the shades of darkness all around. Now she just stood still and listened, letting the adrenalin subside, her frozen hands thrust under her armpits.

Silence. So far so good. Now what?

Somewhere on the ground below was the place where the box would have been left, but it was clear that she was too high up to see anything down there. Further along she saw the top of a wooden ladder projecting above the edge of the scaffold platform. She shivered and began to move carefully towards it. Crouching down, with her left arm hooked around the scaffolding rail, she swung herself under it and round on to the ladder, her right foot making contact with one of its rungs as her right hand grabbed its side. As she shifted her weight over so as to move her left foot and hand across, the right foot abruptly slipped off its perch. With a shock that jarred her whole body it slammed down on to the rung below, slipped again and then caught on the one below that.

She found herself muttering, choking, ‘Dear God, dear God,’ over and over through chattering teeth as she clung to the ladder, recovering her grip. Then, finding that her arms and legs were aching with the tension of her rigid hold, she eased one foot out, and with infinite care began a slow descent. She reached the next scaffolding platform but kept on going down, step by painful step, clinging to the ladder, her cheek brushing each icy metal rung, until she reached its foot on a third level below. Rolling on to the safety of the boards she crept back from the edge, breathing hard. Her arms and legs were trembling with the effort and her heart was in overdrive again.

After a while she stood up, walked gingerly back to the rail and looked down. Clearer, but not clear enough. She could make out a white form in the centre of a dark hollow below her, surrounded by a grid of grey lines.