The Marx Sisters (5 page)

‘This lack of attention from developers was due not to its location or potential, you understand, but rather to the confusing complexity and multiplicity of freeholds, lease-holds and tenancies which established themselves within the block, and which frustrated the most determined attempts to replace the warren of small buildings with something more coherent and profitable. There is that one row on the west side of the block, where an Edwardian developer managed to buy up about half of the street frontage and build that rather flamboyant red brick and stone trimmed office building seven storeys tall (thanks to the recent introduction of Mr Otis’s patent safety lifts), but
the rest of the block remained as we see it, a jumble of fragmented ownerships, uses, floor levels and building forms.

‘Now’—Mr Hepple leaned forward over the desk and looked intently at them, as if he was getting to the point of his story—‘because of this, rents in Jerusalem Lane have remained low throughout its history, and within a generation of its construction it had established itself as a small haven for poor newcomers to the city, and in particular immigrants and refugees from Europe. The first such wave was of Russian Jews, fleeing the pogroms of the 1830s, and we can still see the traces of their early occupation of the area in the synagogue at the south end of the Lane, opposite Mrs Winterbottom’s house, and by the name of the public house,
The Wandering Jew
, across the road in the next block to the north, and of course by the name of Jerusalem Lane itself.

‘After the disturbances in the year of revolutions, 1848, political refugees from Germany, France and half a dozen other European countries found their way to the Lane. Did you by any chance notice the engraving over there by the door?’

‘I did,’ Brock said. ‘It looks like a Doré.’

‘Quite right, Chief Inspector! It is one of Gustave Doré’s scenes of Victorian London, and it is actually a view of Jerusalem Lane as it was in the decades after that influx of refugees from the continent.’

Brock and Kathy got up and had a look at the drawing hanging in its black and gold frame. It showed a narrow street teeming with hawkers, beggars, handcarts and ragged children.

‘Among those refugees, and the most famous of our former residents, was Karl Marx, who lived for most of 1850 with his family in the house of a Jewish lace dealer at number 3 Jerusalem Lane, which most recently has been Adam Kowalski’s home and bookshop. You can see a plaque, mounted in the wall outside the shop a few years
ago to record the fact that the Marxes lived there.’ Mr Hepple chuckled and a twinkle came into his eye. ‘It was not a period which the Marx family was to look back on with much nostalgia. They lived in great poverty in two rooms on the second floor, one of which was shared by the whole family: Karl, his pregnant wife Jenny, their three small children, and their maid. The other room was used by Karl alone as his study, chaotically untidy and invariably filled with a fog of tobacco smoke so thick that it stung the eyes of anyone who ventured in. There he worked late into the night on his researches into British capitalism and composing his
Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League
.’

Mr Hepple beamed as he showed off his knowledge. He paused to gulp down some more coffee, and Kathy, seeing that Brock was showing no sign of wanting to interrupt him, made to speak. Hepple sensed this, however, and got in first.

‘Cramped, cold and spartan as their accommodation was, it at least had the advantage of being only a short walk to the British Museum, for which Marx gained a reader’s ticket in the June of that year, and where he spent the next three months immersed in back numbers of the
Economist
. Soon after they moved into Jerusalem Lane, Jenny became ill and, fearful of losing her as they had lost their fourth child not long before, Karl sent her to stay with friends for over a month. It was during this period that the maid became mysteriously pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy towards the end of that year. Soon after, around Christmas time, the family was evicted for not paying their rent, and, with the help of Marx’s friend Engels, moved on, firstly to lodgings in Soho, and later, when they inherited money, out to the new suburbs of Kentish Town and Hampstead.

‘A hundred years later, in the period after the Second World War, Jerusalem Lane was largely unchanged, and was still providing shelter to refugees from European upheavals,
as waves of Latvians, East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and Poles made their way westward. For most it was, as for the Marxes, a temporary stage on their route to prosperity in the suburbs of the Home Counties, but others stayed, setting up small businesses in the buildings which had once housed the Russian-Jewish clog maker, butcher and lace trader. The key to the success of these small businesses (and I would count my father’s practice among them) was Jerusalem Lane itself, which provided a short cut for people travelling from the tube station at its north end to the northern parts of Holborn and to the hospital of Great Ormond Street. Each day the ebb and flow of these travellers have irrigated the cash registers of Witz’s Cameras, Kowalski’s Old and New Books, Brunhilde’s Flower Shop and all the rest, while the Balaton Café and Böll’s Coffee and Chocolates have tempted people to linger before moving on to the noise and traffic of the surrounding streets, where a somewhat greyer style of trading—office supplies, photocopy services and travel agencies—has taken over.

‘However, none of the children of these refugees of the 40s and 50s have remained in the Lane; they have moved out to the suburbs, returning occasionally to visit their now ageing parents, still living above the shop, still without cars (for there is nowhere to put them), and still performing their good-natured, if sometimes fiery and increasingly eccentric, revue of Central European politics of a generation ago.’

Brock roused himself. ‘Mrs Winterbottom had children?’

‘A son, yes.’ But Mr Hepple hadn’t quite finished the broad picture. ‘The Winterbottoms didn’t really fit this pattern. They weren’t refugees, unless from Australia,’ and he gave a self-deprecating little laugh to avoid the possibility of offence. ‘They weren’t Central Europeans or Jews. They were simply Londoners returning almost by accident to this area. But they became, and Meredith especially, the linchpins of the place.’

‘I met the son yesterday evening, sir,’ Kathy said. ‘Terry Winter. Lives in South London. Eleanor phoned him and he came to the house.’

‘Winter?’ Brock queried.

‘Yes, he was particular about that.’

‘He dropped the “bottom”,’ the solicitor interjected, anxious to resume his role as principal storyteller. ‘Meredith was rather annoyed when he did it. Quite disgusted in fact. I rather gathered it was his wife who was behind it, so to speak.’ They all showed their appreciation of his little joke.

‘No other children, then?’ Brock asked.

The solicitor shook his head.

‘And the sisters? How do they go in ages?’

‘Now, let me see. Meredith was the oldest certainly, and would have been in her mid-seventies. Peg was next and Eleanor youngest. There are only a couple of years between each of them, so Eleanor must be sixty-nine or seventy, although I must say she doesn’t look it, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Have they all been living there since 1967?’

‘No, no. In those days Peg was a buyer for one of the big department stores—I’m not sure which one—and Eleanor was an assistant librarian at the British Museum. They were both single ladies, and had their own flats somewhere.’

‘Wasn’t Peg married?’ Kathy asked.

‘Only briefly. She was widowed before Meredith and Frank returned to England.’

‘So, they came back.’

‘Yes, and lived together at number 22 for ten or twelve years. In those days it was an ironmonger who rented the ground-floor shop. Terry only lived with them for a year or so, because he was nineteen or twenty at that stage and went off to technical college or something, and got a place of his own.

‘Then Frank died. Cancer of the bowel. That would have been about ten years ago. By this stage Peg had retired, and Eleanor was coming up to it as well, and so Meredith had the
alterations done to the top floor and made them their own flats for them to come and live at 22 with her. I must say that I was very doubtful about it. They’re so different the three of them, I thought they’d never get on living together.’

‘In what ways different?’

‘Well, in every way. Their personalities, their tastes, and above all in their politics.’

‘Politics?’

‘Oh dear me yes. Meredith, well she didn’t really have any politics; I mean she might have voted Tory, but there again it might have been Liberal or Labour if it suited. She was a business woman, like Frank. They rented the newsagent’s on the corner next door—what’s now Stwosz’s—just for something to occupy Frank when he wasn’t doing business with his stockbroker. And they made a real go of it, too. Special pipe tobaccos and cigars ordered for individual customers, special deliveries of the foreign financial papers to the offices around here, you know. They were really entrepreneurs—what the other two sisters would call
petite bourgeoisie
, I dare say.’

‘They were of a pinker persuasion, I take it?’ Brock said.

‘Pink? Oh dear me no. Red! And very red at that. Eleanor is what she calls a “scientific socialist”, which I think is some form of extreme Marxist, and Peg is a Stalinist.’

‘Stalinist?’ Brock and Kathy gaped at the solicitor, trying to reconcile this information with the vision of the Queen Mother they had met at number 22.

‘Indeed!’ Mr Hepple beamed, delighted at the effect of this titbit. ‘Staunch member of the Party. Used to go every summer to East Germany and other delightful parts of the workers’ paradise, at the invitation of the comrades. And still believes in it all. Quite unyielding. She was telling me only the other day. “They’ve lost all sense of discipline,” she said. “You’ll see what a mess there’ll be now they’ve abandoned the Party.” And I said, “You must be the very last Stalinist left in Europe,” and she said yes, she thought she
might donate her body to the British Museum to be stuffed and displayed as the last member of an extinct species, when they decided to do away with her.’

The smile slowly faded from his chubby pink cheeks as he registered his own words. ‘Oh dear,’ he murmured, ‘oh dear, oh dear.’

‘Mr Hepple,’ Brock said, taking advantage of his moment of confusion, ‘I wonder if you would be able to help us in the matter of Mrs Winterbottom’s will.’

‘Well, I am her sole executor, so I don’t see why not, under the circumstances. She made it out some time ago, but I can recall the gist.’

‘She didn’t alter it recently, or talk of doing so?’

‘No, no. In fact I hadn’t really seen her for a while. As I say, I don’t get up here so often now. The main beneficiary of Mrs Winterbottom is her son, with small legacies for his two daughters—some pieces of jewellery and a little cash. Unless her circumstances changed substantially in the last year or so, her estate really amounts to some shares and other savings left by her husband, which she had been gradually eating into for her income over the past ten years, together with the property, number 22. However, she had me establish a trust to administer the property after her death for the period that either or both of her sisters survive her, to allow them to continue to remain there for as long as they wished, rent-free. Once they leave or pass away, the property reverts unobstructed to the son.’

‘Could he challenge that?’ Kathy asked.

The solicitor examined his fingernails. ‘No, I think that’s unlikely.’ From his tone Kathy felt he had considered this possibility quite carefully. She suddenly wondered if he was more devious than he looked.

‘And is he aware of the terms of his mother’s will?’ she asked.

‘I believe so,’ he said vaguely, then suddenly looked worried. ‘You’re surely not suggesting . . .’

‘These are just standard lines of inquiry in these sorts of circumstances, Mr Hepple,’ Brock said soothingly. ‘I’m sure you understand.’

‘I see.’ He still looked worried. ‘I must say my familiarity with murder investigations is somewhat limited. The last time I came up against such a thing was many years ago. A client in Southwark, I believe . . .’

‘We’d best be getting along, sir,’ Kathy broke in hurriedly, and rose to her feet.

‘Of course, quite so.’ The solicitor got up and hurried round his desk to show them out, making a particular point of shaking Brock’s hand. ‘If there’s anything you want to know about the people around here, Miss Pemberton is the person to speak to. She’s been living here for some years now, and she does the books and VAT returns for quite a few of them. We shall be very sorry to part company with her.’

‘She’s leaving?’

‘Well, we both are in point of fact.’ He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands in regret. ‘We do so little business here,’ he said, lowering his voice to a discreet whisper. ‘It really doesn’t make much sense—hasn’t for several years now. So we’re selling the property, and Miss Pemberton has her own plans to retire.’

From the car phone they arranged to interview Meredith Winterbottom’s son at his home later that afternoon. Kathy had to return to her divisional headquarters near by, where an incident room had been set up in an office adjoining her own, to check on the progress of the three other detectives who had been working their way round the neighbourhood that morning, interviewing potential witnesses. As she was about to leave, she hesitated a moment and then turned to Brock.

‘Sir, do you think I might be able to knock off by 7 tonight? I was at it till fairly late last night, and I sort of had something arranged for this evening. Of course, if you feel it’s important . . .’

‘Not at all,’ Brock replied genially. ‘We should have done for the day well before then. And, anyway, it’s your case. We’ll do as you say.’

As she left, she thought uneasily that this certainly wasn’t the Chief Inspector Brock she’d heard about.
Maybe he’s getting soft
, she thought.
Or maybe he’s like this until you make your first mistake
.