And so it was that, when Winter was finally charged at 4.20 a.m. the next day, he found—to his great surprise and the police’s—both Mr Hepple and Martin Connell waiting for him. Geraldine turned up at the court hearing in the afternoon and guaranteed his bail, which the magistrate granted despite the opposition of the police.
She had rescued him. She smiled to herself and tightened her grip around his legs, a grip which, it occurred to Terry, was a far stronger restraint than any to be found in Her Majesty’s prisons. He put out his hand and stroked her hair, hoping to placate her need for him. She snuggled against his leg and clung to him even more tightly.
It was really very difficult to believe that not so long ago he would have gone to so much trouble to get this close to her. How desirable those shoulders, that hair had seemed then! Now he saw only the lines around her eyes, and was irritated that someone in their sort of business didn’t make more of herself. It was a source of continual wonder to him how this happened, time after time, this ebb and flow of desire, from craving to indifference, so that the same woman could seem so completely irresistible one week, and so embarrassingly unappealing the next.
He looked around the cheap furniture of the motel room, lit by the table lamp, and remembered Geraldine’s miserable little flat. How threadbare it was compared to what he had left behind in Chislehurst! He had a vivid recollection of the carpet frayed by the door, the clutter of cheap plastic toys left in a corner by her two little brats, the Woolworth’s crockery, the smell of the homemade soup which always clung to the place. How would he be able to stand it?
Into his mind came a picture of a plastic bag enveloping this head upon his knee, of a hammer thudding into its skull. He shuddered and closed his eyes, and the nausea which had been with him now since the police arrived yesterday morning, returned, welling up in his stomach.
‘Darling?’ She was looking up into his face, concerned. She reached up with one hand and took his, gripping it tight. ‘Don’t worry! Everything will be all right now.’
He groaned. ‘How can you say that?’
‘Because it’s true! Look. You’ll admit the things you did to frighten your aunts. You’ll say how stupid it was, how sorry you are, but you were driven to it by your financial worries. It all got out of hand. But at least you didn’t physically hurt anyone. And you’ll make a clean breast of it with your Aunt Peg, and tell her how awful you feel and beg her forgiveness. And she will forgive you, because she’s always been fond of you. And then she’ll tell the court how she’s forgiven you, and no harm’s done, and they won’t be able to punish you. You’ve never been in trouble before.
‘As long as they don’t think you had anything to do with the death of your mother and Eleanor—and they can’t if I can tell them that you were with me at the time your mother must have died. And you know’—her voice became a whisper, intense and intimate, and her hand slipped out of his and gripped his thigh uncomfortably tight—‘you know I will say that, don’t you, darling, that I won’t mention the hour you were away . . .’
‘It was hardly an hour,’ he said weakly, ‘and it was to check the salon, you know that.’
‘Of course, but we didn’t tell them last time, so we can’t bring it up now, can we?’
He shook his head obediently. It wasn’t she who was going to suffocate; it was he, and not in the folds of a plastic bag but in the smothering embrace of her love. Perhaps after all it was inevitable. He had always felt that his freedom with women was illusory. When it came to the big decisions, it was his mother, his wife and now Geraldine who took the reins. Men, after all, were putty. A woman might leave her husband because she wanted something better, whereas a man would fool around, pathetically hoping for the best of both worlds, and finally make a move only when his wife or his mistress forced him to jump. For a short time in the inevitable transition from Caroline to Geraldine he had managed to slip the leash, to become a single man again, but he had messed it up, as he inevitably must.
Geraldine saw the worry in his eyes. Yet, terrible as this was, it would be the thing which would save them both. She would lead him out of this tragedy, and their relationship would thenceforth be unique, not the outcome of one of his affairs, but a new contract, a new bond. She would have saved him and would have put herself beyond betrayal. But first he must sink to the very bottom. Already two salons had gone, and Caroline would take as much of the rest as she could. And his experience with the police through last night and today must have been terrifying.
She had never doubted that he would come to her in the end. At first she had pretended that, like him, she wanted a casual, enjoyable affair. But her heart, frozen hard through eight bitter years of her husband’s indifference, of watching him being stolen away by another woman, of divorce, and of steeling herself to lonely independence, this heart, being melted at last by Terry’s confidence and passion, did not want a passing romance. So fast that she hardly realized it was happening, she found herself in the grip of what in her childhood her mother had described to her with dread in her voice, as a ‘grand passion’, the kind of passion that takes over your life, and, like some exotic tropical disease in the blood, never ever leaves you.
She would lead him out of his present despair, and when things had settled down she would speak to Peg, and they would agree on a way to sell the house to the developer. And then she and Terry would start again, from the bottom, building together. They might have a baby—she wasn’t too old. He would come to regard her boys as his own. And they would start a little business together. But not hairdressing. No more girls, no more temptation. He was a mess now, falling apart at the seams. But like an unruly plant which had been neglected and left to grow wild, he could be pruned and shaped and nurtured, and in a season or two he would be transformed.
Terry felt the strain across his shoulderblades. He breathed deeply, trying to relax. Perhaps, after all, she was right. Perhaps things weren’t so hopeless. He would just have to face the music over the stupid games he’d played, if they would only leave it at that. And afterwards, who knew? Geraldine’s little flat wasn’t so bad a place to shelter from the storm, and at least she was a much better cook than that bitch Caroline had ever been, for all her German kitchens. Two salons had gone, and a third on the way, but at least one of the other two might be saved, and he could build up again, learning from his past experience. In a year or two he would be back on his feet again, hiring girls. He smiled to himself. There was that pretty young black girl who had started just two weeks ago at New Cross. He’d never been to bed with a black girl.
23
The next morning Brock received a call from Judith Naismith, who wanted to meet him. He said that he and Kathy would come to her hotel room at 10. Just as they were about to leave, a transatlantic call came through.
‘It turned out our Search Committee had actually considered Judith Naismith, David, so I have some information on her.’
‘Perfect timing, Nigel. Let’s have it.’
‘She got off to a very strong start at Princeton when she arrived here, mostly developing the areas she worked on for her Cambridge doctorate—a study of nineteenth-century women who had contributed to the development of economic theory. Her first five years—that’s ’77 to ’82—she had a dozen strong papers published in refereed journals, about the same number of conference papers, and a book. She was highly regarded, went on tenure track in ’80 and got tenure in ’83. Then things started to dry up. There’s been very little publication since, and the word is she’s lost her way. The advice of referees to our committee was that she was living on that early reputation. There was also a bit of scandal a couple of years ago about an affair with a student who took an overdose.
‘So, one way or another our people decided not to take it any further. I understand, though, that she has recently been applying for big funding from foundations—well, big for historians, anyway, six figures—but I don’t know what for exactly. So maybe she has some new project on the
blocks. That’s about it.’
‘That’s terrific, Nigel. Most obliged. Fills us in nicely.’
‘Oh, by the way, that student who OD’d was a girl.’
Judith seemed slightly flustered when she opened the door to them. ‘You’re early,’ she said. The bed was unmade and articles of clothing scattered across the floor. ‘Would you mind sitting over there by the window? I’ll be a sec.’
They sat together on a grey settee and looked at the tastefully vapid lithographs in gold frames bolted to the wall, while Judith rapidly swept some order into the other end of the room. Finally she came over and sat in an armchair facing them. She crossed her legs, lit a cigarette, and took a deep breath.
‘This is very difficult for me,’ she began.
‘I understand,’ Brock said. ‘You’ve talked things over with your friend?’
‘No. It’s not that.’ She frowned and flicked the ashless cigarette impatiently in the direction of the glass table. ‘You probably passed her in the corridor just now.’ She shrugged. ‘She was splitting up with her husband, anyway.
‘Look, supposing . . . supposing you had some case where there were industrial secrets involved. Something like that. You could understand, couldn’t you, how difficult it might be for someone involved to talk about it, without giving out information that might find its way to a competitor?
‘In a way, for me, source materials are a bit like that. I know a professor over here, an economic historian, who was walking home one afternoon thirty years ago, and he passed a site in South London where they were demolishing old buildings. He noticed a pile of old books scattered about on the floor of a half-demolished building and went in to investigate. They turned out to be the complete account books for the building company which had had its offices there for an unbroken period of a hundred and ten years. That find totally changed his life.’
She stared intently at them, willing them to understand.
‘His whole subsequent academic reputation and career grew out of his work on the nineteenth-century economy of South London based on the interpretations and computer analyses of the figures contained in those ledgers. They were his private gold mine, which he spent the rest of his life excavating. If somebody else had noticed them first, and another historian had got hold of them, he might now be just another embittered lecturer in a minor department, instead of the internationally revered father of studies in the economy of Victorian cities.’
‘And you’ve found something similar here?’ Brock asked.
‘Maybe. I’m not sure. If . . . if I tell you about it, is there any way I can guarantee it won’t get passed on . . .?’
‘To one of your academic competitors? Dr Naismith, if your information is relevant to this murder investigation, there’s no way you are going to be able to keep it to yourself.’
She nodded, took another shallow drag on the cigarette and flicked it.
‘It began with that letter that Bob Jones found.’
‘We were beginning to doubt its existence when it couldn’t be found in his flat.’
‘Oh, it existed, all right. I saw it. The mystifying thing is what it was doing there. You have to understand that when Marx died, all his papers and books were gathered together, and carefully preserved. They called the complete collection the Nachlass— you know, the Estate, almost like the shroud, or the grail, or the true cross or whatever. It was in the care of Engels at first, who continued working on his friend’s papers and preparing the second and third volumes of Das Kapital for publication in the period up until he died in 1895, twelve years after Marx. Now Engels gathered together the correspondence he had had with Marx over forty years, and, so we’re told, preserved all but a few excessively intimate letters from his friend. They take up nine volumes, each about four or five hundred pages, in the collected edition of Marx and Engels’ works.
‘How then had this one solitary letter gone astray? And was it in fact solitary? At first I thought it an amusing puzzle, but when we met Meredith and she showed me the books in Eleanor’s bookcase, I began to take it seriously. There were maybe ten or a dozen books that really interested me—I could give you most of their titles. The thing about them was that they all seemed to have belonged to Eleanor Marx, the youngest of Marx’s children, and his favourite. I am very interested in her. She was a significant figure in the development of socialism at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as being important for the work she did on her father’s manuscripts. Some of the books were hers, inscribed with her name, and some had been given her by her father with handwritten dedications from him to “Tussy”, the pet name he gave her.
‘I was intrigued by how these could have come into the possession of Eleanor Harper, who not only had the same first name as Eleanor Marx, and actually looked rather like her, but also had a picture of Eleanor Marx hanging in her living room.’
‘Her great-aunt,’ Kathy said.
‘That’s right. It took me some time to work it out, because the connection wasn’t through any of Marx’s six legitimate children. But in 1850 the Marxes’ maid, Héléne Demuth, whom they called “Lenchen”, or sometimes “Nimm”, had a baby boy, Frederick Demuth, who was assumed at the time to be Friedrich Engels’ illegitimate son.’
‘Yes, he was born in Jerusalem Lane,’ Kathy said, recalling the account which Mr Hepple the solicitor had given of the history of the Lane.
Judith Naismith stared at her, astounded, ‘You know, then?’
‘Not everything,’ Brock interjected. ‘Please, go on.’
‘Well, the baby wasn’t brought up in the Marx household, and he became a manual labourer when he grew up. But just before Engels died, he revealed that Marx had been the father of the child, not himself. Eleanor was shocked that her beloved father could have first deceived her mother and then abandoned the child, but she got over it and became quite attached to her half-brother, and helped him in various ways before she died in 1898.
‘The year before that, Frederick Demuth married a young woman, Rebecca Jacobs, who was a friend and acolyte of Eleanor’s. They had a daughter, Mary, who married one George Harper, and they had three daughters, Meredith, Eleanor and Peg.’
‘So they were the great-granddaughters of Karl Marx,’ Kathy said.
‘Yes. Even so, it was puzzling that they should have inherited books and papers from Eleanor Marx. She didn’t have any children of her own, but still, there were others to whom she would have been more likely to have given things like that than to the labourer Frederick—her sister Laura, for instance. It was the other papers which Meredith gave me that made me begin to suspect the reason.’
Judith got abruptly to her feet and lit another cigarette. She strode over to the window and stood for a moment, arms folded, exhaling smoke. They waited, and after a while she said, without looking back, ‘Would you like a coffee or something? I wouldn’t mind one. There’s a kettle and cups over there.’
She made no move, and Kathy said to Brock, ‘Shall I?’
‘Would you mind, love?’ Judith said from the window, still not turning round.
Kathy glared at her back and got up. No one spoke until she returned to the glass table with three cups of black coffee, together with some small tubs of long-life milk and packets of sugar. Judith then sat down again and continued her account.
‘One of the pieces of paper Meredith gave me was another letter, this time from Engels to Marx, and dated a couple of years after the first one. The thing it had in common with the first was that it also mentioned the fourth and final volume of Das Kapital, and referred to it as das Endziel, that is, the final “aim” or “goal”. I thought at first that this was a term which Engels was using to describe the last volume. I couldn’t recall the word being used before at all. But then I looked at the second piece of paper that Meredith had given me. It was a page of a manuscript handwritten in Marx’s usual chaotic script, with corrections and insertions, like the draft of an essay. Written across the top, in a different
script which I later identified as Tussy’s, was a message which read, “To my dearest Rebecca, this is our true Endziel. Treasure it. E.M.”
‘It was dated 31 March 1898—the day Tussy died.’
Kathy and Brock waited, still uncertain where all this was leading, while she lit another cigarette from the stub of the last.
‘You have to understand the circumstances then,’ Judith went on. ‘When Marx died, there was great concern and rivalry between the various socialist factions about his Nachlass, so much so that the German Social Democratic Party actually planted first a housekeeper, Louise Kautsky, and then a doctor, Ludwig Freyberger, in Engels’ household in order to make sure that when Engels died, everything would come to the German Party. The year before he died, Eleanor discovered that they had persuaded him to change his will so that the German Party would inherit all his books, manuscripts and letters, including all of Marx’s own books which Eleanor had given to Engels when her father died to help him with his work. Tussy was furious and had a terrible row with him, which eventually came to a head on Christmas Day 1894, when Engels promised to leave manuscripts in Marx’s handwriting to her, along with family letters.
‘But Tussy was still terrified that the Freybergers—the two spies had married by this stage—would persuade him to change his mind, or would appropriate manuscripts in his possession. They tried to prevent her having access to Engels’ house, and her suspicions were further heightened when there was an announcement in the paper of the German Party, Vorwärts, that volume four of Das Kapital, which she was actually working on, would not be issued. She even begged Engels to allow her to copy her father’s rough draft of volume four herself, or with her sister Laura, in order that it not be lost before she had completed the task of preparing it for a publisher.
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