The Marx Sisters: A Kathy and Brock Mystery by Barry Maitland

Author:Barry Maitland [Maitland, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781559704748
Amazon: 1559704748
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 1999-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

17

Kathy had a disturbed night. Vague and uneasy images haunted her shallow sleep, and in the waking intervals her brain kept returning to insignificant incidents of her past work which now seemed ominous and foreboding. When the alarm clock beside her bed showed five o’clock, she was glad to abandon the attempt to sleep further and got up. With the lights on and a mug of hot tea beside her bed, the sense of unease evaporated. Brock had warned her that the incident room set up at Jerusalem Lane was cold, so she pulled on layers of warm clothing, relishing the prospect of returning to the place which she had not been able to forget during the six months since Meredith Winterbottom’s death.

She broke her tube journey to call in at ED Division, where she left some messages and picked up her files on the abortive Winterbottom investigation of the previous September. She skimmed through these, as she waited for the tube to Jerusalem Lane.

When she arrived, she found the main Underground exit sealed off. It was only when she reached street level through the alternative exit on to Welbeck Street that she realized why. Looking across at the near corner of the Jerusalem Lane block, she saw in the dawn light that the tube station and its surrounding buildings no longer existed. She felt a jolt of shock, like the survivor of a night air-raid returning to the surface and discovering a ruined and alien wasteland where the day before had been the intimately familiar landscape of home. A smell of burning hung over the place. Irrationally, she wondered if the man who had been protecting his newspapers with plastic sheeting on that corner had survived, and then noticed him further along on her side of the street.

Crossing over, she came to the north end of Jerusalem Lane and saw through a high chain-link fence that almost the whole of that half of the block lying on the east side of the Lane had gone. Witz’s Cameras and Kowalski’s Bookshop, Dr Botev’s surgery, Brunhilde Capek’s flower shop—all had gone. Only the synagogue, its north wall raw and exposed by the surrounding demolition, remained at the far end of a huge hole which dropped away beyond her feet. From the darkness of its depths, where unfamiliar frameworks of scaffolding were already climbing up towards the surface, came flashes of blinding white light, the whine and growl of machinery, and the clanking of metal-tracked vehicles, as if the panzers of an invading force were rousing themselves for another day of action.

At first sight the west side of the Lane appeared intact, but as Kathy walked down towards the south end she saw that most of the doorways and windows were boarded up against the entry of vandals. The doors to the office of Hepple, Tyas & Turton and the flat of Sylvia Pemberton had four-by-twos nailed across their frames, and the windows of the Balaton Café and Böll’s Coffee and Chocolates

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