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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 thealterations 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 shemight 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