The Distant Dead

by Lesley Thomson

  the

  distant dead

  STELLA DARNELL runs a successful cleaning company in west London. Her father was a senior detective in the Metropolitan police. Like him, Stella roots into shadowy places and restores order.

  JACK HARMON works the night shifts as a London Underground train driver. Where Stella is rational and practical, Jack is governed by intuition. Their different skills make them a successful detective partnership.

  By Lesley Thomson

  Seven Miles from Sydney

  A Kind of Vanishing

  Death of a Mermaid

  The Detective’s Daughter Series

  The Detective’s Daughter

  Ghost Girl

  The Detective’s Secret

  The House With No Rooms

  The Dog Walker

  The Death Chamber

  The Playground Murders

  The Runaway (A Detective’s Daughter Short Story)

  Lesley

  THOMSON

  the

  distant dead

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Lesley Thomson, 2021

  The moral right of Lesley Thomson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Map reprinted from The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bell’s Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury, by H. J. L. J. Massé (EBook #22260)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781788549752

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781788549769

  ISBN (E): 9781788549745

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  For Melanie, always

  Contents

  By Lesley Thomson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  PART ONE

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  PART TWO

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Map

  PART ONE

  Prologue

  Thursday, 12 December 1940

  It used to be that a clear night with stars and a full moon spelled romance and love. Now, with the end of the longest period of all-clears since intensified raids began, the cloudless sky spelled death.

  In the small hours, the sky billowed with smoke from fires caused by incendiaries that pulverized pavements, destroyed homes, eviscerated lives.

  Etched against the smog, in a street near the River Thames, blacked-out windows offered blank countenances, their occupants crouched in shelters, cellars and under kitchen tables. The tide had turned and the river welled over the camber near the eyot. In the moonlight the flotsam of bottles and lengths of scorched timber resembled severed limbs.

  A man and a woman, clinging close, wove along Eyot Gardens. The woman flinched at a crash which sounded nearby but was miles to the east. In trilby and mac, the man was her hero as he hustled her into a house on the corner by the Thames. Inside, he kicked shut the front door and when he flicked an electric light switch, a glass chandelier, at variance with a suburban villa, flooded the herringbone-tiled hall in remorseless light. Clasping his lover’s chin with an elegant hand, his whisper might have been ‘I love you’. Or it might not.

  Hours passed. Fog rolled in, slick and poisonous, shrouding the river. Yet, obscuring London from the Luftwaffe, it was the city’s friend. The roar of engines and the thunder of explosions ceased as planes returned to Germany. Destruction done, they dropped the last of their payload over Sussex before they crossed the English Channel.

  A scream, elemental, animalistic. Silence. No doors were opened, no sashes were flung up. If walls had ears, they did not hear.

  Chapter One

  December 2019

  Jackie

  ‘Clean Slate for a fresh start, Beverly speaking, how may I help you?’ Beverly Jameson, blonde hair streaked with silver and a diamanté-beaded scrunchie snatching it high up in a palm-tree effect, a short skirt over leggings and cherry blossom Dr Martens, rocked back in her chair, pen aloft.

  Jackie felt satisfaction at Bev’s opener. It was a good while – eight years? – since she’d weaned Bev off her dreadful sing-song rap to answer in lovely warm tones. Not that it was genuine, with Stella no longer there; neither of them felt as cheerful as Bev was sounding. In the mornings, it was all Jackie could do to get out of bed.

  ‘Hello? Clean Slate, Bev here… Hello? Look, is someone there?’ The tone was cooling. ‘Please speak?’ Bev put down the receiver. ‘That’s got to be the sixth time this week. I should have kept a record. Thursday morning, ten past nine. Right,’ she flung down her pens and addressed the phone, ‘whoever you are, bring it on.’

  ‘Could be a wrong number,’ Jackie said.

  ‘I swear someone’s there. He listens and doesn’t speak.’

  ‘You think it’s a man?’ Jackie was completing a contract on a bi-weekly clean of a church hall. Usually by the start of December her in-tray was groaning with new business, people wanting super-clean homes for Christmas, but at this rate they’d be letting go of those cleaners who hadn’t already migrated to a more successful company. Jackie dreaded the possibility she might have to give the l
oyal old-timers, Wendy and Donnette who’d been at school with Stella, their cards. Once, good operatives were hens’ teeth, now Clean Slate had teams to spare, but no work for them.

  ‘Has to be a man. What woman would do…’ Beverly jerked her shoulders in an exaggerated shudder. ‘Creeps me out.’

  ‘Could be a mystery shopper.’ Jackie couldn’t bear this idea. The vultures were circling. It was, however, a distraction from her constant fretting about Stella. If Clean Slate didn’t need cleaners, they wouldn’t need office staff. Suzy, Stella’s mum, was in Sydney visiting her son, but she could update the customer database from there and anyway she’d stopped drawing a salary. Of all of them Suzy was the least worried. Just like her father leaving the baby for others to hold, Stella will sort herself out and be back. Jackie could manage, she and Graham had savings and were mortgage free. Bev and her wife had just bought a flat in Richmond, so if Jackie had to let her go…

  ‘If it was mystery shopping, he’d probe us about our services and waste time so we couldn’t bring in real new business.’ Bev was grim-faced. ‘I’ve got a nasty feeling it’s some weirdo after Stella. But why now? She hasn’t done any interviews.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not.’ Jackie felt queasy. More than once she’d encouraged Stella to do an interview with reporter Lucie May for the local paper. The detective’s daughter who cleaned for a living had, after her father’s death, solved several murders. In the past, publicity had drummed up new customers for Clean Slate. But a recent article had also drummed up admirers who, seeing Stella’s photograph in the paper, wanted her to do more for them than clean. Jackie sought to reassure Bev – and herself – about the anonymous caller.

  ‘At least he won’t find Stella in Tewkesbury.’

  Chapter Two

  December 2019

  Stella

  Stella Darnell loved cleaning, to make surfaces shine and retore order from chaos. Deep cleaning was her passion, but it wasn’t allowed in the abbey. The handout from the Churches Conservation Trust said to ignore your usual standards, a church will never be free of dust or cobwebs. No aggressive cleaning products like furniture cream or silicone polish, the favoured weapons in Stella’s usual armoury. The handout said to clean ‘gently and sympathetically’. After several shifts in Tewkesbury Abbey, Stella found this worked for her too. She loved her mornings being sympathetic with the tombs.

  ‘That’s a warning to the living.’ A man was leaning against the portico to the south ambulatory. ‘To remember the grisly gruesome aspect of death. It’s not all angels and lambs.’

  Taken by surprise, Stella dropped the dusting brush.

  ‘What is?’ She scrabbled for the brush on the stone floor of the side chapel.

  ‘What you’re cleaning, it’s a cadaver tomb.’ Arms folded, the man smiled. ‘Christ, have you got to clean the whole abbey with a small brush?’

  ‘Only the carvings, otherwise I’ve got a larger one.’ Stella flicked the sable into the crevice between the upturned feet of the figure lying on the tomb.

  ‘They were a macabre thing in medieval times. You’re cleaning vermin which feast on the rotting corpse. See, there’s a mouse, that’s a toad.’ He took a step closer. ‘Fascinating. Those indentations were scored by early visitors to the abbey leaving their mark. These days they have historic value.’

  He was too close. Security patrolled regularly; ten minutes earlier one had pointed out Stanley lifting his leg against a pillar by the nave. Stella had mopped it up.

  ‘There are about fifty cadaver tombs in churches in Britain. I mean, they had a right to be obsessed with death, there were many visitations of pestilence in the last part of the fourteenth century.’ He came over and rested his arms on the recumbent figure. ‘This one is the starved monk, aka the Wakeman Cenotaph. Not that Wakeman himself is interred here.’

  Stella shot a glance at Stanley. Dogs were for protection, but her miscreant poodle had twisted round and was preening his tail.

  ‘Seriously, though, you do this every morning?’ The man was grinning. ‘One hell of a gig!’

  ‘No, this week I’m cleaning here in the Wakeman Cenotaph at the end of the North Ambulatory, we have a rota—’ Stella stopped. There had been several recent muggings: a handbag snatch in the presbytery, a verger attacked by a gang in balaclavas, his arm broken and his watch stolen. If this man was checking out Tewkesbury Abbey, he’d start by buttering up one of the cleaners. ‘The abbey is closed. How come you’re here?’

  ‘In my job it’s my business to flout rules, that’s how you learn stuff.’ He moved towards Stanley, presumably thinking fussing her dog was the way in. Stanley whipped around, panting from his preening, and bared his teeth.

  ‘That’s a warning to the living,’ Stella said. The Ralph Lauren combat jacket, hair escaping from under a black beanie and glasses stamped with Armani didn’t fit a mugger, unless he was wearing what he’d nicked. He was late forties, surely too old for mugging. Except Stella’s inner policeman’s daughter voice proclaimed that rubbish. Anyone could mug anyone.

  ‘Never approach a dog unawares.’ The man was holding out a hand for her to shake. ‘Roddy March. Of course.’

  Of course? Stella laid her brush on the ribcage of the starved monk and made a quick decision: ‘I’m Beverly.’

  ‘Beverly? I thought—’ March appeared wrong-footed.

  ‘I have to get on.’ Stella withdrew her hand and swished the brush over the monk’s protruding bones. March was likely a harmless geek who toured churches collecting weird facts, but her three mornings cleaning the abbey had become precious and Stella wanted to clean alone.

  ‘I’m a podcaster,’ March said.

  ‘Oh, right.’ Stella felt that in this conversation – which she didn’t want – she had nothing to say; she never listened to podcasts and what she knew about history could be cobbled into a handout.

  ‘Deep reporting is the way forward.’

  ‘On cadaver tombs?’ Deep cleaning certainly was. Stella gave the monk a final brush.

  ‘You could say that.’ He laughed. ‘Hey, I’m building tons of followers, you should join the conversation.’ He was rummaging in one of the pockets of his jacket.

  ‘I have to work.’ An inane response, but Stella had no inclination to join in a conversation now, or any time. She’d come to Tewkesbury, she had told Jack, because she needed space. So far, she had found it, but not this morning.

  ‘Here, you need my card. Check out my podcast. Radio Public’s a cool platform, but I’m everywhere. I’ve podded out one ep, so you don’t have to play catch-up.’ March tossed his fringe. ‘Actually, if you fancy it, we could—’

  Stella was reprieved by March’s phone, the ringtone a haunting electronic tune which he allowed to play out as, spinning on his heel, he answered the call out in the ambulatory.

  ‘Wotcha…’

  Stella stuffed the card in her fleece pocket. She was interested in the concept of a cadaver tomb. She looked closely at the starved monk. She no longer saw a collection of surfaces with crevices into which she must flick her brush. The emaciated body lying on the plinth was indeed teeming with creatures: lizards, snails, the mouse – Jack wouldn’t think them vermin – and, although the stone had weathered over six centuries, it had originally been carved to represent decay. Stella caught March’s conversation.

  ‘…when do you start?… Yeah, so what did you expect, planting cabbages isn’t rocket science… Wait, what do you mean you’re here? Go outside. Now. Christ, I’m not flirting, she’s just a cleaner and no, actually she’s not. Her name’s Beverly… I’m on my…’

  March’s voice faded. Stella heard the boom of the north porch door shutting. Twice.

  Just a cleaner. Over the decades, she’d grown used to those whose carpets she vacuumed and toilets she sluiced discounting her; it was almost worse when they treated her as a friend and told her their problems.

  Whoever March was talking to had been in the abbey. Perhaps one of the other clean
ers, there were three on today. But he’d ordered whoever it was to leave and the team’s shift wouldn’t be finished for an hour. Likely it was a jealous partner. Stella felt for whoever it was, Jackie reckoned people were jealous when the other person was distant and ungiving, it made the jealous person think others got what they didn’t. Since Stella had been in Tewkesbury, this had made sense. Jack got jealous. Was Stella ungiving? Whatever, Stella did know that jealousy was a scary emotion, it could lead to murder.

  Once a woman of action and super-efficiency, Stella Darnell, fifty-three last birthday, would have been impatient at having to consider the ‘age and fragility’ of an object when cleaning. Her job was to make things look as good as new. She would have been horrified to abandon usual standards. But nowadays Stella understood fragility; she didn’t require a cadaver tomb to warn her about the reality of death.

  Stella retracted the handle of the spider-web brush and packed it in her trolley. Never mind if the likes of Roddy March dubbed her just a cleaner. She hoped that if she looked after the abbey, it would look after her.

  *

  Stella wandered the streets in the village of Winchcombe, steeped in nostalgia for past times laced with grief for all she had lost. In the grounds of Sudeley Castle she unclipped Stanley’s lead and threw him a tennis ball. He quickly tired of the game, leaving her to fetch it herself.

  Stella was recovering from what she thought of as an emotional melt-down. After years of working at full tilt to keep her grief at the sudden death of her father seven years before at bay, she had been engulfed by it. She had upped sticks from her London life – running her cleaning company, the man she loved – and had retreated to Gloucestershire.

  Winchcombe was forty minutes from Tewkesbury. The last time she’d been there was with Jack. A different life. Stella had to admit – idiot – that she had hoped to find him there. Stanley had too, perhaps, because when they passed what had been a mean tumble-down cottage squeezed between larger buildings in a back lane – the scene of a murder that she and Jack had solved – he’d strained towards the door. Now adorned with hanging baskets and a slate name plate, it had become a Cotswold dream home.