‘Dad said when you’re gone, you’re gone…’ Stella lost her thread and ground to a stop.
‘Thank you, Stella,’ Felicity said after a pause. ‘We hold different views on death, there’s no right or wrong way to view it.’
‘Except murder,’ Roddy muttered, and Stella caught herself nodding.
‘…we die at our allotted time. It’s written on our graves, if not in the stars,’ Clive intoned.
She will never be stirred
In her loamy cell
By the waves long heard
And loved so well…
‘Not more Thomas Hardy.’ Joy groaned as if she was inundated with Hardy’s poetry.
‘My grave will be on a hillside overlooking the sea where I can bask in the sun and be refreshed by gentle rain.’ Felicity must have forgotten she wasn’t meant to express an opinion.
‘Only the headstone will have that,’ Joy said. ‘You’ll be six feet under in a loamy cell.’
‘Mr March, why you have come today?’ Felicity sounded more accusatory than curious.
‘Why have I come? Ooh, tough one.’ Roddy March sucked his pen. ‘Long story short. Most of you will have heard the first episode of The Distant Dead, my podcast about murder victims whose real killers never paid for their crimes because the cases were firmly closed.’
‘Not had the pleasure, old son,’ Clive said.
‘Yes.’ Andrea sounded grudging.
Joy murmured something which might have been ‘certainly not’.
‘I thought you were…’ Stella realized she’d misunderstood – March had never actually said his podcast was about cadaver tombs. She was rather disappointed.
‘Ooh yes, lovey. Very good, kept me guessing, you should listen, Joy.’ Gladys looked at Joy. Stella thought if Jack was there, he’d say there was little love lost between Joy and Gladys.
Felicity said nothing, and Stella assumed that, as a pathologist, Felicity wouldn’t care for a podcast which sought to prove that the police – and by extension her own profession – had made a mistake.
‘I’m clawing back justice for those who, as Clive says, did not defy time. If you go to your grave with an innocent person charged with your murder, your story has the wrong ending. You are robbed of your legacy.’ Inexplicably, he nodded at Joy, then Stella remembered Joy had talked about legacy the evening before. ‘The Distant Dead will name the true killers of murders committed in the last hundred years. Murders by the likes of James Hanratty and Timothy Evans.’
‘DNA proved that Hanratty did kill that scientist,’ Andrea said.
‘Don’t split hairs, love,’ Gladys Wren said. ‘For years he was supposed innocent, that’s what Roddy means.’
‘I’ll be starting with a murder familiar to many of you. The Tewkesbury Murder Mystery. Although, since 1963 when it occurred, many have been bumped off in this town, it is the brutal killing in Cloisters House by the abbey wall that remains etched in the public’s memory.’ March took the last piece of cake.
‘Not that many murders.’ Andrea sounded defensive. ‘Fewer than in Cheltenham.’
‘And it’s no mystery,’ Joy said. ‘Another instance of son kills father.’
‘Trust you to rain on his parade, Madame Joy.’ Clive raised an eyebrow.
‘It was an open and shut case.’ Joy shut her mouth, lips pursed.
‘Joy, Clive, go, you guys. I intend to provoke just this conversation. The hive mind will shine a light on the true killer.’ Roddy March splayed out his palms. ‘Of course, the twenty-second of November 1963 was etched on memories because—’
‘You said etched already,’ Andrea said.
‘—many of you can recall what you were doing when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but Kennedy wasn’t the only famous man to meet his maker that day. On that same Friday, renowned Home Office pathologist Professor Aleck Northcote was having a nightcap when there was a loud knock on the door.’
‘You can’t know it was loud,’ Felicity said.
‘Did you know him?’ Gladys Wren asked Felicity. ‘With you both being in that business? Small world, I’d suppose.’
‘No,’ Felicity said. ‘Obviously I’ve heard of him, his textbook is the bible. Northcote would be 118 if he was alive today. I’m younger.’
‘You don’t look anything like it, dearie,’ Gladys said, although Felicity hadn’t given her age and everyone in the room looked younger than 118.
‘And what if the intruder had a key?’ Andrea said.
‘Professor Northcote signed my copy of his autobiography when I was a student.’ Felicity appeared to be off down memory lane.
‘The son was guilty, they proved it beyond doubt.’ Joy abruptly scraped back her chair and crossed to the servery. ‘I was eight at the time.’
‘Like you said, kids of that age know right from wrong,’ Gladys said, apparently without point. ‘We all have occasion to know about that night.’
‘Stella doesn’t know what the hell you’re all talking about, do you?’ Andrea rounded on Stella.
‘Well, I—’ Stella felt the atmosphere had taken an unpleasant turn.
‘That evening, while the world was reeling from Kennedy’s death, Giles Northcote takes the mid-morning train from Paddington bound for Tewkesbury to tap his old pater for another loan.’ March talked as if no one had interrupted. ‘Giles has run up yet another gambling debt, he risks being blackballed from his club. Yes, there’s a sweet Victorian feel to this narrative. He is expected. Aleck tells his trusty housekeeper that Giles is coming and that he knows it’s not a social call. The young buck is seen drinking in the Black Bear at lunchtime and later pacing the Victoria Pleasure Gardens, presumably getting up courage to face his dad.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Andrea said again.
‘Then around eight that evening, Giles Northcote weaves his way along the high street to Cloisters House. The story is one played out all over the land for generations: Papa refuses to cough up and by now pissed and desperate, Giles batters him over the head with a handy poker. He steals cash from Northcote’s wallet, swipes a silver cup Aleck won for running round the world or some such in his gilded youth. Miss Fleming, aforesaid housekeeper, comes back from the pictures to find her master dead in the hall, his groping fingers centimetres from an original 1930s Bakelite telephone.’
‘The kind of phone doesn’t matter,’ Andrea said.
‘He’s setting the scene.’ Gladys seemed to have taken to Roddy March.
‘I lead my listeners on a journey, they see what I see,’ March told Andrea. Although Stella rather thought Andrea had earned it, she felt a bit sorry for her. March was hijacking the Death Café and Andrea was the only person who appeared to mind. Stella saw it as a get-out from having to say any more about herself.
‘Northcote was my customer.’ Clive rubbed his chin. ‘His skeleton clock was the first timepiece I handled, as a wet-behind-the-ears seventeen-year-old,’ he said in a dreamy voice as if they were at a séance. ‘The chap was terribly conceited, but he took me under his wing. I suspect I was the son Giles was not. My father couldn’t get on with him so he was happy to let me loose on the man’s clock. Think he wanted me to botch it, one in the eye for me and Northcote. I was the fourth Burgess at Burgess and Son, and, like his father before him, my old man was jealous of my skills. You never forget your first piece, an elegant Charles MacDowell clock, simple design with oblique toothed gearing. Exquisite.’
‘What has this to do with death?’ Andrea asked.
‘It did end badly because when Northcote’s boy did for him, Northcote hadn’t paid. He’d promised to give me double. I’d forgotten to get him to sign a receipt, we had no proof of the work. Got it in the neck for that, I can tell you. When I heard the news, I wanted to motor to Wormwood Scrubs for How to Kill Your Father tips from Giles.’ Clive scratched at a blob of food on his tie. ‘You’d be on the right track. Many in Tewkesbury had reason to bash Professor Northcote’s head in. The blighter supposed
that, being knight of the realm, he needn’t pay for The Times, his pipe tobacco or bar tabs run up when he was ingratiating himself with the masses so they’d make him mayor.’ Clive was revving up. Northcote’s murder might have been days ago. Clive had said time was a construct; maybe, for him, the murder was yesterday.
‘I’m afraid that there was no doubt the son did it,’ Felicity said. ‘They found Aleck’s cup – for the four-minute mile, two seconds slower than Roger Bannister – in Giles’s flat. He was going to sell it.’
‘I thought you didn’t know him?’ Andrea said.
‘No more I did, but we path. students venerated Professor Northcote. He was Aleck the Great.’ She looked nostalgic.
‘Here’s what really happened.’ Roddy March held up his pen. ‘After Giles left that night, Aleck received another visitor.’
‘Who?’ Perhaps Felicity had forgotten it was meant to be a Death Café.
‘He’s not going to tell us.’ Joy was at the servery counter. Roddy March jumped up and took one of the mugs she’d left there. The scented steam coiling into the cooling air, Stella knew was chamomile. She hadn’t heard March ask for the tea, but befuddled by the occasion, could easily have missed it. ‘He’s here to plug his pod-thingy, aren’t you, Mr March.’ The teabag dripped over the plate. Watching it slowly revolve, Stella pictured a body dangling from gallows. ‘I’ve heard of these podcasts; mostly you never find out who did what, they merely sensationalize the crime.’
‘The murderer still lives amongst us.’ Roddy March’s tone would have gone well in a séance. Although the fire was still burning in the grate, the atmosphere was distinctly chill. Stella regretted that she had come.
‘For the guilty, time knows no statute of limitation, the clock of crime is always ticking,’ Clive said.
‘True-crime podcasts are done to whip up drama. You should consider the families of the victims.’ Stella cast about for how to get the discussion back to cremation and burial. Except Jack would say that was her rescuing.
Joy did it for her. Complaining it wasn’t Agatha Christie, she rapped the table with her cake fork. ‘I came here to talk about death, not murder.’
‘Murder is death,’ Clive said.
‘Mr March isn’t dead yet,’ Joy said. ‘None of us is.’
‘The mystery will be solved,’ Roddy cried. ‘In the last episode I do the big reveal. You learn the identity of Northcote’s true killer. You’ll hear the why, the when and how the true murderer escaped justice for decades. This is a case of cause and effect. Northcote’s murder is an echo from a long-forgotten murder that took place in London during the war. As you’ll discover, time ain’t always a healer.’
‘Time is never a healer. It simply passes.’ Clive winked at Joy. ‘I do not mean it dies.’
‘You will be hooked.’ Roddy dropped his voice. Stella was startled to see he was talking to her.
‘Mr March.’ Felicity jumped up. ‘Enough. You weren’t here yesterday when I outlined Death Café ground rules. You are promoting your business. If you have nothing about death to share with us, you must leave.’
‘Roddy’s not an undertaker or a coffin-maker.’ Gladys seemed to have taken a shine to March. ‘Although, I wouldn’t make a song and dance about doing either of those.’
‘You’ll need both one day,’ Joy said.
‘I do have something to share,’ Roddy told Felicity.
‘Seriously, can we move on?’ Andrea said. ‘We’re wasting time.’
‘There’s always time,’ Clive said.
‘Someone wants to kill me,’ Roddy said.
Chapter Eight
Thursday, 12 December 1940
Divisional Detective Inspector George Cotton had the stomach for an autopsy. Thirty years in the Metropolitan police had hardened him to the reek of bodies and disinfectant. With the morgue attendants banging in and out of the swing doors to the yard, he covered his nose and mouth with his scarf, not for the smell but to ward off the arctic cold.
How he longed for a different reality. Him in his office, chair up to the radiator, and Maple typing away at Express Dairies on King Street. At five, she would begin her journey home to Corney Road, back to her family.
Instead, Maple lay on Northcote’s porcelain slab, her head cushioned on a block. Hammersmith’s cheery mortuary attendant Ed White – Weissman until the war – stripped her, calling out each item for PC Shepherd to record in his notebook and dropping it in a brown paper bag. Camisole. Boned brassiere, silk stockings, right leg torn at calf…
Cotton’s thoughts were halted by the crack of the ribcage as Dr Northcote made the first incision. Cotton clenched his jaw as he observed the stony-faced pathologist working with nimble craftsman’s fingers.
Months of the Blitz had exposed Cotton to twisted, mangled corpses, burnt in the fires of incendiary bombs, crushed by masonry, shredded by shrapnel. Nothing had inured him against the pain of seeing someone’s loved person, whole and as if asleep, be butchered, however skilfully, by a pathologist. It was that very finesse which upset Cotton. Stamping on the tiled floor as the chill seeped through his soles, he felt as if Maple Greenhill was to be murdered all over again.
As Northcote worked, he murmured a commentary which Alberta Porter, his pretty and very capable secretary, perched on a camping stool, took down in shorthand. Porter’s sensible brogues were yet not sensible enough for the wading into rivers and ditches she did to assist her boss examine a corpse in situ. Northcote called Porter his right-hand girl.
While Northcote talked about listening to the corpse, Cotton heard only silence. Maple Greenhill would never speak again.
Today, Cotton felt that, aside from assisting the pathologist, Alberta Porter was also there to represent her own sex. Porter’s cool and steady manner equalled Northcote’s, but now, Cotton knew, the rising pink in cheeks that never saw rouge was for the blunt-faced blokes, himself included, who were gawping at Maple Greenhill in the altogether.
The doctor believed all his deceased – including hanged murderers and the ‘ladies of the night’ of whom he so disapproved – deserved his best. He delved into the truth of their deaths however they had lived.
Cotton knew Northcote suffered with his back but he never spoke of the pain. Lifting out Maple’s organs – kidneys, liver, her heart: ‘healthy as the day she was born, no appendix’ – he passed them to White, ready to receive them into enamel dishes.
Somewhat soothed by the background splashing and gurgling as White chased runnels of blood into the gutters with water from a rubber hose, and by the scratching of Alberta Porter’s HB2 pencil, Cotton made himself concentrate on Northcote’s findings.
‘…as I said at the scene, Greenhill was strangled. The hyoid bone is broken. There’s evidence of damage to the larynx, see this bruising to the skin around the neck?’ He indicated Maple’s skin, now lifeless as tallow, with the tip of a blade of what Cotton knew was a cartilage knife. ‘It’s livid where the blood settled after he flung her down. Gravity’s pull. That’s skin in her nails, one hair from the pubic region, I suspect from their consensual love-making. She didn’t argue. Blunt force trauma at the back of the skull. As I said early this morning she was probably hit by an ash tray, a square one judging by the indentation.’
‘That nail’s broken.’ Cotton tried to avoid pre-empting Northcote. Like his mother always said, don’t go telling the doctor what’s wrong with you. Now he pointed at the middle finger of Maple’s right hand.
‘Unrelated. Down to cheap varnish, these girls don’t look after themselves, with their sordid existence, they’re used up by thirty. She had a way to go, look at this lovely elastic skin.’ Northcote’s brow furrowed. A highly respected expert witness, he carried the jury with him the moment he stepped into the box. Defence counsels buckled before his opinion, uttered with granite authority. True to science, Northcote wasn’t swayed by prejudice. However, a practising Christian, he loathed prostitutes.
‘It is a hard life.’ Cotton was on
e of the few prepared to part company with Northcote. ‘It would help if men didn’t go after them.’
‘Most lives are hard, George, but can you see your daughter resorting to this?’ Handing Porter his white coat for laundering, Northcote indicated Maple, her ravaged body shrouded now under a sheet. He began scrubbing his hands over the sink, working up a carbolic lather, sluicing to his elbows.
‘No, but—’
‘Blimey, what cat was that?’ White was looking at livid score marks which ran the length of Northcote’s forearm.
‘Bloody wife’s rose-bush.’ Northcote rolled down his sleeves and, businesslike, clipped gold links into his cuffs.
‘You want to watch for sepsis, sir,’ White warned.
‘Julia slathered me in iodine, unnecessary fuss.’ His back to Porter holding out his overcoat, Northcote shrugged it on.
Outside in the yard, Alberta Porter climbed in the passenger seat of Northcote’s Daimler. The two men sheltered from a vicious wind by the entrance to Hammersmith Crematorium, next door to the morgue. Failing to find his lighter, Northcote accepted Cotton’s match. Like a conclave’s signal, the detective and the pathologist sent wreaths of blue smoke up to the dull grey sky. Job done.
‘I’m thinking Maple knew her assailant. She had dressed up for last night.’ Cotton looked through the car window at Porter leafing through her notes. Few pathologists took personal secretaries with them to the morgue or the places of execution. Northcote treated Porter as one of the boys. Cotton liked that about him.
‘That’s your department, Cotton, you know my view. These French Annies have to dress to command the cash. Empty houses are a tart’s Mecca.’
‘It’s the wrong sort of looking good. She was dressing for a man she loved, not for some drunk soldier on leave.’ Cotton was always disappointed by Northcote’s crude language; although it was how blokes at the station talked, Northcote was an educated church-goer. Cotton crushed his cigarette on the asphalt. ‘We found two cigarette butts in the grate. If there was an ashtray, her killer removed it. They stopped for a smoke. Most of the girls I meet don’t hang about, time is money.’
The Distant Dead Page 6