The Distant Dead

by Lesley Thomson

  Inside Jalalpur Villa, although the body had gone hours earlier, the air smelled fetid. Taking another tour of the house, Cotton was amazed at the sheer number of antiques, the china figurines superior to Agnes’s factory-made collection of ladies with parasols that paraded on their radiogram. Vases, bowls, glasses in display cabinets in every room. A devil to clean, Agnes would say.

  He confirmed that the silk coverlets on the sumptuous four-poster in the main bedroom were undisturbed: Maple’s killer had not taken her upstairs. He’d been in a hurry from the start.

  In the living room – Aleck had called it the drawing room – Shepherd was bending over a pianola set next to a towering oak tallboy.

  ‘Mum and Dad saved for ever for one of these and he’s got one and more things besides. How do you get that much money? Mum’s always saying having something means doing without something else.’

  ‘Some people can have their cake and eat it. Oliver Hurrell hasn’t got anything now, poor chap.’ Cotton pulled back the brocade curtains. In daylight, the room lost the look of a museum and became the dreary setting for a brutal slaying. Cotton scrutinized the settee and saw again the faint dents in the settee cushions where the man had had his way. Had Maple been willing or was she raped?

  ‘What’s this?’ Shepherd was looking at the Turkey rug. Stepping back, he knocked a hexagonal occasional table inlaid with ivory. He righted it and, crouching, lifted the edge of the rug. He held up a silver cigarette lighter. ‘No cigarettes in the house.’

  ‘I’ll make a detective of you yet.’ Cotton flapped out a fresh cotton hankie and took the lighter. He caught a whiff of fuel. ‘You’re right. None of the rooms smell of tobacco. Dr Northcote said that Hurrell didn’t smoke. ‘This can only mean—’

  ‘—that it has to be his, sir. Stupid bastard didn’t do a sweep of the room after he’d killed her. It belongs to our murderer.’ Shepherd, the reluctant detective, came alive.

  ‘Well done, lad, this could be the clue we need. Even the cleverest murderers make careless mistakes.’ Cotton held up the cigarette lighter. ‘Crikey, it’s a Dunhill, our killer had some cash.’

  ‘A-X-E.’ Looking over his shoulder, Shepherd read out the three letters engraved on the side. ‘Could be a secret society, fifth columnist, my dad says they’re everywhere.’

  ‘That’s an N, not an E. I’d guess they’re initials.’

  ‘What kind of name starts with X?’

  ‘Xavier,’ Cotton said without thinking. Then he let out a groan. He thought back a couple of hours to the chill mortuary yard. He’d used his Swan Vestas to light Northcote’s cigarette. ‘Aleck Xavier Northcote. False alarm. Dr Northcote must have left this here last night.’

  ‘Careless, if you ask me,’ Shepherd said.

  ‘Luckily I’m not asking you, Constable, though I grant you it’s out of character,’ Cotton snapped. Aleck Northcote forbade smoking when examining a body in situ or at the mortuary. He said the dead told their story through his senses as much as by their flesh and insisted nothing must mar the truth. Not like Dr Bradman, who, Cotton knew from colleagues, could be influenced by police to find the right result.

  It was inconceivable that Northcote, the pathologist who never made mistakes had made a mistake.

  ‘Come on, Shepherd, best boots to the fore. Time to tell Mr and Mrs Greenhill their daughter died last night.’

  *

  As they drove past Chiswick House grounds, Shepherd remarked that an incendiary had dropped there recently. ‘They do open-air concerts, my nan goes sometimes – suppose she’d been there?’ One of Shepherd’s habits was to suppose what if someone he knew happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cotton never said how it was likely, for them both, that one of his ‘supposes’ would come to pass.

  ‘Turn left here,’ he said instead.

  Corney Road, built in the last decade as a suburban escape from London, comprised one line of semi-detached houses, the brickwork yet to be stained by smog. The kerb line of pollarded willows did not quite obscure the cemetery opposite. Many of the front gardens were turned over to vegetable patches, fences were freshly whitewashed; residents in Corney Road cared about their homes.

  ‘It looks respectable.’ Shepherd also believed Maple Greenhill was a part-time prostitute.

  ‘So was our victim. And, even if she was a prostitute, you treat her the same as if she was your nan.’ Cotton was now sure Maple had been meeting a sweetheart. ‘First law of detection, lad,’ he told the young constable. ‘Rules have exceptions and exceptions are the rule.’

  Although Corney Road was outside D Division, Cotton could give Shepherd directions because five years ago he’d buried his parents in the cemetery. That rainy Thursday, watching the two coffins lowered into the ground, a gale inverted his brolly, snapping the spokes. Lashed by rain, his funeral black hung heavy as he’d thrown what was mud onto the caskets. Walking away with Joe, his thirty-five-year-old baby brother, they slipped and their shoes squelched on the sodden grass. Joe never got over them dying in the Hertfordshire rail crash. Signalman error. An irony, if you thought about it, with their signalman dad just retired from the Southern Railway. Cotton did not think about it. He hadn’t been back to the cemetery. It had been Joe who kept the grave tidy. Agnes did it now.

  Nerving himself for Maple Greenhill’s parents, Cotton felt a crumb of comfort that his mum and dad never knew the war. They didn’t know Joe had been killed a few weeks ago when HMS Royal Oak was torpedoed off Scapa Flow.

  As he and Shepherd crossed to the Greenhills’ house, Cotton reckoned, on balance, his family’s deaths were trumped by a child raped and murdered. If that happened to June, it would slay him.

  ‘What’s Maple done now?’ Vernon Greenhill’s forearms were streaked with grease and this reminded Cotton that Maple’s twenty-one-year-old brother worked as a mechanic. Seeing biceps bulging beneath his shirtsleeves, Cotton knew that, on hearing bad news, family could go for the messenger.

  ‘Mother and father indoors, son?’ Cotton clasped his hat.

  ‘If she’s got herself arrested, tell me. Mum’s got a weak heart.’ Vernon Greenhill barred the way.

  ‘She will have to hear this, Vernon.’

  Perhaps cowed by the use of his name, Vernon Greenhill retreated into a hallway, gleaming parquet giving off a scent of beeswax. Pausing to drop his hat onto an antler stand beside an aspidistra on a tall spindly table, Cotton stepped into what Agnes called her parlour. A fire crackled in a grate. On the mantelpiece Maple and Vernon’s framed faces beamed, kids’ shiny complexions flannelled clean.

  ‘It’s the police about Maple.’ Staying by the door, Vernon wasn’t beaming now.

  Keith and Evelyn Greenhill, in their early forties, but, dressed in what for Cotton would be his Sunday best, seemed older. Seated on a green velvet sofa they stared out of the window to the graves. Cotton had the uneasy impression they had got ready for the news he was about to give them.

  ‘What’s she done now?’ Keith Greenhill was a masculine version of his daughter, the same wide mouth, hazel eyes, but with a short back and sides, combed and oiled. On Maple the looks were pleasant, augmented, Cotton guessed, by a lively character. On Greenhill they were handsome. Cotton caught himself wondering if Greenhill was faithful. These days too many crimes involved adultery.

  ‘Who says she’s in trouble, Keith?’ From her expression, Cotton saw that Evelyn Greenhill was frightened of what her husband might let slip. Perhaps they hadn’t reported that their daughter had failed to come home last night because they had not expected her. Her lips were pale, her eyes glassy. Tipping his head, Cotton told Shepherd to get Mrs Greenhill a glass of water.

  During his long career, Cotton had told many a relative that their son, daughter, loved ones were dead. Seeking to reassure the Greenhills that Maple had done nothing wrong, he had to say what had been done to her.

  ‘How?’ Vernon was the first to speak.

  ‘She was strangled.’ Cotton didn’t b
elieve in mincing words.

  ‘Who on earth would…?’ Evelyn Cotton took the glass from Shepherd, but didn’t drink from it. ‘Everyone loved her.’

  ‘That’s what we will find out.’ Burning up, Cotton stepped away from the fire and nearly trod on a boy sprawled on his front on a rug near the window. The face considering him was what Cotton’s mum would have called a proper little cherub. Rosy-cheeked, sandy curls. Cotton knew instantly he was the boy in the photograph that Maple had carried in her handbag. Her son.

  Awkwardly, the boy clambered up onto sturdy legs, reaching up to Cotton, a lead soldier in his fist. Cotton stared down. Then, God love him, Shepherd stepped in and, taking the soldier, aimed the tiny musket at Cotton and said, ‘Bang bang.’ This set off peals of laughter.

  ‘More,’ the boy squealed.

  Cotton expected someone in the room to get the boy to be quiet, but no one moved. Instead, kneeling down to the toddler’s height, Shepherd told him, ‘I’ve got a soldier just like this in my toy box.’

  ‘Have you caught him?’ Vernon Greenhill asked.

  ‘No. Not yet.’ Cotton felt perspiration trickle down his brow and he dashed at it with a sleeve. He said, ‘Someone will hang for this.’ And there was him not holding with capital punishment.

  ‘You’d better mean that,’ Vernon said.

  ‘Don’t be rude, Vernon,’ his mother scolded. ‘The police will do their best.’

  ‘I’m afraid we do need to ask you some questions about Maple. Anything you can tell us to identify this man. Like was she seeing someone regular or—’

  ‘Or what?’ Vernon Greenhill squared up to Cotton. ‘You saying Maple was a, was a… prostitute?’ He reddened.

  ‘Take it easy, sir.’ Shepherd touted the lead soldier.

  ‘She didn’t go with men,’ Vernon Greenhill spluttered.

  The boy, making choo-choo noises, pushed a tin engine over Shepherd’s boot. Incontrovertible proof that, some four years ago, Maple had gone with at least one man.

  ‘I have to ask… could Maple have been working in the evenings?’

  ‘You wash your mouth out.’ Vernon stepped up to Cotton. Although much shorter, his biceps would carry the day. Cotton was out of shape. Maybe Shepherd reckoned the same: he was on his feet in a jiffy.

  ‘Steady, son.’ Cotton braced himself. ‘It’s a capital offence to threaten a police officer.’

  ‘Vernon, enough.’ Evelyn Greenhill reminded Cotton of his own mother. A small, slight woman who demonstrated that size is no indicator of strength. Maisie Cotton had kept her two boys in order with just such a look. Evelyn looked at William tootling his engine over the braid rug. ‘Maple put everything into her baby.’

  ‘She wasn’t a prostitute,’ Vernon said.

  ‘Was there a regular chap? Someone she had a shine for?’ Cotton was kindly.

  ‘Not that we knew.’ Evelyn was on the edge of the settee, hugging herself close to the fire. It needed more coal, but no one had seen. She told him that they’d said goodbye to Maple on the doorstep, she was seeing her friend Ida.

  ‘Mummy didn’t bring Plaay-yer’s,’ the boy piped up. Agnes used to warn him about children’s big ears, and not to mention any horrible things from work with them there.

  ‘Maple told William she was just getting fags.’ Keith shook his head. ‘He’s got the memory of an elephant.’

  ‘You knew that was… not the case.’ Cotton guessed young William understood the word ‘lie’. ‘Did Maple tell you where she was actually going?’

  ‘Down the Palais,’ Vernon mumbled. ‘I should have gone but Mary, she’s my fiancée, had a shift the next day so…’ He stopped and Cotton saw that, like his nephew, Vernon Greenhill knew about lying. He had never been accompanying Maple to the dance hall. And nor, Cotton would confirm, had the friend called Ida.

  ‘Mary’s a clippie on the 27.’ Evelyn’s note of pride sounded by rote, for her son’s benefit. She was probably prouder of her secretary daughter.

  ‘I’d like to see Maple’s room, to get a picture of her, things she liked, any hobbies and such, anything that could help find who did this.’ Cotton sidestepped Vernon at the door.

  ‘Stay with your dad.’ Evelyn Greenhill got up and took Shepherd and Cotton upstairs. The landing window was still blacked out with fabric pinned to the frame. Switching on a light, she sighed, ‘Maple does the blackout, we don’t ask much, not even keep for the baby, but she makes a song and dance every time.’

  ‘My girl’s the same.’ Cotton winced at his tactlessness – Mrs Greenhill had snared him by speaking of Maple as if she was alive. ‘It is a palaver.’

  ‘Just spent nearly fourteen shillings on her linen sheets, what a—’ Mrs Greenhill’s face contorted. She wasn’t complaining, Cotton realized, but mourning that her daughter wouldn’t benefit. ‘Make yourselves at home,’ Mrs Greenhill told them as she returned down the stairs.

  ‘We’re hardly going to do that,’ Shepherd whispered once they were alone.

  ‘You say all sorts when you’ve had bad news.’ When he was told about his parents’ deaths Cotton had asked which bit of the train they’d been in. Not an idle question. On holidays, knowing what could go wrong, his dad always insisted they sat on suitcases in the guard’s wagon. That day, his mum’s birthday treat, they’d gone in the first-class carriage behind the engine. Cotton flicked a hand as if at the memory and said, ‘Master Vernon knows something he’s not telling.’

  ‘How do you make that out, sir?’ Shepherd said.

  ‘He’s too convinced Maple wasn’t a prostitute.’

  ‘My sister sends me spare, but I’d be browned off if a copper hinted she was a prostitute, not that she is,’ Shepherd said.

  ‘Good lad, that’s what brothers are for,’ Cotton said. ‘I think he’s upset because he knows there was a man and he didn’t protect her.’

  ‘If he knows and isn’t saying then we should arrest him.’ Shepherd saw arresting people as a perk of the job.

  ‘Vernon doesn’t know, or mark my words, he’d have high-tailed it, fists ready, when we told them. He will be kicking himself for not finding out who his sister was courting. My guess is this man is married or Maple would have been over the moon to tell her family.’

  Maple’s bedroom was a poignant illustration of her switch from child to mother. A teddy bear and a feeding bottle, children’s books – Out With Romany, The Family From One End Street, Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare – too old for the boy were in a bookcase also stacked with wooden building bricks and a Peek Freans crackers tin filled with more lead soldiers. Errol Flynn, cut from the Sunday Pictorial, was on the wall. A scratched and mended cot was hard up to a bed that Maple must have slept in since she was a girl little older than her son.

  A double-doored utility wardrobe left scant floorspace, bought, Cotton decided, to accommodate Maple and William’s things. He opened it and recoiled. The delicate flowery scent evoked the dead girl far more than viewing her body on Northcote’s slab.

  Inside hung some frocks and blouses and a couple of work skirts. Unlike the silk dress Maple had been wearing when she was murdered, all looked hand-made. Another coat, of cheaper material than the fancy one Maple was found in. He said, ‘Maple appears to have led two lives: secretary at the dairy, and for nights out she dolled herself up in garments that were so dear a girl on her modest wage would have to save up half her life to afford.’

  ‘If Maple was selling herself, she was going for the highest bidder.’ Shepherd whistled.

  ‘Wash your mouth out, PC Shepherd.’ Cotton whipped around. ‘Damn well show respect to this young woman who, if she was alive, would have been ashamed to have you and me turning over her bedroom.’

  Shepherd at least had the grace to look ashamed. To spare his blushes, Cotton got Shepherd checking under the bed, delving beneath the lumpy palliasse, pillows, shaking out sheets and blankets while Cotton sifted through Maple’s undergarments. They were searching, Cotton told him, for a billet-doux, or some
thing Maple’s man had given her as a gift.

  Wrapped in a flannel vest, which Cotton suspected had been rarely worn, he discovered her 1927 diary when Maple was ten. The flyleaf was inscribed, ‘For Maple, every girl must keep her secrets, love Mum.’ Had Evelyn hoped this would inspire Maple to share confidences with her? When did Maple’s secrets become too dark to tell? The diary was pure innocence, scattered with declarations, Maple’s favourite dinner – bubble and squeak – she loved the colour sky-blue and wanted to marry Cary Grant. Entries petered out after February. The back pages were crammed with bus tickets – the 11, the 15, routes into London – there was an entry ticket for the Victoria and Albert Museum and a photograph of a girl; he saw a younger Maple in the sun-bleached features, squinting in sunlight on a chair in a school playground. On the back she’d written: ‘1929, I’m the only one going to the grammer. I’ll end up head girl at Burlington!’

  Cotton’s daughter June had gone to Burlington School for Girls six years before Maple. Cotton noted Maple’s misspelling of grammar. June was always top in spelling. She too was a secretary, but worked for a solicitor who now she was going to marry. Cotton shut the diary. Maple was dead, for God’s sake, it wasn’t right to compare.

  ‘Found something, sir.’ Shepherd strained into the gap between the wall and the bed. Heaving himself up, he passed Cotton a small box.

  ‘I was expecting diamonds.’ Cotton whistled at what looked like a curtain ring nestling on a cushion of deep blue silk. ‘Humboldt and Baxter’s Jewellers have expanded to hardware. OK, it’s time for a confab with brother Vernon.’