The Distant Dead

by Lesley Thomson

  He closed Maple’s bedroom door after Shepherd and went downstairs. Vernon Greenhill was sitting on a chair by the window, William asleep on his lap. Cotton felt warmer towards Vernon.

  ‘We think there was a man,’ Cotton told them.

  ‘I said that. Those times she said she was round with Ida.’ Keith rounded on his wife. ‘Ida never saw her. I asked her.’

  ‘I said leave it to me.’ Evelyn rounded on her husband.

  ‘You never did anything. If we’d had it out with her…’ Keith Greenhill knew when to stop, Cotton was pleased to see.

  ‘It’s no one’s fault,’ Cotton said.

  ‘We nearly lost her when she was carrying him, I couldn’t let her go again or she would have been on the street.’ Evelyn went and took William from Vernon.

  ‘You were too soft on her.’ Vernon pulled at the collar of his shirt. ‘If you’d come clean when he was born, we’d know where we were. I’m sick of telling porkies every time I leave the house.’

  ‘What porkies?’ Cotton asked.

  ‘William’s passed off as theirs. Maple was his big sister. Only Maple let him call her Mummy on the quiet. You never stopped her.’

  Cotton knew Maple having a child out of wedlock would have been a blow to what was a respectable family living in a respectable street. They had taken the boy into the family – it took courage. Cotton had recently attended two failed abortion deaths, one in a smart flat on the river, the other a backstreet affair not far from his home. Since the war, like murder and stealing from the dead, abortions had become more common. It was harder for wives to work the timings to fit when their men had been home on leave. Women like Maple who didn’t want to lose freedom or be shamed out of town.

  ‘If you’d had it out with her, mother to daughter…’ Keith said.

  ‘I did ask how she got that coat, it looked fearfully dear,’ Evelyn said. ‘She palmed me off saying she’d got a rise. I had a word with that pecky-mouthed manager of hers and he said he’d give her a raise when she bucked up her ways.’

  ‘You never should have gone to him,’ Vernon blazed. ‘That’s her business.’

  ‘Buck her ways up how?’ Cotton asked.

  ‘He claimed she got in late in the mornings and took long dinner breaks. He did say she’d kept her job because when she did the work it was of the highest standard.’ Evelyn said again, ‘Maple put everything into her baby.’

  ‘She wasn’t a prostitute,’ Vernon said, as if someone had just said Maple was.

  ‘Can any of you can shed light on how Maple came by this?’ Cotton opened the little box.

  ‘She was engaged,’ Vernon blurted then looked horrified.

  ‘You knew that and never said?’ his mother shrieked at him. William woke up and started crying. Evelyn rocked him violently. ‘There, there, lamb, there, there.’

  ‘Maple made me promise.’ Vernon looked miserable.

  ‘Who was he?’ It was grey outside, but for Cotton it was as if the sun shone. If he could find Maple’s killer, one day he’d retire happy. Was he close? Then he recalled what he’d told Shepherd: if Vernon knew the man’s name the boy would have been gone by now and someone wouldn’t have been safe.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Vernon looked away.

  ‘You sister’s dead, Vernon, she has no secrets to keep.’ Seeing the boy hang his head between his knees, Cotton softened. ‘You can help her now by telling us what you do know.’

  ‘If I knew, think I would be answering your stupid questions? I’d have it out with him.’ Vernon scrubbed at the back of his head and sat up.

  Quite so.

  ‘Leave that to the police,’ Constable Shepherd sniffed importantly.

  ‘Did Maple talk about him? Say why she liked him? Anything she said could give us a clue to who he is.’

  ‘She said I’d like him, that’s all. That we liked the same things.’

  ‘What things?’ Evelyn had got William off to sleep again. ‘What things did she say you both liked?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’ Blank-faced, Vernon stared at the grate, the fire long burnt out.

  ‘What do you like doing?’ Cotton asked.

  ‘The usual.’ Vernon spun the wheels on William’s engine. ‘Me and Mary go dancing, follow the dogs at White City.’

  ‘You and Mary are saving for a house, what are you doing frittering away cash?’ Keith scowled. Cotton knew that in the face of tragedy, people stuck to the everyday.

  ‘What am I meant to say? He asked me,’ Vernon said. ‘When I won fourteen and three on Highland Rum last year, I didn’t hear you complain.’

  ‘Did Maple say this man liked greyhound racing?’ Hopeless. Cotton knew there were ninety thousand at the White City stadium for the Derby. Needle and haystack was the story of his life.

  ‘Maple’s murdered and you’re on about dog-racing?’ Evelyn kissed the sleeping boy on the forehead. William looked so peaceful, but Cotton knew that soon enough he’d miss his mum. Or his ‘big sister’.

  ‘It’s fake,’ Keith Greenhill said. ‘That ring. Two a penny in Shepherd’s Bush market.’

  ‘Keith’s dad was a pawnbroker.’ Evelyn caught her husband’s look. ‘Well, he was.’

  ‘Anyone can see that’s cheap tat. It certainly wasn’t purchased at this jeweller.’ Keith handed the box back to Cotton. ‘He was having my daughter on.’ He clenched a fist.

  ‘Maple knew that, you think she’s stupid? She didn’t care,’ Vernon spat out. ‘It was temporary, until he could take her to choose her own, she said.’

  ‘What was stopping him?’ Evelyn’s head snapped up. ‘You knew?’

  ‘He was married, of course.’ Keith shook his head. ‘That posh box will have had his wife’s wedding ring in it. I know the sort.’

  ‘He had a big house in the country,’ Vernon said.

  Cotton flipped open his notebook. ‘Where?’

  ‘Out west somewhere, she never said.’ Vernon looked wrung out. He said, ‘Automobiles.’

  ‘Auto… Sorry, lad, what do you mean?’ Cotton looked up.

  ‘He means cars. Vernon likes to talk American. He mends Cadillacs, Daimlers, you name it.’ It was as if, forgetting why the police were there, Keith felt momentary pride in his son.

  ‘Daimler is British.’ Impatient, his son missed the moment. ‘Maple said his car would pay for this house.’

  ‘This house is nearly paid for,’ Keith said and glaring at Cotton who perhaps hadn’t hidden his surprise, ‘I’m an actuary. Maple comes from a respectable home.’

  ‘Did Maple say what sort of car this man drove?’ Cotton chased the smallest hare.

  ‘No, I’d remember that.’ Vernon frowned. Cotton knew the poor kid was on the foothills of the guilt he would feel, for the rest of his life, about his dead sister.

  ‘My daddy isn’t in the ar-my, Mummy says he’s saving so-wells for England.’ William had gone from fast asleep to wide awake. Cotton could envy him that.

  ‘Tell us about your daddy, William?’ Cotton stooped down to the boy.

  ‘He can’t make them bet-ter, he gives them to God.’ Overcome with shyness, William buried his face in his grandmother’s tummy.

  ‘He makes things up. Hears about the other kiddies’ dads being in the army and invents one for himself,’ Evelyn said stiffly.

  ‘His dad is in the army. The blighter signed up to shirk duty to his son and my sister. He deserves everything the Nazis give him.’ No one disagreed with Vernon.

  *

  ‘What if William isn’t making it up, sir? What if that stuff about his daddy is what Maple told him about this secret man?’ Shepherd said when they were in the car.

  ‘You might have something, Constable.’ Cotton slapped the dashboard with his notebook. ‘Maple tells William bedtime stories about her so-called fiancé. He’s not a soldier, he saves souls. Oh,’ he groaned, ‘please God tell me that our killer isn’t a vicar.’

  Chapter Eleven

  2019

  The bells toll
ed midnight. Footsteps clipped on stone. All the lamps had been put on, animating censing angels, fierce-faced tabor players and exposing the triforium walk high up in the vaulted ceiling. Yellow numbered markers dotted the tombstoned floor. Tewkesbury Abbey was a crime scene. The plastic barriers left by workmen had been stacked against a pillar.

  The rattle of wheels made Stella look up. Roddy’s body was being wheeled to the north door on a gurney. Her teeth began to chatter. Stella had insisted she didn’t need to go to hospital, but huddled by the rood screen, she was grateful for the beaker of sweet tea conjured up by a policewoman. Her fingers and toes had gone numb. Her mind was numb. Jaw clenched, Stella accidentally bit her tongue. She tasted copper. She smelled copper. Her trousers stiffened as Roddy’s blood dried.

  The rattling faded then Stella heard the boom of the north doors. Looking at Jesus on the Cross through the rood screen, she saw instead Roddy March, his teeth bared in agony, gasping for breath in her arms.

  Cawomy. Had Roddy really been trying to say ‘Chamomile’? It could be the name of his girlfriend, the jealous caller. Caroline, Karen, Charmian?

  Where the north ambulatory had been blocked off with plastic barriers because workmen were repairing was police tape and arc lamps.

  Only when Roddy’s body was extracted from her embrace had Stella understood help had arrived. Legs buckling, she was helped to her feet by two police officers. They leaned her against the starved monk to get her breath.

  Someone wants to kill me.

  Roddy had said that when Felicity told him he had to leave the Death Café. She had escorted him out and then he had been killed. Stella had so nearly followed him, but aware that Felicity’s Death Café was already a disaster, had felt she should stay.

  ‘Sorry to keep you, Stella.’ A woman came out of the north ambulatory and wove between the chairs towards her. Dark-suited, high heels, short hair, foundation, mascara, red lipstick in the middle of the night, when the woman – the SIO, Stella guessed – had probably been called from her bed. Wait, surely not. It was.

  Janet Piper belonged to Stella’s old life in London – what was she doing here?

  ‘Janet.’ Stella was appalled to feel on the verge of tears. The Death Café, Roddy’s murder and now surrounded by strangers, it was Janet Piper, once WPC Piper, one of her dad’s favourite colleagues. Had Terry Darnell been a different kind of man they might have had an affair. Even as a girl, Stella had divined that Janet loved him. She’d organized Terry’s leaving do and, later, the force funeral, the Union Flag draped on his coffin. Stella’s mother had been certain Terry was unfaithful with Janet, but Suzy Darnell’s facts required no evidence.

  Janet, like Martin Cashman, her dad’s best friend, had always had Terry’s back. Stella had last seen Janet in Hammersmith police station when she’d given her a witness statement on the case Lucie May called The Playground Murders. Why was Janet in Tewkesbury?

  Stella’s expression must have betrayed this because, sitting down, Janet said, ‘I moved to Gloucestershire two months ago. More trees, less murders, or so I expected.’ Janet signalled in the direction of the cadaver tomb where Roddy had been murdered.

  ‘Never mind me, you’re the last person I expected to meet and, forgive me saying, in a church. Otherwise, business as per, you finding a body.’ Despite her levity, Janet sounded concerned.

  ‘It’s a long story.’ A very short story, but not one Stella wanted to tell.

  ‘Catch me over a drink.’ Janet touched her shoulder. ‘It’s great to clap eyes on a familiar face, especially yours. Don’t get me wrong, I love my new job, I’ve got a top floor flat overlooking the Severn, above the floods, and the walks around here are to die— ahem, fantastic. Yet I’m homesick for the Shepherd’s Bush Road and, get this, I miss Hammersmith Broadway in the rain.’ Janet rapped her notebook. ‘And no one’s a patch on Terry, he was a one-off.’

  ‘Did you find his notebook?’ Unwilling to even think about her dad, Stella recalled Roddy scribbling in the Death Café.

  ‘Terry’s?’

  ‘Roddy’s. He was writing in one.’

  ‘Whoa. Winding back,’ Janet said. ‘You saying you knew the victim?’

  ‘I only met him twice.’ As Stella described her encounter with March the previous morning by the cadaver tomb, and how he’d appeared at the Death Café, she felt herself flush with shame again for not going after Roddy. ‘The facilitator will know more.’ Then she remembered Roddy hadn’t booked. ‘She won’t have his address.’

  ‘No probs, we found a card for some boarding house in his trouser pocket, it’s where he was staying.’ Janet patted Stella’s shoulder. ‘Got to say, I’m made up my chief witness is equipped with the observational skills of a raptor and that you knew him is gold.’

  ‘We only said a few words.’

  ‘Let’s hear them.’

  ‘Roddy March was at the Death Café when I arrived. On the second night.’

  ‘How many Death Cafés have you gone to, Stella?’ Janet’s tact sounded effortful.

  ‘One, really – it was split into two.’ Stella explained that Felicity had been called away. ‘Roddy sat next to me, maybe because we’d met here the day before and he didn’t know anyone. Like I say, he was writing notes.’ Stella’s so-called observation skills felt blunted.

  ‘You met him here yesterday?’ Janet stopped writing, in shorthand, Stella noticed. ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘By the cadaver tomb. This one’s called the…’ Stella swallowed. ‘Exactly where he was attacked. By the starved monk.’

  ‘You didn’t plan to meet there?’

  ‘No,’ Stella exclaimed. ‘I was cleaning and he appeared.’

  ‘So that wasn’t the first time Roddy March had been to the… what did you call it?’

  Stella told Janet what Roddy had told her about the tombs and that he’d received a phone call and gone off. She hadn’t seen him again until the second evening at the Death Café.

  ‘Did you get the impression he was expecting to meet someone there?’

  ‘No, the opposite. He told whoever rang him that he’d see them outside the abbey. It didn’t sound as if he expected to meet them by the tomb. I felt he expected me to know him, due to his podcast.’

  ‘Podcast?’ Frowning, Janet was writing rapidly.

  ‘He’s doing one – was doing – on men hanged for crimes he believed they never committed. No, not quite that; it was about matching the true killer to their victim, which gave the victim justice. Roddy said he’d released the first episode.’

  ‘Have you heard it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This is great stuff, Stella. Just a mo. Hey, Tony.’ Janet waved to a middle-aged man, his rumpled look suggesting he’d had to dress in the dark, talking to a woman in forensics overalls. He looked like Terry. Get a grip. In London Stella had seen Terry everywhere, but – so far – not in Tewkesbury.

  ‘Our victim did a true-crime podcast – check it out, has he upset someone? Who has he interviewed? What did he unearth? What’s so interesting about that chapel? Our witness saw him there yesterday,’ Janet fired at the man when he came over. She looked at Stella. ‘What’s it called, this chapel, and for that matter the podcast? No worries, that’s what Google’s for.’

  ‘The tomb of the starved monk. He called it a cadaver tomb.’ Up close, Tony didn’t look at all like her dad. ‘On my cleaning rota it’s called the Wakeman Cenotaph.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Watching Tony hurry away already on his phone, Janet turned to Stella. ‘What was March’s mood in this Dead Café? Nervous, wired?’

  ‘Death Café. I didn’t notice, but he wrote a lot of stuff down in his notebook.’ Stella told Janet what Roddy had written about Andrea.

  ‘Did she see it?’

  ‘I doubt it, she was on the other side of the table.’

  ‘Not really a motive to stab him to death.’ Unconsciously perhaps, Janet wore the same grumpy expression as the angel she was staring at. ‘Sounds like Mar
ch was interested in you? First, he meets you in the abbey, then fronts up at the Death Club – could he have followed you?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have known I’d return the second night.’ Stella had not intended to return.

  The white Peugeot van slows down, no lights. Silence. The darkness is tangible like thick cloth.

  Her teeth began to chatter again. Janet reached over and pulled the foil blanket tighter around her.

  ‘I’m sure not,’ Stella decided. ‘Roddy only wanted to talk about his podcast. About a murder in Tewkesbury years ago. I suspect he was there to fact-find. The group was local and one man, called Clive, had known the victim.’ Suddenly Stella felt Roddy had been interested in her. A feeling she couldn’t substantiate, but couldn’t dismiss. Was he the van driver on the lane?

  ‘I see.’ Janet was expressionless so Stella had no clue what it was that she saw. ‘Did you think March knew who you are?’

  ‘I’m not anyone.’

  ‘Last I knew, you were running a detective agency and cleaning for half of London on the side.’ Janet raised an eyebrow. ‘Thanks to that Lucie May, you’ve been in the media. I don’t miss her. No surprise if some true-crime podcaster had you on his radar.’

  ‘Clean Slate is only cleaning now.’ Horrified to be on anyone’s radar, Stella didn’t say she’d given up everything to start again in Tewkesbury.

  ‘You sure March knew no one? Someone who might bear him a grudge? Did you notice if anyone was unfriendly towards him? You know the drill, Stella. However apparently irrelevant or everyday, give it to me raw.’

  Stella said everyone in the group apart from Clive Burgess, who made clocks, had been sulky. ‘Including me, I’m afraid.’ Gladys Wren, the lodging house owner, had defended March, but Stella imagined Roddy had been charming to older women. Felicity was cross with him for gatecrashing and transgressing the rules, and on the first night she’d also been annoyed that Andrea the gardener was late. Stella presumed now that Felicity, a retired pathologist, preferred dead people.