The Distant Dead

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘Who’s Felicity?’

  ‘The facilitator, she ran the group, it was her first time.’

  ‘Felicity the facilitator. That’s actually quite funny.’ Janet did a shorthand squiggle which, to Stella, had no resemblance to anything she’d said.

  ‘I think it was then Roddy told us someone wanted to murder him,’ Stella said.

  ‘Say again.’ Bolt upright, Janet stared at Stella.

  ‘Roddy claimed someone wanted to murder him. He’d had death threats, a dead bird on his car.’

  ‘What sort of bird?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’ Stella was surprised, it was the sort of off-the-wall question Jack would ask. ‘That’s about when Felicity suggested he go to the police in Cheltenham. The station here is shut.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’ Janet pulled a face. ‘Did you believe him? Great way to whip up followers for this podcast.’ Janet was writing. Stella knew that, years before, having passed her sergeant exams, Janet had come top in Pitman’s typing and shorthand. Terry made her keep it quiet to avoid becoming, as he’d said, CID’s Girl Friday.

  ‘I think Roddy wanted to stay talking to the group, but Felicity was firm. I saw her point, the session wasn’t going according to plan. Afterwards, the man called Clive said more about the murder Roddy was investigating. It was in Cloisters House, that big house on the other side of the abbey wall.’ Stella tilted a hand towards the altar. ‘Andrea, she’s the abbey gardener, complained Roddy was a time-waster who leeched off the attention of others. She seemed to have taken a dislike to him.’ Stella rubbed her face. If only she’d gone after Roddy when he left.

  ‘This Andrea, could she have disliked March enough to stab him?’ Janet tapped her upper lip with her pen. ‘Are you sure she didn’t see his potted description of her?’

  ‘I got the impression Andrea was like that generally. That, or she didn’t like me either. I wouldn’t expect her to attack me.’

  ‘Sounds like, piss her off and you’re in her sights,’ Janet said. ‘I’ll look forward to my chat with her.’

  ‘Roddy can’t have got in her way, he hardly noticed her.’

  ‘That March described Andrea as a loose cannon suggests she’s a disrupter – but how did March know that?’

  ‘Her attitude was combative, impatient. She pushed against the spirit of the Death Café. When Felicity asked what Andrea wanted from the session she said she hoped to get home without getting caught in the rain again.’ Stella flapped the foil blanket. ‘Thinking about it, that was the first night, when Roddy wasn’t there.’

  ‘What murder was March investigating?’ Janet seemed satisfied with this.

  ‘Friday the twenty-second of November 1963.’ Stella was glad to have observed one specific fact; it felt that her supposed raptor skills had deserted her. She told Janet about the murder of the pathologist and how his son was executed for it. Janet was animated – she’d heard of Professor Northcote.

  ‘Your dad heard Northcote got too big for his boots, the man’s word was gospel. Terry said, in the early sixties, when he was stationed in east London, one old geezer at the Hackney mortuary could remember Northcote working through the Blitz. Terry mistrusted heroes, the best professionals work in teams. I never let myself forget that.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘The Northcote case was cut and dried. Sounds like March was creating fake news. There’s many a failed reporter going for reinvention as a top-list podcaster. The lovely Lucie May comes swiftly to mind.’

  ‘Roddy said he had proof Giles Northcote didn’t kill his father.’ At the mention of Lucie, Stella felt uncomfortable. No love was lost between Janet and Lucie May with whom, after Stella’s mum left Terry, he actually did have an affair.

  ‘Did anyone seem uncomfortable about this? Supposing for a second that March was on to something, him saying that could have put the wind up someone in the group. Perhaps that was his intention?’

  ‘Hard to say. No one seemed bothered that he’d gone.’

  ‘To your knowledge did anyone follow him? Apart from you, of course.’

  ‘Joy was in the abbey when I arrived, she plays the organ. But I think he was alive during the music.’ Cold and exhausted, Stella tried to think how it had gone. When did the music stop? She couldn’t get past the terrible vision of Roddy’s stricken face. The blood.

  ‘I just talked to her. Playing that thing, she claims not to have heard anything. As you know, March was stabbed in the back. The killer didn’t require strength, just the element of surprise.’ Janet returned to her earlier point. ‘I’m tending to think March went to this starved monk tomb hoping you’d meet him. Are you sure he didn’t suggest a rendezvous there?’

  ‘No.’ Stella’s stomach plunged. Up until now Janet had been chatty, almost as if they were mates, now she was homing in. As Stella knew in a murder case, everyone’s a suspect and especially the witness who found the body. ‘This is probably nothing.’ She told Janet about the van slowing to a stop on the road from Winchcombe.

  ‘We’ll check if March drove a white van. That could be kids, there’s been a spate of muggings. One MO is fake car trouble. Driver behind offers help, kids wave a knife and demand cash. You had a lucky escape. We had a mugging in the abbey.’ Janet dropped her pen and retrieving it said, ‘Not all woolly lambs and rolling combine harvesters in the country.’

  ‘I should have gone after Roddy,’ Stella said.

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up. If you had we might be shunting you off to the morgue too.’ Janet swished to a fresh page in her notebook and looking at Stella asked, ‘While I think of it, why did you come to the abbey after you left the Death Café?’

  Right at that moment, Stella was asking herself the same question.

  Chapter Twelve

  1940

  ‘…Only that the Palais de Danse was the last place where the victim was believed to have gone. My constable will be there within the hour.’ Suffering Jesus. Cotton replaced the receiver onto the cradle before he said anything that might land him in trouble. The manager at the Palais swore it was unlikely any of his staff recalled Maple, ‘…and since she wasn’t killed at the dance hall, what’s it to do with us?’ The war had made people callous.

  Chief Superintendent Hackett hadn’t been best pleased that Cotton was canvassing alibis for vicars in the parishes of Hammersmith and Chiswick. ‘No man of God would do that to a woman, let alone touch a prostitute.’ Nor had it helped to hear it was the only lead they’d got.

  Cotton took a gulp from the cup of tea Ethel had brought and, sitting back in his chair, arms behind his head, his eye fell on Aleck Northcote’s Dunhill lighter beside Cotton’s own tobacco tin. Grimacing, he got back on the telephone and dialled the pathologist’s office in Whitehall. A snooty-sounding assistant informed him, ‘Dr Northcote is unavailable, he is at the Hackney mortuary, then he will be motoring to Hampshire regarding a deceased male body found in a cow field.’ The man’s implication being that Northcote was more important than Cotton. He was more important, but Northcote was the last chap to rub that in.

  ‘Please tell Aleck I came upon his lighter at the murder scene and have it safe at the station.’ Cotton slammed down the receiver. He instantly regretted calling. Northcote had been careless leaving his lighter where Maple Greenhill was strangled. Northcote might be annoyed with himself, but he’d be properly browned off with Cotton for highlighting this to one of his assistants. Cotton could have saved Aleck’s face by discreetly returning the lighter. Even slipping it in Aleck’s overcoat pocket when he was working. Finishing his tea, Cotton had to admit he resented how the pathologist’s error had momentarily given him false hope that they had a strong lead to Maple’s murderer.

  It was a relief to know that the giant of his profession got things wrong; Northcote was human like the rest of them.

  Cotton got up and leaned on the back of his chair, gazing through the criss-crossed tape on the window at the traffic on Brook Green Road. The police station was a few doors from the Palai
s where Vernon said his sister had gone dancing with her friend Ida. If Maple had gone there, it hadn’t been with Ida. Mulling over the facts, Cotton set about pinning up the blackout cloth, a job he refused to leave to Ethel.

  After leaving the Greenhills, he and Shepherd visited the Lyons’ on Kensington High Street where Ida worked as a Nippy. Clutching a tray of crockery, the girl, her hair rolled like Maple’s in the photograph with William, had sat on a kitchen stool and wept as she told them she hadn’t wanted to be Maple’s excuse. ‘I never expected she’d get in such trouble, she said she was marrying a real gentleman.’ Again, Cotton had felt the rush, they were close on Maple’s killer, but it had fizzled to nothing. Ida had never met the man, Maple wouldn’t even tell her his name. She had told Ida that he was rich and had a lovely car.

  ‘Did she say they had sexual relations?’

  Convulsed, Ida had admitted how, sometimes, she and Maple had both seen their chaps in an alley. ‘I won’t ever again. I promise. I asked her why, seeing as he had cash, he didn’t take her to a hotel. We had a bit of a tiff over that.’

  ‘I’d never have thought it of her, she looks like a good girl, and what’s more a Nippy,’ Shepherd said after.

  ‘Buck up, Constable, your cheeks are meeting in the middle like you’ve swallowed a horsefly. Good girls do it too.’ Not that Cotton cared to think of June in a backstreet – anywhere – with her solicitor fellow. ‘There’s a war on, everyone’s grabbing at life while they have it.’

  Now, forehead resting against the pane, Cotton watched the street outside the police station. Maple would have walked on that pavement. Going by where she lived, she’d have got the bus to the Broadway. Did she meet the man at the dance hall or had he escorted her? Cotton doubted it, although he’d certainly escorted her out. The empty house was a step up from an alleyway, but he hadn’t even had her in a bed. Cotton caught his fists clenching and recalled how Keith Greenhill, convinced his daughter had a man, said how the blighter never walked her home. Not even to the end of the street, I keep an eye out.

  Three in the afternoon and it was nearly dark. Since the raids, London was under a permanent cloud of smoke from the fires. He turned from the window.

  Yellow electric light washed over the room. The building was less than a decade old, but to Cotton it felt tawdry. His office with four desks, grey cabinets, buff folders awaiting Ethel’s filing looked bleak as death. Two of the desks, wire baskets empty, ink on the blotters dry, were reminders of Evans and Franklin who had gone to fight. Evans had died when a prize fool lost control of a jeep training in the Phoney War. Cotton prayed in church on Sundays for Franklin to see the war out.

  Next to a sepia-stained photograph of Agnes and June was another of Cotton’s passing-out in May 1912. Cotton was on the end of the first row, wet behind the ears, all set to end crime. Since then some had left the force, and a few enlisted and were killed in the Great War. Bob Hackett sat next to Cotton, like him a constable, now his boss. These days Hackett preferred golf to catching criminals. You could say that every man in the photo – each determined and keen – had died so to speak. Himself included.

  A few years off fifty, Cotton had seen too much. There he was, trying to instil Shepherd with a detective’s eye and a love of the job when more than ready to hang up his dancing shoes, Cotton himself had scant faith they’d find Maple’s murderer.

  Shepherd was at the mortuary fetching Maple’s clothes. He’d pack him off to the Palais when he came back.

  Sitting down again, Cotton was distracted by Ethel’s blurry outline through the chicken-wire glass partition. He heard muffled clacks as she typed up his interim report on the murder. Cotton took refuge in a small dose of normal life. This jolted his memory that he hadn’t booked tickets for Aladdin up in town. Ethel had offered but, unlike the chief super, Cotton would not have his secretary manage his family as well as his office.

  ‘Temple Bar 3161 please,’ he told the operator.

  Cotton bagged three seats in the stalls, two rows from the stage. Since the Blitz, theatre performances ended before 9.30 p.m. If there was a raid, Agnes would make them find the nearest shelter. Were it up to him and June they’d stay in their seats.

  Afterwards they’d have a bite to eat at that fancy Lyons’ on Oxford Street. Cotton smiled; he liked splashing out on his family.

  Chapter Thirteen

  2019

  Stella

  ‘…why did you come to the abbey after you left the Death Café?’

  So, there it was. Stella was a suspect. Every detective keeps in their mind that the witness who finds the body is the murderer.

  ‘I heard the organ.’ Not the reason. If Stella had said that since living in Tewkesbury, the abbey was home, Janet’s suspicions would sky-rocket. She well knew neither Terry nor Stella believed in God. Stella couldn’t admit she felt soothed by stained glass images of the Passion, the trefoil arcade, the spandrels depicting intricate foliage, the glow of the votive candles and the hum of the two gigantic stoves which kept the abbey warm. Best not to admit she liked to think murmuring voices in the vaulted space echoed from across centuries.

  Stella had not followed Roddy to the abbey, but she couldn’t prove it.

  ‘My colleague said you saw someone in here.’ Janet wouldn’t seriously suspect Terry’s daughter of murder. Would she?

  If Stella were Janet, she’d suspect Stella.

  ‘I didn’t actually see a person, just a shadow. Over there, on that wall.’ Stella pointed across the nave to the north ambulatory. ‘I assumed it was Roddy when I saw his beanie on the chair.’

  ‘Show me which chair.’ Janet was up and striding away. Her foil blanket flapping, Stella went after her.

  ‘I was here.’ Too weak to stand, Stella sat down on the chair. ‘The shadow was there.’

  ‘You didn’t speak to March?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was him.’

  ‘You’re sure the beanie was his?’ Janet was merely doing her job, but it was making Stella nervous, as if she had something to hide.

  ‘I’m not sure, it’s just that Roddy wore one.’ Detectives took a witness’s nerves into account. Her dad had said the police could make the angels feel guilty. ‘It was like the one Roddy wore at the Death Café and yesterday in the abbey. The shadow looked like a head and shoulders.’ The more you say, the more you incriminate yourself. Stella crossed the flagstones and swept her hand over the sandstone to show where the shadow had been.

  ‘You weren’t afraid of being here on your own?’ Janet cast about. ‘This place is giving me the heebie-jeebies and that’s with half of Gloucestershire police here. But what am I saying? Stella Darnell has faced down cold-blooded killers. This is a walk in the park.’

  ‘I like it here alone.’ Stella couldn’t tell if Janet was being sarcastic. She stopped herself mentioning the Three Kings. Then Janet would think she’d lost it.

  ‘You weren’t tempted to see who it was?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Since that door to the right of the nave is the only exit, anyone leaving would have had to pass you.’ Janet nodded towards the north door off the ambulatory.

  ‘I assumed they’d gone towards the organ, perhaps to speak to Joy.’

  ‘If you go that way,’ Janet was looking at a folded tourist map, ‘and keep going, you reach the chapel where March was murdered. Keep going, you’ll pass round the back of the altar and then find yourself over there. Since you were on the same route, did it occur to you that you might meet March, or whoever, coming towards you clockwise?’

  ‘No.’ It had.

  While Janet had Forensics fingerprint the chair, the hymn book and the Bible tucked in the slot of the chair in front, Stella cast about for a raptor-like observation to toss at Janet, like meat to a lion, but the cupboard was bare.

  ‘If March went this side to the monk’s tomb, he’d have seen the organist. Name of Joy.’ Janet shifted a stack of plastic barriers leaning against the pillar. ‘Yet Joy says no one
passed her.’

  ‘The music stopped before I got up. It was why I got up – I was going to leave.’ Stella had changed her story, earlier she’d said she didn’t know when she got up.

  ‘What made you go that way? Sorry to go on but I need to get spatials straight.’ Janet began annotating her map of the abbey. ‘You bypassed Joy.’

  ‘I wasn’t keen to chat.’

  ‘That figures, she’s a sharp body. No tears for March, just cross I was keeping her. I suppose it’s feasible: deep in her organ, she missed March, if he did go that way.’ Holding the map, Janet marked an X by the organ. ‘You were leaving yet you went the opposite way to the exit.’

  ‘I went to give Roddy the beanie.’ Stella felt dizzy.

  ‘You didn’t take it with you.’ Janet smiled pleasantly, as if the question was of no consequence.

  ‘I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure it was his.’

  ‘Unless he had left his hat earlier and it wasn’t him listening to the music. You don’t sound a hundred per cent certain about the shadow.’

  ‘Not all the lights were on so no, I’m not.’ Stella caught the lifeline.

  ‘No matter, we can return to that tomorrow. You’ll be in shock. You did good tonight.’ Janet touched Stella’s elbow. ‘Listen, Stella, you did your best to save March, but you had no chance. Even if the paramedics had arrived, he’d have died. The knife went through his ribcage at the back and into his heart.’

  ‘Right.’ Dwelling on this fact, Stella was not prepared for the trick question.

  ‘What was the interval between you finding March and when you called it in?’

  ‘Three minutes?’ Stella reeled and caught the pillar for balance. ‘I’m sorry, it’s all a blur.’

  ‘Don’t be. This is great stuff. We’ll get you home. Tony, my sergeant, will give you a lift.’

  ‘I’d prefer to walk. Clear my head,’ Stella said.