The Distant Dead

by Lesley Thomson

  Curled up on a leather sofa, a diminutive champagne-coloured poodle snoozed, chin resting on a stuffed rat whose greyed fabric indicated he was the dog’s favoured companion. The scene – tossed cushions, the contents of an upended waste-paper basket, screws of paper, several scrunched-up packets that had contained dried figs scattered on the carpet – suggested the aftermath of an alcohol-fuelled fight.

  The dog’s ears pricked. A woman, tall and perhaps too thin, in workaday jeans, a fraying Christmas jumper (reindeer whose antlers reached her shoulders), black police issue boots, stomped into the room. Pushing back her hair, Stella Darnell viewed the mess with a critical eye then, taking the bin bag snagged in the back pocket of her jeans, set about clearing up.

  The poodle, ecstatic to have company, danced around Stella on his hind legs as she moved about. Stopping to scruffle Stanley’s ears, she had soon restored order. Plumped cushions were arranged on the sofa. Stella stacked the takeaway dishes and tipped them into the bag. As everyone in the Clean Slate office was saying at that very moment, Stella Darnell was never happier than when tackling a mess.

  In the kitchen Stella cut a wedge of dog food from a plastic container, mashed it and placed the bowl on a mat patterned with paws.

  ‘Stanley, breakfast.’ ‘Breakfast’ was a key word in Stanley’s relatively extensive vocabulary and the dance became dervish-like. As Stella lowered the bowl, he abruptly sat down by the mat. Pummelling her aching temple, Stella commanded ‘Release’. Leaving Stanley to his food, she wandered back to the living room.

  Lucie had drunk most of the bottle. Stella’s headache was due to tossing and turning for what remained of the night. She had kept seeing Roddy March beside the cadaver tomb. The coppery smell, his expression, soft locks of hair when she stroked it from his face. Stella had shouted at Janet because for Janet, Roddy’s murder was simply a case to be solved. For Stella it was more profound. All she could think was, Roddy March had been alive – and annoying – and now he was dead.

  Roddy’s murder had kept Stella awake, but so had her conscience. She had told Lucie about the murder. Ultimately Lucie would have found out, a BBC Breaking News alert had come in at two thirty – Man found dead in Tewkesbury Abbey – but that wouldn’t have been down to Stella spilling the beans.

  After she’d accepted Auntie Lucie’s prescription of a hot shower, capitulated to wearing one of Lucie’s panda-bear leisure suits and drunk a glass of Merlot, Stella had basically run off at the mouth. She gave the veteran tabloid reporter the full story.

  ‘Of course, off the record, Sherlock,’ Lucie had cooed. Hours later – the last chimes of the abbey Stella remembered were 3 a.m. – Lucie started a new notebook.

  Coshed by drowsiness, Stella had begun clearing up until Lucy shooed her to bed. ‘I’ve got this, honey-bunch.’

  Now, hunched on the sofa, Stanley on her lap licking his toes, Stella fretted about exactly what Lucie had ‘got’. Not the clearing up, but that suited Stella.

  Stella hadn’t told Lucie the SIO was Janet, that would have definitely put flames to petrol. In Hammersmith, where Lucie was chief crime reporter on the Chronicle, Lucie had claimed Janet was jealous of her being with Terry. Lucie was as convinced as Stella’s mother that Terry and Janet had been an item. She took it personally when Janet embargoed her stories or didn’t pick her to ask a question at press briefings.

  Some forty years ago, in the heat of separation from Stella’s mother, propelled by a broken heart Terry had had an affair with Lucie. For him it was an affair on the rebound; for Lucie – self-styled truth warrior – it had been love.

  It wouldn’t be personal, Stella knew. It riled all police detectives when journalists subjugated reality for hypotheticals. When facts failed to fit her stories, Lucie defaulted to fiction. Yet Janet wouldn’t allow her personal feelings to get in the way of her work. Lucie, on the other hand, gave resentments and animosities free rein.

  Stella had no qualms about keeping back from Lucie that Janet was in Tewkesbury, but she should have told Janet that, convalescing from a head injury, Lucie May was Stella’s flatmate.

  Two months ago, Stella’s friends – and Jack – had deemed it ludicrous that Stella would share a flat with Lucie. Jackie and Beverly warned Stella that money and domestics were always the stumbling blocks. Stella’s mum, despite having left Terry, had been jealous that he’d taken up with Lucie and now told Stella that ‘Lucie May will skin you alive’.

  However, Stella and Lucie had surprised everyone by getting on famously. Stella accepted that Lucie’s fulsome offers to shop, cook and clean never translated into deed. Stella preferred to do these tasks herself. Stella’s own idea of cooking was an array of ready meals – shepherd, cottage and fish pies with frozen peas as a concession to Jackie’s frequent suggestions that Stella eat more greens. Every week, Lucie treated them to a takeaway. This week, Indian.

  Stella dreaded the day when, fully recovered, Lucie must inevitably return to London. Stella had no plans to go back, but in the last weeks distantly recognized that she liked life in Tewksbury because Lucie was there too. She had tried encouraging Lucie to stop researching and actually begin writing her true-crime bestseller. But, easily side-tracked by other stories or another avenue of research, Lucie hadn’t progressed to page one. If Stella had planned a way of keeping Lucie in Tewkesbury, nothing was more effective than telling her about Roddy March’s murder.

  Stella placed her empty mug on a Tewkesbury Abbey coaster and going into Google Play Store, she downloaded a podcast app.

  Her brain a fug, Stella had forgotten the title of the podcast and was trying to remember when Lucie breezed in on wafts of lavender bath gel and the dry shampoo she used regardless of the all-body power shower. In her combats and a combat jacket not unlike Roddy March’s, Lucie operated as if reporting from a war-zone, hence dry shampoo. Garlanded with the Bluetooth earbuds that were a permanent accessory, she clutched a bag of figs in one hand, phone in the other.

  ‘There’s a press conference at 11 a.m., gotta be there.’

  ‘No.’ Stella hadn’t heard Lucie get up. Since Janet had called her observant, Stella was observing how much she failed to observe. ‘You can’t let Janet see you here.’ Damn, that was the cat out of the bag.

  ‘Janet? No don’t tell me.’ The penny had dropped.

  ‘Don’t rock the boat,’ Stella said. ‘I intend to do just that. Imagine her face,’ Lucie cackled.

  Stella felt dread pump through her veins. Janet already had Stella as a suspect; how much worse when she discovered Stella had lied, if by omission, about Lucie? Stella uttered the first thing that entered her head and the last thing she meant to say.

  ‘Janet is trusting me with stuff about the case that she would never tell any other reporter. She’s treating me like Terry. If she sees you, she’ll cut me out.’

  ‘Wise idea.’ Lucie was fiddling with her phone. ‘I’ll stay undercover for now.’

  ‘I can’t remember the name of Roddy’s podcast.’ Stella diverted Lucie in case she changed her mind.

  ‘The Distant Dead.’ You can’t pull the wool over that kid’s eyes. ‘I started listening last night, but fell asleep. Draw your own conclusion.’

  ‘Let’s listen now.’ Stella connected her phone to the Bluetooth speaker Jack had given her after one of their cases.

  ‘He has three subscribers. I’m betting, mum, dad and the cat.’ Lucie tapped at her phone screen. ‘There, now he has four.’ She settled into the creaky old recliner she had called her cockpit and which, feet pointing upwards, she rarely left.

  ‘One of the subscribers could have murdered Roddy’s murderer,’ Stella said.

  ‘I like that notion. Murderers can be arrogant, but pretty stupid to leave a digital trail.’ Lucie fussed with her notebook. ‘You said March was full of himself; men like that get on people’s tits. The few minutes I heard confirmed that. He makes drama out of a non-event.’ Chattering happily, Lucie nipped off the end of a fig from her new bag.


  ‘I didn’t say he was full of… he was just…’ What had Roddy been?

  ‘Let us sit comfortably and listen.’ Lucie nestled in her cockpit.

  ‘This podcast contains serious and graphically violent scenes. If you are affected by anything you have heard, contact your nearest crisis centre. Be aware I have been prepared to go the distance in my quest for truth…’

  Stella was unprepared for the shock of Roddy’s voice coming through the speaker almost if he was in the room. Whereas at the Death Café Roddy had rattled on about his podcast, now thanking the design company who had sponsored the series, he was ponderous, each word lined up after the other. Also, he sounded Australian.

  ‘I’m Roddy March and you’re listening to The Distant Dead. Over the next weeks I will take you through my investigation of a chain of brutal, callous murders that span generations. As the March hare I chase scents until I catch the answer…’

  ‘He mixes metaphors good enough to drink. Oh, and hares don’t chase they are chased,’ Lucie scoffed. ‘You didn’t mention he was an Aussie.’

  ‘He didn’t talk like that last night.’

  ‘Some of the best true-crime podcasts come from down under. March was after a global audience. Shame he sounds like a satnav.’ Lucie twirled a fig on its stem.

  ‘I begin with the brutal slaying of Professor Aleck Xavier Northcote, Home Office pathologist, in the sitting room of his home in Tewkesbury on a cold November night in 1963. But wait on, Northcote’s death was the effect, not the cause.’ A pause was filled with piano music that must be intended to heighten a sense of suspense. ‘Why is this date familiar? Older listeners will recall Friday the twenty-second of November as the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Meanwhile, in the ancient market town of Tewkesbury, the inhabitants woke up on Saturday the twenty-third to the unbelievable news that there was A. Murderer. At Large.’

  ‘Honest to God, March’s delivery. Could. Make. Me. A. Murderer.’ Lucie munched on her fig.

  ‘Widowed, his grown-up son living in London, his housekeeper out at the cinema, Professor Sir Aleck Northcote was alone in his grand house hard by the River Severn. Julia, his wife, unable to handle the cruel privations of the war, blackout, constant air raids, rationing, had hung herself twenty-odd years earlier…’

  ‘Hanged, not hung,’ Lucie said.

  ‘The Northcotes, prominent auctioneers, had owned the house in Tewkesbury set in the English county of Gloucestershire for centuries. A picturesque market town where people existed happily, going about their business. Or did they? Aleck had abandoned business for his own pleasure: pathology. From the mid-thirties, now living in an equally big house in London, Julia and Aleck were strictly weekenders. Some of you will have heard, if not of the murdered pathologist, then of the Quarry Murders case in 1941 and the Bodies in the Basement after the war in 1951.’ More piano music. ‘Sir Aleck was more used to examining a corpse than to being that corpse himself. I’m Roddy March and you’re listening to The Distant Dead.’

  ‘Kinell,’ Lucie scoffed. ‘These podcasters haven’t an iota of journalistic training. They think all you need is a tape recorder and a bedroom.’

  Stella knew podcasts were one of Lucie’s hobby-horse gripes. Another horse being that training was pointless: ‘the only way to learn is on the job.’ Lucie was comfortable with holding two opposing views.

  ‘Northcote’s murder was solved and his murderer judiciously hung in April 1964. The Northcote case gathered dust in police archives, solved, signed and sealed. What’s the mystery you could ask?’ The piano.

  ‘I could ask,’ Lucie said. ‘Hanged.’

  ‘Many bad books have been published about Northcote’s murder. Lots of sensational inaccuracies, but the biggest is that no one knew the real killer. What was the truth of what went on in that cavernous house on that stormy November night? No one has questioned the judge’s verdict. Until. Now.’

  ‘Another pot-boiler rushed out to catch the zeitgeist while it’s bubbling on the stove.’ Lucie thought nothing of mixing her own metaphors. Happier talking than writing, Stella was increasingly certain Roddy’s murder was to be Lucie’s latest excuse for abandoning her own true-crime book.

  ‘…prove to you that the man hung on the morning of the eighteenth of May at HMP Pentonville – only weeks before the end of capital punishment in Great Britain – was as innocent as the spring day on which his neck was snapped. I will show that, after the supposed killer left Cloisters House, Professor Northcote got another visitor. His. Murderer.’

  ‘Da da da dah. Actually the last hanging in Britain was on the sixteenth of December 1969 so that’s tosh for starters. ’ Lucie sang as she ripped the top off another fig. ‘Sadly, that style works, listeners lap it up. No editor to correct gigantic holes in his grammar.’ Lucie often railed against her editor at the Chronicle.

  ‘That evening, when Northcote was opening the door to his visitor, most Brits were glued to their TVs reeling from the death of America’s president. If Northcote shouted for help, his cry went unheard. There was no witness. Or. Was. There?’

  As he had at the Death Café, March promised to reveal the name of the murderer at the end of the series. ‘This is a living podcast, I’m unearthing secrets by the minute and as I do, I will share them with you. I don’t know how many episodes this will take, but please come with me on what will definitely be a bumpy ride… Giles Northcote was the Northcotes’ only child – could the great man have been slain by a boy he’d dandled in his arms over twenty-five years earlier? That the professor’s middle name of Xavier, like everything I tell you, is a brick in the wall of this fifty-year-old mystery. Like so many deaths, the accessories are clues. Holmes had his pipe, we have a cigarette lighter, a tailor’s ticket and… well, why not wait and see?’

  ‘I love how he compares himself to Sherlock Holmes.’ Lucie was busy writing in her notebook as Roddy had the night before. ‘No shame.’

  ‘You call me Sherlock,’ Stella said.

  ‘A fair comparison.’

  Stella was glad that, engrossed in her notes, Lucie didn’t see her struggle not to smile. Lucie was a harsh judge, so that was a compliment.

  ‘We know that Giles Northcote called his father earlier that Friday requesting to see him. The renowned professor knew his son’s reason for coming was not filial affection. We know Aleck poured Giles at least one whisky; Giles’s fingerprints were on a glass and the decanter. In his police statement Giles confirmed this as he admitted tapping Northcote Senior for a loan to pay off a substantial gambling debt. His father refused. Giles claims he “took this on the chin”. On his return to London, he got drunk and didn’t waken until noon on the Saturday to headlines in the papers that Kennedy was dead. And in smaller print how his own father had been bludgeoned to a pulp with a poker. Giles’s girlfriend had dumped him so, alone in his flat, no one supported his alibi. Scotland Yard found Giles’s smudged thumbprint on the poker and his fate was sealed by the discovery of a silver cup Giles had pinched from his father and hidden in a cupboard.

  ‘But what if Giles was cool with his father’s refusal of money? The silver cup was worth five hundred pounds which easily covered his debt. Giles claimed he’d raked the fire with the poker, and maybe that’s all he used it for. Why would he kill the golden goose?’

  ‘To benefit from the will, one would suppose, young March,’ Lucie said.

  ‘If Giles did kill him, he did nothing to cover his tracks.’ Stella took down notes as Roddy gave more background.

  Giles Hugh Northcote, twenty-six, single, no children. Expelled from Eton for going to the races. This surprised Stella, she’d rather expected it to be mandatory curriculum to know about horses. Giles was ‘booted out’ of the army for being drunk on duty while serving in Aden, now Yemen, then a British Protectorate. His voice deepening, Roddy said, ‘Aleck was alive when his son left. Not long after there came another knock on the door and, expecting Giles come back to plead, No
rthcote answered it. He admitted his visitor. It’s by this unknown person’s hand that the pathologist sustained the ugly and vicious attack that ended his illustrious life.’

  ‘Save us.’ Lucie pressed a button on the recliner and her feet went up several inches.

  ‘Aleck drags himself to the hall telephone but, fixed to the wall, he can’t reach it. The housekeeper comes back from the cinema and notices the receiver dangling. Then she sees her master in a pool of blood on the hall floor. Professor Sir Aleck Northcote died the way he’d lived, a mutilated corpse on a mortuary slab.’ More piano chords then Roddy said, ‘Check out our website for photos and pics of the key players. Join in the conversation: do you know about this case? Have you spotted an anomaly?’

  ‘Mortuary slab. Catchy notion until you pick it apart,’ Lucie commented. ‘And he can’t keep to one tense. What a dog’s breakfast.’

  ‘I was reading that some podcasts have got people out of prison.’ Stella saw a dog’s breakfast as a good thing.

  ‘Now let’s turn back the clock to the nineteen thirties when Aleck is plain Dr Northcote but already swarming the pole. His unrivalled knowledge of contusions has just done for the Brandy Snap Strangler.’

  Stella wished they could turn the clock back. Clive’s insistence that time was a concept should mean Roddy was still alive. Turn it further back and she hadn’t gone to the Death Café nor been frightened on a country lane. She and Jack were still together.

  ‘Armchair forensic specialists schooled on box sets and podcasts, we’re alert to fake news. But imagine a world in which one man can inspire such veneration that a twitch of his finger sways a jury to hang a man they should let walk free. Northcote was that man. As you’d expect, such a man gains enemies. Who? Were. They?

  ‘First up, Northcote’s colleague and arch-rival Gerald Bradman. Known amongst his colleagues as the Butcher, Bradman blagged his way through autopsies and trials. More than once Northcote was brought in to do a second autopsy. Incidentally, a nasty twist is that the pathologist who cut open Northcote and his son after their deaths was none other than the Butcher. With Northcote gone, Bradman stepped into his shoes.