The Distant Dead

by Lesley Thomson

  Roddy, oh Roddy, talk to me, what happened? Reliving her own words, Stella didn’t trust herself to speak.

  ‘Terrible way to go.’ Jack had seen this, he was helping.

  ‘From the way March swanned over to you last night I was convinced you two were old friends.’ Joy swung a leather dossier case.

  ‘How observant, I bet the police loved you,’ Jack crooned with unbridled admiration. ‘They’d never met before.’

  ‘Actually, we had—’

  ‘What I didn’t tell the police was that, with her fancy airs, Felicity is no better than she ought to be. Just because she conducts the choir, she thinks she can lord it over us. I ask you, where would she be without the organ? March was in league with Gladys Wren, anyone could see that.’

  Anyone except Stella who, according to Janet, had the observational skills of a raptor.

  ‘Trust me, I know a few things about our Felicity that don’t bear repeating,’ Joy said.

  ‘Ooh, secrets. Exciting.’ Jack clapped his hands. ‘Do tell.’

  ‘I am not one to gossip in a House of God.’ Joy was prim. ‘However, I am concerned that dear Felicity’s conducting skills are not what they were. A soprano told me she was off beat last week, poor thing.’

  ‘Felicity runs the abbey choir,’ Stella told Jack.

  ‘On whose soul may God have pity,’ Joy said randomly.

  ‘How marvellous. I’ve always wanted to sing with a group,’ Jack rhapsodized.

  Someone had dimmed the lights, the subtle illumination playing tricks on perspective so to Stella it seemed that the tall font on its stone plinth was a church spire on a horizon. The triforium walk and the vaulted ceiling were lost in gloom.

  ‘Do you have a theory about who murdered Roderick March?’ Jack turned serious.

  ‘Kids. A nasty gang is marauding through Tewkesbury. That female police officer agrees. I told her that we’d over a hundred pounds’ worth of goods stolen from the gift shop last month. Nothing is sacred.’ Joy hugged her music case.

  ‘Murder makes suspects of us all,’ Jack chirped. ‘That must have taken some lugging out, gifts in these shops are usually inexpensive.’

  ‘We only sell objects of quality.’ Joy’s smile had long gone.

  ‘I came for evensong.’ Stella changed the subject again.

  ‘Me too,’ agreed Jack. ‘Divine.’

  ‘There’s a recital here on Thursday evening. We contemplated cancelling after the nasty incident, but we’ve rehearsed so it would be a great shame. Bach – JS, not the other one – and some Dupré.’ Joy slipped a hand in her dossier.

  ‘Ah, Jacqueline,’ Jack brayed. ‘“The Swan” kills me every time.’ Stella silently urged Jack to stop while he was losing ground.

  ‘Marcel Dupre’s “Cortège et Litanie”,’ Joy corrected him.

  ‘Sublime.’ Jack glided over his misstep and, in that instant, Stella recalled exactly why they’d been a team.

  They all walked out of the abbey and Joy locked the door. High up in the tower, the bells rang for six thirty. The chimes were muffled by the steady rain.

  ‘Straight out of Ngaio Marsh,’ Jack said as they watched Joy trot away down the yew path, her bag swinging. ‘Detective writer from the thirties.’

  ‘I know who Ngaio Marsh is,’ Stella said, although she did not.

  ‘Here, take your boy.’ Jack passed her Stanley’s lead. ‘Stella, I am sorry about the ambush, I forgot Lucie works with what might not be reality and I was happy to buy in to it. If you won’t come back, would you at least let me research the case? Gen up on this Professor Northcote. Don’t forget the National Archives is round the corner from my house. I could see if the case has legs.’

  They had reached the abbey gates. What Lucie called Jack’s chiselled features were like carved stone in the lamplight. Tall, dark and handsome, Lucie and Jackie called him.

  ‘I’m a cleaner, not a detective,’ Stella snapped. ‘And it’s not up to me what you do. Janet is moving towards thinking it’s a gang, like Joy said. Roddy’s wallet was missing.’

  ‘You said.’ Hands plunged in his coat pockets, Jack hunched into his collar. His dripping fringe, in spikes, hung over his forehead. ‘Goodbye then, Stella.’

  It was good to see you. She formed the words too late. In his long black coat Jack had merged into the darkness. The pavement was empty.

  Rooted to the spot, Stella became aware of the distant thunder of the weir, water crashing through the sluices into the Severn. And above the tumult, Roddy’s dying whisper, ‘…Cah… ca… wo… my…’

  Car Wo My. Car Wo My.

  Roddy March’s dying words had become a mantra. But no amount of repeating what amounted to a series of sounds, Stella could make no more sense of what Roddy had been trying to tell her.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  December 1940

  ‘After Ernest, my sister and her husband are chivvying me to put a toe in the water. They took me to the Palais, to get acclimatized, nothing more. Sue went to powder her nose, David was getting drinks, that’s when I saw them. Clark Gable doesn’t say it. He reminded me of Ernest; the way he danced he must have had proper lessons. She was unremarkable, but love transforms a face. Daft, but watching them I felt the chance of romance hadn’t after all died.’

  Cotton circled Clark Gable in his notebook. He knew Una Hughes had meant the man with Maple really did look like Gable. Her own features would once have been attractive if not dulled by bags under her eyes. She had told him she was the walking wounded from grief and, with warnings coming thick and fast night and day, got no sleep. Recently he’d noticed Agnes looked worn out. She spent most nights on the substation telephone and, if they asked, making tea for the regulars. The Auxiliaries had to make their own.

  ‘What time did they leave?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s see, well, Moaning Minnie went off at ten thirty. We decided to stick it out, it’s exhausting reacting to every warning and half the time nothing happens. When I looked again, I couldn’t see them. I could have cried. Sue, my sister, said stuff and nonsense, they weren’t Romeo and Juliet, makes no difference to you. But you see, it did. It spelled The End.’ Una Hughes patted her rolled fringe. Cotton felt saddened; widowed at twenty-five like so many other girls, Una Hughes was too young to be deciding her life was over.

  ‘When Maple – a pretty name – popped up on the screen before the newsreel, I nearly fainted. Poor girl. There’s people dying every day, but Maple Greenhill and her chap were meant to be spared. A girl like her being dead, it’s like Adolf has won.’ Cotton, somewhat of a romantic, was inclined to agree.

  Mrs Davis had come to the station asking for Divisional Detective Inspector George Cotton. She’d started talking before he’d even got her sitting down with a cuppa. ‘Her face popped up on the screen at the Carlton up town. I’d gone with my mother to the new Errol Flynn… really, Inspector Cotton, it can’t have been Maple’s chap who did it, he looked so respectable. Debonair, actually bit like Errol Flynn now I mention it.’

  ‘Would you recognize this man if you saw him again?’ Cotton said.

  ‘Oh yes. I can see him now clear as day.’

  *

  Sitting in the library of Northcote’s palatial home in Ravenscourt Square that evening so, Cotton observed, could he. Clear as day.

  ‘I need this.’ Aleck Northcote was pouring himself another whisky from the crystal decanter on a drinks trolley. Snapping his teeth on the stem of his pipe, he relaxed back in his armchair. ‘Hell of a day, George. Six warnings, one being the bomb that hit the docks and burst a watermain. It closed off the Whitechapel Road and delayed me on my way to the mortuary. I tell you, the Führer had me in his sights. I’m a liability – where I go the Hun follow. To top it, Jumble’s fractured her damn leg at the Hippodrome, doing high jinks with some fancy man. Thank God today is over.’

  ‘Poor Miss Porter.’ Cotton was surprised to hear Northcote’s secretary – Jumble was Northcote’s pet name for her – got
up to ‘high jinks’. He’d refused a whisky, although he too could do with it – he was still on duty.

  ‘Poor me,’ Northcote wailed. ‘I can’t begin to say, I am at sixes and sevens without her, my fool of a lab assistant is useless.’ He tamped down his pipe and lit it. Puffing, he asked, ‘Any luck with that prostitute? I gather old Bob wants it bagged. Good as said you were wasting too much time on it.’

  ‘Hackett said that?’ Cotton hadn’t known the two men were on first-name terms.

  ‘I asked him, mainly to stop him asking me about his damn haemorrhoids. I advised, keep taking the ointment and lay off the sauce – that depressed him.’ Northcote held his pipe aloft.

  Cotton was startled when the door opened. To his dismay Julia Northcote walked in. Seeing Cotton, she gave a start. When he’d called to arrange to see him, Aleck had said his wife would be at some dull old lecture on nutrition for the poor, so Cotton had expected to find the coast clear. He stood up.

  ‘Good evening, Inspector.’ Her gaze slid off him.

  ‘You know each other?’ Northcote gestured to the drinks trolley. ‘One of your gins, dear? You fought free and escaped the spinsters then?’

  ‘I met the inspector at the police shindig you dragged me to.’ Why had she lied? ‘I didn’t escape, they’re good women, it ended early to beat the Nazis. Nothing for me, I feel thoroughly second-rate. I’m off to bed. I’ll leave you to… your business.’ This time, Julia Northcote looked at Cotton properly.

  ‘George and I are chewing the cud of crime and punishment.’ Northcote was cheery.

  ‘Inspector, I wish you every success with your investigation.’ Her hand on the door, Julia Northcote was still looking at Cotton and, although it felt rude, he made himself hold her steady gaze. ‘I’m confident you will find the monster who soiled that girl then snuffed her out.’

  ‘I hope to, Mrs Northcote.’ Julia Northcote knew.

  ‘George puts Sherlock Holmes to shame, dear, but on this I can’t share your confidence. George and I know that in sordid cases like this, the only hope is when, or if, the chap kills another girl, he makes a slip.’

  Julia Northcote didn’t reply. Bidding Cotton goodnight, she left the room. After the faint creaks on the stairs had receded, still standing, Cotton said, ‘He has slipped up.’

  ‘You didn’t say.’ Northcote’s face stiffened. His eyes were cold, cruel and unstinting.

  Cotton felt he could read what was passing across the pathologist’s mind as he rapidly assessed the situation. His high-flying career had convinced him he was invincible, he would never be found out. If he had been, he would have been confident that the police, the coroner, his colleagues would protect him. Julia Northcote’s parting words might be spelled in the cloud of blue pipe smoke.

  ‘I’m confident you will find the monster who soiled that girl then snuffed her out.’

  ‘I wish this wasn’t happening.’ Cotton went to the door, although Northcote wouldn’t make a run for it and he knew that Mrs Northcote would not return.

  Standing sentry, Cotton repeated all that he had told Bob Hackett. The elements of evidence: the scratched arms, the lighter, Northcote’s print on a paperweight, the radiogram, You knew Maple had been strangled, you had no reason to touch it. Another on the radiogram, on the other side of the room where you had no reason to go. That Northcote arrived within minutes of the call had seemed impressive. ‘You said you lived around the corner but I’ve just come from Chiswick and it took me just over a quarter of an hour. The PC who made the call reported that you got there in little more than three minutes. Perfectly possible if you were already in the vicinity, waiting until you could have legitimately got the message.’

  ‘George, I’ve always respected your common sense and fine judgement, don’t fall at the fourth now.’ There was no mistaking the warning in Northcote’s tone.

  Cotton continued, ‘Miss Porter put in the diary that you were at the lab until nine, but the man you called your “fool of a lab assistant” told us that you left at five. You said you were taking your wife out to dinner.’

  ‘George, you are on the rack with this murder. As your friend, why don’t I have a chat with Hackett, see if he can’t give you lighter duties? Or set you loose to dig for England on that allotment of yours. Maybe you could join your wife at the AFS and put out fires, so much wiser than setting them, don’t you think?’

  ‘I could twist facts to make sense of the senseless, but then there is the coat.’ Cotton related how they’d found the mending ticket from Bright the tailor tucked in the lining of Maple’s coat. ‘A coat that belonged to Mrs Northcote. Your wife.’

  ‘Don’t you dare bring my wife into it.’ Northcote remained seated in the other wing-backed chair, but now his face seemed alive as if charged with electricity. He looked like an automaton; in that second Cotton saw nothing human about him. He should have come with Shepherd. He had come alone to spare Northcote. His mistake.

  ‘However, if we must involve her…’ Northcote raised a hand and, without looking, took hold of a china handle at the end of a cord beside his chair.

  Expecting a servant or a butler, Cotton was astonished when Mrs Northcote reappeared. Wrapped in a silk kimono, Julia Northcote stepped into the room. It was so soon after her husband had pulled on the cord that Cotton suspected her of listening from the hall. So, from his expression, did Northcote.

  ‘Julia, please would you put the inspector’s mind at rest? There’s been some confusion in CID – comprising two men – regarding that silly business with your coat that Bright the tailor claims to have given to me. It is pretty ghastly, but the ticket you lost, and indeed the coat, have been found on the corpse of that prostitute strangled in Chiswick. Although there will be other such coats in London, the valiant Cotton here declares them a match.’

  The ensuing pause was broken by the siren. Moaning Minnie, as Una Hughes had called it. Una Hughes who, so impressed by Maple’s debonair dancing partner, had not forgotten him. Glancing at a folded newspaper photograph which Cotton happened to leave on the table, she had recognized the pathologist with the film-star looks whose forensic work on corpses pointed police to the killer as the man she’d seen with Maple.

  The siren stopped. Julia Cotton gave a sigh. ‘This again?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, darling.’ Aleck sat, legs crossed at the ankles, fingers intertwined, at home in his home.

  Cotton hoped to God Agnes, not on shift tonight, had taken June to the shelter. Although she hated him doing it, if she was on her own, she preferred curling up under the kitchen table to their damp dug-out.

  ‘As the inspector knows, I lost the ticket for my coat, I went to Bright’s to collect my coat only to find you had already done so,’ Julia Northcote said. ‘Now you’re saying that, all the time, the coat you gave me and the mending ticket for which I turned the house upside down looking for yesterday, were in the possession of a dead tart?’

  ‘You went to the shop?’ For the first time Northcote looked disturbed.

  ‘Didn’t I say?’ Mrs Northcote flapped pipe smoke away with a hand. ‘I was expecting to collect my coat, a thoughtful gift from you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Northcote’s smile filled Cotton with dread.

  ‘I preferred to put it out of my mind, the affair is too sickening. I shan’t be using Bright again, he’s clearly unfussy about the standard of customer. I want nothing to do with the whole, frankly revolting, business.’

  ‘If you had told me, we could have saved Cotton here a lot of trouble.’

  ‘If Inspector Cotton wants an explanation, here it is: Mr Bright accidentally – or on purpose – eyeing a bargain, sold my repaired coat to the first comer. A whore who, with airs and graces, then lured some poor unfortunate man with no more brain than the chair you are sitting in, Aleck.’ Julia stifled a yawn. ‘Bright will no doubt come up with some story to cover his tracks. Lucky for him, without the ticket I can’t prove he ever had the coat. However, I’m sure that the
nice inspector knows who to believe.’ Again, she looked at Cotton.

  ‘I have a witness,’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  2019

  Jack

  Jack was in the Kew National Archives – as he’d reminded Stella, he lived just around the corner. He had not told Stella that, regardless of what she’d said, he would work on the case. Without Stella, what else was he to do with himself?

  Last night, on the drive back to London, his spirits in his boots, it had sunk in that Stella didn’t see their relationship as on a break, she considered it broken.

  Lucie had texted that if he discovered a link between Northcote’s murder in 1963 and March’s two nights ago, she was sure Stella would be all over it. And by extension you too, Jackanory. Jack knew Lucie’s view could be more fanciful than his own, but when she predicted what he yearned for…

  Wrangling with his conscience, Jack concluded that, although Stella didn’t want them to be a team on Roddy March’s murder in Tewkesbury Abbey, she’d said nothing about the case featured in March’s putative podcast. How pleased she might be if Jack discovered the real killer of Aleck Northcote in Cloisters, the professor’s house adjoining Tewkesbury Abbey, fifty-six years ago in 1963.

  He had followed a paper files trail, stared at the computer screen until he felt seasick. Although he’d scanned material to his phone, gifted with a photographic memory, Jack could summon images and screeds of text at a mental press of a button. When they were a team, Stella handled information capture and populating colour-coded spreadsheets. She’d make them pause and take stock. Jack dealt in impressions and imaginings, ghost voices in subways and at window panes. Now he had to cover both angles.

  Jack had come armed with a potted biography of Aleck Northcote. Born 1901, father a Guildford GP who suffered a fatal heart attack when Aleck was ten and at boarding school in Gloucestershire. Scholarship to King’s to study medicine. In 1925 Northcote married his secretary, Julia Barnes. Giles was born the following year. A marriage not underpinned by love, Jack pondered, but of convenience? Northcote swooshed up the career ladder to be a pathologist by thirty. Not possible now, Jack knew, forensics was more complicated.