A shape detached itself from the darkness of the Avon. It resolved into a man, the hood of his fleece up, a scarf covering his mouth.
‘Evening, la-ladies. La-ate to be wandering alone.’ He swayed towards them. Tall, thin. Menacing.
‘Buzz off, Mr Man,’ Lucie barked.
‘Ooff. N-n-not ver-r-y nice.’ Stamping in a puddle, hands in his fleece pockets, he drew nearer. The escaping strand of dark hair precluded Clive, Stella decided.
‘Turn around, Dick Whittington. There’s a good reason why I’m only allowed out in daylight hours.’ Lucie braced herself.
‘Effing lezzies.’ The man stomped away towards the weir.
‘If he was spying on us, he’d have seen double,’ Lucie said when they were alone. ‘Old soak missed his way home from the pub. This is Stag Villas, time to see Old Father Time.’
Ahead a pallid shape proved to be a Georgian terrace of three houses. Standing outside, Stella made out three carved stags, one reclining on each porch, slender legs folded. Every window was dark. Dismissive of time, had Clive Burgess forgotten their appointment? She yelled over the wind, ‘He’s not there.’
‘Only one way to find out.’ Splashing through puddles, Lucie pulled an iron lever affixed beside the door. ‘It’s open.’ Before Stella could stop Lucie, she shouldered inside.
Peering back to the river, the man had made her uneasy. Stella saw someone crouched on the towpath. Staring hard, it became a yellow salt bin. She hurried after Lucie into the house.
‘What is that noise?’ Lucie looked nervous.
From all around came a chattering, insidious as cicadas.
Stella found the light switch. Light flooded a spacious hall.
‘Christ on a bike, Clive likes clocks.’ Lucie’s faux fur was like a damp animal draped over her.
Grandfather clocks lined the walls, pale wood, some oak, mahogany, all somehow forbidding. On a marble table stood an ornate clock of porcelain with silver filigree. Stella wasn’t up on antiques but through cleaning for clients, ormolu and Louis XIV came to mind. One she could identify, the brass fittings not hidden, was a skeleton clock. Was it, she wondered, the one Clive had said he mended for Professor Northcote?
‘Clive?’ Stella’s voice was hoarse after shouting. ‘It’s me. Stella. I hope it’s OK, I’ve brought a friend.’
‘Coo-ee,’ Lucie called.
They ventured into a room on the right and the chattering grew louder. On an oval dining table were more clocks. Stella froze. Each faced across the table, like dinner guests. More clocks were set on plinths around the room and, in each corner, as if waiting to serve food, stood grandfather clocks.
‘Useless, none of them tell the time,’ Lucie said. Her horror mounting, Stella saw that every face was blank. There were no numbers. No hands.
‘At the Death Café, Clive said some clocks keep the time to themselves.’ Stella cleared her throat. ‘They don’t tell the time.’
‘I hate concept art.’ Lucie was snappish, not a good sign. Stella needed her to be fearless.
In the living room more clocks crowded every surface, pendulums swinging. Some ticked rapidly like beaks chipping bark, others with a ponderous clunk. The awful chattering set Stella’s heart beating faster, faster, faster. She fought the impression that every clock had turned to face them.
‘Something is very off,’ Lucie said. ‘He’s not in the kitchen. There are two mugs out for tea so he was expecting you.’
‘Yes.’ Stella knew from experience that a trouble shared was a trouble doubled.
‘Where is Clive the Clock?’ Lucie stepped out to the hall. ‘Clive? If you’re hiding in one of your hideous upright coffins ready to jump out shouting “Cuckoo”, do not.’
The chattering was getting louder.
Stella flapped aside the living-room curtains. Nothing. Through the window, the flooded Avon reflected the clouds tearing across the sky. From habit, Stella did a finger test on the sill. Clean. Then she recalled Clive saying dust was the enemy of time, it clogged the cogs. Or had Joy said it? If only, like Roddy, she’d taken notes. This reminded her that Roddy’s notebook was missing.
‘Mr Clo-ock,’ Lucie wheedled. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are.’
‘We ought to leave.’ Stella came out to the hall and saw Lucie already halfway up the stairs.
‘He could have passed out on his bed.’ Lucie reached the landing.
Clive was in none of the four bedrooms. All the beds were neatly made without a crease, each room spotless with, thankfully, only one clock in each.
‘Yuk, don’t tell me that’s his aftershave.’ Lucie wrinkled her nose at a smell which pervaded all the rooms.
‘It’s Horolene, it’s for cleaning clocks,’ Stella knew about cleaning. ‘It means Clive was here recently.’
When they returned downstairs, Lucie headed down the passage to the kitchen.
‘You looked there,’ Stella said.
‘I need a cuppa before I face that friggin’ towpath again and who knows, in the time it takes to dunk a teabag, Clive might appear,’ Lucie said.
Stella was surprised that the kitchen was modern, with white cupboards, white stone counters, white sink and taps. Silver microwave, toaster, kettle, oven. No clocks.
Lucie filled the kettle and skittered about the room, eventually finding an old-fashioned Lipton’s tea-caddy.
‘There’s something on the lawn.’ Stella peered out through raindrops streaming down panes in the back door. ‘What’s that light?’
‘Scarecrow lit by the moon.’ Lucie joined her.
‘There is no moon.’ Frantic now, Stella fiddled with the key, eventually turned it, and plunged out into the freezing garden, Lucie behind her.
A lantern stood beside a plinth in the centre of the lawn. The candle was burned almost to a stub and in the guttering flame they made out a bundle draped over Clive’s birdbath.
Flash. Flash. Flash. Lucie was firing off photos with her phone. The on-off light revealed the scene in high relief.
Clive was sprawled on the birdbath, staring upwards, his face fixed in a ghastly grimace. Not a birdbath. Clive Burgess was impaled on a sundial. Stella dialled 999.
‘I’m calling in a murder.’ As Stella gave Clive’s address, she saw Lucie writing in her notebook.
For the clockmaker time stopped when…
Chapter Twenty-Five
29 December 1940
That terrible swingeing sound. Crash. If the house shook, the bomb was within about three miles. A fraction of silence. Crash. It would go on until dawn. Extraordinarily, after weeks of the Blitz, so much of London was still standing. Tonight it seemed more terrible, perhaps because for three nights the weather had been onside and the Nazis had left them in peace.
When Cotton walked across Shepherd’s Bush Green in the mornings, shops were still there. Business as Usual. Houses undamaged, the trams and trains still ran. His own street was intact so that, on a Sunday sweeping up leaves in their garden, he teased himself life was normal, the country wasn’t imprisoned in a set of complex rules and regulations for its own good, and that there was not the chance of dying, if not today, then tomorrow.
Cotton hunched on the bed watching searchlights raking the sky. It rained down with flares, incendiaries. Bombs. Agnes had made him promise to go out to the shelter. But he could not when she was at the substation risking her life to keep people safe. How he wished she’d volunteered for something less dangerous. Her captain had told him she was the glue in the outfit, handling messages for reinforcements, the engines, turntables, pumps, in double quick time. Cotton took it as a hint not to prevent Agnes doing her bit.
Another explosion. It drowned out Billy Cotton downstairs on the radiogram. Cotton tensed when the windows rattled, closer that time.
Agnes was the glue at home too. When he’d returned from arresting Northcote last night, she’d got the fire going, using up the coal ration. They had sat watching the flames, drinking hot chocolate as he related
what had happened.
‘They should hang him.’ She snuggled closer. Like him, Agnes didn’t hold with state execution. Solves nothing, she’d say. There were exceptions.
He’d told her how he’d escorted Northcote to the station where they were met by Chief Superintendent Robert Hackett and the coroner, Wolsey Banks. His first clue should have been when both men had groused that they’d had to come out in a raid. The second when, going into Hackett’s office, Banks had told him to wait outside.
‘Ten minutes later, Northcote comes out.
‘“Night, George.” He tips his hat and strolls off down the corridor as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
‘Next thing I’m hauled in there to be told by Bob in his best King’s English how it “was all an unfortunate misunderstanding”. Banks is tearing up Una Hughes’s statement there and then; he says everything is explained. Northcote “deeply regretted his slip with the lighter, it proves I’m human like everyone else”. Hackett and Banks had a good laugh at that.
‘Hackett tells me I had gone against his orders, “countermanded” was his word. I had no busines charging Aleck Northcote with murder. Hackett said he’d “expressly told me the matter was in the hands of the coroner”.’
Oblivious to the hiss of incendiaries, the Messerschmitts and Heinkels pummelling the city or deafening bangs of returning gunfire, Cotton hunched on the edge of the bed. He was back in the flickering firelight, Agnes holding his hand, saying nothing, just listening like she did.
‘“…disgraceful to lay murder at the door of a respectable man who daily gives his life for King and country. Northcote is worth more to the home front than some grubby shop girl.” I couldn’t believe it was Banks talking.
‘I tried putting the case: “Northcote knew the house was empty, he’d performed the autopsy on the owner… the stubs in the grate were the same brand of cigarette, his fingerprints, those scratches—”’
‘“Murder by person or persons unknown.” Banks is puffing on his pipe.
‘“Bob?” I tried to appeal to the bloke I passed out with, we always had each other’s backs. But Bob is at the door.
‘“Thank you, Inspector Cotton, that will be all.” Agnes, you’d never have recognized him.’
‘Betty’s been funny with me. I thought it was because I saw her getting extra down the butcher’s,’ Agnes had said. ‘He must have told her to keep her distance. He won’t have said why, he never tells her anything except if he’s won at golf. So, your hard work with Shepherd is thrown away and a cold-blooded murderer is free to kill again all because he’s so ruddy important.’ Agnes had held his hand. ‘Doesn’t that man have enough dead bodies that he needn’t be killing more?’
Cotton clutched the quilt, wishing it was Agnes’s hand. Before she’d gone out to the substation earlier that evening, she’d said, ‘Men like that, Maple Greenhill wasn’t his first and won’t be his last…’ She had kissed him and told him to collect up stuff for the shelter. June was out with her man. ‘I’ve told her not to be late.’
Cotton hadn’t told her how Wolsey Banks, the man who had swapped allotment tips with him and once described Cotton as the cream of the force, had walked past him as if he wasn’t there.
He hadn’t been able to tell Agnes his pension was in doubt if he made trouble. She did know that tomorrow, although suspended, Cotton was expected to inform Keith and Evelyn Greenhill the police had not found their girl’s killer. Hackett had suggested Cotton ‘call the girl a casualty of the war’.
‘Adolf didn’t strangle Maple Greenhill.’ Agnes had been furious. ‘Northcote did that.’
Now Cotton raised his head. Through the smoke he could see the distant glow of fires in the east. He wanted June home. At least her man would bring her to the door.
Despite the raid, he went out and peered up and down the street. The moon was obliterated by smoke. It was dark as pitch. Cotton couldn’t see the kerb.
This meant when Shepherd found him still standing by the gate half an hour later, Cotton was taken by surprise.
‘You’ve heard then?’ Hackett had wasted no time. He’d have to recruit a new team. The only winner was Shepherd – he was getting his way and being shipped out to fight.
‘Heard?’ In the hall light Shepherd looked sick as a dog.
‘About Dr Northcote. I wanted to tell you myself, but I’ve been furloughed.’
‘It’s not that, sir. They sent me to tell you. Shepherd clutched his hat. ‘The Paddington substation got a hit and Agnes… I’m sorry, sir.’
‘Not your fault, lad,’ Cotton said.
PART TWO
Chapter Twenty-Six
5 November 1979
The explosion made the bridge vibrate. A spray of light across the sky made multicoloured molten glass of the water cascading through the sluices into the River Avon. Guy Fawkes was long dead, but every year he had to be burnt again. Cotton was a Catholic, but when he’d married Agnes, strict Church of England, he’d let it lapse. Nothing that had happened since had restored any kind of faith.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, another one.’ Cotton wiped rainwater from his face.
Since the Blitz, he couldn’t stand bangs: a car back-firing; a door slamming; fireworks all became gunfire, bombs. On other years at this time he stayed home, headphones on to block out the sound, listening to records from their collection. Agnes’s favourites: Chopin, Beethoven sonatas, Vaughan Williams.
Dr Aleck Northcote had found it amusing that the Cottons liked classical music while he, ‘eminent pathologist, adored band music. A chap can’t get hold of a girl to Vaughan Williams.’ George hadn’t put Northcote right. They’d agreed it took all sorts while each secretly admiring the other man for having something more about him.
Cotton checked his watch. Nearly ten.
A flare. The scream of an incendiary. He clutched the guard rail and stared fixedly past the old mill to where the tower of the abbey showed above the rooftops. It had survived centuries, the Dissolution. The Blitz. When Cotton had arrived in Tewkesbury he’d gone straight to the abbey and, regardless of his lost faith in God, had lit a candle for Agnes. Then another for June and her babbies. Grumpy teenagers with better things to do than visit Grandad when June came to check on him. He’d found himself thinking how the abbey belonged to the Catholics first, perhaps because in his old age, Catholicism was once again his harbour.
A high-pitched whistle was a V2, Hitler’s last hurrah. Whistle. Silence. Death. In the end it had never been his turn.
Cotton sensed he wasn’t alone. He turned. Too late. His detective’s brain registered that his throat would now be cut from the front instead of the back. Less clean, but as effective.
Pain was extinguished by the shock when Cotton’s body was tipped over the bridge and hit the water. It was quickly carried away on the current, bobbing briefly before it sank. The post-mortem would find that actual death was by drowning.
A firework ended the night’s display. It illuminated the bridge, the weir and a terrace of houses along the bank. Cotton’s killer was revealed, steeped in white light, like a sculpture of cold steel.
Unlike when Maple Greenhill had been strangled nearly forty years before, this time there was a witness.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
2019
Jack
7 p.m. The night after Jack’s abortive trip to Tewkesbury. He slumped on the sofa in his sitting room staring at the fire. His sofa was long enough for Stella and him to lie end to end, toes touching. Just him now.
Idly sifting through Rightmove, a way of weaning himself off being a guest in a True Host’s house, Jack had discovered a listing for the house in Ravenscourt Square where Professor Northcote had lived until 1942. Instantly he considered booking a viewing, but thought better of it. Best not to leave footprints, digital or literal.
Then he felt the nearest to happy that he’d felt for two months. There was a Virtual Tour. A devotee of Street View, Jack used to ‘walk’ routes around Lo
ndon, a reconnaissance for when he did the real thing. Now virtual reality software allowed him to explore a house in what estate agents called ‘immersive 3D’. He could wander around Northcote’s old home and not a soul would know.
Clicking his mouse pad, he hopped along the faint circular markers which, like stepping stones, allowed him to move through the property.
The house had been modernized since 1942 when, according to the electoral roll and, Jack now saw, on an English Heritage blue plaque, Northcote had moved permanently to his weekend house in Tewkesbury.
The ground floor was open plan – what he guessed was one an elegant hall with a sweeping staircase had been knocked into one with the downstairs rooms. With no nooks or alcoves, it resembled a sprawling modern office. Ceiling spots killed shadow and slants of light. Jack’s heart sank – were there to have been a clue to any mystery round Northcote’s murder it was there.
Jack ‘climbed’ the stairs, hopping along the circular markers into each room. There at last were original panelled doors, ceiling roses, alcove cupboards, fireplaces. Handles that Northcote and his wife had turned, cupboards they had opened. Door jambs they had touched during the thirties.
Jack let out a sigh. The top landing was unchanged. Oak balustrades curved round and down to the soulless office three storeys below. Jack had grown up in such a house, he’d spent hours as a small boy peering through the spindles to the perilous drop. Now he zoomed in on the banister, he saw the grain in the wood smoothed by hands over centuries and, immersed in the experience, caught the scent of beeswax polish.
Using the dollhouse view, Jack could turn and twist the cluster of rooms, suspended like a jewel-bright Christmas tree decoration, and peer inside. Stripped of external walls, each room exposed, he was reminded of the Blitz photos in the Archives. Interiors blown open by a bomb, to reveal to the street how lives were lived.
The Distant Dead Page 18