Jack swooped in on the landing where, on New Year’s Day 1941, Julia Northcote, the pathologist’s wife, hanged herself. Thirty-six and beautiful, her son staying with a friend from his boarding school. She had at least avoided the possibility Giles would find his mother. Jack felt an affinity with the boy and later the man who had sat hunched in a prison cell that last night awaiting a verdict of judicial murder. Giles had worked at the stock exchange, unsuccessfully, Jack guessed, since he’d been in debt. He must have found life a struggle; you never got over losing your mother.
Circling like an albatross, Jack tried to read Julia Northcote’s long-gone mind as she prepared her scaffold and, proficient as a Pierrepoint, dispatched herself. No thought of her boy, who would be motherless. Jack’s own mother hadn’t killed herself yet he did sometimes blame her for leaving him. Across decades, he asked Julia Northcote, ‘Why? Why did you do it?’
He shivered. No amount of clicking and zooming about on the landing would turn back time. He hopped along the white markers to the front attic bedrooms, then the back – what were once the servants’ quarters.
Jack was not alone.
A man bent by an alcove cupboard, low-slung jeans giving Jack an unwanted view of cheek butts. Automatically, as if to tackle the intruder, Jack leapt the cursor forward. The man vanished.
Now the cupboard door was closed, the room was empty. He clicked back to the door and came in again. This time there was no man and the cupboard was still shut. He pinched out to the Death Landing and tried again. Nothing.
This time, Jack made sure to click on every marker.
There he was. Purple polo shirt, brown Goodyear rigger boots, he crouched on his haunches, sideways to the camera. The glimpse of his face suggested he was about Jack’s age, early forties, hair greying at the temples. Perhaps he was the virtual tour photographer and the image file editor had been careless.
Jack’s phone buzzed with a text. A supper invitation at Jackie and Graham’s. Bev and Cheryl are coming. He loved it there, the Makepeaces were the family he’d never had, Jackie’s cooking like a mother’s love. Not that he could remember his mother’s meals. Yet he was suspicious. Everyone would know he’d seen Stella last night. Maybe they were offering him a cleaning shift; with Stella gone shifts were thin on the ground. No, Stella’s gatekeepers, Bev and Jackie, planned to tick him off for going to Tewkesbury. Tempted to ignore the text, Jack abandoned himself to his fate.
*
‘Jackie wants a summit.’ Beverly hauled off his coat and tossed it onto one of a row of hooks in the hall. ‘I found a clue.’
‘I’ll go then.’ Jack reached for his coat.
‘Don’t be a nutter, that’s why you’re here. Plus Jax is trying out the Persian rice cooker me and Cheryl got for her sixtieth, she’s doing a tahdig. Lamb with apricots, sensational.’ Beverly pinched her fingers and kissed them.
In the kitchen, Jack was mobbed. Jackie hugged him, Cheryl, more circumspect, patted his shoulder and Graham thrust a bottle of London Pride into his hand. Jack was home from home.
The tahdig was perfectly formed with a golden-brown crust. Graham carved the lamb – otherwise unconventional, the family held to a couple of traditional cornerstones. Jackie sat Jack next to her.
When everyone’s plates were full, Bev raised glasses to absent friends.
‘Stella.’ Jackie named the unnameable. In an undertone to Jack, ‘I am sorry Lucie misjudged Stella’s mood.’
‘You were right, she’s not interested.’ He felt mild relief that Jackie didn’t consider him Stella’s stalker.
‘I didn’t say that,’ Jackie said. ‘Give her time as well as space.’
‘I was checking the catch-all junk mail and found one addressed to Stella.’ Beverly glanced at Jack who was frowning. ‘Don’t look like that, Stella diverted her work inbox to me, not that I found it there. It was sent two weeks ago – I missed it.’
‘You can’t cover everything.’ Jack’s frown wasn’t judgement on Stella’s right to privacy – he knew about that – he was sad Stella wasn’t there to check her own email.
‘I can actually,’ Beverly said. ‘It was from Roderick March. The podcaster who was murdered?’
‘If it was in the junk folder, that means Stella never got it,’ Jack said.
‘I’ve got it here.’ Beverly went to her rucksack – a replica of Stella’s – and fished out her pretend police notebook. Inside was a folded paper. ‘Listen.’
‘“Hi there Stella,
Good to link up. As you know, I’m an investigative podcaster. Like the Innocence Project in the States, but better. I seek justice, not for the living, but for the dead, for those who have been silenced.”’
‘OMFG,’ Graham groaned. Jackie sssh’d him.
‘Stella said she didn’t know March.’ Jack felt himself grow hot.
‘Which means she didn’t know him.’ Jackie told him. ‘March, on the other hand, assumes Stella has heard of him and will want to “link up”. Hubris, pure and simple.’
‘It gets creepier,’ Beverly rattled the paper. ‘“You’ve snared a few solves. So, here’s one to assist me with. I belled your office and a starchy lady said you’re on sabbatical. Awesome. Madam wouldn’t spill details, but we investigators can walk through walls. I found your personal email, no sweat.
‘“My podcast airs soon and it would be cool to have you on board. I’m in Tewkesbury, ground zero. Can you be here pronto? Should have nabbed you sooner, my bad. Roddy.”’
Reading over Beverly’s shoulder, Cheryl scoffed, ‘“Award-winning journalist and crime consultant. How cold is your murder? Call me.”’
‘Not to be rude about the dead, but what a clown.’ Bev flopped back down at the table.
‘March must have gone to that Death Café to meet Stella,’ Jack said.
‘Has anyone heard his podcast?’ Graham began clearing the plates.
‘Yes,’ Jack and Beverly both said. Between them they outlined the 1963 murder mystery.
‘Sounds like the bloke was fanning the embers of a failed career, all smoke no fire.’ Graham loaded the dishwasher.
‘Lucie thought that,’ Jack said.
‘If, as March claimed, he found this Professor Northcote’s true killer, it’s obvious who murdered him.’ Beverly was making notes, as Stella would if she were there. Capture even the most irrelevant, it may be key.
A police siren blared. Jack took his phone from his back pocket, ‘It’s Lucie. Please keep quiet, she mustn’t know you’re here.’
‘We live here.’ Graham tossed a tablet of dishwasher soap from hand to hand like a juggler.
‘Gray.’ Jackie pulled a face at him.
‘No need, it’s a voicemail.’
‘What did she say?’ Beverly looked ready to write down whatever was said. As Stella would.
‘A couple of things. As you know, Janet is secretly keeping Stella updated on the case. Lucie says Janet’s homesick and Stella equals Terry.’
‘Stella equals home.’ Beverly’s comment silenced them.
Finally, Jack went on, ‘Janet met Stella in a bookshop this afternoon then rang her later to say there’s a statue of the Virgin Mary and a candlestick missing from a tomb in Tewkesbury Abbey. Apparently, they were there last Sunday and were probably stolen around when March was killed. Janet is thinking it’s aggravated robbery or whatever and not to do with March and his podcast.’
‘Is that what Lucie and Stella think?’ Jackie asked.
‘No idea about Stella, but Lucie said it’s Janet Piper seeing no further than her nose. Lucie said one of the Death Café people, a clockmaker, has invited them to his house tonight, she’s leaving now.’
‘According to my research,’ Beverly was consulting her notes, ‘Northcote’s forensic evidence put away tons of villains over forty years from before the Second World War. If March’s murder is connected to the murder of the professor, that’s a lot of suspects.’
‘I think that’s where the answer lies
.’ Jack told them about his day at the archives, Julia Northcote’s suicide, that the house where she hanged herself was up for sale and about the man he’d spotted on the Virtual Tour. ‘I’m wondering if the two murders we know about are links in a longer chain of killings. Three at least.’
‘What’s your evidence?’ Cheryl asked.
‘I don’t need it, I use intuition.’ Jack pulled himself together; Stella’s leaving was making him a nasty person. ‘Suppose Julia’s relatives blamed Aleck Northcote for her suicide and wreaked revenge? The inquest said she didn’t leave a note, but if she did and it was critical of Northcote, he might have destroyed it.’
‘Twenty-three years later?’ Impatient with intuition, Beverly would be missing Stella’s down-to-earth approach. Stella would understand Jack.
‘Someone murders Northcote because Northcote made his wife unhappy then someone else murders the podcaster for threatening to reveal Northcote’s murderer.’ Cheryl was following him.
‘Stella told me the attendees of the Death Café have alibis,’ Beverly said. ‘March left first. One fishy customer is an organist who went to the abbey straight after and was playing music. But Stella was there too so either Stella murdered him or neither of them did.’
Stella had been talking to Beverly. Jack couldn’t check a flare of jealousy.
‘Look at this.’ Beverly laid an A4 photocopy of the front page of a Gloucestershire Echo on the table.
Cleaner Finds Man Dying in Tomb
‘It says he was dying, not dead. Did he speak to her?’ Cheryl said. ‘If he did, Stella might be in danger.’
Jack felt shame this hadn’t occurred to him. Stella had found the body, she was front page news. Any murderer worth his or her salt would see her as a threat.
‘She told me it’s a matter for the police,’ Jack said. ‘She’s not investigating it.’
‘She was fobbing you off.’ Beverly could be blunt.
‘I think I got that, Bev.’ Nasty person was back. Stella had lied. She and Lucie were deep in the case. Bev, perhaps Jackie and Cheryl too, were a team.
‘There you go, mate.’ Graham put down a fresh bottle of London Pride in front of him.
Gratefully Jack took a slug and looking at the Echo, exclaimed, ‘That’s Roddy March.’
‘We know that,’ Bev said.
‘I mean that’s the man on the virtual tour. Wait.’ Jack opened the Rightmove app on his phone and found Northcote’s old London home. Agitated, he kept missing the right circular marker. At last he found it, and enlarged the man crouching by the cupboard. ‘See?’
‘Oh, yes. That is March.’ Beverly remained calm.
‘I recognise that shirt. It’s a company called Geo-Space.’ Graham leaned over the table. ‘We used them for a Jobcentre Plus building. They scan the interior for an accurate reading of the space and stitch in the redesign. It’s a more accurate version than the one they use for home interiors.’ A council surveyor, Graham was expert in computer-aided design.
‘Sloppy editing,’ Graham added, echoing Jack’s earlier thought. ‘Looks like March worked for Geo-Space. What’s he looking for?’
‘March must have believed Northcote’s real killer was linked to that house,’ Beverly said. ‘When did Northcote leave Ravenscourt Square?’
‘Nineteen forty-one,’ Jack said.
‘The same year his wife committed suicide,’ Beverly said.
‘Jack, love, send Bev a screenshot of the man by the cupboard to forward to Stella,’ Jackie said.
‘OK.’ Why couldn’t he send it direct? They were behaving as if he and Stella had split up.
So, if he was single, he could do what he liked. Jack knew what he’d do next.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
2019
Stella
‘What’s she doing here?’ Janet ducked under the ‘Do Not Cross’ tape. ‘Get the hell out. Now.’
‘I’m a witness, darling.’ Lucie bared her teeth in a wolfish smile. ‘Stella and I found the body. To save you time, I can confirm our clockmaker has been murdered.’
‘You talked to a reporter,’ Janet muttered to Stella as she stalked past her into the house.
‘It wasn’t like—’ Stella trailed in Janet’s wake, with Lucie shadowing.
‘I will tell you what it’s like. For the second time in two days you’re first to find a body and this time you’ve brought the gutter press.’
‘Three,’ Lucie called.
‘What?’ Janet halted abruptly.
‘Three days,’ Lucie said. ‘We journos worship the god of accuracy.’
‘I’m not sure—’ Stella groaned inwardly.
‘Shut the eff up. You’ve stomped all over my crime scene, no doubt you’ve done a deal on a syndicated story, I do not want her in my sight. Give my sergeant a statement then do me a favour.’
‘Anything,’ Stella dived in.
‘Go home to London.’ Janet looked at Lucie. ‘If I find you—’
‘Tewkesbury is my home. Me and Sherlock are flatmates.’ Lucie held on to Stella’s arm. ‘Come visit, I’m no-carbs, but we can rise to biscuits.’
‘Is this true?’ Janet wheeled around to Stella. Her expression wasn’t anger; she looked hurt.
‘I was going to…’
Janet tramped across the grass to a tent already erected over the sundial. Inside, silhouetted figures were a shadow show. When Janet flapped aside the opening, Stella caught a glimpse of Clive’s contorted body. The tip of the sundial, gold in the arc lights, was sticking out of his chest.
*
‘No more titbits from the constabulary.’ Draped in her cockpit, Lucie stirred a nippet with her devil’s headed swizzle stick.
‘Nope.’ Not much of a drinker, Stella had accepted one of Lucie’s nippets – gin dashed over rocks with a splash of tonic – but it did not take the edge off the nightmare. She’d considered emailing Janet to explain Lucie had already known about Roddy’s murder. While true, it didn’t cover the bit where Stella had told Lucie about finding Roddy, or his dying words, whatever they were.
On the towpath outside Clive’s house after giving their statements, Janet had informed Stella that when she got kicked out of the police, she’d blame Stella. Unfair – Janet had chosen to open up to her. Ultimately though, Janet had trusted Terry’s daughter as the next best thing to Terry. Stella had let Janet – and Terry – down. She checked her phone, in case Janet had texted.
‘Don’t bother, kiddo.’ Lucie’s corncrake voice, hardened by the years when she’d been a dedicated smoker, broke into Stella’s misery. The devil’s head bobbed as she chased an ice cube around her empty glass. ‘We’re on our own. A terrible irony that Roddy March cared about victims getting assigned the right killer and now the venerable constabulary will file him as collateral damage in a robbery with violence.’ She rose to replenish her glass.
‘It’s a police matter, we should leave it to them.’ Stella repeated what she’d said to Jack in the abbey the night before.
‘Off your high-horsey-horse, Stellagmite.’ Lucie hooked up the ice and, tossing it into her mouth, crunched it up. ‘I’m an investigating journalist, this is my matter too.’
‘How hot was the kettle?’ Stella suddenly said.
‘I didn’t make you tea, you changed your mind and went for a nippy-noo.’
‘At Clive’s house, when you were going to make tea, you didn’t have to fill it, remember?’
‘Warmish and no, it was pretty full.’ Concocting her third nippet, Lucie said, ‘I see where you’re going.’
‘Clive’s killer was there just before we arrived. Clive either filled the kettle to make his visitor a drink or because we were due soon. Either way, he was killed minutes earlier. He probably told whoever was there that we were expected.’
‘Why did someone want him dead?’ Lucie was asking her swizzle stick.
‘They had got wind Clive knew something about Roddy’s murder?’
‘Or… let’s suppose our mur
derer was only on a fishing trip to hook out what Clive knew and while he was showing them his sundial, he or she realized he knew too much.’
‘You think they didn’t mean to kill him then?’
‘No one wants superfluous blood on their hands, although I doubt it was spur of the moment. Impaling a clockmaker on a sundial is such a glorious idea.’ Lucie, back in her chair, conducted her swizzle stick in time as she spoke.
‘Clive gives a tour of the clocks. He shows how his sundial gleams in the moonlight, turns his back and, crunch. He’s kebabbed.’ Despite sounding jaunty, Lucie appeared sickened by this description. Stella had learnt that the veteran reporter’s tough exterior encapsulated a soft heart.
‘Of course, the man on the towpath.’ Stella jolted, spilling gin on Stanley, asleep on her lap. ‘That’s why Clive’s front door was open.’
‘’Fraid so.’ Lucie frowned. ‘It was so damn dark down there.’
‘We have to tell Janet.’ Stella patted Stanley dry with her sleeve.
‘We do not. We shall form our own fight club. Wait for Granite-Janet’s face when we drop the real murderer into her in-tray.’
‘She’ll ask why we didn’t mention the man on the towpath.’ Stella didn’t want to get one over on Janet.
‘She has no reason to ask and if she does, we forgot. Which we did.’ Lucie was undeterred. ‘I’m betting it’s one of your Death buddies. Roddy March came there to warn the person who was threatening him that he was on to them. Rash move.’
Stella’s phone pinged with a text. ‘It’s Bev.’
‘She’ll be telling you Jack can’t live without you.’
‘She’s forwarded an email.’ Stella opened her laptop and scrolled to her inbox.
‘…you might give the guy a break…’ Lucie was saying.
‘Roddy came to see me,’ Stella said. ‘He wrote to me after we came to Tewkesbury. Bev said she found the email in junk. She’s at Jackie’s. They said I should see it. Roddy wanted my assistance with his podcast about Northcote’s murder at Cloisters House. No wonder he expected me to know him. He must have assumed I was in Tewkesbury because I was interested in Northcote’s murder.’
The Distant Dead Page 19