The Distant Dead

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘Here you are, girls.’ Mrs Wren was back. ‘Stella, with you and Roddy being friends and all, you must be heartbroken, I know I am.’

  ‘We weren’t—’

  ‘Dreadful, awful,’ Lucie dug Stella with an elbow. ‘So Roddy told you that he knew Stella.’

  ‘He mentioned they were going to work together on his poddy thingy. What a disappointment for you, dear.’

  Stella took refuge in what proved to be delicious cake.

  ‘What paper did you say you wrote for?’ Her expression peaceable, Gladys leaned down to Lucie.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Lucie said. ‘The nationals, whichever coughs up the right price.’

  ‘Roderick would want me talking to you. “Knock yourself out”, he’d say. That did make me laugh. He promised me helping him with his podcast would make me rich. Sitting right where Stella is now. “You’ll be able to get a new boiler and pick and choose your guests.” I said, a new hip will do me, Mr Prince.’

  ‘Roddy wanted you to help him…’ Stella felt herself flush. She’d assumed Roddy had wanted to pick her brains as a successful detective, but he’d asked his landlady too. Was he even serious?

  ‘Every night, we’d have a sherry – or two – and he’d ask his questions. Even though it was about me, I had to think. My memory’s not so good. Roddy said it’s not Alzheimer’s, it’s me being a busy businesswoman. The gorgeous boy, always trying to make me feel on top of the world.’ Gladys smiled to herself.

  Stella noticed Gladys Wren wasn’t as smartly turned out as at the Death Café. Her pink shell-suit had seen better days and while she’d obviously combed her hair it looked unwashed. She wore no make-up.

  ‘What questions did March ask?’ Lucie was poised over her notebook.

  ‘What the professor was like, was he kind, nasty, who were his friends, that sort of thing. Right down to what he liked to eat.’ Gladys Wren cut up the rest of the cake. ‘Help yourselves, don’t stand on ceremony.’

  ‘How could you know?’ Stella said.

  ‘Didn’t I say?’ Gladys said. ‘I was Sir Aleck’s housekeeper.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  2019

  Jackie

  ‘You look as if you spent the night here.’ Jackie hoped Beverly and Jack hadn’t done something illegal that both would deeply regret. Without Stella, Jack was a loose cannon and Bev would do anything for Jack and Stella. His hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, Jack’s sheepish countenance didn’t reassure.

  ‘We didn’t sleep.’ Yawning, Beverly pulled back her hair and secured it with her diamanté scrunchie.

  Please not. Squaring off a bundle of dormant customer files she hoped to bring to life, Jackie let the silence reach a crescendo.

  ‘It was Bev, I’d never have asked her,’ Jack eventually said.

  ‘Is it always someone else?’ Distantly Jackie noted how once quietly pleasurable office tasks had become purgatory.

  ‘I shouldn’t have gone. Jack rescued me.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Jackie muttered. Modelling herself on Stella, Beverly rarely lied. Jackie had hoped with no Stella, Bev would keep out of Jack’s slipstream. Bev was sunshine incarnate to his dead of night.

  ‘We’ve arranged everything next door where there’s more space to spread out.’ Beverly opened Stella’s office door. Reluctantly, Jackie followed her.

  ‘Spread what out and you shouldn’t have gone where?’ Seeing Stella’s empty chair, Jackie felt her chest tighten. Then she saw that the carpet tiles were covered with papers.

  ‘We’ve found the murder that caused Professor Northcote’s murder.’ Beverly knelt down. ‘Roddy March was either hiding this box of papers on the virtual tour or he was about to retrieve them and was interrupted. Either way, we’ve got them now.’

  Dead Prostitute Worked in Dead Man’s Home. On a yellowed front page of the Daily Express. Strangler Kills Girl for Extorting Cash emblazed across the Daily Despatch. The Daily Mail said, Greed Spells Girl’s End. All were dated 12 December 1940.

  ‘As you see, newspapers called Maple a sex-worker. In fact, she was an accounts clerk at the Express Dairies which used to be on King Street. She was found strangled in a house owned by a solicitor who was killed fire-watching. Apparently, lots of people were. Police said that she knew the house was unoccupied and lured clients there to, as the News of the World said, “ply her trade”.’

  ‘How does this relate to Sir Aleck Northcote?’ Jackie mustered herself.

  ‘He did the autopsy on Maple.’ Beverly’s eyes gleamed. ‘Jack found the PM report. Her hyoid bone was crushed with, quote, “terrific force from behind”. As Northcote puts it, wait…’ Beverly scrabbled among the papers and finding a stapled document, read, ‘she “put up a struggle but her assailant was too clever for her”.’

  ‘How clever do you have to be to grab a woman from behind and squeeze the life out of her?’ Casting back eighty years, Jackie felt inchoate rage for the self-satisfied pathologist, even though his own end had been even more grisly. ‘His job was to find cause of death, not judge the intellect of the culprit.’

  ‘There’s more.’ Pulling out one of Stella’s visitor chairs, Bev motioned for Jackie to sit while, with an outstretched arm, she stopped Jack from pacing the room.

  ‘So, who killed this Maple Greenhill?’ Jackie asked.

  ‘Here’s the thing. The coroner, Wolsey Banks, ruled “murder by person or persons unknown”.’ Beverly held up a newspaper article. ‘The press speculated it was a serviceman. The murder rate went up during the war; men on leave found the home they were fighting for didn’t exist. Wives had other men or liked their new freedom. Trained to kill, servicemen defaulted to murder. The blackout and bombed or burnt-out buildings were a perfect screen for killing and disposal. A corpse found under rubble might be an air-raid casualty. Newspapers warned of “night blooms luring men into the gaping maws of destroyed homes”. Crap. As if the likes of Maple were monsters and their killers, soldiers, ARP wardens, whoever, the innocent victims.’ It was a while since Jackie had seen Beverly so fired up.

  ‘Maple Greenhill wasn’t a sex-worker,’ Jack said. ‘In an interview, I read that her brother Vernon Greenhill insisted she was murdered by a man she expected to marry.’

  ‘Who was that?’ Jackie stifled a sneeze. An air of damp from the old papers had pervaded Stella’s office.

  ‘Firstly, we have discovered an incredible coincidence.’ Beverly looked fit to bust.

  ‘There’s no such thing as a coincidence, it’s a sign,’ Jack said.

  ‘What?’ Jackie put aside how they’d got the papers, she didn’t want to know.

  ‘Maple Greenhill’s family used to live in your street. Corney Road.’ Beverly added, ‘In your house.’

  ‘Goodness, my mother-in-law’s ears will be burning in her grave.’ Jackie gave a dry laugh. ‘When we bought it, Violet said the house reeked of an unhappy spirit. She said misery seeped from the walls. Violet was a spiritualist, she made a fortune out of tarot and whatnot. To my mind, she was a charlatan, but her tea leaves were spot on – we’re living in the home of a murdered woman.’ Jackie looked at the ceiling. ‘Sorry, Vi, I should have listened.’

  ‘From December 1940, your house was witness to wholesale grief.’ Jack didn’t pull punches. ‘Grief can be assuaged, it’s a happy home now.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Jack,’ Jackie snapped. ‘It’s nearly nine, in a minute the phone will ring off the hook with customers. Is there more?’

  ‘This belonged to Aleck Northcote.’ Like a magician, Bev revealed a plastic Tesco bag with an object inside. ‘This gold cigarette lighter was in the box. It’s the first clue found by Divisional Detective Inspector George Cotton, the man running Maple’s case. It was found at the scene of the crime. Roddy must have put it in this Tesco bag, obviously it wasn’t Julia Northcote. Julia must have hoped it would seal his fate.’

  ‘Wolsey Banks accepted Northcote’s apology for accidentally leaving his lighter in the deserted house a
fter his in-situ examination of Maple’s body. This is him.’ Crouching, Jack shuffled papers and gave Jackie a cutting headed, Severed Leg Mystery Pathologist Provides Answer. A photograph of a man in a top hat was captioned Home Office pathologist Dr Aleck Northcote leaves Old Bailey Criminal Court.

  ‘You’re connecting Roddy March being in the Ravenscourt Square house with this box of cuttings and therefore with Aleck Northcote?’ Jackie felt resistant to their palpable excitement.

  ‘Don’t forget Clive Burgess the clockmaker.’ Bev set down the chain of murders on Stella’s whiteboard.

  ‘That’s not how we’re making the connection.’ Jack pulled out a folded sheet from his inside coat pocket. They had choreographed their presentation, annoying but, Jackie admitted, quite impressive. If only Stella was there to see it.

  With a flourish Jack said, ‘We know, because Julia Northcote, the pathologist’s wife, told us herself.’

  ‘The woman who committed suicide?’ Jackie remembered Bev’s outline of the Tewkesbury murder at their meeting the day before.

  ‘Or did she? This is the heart of the matter.’ Beverly wrote out the chain of murders with arrows leading to the next death.

  Maple Greenhill (1940) → Julia Northcote (1941) → Aleck Northcote (1963) → Roddy March (2019) → Clive Burgess (2019).

  As Beverly wrote, Jack read out the letter.

  ‘If you are reading this then I shall no longer be on this earth. I must restore justice to a girl whom I should want dead were she not already dead. The Hammersmith coroner has ruled Maple Greenhill’s murder as by person or persons unknown, her killer known only to God.

  ‘I have no allegiance to a pert little madam who, had he been a different man, would have snared my husband for herself without a qualm. Aleck was not that man. If I am writing this it is because I will have been prevented from revealing the truth of the case to Divisional Detective Inspector George Cotton. A good man.

  ‘Aleck will have prevented me.

  ‘Aleck bought me the reefer coat for my birthday, plum suits me, he said. On her, the coat would have looked as cheap as she was. After they found the ticket in the coat, the inspector came to arrest Aleck. I felt fear and anger. Fear for my darling Giles, condemned forever to be a murderer’s son. Anger with Aleck, who had dragged us into his filth.

  ‘Cotton and Aleck left in Aleck’s car because Cotton is a decent man. I would have packed him into a Black Maria. An hour later Aleck returned. “I had to examine specimens for George.” George, he said, like they were best friends. I didn’t say that I knew he had lied, and that through the door I had heard Aleck arrested, like a common bank robber.

  ‘Today, December 29th, as the Nazis cause a row overhead, I’m making sure I write it all down.

  ‘“Did you kill that tart?” I faced him with it this morning. He admitted it readily, said how lonely he got in town when I’m in Tewkesbury with Giles at school. After seeing bodies all day, he needed relief. Did I understand it meant nothing? But the girl demanded marriage and said if he refused, she’d blow the gaff. His term. In a moment of madness, he gripped her throat. She wasn’t meant to die.

  ‘A stupid mistake – Banks and Cotton’s superior had dealt with Cotton. They dismissed it as a trivial matter compared to the pummelling the Germans are giving us. Cotton is to be farmed out to his allotment. As a pioneer in his field, Aleck is indispensable to the war effort.

  ‘Whoever reads this, I will secrete it in Giles’s favourite hidey-hole where Aleck won’t find it. For Giles it was sweets; for me it is the revelation of a woman scorned. Whenever you read this, please take it to George Cotton who I trust will seek justice. Should he no longer be alive it must go to Downing Street and straight into the hands of Mr Attlee, another good man, and despite what Alecks says, far superior to Mr Churchill.

  ‘Julia Northcote. New Year’s Day 1940.

  ‘PS: Wolsley Banks will accept that I died by my own hand. But if I am dead it is because my husband wanted me dead. I pray it does not come to that.’

  Although she knew the contents, after he had finished reading Beverly looked as stunned as Jackie felt. She said, ‘Presumably it was never given to Cotton or to Clement Attlee.’

  ‘It’s my guess that Roddy was the first to read it. For some reason he chose to leave it where he found it,’ Jack said.

  ‘It was Aleck Northcote who got the rope from the shed and strung his presumably unconscious wife from the top banister.’ Beverly had gone pink. ‘He knew how to make it look like suicide, but he’d never have been doubted. If it had been ruled murder, Northcote would have been the prime suspect; awkward since they’d already got him off the hook for Maple Greenhill’s murder.’

  ‘We found the inquest report on the National Archives database before you arrived. Northcote reported returning from work to find his “beloved wife suspended by a rope from the banister. I began to cut her down but knew I lacked the strength to haul her over the balustrade. I couldn’t let her fall to the hall below.”’ Jack spoke in a monotone.

  ‘He should have known to leave her until the police came.’ Jackie had the bug – she too was ready to fight for Julia Northcote.

  ‘Northcote told the inquest that the balance of her mind was disturbed by the Blitz and the blackouts. The press took Northcote’s side, his wife had abandoned her family,’ Beverly said. ‘Her death went badly with a public expected to rally round the flag and be “in it together”.’

  ‘Virginia Woolf killed herself a couple of months later and the papers gave her a hard time for jumping ship,’ Jack said. ‘Yet again, Northcote got away with murder. He was knighted, as was Banks the coroner. Cotton’s boss Robert Hackett got a CBE for services to his country.’

  ‘Can we try to trace this Inspector Cotton?’ Jackie said. ‘Sounds like he was the fall guy.’

  ‘If George Cotton were alive, he’d be a hundred and twenty-six. Unfortunately, he died ages ago in 1979 in his eighties. And here’s another sign, he’s buried in your cemetery,’ Jack said. ‘We are meant to solve this case.’

  ‘It might be opposite our house but it’s not my cemetery.’ Jackie was sharp. ‘OK, guys, I have to ask, how did you find this?’

  Jackie kept her face blank as Jack confessed to finding Beverly in Northcote’s old house in Ravenscourt Square where he too had planned to sneak in and find what Roddy March had been looking for.

  ‘How did Roddy March know the box was hidden there?’

  ‘I rang Geo-Space, the company who made the virtual tour, just before you arrived. March wasn’t down as the photographer, but there had been a Wolsey Banks who did a brief stint for the company.’ Beverly paused for Jack to make the connection.

  ‘If he was considering removing it, then someone interrupted him.’

  ‘Did March’s killer think he had Julia’s letter and try to get it from him?’

  ‘That presupposes Roddy and his killer knew about her letter,’ Jack said.

  ‘If the murderer knew the letter was in the house, why not take it? That they didn’t suggests they were unaware it was there.’ Jackie knew they were too polite to say they had been over this ground.

  ‘Meanwhile, Lucie has texted saying the police are thinking it a stranger murder. They’re looking for the gang members responsible for the spate of muggings and robberies in the areas. Which means,’ Beverly clapped her hands, ‘we’re on our own with this case.’

  ‘Not quite.’ Jackie began gathering up the papers. She stowed them in their cardboard box. ‘Take that with you.’

  ‘Take it where?’ Jack and Beverly asked at once.

  ‘Tewkesbury.’ Jackie laid the box on Stella’s desk. ‘We are in this together and we’ll come out of it together. You go and join Stella and Lucie’s team and, this time, don’t take no for an answer.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  2019

  Stella

  Roddy’s room was, as Stella had expected, sealed with police tape. Relieved, Stella was horrified when Glady
s peeled off the tape and unlocked the door. ‘That lady detective won’t know. Lord knows when I can get on with reletting it. Although the very idea of a stranger in Roderick’s bedroom…’ She rubbed her hip which if, as Roddy had promised and now Lucie was rashly promising too, would be replaced when Lucie’s true-crime book was a bestseller.

  ‘His mum and dad aren’t even allowed in,’ Gladys announced as they stood in the bedsit breathing stale air. Hearing this, Stella’s horror that they were trespassing shot sky high.

  The smell of dirty washing, dominated by socks. The shape of Roddy’s head was outlined on the pillow. Stella imagined him hunched over his laptop pecking out his podcast script with one finger. Sprawled on the bed recording the podcast which, he’d promised Gladys, would change their lives. Stella pictured Roddy slamming shut the laptop, snatching his combat jacket and hurrying to the Death Café.

  With no idea it was the last day of his life.

  ‘We should go,’ Stella said.

  ‘Nice room.’ With a view of a brick wall, dark and dingy even with lights on, it was not nice. Her gimlet eyes scouring every corner, Lucie would be buttering up the landlady.

  ‘I’d give it a spruce every day, not part of the service, but Roderick was up to his ears. Look at this mess, I can’t let his parents see it.’

  Black fingerprint powder speckled every surface: the corner sink, the small induction hob, a kettle with the lid off lay on top of a mini-fridge. Drawers had been opened and a shirt was caught between the wardrobe doors. Janet had said they hadn’t found Roddy’s laptop or his notebook. Stella felt hopeless – what could she and Lucie hope to find? Beyond the ruined dreams of a dead man.

  ‘So, Gladys, fancy you being the one to find Professor Northcote dead all those years ago.’ Lucie did her Red Riding Hood smile.

  ‘I’ll never forget the sight of him there in the hall.’ Gladys clasped her hands in front of her paisley overall. ‘A great long streak of blood on the floor where he’d dragged himself to the phone. I found it hanging off the hook. Police said Sir Aleck knocked it off the cradle trying to dial. Like I said to Roderick, that young Giles might have been a trial to his father, but what son isn’t? He was a sweet soul at heart.’ She lowered herself onto the end of Roddy’s bed. ‘There’s evil in this world.’