‘Too sweet a soul to commit murder?’ Lucie was disguised as a sweet soul.
‘Giles loved his dog. They say it starts with animals and children then works up. He needed money and the police said desperate people will do anything. The professor said his son was a lost cause. “Gladys,” he said, “the boy’s a bottomless pit, his mother spoiled him. One day it’ll end badly.”’ She smoothed the candlewick bedspread. ‘Sir Aleck was out of sorts after Giles left for London. Derek came to take me to the pictures, it was my night off, and I wasn’t giving that up to stay behind. In the end Derek got a shout, he was a fireman, so we never did see the film.’
‘I understand you didn’t live in,’ Lucie said.
‘Sir Aleck was on at me to stay. Since his wife had done away with herself, he said he hated the empty house. Some nights I did make up a bed in the attic.’ Mrs Wren gave a peremptory sniff as if warding off any lewd ideas that Lucie or Stella might harbour.
‘Julia Northcote died in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1941.’ Stella was confirming the date, but felt her tone implied that by 1963 Professor Northcote should have got over it.
‘He was never the same man after that, or so he said.’ Mrs Wren got off the bed. ‘I wish I’d never agreed to go with Derek, but the film was finishing in Evesham that night. If I’d stayed poor Giles would be alive.’
‘And perhaps Professor Northcote?’ Lucie said.
‘Yes, him too.’ She gave another sniff.
‘If you’d stayed, you could have been another victim.’ Stella was surprised this hadn’t occurred to Gladys.
‘Who do you think did it?’ Lucie rounded on her.
‘I’m no detective.’ Gladys’s expression suggested to Stella that she knew that Lucie was preparing to pounce. ‘All I know is, whatever people say, it wasn’t me.’
‘Who used to come to Cloisters House?’ Stella interrupted. To her Gladys seemed genuinely upset by Roddy’s death. Personally, Stella was sticking to her first impression of Gladys as a kindly woman, not the sort to kill her ex-employer and then Roddy to prevent him exposing her. An opinion based on intuition, usually Jack’s domain, that Stella could not substantiate.
‘Northcote was generous to all callers, handing out half-crowns to the butcher’s boy, the rag and bone man. When it came to the new window cleaner, I said see how he does first, but would Northcote listen? He bought me all sorts too.’
‘Apart from Giles, did any of these tradespeople visit that day?’ Stella said.
‘Harry with the meat, cheeky so-and-so, wanted to marry me. Derek saw him off. Harry’s got his own shop now, his grandson manages it. Giles in the evening, of course, poor lamb. No one else while I was there.’
‘You must have been young at the time. What are you now, sixties?’ Lucie’s crooning tone might work on her budgie, but Gladys Wren wasn’t fooled.
‘Come on, love, you’re as bad as Roderick dripping flattery. As you well know, you and me are in our seventies. I was eighteen then, Cloisters House was my first job and last job, because Derek and me got wed.’
‘Goodness, not a bad position for someone so young. I suppose Aleck planned to train you up.’ Lucie swam over the reference to their ages.
‘Sir Aleck was keen to give me a leg-up.’ Gladys’s eyes glazed – grief was tiring, Stella knew. Gladys was downbeat compared with the chirpy personality she’d displayed at the Death Café.
‘Could Northcote’s murder have been a random attack?’ Stella asked gently.
‘Not a bit of it. He knew whoever it was or he’d never have let them in. He never let just anyone over the threshold.’ Her agitation now apparent, Gladys worked her lips. ‘Ladies, if there’s nothing else…’
‘So, you telling the police this led them to charge the one visitor Sir Aleck Northcote would have unhesitatingly allowed in. His son. That’s why they charged Giles with his murder.’ Pounce. Lucie might have bided her time, but Gladys putting her at over seventy was tantamount to a declaration of war. ‘What about Roderick March, did he have visitors?’
‘Only Clive the Clock, as Roderick called him.’
‘Wait, he knew Clive?’ Lucie said.
‘Clive Burgess cleaned a watch for him.’
‘They never said they knew each other.’ Stella reflected that nor had they said they didn’t. ‘Did Roddy interview Clive for The Distant Dead?’
‘Yes, Clive came here after the first Death Café, thick as thieves, they were.’ Gladys looked annoyed.
‘What did Clive tell March?’ Lucie said.
Gladys’s eyes glittered. ‘I’ve no idea, dear. Ask me, Clive talking to Roderick is why they’re both gone.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
2019
Jackie
‘Phyllis, I’ve never asked if you knew the family who used to live in our house before us?’ Jackie sipped deathly strong tea from a mug extolling Lytham St Annes.
Jackie dropped in on her elderly neighbour every week, usually after work, but today it was for elevenses and Jackie was fact-finding. ‘Name of Greenhill. They were here during the war, so before your time.’ Although Phyllis had grown up in Lytham, she and her husband had lived in the house next to Jackie for over sixty years. Phyllis was the Corney Road Oracle.
‘I should say, I’m not that old.’ Phyllis stuck out her tongue as, needles clacking, she knitted a garment for another generation of her family. ‘I do remember them. Vernon Greenhill had a lovely wife, I did feel for her when he died, ooh, years ago now. Mary, that was her name, she’d been on the buses during the war. They moved out to Windsor, but we exchanged Christmas cards. She died in a home in 1999. Her son Cliff wrote to tell me. The man they sold to was a grumpy old so-and-so, never gave you the time of day, your family was a tonic, I can tell you.’
‘I had heard their relative was murdered. Sounds silly, but somehow I feel involved.’ Since Jack and Beverly had told her about Maple Greenhill, she felt haunted by the notion of the young woman walking out of their house for a night at the Hammersmith Palais, where Jackie herself had danced with Graham in her teens. Jackie wondered which of the bedrooms had been Maple’s. She had grown up in the same house as Jackie’s two boys. Maple felt like family.
‘Maple was Vernon Greenhill’s older sister. Mary said how she could never measure up to Maple, no one could. Vernon opened a car showroom for William to run along with his garage.’
‘Was William Vernon’s son?’ Jackie asked.
‘Ah, well. According to Mary, when William was born, just before the war, it was given out he was Maple and Vernon’s little brother. I met William when we moved in – he was about twenty. After Vernon died, Mary told me William was Maple’s boy. The parents had lied to save scandal.’ Phyllis stopped knitting. ‘After all that, and Maple never lived to see her little mite grow up.’
‘Do you know where William lives now?’ Jackie quelled her excitement.
‘William went off after Mr and Mrs Greenhill died, Mary said he wanted a new life.’ Phyllis swapped wool to a different colour. ‘Vernon was keeping the business for him but when he didn’t want it Cliff had to step in.’
‘Is Cliff still running the garage?’
‘Oh yes, our John got a car from them last year.’ Phyllis tugged the stitches on her needle. ‘King Street, near where the Commodore used to be.’
‘Maple’s Motors.’ Jackie went cold. ‘Vernon named it after his sister.’
‘So, Maple lived on, it was her legacy.’
Back in her own kitchen, Jackie called Beverly. She and Jack would be leaving for Tewkesbury in the afternoon.
‘Bev? I’ve got a job for you.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
2019
Stella
‘I’m guessing if he had to die, Roddy would like the whole starved monk thing.’ Lucie was dancing around the chapel. Roddy’s murder had invigorated her. She resumed reading from a printout on cadaver tombs.
‘“… the monument is a canopied altar tomb
topped with an effigy of a skeletal cadaver being crawled over by vermin…”’
It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but the day had been grey and now the tower was lost in heavy mist.
Stella had collapsed into bed at ten the night before, leaving Lucie busy in her cockpit. She was still there, fresh as a daisy, when Stella set about her morning clean. As Stella removed empty fig packets – too many, she should warn Lucie of likely consequences – Lucie remained absorbed in what she was reading. She hadn’t looked up when Stella had given her coffee in Lucie’s pint-sized mug. She was reading up on the abbey. Lucie’s attention to detail was after Stella’s own heart and she had felt bad for assuming Lucie’s hectic manner mirrored her work process.
‘The carver’s included every rib.’ Lucie bent over the monk. ‘Tsssk. Some ancient squirrel on a stick has carved his initials on the poor bloke.’
‘Roddy said those marks are considered of historic value,’ Stella remembered.
‘Pish posh. I call it graffiti.’ Lucie traced the myriad marks scored over the carved figure as if with a healing hand.
‘It’s a legacy.’ Stella thought of Joy’s comment at the Death Café. ‘Roddy was interested in cadaver tombs. I wonder, was his killer’s intention to highlight a link between Roddy and the cadaver monk, as with Clive and his clocks?’
‘“Time Keeper Slain by Sundial”, I get that, but “True Crime Podcaster Dies by Starved Monk” is a bit deep. Who knew March was obsessed with old tombs?’
‘Jack told me there was a theory in the nineteenth century that the last image a person saw was imprinted on their eye and could be restored. If that was true, we’d see Roddy’s murderer.’
‘Optography. Stella, if you don’t want Jack, please don’t channel him. We need your cool rational mind. If it held water, it’s you who would be imprinted on his eyes. Questions: why, instead of going to the police in Cheltenham, did March come to the abbey? He wanted you on board for his podcast so why not talk to you after the Death Cafe?’ Lucie went out to the north ambulatory.
‘Something changed his mind.’ Stella trawled her memory of both Death Café evenings. There had been a mood of frustration, as if the group, although there from their own free will, had been kept back on detention.
‘March’s phone would tell us who rang him on the morning you met him. The police are treating his missing laptop and phone as evidence of mugging. Assailants take his wallet which tells them where he lived. They get in and strip his room of valuables. Who else had access to March’s bedsit?’ Lucie stopped by a shelf of second-hand books on sale for two pounds each. ‘Here’s an idea. Gladys is to meet March in the abbey after the Death Café. She scampers across, stabs March and dumps his beanie on a chair to make it look like he’d been listening to Joy’s sublime music. When you steam in searching for God, it was her shadow you saw on the wall.’
‘I wasn’t—’ Stella spotted a novel by Ngaio Marsh, the writer Jack mentioned when he’d found Stella in the abbey. On impulse, she dropped a few pound coins into a box on the wall and took it.
Above the hum of heating and the echo of echoes which filled the abbey with an eerie non-specific sound, she heard a familiar voice. She peeped into the gift shop. A woman was wrapping up a set of abbey mugs and chatting with an elderly couple in matching Burberry macs.
Stella shrank back and whispered to Lucie, ‘That’s Joy, the organist.’
‘We’re in business.’ Lucie turned on her phone’s recording app and, whisking around the Burberry couple, she flapped into the shop. Stella trailed after. This was not going to go well.
‘Lucie May. I’m Stella’s best friend. Joy, I think?’ Lucie floated about in front of the counter, tipping her head like a bird as she appeared to admire the gifts for sale.
‘Hi, Joy.’ Stella executed a wave behind her.
‘Stella. You are becoming quite a regular. Have you bought tickets for our recital yet?’
‘No. I’ve been busy.’
‘Goodness, haven’t you. Finding bodies all over the place. And poor dear Clive to boot. Are any of us safe?’ Joy clasped a large green pendant to her embroidered chest.
‘Isn’t that jade darling.’ Lucie loomed at the pendant.
‘Malachite.’ Joy straightened a pile of abbey teacloths. ‘There’s a nasty gang going about. I’ve asked for extra security.’
‘We must band together to bring this killer to book before there is a third death.’ Lucie sailed about the gift shop nudging display carousels into a gentle spin, sniffing scented candles. ‘I only had the pleasure of meeting Clive post-mortem.’
This was the wrong tone to take with no-nonsense Joy. Wildly, Stella snatched up a group of plaster models labelled Nativity Figures and presented them to Joy. ‘I’ll have these, please.’
‘Would you like them wrapped as a Christmas gift?’
‘They’re for me, it’s fine.’
‘They’ll be half price after the festive season. You didn’t hear that from me.’ Joy slipped the figures, Mary with Jesus in her arms and Joseph draped in sickly orange robes, into a paper bag and slid it over the counter to Stella.
‘Joy, would you be willing to chat with Lucie and me? Lucie’s a reporter, she’s concerned to find Roddy’s killer.’ Stella pre-empted Lucie.
‘Concerned to get a story, methinks.’ Joy tweaked the battalion of Mary and Josephs to close the resulting gap. Unattractive though the Nativity pieces were, Stella was pleased with her purchase. Their heads bowed, Mary and Joseph exuded calm.
‘We have to earn a crust,’ Lucie cackled.
‘You’ll earn a loaf of bread and a good few fish too with any story about this.’ Joy moved one of the Marys along the line as if in checkmate.
‘If you’d rather not get involved…’ Lucie beamed.
‘Come to my cottage later. I promise not to be dead when you arrive.’ Stella was instantly calm, watching Joy scribble her address on an abbey opening times leaflet. Joy would be a match for Lucie.
‘Bagged.’ Popping a fig into her mouth, Lucie swam out of the north ambulatory and out of the abbey. Stella caught up with her on the yew path. ‘Don’t be fooled by that air of sanctity, those types are first in line to kill. One down, two to go. Grumpy Andrea and Morticia, Queen of the Death Café.’
‘Felicity.’ Stella felt bound to tone Lucie down.
The rain had eased, but tumbling dark clouds rolling above the Avon threatened a storm.
‘What’s he doing?’ Lucie pointed at a figure, sketchy in the rain, bending by the wall adjoining Cloisters House.
‘It’s a woman. That’s Andrea,’ Stella realized.
‘Our eggs are gathering in their basket.’ Giving a sniff like the bloodhound Jack said Lucie was in another life, she beetled across the abbey lawn. Sensing action, Stanley dragged Stella after her.
‘Coo-ee, Andrea?’ Lucie pronounced it ‘And-raya.’
At the Death Café, Stella hadn’t needed an eagle eye to know Andrea preferred plants to people. Where they could, people chose work to suit their nature.
‘It’s you that is the artist behind these beautiful gardens.’ She swept out an arm, taking in the grass and grey tombs wet with rain.
There was no answer to this and Andrea gave none.
‘Stella told me all about you.’
‘Only that I’d met you,’ Stella quickly said. ‘Lucie’s keen to find who killed Roddy. Maybe you haven’t heard, but Clive the clockmaker was murdered last night.’
Andrea leaned on the handle of her spade and stared off towards Cloisters House, as if by fixing on the middle distance, she could make Stella and Lucie disappear.
‘Are you OK? You know, with… murders happening?’ Lucie looked at Stella with a ‘we’ve got a right one here’ expression.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘What a shock, Roddy and Clive both dead. It quite rattled me.’
‘You didn’t know him.’
Lucie got out her phone. ‘Can I reco
rd this? Hearing and memory are jiggered. Do not get old.’ Lucie rarely referred to her age. Stella knew, as did Gladys, that she was over seventy, but Lucie usually portrayed herself as reluctantly staring forty in the face.
‘I’m working.’ Andrea put a booted foot on her fork. ‘Careful, don’t squash those crocuses.’ She pointed to a clump of purple flowers that Lucie, stepping backwards, nearly squashed.
‘We won’t stop you. Evenings are more civilized. We’re seeing Joy at seven, we can be with you by end of play. I’m presuming you stop digging when it’s dark.’ Lucie essayed a wave at a dug-over flower bed at their feet.
‘I don’t talk to journalists.’ Andrea threw her fork into a nearby wheelbarrow and trundled it away.
‘She’s not a gardener,’ Lucie said when Andrea was out of earshot.
‘Why do you say that?’ Stella felt obscurely irritable at Lucie dissing Andrea’s skills.
‘The blisters on her hands. She’s not used to wielding a fork. And she doesn’t know her crocuses from her cyclamen.’ Lucie was leading them to a shed at the border of the grounds. ‘We shall beard her in her grotto later. Geronimo.’
‘We don’t know where Andrea— What are you doing?’ Stella watched Lucie drag a heavy man’s bike out from behind the shed.
‘As you know, my Stellagmite, life is cause and effect.’ Lucie propped the bicycle against one of the stone coffins. She dived into her capacious leather bag, pulled out her plastic make-up bag with leopard markings and, gripping a pair of nail scissors, jabbed the front tyre.
‘Lucie.’ Stella felt sick as Lucie twisted the blade into the rubber. In the muffled silence, she heard a hiss as the inner tube deflated.
‘It’s frog-freezing, let us take a pot of lapsang in the tearooms.’ Putting away the scissors, Lucie smacked her hands on her cargo pants.
The Distant Dead Page 22