The Distant Dead

by Lesley Thomson

  Outside March’s room, the police tape looked undisturbed. Jack couldn’t tell that Mrs Wren had peeled it off to gain entry, as Lucie and Stella had told him. The woman was a pro. Jack knew Andrea lodged on the floor above.

  He knocked on both doors, ready with how he’d found the front door ajar and was checking for intruders. No reply. Unlike when he’d gone to Northcote’s London home, this time Jack had his trusty set of lock picks.

  As a surgeon practises needlework on pigs’ skin, Jack had spent many a dull evening – without Stella – picking his collection of locks. He too was a pro and now he had the tumblers in the lock of the door released in moments.

  Jack snapped on latex gloves and did a fast but efficient sweep. No business card, nothing to connect Andrea to Geo-Space. In the wardrobe, a couple of dresses and smart women’s shoes and two pairs of pristine denim overalls. Andrea’s disguise.

  A crumpled leaflet for the Death Café lay on the nightstand. Next to this, Jack was startled to see a copy of Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. The novel was a blip in either the profile of the sullen gardener or high-flying tech executive. It warmed Jack to Andrea and he began to hope she wasn’t a budding serial killer.

  He homed in on a laptop which shared the veneered dressing table with a mascara stick and a black eye liner, both Jo Malone, likely vestiges of Andrea’s true identity. She hadn’t got to grips with the rigours of being undercover.

  Jack wasn’t as deft with computers as he was with locks. With her logical brain, cracking passwords was more Stella’s territory. For the sake of doing something, he tapped in ‘March’. Not having met Andrea he had no idea what else mattered to her. He guessed that, an IT geek, Andrea hadn’t gone for a pet’s name or her street name. Idly he typed in ‘Geo-Space’ and was amazed to see he’d cracked it. Andrea was into double bluff. Was that a clue? Or perhaps she had nothing to hide.

  Jack soon found out that this wasn’t true. In a folder marked ‘Homes’ were several files of virtual tours. Each file contained a different property, a couple of flats in West London, an architect plan. Boring, Andrea was more of a workaholic than Zack Hunt had suggested to Jackie. Then Jack froze.

  In the file called ‘Cleaning’ was a property he recognized. Not at first, he’d only been there once. But as the image spiralled out of dollhouse mode then zoomed into the sitting room, Jack felt icy sweat trickle down his forehead. It was Stella and Lucie’s flat. With a trembling finger, he clicked along the circular markers, moving around the room where he’d sat hours earlier. He avoided the bedrooms, even entering virtually felt wrong. Not as wrong as Andrea scanning Stella and Lucie’s private space.

  Jack fumbled in his wallet and fished out his USB stick. He fitted it into the side of Andrea’s machine and swiped a copy of the folder onto it. As he did so, he heard the front door open. He clicked the laptop to off. More perspiration as it took ages to close. He fought the urge to shut the lid; it would only fire up when Andrea lifted it and she’d know someone had been there. Footsteps on the stairs, the step too light for the lodger with the letter.

  Jack had forgotten about the mystery caller who had asked for him by name.

  The only hiding place was the wardrobe. Opening the door, Jack eased himself inside and pulled it to. As if it made him invisible, he screwed his eyes shut and held his breath. If you can feel someone watching you, you are unaware of them when they’re not. Jack had to look.

  The handle turned slowly, hesitantly. Jack pictured someone outside on the landing. Playing with him. Had he left a drawer open? Had he accidentally pressed restart on the laptop? None of that mattered if they knew he was there.

  Footsteps in the room. Jack imagined breathing although there was silence. He hadn’t had time to crouch or hide himself behind Andrea’s overalls. If the wardrobe was opened, that would be it. Would he be number five in the chain? As if to calm himself he recited the names Maple, Northcote, March, Clive the Clockmaker. Jack Harmon. He would never see Stella again. Never hold her…

  Jack was about to burst out of the wardrobe, surprise his only weapon, when he heard the door shut and the key turn in the lock. His hearing tuned for a pin dropping, he caught the slightest tread on the stairs. The click of the front door. Could be a trick, but he could not stay where he was.

  With feathery fingers, it took him longer to pick the lock. Jack was ready to faint when he finally emerged onto the landing and risked a look over the banisters. No one. He would not be trapped a second time. He rightly guessed that a third door on the landing was a lavatory. Inside, he stood on the pan and succeeded in thrusting up the window sash. He came face to face with a rusting pipe and a twenty-foot drop onto slimy concrete below. Was whoever might be waiting for him more dangerous than the pipe and the concrete? He had only to think of Roddy March and Clive the Clockmaker to know the answer.

  Jack got stuck halfway out of the window. It took all his gymnastic initiative to wriggle through the aperture. He gripped the pipe for stability, not cheered by noticing it shifted slightly. It was raining heavily and although he was cold, he welcomed the stream of water soaking his face and neck.

  Jack nerved himself to let go of the window sill and relinquish himself to the soil pipe. He whispered a prayer to any god out there who might listen as he made sense of something fixed to the wall of the house. A ladder.

  When he reached the ground, he raced down a paved garden to the back gate. It was locked and, fresh out of patience with picking locks, Jack took a run at the wall. On his second attempt, he got a grip and hauled himself over. He landed badly on the other side. He was in an alleyway. It took him to a road which in turn led to the high street. Blinking back rainwater, Jack looked into the window of Phonz Cheep, the accessory shop beneath Stella and Lucie’s flat.

  ‘Is it OK for me to come up?’ Jack spoke into the intercom. ‘No worries if not.’ Lie, damn lie.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ Stella answered.

  I’ve missed you. Splashing about on the pavement in the neon light of Phonz Cheep, Jack was Gene Kelly.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  2019

  Stella

  I’ve missed you. The words had tumbled out. Now Stella said, ‘Let me get a towel for your hair.’

  ‘Have you?’ Jack had heard it then.

  ‘Yes.’ Unable to think what else to say, Stella busied herself making tea.

  ‘Jackie said to ignore you if you refused to let us help. But seriously, I will head off if that feels more comfortable. I mean, Bev could stay perhaps?’ Jack had his brave face.

  ‘Don’t.’ In the lounge, Stella resumed her corner on the sofa; Lucie’s cockpit was too Lucie for comfort. Seeing Jack going to the armchair, Stella heard herself implore, ‘Please sit next to me.’

  ‘Stella, I’ve found something.’ Jack took the other corner, Stanley leapt onto his lap. He held a USB stick. ‘It comes with a “creep you out” warning.’

  ‘OK.’ Unsure she was ready to be creeped out, Stella put her laptop in the space between them on the sofa and inserted the stick.

  ‘Lucie gave me and Bev tasks.’ Scrubbing his head with the towel, Jack’s voice was muffled.

  ‘She shouldn’t have.’ Once Stella would have resented Lucie taking over a case but since living with her, she didn’t mind. However, she didn’t like Lucie bossing Beverly. Jack could handle himself. She listened, incredulous, as Jack outlined what Lucie had asked them to do.

  ‘I had no trouble checking out Andrea’s bedsit, as you’d guess.’ Jack peered out from under the towel. ‘Bev can’t come to harm in the abbey gift shop and she’s a sensible woman.’

  ‘Roddy was murdered in the abbey, possibly by Joy. We should stick together. And if she was that sensible, Bev wouldn’t have broken into Northcote’s London house.’ Without thinking Stella batted Jack’s leg. ‘Nor would you.’

  ‘We didn’t break in, we found the key.’ Jack finger-combed his hair. ‘But you are right. Stella, can you forgive me?’

  �
��No need.’ Stella clicked on the USB stick, labelled ‘Jack’s Contraband’ – Jack liked to walk on the wild side. A geometrical shape appeared on the screen, spun around, then resolved into their lounge. There was Lucie’s cockpit, the pouffe. Stanley’s bed was empty. ‘I don’t get it, is this some kind of graphic software?’

  ‘I wish.’ Jack folded the towel. ‘It’s a CAD scan of this flat. Like that virtual tour with Roddy March in the film.’

  ‘No, that’s not now.’ She realized the papers on Lucie’s cockpit were pages from her putative true-crime book on The Playground Murders in Hammersmith and not the biography of Northcote which Stella had been reading when Jack called.

  ‘Did you get this off the letting agents? Is the flat on the market?’ Stella had been putting off whether to extend the lease after Lucie left. Had the decision been taken out of her hands?

  ‘I found it on Andrea’s computer.’ Jack’s face was serious.

  ‘Andrea was living here before us?’ Stella fought off panic.

  ‘It wasn’t scanned for an estate agent.’ Jack directed the cursor to the left of the room. See, there’s your rucksack by the coffee table. And isn’t that Stanley’s Mr Ratty?’

  ‘You’re saying Andrea broke in here?’

  ‘It would seem so,’ Jack said.

  ‘Is this some kind of warning?’

  ‘If she planned to send it you, yes. But more likely she was doing a recce. This gives her offline access to every inch of the flat.’

  Jack got Stella to open the other files in the folder. It took them round the abbey. Stella clicked along the ambulatory to the chapel with the tomb of the starved monk where her heart rate doubled. She could almost see Roddy’s body slumped against the plinth. Jack asked Stella to check the other two files, but the interiors meant nothing. If the people who lived there were in any danger, they had no way to warn them.

  ‘Whoever killed Roddy and Clive was calculating, even if they committed the murders on impulse. They left no clues and, since the police are charging those boys in Evesham, the real murderer has got away with it,’ Stella said.

  ‘I agree, and right now Andrea is my prime suspect,’ Jack said. ‘She had reason to murder Roddy, he was cutting her out of the podcast in favour of you. You are obviously in her sights. Like me with True Hosts, Andrea preps before taking action. Unlike me, she’s designed her own software so she can prowl around a home without leaving her chair.’

  ‘Is she a True Host?’ Stella was determined to sound OK about Jack stalking killers and living in their closets. No one was perfect. Least of all her.

  ‘She could be.’ Jack steepled his fingers. ‘We might no longer believe that when someone takes our photograph they steal our soul, but with this scan Andrea has stolen your privacy. How did she know where you live?’

  ‘She would have seen my name on the cleaning rota; she could have followed me home. Then all she had to do was call when Lucie and I were out. But how did she get in?’ Unconsciously Stella shifted closer to Jack on the sofa until their thighs were touching.

  ‘I’m afraid a Yale lock is no challenge.’ Jack closed the file and removed his USB stick from Stella’s laptop. ‘Stella, you’re not safe here. I’d like to swap – you take my room at the hotel, then if Andrea dares break in again, I’ll be waiting.’

  The abbey clock struck midday. The mugs of tea had gone cold. Outside there was a lull in the rain. Neither Stella nor Jack could have said when they began clasping hands.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  2019

  Jack

  Rain fell in a slant across the abbey close; a gargoyle above the north buttress spewed water which, whipped by the wind, splashed against the stone wall. The bells in the tower tolled four o’clock. Two figures and a small dog huddled beneath an umbrella hurried up the path between two lines of yews into a pool of yellow light spilling on to the flagstones and entered through the north door.

  Retracting the umbrella, Jack dried his face on his coat sleeve. Stella was already halfway up the right-hand side. He found her with three life-size alabaster models of the kings, a motley crew lurking in the gloom of the south ambulatory.

  Jack felt in the grip of an awakening that was less to do with God than that he and Stella had spent the previous few hours making love. Afterwards, they had lain in each other’s arms as if resting on a fluffy white cloud. Then they’d made a plan.

  ‘That’s the Grove organ Joy plays,’ Stella whispered, as with Stanley the poodle swaddled in a towel on her lap she settled on a chair. Seemingly now expert on the abbey, Stella told him that the north transept was fifty-eight feet high.

  ‘It’s horrible to think of the men who died building this.’ Jack admired fine geometrical tracery around small pointed windows. ‘Beneath beauty lies ugliness.’

  ‘Beneath ugliness there’s more beauty.’ Stella’s optimism made Jack want to kiss her right there.

  They crossed the nave to the western end where, putting Stanley down, Stella showed Jack the font, a giant octagonal receptacle carved, she informed him, in Purbeck stone. Abruptly she said, ‘Jackie said Zack Hunt at Geo-Space had taken over Andrea’s office and behaved like he was in charge.’ Stella pushed the towel into the rucksack she’d bought from a luggage shop in the high street. Even when the police relinquished the bag that was stolen by the mugger on the bridge, Stella didn’t want it back. ‘Andrea said Roddy stole her project – the murder of Maple Greenhill then later the consequent killing of Aleck Northcote at Cloisters House – for his podcast and ousted her. Zack Hunt is ousting her from Geo-Space. It’s a bit like me.’

  ‘No one’s ousting you from Clean Slate.’ Jack sought to reassure her.

  ‘No, I know. But what if Andrea needed to take a break, find what mattered to her? Like I did.’ Stella brushed his fingers. ‘She realized she loved Roddy.’

  ‘Meantime lovely Roddy was after you. Whoa.’ Jack spread his arms before a gigantic stove caged in mesh. This was more an object of worship than the glittering altar or the mysteries depicted in the stained-glass windows. ‘A Gurney, what a Victorian invention! And here’s one in operation. Isn’t the “London Warming and Heating Company” a magical name?’

  ‘Rather long, but yes, nice.’ Stella’s willing interest made Jack want to whirl her around and shout how much he loved her. Except that wouldn’t go down well.

  ‘If who Andrea discovered was Roddy, I feel sorry for her. She didn’t matter to him.’ Stella peered through an iron grating into what was called the Clarence Vault.

  Somewhere, Stella remembered reading that the vault contained the remains of George, Duke of Clarence, and his wife, Isabel, who had died of poisoning.

  Murder was never far away.

  ‘You mattered to March. If Andrea killed Roddy and then Clive and, mad with jealousy, attacked you, she doesn’t get my sympathy vote.’ Wracked with his own jealousy, Jack felt no regret that Roddy March was out of the picture. What if Stella and March had worked together…

  ‘Time to go undercover,’ Stella announced.

  Stella had suggested Jack visit Joy in the gift shop. Since Beverly had texted that Joy had hired her, Stella wanted to check up on her to know she was safe. Jack had warned Beverly he’d be incognito, treat me as a stranger. Bev texted back, Who are you? Jack would try to gauge if Joy was the harmless organist she portrayed herself as.

  Stella sat where she had seen the shadow on the wall the night March was murdered. Nervous for her safety too, Jack wanted Stella to come with him, but Stella was adamant, he’d learn more alone. She and Joy hadn’t hit it off.

  Confirming there were a good few people around, Jack left Stella perusing ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ in a copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern with Stanley. Still with misgivings, he slipped around the pillar to St James’s chapel.

  Jack had read that, compared with the chapel housing the starved monk, St James had got a raw deal. The chapel had gone to wrack and ruin, lying open to the elements for centuries until i
t was walled off and used as a schoolroom. Jack felt uncomfortable treading on the tombs of the men beheaded at the battle of Tewkesbury – the Dukes of Somerset and Devon and more – interred beneath what was now the abbey’s gift shop.

  For all that St James’s Chapel was dedicated to Mammon, Jack felt his spirits lifted by the bright objects and myriad scents of candles, potpourri oil and branded soap. Spotlight tracks across the vaulted ceiling shone on abbey mugs, boxes of abbey chocolate and fudge. A table was piled with rose and lavender hand cream, framed pictures of Christ in the stable and saints hung from wire strung from one cladded pillar to another.

  No sign of Joy or Beverly. Their absence surely an invitation to any muggers Janet hadn’t nabbed. A sign warned CCTV was in operation. Jack located the camera and gave it a long stare. That should smoke Joy out from her sarcophagus. When he’d met her after evensong in what was now a different ‘without Stella’ life, Jack had felt something was off about her. Or was it that Joy had got to spend two evenings at a Death Café with Stella? Jealousy kills.

  Jack gravitated to a carousel dominated by fabric hen doorstops. Easter leftovers, they were reduced to £5.50. He toyed with getting one for Stella before coming to his senses.

  ‘Are you looking for a specific item, sir?’ In abbey gift shop uniform of cream shirt, navy cardigan and tabard, Joy looked sterner than in the multicoloured knitted jacket of last time. Of a similar age to Stella, they were chalk and cheese. Stella dressed forever young while Joy’s cream tea and Christian outfit suggested timeless middle-age. If Joy was their murderer, she was in perfect disguise.

  ‘It’s a stocking filler, for my partner.’ While not foolproof, Jack’s principle of opening his mouth in the hope the right words came out generally served. On the pretext of admiring the shop, Jack scanned for Beverly. ‘Gosh, do you manage this lovely emporium alone?’