The Distant Dead

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘I have a girl.’ Joy didn’t expand.

  Damn. Stella had warned him not to sweet-talk Joy but, intent on nuzzling her neck, he hadn’t paid heed. Joy was no-nonsense.

  As were Roddy and Clive’s murders.

  ‘Thank heavens, it’s a lot to manage.’ Jack swept an arm around the empty shop.

  ‘Does he or she like jewellery? Some nice earrings and necklaces have come in.’ Joy was all business.

  ‘No.’ Stella would hate ‘nice earrings’. Catching sight of a miniature Joseph carrying a lantern with a lamb snuffling in his robes and a Mary with baby Jesus, Jack crowed, ‘Perfect. It must be a gift that brings peace. She recently had a shock.’

  ‘Five pounds for the pair.’ Ignoring the reference to shock, Joy was supremely professional. Or she was a psychopath.

  ‘She was attacked on that bridge by the weir.’

  If Joy had attacked Stella, she might now recall that she’d met Jack before. Yet her expression remained inscrutable. Jack prattled on, ‘What with that terrible murder here, well, not literally here, at the Wakeman Cenotaph. Terrible to die violently in a sanctified space. Or perhaps a comfort.’

  ‘I doubt Mr March was bothered by the scene of his death or that he was stabbed with a sharp knife. He’ll be where he belongs now.’ Joy slid Mary and Joseph across the counter towards Jack.

  ‘So right. Do you think it was this gang of boys the police have arrested?’ Jack imagined Mary and Joseph were himself and Stella. Concentrate.

  ‘These days it’s as likely to be a female. One knows where one is with boys.’ Joy was animated. Did she know March was killed by a woman?

  ‘Do you feel safe here?’ Not a kind question, but proof boys weren’t so reliable.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Joy shook her head and said, ‘We have hens going cheap.’ Her face betrayed no sense this might be humour so Jack didn’t laugh.

  ‘Don’t they look fun? After her shock.’ He did want a hen. True Hosts could read your mind. ‘What with these murders, she’s set to hightail it out of Tewkesbury. Boo-hoo, I say.’

  ‘We don’t get murders every week and Clive probably slipped and fell on his sundial. That was him all over.’

  ‘Oh, crikey.’ Jack clasped his hands. ‘You knew the poor gentleman? I am so very, very sorry. I gather he was a clockmaker.’

  ‘Clive had more enemies than clocks – he overcharged.’ Joy was emptying Mary and Josephs from their boxes onto the counter. ‘Not to mention wandering hands. Some deluded souls, naming no names, put his disinhibition down to dementia. Clive Burgess was as sharp as a pendulum, he was born an octopus.’

  ‘Did, um, did Clive wander in your dir…?’ The Marys were lined up in the front of the Josephs.

  ‘Do you want a set?’ Joy waved a hand at one of the carousels. ‘Or a hen?’

  ‘Yes and yes.’ Jack snatched a hen from the stand and speaking confidentially to it, ‘My partner read somewhere that the murdered podcaster, Ron Marsh was it, received death threats.’

  ‘March. Roderick. She may also have “read somewhere” that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ Joy shoved two Marys into a box and, snatching the hen from Jack, snipped off the price label. ‘Due to saving the planet, we don’t gift wrap, do you want a bag?’

  ‘I’ll give them to her now, dwelling on Christ’s birth and his um…’ Jack clasped the Easter hen, ‘…resurrection will be calming.’ He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.

  Beverly was crouched in a corner unpacking gigantic candles, shaking her head. Yes, OK, wrong tack.

  ‘A couple of plastic Nativity icons won’t satisfy a lust for gossip. Try the internet. Or perhaps you have.’ Game set and match to Joy.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  2019

  Stella

  ‘I keep inviting you at short notice. My father called me impulsive, I wanted to clarify that you’re not just my cleaner, not my cleaner at all, you clean for me.’ Felicity was wheezing slightly as she led Stella into her – once Northcote’s – drawing room. ‘I felt we had a rapport at that frightful hash of a Death Café, at which the only good thing was meeting you. I hope you like scones, I cooked them especially.’

  Stella had told Jack that she’d see him at the flat later.

  ‘Did you miss evensong?’ Felicity’s eyes glittered in the firelight.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I apologize for dragging you away. Do you want to shoot back for the Voluntary?’

  ‘It’s nice to see you.’ Stella’s head wound ached and she’d rather return to the flat and rest. She touched it gingerly.

  ‘Would your doggie like water?’ Felicity laid a plate of scones beside Stella.

  ‘He’s just had some, thanks.’ Stella knew Stanley would prefer scones.

  ‘Was dear Joy about to bash out ditties on her organ?’ Felicity winked as if this was a shared joke.

  ‘I think today is one of her days in the gift shop.’

  ‘You are well up on abbey life.’ Felicity was cutting her scone with a knife surely meant for tougher material.

  ‘I used to clean there.’ If only cleaning in the abbey was all she still did.

  ‘Used to?’

  ‘The cleaning agency heard that I found Roddy Marsh dying and were worried employing me would attract the wrong kind of publicity. They cancelled my shifts.’ No point pretending that she was rushed off her feet.

  ‘I thought Roddy was dead when you found him.’ Felicity paused mid-bite.

  ‘He died soon after.’ The police had kept that back. Spreading too much cream on her scone, Stella hoped that now there’d been arrests that slip didn’t matter.

  ‘Did you capture any last words?’ Felicity flourished her napkin. ‘For his loved ones?’

  ‘No,’ Stella said.

  ‘That’s wrongful dismissal, you should take the cleaning company to court.’ Felicity looked suddenly indignant.

  ‘They said I needed a rest and would be in touch when I felt better.’ A burning log tumbled to the edge of the grate.

  ‘Charlatans. Start your own company, that would be my response.’ Grabbing the poker, Felicity whacked the log to the top of the pile where it was engulfed by blue-yellow flames.

  ‘I don’t want the responsibility.’ Stella was startled by a swishing sound in the hall. From her tour the day before she guessed it was the green baize door to the kitchen. She had assumed they were alone.

  ‘Come,’ Felicity commanded, her head cocked.

  Luckily Stella had swallowed the rest of the scone because when the door opened and in stockinged feet, tatty gardening jacket glistening with raindrops, Andrea skated in and stood by the fire.

  ‘Didn’t realize you had company. I’ve been calling out.’ She was gruffer than ever. ‘I’ve come for my money.’

  ‘I left it outside, on the kitchen window sill. There was no need to come in here.’ In an aside to Stella, ‘Andrea is my gardener – you met.’

  ‘Hi. Small world.’ Stella’s rictus smile wasn’t reciprocated. Andrea is my gardener. Andrea, it seemed, was not invited to tea.

  ‘You left it outside?’ Andrea scowled. ‘It will be soaked.’

  ‘Call it laundered and don’t spend it until it’s dry.’ Patting her chest Felicity seemed to enjoy her own joke.

  ‘I didn’t realize you knew each other,’ Stella said.

  ‘She made me act like a stranger. She wanted me there to bulk up the numbers. Strangely, the advert to do to a Death Café got few takers.’ Andrea’s wet clothes gave off steam from the hot fire. ‘I’ll go and find my money, then, shall I?’

  Perhaps as a Home Office employee with a good pension, Felicity didn’t understand the anxiety of getting paid on time and with respect. A respect all the more important when paying a woman who may have murdered the last two people who upset her. Stella made up her mind to warn Felicity. Yet what if Andrea was innocent? If Felicity sacked Andrea, it would be down to Stella.

  ‘A difficult madam,
I told her not to come the second night after her rudeness. Extraordinary behaviour,’ Felicity said to the closing door. ‘Heigh-ho, it’s what comes of employing staff without a reference.’

  ‘You didn’t ask me for a reference,’ Stella said.

  ‘You came with a track record. I did my research.’ Felicity began gathering up the tea things. If Felicity had done her research, she’d know Stella owned a cleaning company.

  ‘Let me help.’ Stella wanted to check Andrea wasn’t in the kitchen waiting for Stella to leave before she attacked Felicity with a gardening implement.

  ‘You are not here to clean.’ Felicity’s warmth contrasted with her treatment of Andrea. Stunned by Felicity having researched her, Stella was astonished when she said, ‘I invited you to see my morgue.’

  ‘Can I just grab a drink of water?’ Stella had to assure herself that Andrea had gone. Little comfort, Andrea could have opened and shut the dividing door to fool them, then sneaked upstairs. Stella gulped the water, then, her hearing tuned for the slightest sound, went with Felicity down to the basement.

  ‘Shall we take the key?’ Stella said when Felicity left the key on the outside of the basement door. Andrea could take them prisoner.

  ‘Are you worried we’ll be locked in?’ Felicity began descending a long flight of stone steps.

  ‘It’s happened before,’ Stella said. ‘I tell my staff—’

  ‘What staff?’ Felicity was waiting at the bottom of what must be a very deep basement.

  ‘I used to run a cleaning company.’ Stella couldn’t see in the dark.

  ‘I didn’t know.’ Felicity flicked on the light. ‘Aren’t you a detective?’

  ‘Not now. I only clean.’ The top of the stone staircase was lost in gloom. Stella became aware of being cold. Jack had said Andrea was his prime suspect, but what about Felicity?

  ‘Are you worried someone’s there?’ Felicity’s voice was like melted chocolate.

  ‘There’s something I should tell you.’ Feeling dreadful, Stella told Felicity about Andrea’s software. She kept back that Andrea and March were lovers. ‘She’s not really a gardener.’

  ‘I dislike being taken for a fool.’ Felicity’s features darkened.

  ‘I could be wrong,’ Stella said. ‘Perhaps she just wanted a career change.’

  ‘As I understand it, you are never wrong, Stella Darnell.’ Felicity opened a door and the temperature plummeted. A hand on Stella’s back, she said, ‘After you.’

  The first thing Stella saw was a mortuary slab.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  2019

  Jack

  Gone to see Felicity.

  When he read Stella’s text Jack was plunged into doom. He’d hoped their time in bed meant Stella and he were a team but now she’d gone to tea with Felicity by herself, he could have gone too. Did Stella regret the sex, and saying she loved him? Was she scared she’d lost the space she’d found in Tewkesbury? If he rang, Stella might feel pestered. She’d think he was desperate. Which he was.

  In anguish, keeping out of the lamplight, Jack wandered the abbey close. The rain had stopped, the grass was soggy and soon his shoes were wet through. He told himself he was looking for Andrea the gardener, although she wouldn’t work in the dark. One, two three. He reached the wall of Cloisters House. Two more steps. Through the gate into the garden.

  Jack reasoned that if he watched Stella through a window, it could help the case. She need never know.

  The house was a hundred or so feet away, the top windows were unlit, but a lamp glowed on the ground floor. His heart skipped. Stella was in there.

  Jack shut the gate and, aiming the beam of his Maglite down, trod carefully over a carpet of dead plants and leaves. Stakes stuck into the soil every which way seemed to tilt in the torchlight. The garden was a wasteland. Felicity, retired pathologist and Death Café host, didn’t have green fingers.

  He tripped against something hard. It was a raised bed supported by sleepers. Jack saw he’d done Felicity a disservice – he’d was in her veg patch. His torch picked out a compost bin and a water butt beside a couple of cold frames. It recalled the garden at his boarding school, a refuge from the bully who’d nearly broken his spirit. Skirting a lavender bush, Jack found a grave.

  Not a grave. Since his mother was murdered, death was Jack’s default. He gave himself a break, it was just that the plot looked the right length and breadth. Weeds and clods of grass lay piled to one side, the soil was freshly dug. Adjusting his beam, Jack saw a spade under the lavender bush. He pulled it out and dropped it.

  It was streaked with blood.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  2019

  Stella

  It didn’t get much more suspicious than having your own morgue, a rack of cutting and sawing implements, specimen jars and a body freezer. Stella paused to wave to Felicity still in the hall; the tall willowy figure elegant in the lamplight didn’t wave.

  Her wound properly throbbing now, Stella hastened up the high street and turned into the abbey close. She picked her way through the puddles on the grass to the back gate of Cloisters House. She needed to be sure Andrea was not in Felicity’s garden waiting to pounce. Now she was equally, if not more, worried for Andrea. With pathologist’s skills – and a slab – Felicity could slice, dice and dispose of Andrea in an hour. Stella heard voices.

  ‘What did you do?’ The distress was animal.

  ‘Chopped off the head, if you must know.’

  Stella crept into the garden and stopped short.

  ‘I’ll swing for you, I swear.’ Jack.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ It was Andrea.

  Stella saw torchlight, broken by foliage, dart this way and that. Desperate to get to Jack, she tore forward and stumbled on a twist of vegetation. Momentum carried her on, then her legs gave way. She landed on her knees in a pool of light.

  ‘Oh, look who’s risen from the dead,’ Andrea said.

  ‘Stella, oh my God, Stella.’ Jack knelt down and clasped her. So tight it rather hurt.

  ‘Ow,’ Stella managed at last.

  ‘I thought she’d killed you too,’ Jack choked.

  ‘What do you mean “too”?’ Andrea barked.

  ‘You have blood on your spade.’ Jack helped Stella to her feet.

  ‘I told you, it was a pigeon. Felicity’s horrible cat mauled it then left it dying. I had to finish it off. Please could you stop shining that in my face?’

  Andrea did look distressed about the pigeon, but she might be a good actor. Lucie said her readers complained about graphic descriptions of animals’ deaths in her articles, but couldn’t get enough human murder.

  ‘We shouldn’t be here,’ Stella muttered to Jack.

  ‘I’m the gardener, I’m allowed,’ Andrea said.

  ‘Not at seven at night,’ Stella said. ‘Besides, we need to talk.’

  ‘I told you and your reporter sidekick I’m not playing your detective games.’ Andrea stomped out of the garden.

  Jack and Stella chased after to where Stella knew Andrea kept her bike. In time to see Andrea opening the door of a white van.

  ‘When you tell us the truth, we’ll leave you alone, Andrea.’ Stella stood by the bonnet. ‘You might start with why you stopped on a lane the night before Roddy was murdered?’

  ‘You were lucky I didn’t tear you limb from limb.’ Andrea slumped onto a stone coffin by the abbey’s south wall. She didn’t look capable of being rude, let alone bashing a pigeon with a spade.

  ‘I think we have exposed a charade. Andrea Rogers, chief exec of an IT company, is undone.’ Jack was being unnecessarily dramatic.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Stella asked Andrea.

  ‘The bastard robbed me,’ Andrea groaned.

  ‘Felicity?’ Stella recalled the wages, paid reluctantly, in soaked notes.

  ‘Her? She always robs me, tight bitch,’ Andrea said. ‘No, Roddy. The rest is true, I did meet him online. I wanted a mature man who didn’t show off and demand
endless sex. A life companion, someone to love me.’

  ‘Instead you got March. And for this bloke you found on an app, you gave up Geo-Space, a software company making CAD 3D films for estate agents, developers and architects.’ Jack sounded superior. OK, Stella hadn’t got him off an app, but as Lucie said, she’d got him by lurking on a dark night near where his mother was murdered.

  ‘We know you’re selling a house you only bought six months ago which was the home of pathologist Sir Aleck Northcote. It was where his wife hanged herself.’ Jack was setting a trap since they knew Julia Northcote was murdered.

  ‘She didn’t commit suicide, Northcote murdered her, as he murdered Maple.’ Andrea clamped her hand over her mouth but, too late, the words had flown.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Jack crooned. ‘Shall I nudge you? Lyons’ Swiss Roll and a letter from a hanged woman.’

  ‘How did you find it?’ Andrea looked all-in.

  Jack handed his phone to Andrea. Stella saw he’d brought up Andrea’s virtual tour of Northcote’s Ravenscourt Square house. Andrea’s house.

  ‘Your point is?’ Andrea was moving, virtually, through the rooms.

  Jack leaned over and clicked the marker that, like the wardrobe door into Narnia, revealed Roddy March on the top floor.

  ‘The. Total. Fuckwit.’ Andrea’s voice carried across the Avon. ‘Zack effing Hunt’s useless editing. I knew I shouldn’t have asked him. He’s fired.’

  ‘Is this the same Zack as the one occupying your office and passing himself off as CEO?’ Jack said airily.

  Andrea looked so dreadful that, in rescue mode, Stella joined her on the coffin.

  ‘Not so fast, Poirot.’ Andrea was busy on Jack’s phone. She thrust it at Stella.

  Blurred lamplight. Pavements, railings, kerbs, three cars and, beyond, a scribble of houses. A counter at 6.34 a.m. rolled in real time. Not Street View then. CCTV.