The Distant Dead by Lesley Thomson (most difficult books to read .txt) 📗

It should be good news that the woman in the photo matched the body currently being transported to the Hammersmith morgue, but what Cotton would give for the bag to have been a false lead. For the picture to portray a mother still alive and able to cuddle her baby.

Five past five. The raid had ended but blackout wouldn’t come off until 8.40 a.m. As the car crawled at ten miles an hour, Cotton, the bearer of bad news, did not want to go where they were going.

Under the cover of his coat, he shone his electric torch on the photograph. Maple Greenhill’s smile was broad, he could almost see that she must have burst into laughter as soon as the shutter clicked. Maple had enjoyed life.

In last night’s raid, many had lost their lives, but dwelling on one, Cotton vowed to catch the man who had ended that life.

Except, as the car tracked tramlines, a trick that in the dark lessened the chance of straying to the other side of the road, Cotton privately agreed with Shepherd: so far, they had sweet Fanny Adams.

Chapter Six

December 2019

Jack

Midnight. St Nicholas’s churchyard. By the faint light of a lamp-post on the pavement beyond the railing, Jack Harmon bent to make out the name.

GEORGE COTTON

1894–1979

Simple facts, nothing to get his teeth into. No dates with which to nourish his need to flesh out the dead. For example, if a person died on their birthday you could imagine they’d been fighting a life-limiting illness and had exerted the last of their will to round off their life. Those whose death was in early January had wanted a final Christmas.

Shifting his gaze to an adjacent grave, Jack read that John and Victoria Cotton had died on the same day in 1935. Innocent victims of the Welwyn Garden City railway accident. Odd phrasing. Was the driver considered guilty? A train driver himself, Jack blanched at the idea.

After dark the cemetery gates were locked, but Jack knew a way in. He liked the prospect of the Cotton family meeting again. Did you haunt where you had been buried or where you died? Ghosts were not limited by geography. Their graves were their resting places.

These days it was all about confectionery and dressing up. Jack never abandoned hope that one night, wandering in a cemetery between the serried ranks of dead, one person would join him. His mother.

Her grave was miles away in Sussex but she was murdered beside the River Thames, ten minutes from the cemetery, two years after George Cotton’s death. Yesterday, Jack’s son had asked if the dead did walk, did they take it in turns? The little boy had worked out that the dead outnumbered the living, there would be a crowd of ghosts. Bella, Jack’s ex, had been cross with Jack: You tell them such crap.

Without – literally – meeting a soul, Jack climbed back through a gap in the cemetery wall, crept alongside the ancient walls of the darkened church and out through the lychgate onto Chiswick Mall. Like the cemetery, the street was timeless. Victorian wrought-iron lamps, now casting bleak LED light onto cobbles, had once hissed with gas. In the threaded dark, cars became hansom cabs.

He told Stella she had rescued him from his half-life. Well, now she had put him back there. Saying that had been a mistake. Stella shunned even a whiff of dependency. A woman of action, she had no truck with ghosts, or signs Jack believed defined fate. Stupid him, his signs, ghosts, amulets had led him here. Alone.

Jack felt Stella’s absence like a death. He was the walking dead.

Jack felt a weight in his pocket and took out the pebble. A driver on the London Underground, he’d come off the dead-late shift on the District line at Ealing Broadway. He’d walked through the terminated train checking for passengers, asleep or drunk or both. He’d found the pebble on the floor of the last car and, picking it up, saw a face had been scratched into the flint, eyes and mouth wide as if in horror. He intended to hand it to Lost Property, knowing they’d laugh at him for bothering, but now, the aghast face was company.

The tide was receding. The causeway was littered with flotsam, broken glass and bits of wood which, lit by the waxing moon, looked like limbs. The mud gleamed as if phosphorous. Careful not to slip in his rubber-soled shoes Jack went down slime-ridden river stairs onto the beach. He walked a rotted plank to the causeway and from there to the eyot, a scrap of land only accessible by foot at low tide.

Jack Harmon walked the streets of London. It was his habit to follow home late commuters, night-shift workers, couples keeping their distance, love long over. He’d linger in shadows to keep watch on his chosen house until the grey light of dawn. Jack knew most of us trust that bad things only happen to other people. Set in our routines – dog-walking, jogging, journeying to and from work or the supermarket – we don’t see what else is happening.

We move house and, excited to collect the key, never consider who else has a copy. We tell the chemist our address without heed to who is queuing behind. We banter with the window cleaner, meter reader, we give the plumber the alarm code. We leave doors unlatched to nip out for chocolate we shouldn’t have and we express horror at a murder in the local paper, never thinking that we ourselves may die that way.

Standing amongst tall reeds on the eyot, Jack whispered on the breeze.

‘Have you seen the cold-hearted shadow who waits so patiently for a chance to know you better?’

Jack knew, it takes one to know one.

Chapter Seven

December 2019

Stella

Since she’d moved to Tewkesbury, Stella was appreciating that she worked for someone else. She could do the job, and leave. Today had begun by cleaning the Abbey tea shop,