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

son, but she could update the customer database from there and anyway she’d stopped drawing a salary. Of all of them Suzy was the least worried. Just like her father leaving the baby for others to hold, Stella will sort herself out and be back. Jackie could manage, she and Graham had savings and were mortgage free. Bev and her wife had just bought a flat in Richmond, so if Jackie had to let her go…

‘If it was mystery shopping, he’d probe us about our services and waste time so we couldn’t bring in real new business.’ Bev was grim-faced. ‘I’ve got a nasty feeling it’s some weirdo after Stella. But why now? She hasn’t done any interviews.’

‘I’m sure it’s not.’ Jackie felt queasy. More than once she’d encouraged Stella to do an interview with reporter Lucie May for the local paper. The detective’s daughter who cleaned for a living had, after her father’s death, solved several murders. In the past, publicity had drummed up new customers for Clean Slate. But a recent article had also drummed up admirers who, seeing Stella’s photograph in the paper, wanted her to do more for them than clean. Jackie sought to reassure Bev – and herself – about the anonymous caller.

‘At least he won’t find Stella in Tewkesbury.’

Chapter Two

December 2019

Stella

Stella Darnell loved cleaning, to make surfaces shine and retore order from chaos. Deep cleaning was her passion, but it wasn’t allowed in the abbey. The handout from the Churches Conservation Trust said to ignore your usual standards, a church will never be free of dust or cobwebs. No aggressive cleaning products like furniture cream or silicone polish, the favoured weapons in Stella’s usual armoury. The handout said to clean ‘gently and sympathetically’. After several shifts in Tewkesbury Abbey, Stella found this worked for her too. She loved her mornings being sympathetic with the tombs.

‘That’s a warning to the living.’ A man was leaning against the portico to the south ambulatory. ‘To remember the grisly gruesome aspect of death. It’s not all angels and lambs.’

Taken by surprise, Stella dropped the dusting brush.

‘What is?’ She scrabbled for the brush on the stone floor of the side chapel.

‘What you’re cleaning, it’s a cadaver tomb.’ Arms folded, the man smiled. ‘Christ, have you got to clean the whole abbey with a small brush?’

‘Only the carvings, otherwise I’ve got a larger one.’ Stella flicked the sable into the crevice between the upturned feet of the figure lying on the tomb.

‘They were a macabre thing in medieval times. You’re cleaning vermin which feast on the rotting corpse. See, there’s a mouse, that’s a toad.’ He took a step closer. ‘Fascinating. Those indentations were scored by early visitors to the abbey leaving their mark. These days they have historic value.’

He was too close. Security patrolled regularly; ten minutes earlier one had pointed out Stanley lifting his leg against a pillar by the nave. Stella had mopped it up.

‘There are about fifty cadaver tombs in churches in Britain. I mean, they had a right to be obsessed with death, there were many visitations of pestilence in the last part of the fourteenth century.’ He came over and rested his arms on the recumbent figure. ‘This one is the starved monk, aka the Wakeman Cenotaph. Not that Wakeman himself is interred here.’

Stella shot a glance at Stanley. Dogs were for protection, but her miscreant poodle had twisted round and was preening his tail.

‘Seriously, though, you do this every morning?’ The man was grinning. ‘One hell of a gig!’

‘No, this week I’m cleaning here in the Wakeman Cenotaph at the end of the North Ambulatory, we have a rota—’ Stella stopped. There had been several recent muggings: a handbag snatch in the presbytery, a verger attacked by a gang in balaclavas, his arm broken and his watch stolen. If this man was checking out Tewkesbury Abbey, he’d start by buttering up one of the cleaners. ‘The abbey is closed. How come you’re here?’

‘In my job it’s my business to flout rules, that’s how you learn stuff.’ He moved towards Stanley, presumably thinking fussing her dog was the way in. Stanley whipped around, panting from his preening, and bared his teeth.

‘That’s a warning to the living,’ Stella said. The Ralph Lauren combat jacket, hair escaping from under a black beanie and glasses stamped with Armani didn’t fit a mugger, unless he was wearing what he’d nicked. He was late forties, surely too old for mugging. Except Stella’s inner policeman’s daughter voice proclaimed that rubbish. Anyone could mug anyone.

‘Never approach a dog unawares.’ The man was holding out a hand for her to shake. ‘Roddy March. Of course.’

Of course? Stella laid her brush on the ribcage of the starved monk and made a quick decision: ‘I’m Beverly.’

‘Beverly? I thought—’ March appeared wrong-footed.

‘I have to get on.’ Stella withdrew her hand and swished the brush over the monk’s protruding bones. March was likely a harmless geek who toured churches collecting weird facts, but her three mornings cleaning the abbey had become precious and Stella wanted to clean alone.

‘I’m a podcaster,’ March said.

‘Oh, right.’ Stella felt that in this conversation – which she didn’t want – she had nothing to say; she never listened to podcasts and what she knew about history could be cobbled into a handout.

‘Deep reporting is the way forward.’

‘On cadaver tombs?’ Deep cleaning certainly was. Stella gave the monk a final brush.

‘You could say that.’ He laughed. ‘Hey, I’m building tons of followers, you should join the conversation.’ He was rummaging in one of the pockets of his jacket.

‘I have to work.’ An inane response, but Stella had no inclination to join in a conversation now, or any time. She’d come to Tewkesbury, she had told Jack, because she needed space. So far, she had found it, but not this morning.

‘Here, you need my card. Check out my podcast. Radio Public’s a cool platform, but I’m everywhere. I’ve podded out one ep, so you don’t have to play catch-up.’ March