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

‘I should have gone but Mary, she’s my fiancée, had a shift the next day so…’ He stopped and Cotton saw that, like his nephew, Vernon Greenhill knew about lying. He had never been accompanying Maple to the dance hall. And nor, Cotton would confirm, had the friend called Ida.

‘Mary’s a clippie on the 27.’ Evelyn’s note of pride sounded by rote, for her son’s benefit. She was probably prouder of her secretary daughter.

‘I’d like to see Maple’s room, to get a picture of her, things she liked, any hobbies and such, anything that could help find who did this.’ Cotton sidestepped Vernon at the door.

‘Stay with your dad.’ Evelyn Greenhill got up and took Shepherd and Cotton upstairs. The landing window was still blacked out with fabric pinned to the frame. Switching on a light, she sighed, ‘Maple does the blackout, we don’t ask much, not even keep for the baby, but she makes a song and dance every time.’

‘My girl’s the same.’ Cotton winced at his tactlessness – Mrs Greenhill had snared him by speaking of Maple as if she was alive. ‘It is a palaver.’

‘Just spent nearly fourteen shillings on her linen sheets, what a—’ Mrs Greenhill’s face contorted. She wasn’t complaining, Cotton realized, but mourning that her daughter wouldn’t benefit. ‘Make yourselves at home,’ Mrs Greenhill told them as she returned down the stairs.

‘We’re hardly going to do that,’ Shepherd whispered once they were alone.

‘You say all sorts when you’ve had bad news.’ When he was told about his parents’ deaths Cotton had asked which bit of the train they’d been in. Not an idle question. On holidays, knowing what could go wrong, his dad always insisted they sat on suitcases in the guard’s wagon. That day, his mum’s birthday treat, they’d gone in the first-class carriage behind the engine. Cotton flicked a hand as if at the memory and said, ‘Master Vernon knows something he’s not telling.’

‘How do you make that out, sir?’ Shepherd said.

‘He’s too convinced Maple wasn’t a prostitute.’

‘My sister sends me spare, but I’d be browned off if a copper hinted she was a prostitute, not that she is,’ Shepherd said.

‘Good lad, that’s what brothers are for,’ Cotton said. ‘I think he’s upset because he knows there was a man and he didn’t protect her.’

‘If he knows and isn’t saying then we should arrest him.’ Shepherd saw arresting people as a perk of the job.

‘Vernon doesn’t know, or mark my words, he’d have high-tailed it, fists ready, when we told them. He will be kicking himself for not finding out who his sister was courting. My guess is this man is married or Maple would have been over the moon to tell her family.’

Maple’s bedroom was a poignant illustration of her switch from child to mother. A teddy bear and a feeding bottle, children’s books – Out With Romany, The Family From One End Street, Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare – too old for the boy were in a bookcase also stacked with wooden building bricks and a Peek Freans crackers tin filled with more lead soldiers. Errol Flynn, cut from the Sunday Pictorial, was on the wall. A scratched and mended cot was hard up to a bed that Maple must have slept in since she was a girl little older than her son.

A double-doored utility wardrobe left scant floorspace, bought, Cotton decided, to accommodate Maple and William’s things. He opened it and recoiled. The delicate flowery scent evoked the dead girl far more than viewing her body on Northcote’s slab.

Inside hung some frocks and blouses and a couple of work skirts. Unlike the silk dress Maple had been wearing when she was murdered, all looked hand-made. Another coat, of cheaper material than the fancy one Maple was found in. He said, ‘Maple appears to have led two lives: secretary at the dairy, and for nights out she dolled herself up in garments that were so dear a girl on her modest wage would have to save up half her life to afford.’

‘If Maple was selling herself, she was going for the highest bidder.’ Shepherd whistled.

‘Wash your mouth out, PC Shepherd.’ Cotton whipped around. ‘Damn well show respect to this young woman who, if she was alive, would have been ashamed to have you and me turning over her bedroom.’

Shepherd at least had the grace to look ashamed. To spare his blushes, Cotton got Shepherd checking under the bed, delving beneath the lumpy palliasse, pillows, shaking out sheets and blankets while Cotton sifted through Maple’s undergarments. They were searching, Cotton told him, for a billet-doux, or something Maple’s man had given her as a gift.

Wrapped in a flannel vest, which Cotton suspected had been rarely worn, he discovered her 1927 diary when Maple was ten. The flyleaf was inscribed, ‘For Maple, every girl must keep her secrets, love Mum.’ Had Evelyn hoped this would inspire Maple to share confidences with her? When did Maple’s secrets become too dark to tell? The diary was pure innocence, scattered with declarations, Maple’s favourite dinner – bubble and squeak – she loved the colour sky-blue and wanted to marry Cary Grant. Entries petered out after February. The back pages were crammed with bus tickets – the 11, the 15, routes into London – there was an entry ticket for the Victoria and Albert Museum and a photograph of a girl; he saw a younger Maple in the sun-bleached features, squinting in sunlight on a chair in a school playground. On the back she’d written: ‘1929, I’m the only one going to the grammer. I’ll end up head girl at Burlington!’

Cotton’s daughter June had gone to Burlington School for Girls six years before Maple. Cotton noted Maple’s misspelling of grammar. June was always top in spelling. She too was a secretary, but worked for a solicitor who now she was going to marry. Cotton shut the diary. Maple was dead, for God’s sake, it wasn’t right to compare.

‘Found something, sir.’ Shepherd strained into the gap between the