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

Chief Superintendent Hackett hadn’t been best pleased that Cotton was canvassing alibis for vicars in the parishes of Hammersmith and Chiswick. ‘No man of God would do that to a woman, let alone touch a prostitute.’ Nor had it helped to hear it was the only lead they’d got.

Cotton took a gulp from the cup of tea Ethel had brought and, sitting back in his chair, arms behind his head, his eye fell on Aleck Northcote’s Dunhill lighter beside Cotton’s own tobacco tin. Grimacing, he got back on the telephone and dialled the pathologist’s office in Whitehall. A snooty-sounding assistant informed him, ‘Dr Northcote is unavailable, he is at the Hackney mortuary, then he will be motoring to Hampshire regarding a deceased male body found in a cow field.’ The man’s implication being that Northcote was more important than Cotton. He was more important, but Northcote was the last chap to rub that in.

‘Please tell Aleck I came upon his lighter at the murder scene and have it safe at the station.’ Cotton slammed down the receiver. He instantly regretted calling. Northcote had been careless leaving his lighter where Maple Greenhill was strangled. Northcote might be annoyed with himself, but he’d be properly browned off with Cotton for highlighting this to one of his assistants. Cotton could have saved Aleck’s face by discreetly returning the lighter. Even slipping it in Aleck’s overcoat pocket when he was working. Finishing his tea, Cotton had to admit he resented how the pathologist’s error had momentarily given him false hope that they had a strong lead to Maple’s murderer.

It was a relief to know that the giant of his profession got things wrong; Northcote was human like the rest of them.

Cotton got up and leaned on the back of his chair, gazing through the criss-crossed tape on the window at the traffic on Brook Green Road. The police station was a few doors from the Palais where Vernon said his sister had gone dancing with her friend Ida. If Maple had gone there, it hadn’t been with Ida. Mulling over the facts, Cotton set about pinning up the blackout cloth, a job he refused to leave to Ethel.

After leaving the Greenhills, he and Shepherd visited the Lyons’ on Kensington High Street where Ida worked as a Nippy. Clutching a tray of crockery, the girl, her hair rolled like Maple’s in the photograph with William, had sat on a kitchen stool and wept as she told them she hadn’t wanted to be Maple’s excuse. ‘I never expected she’d get in such trouble, she said she was marrying a real gentleman.’ Again, Cotton had felt the rush, they were close on Maple’s killer, but it had fizzled to nothing. Ida had never met the man, Maple wouldn’t even tell her his name. She had told Ida that he was rich and had a lovely car.

‘Did she say they had sexual relations?’

Convulsed, Ida had admitted how, sometimes, she and Maple had both seen their chaps in an alley. ‘I won’t ever again. I promise. I asked her why, seeing as he had cash, he didn’t take her to a hotel. We had a bit of a tiff over that.’

‘I’d never have thought it of her, she looks like a good girl, and what’s more a Nippy,’ Shepherd said after.

‘Buck up, Constable, your cheeks are meeting in the middle like you’ve swallowed a horsefly. Good girls do it too.’ Not that Cotton cared to think of June in a backstreet – anywhere – with her solicitor fellow. ‘There’s a war on, everyone’s grabbing at life while they have it.’

Now, forehead resting against the pane, Cotton watched the street outside the police station. Maple would have walked on that pavement. Going by where she lived, she’d have got the bus to the Broadway. Did she meet the man at the dance hall or had he escorted her? Cotton doubted it, although he’d certainly escorted her out. The empty house was a step up from an alleyway, but he hadn’t even had her in a bed. Cotton caught his fists clenching and recalled how Keith Greenhill, convinced his daughter had a man, said how the blighter never walked her home. Not even to the end of the street, I keep an eye out.

Three in the afternoon and it was nearly dark. Since the raids, London was under a permanent cloud of smoke from the fires. He turned from the window.

Yellow electric light washed over the room. The building was less than a decade old, but to Cotton it felt tawdry. His office with four desks, grey cabinets, buff folders awaiting Ethel’s filing looked bleak as death. Two of the desks, wire baskets empty, ink on the blotters dry, were reminders of Evans and Franklin who had gone to fight. Evans had died when a prize fool lost control of a jeep training in the Phoney War. Cotton prayed in church on Sundays for Franklin to see the war out.

Next to a sepia-stained photograph of Agnes and June was another of Cotton’s passing-out in May 1912. Cotton was on the end of the first row, wet behind the ears, all set to end crime. Since then some had left the force, and a few enlisted and were killed in the Great War. Bob Hackett sat next to Cotton, like him a constable, now his boss. These days Hackett preferred golf to catching criminals. You could say that every man in the photo – each determined and keen – had died so to speak. Himself included.

A few years off fifty, Cotton had seen too much. There he was, trying to instil Shepherd with a detective’s eye and a love of the job when more than ready to hang up his dancing shoes, Cotton himself had scant faith they’d find Maple’s murderer.

Shepherd was at the mortuary fetching Maple’s clothes. He’d pack him off to the Palais when he