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

further back and she hadn’t gone to the Death Café nor been frightened on a country lane. She and Jack were still together.

‘Armchair forensic specialists schooled on box sets and podcasts, we’re alert to fake news. But imagine a world in which one man can inspire such veneration that a twitch of his finger sways a jury to hang a man they should let walk free. Northcote was that man. As you’d expect, such a man gains enemies. Who? Were. They?

‘First up, Northcote’s colleague and arch-rival Gerald Bradman. Known amongst his colleagues as the Butcher, Bradman blagged his way through autopsies and trials. More than once Northcote was brought in to do a second autopsy. Incidentally, a nasty twist is that the pathologist who cut open Northcote and his son after their deaths was none other than the Butcher. With Northcote gone, Bradman stepped into his shoes.

‘Did Professor Bradman kill his rival? Supposedly in the clear, he had signed into his club on that cold rainy night in November. A taxi driver was driving him home to his house in Harley Street at the same moment as Northcote’s housekeeper found Northcote dead. But never make an assumption. In episode two we will examine this alibi with the same level of detail that Northcote himself would apply…’

Was Stella someone’s enemy? When she walked out on her own life, she had walked out on other lives too. Jack. Everyone at Clean Slate. Her mother and, although he lived in Sydney, her brother too. The piano music broke into her musing.

‘…the flipside of respect and awe is envy and hate…’

‘Wrong. It’s disrespect and disdain.’ Lucie chomped on a fig.

‘Police arrested Giles the next afternoon at the Cheltenham races where he won more than enough to pay off his debts without selling that cup. Giles was found guilty. After the frenzied attack, the judge said Giles had coolly replaced the poker with the other fire irons and had the presence of mind to destroy his bloodstained garments. I’ll leave you to spot the double irony.’

Stella couldn’t spot double anything, nor by the look on her face could Lucie.

‘Ponder how, given the alcohol Giles had put away at his father’s and later at his flat, he was capable of so comprehensively disposing of bloodied clothes? How did Giles travel unnoticed from Tewkesbury to London, in bloodstained clothes? And winding back, what fit twenty-six-year-old lets his elderly dad hop up to the fire with the poker? Giles took that task for himself, ergo fingerprints on the poker…’

‘A twenty-six-year-old bloke happy to nick his dad’s silverware and squeeze him for a few quid, that’s who,’ Lucie said.

‘…was hung on circumstantial evidence. Fingerprints, and that the housekeeper opened the door to him as she left for the cinema…’

‘Hung? Giles wasn’t a ham, for God’s sake.’ Lucie was getting spiteful.

‘…Let’s look at this fingerprint. It was the print for a right thumb on the poker. Giles Northcote was left-handed. Motive? Yes, Giles would inherit, but he knew that his father had willed his son got nothing until he reached thirty-five. Nine years away. Aleck Northcote was worth more to his son alive. In summary, milud, the trial was a car-crash…’

‘I skimmed the first pot-boiler that was out of the trap, Hate Father Hate Son.’ Lucie waved her leather-bound Kindle at Stella. ‘In it, Giles’s barrister, a James Dudeney, tells the author that in his teens, Giles hurt his left arm in a rowing accident on the Thames, so he learnt to compensate with his right. March never checked. Honest to God, the boneless wonders who churn out these podcast-dreadfuls never do the legwork.’ Lucie subsided into her cockpit.

‘All the same, a poker isn’t so heavy. Isn’t it likely Giles’s instinct would have been to use his left? He may not have touched the fire and if he did kill his father then it was probably in the heat of the moment,’ Stella said.

‘True, oh queen,’ Lucie said. ‘March should have got you on board. Pose an argument, counter. Get your listeners sure it’s red, then reveal it’s yellow.’

‘This murder upended every convention about how true-crime stories usually unfold.’ Roddy went on, ‘Where how a murder investigation is meant to go turns a somersault. Where each break in the investigation appears to raise more questions than it answers. Northcote’s murder is the first clue in a story that will not go the way you expect. By the end, you will learn the identity of Sir Aleck’s other visitor on that fateful winter’s night.

‘A visitor no one feared, to whom no one attributed evil. That person went to Cloisters House with only one purpose. Murder.’

More piano, then Roddy again, ‘The Distant Dead is brought to you by March Hare Productions. I’m Roddy March and you’re listening to The Distant Dead.’

‘Tosh and tosher. I bet March had no idea who did it.’ Lucie gnashed at a fig.

Roddy’s podcast did have a third-rate feel, sensational with overblown emphasis to keep the listeners’ interest. Recalling his scared expression, his struggle to speak as he died in her arms, Stella realized she’d wanted his podcast to be a legacy, a great thing to remember him by.

Janet had said Stella’s experience was traumatic, but Stella diminished it; lots of people went through much worse. Suddenly she felt crushed by a terrible sensation in her abdomen, raw grief for a man she’d hardly known. At the end of the only episode of his podcast that there would ever be, Stella felt as if Roddy March had died all over again. Now was only silence.

Chapter Seventeen

December 1940

‘A thirty-tonner hit three shops and pulverized the flats above.’ The ARP warden let them through the safety barrier. ‘No casualties, but then what happens? The all-clear goes and that bloody thing only smashes into the hole.’

‘Fatalities?’ Cotton gazed down at the mangle of twisted metal scattered with bricks and burnt timber nose first in the crater. Only the swan was visible of a Swan Vesta advert on the