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

‘Female clippie, four passengers at the front downstairs, a babbie and the mother on the top deck…’ Whatever the warden said next was lost as a District line train clattered over the viaduct.

Cotton reckoned more died in blackout accidents, fires and structural collapse than by direct hits from the Luftwaffe’s Blitzkrieg.

‘Hey you.’ The warden was distracted by an Express Dairies float negotiating the edge of what must be a twenty-foot drop. Cotton felt triumph as the float made it to the other side and, engine whining, trundled away. ARPs were jumped-up idiots acting like police.

Maple worked for Express Dairies.

Cotton and Shepherd trod across rubble and around the corner to Turnham Green station. They dodged women, some lugging string bags that bulged with tins of ham, vegetables, parcels of meat, others peering into shop windows. Some of the fronts were rimmed with cotton wool snow and adorned with tinsel, baubles and plaster Father Christmases. It could be a usual winter’s day before Christmas. Cotton had forgotten what was usual. This year June was having Christmas lunch with her fiancé’s family, it would be just him and Agnes. At least they would all have Aladdin together.

The J. Sainsbury next door to a boarded-up violin-maker’s said Business as Usual. Agnes said those three words summed up the British spirit. Cotton didn’t fight her, although his notion of the British spirit was that represented by the looters who stripped homes bare like dogs tearing at a carcass.

Beyond, a dolls’ hospital was intact as, Cotton was thankful to see, was Bright’s Tailoring. In the last months he’d lost count of the times he’d gone to see a suspect or interview a victim, only to be directed to the morgue.

After the glassy stares of the – presumably ‘cured’ – dolls in the window of the dolls’ hospital, came the life-size manikins displayed at the tailor’s. All done up in garments dearer than anything Cotton could afford.

Since he was the one who found the ticket, Cotton let Shepherd take the lead.

A black cat with white-booted paws at the foot of a dummy in an evening dress scrutinized them through the glass before curling back into a ball.

A man in a Sunday best suit was switching the sign to ‘Closed’, but seeing them, pulled open the door.

‘How can I help, gentlemen?’ His grizzled hair was thinning, deep lines scored sallow cheeks either side of a smiling mouth.

‘Mr Bright?’ Shepherd reached for his badge, while Cotton guessed from Bright’s overeager manner that Bright already knew they were police. He ushered them in and shut the door.

The low-ceilinged room was lit by strong bulbs in a line behind the counter, like an actor’s dressing room in the pictures. A ceramic bar fire glowed in one corner. Along one wall bolts of material were slotted into pigeonholes. Cotton decided that the rack of dresses and suits shrouded in tissue paper could be bodies in an abattoir. Agnes would say, you would, wouldn’t you.

‘Is there a problem?’ The tailor, needlepoint-neat, his hair cut short back and sides, regarded them over wire spectacles. Cotton saw a resemblance to Humphrey Bogart and had no doubt that women – Maple? – did too.

‘Can I see your papers?’ Shepherd’s no-messing tone suggested he too was on the case. He shot his cuffs, perhaps to appear less off the peg, and to let Bright know if he’d murdered Maple Greenhill, they were on to him.

‘I’m a legal Jewish refugee. I came here in 1933, we saw what was coming with Hitler even before he was made chancellor. I am British now.’ He spoke with a lilting foreign accent that Cotton found pleasant to the ear.

Cotton caught the name on the ID that Bright produced. Joseph Ivan Bright. Cotton’s mother had been Jewish which made Cotton and his brother Joe Jewish too. But she’d drummed into them that they were Londoners, born and bred. Cotton’s Uncle John was in the Black Shirts. He’d been decapitated leaning out of a train window shouting obscenities on the day war was declared. God’s ways weren’t so mysterious after all.

‘Who is the owner of the item of clothing referred to on this ticket?’ Shepherd asked stiffly. He slid the ticket across the counter.

Bright lifted his glasses and examined it. ‘Ah yes. A tear in the sleeve. She caught it on a hook, as I remember. Unfortunately, she blamed it on the material, but it had torn, it was not frayed. As I do, I mended it without fuss. Her husband collected it, as a surprise, so he didn’t have the ticket.’ Bright added, ‘After I mended the rip, you couldn’t tell.’

Cotton liked a man who made no bones about his skills. Northcote was like that. Cotton’s mother used to say, if you couldn’t stand up for yourself in a high wind you deserved to be knocked over. Bright wasn’t exaggerating, the coat had looked good as new.

‘Who was her husband?’ Was he Maple’s fancy man?

Before Bright could answer they were all startled by the bell above the door as a woman, trim in an astrakhan coat like the coat in the window, burst into the shop.

‘Mr Bright, I was sure I’d missed you. I’ve searched high and low for that damned ticket, turned the house…’ Seeing Shepherd and Cotton the woman faltered. ‘Do excuse me, I didn’t see you had customers.’

‘How extraordinary, madam, we have it.’ Bright held up the ticket. ‘It is not lost. The police have this minute returned it.’

‘The police?’ The woman blanched. Cotton was used to people looking guilty when they discovered he was a police officer, but rarely were they of this woman’s class, nudging forty and a couple of rungs below royalty.

No one was too wealthy to murder. Cotton paid the brim of his hat through his fingers as a theory formed.

Wife discovers husband has mistress. Wife arranges to meet Maple in the empty house and, trusting, Maple goes there. Sensing no threat, she turns her back