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

‘OK.’ Stella fixed her own gaze on the abbey tower.

Chapter Nineteen

December 1940

Chief Superintendent Robert Hackett’s office was on the top floor of the police station. While a part-glazed partition split CID in two, Hackett’s oak-panelled affair sprawled across the entire square footage. A football-field-sized desk, four-seater chesterfield and conference table still left room enough for, as Hackett liked to say, swinging a villain. However, like CID, the metal casements did not deaden the clatter of trams and lorries on Shepherd’s Bush Road below.

When Hackett’s long-suffering secretary told him to go in, Cotton was unsurprised to find the room empty. The top brass offices included showers and water closets which, a memorandum sent before the move last year had said, ‘enabled dignified preparation for functions’. Or, as Shepherd reckoned, they enabled undignified hanky-panky with secretaries. Cotton knew Hackett, deacon at his church and self-styled pillar of the community, was unfaithful. With this, and a martyr to piles, he made full use of the facilities.

Prepared for a wait, Cotton sat on the other side of Hackett’s desk. Passing out himself, Hackett had the photograph of them all framed on the wall – Hackett had made Cotton’s present rank in his late thirties and chief super at forty. Alone, the men reverted to friends sharing a pint in the pub across the road, their wives swapped recipes and family news, but at work their roles were strictly observed.

Cotton fiddled with the galvanized metal pencil sharpener affixed to Hackett’s desk, turning the handle as if every crank would grind down the problem.

An embroidered homily hung above Hackett’s chair: Home Sweet Home. Perhaps Betty Hackett’s swipe at Bob’s long hours, which Cotton knew were spent mostly on the Richmond golf course.

Agnes had sent him off that morning with a greaseproof packet of fish-paste sandwiches and a lingering kiss on the cheek.

‘Georgie, you’ve got enough for a jury to find him guilty many times over. Not but what that lazy so and so Bob Hackett will claim the glory. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not Dr Northcote’s first time…’

‘Anything in that prostitute case?’ The door behind Cotton burst open and Bob Hackett strode across the thick carpet, planting himself on his air-cushioned chair with a fleeting grimace.

‘Maple Greenhill wasn’t a prostitute. She had a sweetheart,’ Cotton snapped.

‘Decent women don’t end up in empty houses with their knickers down.’ Pain made Hackett crude.

‘Her brother claims she was engaged.’ Cotton had brought his notebook but he didn’t need it, the facts were at his fingertips.

‘Not according to this.’ Hackett flourished some papers and Cotton recognized the carbon of Northcote’s pathology report which he’d sent by internal mail the previous evening. ‘Girl hoodwinks a chap with her sexual advances then extorts more cash.’

‘Northcote doesn’t say that.’ Had Northcote talked to Hackett? Get your chap off my back, he’s questioning my results.

‘No need.’ Chin on elbows, Hackett winced. ‘George, don’t go making her one of your lame ducks. Banks won’t thank us for inflating a common or garden murder when there’s decent Londoners dying for their country.’

Wolsey Banks, the west London coroner, adjourned and reopened his inquests as often as it took to locate witnesses, suicide notes, wills, shopping lists, everything that might determine cause of death. Frustrating when a guilty man walked away scot-free because a scribbled note cast the slightest doubt on the crime, but today Cotton was counting on Banks’s diligence. Tither and Cameron, the coroner’s officers, would back him up.

‘Actually, sir, I’m about to make an arrest. I know who killed Maple.’

Home Sweet Home. Cotton cranked the sharpener handle.

‘I will have to charge Dr Aleck Northcote. With murder.’

A shower of shavings trapped in the housing fluttered to the carpet. Outside on the street, neither man registered the clop of horses’ hooves as a coal merchant trundled by.

Shifting on his rubber cushion, Hackett barked, ‘For heaven’s sake, George, stop doing that.’

‘Mrs Northcote said her husband was working the night Maple was murdered.’ Cotton had lain awake all night rehearsing the words. ‘His secretary confirmed, however, that, at Northcote’s request, she had made a retrospective entry in his work diary for when he was called to the hou—’

‘Stop.’ Hackett had gone white. ‘George, this bombing is getting to us all. Invasion any minute, we’re all under strain. Agnes told the missus you were at your parents’ grave the other day.’

‘The cemetery is opposite where Maple Greenhill lived. I didn’t go in.’ Cotton knew Hackett’s MO was to pull you down a peg or two if he didn’t like what you said.

He listed the evidence starting with the scratches on Northcote’s arms. Yes, the lighter on its own could be explained. It was untypical of Northcote to leave a personal item at a murder scene, but we all make mistakes. Trickier was the tailor’s ticket in Maple Greenhill’s coat. Then the coat collected from the tailor by Northcote himself and which, Bright believed, belonged to Julia Northcote, the pathologist’s wife.

‘She admitted as much, sir.’

‘I’d call you shellshocked if you’d ever fired a gun for your country,’ Hackett said.

‘…two cigarette butts in the grate, a fingerprint on the radiogram and on a paperweight on the mantelpiece which Northcote had no reason to touch. Cherrill from the Yard had confirmed they belonged to the pathologist. He’d assumed Aleck had picked it up to confirm if it was the murder weapon.’

‘How do you know they’re his?’ Hackett growled.

‘They’re on the Yard’s files.’

‘Why the dickens is he on their system?’ Hackett was as surprised as Shepherd had been.

‘They’ve got you and me too, sir. That time he gave us a tour? It’s useful for elimination when we’re at a scene.’

‘You can ruddy well eliminate Northcote.’ Hackett banged his desk. ‘Kindly explain how, if Dr Northcote killed this girl, that his PM report says its murder? Don’t you think he’d have called it an accident? No one would have questioned it.’

‘Any half-decent pathologist would have seen the broken hyoid bone. If he’d omitted that and there’d