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

you are sitting in, Aleck.’ Julia stifled a yawn. ‘Bright will no doubt come up with some story to cover his tracks. Lucky for him, without the ticket I can’t prove he ever had the coat. However, I’m sure that the nice inspector knows who to believe.’ Again, she looked at Cotton.

‘I have a witness,’ he said.

Chapter Twenty-Two

2019

Jack

Jack was in the Kew National Archives – as he’d reminded Stella, he lived just around the corner. He had not told Stella that, regardless of what she’d said, he would work on the case. Without Stella, what else was he to do with himself?

Last night, on the drive back to London, his spirits in his boots, it had sunk in that Stella didn’t see their relationship as on a break, she considered it broken.

Lucie had texted that if he discovered a link between Northcote’s murder in 1963 and March’s two nights ago, she was sure Stella would be all over it. And by extension you too, Jackanory. Jack knew Lucie’s view could be more fanciful than his own, but when she predicted what he yearned for…

Wrangling with his conscience, Jack concluded that, although Stella didn’t want them to be a team on Roddy March’s murder in Tewkesbury Abbey, she’d said nothing about the case featured in March’s putative podcast. How pleased she might be if Jack discovered the real killer of Aleck Northcote in Cloisters, the professor’s house adjoining Tewkesbury Abbey, fifty-six years ago in 1963.

He had followed a paper files trail, stared at the computer screen until he felt seasick. Although he’d scanned material to his phone, gifted with a photographic memory, Jack could summon images and screeds of text at a mental press of a button. When they were a team, Stella handled information capture and populating colour-coded spreadsheets. She’d make them pause and take stock. Jack dealt in impressions and imaginings, ghost voices in subways and at window panes. Now he had to cover both angles.

Jack had come armed with a potted biography of Aleck Northcote. Born 1901, father a Guildford GP who suffered a fatal heart attack when Aleck was ten and at boarding school in Gloucestershire. Scholarship to King’s to study medicine. In 1925 Northcote married his secretary, Julia Barnes. Giles was born the following year. A marriage not underpinned by love, Jack pondered, but of convenience? Northcote swooshed up the career ladder to be a pathologist by thirty. Not possible now, Jack knew, forensics was more complicated.

Luck played its part. Northcote was at the right crime scene at the right time. The 1933 Triplets in the Lake Murders came in while Northcote’s boss was holidaying in France. His discovery of a thumbprint on one of the bodies led police to the father and Northcote to stardom. He sent Giles to Harrow, bought two palatial homes, the London one and Cloisters House in Tewkesbury, where, on 22 November 1963, Professor Aleck Northcote was beaten to death aged sixty-two.

From newspaper articles Jack traced Northcote’s London house to Ravenscourt Square. The seasick feeling had begun as he combed the fine print in volumes of the electoral roll from 1933 onwards until he finally found the Northcotes at the Laburnums – too posh for a house number. After 1941 Julia’s name was no longer there. And from 1942, the Laburnums was occupied by the Smith family. On Street View, Jack found the house a disappointment, just visible through a lychgate with a pitched roof that better belonged on a village church. Had the Northcotes divorced? It happened during the Second World War, Julia could have been killed by a bomb. Although he knew nothing about her, Jack hoped she’d gone on ahead to Tewkesbury. His interest piqued, he dug deeper and in an article printed in the News of the World, got a shock.

Police were called to a respectable London square on New Year’s Day Eve after reports of a man causing a disturbance. They arrived to find eminent Home Office pathologist Professor Aleck Northcote distraught, being comforted on the kerb by neighbours. Northcote led them upstairs to where he had found his wife of fifteen years dangling lifeless from a length of rope.

A week later the Daily Mirror reported the inquest at which Professor Northcote was a key witness. He told the court that recently he’d suspected that the balance of his wife’s mind was disturbed. The coroner, the weirdly named Wolsey Banks, ruled suicide although no note had apparently been found.

Jack felt unaccountably flat. His motivation for being at the Archives – that he clung to – was the slimmest chance he might win Stella back. Personally, he doubted Roddy March’s theory that Giles was innocent, and he’d been annoyed by Stella referring to the dead podcaster as ‘Roddy’. As if they had been friends. If anything, this made Jack more inclined to think Giles Northcote had murdered his father. Having had little love for his own father, Jack could put himself there.

However, Jack did know that where murder was concerned, more than one person often paid. It could be the judge who had dished out the sentence, or the barrister whose defence had fallen short, so why not the pathologist who delivered incriminating evidence in what The Times called a mellifluous baritone?

Whether the person in the dock was guilty or innocent, Jack knew only too well that the relatives of victims nursed grudges for decades. Until one day they instituted punishment of their own.

Giles Northcote may have been framed. And what sweet revenge if, before bludgeoning him with his own poker, his killer had paused to tell the pathologist that Giles would hang for Northcote’s murder.

The more Jack read, the more he began to suspect the truth about the murders of Northcote and the podcaster lay in the past. Events often came in threes. If this was a chain reaction, then who was murdered first? Or who would be murdered next?

Chapter Twenty-Three

2019

Stella

When Janet suggested they meet at the bookshop on the