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

of your hideous upright coffins ready to jump out shouting “Cuckoo”, do not.’

The chattering was getting louder.

Stella flapped aside the living-room curtains. Nothing. Through the window, the flooded Avon reflected the clouds tearing across the sky. From habit, Stella did a finger test on the sill. Clean. Then she recalled Clive saying dust was the enemy of time, it clogged the cogs. Or had Joy said it? If only, like Roddy, she’d taken notes. This reminded her that Roddy’s notebook was missing.

‘Mr Clo-ock,’ Lucie wheedled. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are.’

‘We ought to leave.’ Stella came out to the hall and saw Lucie already halfway up the stairs.

‘He could have passed out on his bed.’ Lucie reached the landing.

Clive was in none of the four bedrooms. All the beds were neatly made without a crease, each room spotless with, thankfully, only one clock in each.

‘Yuk, don’t tell me that’s his aftershave.’ Lucie wrinkled her nose at a smell which pervaded all the rooms.

‘It’s Horolene, it’s for cleaning clocks,’ Stella knew about cleaning. ‘It means Clive was here recently.’

When they returned downstairs, Lucie headed down the passage to the kitchen.

‘You looked there,’ Stella said.

‘I need a cuppa before I face that friggin’ towpath again and who knows, in the time it takes to dunk a teabag, Clive might appear,’ Lucie said.

Stella was surprised that the kitchen was modern, with white cupboards, white stone counters, white sink and taps. Silver microwave, toaster, kettle, oven. No clocks.

Lucie filled the kettle and skittered about the room, eventually finding an old-fashioned Lipton’s tea-caddy.

‘There’s something on the lawn.’ Stella peered out through raindrops streaming down panes in the back door. ‘What’s that light?’

‘Scarecrow lit by the moon.’ Lucie joined her.

‘There is no moon.’ Frantic now, Stella fiddled with the key, eventually turned it, and plunged out into the freezing garden, Lucie behind her.

A lantern stood beside a plinth in the centre of the lawn. The candle was burned almost to a stub and in the guttering flame they made out a bundle draped over Clive’s birdbath.

Flash. Flash. Flash. Lucie was firing off photos with her phone. The on-off light revealed the scene in high relief.

Clive was sprawled on the birdbath, staring upwards, his face fixed in a ghastly grimace. Not a birdbath. Clive Burgess was impaled on a sundial. Stella dialled 999.

‘I’m calling in a murder.’ As Stella gave Clive’s address, she saw Lucie writing in her notebook.

For the clockmaker time stopped when…

Chapter Twenty-Five

29 December 1940

That terrible swingeing sound. Crash. If the house shook, the bomb was within about three miles. A fraction of silence. Crash. It would go on until dawn. Extraordinarily, after weeks of the Blitz, so much of London was still standing. Tonight it seemed more terrible, perhaps because for three nights the weather had been onside and the Nazis had left them in peace.

When Cotton walked across Shepherd’s Bush Green in the mornings, shops were still there. Business as Usual. Houses undamaged, the trams and trains still ran. His own street was intact so that, on a Sunday sweeping up leaves in their garden, he teased himself life was normal, the country wasn’t imprisoned in a set of complex rules and regulations for its own good, and that there was not the chance of dying, if not today, then tomorrow.

Cotton hunched on the bed watching searchlights raking the sky. It rained down with flares, incendiaries. Bombs. Agnes had made him promise to go out to the shelter. But he could not when she was at the substation risking her life to keep people safe. How he wished she’d volunteered for something less dangerous. Her captain had told him she was the glue in the outfit, handling messages for reinforcements, the engines, turntables, pumps, in double quick time. Cotton took it as a hint not to prevent Agnes doing her bit.

Another explosion. It drowned out Billy Cotton downstairs on the radiogram. Cotton tensed when the windows rattled, closer that time.

Agnes was the glue at home too. When he’d returned from arresting Northcote last night, she’d got the fire going, using up the coal ration. They had sat watching the flames, drinking hot chocolate as he related what had happened.

‘They should hang him.’ She snuggled closer. Like him, Agnes didn’t hold with state execution. Solves nothing, she’d say. There were exceptions.

He’d told her how he’d escorted Northcote to the station where they were met by Chief Superintendent Robert Hackett and the coroner, Wolsey Banks. His first clue should have been when both men had groused that they’d had to come out in a raid. The second when, going into Hackett’s office, Banks had told him to wait outside.

‘Ten minutes later, Northcote comes out.

‘“Night, George.” He tips his hat and strolls off down the corridor as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

‘Next thing I’m hauled in there to be told by Bob in his best King’s English how it “was all an unfortunate misunderstanding”. Banks is tearing up Una Hughes’s statement there and then; he says everything is explained. Northcote “deeply regretted his slip with the lighter, it proves I’m human like everyone else”. Hackett and Banks had a good laugh at that.

‘Hackett tells me I had gone against his orders, “countermanded” was his word. I had no busines charging Aleck Northcote with murder. Hackett said he’d “expressly told me the matter was in the hands of the coroner”.’

Oblivious to the hiss of incendiaries, the Messerschmitts and Heinkels pummelling the city or deafening bangs of returning gunfire, Cotton hunched on the edge of the bed. He was back in the flickering firelight, Agnes holding his hand, saying nothing, just listening like she did.

‘“…disgraceful to lay murder at the door of a respectable man who daily gives his life for King and country. Northcote is worth more to the home front than some grubby shop girl.” I couldn’t believe it was Banks talking.

‘I tried putting the case: “Northcote knew the house was empty, he’d performed the autopsy on the