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

send you a quote.’ With a shock Stella saw the Bakelite phone on the wall in the hall. Below was a table with a compartment filled with faded telephone directories, most for London. Stella supposed Northcote had phoned through more to the capital than locally in Gloucestershire. She was looking at the very receiver that Northcote pulled off the cradle when, bleeding to death, he had tried to call for help.

‘Good.’ Felicity had been formal since Stella had asked about the housekeeper. Perhaps Joy was right after all. ‘If you hear any more revolting rumours, please scotch them. Indeed, when you work for me, what you see or hear must be scotched at once. I don’t like gossips.’

‘Always.’ Stella felt a burst of the rage which recently had dogged her. She doused it with politeness, ‘It’s a lovely house.’

‘It sat empty for years until the seventies when I got it for tuppence with a legacy from a ghastly aunt. Goddamn scandal. Stamped with Aleck’s spirit, it was worth a million.’

‘Lovely.’ Stella charged for the front door.

After waving at Felicity, shaken by the pathologist living in a ghost house, Stella accidentally cut down Mill Street and was brought up short by a roaring sound, finding herself on the bridge over the weir. Below, foaming water torrented through the filters. In the thin lamplight a stick was being tossed on the spume. Stella watched it spin. It sank then briefly resurfaced before being whirled away into inky blackness.

On the other bank of the Avon she could just see Stag Villas. Again, no lights. Had Clive had neighbours? Stella shut her eyes to the vision of the elderly clockmaker splayed over his sundial, his terrible grimace describing the violence of his end.

The relentless pounding beneath the wooden slats mesmerized her and gazing down at the churning water, Stella swayed as if drunk. She gripped the cold, slick ironwork of the guard rail.

The weir obliterated other sounds so it was only when Stella felt the slats vibrate that she realized she was no longer alone. She had time to see an arm raised and to compute, not feel, terror. Then the arm came down.

Chapter Forty

2019

Jack

Bev wanted to keep costs down and find a bed and breakfast, but Jack said they’d have more anonymity in a hotel. He was on a decent whack with London Underground, so it was his treat. They booked rooms on the third floor of a hotel on Tewkesbury’s high street. Peering out of the tiny casement window, Beverly had been delighted to see her Mini in the car park below.

After they’d unpacked, Beverly joined Jack in his room and now they lay on his bed sipping tea and sharing one of the little packets of shortcake biscuits that came with the UHT milk capsules and tubes of instant coffee.

‘Shall we have a nose around the town?’ Jack jumped up.

‘Only if you promise not to call on Stella.’

‘Promise.’ Jack was desperate to call on Stella, but it was nearly ten and Stella liked an early night. It was wiser to wait until morning.

With only a couple of burger bars and an Italian restaurant still open, the town was quiet. Jack led them down Red Lane, a narrow passage that at one time, he supposed, was one of the alleys which had once been slum dwellings. This alley emerged opposite what Bev said was a derelict flour factory. On this dimly lit winter’s night it was every bit dark and satanic.

‘This is creepy.’ Beverly sounded ecstatic rather than afraid.

They stood on a wrought-iron bridge over what Jack’s app said was the Avon, but might as easily be a canal in Venice. Looking into the fast-running water, Jack made a silent wish that Stella would welcome him with open arms.

Returning to the path, they passed a barge moored, the creaking of timber as it eased away from the bank and back again could be groaning. Jack’s chest contracted when he saw Tewkesbury Abbey, peeping above rooftops. Since his fleeting visit to the town, in his mind the abbey encompassed Stella. Was she there now?

‘The abbey is closed. We’ll go tomorrow and see where Mr Roddy Podcast was murdered.’ Beverly had taken to reading Jack’s mind. ‘The other dead man, the one who made clocks, lived across the river over there.’

A hum became a roar and suddenly they were by the weir. Water streamed through the sluices and in that moment was smooth as steel before it hit the river and tumulted to a seething mass.

The bridge was more workaday than a Venice version. Jack guessed a clapboard structure housed the sluice controls. The son of a civil engineer, bridges and tunnels were in his DNA; it was no accident he drove an underground train.

‘George Cotton died here.’ Beverly’s torch lit their way between Fletcher’s Mill and a low brick wall onto a gantry which angled out to the bridge. ‘We’ve come straight from his grave to the last place on this earth he saw before he fell in,’ she said. ‘Actually, how was that possible? This railing’s pretty high and he was in his eighties, he’d have had to climb it.’

‘His daughter had just died of cancer, maybe he came here to die.’ Jack could think of worse places.

‘Why come all the way here?’

‘Tewkesbury was where Northcote had lived. Maybe he too was interested to know who administered the death penalty twenty odd years after Northcote should have got it.’

‘Even if Cotton was obsessed with his unsolved case, why not come before?’

‘Like you said, June had died, his police career had ended badly, what had he to live for?’ Jack watched water pushing through the sluice and felt his veins fill with terrific velocity as it slammed into the river. ‘Come on, the sooner we’re in bed the sooner we’re up.’

‘Eeugh.’ Beverly held her hand in front of the torch on her phone.

‘You’re bleeding, how did that happen?’ Jack gave her a tissue.

‘It’s not me.’ Dabbing her fingers, Bev shone