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

setting a trap since they knew Julia Northcote was murdered.

‘She didn’t commit suicide, Northcote murdered her, as he murdered Maple.’ Andrea clamped her hand over her mouth but, too late, the words had flown.

‘How do you know that?’ Jack crooned. ‘Shall I nudge you? Lyons’ Swiss Roll and a letter from a hanged woman.’

‘How did you find it?’ Andrea looked all-in.

Jack handed his phone to Andrea. Stella saw he’d brought up Andrea’s virtual tour of Northcote’s Ravenscourt Square house. Andrea’s house.

‘Your point is?’ Andrea was moving, virtually, through the rooms.

Jack leaned over and clicked the marker that, like the wardrobe door into Narnia, revealed Roddy March on the top floor.

‘The. Total. Fuckwit.’ Andrea’s voice carried across the Avon. ‘Zack effing Hunt’s useless editing. I knew I shouldn’t have asked him. He’s fired.’

‘Is this the same Zack as the one occupying your office and passing himself off as CEO?’ Jack said airily.

Andrea looked so dreadful that, in rescue mode, Stella joined her on the coffin.

‘Not so fast, Poirot.’ Andrea was busy on Jack’s phone. She thrust it at Stella.

Blurred lamplight. Pavements, railings, kerbs, three cars and, beyond, a scribble of houses. A counter at 6.34 a.m. rolled in real time. Not Street View then. CCTV.

Leaning across Stella, Andrea tapped the image. It speeded up. The lamp-post went out, the scene was washed in grey light incrementally brightening. 10.13 a.m. The street was sketched with diagonal lines. Rain. Puddles appeared. Cars and front doors became tinged with colour as time passed. Occasionally umbrellaed pedestrians shot across the frame. Hours rolled. Light diminished. Dusk. 4.54 p.m. The lamp-post lit up. On time went. The rain eased. A woman opened a gate of the nearest house and drifted up the path. She looked up. Andrea froze the image.

‘That’s you,’ Stella said.

‘Date and time?’ Andrea indicated the bottom of the screen.

Stella read out the numbers on the frozen screen. ‘Oh, that’s—’

‘—when Clive Burgess was murdered. Oh, and by the way, the pathologist is in with the lab people here. Boy, does she like a gossip. She told me how both men died.’ She glared at Stella. ‘No doubt you’ve updated Felicity on my true status?’

‘Where is this street?’ Unrepentant, Stella had clients who, while demanding confidentiality, would, as Lucie put it, spill everyone else’s beans.

‘It’s my dad’s place in Chertsey. Two hours away by road. Proof that I wasn’t here in Tewkesbury nailing dirty old Clive to his sundial.’

‘Clive could have been killed in a botched robbery. His death might be unconnected to Roddy’s murder,’ Stella said.

‘It proves you didn’t kill Clive,’ Jack said. ‘March stole your project and dumped you. Revenge is a motive served at any temperature.’

‘I’m a woman scorned. Hell hath no fury?’ Andrea shook her head. ‘I thought you prize detectives had Roderick and Clive Burgess murdered by the same killer. Ergo, to be innocent of one murder makes me innocent of both.’

‘Good point,’ Stella admitted.

‘If it’s a consolation, I’m sure March would have used Stella then spat her out too,’ Jack said.

‘Let’s be clear.’ Stella got off the coffin. ‘One, had March asked me, I’d have refused to work on his podcast. Two, I didn’t fancy him, and three, I love Jack.’

‘How touching.’ Andrea did a slow hand-clap.

Jack and Stella’s phones went off. The ringtone, Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’, fractionally out of synch. Stella read her text.

‘Jackie’s found William Greenhill.’

Jack was reading his text. ‘Seems we don’t know everything, do we, Andrea Greenhill?’

Chapter Forty-Nine

2019

Jack

‘I love Jack.’

Basking in Stella’s words in the abbey close an hour ago, Jack struggled to concentrate. Over pizza and beer in the flat, the team was debriefing. Jack and Stella skipped how they’d spent part of the day. Stella, beside him on the sofa, was updating her spreadsheet. Stanley snoozed on his bed, his chin on Mr Ratty. Lucie was in her cockpit, Bev was curled in the armchair and Jackie was perched on top of a pile of empty pizza boxes via Zoom. Jackie was walking them through her sensational discovery.

‘It’s in plain sight on Ancestry. I put in William Greenhill and there it was. Andrea’s pretend identity was thin. Although I only found it because I went looking.’

‘So, Andrea is Maple Greenhill’s granddaughter,’ Beverly said. ‘Let me get this straight. William is her father. He was three when his mother, Maple, was murdered nearly eighty years ago.’

‘William Greenhill is now eighty-two.’ Lucie had done the maths.

‘Andrea’s mother was fifteen years younger, but died of cancer last year,’ Jackie said.

‘Andrea told us that the rumour the Greenhills heard that William was a doctor was correct. Guess what sort?’ Jack said.

‘No games.’ Lucie was still sulking that Stella and Jack had got Andrea talking when she’d failed.

‘A pathologist?’ Jackie’s ceiling shot into view when she jogged her laptop. She righted it and reappeared.

‘Bingo.’ Jack pointed at Jackie, on Lucie’s laptop. ‘Not a coincidence, but I’ll come to that. After his wife died, Greenhill, or, calling him by his new name, Rogers, told Andrea about Maple and that the killer was never caught. Until then he’d said his parents died when he was young. He confessed that, when he was twenty, Vernon, the man he’d known as his older brother, told him his parents were his grandparents. This was 1958, eighteen years after Maple was murdered and—’

‘We know this.’ Lucie was ripping into a fig.

‘Cleo Greenhill had told Bev that, learning this, William took off. Vernon never saw him again. It broke his heart. He’d lost his sister and her child. He named his garage after Maple and made his son Cliff keep it going for when William returned. Bev and me saw what being second fiddle to a missing cousin has done to Cliff. He sits at his desk drinking. Meanwhile, William Greenhill never came back and is a successful pathologist in the mould of Northcote. As for mending cars, Andrea said he can’t change a tyre.

‘Privately, he must have wanted to know about his mother because he went on Ancestry, obtained