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

few feet when Stella spotted the source of the noise. A large glass marble lay in the middle of the ambulatory.

‘She threw it to distract us,’ Felicity breathed. ‘Make us think she is nearer than she is. Mind games.’

At that moment the lights went out.

‘Don’t move,’ Felicity breathed in her ear.

It wasn’t properly dark. The sconces had dimmed. Stella made out the myriad arches, chapels shrouded in gloom. Shafts of moonlight drifted through the stained-glass windows.

‘This is hopeless, Joy could be anywhere.’ Stella tried to work out where the door was. The marble said Joy knew exactly where they were.

‘I know where she’ll be,’ Felicity said. Stella felt a flood of gratitude. Felicity had come to the abbey when it would have been safer for her to call the police from a public place. Stella didn’t need to ask Felicity where Joy was. She knew.

Joy had returned to the scene of her crimes. The tomb of the starved monk.

Chapter Fifty-Three

2019

Jack

‘What do you mean, you know who killed Roderick March?’ Janet burst into the interview room with notebook and takeaway coffee. They hadn’t even been offered water.

Jack felt as exhausted as Janet looked. A crash on the M4 had put four hours on the two-hour journey. He’d been sitting with Andrea and William Greenhill at a sticky plastic-coated table for a long half hour. Janet intended them to suffer. Their news, highlighting a series of police mistakes, would not improve her mood.

The electric wall clock said two minutes past seven o’clock. The room’s high ceiling did nothing to dispel stifling heat pumping from a tubular radiator or the odour of overused furniture and compounded fear.

‘We know who murdered Maple Greenhill and Julia Northcote in 1940 and 1941, and then Aleck Northcote in 1963.’ Jack wanted Stella there, but when he’d tried calling from the gents’ toilet in the police station and several times in the interview room, she hadn’t picked up.

To her credit, Janet said nothing while Jack – his account spliced with Andrea’s snappish interjections – bitch, shitbag, and one worthy of Lucie, fountain of crap – outlined each discovery. March’s crouching image on the virtual tour of Northcote’s London home, the Lyons’ Swiss Roll box with Julia’s account of her husband’s confession which she’d secreted in the house before Northcote murdered her too. How Divisional Detective Inspector George Cotton told William he had evidence – a coat, a mending ticket, a cigarette lighter – leading to Northcote as Maple’s murderer. At this William Greenhill had shouted, ‘This is hearsay.’

‘Dad, we’ve been through this, you heard it from George Cotton, that’s the horse’s mouth.’ Andrea had found patience for her father.

‘You don’t agree, sir?’ Janet didn’t look up from her notes, taken despite her request to record the interview, informal as it was.

‘It’s not a question of agreeing,’ Greenhill said. ‘Northcote can’t defend himself.’

‘Why are you defending him?’ Andrea went pale. ‘Did you do it? Is that why? Revenge for Maple, your mother?’

‘Is your daughter correct, Mr Greenhill?’ Now Janet did look up.

‘No, she’s not.’ Jack saw it all. ‘Or not exactly. William, let me tell them what you have believed for, what, fifty-six years?’

‘Don’t meddle, son.’ William shrank into the collar of his raincoat. Not, Jack knew, a sign of guilt.

‘Get on with it, Jack,’ Janet said.

‘William believes that the visitor Aleck Northcote received after his son Giles had gone was Vernon Greenhill. I’m guessing Vernon told William he wanted Northcote to hang. When the pathologist’s housekeeper found Northcote dead on the hall floor in 1963, William believed Vernon had carried out his threat. Vernon’s granddaughter Cleo also fears this. I thought so too for a while. Seeing the state of Vernon’s son Cliff, so does he. Cotton told William the truth about Maple’s murder, did he also tell Vernon? Did Maple’s brother decide to take an eye for an eye?’

‘Vernon is dead,’ William said. ‘It does no good to rake up the past.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that, sir.’ Janet perhaps agreed, thought Jack.

‘Northcote was murdered out of revenge,’ Jack said. ‘That’s pretty much a no-brainer. But the person who smashed his skull with a poker was not Vernon.’

‘Who then?’ Andrea didn’t look happy.

‘The same woman who would later murder Roddy and Clive because they discovered the truth. Through a jungle of blackmail, ill-temper and deceit we should’ve seen it.’ Jack saw dismay as Janet comprehended the extent of her mistake. ‘Two people were not killed by a gang and nor, half a century ago, did a young man murder his father in a fit of filial fury.’

Stella, the daughter of Janet’s detective hero, should be here.

‘Do you have evidence?’ Janet’s face said she was on board. ‘This man was a pillar of the community with no previous convictions and a lot of gongs. We can’t just go accusing a murdered man of rape and murder.’

Jack was trying to think of how to fudge that they had no evidence but then Andrea leapt up.

‘Yes,’ she cried. ‘Come with me.’

Chapter Fifty-Four

2019

Stella

‘Stay close, Stella. Do not underestimate Joy. She is dangerous.’ Grasping Stella’s elbow, Felicity crept along the darkened ambulatory.

At first Stella thought the Wakeman Cenotaph was empty. Two candles cast a glow over the starved monk and made fabric draped across the front of the small altar appear woven with threads of gold.

Joy had lit the candles. The right-hand side of the chapel was screened by the carved fretwork beneath which was the monk’s tomb. Felicity paused. Stella realized she must be scared. Strangely, this gave Stella courage. She edged to the left and peered around the tomb.

Joy was on the floor, her head forward, hands cupped on her lap. Her palms were filled with blood like an offering. It had drenched her chest. Blood welled from a slit in her neck. Joy slowly lifted her head. She gazed past Stella as if to something beyond. Stella got the scene immediately – Joy had tried to kill herself. She was dying.

‘Joy, can you