The Distant Dead by Lesley Thomson (books for students to read TXT) 📕

Clive couldn’t have forgotten. The plastic thing he was playing with was a spoon from the lid of an ice-cream pot like those sold at the tearoom during the day.

‘…dead parents, dead brother, dead neighbours. It’s a chain, one leads to the next. Dead. Dead. Dead.’

‘Yes, Clive, we get it,’ Joy said. ‘We will all die.’

The Death Café was in free fall. Stella wanted to chair it, set an agenda, objectives, allocate actions, but she’d left Clean Slate and didn’t chair anything. Her own free fall was when Roddy March found out that Felicity and the rest of the group called her Stella when he thought her name was Beverly. It never paid to lie.

The abbey clock chimed six fifteen. The meeting finished at seven thirty. Stella couldn’t hope for Felicity to get another text and send them away two evenings running.

‘Thomas Hardy said our face lives beyond us. Family is legacy.’ Felicity flicked a look at Andrea whose own face was behind the snood. Stella wondered why Andrea had come again, she looked as if she was on detention.

‘I have three kiddies, but seeing as they all take after Derek my face will perish when I die.’ Gladys Wren flicked droplets of rainwater off the sleeves of her silver jacket. Stella noticed Gladys had redone her nail varnish cerise. Stella, in the black suit she used to wear for client meetings, felt better turned out than the night before.

Cheered by this, she said, ‘I started a cleaning company called Clean Slate, I guess that’s a legacy.’ Stella saw Felicity’s rictus expression and realized it could be construed as promotion. Hastily, ‘I have nothing to do with it now, so that’s that, I suppose. I do have stepchildren… had…’ Jack had wanted her to consider Justin and Milly hers, but his twins already had a better mother than Stella could ever be.

‘Death is part of life.’ Felicity was reading from her crib sheet.

‘That implies a nice natural end.’ Roddy March turned his head this way and that, easing his neck as if it was stiff. ‘What about having the life strangled out of you in an empty house or, say, your skull stove in and gouts of blood leaving a trail as you crawl to the phone only to die inches from the receiver? There is no euphemism for murder.’

‘Bumped off. Rubbed out. Offed.’ Andrea pulled down her snood. ‘It’s sick how some people are obsessed with it.’

‘Murder is part of life.’ While not acknowledging that Andrea had effectively contradicted him, Roddy March wrote down what she had said. ‘Anyone can be murdered.’

Stella was propelled back to the lonely dark lane, the lights of the white van extinguished. The stillness. If another car hadn’t drawn up behind her would the van driver have attacked her. Or worse? Taking a large swallow of coffee, she saw the fire was dying, the café had grown cold.

‘Let’s hope not, my boy.’ Clive was winding his watch. Perhaps he’d seen it told the wrong time.

‘Children kill.’ Andrea disappeared back behind her snood. ‘What about that kid who shot his father? Children can be evil.’

‘He’ll be branded a killer for life, poor lad,’ Clive said. ‘Murder is one disease time cannot heal.’

‘It was an accident.’ Stella joined in unintentionally. Boy Kills Dad – the Gloucestershire Echo had reported how a local gamekeeper’s son, mistaking his father for a poacher, had shot him, clean through the heart. Nothing clean about it. The story had saddened her. If time could heal grief, it could never heal guilt.

‘He was eight, quite old enough to know better.’ Joy pursed her lips. ‘Children of that age know right from wrong. They get up to all sorts, blackmail, robbery, murder.’

‘Eight-year-olds know exactly what they’re doing.’ Andrea’s voice was blurred by the snood.

‘We were all young once.’ Felicity offered round more cake. Roddy March was her only taker. ‘Andrea, as a gardener, you’re used to being around dying organisms, tell us your impressions of death?’

‘Who says I’m a gardener?’ Andrea looked hostile.

‘Probably your get-up.’ Roddy smirked. ‘That fabulous outdoor look.’

Stella took in Andrea’s soil-encrusted nails – the opposite of Gladys’s manicured hands – ruddy cheeks, hair tousled from the wind and rain. Glancing at March’s pad, she was disturbed to read: Andrea, loose cannon, Worzel Gummidge, needs a wash. A cruel summary.

‘It’s the signature on your email. Gardener at Tewkesbury Abbey.’ Twitching inverted comma forefingers, Felicity looked impatient. ‘OK, folks, let’s sum up what we have so far. We’ve agreed to dispose of euphemisms. Certainly, in my past life, we told death as we found it.’

‘You’ve had another life?’ Joy looked thunderous as if this was cheating.

‘We could have a séance,’ Gladys said.

‘She means before she retired.’ Andrea sighed.

‘I was a pathologist, a renowned one, actually. Death really was all around me. My name, Dr Felicity Branscombe, aka Cat Woman, and the villain’s enemy, will trip off the tongue to those of you who follow great murder trials.’ Felicity flushed pink.

‘Yes.’ Stella sat up. She’d never heard of Felicity – although as a child she’d liked Cat Woman – but felt bound to rescue her from the table of blank faces. Felicity’s autopsy analogy when she was serving drinks yesterday now made sense. As did her Rod Stewart ringtone which showed Felicity had a sense of humour… The first cut is the deepest...

‘Cool. You and I need a chat.’ Roddy nodded at Felicity who didn’t nod back.

‘Andrea, my dear, this must be familiar territory for you, the abbey gardens is jam-packed with the dead.’ Clive patted Andrea on the shoulder which made her recoil.

‘I don’t see dead people when I’m gardening – flowers and plants are alive,’ Andrea said. ‘My discussion point is what’s best: burial or cremation?’

‘Cremation is warmer.’ Clive said.

Unable to bear the cold any longer, crossing to the fireplace, Stella rattled the handle under the grate and urged dying embers into flames. She laid another log on the fire.

‘…want burial, you’d better book pronto,’ Clive was saying. ‘My great-grandfather