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

for a pathetic amount of savings was judged insane and went to Broadmoor. Bert Whitaker, a fifty-year-old coal lorry driver and fire-watcher got manslaughter for strangling his wife for ‘carping on and on’. Cotton had got scant satisfaction seeing Whitaker on Aleck’s table when, perhaps unable to live without being carped at, he’d hanged himself with his belt. The killer of a middle-aged secretary working late at an employment agency off the Broadway who was beaten to death with her typewriter carriage was never caught. What chance, when CID was two men and a dog? Forget the dog.

Inside Jalalpur Villa, although the body had gone hours earlier, the air smelled fetid. Taking another tour of the house, Cotton was amazed at the sheer number of antiques, the china figurines superior to Agnes’s factory-made collection of ladies with parasols that paraded on their radiogram. Vases, bowls, glasses in display cabinets in every room. A devil to clean, Agnes would say.

He confirmed that the silk coverlets on the sumptuous four-poster in the main bedroom were undisturbed: Maple’s killer had not taken her upstairs. He’d been in a hurry from the start.

In the living room – Aleck had called it the drawing room – Shepherd was bending over a pianola set next to a towering oak tallboy.

‘Mum and Dad saved for ever for one of these and he’s got one and more things besides. How do you get that much money? Mum’s always saying having something means doing without something else.’

‘Some people can have their cake and eat it. Oliver Hurrell hasn’t got anything now, poor chap.’ Cotton pulled back the brocade curtains. In daylight, the room lost the look of a museum and became the dreary setting for a brutal slaying. Cotton scrutinized the settee and saw again the faint dents in the settee cushions where the man had had his way. Had Maple been willing or was she raped?

‘What’s this?’ Shepherd was looking at the Turkey rug. Stepping back, he knocked a hexagonal occasional table inlaid with ivory. He righted it and, crouching, lifted the edge of the rug. He held up a silver cigarette lighter. ‘No cigarettes in the house.’

‘I’ll make a detective of you yet.’ Cotton flapped out a fresh cotton hankie and took the lighter. He caught a whiff of fuel. ‘You’re right. None of the rooms smell of tobacco. Dr Northcote said that Hurrell didn’t smoke. ‘This can only mean—’

‘—that it has to be his, sir. Stupid bastard didn’t do a sweep of the room after he’d killed her. It belongs to our murderer.’ Shepherd, the reluctant detective, came alive.

‘Well done, lad, this could be the clue we need. Even the cleverest murderers make careless mistakes.’ Cotton held up the cigarette lighter. ‘Crikey, it’s a Dunhill, our killer had some cash.’

‘A-X-E.’ Looking over his shoulder, Shepherd read out the three letters engraved on the side. ‘Could be a secret society, fifth columnist, my dad says they’re everywhere.’

‘That’s an N, not an E. I’d guess they’re initials.’

‘What kind of name starts with X?’

‘Xavier,’ Cotton said without thinking. Then he let out a groan. He thought back a couple of hours to the chill mortuary yard. He’d used his Swan Vestas to light Northcote’s cigarette. ‘Aleck Xavier Northcote. False alarm. Dr Northcote must have left this here last night.’

‘Careless, if you ask me,’ Shepherd said.

‘Luckily I’m not asking you, Constable, though I grant you it’s out of character,’ Cotton snapped. Aleck Northcote forbade smoking when examining a body in situ or at the mortuary. He said the dead told their story through his senses as much as by their flesh and insisted nothing must mar the truth. Not like Dr Bradman, who, Cotton knew from colleagues, could be influenced by police to find the right result.

It was inconceivable that Northcote, the pathologist who never made mistakes had made a mistake.

‘Come on, Shepherd, best boots to the fore. Time to tell Mr and Mrs Greenhill their daughter died last night.’

*

As they drove past Chiswick House grounds, Shepherd remarked that an incendiary had dropped there recently. ‘They do open-air concerts, my nan goes sometimes – suppose she’d been there?’ One of Shepherd’s habits was to suppose what if someone he knew happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cotton never said how it was likely, for them both, that one of his ‘supposes’ would come to pass.

‘Turn left here,’ he said instead.

Corney Road, built in the last decade as a suburban escape from London, comprised one line of semi-detached houses, the brickwork yet to be stained by smog. The kerb line of pollarded willows did not quite obscure the cemetery opposite. Many of the front gardens were turned over to vegetable patches, fences were freshly whitewashed; residents in Corney Road cared about their homes.

‘It looks respectable.’ Shepherd also believed Maple Greenhill was a part-time prostitute.

‘So was our victim. And, even if she was a prostitute, you treat her the same as if she was your nan.’ Cotton was now sure Maple had been meeting a sweetheart. ‘First law of detection, lad,’ he told the young constable. ‘Rules have exceptions and exceptions are the rule.’

Although Corney Road was outside D Division, Cotton could give Shepherd directions because five years ago he’d buried his parents in the cemetery. That rainy Thursday, watching the two coffins lowered into the ground, a gale inverted his brolly, snapping the spokes. Lashed by rain, his funeral black hung heavy as he’d thrown what was mud onto the caskets. Walking away with Joe, his thirty-five-year-old baby brother, they slipped and their shoes squelched on the sodden grass. Joe never got over them dying in the Hertfordshire rail crash. Signalman error. An irony, if you thought about it, with their signalman dad just retired from the Southern Railway. Cotton did not think about it. He hadn’t been back to the cemetery. It had been Joe who kept the grave tidy. Agnes did it now.

Nerving himself for Maple Greenhill’s parents, Cotton felt a crumb of