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

‘What was the interval between you finding March and when you called it in?’

‘Three minutes?’ Stella reeled and caught the pillar for balance. ‘I’m sorry, it’s all a blur.’

‘Don’t be. This is great stuff. We’ll get you home. Tony, my sergeant, will give you a lift.’

‘I’d prefer to walk. Clear my head,’ Stella said.

‘I don’t like you wandering around on your own.’ Janet slipped the leaflet into her notebook.

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘OK.’ Janet didn’t look convinced.

‘What he said before he died was something like “Car Wo My”.’ Stella leaned against the pillar. ‘It wasn’t that, obviously.’

‘…Cah… ca… wo… my…’ His eyes were fixed on Stella, wild, his pupils enlarged. He looked terrified.

‘Car? Wo my.’ Stella felt stupid, it couldn’t be that hard.

‘C-c-chh…’

Joy brought him a mug of chamomile at the Death Café; Felicity told me beforehand that she hated the smell,’ Stella added because she’d observed it.

‘Did he want you to get him some perhaps? A last craving. Not heard that one before.’ Janet folded her map. ‘Car Wo My, chamomile – it could work I suppose?’

‘No, when I asked him if he meant that his eyes said no.’

‘If it becomes clearer, or you remember anything, call.’ Janet passed Stella a card with the Gloucestershire Constabulary badge at the top. Stella noted with surprise that Janet was still an inspector; she hadn’t moved west for promotion.

‘I will.’ Setting off down the nave, Stella was grateful she felt so weak or she might not have resisted the temptation to run, which would look guilty. She had reached the porch door when Janet called to her.

‘One more thing, Stella.’

One more thing. Terry had taught Janet well.

‘You refer to March as Roddy, not Roddy March. Odd when you didn’t know him?’ Janet tipped her head.

‘He bled to death on my lap. I was the last person he heard before he died. So yes, I call him Roddy.’ Stella stormed out.

She was on the main street when she got the call. ‘Where’s my rogan josh?’ said the corncrake voice.

Chapter Fourteen

December 1940

Sunlight washed the soot-darkened brick of Hammersmith’s Coroner’s Court. The sky was blue as an August day, but the bitter cold penetrating George Cotton’s overcoat left no doubt it was winter.

Would spring ever come? Would there be primroses in his garden? He longed for the forsythia to bloom.

Last night Wailing Wally, as Agnes called the siren, had gone off at 6.32, with no all-clear until 5.18 a.m. The noise was terrifying, an assault on the nerves, but as he’d told June, it’s our guns that make most of the racket, let’s pray they bring down lots of Nazis. Agnes had been at the substation – she’d ignored his pleas and joined the Auxiliary Fire Service – another reason to fret. But never one to sit still, Agnes had great faith in Churchill, he was a decisive leader with the courage to put himself in the same danger he asked of his people. Cotton had his doubts about the man – you only had to go back to Gallipoli. Cotton was more for Clement Attlee.

Cotton had given up on vicars; as he’d told Hackett, the lead was dead. Hackett was pleased, it wouldn’t help the war effort to put a man of the cloth behind bars.

The investigation had hit the buffers. Shepherd had interviewed Maple’s colleagues at the dairy and tramped around Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush showing Maple’s picture in local pubs. No one at the Palais de Danse had remembered her. They had her photo flashing up in cinemas before the main picture. Vernon had remembered Maple said her fiancé was always comparing her to film stars. Vernon reckoned that was what had turned her head. A painful irony that it was not as a film star Maple had made it to the big screen. So far, nothing. Now Cotton had to find a way to get Aleck Northcote’s lighter back to him without embarrassment.

‘Doc’s still in there.’ Frank Tither, one of the coroner’s officers, jerked a thumb at the mortuary when he saw Cotton. ‘Go on in, George, he won’t mind, seeing as it’s you.’

‘I’ll wait.’ Cotton could leave the lighter in the officers’ room, but both officers kept their desks shipshape; Tither in particular had the eyes of a hawk. Cotton swore inwardly – who would credit this charade when he had a murder to solve?

Although the mortuary dealt with the dead, it was never quiet. Tiles reverberated with the bang of doors as police, undertakers and mortuary staff crashed in and out, and the rattle and clang of trolleys and trays.

‘Come in, George, have a cuppa.’ PC Cameron, the other coroner’s officer, beckoned him.

Cotton couldn’t resist the retreat into the cubbyhole where the two men worked. A coal fire in the grate overcame the razor-sharp draught from a bomb-shattered pane that, covered with hardboard, made the room more cave-like. Cotton accepted the tea which Tither ‘squeezed out of the pot’, and was ‘honoured’ with an arrowroot biscuit: ‘…we don’t offer them to all-comers.’

Cotton got on with the two men which was good because they were Wolsey Banks’s mastiffs. If they took against you then you waited your turn and that could be a while.

Tommy Cameron was a Gloucestershire man and, like Cotton, in his late forties and retained on the force for the duration of the war. Typically, he was mid-way through a story from the good old days. Son of a farm labourer, Cameron spent his boyhood snoozing in hayricks or against the side of a cow he was milking. He picked damsels from the hedgerows, his joke. He was regaling Tither with his runaway bull story. Tither rolled his eyes at Cotton, but the tale – taller with the telling – evoking a time before gas-mask training, fire-watching and the crushing blackout, meant they were only too happy to hear it again. Although Cotton was higher in rank, he envied them. Particularly this morning – what he’d give to