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

books have been published about Northcote’s murder. Lots of sensational inaccuracies, but the biggest is that no one knew the real killer. What was the truth of what went on in that cavernous house on that stormy November night? No one has questioned the judge’s verdict. Until. Now.’

‘Another pot-boiler rushed out to catch the zeitgeist while it’s bubbling on the stove.’ Lucie thought nothing of mixing her own metaphors. Happier talking than writing, Stella was increasingly certain Roddy’s murder was to be Lucie’s latest excuse for abandoning her own true-crime book.

‘…prove to you that the man hung on the morning of the eighteenth of May at HMP Pentonville – only weeks before the end of capital punishment in Great Britain – was as innocent as the spring day on which his neck was snapped. I will show that, after the supposed killer left Cloisters House, Professor Northcote got another visitor. His. Murderer.’

‘Da da da dah. Actually the last hanging in Britain was on the sixteenth of December 1969 so that’s tosh for starters. ’ Lucie sang as she ripped the top off another fig. ‘Sadly, that style works, listeners lap it up. No editor to correct gigantic holes in his grammar.’ Lucie often railed against her editor at the Chronicle.

‘That evening, when Northcote was opening the door to his visitor, most Brits were glued to their TVs reeling from the death of America’s president. If Northcote shouted for help, his cry went unheard. There was no witness. Or. Was. There?’

As he had at the Death Café, March promised to reveal the name of the murderer at the end of the series. ‘This is a living podcast, I’m unearthing secrets by the minute and as I do, I will share them with you. I don’t know how many episodes this will take, but please come with me on what will definitely be a bumpy ride… Giles Northcote was the Northcotes’ only child – could the great man have been slain by a boy he’d dandled in his arms over twenty-five years earlier? That the professor’s middle name of Xavier, like everything I tell you, is a brick in the wall of this fifty-year-old mystery. Like so many deaths, the accessories are clues. Holmes had his pipe, we have a cigarette lighter, a tailor’s ticket and… well, why not wait and see?’

‘I love how he compares himself to Sherlock Holmes.’ Lucie was busy writing in her notebook as Roddy had the night before. ‘No shame.’

‘You call me Sherlock,’ Stella said.

‘A fair comparison.’

Stella was glad that, engrossed in her notes, Lucie didn’t see her struggle not to smile. Lucie was a harsh judge, so that was a compliment.

‘We know that Giles Northcote called his father earlier that Friday requesting to see him. The renowned professor knew his son’s reason for coming was not filial affection. We know Aleck poured Giles at least one whisky; Giles’s fingerprints were on a glass and the decanter. In his police statement Giles confirmed this as he admitted tapping Northcote Senior for a loan to pay off a substantial gambling debt. His father refused. Giles claims he “took this on the chin”. On his return to London, he got drunk and didn’t waken until noon on the Saturday to headlines in the papers that Kennedy was dead. And in smaller print how his own father had been bludgeoned to a pulp with a poker. Giles’s girlfriend had dumped him so, alone in his flat, no one supported his alibi. Scotland Yard found Giles’s smudged thumbprint on the poker and his fate was sealed by the discovery of a silver cup Giles had pinched from his father and hidden in a cupboard.

‘But what if Giles was cool with his father’s refusal of money? The silver cup was worth five hundred pounds which easily covered his debt. Giles claimed he’d raked the fire with the poker, and maybe that’s all he used it for. Why would he kill the golden goose?’

‘To benefit from the will, one would suppose, young March,’ Lucie said.

‘If Giles did kill him, he did nothing to cover his tracks.’ Stella took down notes as Roddy gave more background.

Giles Hugh Northcote, twenty-six, single, no children. Expelled from Eton for going to the races. This surprised Stella, she’d rather expected it to be mandatory curriculum to know about horses. Giles was ‘booted out’ of the army for being drunk on duty while serving in Aden, now Yemen, then a British Protectorate. His voice deepening, Roddy said, ‘Aleck was alive when his son left. Not long after there came another knock on the door and, expecting Giles come back to plead, Northcote answered it. He admitted his visitor. It’s by this unknown person’s hand that the pathologist sustained the ugly and vicious attack that ended his illustrious life.’

‘Save us.’ Lucie pressed a button on the recliner and her feet went up several inches.

‘Aleck drags himself to the hall telephone but, fixed to the wall, he can’t reach it. The housekeeper comes back from the cinema and notices the receiver dangling. Then she sees her master in a pool of blood on the hall floor. Professor Sir Aleck Northcote died the way he’d lived, a mutilated corpse on a mortuary slab.’ More piano chords then Roddy said, ‘Check out our website for photos and pics of the key players. Join in the conversation: do you know about this case? Have you spotted an anomaly?’

‘Mortuary slab. Catchy notion until you pick it apart,’ Lucie commented. ‘And he can’t keep to one tense. What a dog’s breakfast.’

‘I was reading that some podcasts have got people out of prison.’ Stella saw a dog’s breakfast as a good thing.

‘Now let’s turn back the clock to the nineteen thirties when Aleck is plain Dr Northcote but already swarming the pole. His unrivalled knowledge of contusions has just done for the Brandy Snap Strangler.’

Stella wished they could turn the clock back. Clive’s insistence that time was a concept should mean Roddy was still alive. Turn it