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

Julia Northcote didn’t reply. Bidding Cotton goodnight, she left the room. After the faint creaks on the stairs had receded, still standing, Cotton said, ‘He has slipped up.’

‘You didn’t say.’ Northcote’s face stiffened. His eyes were cold, cruel and unstinting.

Cotton felt he could read what was passing across the pathologist’s mind as he rapidly assessed the situation. His high-flying career had convinced him he was invincible, he would never be found out. If he had been, he would have been confident that the police, the coroner, his colleagues would protect him. Julia Northcote’s parting words might be spelled in the cloud of blue pipe smoke.

‘I’m confident you will find the monster who soiled that girl then snuffed her out.’

‘I wish this wasn’t happening.’ Cotton went to the door, although Northcote wouldn’t make a run for it and he knew that Mrs Northcote would not return.

Standing sentry, Cotton repeated all that he had told Bob Hackett. The elements of evidence: the scratched arms, the lighter, Northcote’s print on a paperweight, the radiogram, You knew Maple had been strangled, you had no reason to touch it. Another on the radiogram, on the other side of the room where you had no reason to go. That Northcote arrived within minutes of the call had seemed impressive. ‘You said you lived around the corner but I’ve just come from Chiswick and it took me just over a quarter of an hour. The PC who made the call reported that you got there in little more than three minutes. Perfectly possible if you were already in the vicinity, waiting until you could have legitimately got the message.’

‘George, I’ve always respected your common sense and fine judgement, don’t fall at the fourth now.’ There was no mistaking the warning in Northcote’s tone.

Cotton continued, ‘Miss Porter put in the diary that you were at the lab until nine, but the man you called your “fool of a lab assistant” told us that you left at five. You said you were taking your wife out to dinner.’

‘George, you are on the rack with this murder. As your friend, why don’t I have a chat with Hackett, see if he can’t give you lighter duties? Or set you loose to dig for England on that allotment of yours. Maybe you could join your wife at the AFS and put out fires, so much wiser than setting them, don’t you think?’

‘I could twist facts to make sense of the senseless, but then there is the coat.’ Cotton related how they’d found the mending ticket from Bright the tailor tucked in the lining of Maple’s coat. ‘A coat that belonged to Mrs Northcote. Your wife.’

‘Don’t you dare bring my wife into it.’ Northcote remained seated in the other wing-backed chair, but now his face seemed alive as if charged with electricity. He looked like an automaton; in that second Cotton saw nothing human about him. He should have come with Shepherd. He had come alone to spare Northcote. His mistake.

‘However, if we must involve her…’ Northcote raised a hand and, without looking, took hold of a china handle at the end of a cord beside his chair.

Expecting a servant or a butler, Cotton was astonished when Mrs Northcote reappeared. Wrapped in a silk kimono, Julia Northcote stepped into the room. It was so soon after her husband had pulled on the cord that Cotton suspected her of listening from the hall. So, from his expression, did Northcote.

‘Julia, please would you put the inspector’s mind at rest? There’s been some confusion in CID – comprising two men – regarding that silly business with your coat that Bright the tailor claims to have given to me. It is pretty ghastly, but the ticket you lost, and indeed the coat, have been found on the corpse of that prostitute strangled in Chiswick. Although there will be other such coats in London, the valiant Cotton here declares them a match.’

The ensuing pause was broken by the siren. Moaning Minnie, as Una Hughes had called it. Una Hughes who, so impressed by Maple’s debonair dancing partner, had not forgotten him. Glancing at a folded newspaper photograph which Cotton happened to leave on the table, she had recognized the pathologist with the film-star looks whose forensic work on corpses pointed police to the killer as the man she’d seen with Maple.

The siren stopped. Julia Cotton gave a sigh. ‘This again?’

‘I’m afraid so, darling.’ Aleck sat, legs crossed at the ankles, fingers intertwined, at home in his home.

Cotton hoped to God Agnes, not on shift tonight, had taken June to the shelter. Although she hated him doing it, if she was on her own, she preferred curling up under the kitchen table to their damp dug-out.

‘As the inspector knows, I lost the ticket for my coat, I went to Bright’s to collect my coat only to find you had already done so,’ Julia Northcote said. ‘Now you’re saying that, all the time, the coat you gave me and the mending ticket for which I turned the house upside down looking for yesterday, were in the possession of a dead tart?’

‘You went to the shop?’ For the first time Northcote looked disturbed.

‘Didn’t I say?’ Mrs Northcote flapped pipe smoke away with a hand. ‘I was expecting to collect my coat, a thoughtful gift from you.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Northcote’s smile filled Cotton with dread.

‘I preferred to put it out of my mind, the affair is too sickening. I shan’t be using Bright again, he’s clearly unfussy about the standard of customer. I want nothing to do with the whole, frankly revolting, business.’

‘If you had told me, we could have saved Cotton here a lot of trouble.’

‘If Inspector Cotton wants an explanation, here it is: Mr Bright accidentally – or on purpose – eyeing a bargain, sold my repaired coat to the first comer. A whore who, with airs and graces, then lured some poor unfortunate man with no more brain than the chair