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

high street at 4 p.m. precisely, Stella pictured a shop like the various Waterstones she had cleaned over the years, bright, colourful with a coffee shop. The New Leaf, oddly named as it sold second-hand books, occupied a sixteenth-century half-timbered building squeezed between an Indian takeaway and a shop selling bric-a-brac.

Leading Stanley around two women browsing crime paperbacks that were heaped in tottering towers along a stone-flagged passage, Stella ascended a rickety staircase, then another. On the third floor she was again relieved to find she was there before Janet. She needed time to prepare her befuddled mind for Janet’s rapier-sharp questions.

Six foot in height, Stella had to stoop beneath exposed ceiling joists. A sloping floor gave her the impression that a stack might topple on to her. The damp air smelled of plaster and old books and old dust. It would be a challenge to clean. Stella sighed as she considered again how she needed another cleaning job. Surely not every company would see her knack of coming across dead bodies – only twice – as an obstacle to employing her.

Stella scanned the subject labels on the shelves: ontology, divinology, graphology… her mind became more befuddled. No café, she noted. After the Death Café, she’d had it with cafés. Although since seeing Jack and existing on scant sleep, she craved caffeine.

‘Sorry I’m late, it’s crazy at work.’ Janet did a circuit of the room establishing that they were alone which, watching her opening a cupboard under the eaves at one end of the room, Stella thought she should have done.

‘How is it going?’ Glimpsing cleaning equipment in the cupboard, Stella regained solid ground.

‘If only Terry could see you now.’ Janet flashed her a smile and Stella saw that the older woman looked as tired as Stella felt. ‘Bet you wish you hadn’t torn up that police application Terry gave you for your eighteenth.’

‘The police are not for me.’ Ashamed of her teenage moment of temper, Stella knew if her dad had told Janet, it meant Stella ripping up the form had upset him even more than she’d suspected it had. And she had been a detective: Jack and she had worked as a team. Not any more. Even at eighteen, Stella had had the mind of a cleaner, not of a detective.

‘Yet here you are, ready to help me out.’ Janet dropped her voice.

‘I’m not sure I can.’ Stella did want to keep tabs on Roddy’s case. She’d been in at the beginning and she wanted to make up for not understanding his last words. And, she told herself in pompous defence, since Janet wished to use her as a sounding board, it was her civic duty to comply.

‘We found a mint imperial behind what you called a cadaver tomb. With traces of March’s DNA. Probably got knocked out of his mouth when he was attacked.’ Janet ran a forefinger along the book spines as if testing for dust. ‘Any more luck on what March said before he died? Car something?’

‘Car. Wo my, or mo. Or me.’ Stella snatched at the fading memory.

‘Car. He did have a jeep. We just found it parked on a yellow near the abbey, with a sheaf of tickets. Any chance he was trying to tell you that?’ Janet pulled a face. ‘Bit sad if his last words were fear of being nabbed by a traffic warden.’

‘What with the bells, I couldn’t hear,’ Stella said.

‘What bells?’

‘The abbey’s bells, they struck ten.’

‘That fits in with when you called the ambulance.’ So Janet had checked that Stella was telling the truth. Rummaging in her coat Janet waved a packet of mint imperials. Seeing Stella’s expression she clicked her tongue, ‘OK, so I’m suggestible. Want one?’ Stella shook her head. ‘We found Roddy March’s phone in a bin near the Rose Theatre. No SIM card. Rather than the magnificent Death Café seven – if we include you – more and more I’m erring on the side that this is robbery-murder.’

‘How were Roddy’s parents?’ Stella didn’t agree, but was that just because, as Janet had as good as said the day before in the tearoom, the solution to most murders was banal?

‘She was chatty, going on about a memoir she’s writing about her time in Africa before her parents moved to Australia. Frankly, that was weird. He was matter-of-fact, wanted to know if there was a will, did we have the key to Roderick’s lodgings. How much money was in his account and had it been tampered with.’

‘Maybe not having seen Roddy for five years, it felt remote.’ Stella imagined that if someone she loved died – her mum, her brother… Jack – she’d be in overdrive asking practical questions. Jack might talk about memoirs if she died.

‘I got the sense Roddy was the black sheep of an otherwise fluffy pristine white flock.’ Janet tossed another mint imperial in her mouth and, tucking it in her cheek with her tongue, said, ‘His bedsit was a mess. Bed unmade, dirty clothes on the floor and he was literally living out of a suitcase.

‘What about his laptop?’ Stella asked.

‘We didn’t find a laptop. No phone, nor the notebook you mentioned. Still can’t find anything on any bloody cloud. As I said, those newspaper clippings on retro murders is all we have so far. It’s like he intentionally deleted his footprint.’

‘Or someone else did,’ Stella suggested.

‘He’d kept letters from four exes, two offered to kill him for dumping them by text. What an arse, would you believe it?’

‘Are they suspects?’ Having dumped an ex by text, Stella could believe it.

‘No, they all have alibis. As do your Death lot.’

‘Three have alibis, Felicity Branscombe was at home arguing with the vicar, or whatever he is, over choir music, Gladys Wren drove to the Morrisons out of town. She’s on their CCTV in the veg section. Clive Burgess walked home. He was seen by no one on his journey, but frankly he’s not high up there as a brutal killer. Andrea was seen