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

owner… the stubs in the grate were the same brand of cigarette, his fingerprints, those scratches—”’

‘“Murder by person or persons unknown.” Banks is puffing on his pipe.

‘“Bob?” I tried to appeal to the bloke I passed out with, we always had each other’s backs. But Bob is at the door.

‘“Thank you, Inspector Cotton, that will be all.” Agnes, you’d never have recognized him.’

‘Betty’s been funny with me. I thought it was because I saw her getting extra down the butcher’s,’ Agnes had said. ‘He must have told her to keep her distance. He won’t have said why, he never tells her anything except if he’s won at golf. So, your hard work with Shepherd is thrown away and a cold-blooded murderer is free to kill again all because he’s so ruddy important.’ Agnes had held his hand. ‘Doesn’t that man have enough dead bodies that he needn’t be killing more?’

Cotton clutched the quilt, wishing it was Agnes’s hand. Before she’d gone out to the substation earlier that evening, she’d said, ‘Men like that, Maple Greenhill wasn’t his first and won’t be his last…’ She had kissed him and told him to collect up stuff for the shelter. June was out with her man. ‘I’ve told her not to be late.’

Cotton hadn’t told her how Wolsey Banks, the man who had swapped allotment tips with him and once described Cotton as the cream of the force, had walked past him as if he wasn’t there.

He hadn’t been able to tell Agnes his pension was in doubt if he made trouble. She did know that tomorrow, although suspended, Cotton was expected to inform Keith and Evelyn Greenhill the police had not found their girl’s killer. Hackett had suggested Cotton ‘call the girl a casualty of the war’.

‘Adolf didn’t strangle Maple Greenhill.’ Agnes had been furious. ‘Northcote did that.’

Now Cotton raised his head. Through the smoke he could see the distant glow of fires in the east. He wanted June home. At least her man would bring her to the door.

Despite the raid, he went out and peered up and down the street. The moon was obliterated by smoke. It was dark as pitch. Cotton couldn’t see the kerb.

This meant when Shepherd found him still standing by the gate half an hour later, Cotton was taken by surprise.

‘You’ve heard then?’ Hackett had wasted no time. He’d have to recruit a new team. The only winner was Shepherd – he was getting his way and being shipped out to fight.

‘Heard?’ In the hall light Shepherd looked sick as a dog.

‘About Dr Northcote. I wanted to tell you myself, but I’ve been furloughed.’

‘It’s not that, sir. They sent me to tell you. Shepherd clutched his hat. ‘The Paddington substation got a hit and Agnes… I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Not your fault, lad,’ Cotton said.

PART TWO

Chapter Twenty-Six

5 November 1979

The explosion made the bridge vibrate. A spray of light across the sky made multicoloured molten glass of the water cascading through the sluices into the River Avon. Guy Fawkes was long dead, but every year he had to be burnt again. Cotton was a Catholic, but when he’d married Agnes, strict Church of England, he’d let it lapse. Nothing that had happened since had restored any kind of faith.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, another one.’ Cotton wiped rainwater from his face.

Since the Blitz, he couldn’t stand bangs: a car back-firing; a door slamming; fireworks all became gunfire, bombs. On other years at this time he stayed home, headphones on to block out the sound, listening to records from their collection. Agnes’s favourites: Chopin, Beethoven sonatas, Vaughan Williams.

Dr Aleck Northcote had found it amusing that the Cottons liked classical music while he, ‘eminent pathologist, adored band music. A chap can’t get hold of a girl to Vaughan Williams.’ George hadn’t put Northcote right. They’d agreed it took all sorts while each secretly admiring the other man for having something more about him.

Cotton checked his watch. Nearly ten.

A flare. The scream of an incendiary. He clutched the guard rail and stared fixedly past the old mill to where the tower of the abbey showed above the rooftops. It had survived centuries, the Dissolution. The Blitz. When Cotton had arrived in Tewkesbury he’d gone straight to the abbey and, regardless of his lost faith in God, had lit a candle for Agnes. Then another for June and her babbies. Grumpy teenagers with better things to do than visit Grandad when June came to check on him. He’d found himself thinking how the abbey belonged to the Catholics first, perhaps because in his old age, Catholicism was once again his harbour.

A high-pitched whistle was a V2, Hitler’s last hurrah. Whistle. Silence. Death. In the end it had never been his turn.

Cotton sensed he wasn’t alone. He turned. Too late. His detective’s brain registered that his throat would now be cut from the front instead of the back. Less clean, but as effective.

Pain was extinguished by the shock when Cotton’s body was tipped over the bridge and hit the water. It was quickly carried away on the current, bobbing briefly before it sank. The post-mortem would find that actual death was by drowning.

A firework ended the night’s display. It illuminated the bridge, the weir and a terrace of houses along the bank. Cotton’s killer was revealed, steeped in white light, like a sculpture of cold steel.

Unlike when Maple Greenhill had been strangled nearly forty years before, this time there was a witness.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

2019

Jack

7 p.m. The night after Jack’s abortive trip to Tewkesbury. He slumped on the sofa in his sitting room staring at the fire. His sofa was long enough for Stella and him to lie end to end, toes touching. Just him now.

Idly sifting through Rightmove, a way of weaning himself off being a guest in a True Host’s house, Jack had discovered a listing for the house in Ravenscourt Square where Professor Northcote had lived