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

until 1942. Instantly he considered booking a viewing, but thought better of it. Best not to leave footprints, digital or literal.

Then he felt the nearest to happy that he’d felt for two months. There was a Virtual Tour. A devotee of Street View, Jack used to ‘walk’ routes around London, a reconnaissance for when he did the real thing. Now virtual reality software allowed him to explore a house in what estate agents called ‘immersive 3D’. He could wander around Northcote’s old home and not a soul would know.

Clicking his mouse pad, he hopped along the faint circular markers which, like stepping stones, allowed him to move through the property.

The house had been modernized since 1942 when, according to the electoral roll and, Jack now saw, on an English Heritage blue plaque, Northcote had moved permanently to his weekend house in Tewkesbury.

The ground floor was open plan – what he guessed was one an elegant hall with a sweeping staircase had been knocked into one with the downstairs rooms. With no nooks or alcoves, it resembled a sprawling modern office. Ceiling spots killed shadow and slants of light. Jack’s heart sank – were there to have been a clue to any mystery round Northcote’s murder it was there.

Jack ‘climbed’ the stairs, hopping along the circular markers into each room. There at last were original panelled doors, ceiling roses, alcove cupboards, fireplaces. Handles that Northcote and his wife had turned, cupboards they had opened. Door jambs they had touched during the thirties.

Jack let out a sigh. The top landing was unchanged. Oak balustrades curved round and down to the soulless office three storeys below. Jack had grown up in such a house, he’d spent hours as a small boy peering through the spindles to the perilous drop. Now he zoomed in on the banister, he saw the grain in the wood smoothed by hands over centuries and, immersed in the experience, caught the scent of beeswax polish.

Using the dollhouse view, Jack could turn and twist the cluster of rooms, suspended like a jewel-bright Christmas tree decoration, and peer inside. Stripped of external walls, each room exposed, he was reminded of the Blitz photos in the Archives. Interiors blown open by a bomb, to reveal to the street how lives were lived.

Jack swooped in on the landing where, on New Year’s Day 1941, Julia Northcote, the pathologist’s wife, hanged herself. Thirty-six and beautiful, her son staying with a friend from his boarding school. She had at least avoided the possibility Giles would find his mother. Jack felt an affinity with the boy and later the man who had sat hunched in a prison cell that last night awaiting a verdict of judicial murder. Giles had worked at the stock exchange, unsuccessfully, Jack guessed, since he’d been in debt. He must have found life a struggle; you never got over losing your mother.

Circling like an albatross, Jack tried to read Julia Northcote’s long-gone mind as she prepared her scaffold and, proficient as a Pierrepoint, dispatched herself. No thought of her boy, who would be motherless. Jack’s own mother hadn’t killed herself yet he did sometimes blame her for leaving him. Across decades, he asked Julia Northcote, ‘Why? Why did you do it?’

He shivered. No amount of clicking and zooming about on the landing would turn back time. He hopped along the white markers to the front attic bedrooms, then the back – what were once the servants’ quarters.

Jack was not alone.

A man bent by an alcove cupboard, low-slung jeans giving Jack an unwanted view of cheek butts. Automatically, as if to tackle the intruder, Jack leapt the cursor forward. The man vanished.

Now the cupboard door was closed, the room was empty. He clicked back to the door and came in again. This time there was no man and the cupboard was still shut. He pinched out to the Death Landing and tried again. Nothing.

This time, Jack made sure to click on every marker.

There he was. Purple polo shirt, brown Goodyear rigger boots, he crouched on his haunches, sideways to the camera. The glimpse of his face suggested he was about Jack’s age, early forties, hair greying at the temples. Perhaps he was the virtual tour photographer and the image file editor had been careless.

Jack’s phone buzzed with a text. A supper invitation at Jackie and Graham’s. Bev and Cheryl are coming. He loved it there, the Makepeaces were the family he’d never had, Jackie’s cooking like a mother’s love. Not that he could remember his mother’s meals. Yet he was suspicious. Everyone would know he’d seen Stella last night. Maybe they were offering him a cleaning shift; with Stella gone shifts were thin on the ground. No, Stella’s gatekeepers, Bev and Jackie, planned to tick him off for going to Tewkesbury. Tempted to ignore the text, Jack abandoned himself to his fate.

*

‘Jackie wants a summit.’ Beverly hauled off his coat and tossed it onto one of a row of hooks in the hall. ‘I found a clue.’

‘I’ll go then.’ Jack reached for his coat.

‘Don’t be a nutter, that’s why you’re here. Plus Jax is trying out the Persian rice cooker me and Cheryl got for her sixtieth, she’s doing a tahdig. Lamb with apricots, sensational.’ Beverly pinched her fingers and kissed them.

In the kitchen, Jack was mobbed. Jackie hugged him, Cheryl, more circumspect, patted his shoulder and Graham thrust a bottle of London Pride into his hand. Jack was home from home.

The tahdig was perfectly formed with a golden-brown crust. Graham carved the lamb – otherwise unconventional, the family held to a couple of traditional cornerstones. Jackie sat Jack next to her.

When everyone’s plates were full, Bev raised glasses to absent friends.

‘Stella.’ Jackie named the unnameable. In an undertone to Jack, ‘I am sorry Lucie misjudged Stella’s mood.’

‘You were right, she’s not interested.’ He felt mild relief that Jackie didn’t consider him Stella’s stalker.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Jackie said. ‘Give her time as well as space.’

‘I was checking the catch-all junk mail