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

‘Let’s get out of here, there could be a hidden sensor.’

‘Now you think of it,’ Jack said, ‘if there were there were, the police would be here by now.’

Beverly replaced the plank and stamped down the board. They slotted in the shoe rack. It was impossible to tell there had been any disturbance.

On the landing, Jack made Beverly pause. The house was silent, too silent. He tuned into the quiet. It was the deeper silence of invisibility. Of another heart beating.

‘Someone is here.’ Jack breathed into Beverly’s ear. ‘We are trapped.’

Beverly shook her head and before Jack could stop her, glided soundlessly down to the next floor. He had no choice but to keep close to her.

A creak. Unmistakable. Someone was there.

Beverly was an independent married woman in her thirties yet Jack felt responsible for her. Beverly wasn’t just emulating Stella. It was him and his True Hosts which had inspired her tonight. If Bev got hurt Stella would kill him.

Beverly was climbing out of the landing window. Jack stifled a shout as she disappeared. They were two floors up. Then her head appeared above the sill.

There was a fire escape on the side of the house. He should have known. He really had lost his touch.

Jack tried to keep up with Bev on what felt like an endless descent. The wrought-iron steps were slicked with icy rain, his palm even in latex gloves stung with cold. One misstep could be fatal. The person in the house could be waiting at the bottom.

His worst fear was, for once, not realized.

‘This way.’ Bev was a shadow amongst shadows. Racing blindly in her direction, Jack found her behind the studio.

‘I’ll give you a boost.’

‘Can you take my weight?’ Jack could make out Beverly’s interlaced palms.

‘Yes, hurry.’

Steading himself against the studio wall, Jack stepped onto Bev’s hands and immediately she launched him upwards. He grabbed the top of the wall, his coat twisted around him. At last he was sitting astride the brick. He reached for Beverly. At the same moment they both heard a door open.

‘Quick.’ He hauled Beverly up.

Moments later Beverly was leading Jack around the back of the teahouse in Ravenscourt Park. They crossed the old stable yard where Beverly unbolted a gate and hustled Jack through onto the pavement outside.

‘My car’s in Ravenscourt Square.’ He heaved a breath.

‘You can’t go back. Honestly, Jack, you’re getting soft. How come you didn’t walk? Plus, you entered premises without establishing an exit strategy. It’s not me who’ll get the criminal record.’

‘Seriously, thanks, Bev, you saved us.’ Jack was humbled. ‘I was an idiot.’

‘We’re both idiots. We should have stayed to see who was there. It had to be Roddy March’s murderer – who else has reason to be there?’

‘The owner?’ Jack said. ‘Whoever it was expects us to keep watch, they will have gone by the side entrance to avoid us.’

Beverly’s car, parked twenty minutes away in Chiswick High Road, took three goes to start.

‘Mission accomplished,’ she said as they drove towards Shepherd’s Bush. ‘We’ve got what March was looking for and obviously didn’t find.’

‘Unless he was hiding it, not searching for it.’ A new idea.

‘Let’s open the box at Clean Slate,’ Beverly said. ‘It feels ages since supper – if only there were Lyons’ Swiss Rolls in the box, I could murder one. Let’s get some from the mini-mart.’

Bev had circled Hammersmith Broadway three times – to lose anyone on their tail – when Lucie’s siren ringtone sounded on both their phones.

We’ve got another body.

Chapter Thirty

2019

Stella

Stucco had fallen from the tall thin Georgian house. A woody rosemary bush grew drunkenly in an avocado bath set on bricks by the door. A sign suckered to the downstairs window read, ‘Vacancies’.

‘Well I never. Clive was a silly sod, but I wouldn’t wish that on him.’ Gladys Wren started talking as she opened the door and hastily, as if they were expected, she ushered Lucie and Stella inside. ‘First Roderick, then Mr Know-It-All Burgess. Fancy you being there so soon afterwards. A nasty surprise. Come into my parlour or you’ll be catching your deaths. So kind of you to pop in after your shock yesterday. Dreadful.’

Stella wondered if Gladys’s last remark was meant as ironic. From the two Death Cafés, Stella had concluded no one should underestimate Gladys. Indeed, Lucie had planned to break the news about Clive’s murder to Gladys and study her reaction, but Stella was unsurprised that Gladys was totally up on last night’s murder.

Gladys Wren’s ‘parlour’ was overburdened with a dark sideboard on which was an orange plastic bowl of plastic peaches and nectarines and an Bush radio that dated to before ‘retro’ – the tuning plate recalled the radio from Stella’s visits to her nan in the sixties, offering magical far-off lands, Moscow, Luxembourg, Frankfurt, the Midlands. Perched on a huge television was a stuffed cotton hen. Antimacassars, two care-home-like armchairs and a bamboo magazine rack overflowing with copies of the Radio Times contributed to the time-warp.

‘You’ve collected some treasures.’ Lucie spun about the room.

‘Roderick wanted to put that wireless on eBay, I wouldn’t hear of it. What a bright lad he was.’ Gladys Wren snatched a duster from her apron pocket and whipped it over the radio. She turned to Stella. ‘Want a cuppa?’

‘Yes please.’ Lucie flumped onto a leather pouffe and made parched noises. The pouffe put her at a height disadvantage to the armchairs. Stella knew this would be Lucie’s intention. It made her appear harmless. Stella also knew that Lucie wouldn’t get the better of Mrs Wren. Gladys, please, we’re old friends.

‘Funny-osity,’ Lucie said when Gladys was out of the room. ‘That dress, mutton and lamb— Ooh, Mrs Wren,’ Lucie shot to attention as Gladys returned, ‘fancy you being Roddy’s landlady.’

‘Why didn’t you say at the Death Café?’ Stella said.

‘Roderick wanted me incognito. I had to ask Andrea to keep mum. Goodness, what a temper she was in, I don’t know why she came. Roderick had schooled me with what to say