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

‘What did Clive tell March?’ Lucie said.

Gladys’s eyes glittered. ‘I’ve no idea, dear. Ask me, Clive talking to Roderick is why they’re both gone.’

Chapter Thirty-Three

2019

Jackie

‘Phyllis, I’ve never asked if you knew the family who used to live in our house before us?’ Jackie sipped deathly strong tea from a mug extolling Lytham St Annes.

Jackie dropped in on her elderly neighbour every week, usually after work, but today it was for elevenses and Jackie was fact-finding. ‘Name of Greenhill. They were here during the war, so before your time.’ Although Phyllis had grown up in Lytham, she and her husband had lived in the house next to Jackie for over sixty years. Phyllis was the Corney Road Oracle.

‘I should say, I’m not that old.’ Phyllis stuck out her tongue as, needles clacking, she knitted a garment for another generation of her family. ‘I do remember them. Vernon Greenhill had a lovely wife, I did feel for her when he died, ooh, years ago now. Mary, that was her name, she’d been on the buses during the war. They moved out to Windsor, but we exchanged Christmas cards. She died in a home in 1999. Her son Cliff wrote to tell me. The man they sold to was a grumpy old so-and-so, never gave you the time of day, your family was a tonic, I can tell you.’

‘I had heard their relative was murdered. Sounds silly, but somehow I feel involved.’ Since Jack and Beverly had told her about Maple Greenhill, she felt haunted by the notion of the young woman walking out of their house for a night at the Hammersmith Palais, where Jackie herself had danced with Graham in her teens. Jackie wondered which of the bedrooms had been Maple’s. She had grown up in the same house as Jackie’s two boys. Maple felt like family.

‘Maple was Vernon Greenhill’s older sister. Mary said how she could never measure up to Maple, no one could. Vernon opened a car showroom for William to run along with his garage.’

‘Was William Vernon’s son?’ Jackie asked.

‘Ah, well. According to Mary, when William was born, just before the war, it was given out he was Maple and Vernon’s little brother. I met William when we moved in – he was about twenty. After Vernon died, Mary told me William was Maple’s boy. The parents had lied to save scandal.’ Phyllis stopped knitting. ‘After all that, and Maple never lived to see her little mite grow up.’

‘Do you know where William lives now?’ Jackie quelled her excitement.

‘William went off after Mr and Mrs Greenhill died, Mary said he wanted a new life.’ Phyllis swapped wool to a different colour. ‘Vernon was keeping the business for him but when he didn’t want it Cliff had to step in.’

‘Is Cliff still running the garage?’

‘Oh yes, our John got a car from them last year.’ Phyllis tugged the stitches on her needle. ‘King Street, near where the Commodore used to be.’

‘Maple’s Motors.’ Jackie went cold. ‘Vernon named it after his sister.’

‘So, Maple lived on, it was her legacy.’

Back in her own kitchen, Jackie called Beverly. She and Jack would be leaving for Tewkesbury in the afternoon.

‘Bev? I’ve got a job for you.’

Chapter Thirty-Four

2019

Stella

‘I’m guessing if he had to die, Roddy would like the whole starved monk thing.’ Lucie was dancing around the chapel. Roddy’s murder had invigorated her. She resumed reading from a printout on cadaver tombs.

‘“… the monument is a canopied altar tomb topped with an effigy of a skeletal cadaver being crawled over by vermin…”’

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but the day had been grey and now the tower was lost in heavy mist.

Stella had collapsed into bed at ten the night before, leaving Lucie busy in her cockpit. She was still there, fresh as a daisy, when Stella set about her morning clean. As Stella removed empty fig packets – too many, she should warn Lucie of likely consequences – Lucie remained absorbed in what she was reading. She hadn’t looked up when Stella had given her coffee in Lucie’s pint-sized mug. She was reading up on the abbey. Lucie’s attention to detail was after Stella’s own heart and she had felt bad for assuming Lucie’s hectic manner mirrored her work process.

‘The carver’s included every rib.’ Lucie bent over the monk. ‘Tsssk. Some ancient squirrel on a stick has carved his initials on the poor bloke.’

‘Roddy said those marks are considered of historic value,’ Stella remembered.

‘Pish posh. I call it graffiti.’ Lucie traced the myriad marks scored over the carved figure as if with a healing hand.

‘It’s a legacy.’ Stella thought of Joy’s comment at the Death Café. ‘Roddy was interested in cadaver tombs. I wonder, was his killer’s intention to highlight a link between Roddy and the cadaver monk, as with Clive and his clocks?’

‘“Time Keeper Slain by Sundial”, I get that, but “True Crime Podcaster Dies by Starved Monk” is a bit deep. Who knew March was obsessed with old tombs?’

‘Jack told me there was a theory in the nineteenth century that the last image a person saw was imprinted on their eye and could be restored. If that was true, we’d see Roddy’s murderer.’

‘Optography. Stella, if you don’t want Jack, please don’t channel him. We need your cool rational mind. If it held water, it’s you who would be imprinted on his eyes. Questions: why, instead of going to the police in Cheltenham, did March come to the abbey? He wanted you on board for his podcast so why not talk to you after the Death Cafe?’ Lucie went out to the north ambulatory.

‘Something changed his mind.’ Stella trawled her memory of both Death Café evenings. There had been a mood of frustration, as if the group, although there from their own free will, had been kept back on detention.

‘March’s phone would tell us who rang him on the morning you met him. The police are treating his missing laptop