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

hear me?’ Fear evaporating, Stella knelt before the recumbent body. Desperately she looked about for something with which to staunch the blood. Her scarf. She unwound it from her neck and bundled it, pressing it against Joy’s neck.

‘Felicity, 999, call an ambulance,’ Stella shouted.

Silence.

Stella leaned into the wound, trying at the same time to maintain Joy’s airways.

‘Help is coming.’ Fleetingly Stella noted she was trying to save the life of a multiple murderer. Joy’s eyes looked less vague, they were focused beyond Stella. Stella looked round.

Felicity was illuminated by the candles on the altar table. In her outstretched hand, held perfectly steady, was a knife. Stella knew instantly that it was Sir Aleck Northcote’s cartilage knife, the one stolen from Felicity. By Joy.

‘Don’t hurt her,’ Stella implored Felicity. ‘You of all people know that Joy must face a fair trial. Don’t implicate yourself for Northcote, he’s long dead and he wasn’t worth it.’

‘If that wasn’t pathetic, it would be funny.’ Felicity gave a peculiar high-pitched laugh. ‘Leave her, Stella.’

‘Please don’t do this.’ Stella held her scarf against Joy’s neck. Joy appeared to be using every ounce of strength to implore Stella not to let Felicity hurt her. ‘Felicity, you’re a doctor, think of the Hippocratic Oath.’

‘I don’t save people’s lives. My bible is the corpse.’ Felicity pointed the knife at Stella. ‘Leave her.’

‘I can’t,’ Stella said as Joy’s head dropped forward again.

‘This way, Stella.’ Felicity sounded almost kind.

Chapter Fifty-Five

2019

Jack

‘We can’t search Ms Branscombe’s home without a warrant. Please come out of there, Ms Rogers.’

‘My name is Greenhill.’ Andrea thrust her spade into the bed of soil which, the night before, Jack had supposed was Stella’s grave. ‘I can be here, I’m her gardener. Jack, for God’s sake, hold the torch steady.’

‘Without a warrant, anything you find will be ruled inadmissible by her lawyers.’

‘I’m planting the rosemary and lavender bushes as Felicity asked me. I would have put them in earlier, but I had to visit my elderly father, milud. Madam Felicity would be cross to find the bushes still in their pots.’ Andrea was heaping soil beside a deepening hole. ‘Anyway, she’ll be at her rehearsal.’

Jack looked beyond the veg patch to the house. Every window was dark. Lucie, Stella and Beverly would be at the rehearsal too.

‘Is this enough evidence?’ Andrea waved a Tesco Bag for Life at them, then kneeling on rotting foliage emptied out the contents. Two sealed plastic bags. ‘That poker matches the description of the one given by Northcote’s housekeeper which in her autopsy of him, Felicity said matched the wound in Northcote’s skull.’ Andrea waved the other, larger bag at them. ‘This is Felicity’s disguise, the fruits of various charity shops, she easily fooled them both. Stella Darnell and Lucie May no doubt gave signed statements they’d seen a drunken old man swaying along the footpath?’

Janet didn’t respond.

Jack’s phone rang.

‘Stella, are you OK?’ White sound, rushing so loud Jack had to hold the phone from his ear. ‘Can you hear me, Stella? What’s going on?’

The line went dead.

‘Something’s wrong.’ Jack never had trouble following a hunch. The phone rang again, it was Lucie.

‘Darling! Don’t worry. Stay calm. Bev and me have narrowed the suspects to two. Joy and Felicity. Or both. Whatever, I was lured away and left Stella in the abbey. We’re on our way there now, when will you get back from Chertsey?’

‘I’m here.’ Dashing rain from his eyes, Jack leapt over the makeshift grave and tore across the abbey green. He pushed on the great heavy door and raced up the nave. He didn’t need to be told where Stella would be.

Chapter Fifty-Six

2019

Stella

Spumes of water thundered through the weir. Soaked by rain Stella was at the mercy of the elemental. A primal roar that stirred the depths of every fear she had ever felt. The black floodwaters were not her only enemy.

‘You should have stuck to cleaning.’ Felicity was seemingly oblivious of the water welling up through the footboards on the bridge and the deafening crash of the swollen river pushing through the sluices. ‘You had to meddle.’ Again, that strange fluted laugh. ‘With that podcaster and my idiot gardener trailing in your wake.’

‘Andrea is not a gardener; if you were genuinely interested in your garden, you’d have seen that. She is a brilliant 3D software engineer. Her scan of our flat initially put us off your scent. It was intended as a warning to me to leave Tewkesbury, so she could have Roddy March to herself. Not even your morgue got me worried.’

‘Stella, you are not such a bright girl.’ Her back to the sluice-housing, Felicity appeared monstrous. ‘You and your gaggle of playmates. They’ll be scuttling around the abbey now. They’ve found Joy the Poison Pen bled out and lifeless. Like headless chickens they’ll be tearing into every nook and cranny, every tomb and chapel looking for you. As a cleaner in a little flat in Tewkesbury we could have been friends. You were my ally at the Death Café, I was so disappointed that didn’t come off. Then you spoilt things. Like the fools who ended up on my slab.’ Felicity tapped the cartilage blade on the gantry railing. It made a sound like a Tibetan bell. Clarity within the tumult.

‘Why did you murder Roddy March and Clive Burgess?’ Stella clung to the age-old tactic of keeping Felicity talking.

‘Clive overheard me outside the tearoom telling March to meet me in the abbey after the Death Café. Gentleman Clive had spent his life opening doors for silly women he despised, it never entered his mind that one of those women would kill him.’

‘You must have been there when we…?’ Stella was soaked through. Everywhere was water. ‘You were the old man.’

‘See what I mean? Not so bright, are you? If only you’d left well alone. I did try another way. Andrea was rabidly jealous of you and March,’ Felicity shouted above the cacophony. ‘Isn’t it frustrating how dense fools like March, with puny