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

egos, capture the hearts of clever women? Though with those manners, Andrea was lucky to have him. I encouraged her jealousy. Let her be the one to drive you out of Tewkesbury.’

‘She didn’t have March, he used her.’ Stella could not bear that the last moments of her life might be talking about March. A stupid thought in itself.

‘We used each other. I killed March to stop him using me. He would have destroyed my reputation with his trashy podcast. His life was nothing and Clive was a vile woman-hater. As for you, I resent that you have put me in this position.’

‘You murdered Aleck Northcote.’ If this had dawned sooner, Stella wouldn’t be hanging over a raging weir with a murderer deciding when she would die.

‘Stella the Slow Detective.’ Felicity’s breath smelled of peppermint. Her clothes of formalin. Smiling like a best friend, Felicity laid the flat of the cartilage blade against Stella’s neck. ‘Don’t worry, Stella, this is not how you will die.’

‘Why did you murder Northcote?’ Stella forced herself to sound calm. ‘At the Death Café, you said he was your hero.’

‘I wanted to a be a pathologist ever since I was twelve when I discovered one could cut up human bodies and see their insides for a living.’

‘You must only have been about twenty.’ Lucie had warned that no age was too young to murder. Joy, the blackmailer, liar and a snoop, was ten and, until half an hour ago, the prime suspect.

‘Too young to die, too young to murder.’ Felicity ran the side of the blade down Stella’s neck. If she slit her skin, Stella was too numb with cold and fear to feel it. ‘Too young to be raped.’

‘Aleck Northcote raped you?’ Stella blinked away water that ran down her face like borrowed tears. If she wet herself the rain would disguise it. Death would disguise it.

‘A fellow student boasted how he’d taken his copy of Northcote’s autobiography, Mind over Murder to Tewkesbury and called on Northcote. He was invited in for tea. Northcote signed the book, “To my successor”. Sebastian, that was his name, got low marks, I corrected his mistakes and helped him revise. He was a less than mediocre pathologist.’

‘Northcote probably wrote that in every book.’ Stella was reassuring Felicity. Anything to be allowed to live.

‘Only for men.’ Felicity pressed the blade against Stella’s skin. ‘Women have to work twice as hard to astound and astonish so that we cannot be ignored. When I visited Northcote, it would be a meeting of supreme minds across the generations.’

A siren. The town was flooding, Lucie and Beverly would be trapped in the abbey. Jack wouldn’t reach Tewkesbury. ‘Felicity, please let me go, people need help.’

‘Don’t plead, it’s pathetic,’ Felicity grated. ‘I intended to find Northcote alone, Sebastian said the housekeeper left at six. At Paddington, newspaper hoardings said that JFK had been assassinated. Perhaps this was why one selfish individual chose to jump in front of a train so I didn’t get to Tewkesbury until that evening. No matter, I too was welcomed in. Aleck and I were locked in a discussion about facial reconstruction. He was genuinely fascinated by my theories. He was charm itself, I was transported. My career was made. Here was the greatest living pathologist caught in my spell.

‘It started with a hand on my leg. He oozed compliments. You are quite something, aren’t you, dear. Then he grabbed me. He was savage, clumsy. Revolting. A rabid dog. A dog that had to be put down.

‘Later, on the train back to London, I read the inscription: “For my Girl in the Headlines”. The film Northcote said Gladys, his housekeeper, was seeing that night. Joy told me Gladys lied.’

‘That’s what Clive meant about John Lennon,’ Stella exclaimed. ‘You got Northcote to sign a copy of his book and then you killed him.’

Felicity waved the knife impatiently, ‘One night Joy told me that Gladys Fleming, as was, had been with Aleck that evening. Joy believed Gladys had killed him.’

‘How come Joy told you?’ Stella’s jaw ached from her effort to stop her teeth chattering. The river crashing through the sluices expressed the roar of terror Stella felt. In the sky, ragged skeins of white cloud became sooty black as they passed across the moon.

‘When I bought Cloisters House, I joined the choir. I’ve always loved choral music. Joy came to Cloisters with one of her fussy musical arrangements. After several glasses of brandy – “medicinal, the organ plays havoc with my lower back” – her tongue loosened and out it poured. No friends as a child. She spied on others and bartered secrets to get friends. But she had kept one secret. That Aleck had an affair with his pretty young housekeeper, the gorgeous Gladys. She’d seen them “in this very room”. Giles Northcote hadn’t murdered his father, she said. It was Gladys Wren who’d bludgeoned Aleck with the poker. This was the real music to my ears: I was safe. If there was doubt about Giles Northcote’s guilt, Gladys was next up as culprit. That was until that scoundrel March arrived in Tewkesbury with other ideas.’

‘You let an innocent man hang?’ Stella should not be shocked; were Roddy March’s suspicions true, someone had let Giles Northcote die to save their own skin.

‘Holier than thou doesn’t suit you, Stella. I killed Northcote because he raped me. I wasn’t his successor, I was his sex doll. Should I have given myself up to the police for his son, a gambler and a drunk?’

‘How did Joy find out you killed March?’ Stella’s measurement of time was in inches as the water rose. If she leapt in, what chance would she have? At least she’d control her own death. I love you, Jack. Stupidly it occurred to her that it was two days until Christmas and she wouldn’t see him.

‘March called me that night at the first Death Café. It was him threatening me, I never as much as sent him a poison pen