‘Did Professor Bradman kill his rival? Supposedly in the clear, he had signed into his club on that cold rainy night in November. A taxi driver was driving him home to his house in Harley Street at the same moment as Northcote’s housekeeper found Northcote dead. But never make an assumption. In episode two we will examine this alibi with the same level of detail that Northcote himself would apply…’
Was Stella someone’s enemy? When she walked out on her own life, she had walked out on other lives too. Jack. Everyone at Clean Slate. Her mother and, although he lived in Sydney, her brother too. The piano music broke into her musing.
‘…the flipside of respect and awe is envy and hate…’
‘Wrong. It’s disrespect and disdain.’ Lucie chomped on a fig.
‘Police arrested Giles the next afternoon at the Cheltenham races where he won more than enough to pay off his debts without selling that cup. Giles was found guilty. After the frenzied attack, the judge said Giles had coolly replaced the poker with the other fire irons and had the presence of mind to destroy his bloodstained garments. I’ll leave you to spot the double irony.’
Stella couldn’t spot double anything, nor by the look on her face could Lucie.
‘Ponder how, given the alcohol Giles had put away at his father’s and later at his flat, he was capable of so comprehensively disposing of bloodied clothes? How did Giles travel unnoticed from Tewkesbury to London, in bloodstained clothes? And winding back, what fit twenty-six-year-old lets his elderly dad hop up to the fire with the poker? Giles took that task for himself, ergo fingerprints on the poker…’
‘A twenty-six-year-old bloke happy to nick his dad’s silverware and squeeze him for a few quid, that’s who,’ Lucie said.
‘…was hung on circumstantial evidence. Fingerprints, and that the housekeeper opened the door to him as she left for the cinema…’
‘Hung? Giles wasn’t a ham, for God’s sake.’ Lucie was getting spiteful.
‘…Let’s look at this fingerprint. It was the print for a right thumb on the poker. Giles Northcote was left-handed. Motive? Yes, Giles would inherit, but he knew that his father had willed his son got nothing until he reached thirty-five. Nine years away. Aleck Northcote was worth more to his son alive. In summary, milud, the trial was a car-crash…’
‘I skimmed the first pot-boiler that was out of the trap, Hate Father Hate Son.’ Lucie waved her leather-bound Kindle at Stella. ‘In it, Giles’s barrister, a James Dudeney, tells the author that in his teens, Giles hurt his left arm in a rowing accident on the Thames, so he learnt to compensate with his right. March never checked. Honest to God, the boneless wonders who churn out these podcast-dreadfuls never do the legwork.’ Lucie subsided into her cockpit.
‘All the same, a poker isn’t so heavy. Isn’t it likely Giles’s instinct would have been to use his left? He may not have touched the fire and if he did kill his father then it was probably in the heat of the moment,’ Stella said.
‘True, oh queen,’ Lucie said. ‘March should have got you on board. Pose an argument, counter. Get your listeners sure it’s red, then reveal it’s yellow.’
‘This murder upended every convention about how true-crime stories usually unfold.’ Roddy went on, ‘Where how a murder investigation is meant to go turns a somersault. Where each break in the investigation appears to raise more questions than it answers. Northcote’s murder is the first clue in a story that will not go the way you expect. By the end, you will learn the identity of Sir Aleck’s other visitor on that fateful winter’s night.
‘A visitor no one feared, to whom no one attributed evil. That person went to Cloisters House with only one purpose. Murder.’
More piano, then Roddy again, ‘The Distant Dead is brought to you by March Hare Productions. I’m Roddy March and you’re listening to The Distant Dead.’
‘Tosh and tosher. I bet March had no idea who did it.’ Lucie gnashed at a fig.
Roddy’s podcast did have a third-rate feel, sensational with overblown emphasis to keep the listeners’ interest. Recalling his scared expression, his struggle to speak as he died in her arms, Stella realized she’d wanted his podcast to be a legacy, a great thing to remember him by.
Janet had said Stella’s experience was traumatic, but Stella diminished it; lots of people went through much worse. Suddenly she felt crushed by a terrible sensation in her abdomen, raw grief for a man she’d hardly known. At the end of the only episode of his podcast that there would ever be, Stella felt as if Roddy March had died all over again. Now was only silence.
Chapter Seventeen
December 1940
‘A thirty-tonner hit three shops and pulverized the flats above.’ The ARP warden let them through the safety barrier. ‘No casualties, but then what happens? The all-clear goes and that bloody thing only smashes into the hole.’
‘Fatalities?’ Cotton gazed down at the mangle of twisted metal scattered with bricks and burnt timber nose first in the crater. Only the swan was visible of a Swan Vesta advert on the side of the 27 bus which had never reached Highgate.
‘Female clippie, four passengers at the front downstairs, a babbie and the mother on the top deck…’ Whatever the warden said next was lost as a District line train clattered over the viaduct.
Cotton reckoned more died in blackout accidents, fires and structural collapse than by direct hits from the Luftwaffe’s Blitzkrieg.
‘Hey you.’ The warden was distracted by an Express Dairies float negotiating the edge of what must be a twenty-foot drop. Cotton felt triumph as the float made it to the other side and, engine whining, trundled away. ARPs were jumped-up idiots acting like police.
Maple worked for Express Dairies.
Cotton and Shepherd trod across rubble and around the corner to Turnham Green station. They dodged women, some lugging string bags that bulged with tins of ham, vegetables, parcels of meat, others peering into shop windows. Some of the fronts were rimmed with cotton wool snow and adorned with tinsel, baubles and plaster Father Christmases. It could be a usual winter’s day before Christmas. Cotton had forgotten what was usual. This year June was having Christmas lunch with her fiancé’s family, it would be just him and Agnes. At least they would all have Aladdin together.
The J. Sainsbury next door to a boarded-up violin-maker’s said Business as Usual. Agnes said those three words summed up the British spirit. Cotton didn’t fight her, although his notion of the British spirit was that represented by the looters who stripped homes bare like dogs tearing at a carcass.
Beyond, a dolls’ hospital was intact as, Cotton was thankful to see, was Bright’s Tailoring. In the last months he’d lost count of the times he’d gone to see a suspect or interview a victim, only to be directed to the morgue.
After the glassy stares of the – presumably ‘cured’ – dolls in the window of the dolls’ hospital, came the life-size manikins displayed at the tailor’s. All done up in garments dearer than anything Cotton could afford.
Since he was the one who found the ticket, Cotton let Shepherd take the lead.
A black cat with white-booted paws at the foot of a dummy in an evening dress scrutinized them through the glass before curling back into a ball.
A man in a Sunday best suit was switching the sign to ‘Closed’, but seeing them, pulled open the door.
‘How can I help, gentlemen?’ His grizzled hair was thinning, deep lines scored sallow cheeks either side of a smiling mouth.
‘Mr Bright?’ Shepherd reached for his badge, while Cotton guessed from Bright’s overeager manner that Bright already knew they were police. He ushered them in and shut the door.
The low-ceilinged room was lit by strong bulbs in a line behind the counter, like an actor’s dressing room in the pictures. A ceramic bar fire glowed in one corner. Along one wall bolts of material were slotted into pigeonholes. Cotton decided that the rack of dresses and suits shrouded in tissue paper could be bodies in an abattoir. Agnes would say, you would, wouldn’t you.
‘Is there a problem?’ The tailor, needlepoint-neat, his hair cut short back and sides, regarded them over wire spectacles. Cotton saw a resemblance to Humphrey Bogart and had no doubt that women – Maple? – did too.
‘Can I see your papers?’ Shepherd’s no-messing tone suggested he too was on the case. He shot his cuffs, perhaps to appear less off the peg, and to let Bright know if he’d murdered Maple Greenhill, they were on to him.
‘I’m a legal Jewish refugee. I came here in 1933, we saw what was coming with Hitler even before he was made chancellor. I am British now.’ He spoke with a lilting foreign accent that Cotton found pleasant to the ear.
Cotton caught the name on the ID that Bright produced. Joseph Ivan Bright. Cotton’s mother had been Jewish which made Cotton and his brother Joe Jewish too. But she’d drummed into them that they were Londoners, born and bred. Cotton’s Uncle John was in the Black Shirts. He’d been decapitated leaning out of a train window shouting obscenities on the day war was declared. God’s ways weren’t so mysterious after all.
‘Who is the owner of the item of clothing referred to on this ticket?’ Shepherd asked stiffly. He slid the ticket across the counter.
Bright lifted his glasses and examined it. ‘Ah yes. A tear in the sleeve. She caught it on a hook, as I remember. Unfortunately, she blamed it on the material, but it had torn, it was not frayed. As I do, I mended it without fuss. Her husband collected it, as a surprise, so he didn’t have the ticket.’ Bright added, ‘After I mended the rip, you couldn’t tell.’
Cotton liked a man who made no bones about his skills. Northcote was like that. Cotton’s mother used to say, if you couldn’t stand up for yourself in a high wind you deserved to be knocked over. Bright wasn’t exaggerating, the coat had looked good as new.
‘Who was her husband?’ Was he Maple’s fancy man?
Before Bright could answer they were all startled by the bell above the door as a woman, trim in an astrakhan coat like the coat in the window, burst into the shop.
‘Mr Bright, I was sure I’d missed you. I’ve searched high and low for that damned ticket, turned the house…’ Seeing Shepherd and Cotton the woman faltered. ‘Do excuse me, I didn’t see you had customers.’
‘How extraordinary, madam, we have it.’ Bright held up the ticket. ‘It is not lost. The police have this minute returned it.’
‘The police?’ The woman blanched. Cotton was used to people looking guilty when they discovered he was a police officer, but rarely were they of this woman’s class, nudging forty and a couple of rungs below royalty.
No one was too wealthy to murder. Cotton paid the brim of his hat through his fingers as a theory formed.
Wife discovers husband has mistress. Wife arranges to meet Maple in the empty house and, trusting, Maple goes there. Sensing no threat, she turns her back and is strangled from behind. In the struggle the ticket falls out of wife’s handbag. That didn’t work, Cotton interrupted himself. Ticket in pocket. Husband has no idea when he picks up the coat and, on a whim, thinking Maple would look fine in it, gives it to her. Maple finds ticket, so knows coat belonged to her lover’s wife. He’s married. Knowing she will die, Maple tucks ticket in coat cuff to tell police that her killer is the wife. Wife sees Maple is wearing her coat, goes mad, kills her.
‘Who might you be, madam?’ Cotton stepped forward.
‘Inspector, this is my best customer.’ Bright came around the counter, talking as if they were meeting at a tea party. ‘This is Mrs Northcote.’
Cotton heard the woman’s name and his theory fell apart.
*
‘I’m too old for pantomimes.’ June was sulking over her mushroom soup. ‘Gerry took me to the new Humphrey Bogart at the Warner cinema, a proper grown-up picture .’
‘For goodness’ sake, June, proper grown-ups can be kiddies sometimes. Try not to be ungrateful, Poppet, these days, we’re none of us too old for a good laugh.’ Agnes laid her hand over Cotton’s on what she’d declared was a lovely white tablecloth. ‘I’m in heaven, Georgie.’
George’s Christmas treat – Blitzmas the papers were calling it – the matinee of Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp at the Coliseum followed by a slap-up meal in Lyons’ on Oxford Street – the Mountview Café, no less – hadn’t impressed June. His girl was growing up. Did his little girl have secrets like Maple Greenhill? Not likely, and the diamond ring on her finger wasn’t a Woolworth’s bargain.
All afternoon, diverted by the pantomime, falling about at jokes about air-raid sirens and tripping over the bed in blackout, Cotton had been briefly transported from Maple’s murder. It was back with a vengeance and, appetite gone, Cotton forced his soup down.
‘Penny for ’em, love?’ Agnes was tipping her soup plate away to get the last drop. The soup tasted bland and watery – her calling it heaven put a gloss on it, she could make better at home. ‘It’s that poor Maple, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry.’ He shouldn’t mention work when they were having a night on the town.
They’d been married a month when Agnes had persuaded him to tell her about his day. He’d wanted to keep from her the man’s rotting body strung from his bedroom door in an Earl’s Court mansion block; the two kiddies gassed by their father because his wife was leaving him. Cotton didn’t want Agnes to have in her mind the pictures which haunted his.
‘If I’m going to be a proper wife, I must share everything,’ she’d insisted.
In twenty-two years of marriage, Agnes had listened to stories of murder, suicide, traffic collisions, violent burglaries. She’d walked with him into his seamy underworld. Agnes truly was his better half.
So, when Cotton told Agnes about Maple Greenhill, he’d left nothing out. How Maple had lain twisted on a rug, her arm flung wide as if, even as her soul left her, she was pointing to her murderer. He had told Agnes about the mending ticket, the coat, the lighter. He stopped as something else occurred
‘He had scratches on his arms, from gardening, he said.’ Cotton wiped his hands down his face, ‘Aleck’s never been a gardener, he always says it’s Julia with the green fingers.’
‘Shocking. Poor lamb, she must have fought for her life. Now it’s her mum and dad I feel for. Those pictures in the Express showed her as a nice-looking girl. If I lost June that would be me done with. I’d tell the Nazis, do what you like you can’t hurt me.’ Agnes brushed the back of her hand on June’s cheek.
‘I can look after myself and it won’t be me being strangled, I’m not a prostitute.’ June recoiled from Agnes’s hand.
It seemed to Cotton the room fell silent at the word. But with the quartet – playing some Fats Waller tune – and the murmur of other diners, no one had heard. He expected, too, that the pillars encircled with lily-shaped lamps and circular lights in the high ceiling acted as baffles.
‘Maple wasn’t a prostitute.’ He was patient. ‘She was engaged to her sweetheart like you are.’
‘Not like me at all.’ June clattered down her spoon. ‘If Gerry took me to a dance hall, he’d walk me to my door.’
They looked at their laps while the Nippy took their plates away and brought the main course: Empire beef, potatoes and carrots. Then Christmas pudding with carrots substituting fruit. Agnes said, ‘Everything tastes better when someone else has cooked it.’
Cotton could only think that one thing worse than failing to solve a murder was when you had solved it and the solution was worse than not knowing.
‘We should go. I don’t want to be caught in the St Martin’s Lane shelter, it smells.’ June broke into his thoughts. Cotton waved for the bill.
‘You always say the solution to the murder is there if you do the legwork.’ Agnes might have second sight.
‘If I forget, you remind me.’ Cotton smiled at his wife. Never in his life had it occurred to him to have an affair. Agnes was everything.
‘Dad.’ Out in the cold street, taking his arm, June gave him a sheepish smile. ‘Gerry never takes me to places like this, he says now we’re engaged
we’ve got to save.’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thanks for a lovely evening.’
‘Gerry’s a sensible chap. ’Sides, if it’s not down to your old dad to treat his two best girls once in a while, what’s he for?’
‘That’s better.’ Agnes did up her coat. Cotton saw the tear in her sleeve from a nail. Since she’d joined the AFS, Agnes neglected herself. There was that astrakhan coat in Bright’s window. Hang the expense. It must be hers.
Waiting on the Underground platform, already packed with shelterers, Cotton kept his family close. Some of the public were no better than the Nazis.
On the occasions when scraps of cloth or a stray button solved a murder, Cotton had raised his pint of London Pride to there being one villain fewer in London. Never more than now did Cotton wish he could be Cameron or Tither working in the coroner’s officers’ cosy room at Hammersmith’s mortuary. Or that Maple’s murderer was a vicar in the grip of the devil. Nothing in his career had prepared George Cotton for what he had to do next.
Chapter Eighteen
2019
Stella
At a prearranged meeting, arrive first. At the moment the nominal enters, before they adopt a social mask, watch them. In that flicker of a second, they will inevitably reveal themselves. Stella’s dad had taught her to choose a position with a wide-angle view that included entrances and other exits.
Stella arrived at 9.50 a.m. at the Abbey Gardens teashop and bagged a corner seat with a view of the door and the servery. Everything had returned to normal: tables and chairs at which sat customers eating pastries and drinking coffee. Occasional snatches of conversation told Stella that only one topic was being discussed. The murder of Roddy March.
Stella had been surprised to discover that, since the abbey was closed, the teashop had remained open. But Janet said it wasn’t a crime scene and besides, her team had taken statements from all the Death Café attendees.
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