Stella sniffed musty air, centuries-old dirt that no cleaner could attack. Aside from the Vulpex liquid soap she’d used to wash the floor of the chapel there was another smell. Citrus. Gifted with hyper-olfactory powers, Stella recognized cologne. She’d cleaned enough people’s bathrooms to have encountered Versace’s Dylan Blue. The scent was cut with another. A coppery odour, like old pennies.
The monk looked unchanged. Vaguely, Stella expected more of his emaciated body to have rotted and the creatures crawling over his ribcage to have nibbled away more of his flesh.
The body lay face up, blood pooled through the combat jacket to the stone floor, where a saturated lock of hair glistened. His arm was outstretched, his forefinger pointed at Stella. His face was twisted in a terrible grimace not unlike the carved bosses in the nave.
The podcaster’s assertion that someone wanted to murder him had not been a publicity stunt. Someone had murdered him.
Roddy March’s finger twitched. He was alive.
‘Roddy, oh, Roddy, talk to me. What happened?’ Stella knelt down, oblivious to the blood soaking into her trousers and put her face close to his. She touched the bloodied patch on his chest. Hardly a nick, how was he bleeding so profusely? It was an exit wound. She dare not turn him over – even if she could, Roddy was heavily built. Stella dabbed clumsily at her phone, fingers, slick with blood, sliding on the screen – 989… 96… 999.
‘Ambulance, police. Please be quick. Please.’ Stella described the situation. Good in a crisis she answered the operator’s questions decisively. He was breathing faintly, his airwaves were open. She dare not try to get him on his side. ‘I think he’s been stabbed in the back.
‘His lips are moving.’ Stella stopped being calm. ‘What? Roddy, tell me. Who did this?’ Dimly, she noted she might ask Roddy for a message to his loved ones instead of who had stabbed him in the back. Stella pulled off her jacket and shirt and feeling it pointless, pressed the bundle on the exit wound in Roddy’s chest.
‘…Cah… ca… wo… my…’ His eyes were fixed on Stella, wild, his pupils enlarged. He looked terrified.
‘Car? Wo my.’ Stella felt stupid, it couldn’t be that hard.
‘C-c-chh…’
‘Cawomy.’ Stella imitated Roddy’s first attempt. Jack would say don’t overthink. ‘Chamomile’. The tea Joy had given Roddy at the Death Café. ‘Was your drink poisoned?’ Crazy, no poison would cause Roddy to bleed out.
‘Chhh.’
Stella pressed on the wound; blood was coming through the jacket.
‘Is this a message for… for…?’ Stella remembered the person who had followed him into the abbey yesterday morning. ‘Someone who loves you?’
Stella leaned down to make out the expression in his eyes, but a gossamer film had turned them milky, opaque. Roddy was dead.
Chapter Ten
December 1940
The river had filled and submerged the causeway to the eyot beneath grey-greenish water. A cry pierced the silence and a V-shaped squadron of geese passed over the eyot where, the osier trade long gone, reeds grew dense and tall. The formation broke up as each bird vanished into the smoky mist.
George Cotton leant on a rail opposite the eyot. Last night the east of London had got a basinful; even from Chiswick a pall of smoke was visible. He transferred his gaze to the immediate below, but the Thames offered no comfort. The tide delivered the debris of smashed buildings and – a doll’s head drifted by – of smashed lives. Detective to the core, Cotton kept an eye out for a corpse. In winter the Thames tended to keep hold of her dead, but this was no usual December; since the Blitz nothing was the same. No season could be relied upon. He followed the eddying progress of a length of window sash, the cord trailing, and imagined that someone had once flung up the sash on a summer morning to greet a better day. Agnes called him fanciful.
Cotton had paused to take stock before returning to the house where Maple’s body had been found.
The plash of oars. From a pontoon off a garden that belonged to one of the grand houses behind emerged the bowed figure of a man seated in a rowing boat. Cotton watched as the man rowed skilfully through the channel between the eyot and the river bank. As he cleared it, he glanced across at Cotton. His BBC Home Service voice cut the chill air.
‘Lovely morning, ain’t it.’
Cotton tipped his hat in reply.
‘Nothing ruddy lovely about it.’ Shepherd was at Cotton’s elbow. ‘Not when you haven’t slept a wink.’
‘He’s alive. That’s what matters, lad.’ Cotton pushed off the rail. ‘With a young woman waiting for us to catch her murderer, our beds are a way off yet.’
Jalalpur Villa was on the corner of a terrace of three Edwardian houses, each named after towns in British India. Cotton reckoned the villa called Amritsar, where, twenty years ago, the British Army committed a massacre, could have done with a new name. Looking at Jalalpur Villa, black door shabby with the dirt that coated everything these days, Cotton felt a moment of despair.
‘This will always be a house where a young woman was murdered,’ he said.
‘I expect in, say, fifty years, no one will care,’ Shepherd said. ‘What if we don’t find him, sir?’
‘What have I said? Sunny side up, Constable.’ Cotton wasn’t confident. Since September 1939, there had been eight murders in his division. Only three solved. Two of those were women. One pushed off Hammersmith Bridge by a drunken serviceman of the ilk Aleck believed murdered Maple. He was let off and shipped out to France where he’d been hit by friendly fire – justice of a sort. The eighteen-year-old burglar who beat a pensioner to death
