The Distant Dead

to pick the lock. Jack was ready to faint when he finally emerged onto the landing and risked a look over the banisters. No one. He would not be trapped a second time. He rightly guessed that a third door on the landing was a lavatory. Inside, he stood on the pan and succeeded in thrusting up the window sash. He came face to face with a rusting pipe and a twenty-foot drop onto slimy concrete below. Was whoever might be waiting for him more dangerous than the pipe and the concrete? He had only to think of Roddy March and Clive the Clockmaker to know the answer.

Jack got stuck halfway out of the window. It took all his gymnastic initiative to wriggle through the aperture. He gripped the pipe for stability, not cheered by noticing it shifted slightly. It was raining heavily and although he was cold, he welcomed the stream of water soaking his face and neck.

Jack nerved himself to let go of the window sill and relinquish himself to the soil pipe. He whispered a prayer to any god out there who might listen as he made sense of something fixed to the wall of the house. A ladder.

When he reached the ground, he raced down a paved garden to the back gate. It was locked and, fresh out of patience with picking locks, Jack took a run at the wall. On his second attempt, he got a grip and hauled himself over. He landed badly on the other side. He was in an alleyway. It took him to a road which in turn led to the high street. Blinking back rainwater, Jack looked into the window of Phonz Cheep, the accessory shop beneath Stella and Lucie’s flat.

‘Is it OK for me to come up?’ Jack spoke into the intercom. ‘No worries if not.’ Lie, damn lie.

‘I’ve missed you,’ Stella answered.

I’ve missed you. Splashing about on the pavement in the neon light of Phonz Cheep, Jack was Gene Kelly.

Chapter Forty-Four

2019

Stella

I’ve missed you. The words had tumbled out. Now Stella said, ‘Let me get a towel for your hair.’

‘Have you?’ Jack had heard it then.

‘Yes.’ Unable to think what else to say, Stella busied herself making tea.

‘Jackie said to ignore you if you refused to let us help. But seriously, I will head off if that feels more comfortable. I mean, Bev could stay perhaps?’ Jack had his brave face.

‘Don’t.’ In the lounge, Stella resumed her corner on the sofa; Lucie’s cockpit was too Lucie for comfort. Seeing Jack going to the armchair, Stella heard herself implore, ‘Please sit next to me.’

‘Stella, I’ve found something.’ Jack took the other corner, Stanley leapt onto his lap. He held a USB stick. ‘It comes with a “creep you out” warning.’

‘OK.’ Unsure she was ready to be creeped out, Stella put her laptop in the space between them on the sofa and inserted the stick.

‘Lucie gave me and Bev tasks.’ Scrubbing his head with the towel, Jack’s voice was muffled.

‘She shouldn’t have.’ Once Stella would have resented Lucie taking over a case but since living with her, she didn’t mind. However, she didn’t like Lucie bossing Beverly. Jack could handle himself. She listened, incredulous, as Jack outlined what Lucie had asked them to do.

‘I had no trouble checking out Andrea’s bedsit, as you’d guess.’ Jack peered out from under the towel. ‘Bev can’t come to harm in the abbey gift shop and she’s a sensible woman.’

‘Roddy was murdered in the abbey, possibly by Joy. We should stick together. And if she was that sensible, Bev wouldn’t have broken into Northcote’s London house.’ Without thinking Stella batted Jack’s leg. ‘Nor would you.’

‘We didn’t break in, we found the key.’ Jack finger-combed his hair. ‘But you are right. Stella, can you forgive me?’

‘No need.’ Stella clicked on the USB stick, labelled ‘Jack’s Contraband’ – Jack liked to walk on the wild side. A geometrical shape appeared on the screen, spun around, then resolved into their lounge. There was Lucie’s cockpit, the pouffe. Stanley’s bed was empty. ‘I don’t get it, is this some kind of graphic software?’

‘I wish.’ Jack folded the towel. ‘It’s a CAD scan of this flat. Like that virtual tour with Roddy March in the film.’

‘No, that’s not now.’ She realized the papers on Lucie’s cockpit were pages from her putative true-crime book on The Playground Murders in Hammersmith and not the biography of Northcote which Stella had been reading when Jack called.

‘Did you get this off the letting agents? Is the flat on the market?’ Stella had been putting off whether to extend the lease after Lucie left. Had the decision been taken out of her hands?

‘I found it on Andrea’s computer.’ Jack’s face was serious.

‘Andrea was living here before us?’ Stella fought off panic.

‘It wasn’t scanned for an estate agent.’ Jack directed the cursor to the left of the room. See, there’s your rucksack by the coffee table. And isn’t that Stanley’s Mr Ratty?’

‘You’re saying Andrea broke in here?’

‘It would seem so,’ Jack said.

‘Is this some kind of warning?’

‘If she planned to send it you, yes. But more likely she was doing a recce. This gives her offline access to every inch of the flat.’

Jack got Stella to open the other files in the folder. It took them round the abbey. Stella clicked along the ambulatory to the chapel with the tomb of the starved monk where her heart rate doubled. She could almost see Roddy’s body slumped against the plinth. Jack asked Stella to check the other two files, but the interiors meant nothing. If the people who lived there were in any danger, they had no way to warn them.

‘Whoever killed Roddy and Clive was calculating, even if they committed the murders on impulse. They left no clues and, since the police are charging those boys in Evesham, the real murderer has got away with it,’ Stella said.

‘I agree, and right now Andrea is my prime suspect,’ Jack said. ‘She had reason to