The first thing Stella saw was a mortuary slab.
Chapter Forty-Seven
2019
Jack
Gone to see Felicity.
When he read Stella’s text Jack was plunged into doom. He’d hoped their time in bed meant Stella and he were a team but now she’d gone to tea with Felicity by herself, he could have gone too. Did Stella regret the sex, and saying she loved him? Was she scared she’d lost the space she’d found in Tewkesbury? If he rang, Stella might feel pestered. She’d think he was desperate. Which he was.
In anguish, keeping out of the lamplight, Jack wandered the abbey close. The rain had stopped, the grass was soggy and soon his shoes were wet through. He told himself he was looking for Andrea the gardener, although she wouldn’t work in the dark. One, two three. He reached the wall of Cloisters House. Two more steps. Through the gate into the garden.
Jack reasoned that if he watched Stella through a window, it could help the case. She need never know.
The house was a hundred or so feet away, the top windows were unlit, but a lamp glowed on the ground floor. His heart skipped. Stella was in there.
Jack shut the gate and, aiming the beam of his Maglite down, trod carefully over a carpet of dead plants and leaves. Stakes stuck into the soil every which way seemed to tilt in the torchlight. The garden was a wasteland. Felicity, retired pathologist and Death Café host, didn’t have green fingers.
He tripped against something hard. It was a raised bed supported by sleepers. Jack saw he’d done Felicity a disservice – he’d was in her veg patch. His torch picked out a compost bin and a water butt beside a couple of cold frames. It recalled the garden at his boarding school, a refuge from the bully who’d nearly broken his spirit. Skirting a lavender bush, Jack found a grave.
Not a grave. Since his mother was murdered, death was Jack’s default. He gave himself a break, it was just that the plot looked the right length and breadth. Weeds and clods of grass lay piled to one side, the soil was freshly dug. Adjusting his beam, Jack saw a spade under the lavender bush. He pulled it out and dropped it.
It was streaked with blood.
Chapter Forty-Eight
2019
Stella
It didn’t get much more suspicious than having your own morgue, a rack of cutting and sawing implements, specimen jars and a body freezer. Stella paused to wave to Felicity still in the hall; the tall willowy figure elegant in the lamplight didn’t wave.
Her wound properly throbbing now, Stella hastened up the high street and turned into the abbey close. She picked her way through the puddles on the grass to the back gate of Cloisters House. She needed to be sure Andrea was not in Felicity’s garden waiting to pounce. Now she was equally, if not more, worried for Andrea. With pathologist’s skills – and a slab – Felicity could slice, dice and dispose of Andrea in an hour. Stella heard voices.
‘What did you do?’ The distress was animal.
‘Chopped off the head, if you must know.’
Stella crept into the garden and stopped short.
‘I’ll swing for you, I swear.’ Jack.
‘Why don’t you?’ It was Andrea.
Stella saw torchlight, broken by foliage, dart this way and that. Desperate to get to Jack, she tore forward and stumbled on a twist of vegetation. Momentum carried her on, then her legs gave way. She landed on her knees in a pool of light.
‘Oh, look who’s risen from the dead,’ Andrea said.
‘Stella, oh my God, Stella.’ Jack knelt down and clasped her. So tight it rather hurt.
‘Ow,’ Stella managed at last.
‘I thought she’d killed you too,’ Jack choked.
‘What do you mean “too”?’ Andrea barked.
‘You have blood on your spade.’ Jack helped Stella to her feet.
‘I told you, it was a pigeon. Felicity’s horrible cat mauled it then left it dying. I had to finish it off. Please could you stop shining that in my face?’
Andrea did look distressed about the pigeon, but she might be a good actor. Lucie said her readers complained about graphic descriptions of animals’ deaths in her articles, but couldn’t get enough human murder.
‘We shouldn’t be here,’ Stella muttered to Jack.
‘I’m the gardener, I’m allowed,’ Andrea said.
‘Not at seven at night,’ Stella said. ‘Besides, we need to talk.’
‘I told you and your reporter sidekick I’m not playing your detective games.’ Andrea stomped out of the garden.
Jack and Stella chased after to where Stella knew Andrea kept her bike. In time to see Andrea opening the door of a white van.
‘When you tell us the truth, we’ll leave you alone, Andrea.’ Stella stood by the bonnet. ‘You might start with why you stopped on a lane the night before Roddy was murdered?’
‘You were lucky I didn’t tear you limb from limb.’ Andrea slumped onto a stone coffin by the abbey’s south wall. She didn’t look capable of being rude, let alone bashing a pigeon with a spade.
‘I think we have exposed a charade. Andrea Rogers, chief exec of an IT company, is undone.’ Jack was being unnecessarily dramatic.
‘Are you OK?’ Stella asked Andrea.
‘The bastard robbed me,’ Andrea groaned.
‘Felicity?’ Stella recalled the wages, paid reluctantly, in soaked notes.
‘Her? She always robs me, tight bitch,’ Andrea said. ‘No, Roddy. The rest is true, I did meet him online. I wanted a mature man who didn’t show off and demand endless sex. A life companion, someone to love me.’
‘Instead you got March. And for this bloke you found on an app, you gave up Geo-Space, a software company making CAD 3D films for estate agents, developers and architects.’ Jack sounded superior. OK, Stella hadn’t got him off an app, but as Lucie said, she’d got him by lurking on a dark night near where his mother was murdered.
‘We know you’re selling a house you only bought six months ago which was the home of pathologist Sir Aleck Northcote. It was where his wife hanged herself.’ Jack was
