The Distant Dead, Lesley Thomson [simple e reader .TXT] 📗

Stella was reprieved by March’s phone, the ringtone a haunting electronic tune which he allowed to play out as, spinning on his heel, he answered the call out in the ambulatory.

‘Wotcha…’

Stella stuffed the card in her fleece pocket. She was interested in the concept of a cadaver tomb. She looked closely at the starved monk. She no longer saw a collection of surfaces with crevices into which she must flick her brush. The emaciated body lying on the plinth was indeed teeming with creatures: lizards, snails, the mouse – Jack wouldn’t think them vermin – and, although the stone had weathered over six centuries, it had originally been carved to represent decay. Stella caught March’s conversation.

‘…when do you start?… Yeah, so what did you expect, planting cabbages isn’t rocket science… Wait, what do you mean you’re here? Go outside. Now. Christ, I’m not flirting, she’s just a cleaner and no, actually she’s not. Her name’s Beverly… I’m on my…’

March’s voice faded. Stella heard the boom of the north porch door shutting. Twice.

Just a cleaner. Over the decades, she’d grown used to those whose carpets she vacuumed and toilets she sluiced discounting her; it was almost worse when they treated her as a friend and told her their problems.

Whoever March was talking to had been in the abbey. Perhaps one of the other cleaners, there were three on today. But he’d ordered whoever it was to leave and the team’s shift wouldn’t be finished for an hour. Likely it was a jealous partner. Stella felt for whoever it was, Jackie reckoned people were jealous when the other person was distant and ungiving, it made the jealous person think others got what they didn’t. Since Stella had been in Tewkesbury, this had made sense. Jack got jealous. Was Stella ungiving? Whatever, Stella did know that jealousy was a scary emotion, it could lead to murder.

Once a woman of action and super-efficiency, Stella Darnell, fifty-three last birthday, would have been impatient at having to consider the ‘age and fragility’ of an object when cleaning. Her job was to make things look as good as new. She would have been horrified to abandon usual standards. But nowadays Stella understood fragility; she didn’t require a cadaver tomb to warn her about the reality of death.

Stella retracted the handle of the spider-web brush and packed it in her trolley. Never mind if the likes of Roddy March dubbed her just a cleaner. She hoped that if she looked after the abbey, it would look after her.

*

Stella wandered the streets in the village of Winchcombe, steeped in nostalgia for past times laced with grief for all she had lost. In the grounds of Sudeley Castle she unclipped Stanley’s lead and threw him a tennis ball. He quickly tired of the game, leaving her to fetch it herself.

Stella was recovering from what she thought of as an emotional melt-down. After years of working at full tilt to keep her grief at the sudden death of her father seven years before at bay, she had been engulfed by it. She had upped sticks from her London life – running her cleaning company, the man she loved – and had retreated to Gloucestershire.

Winchcombe was forty minutes from Tewkesbury. The last time she’d been there was with Jack. A different life. Stella had to admit – idiot – that she had hoped to find him there. Stanley had too, perhaps, because when they passed what had been a mean tumble-down cottage squeezed between larger buildings in a back lane – the scene of a murder that she and Jack had solved – he’d strained towards the door. Now adorned with hanging baskets and a slate name plate, it had become a Cotswold dream home.

On Abbey Terrace, the other ‘murder house’ caused Stella’s heart take a dive. She and Jack had fantasized about living there. His kids would join them, Jack had said. ‘We’re not put off by a body in the hall.’ As they passed now, Stanley showed no interest, as if, like Stella, he’d never believed in the dream.

Stella was unfazed by murder; it was life and all it threw at her from which she shrank. The business of a live-in relationship, all the day-to-day stuff. Then one day you die.

Dusk was gathering as Stella trundled the van along the Old Brockhampton Road. She wasn’t expected anywhere, but as she disliked driving in the countryside at night she knew she should soon set off for Tewkesbury. But she had one more visit.

Angling her van onto a verge by a five-bar gate, Stella released Stanley from his jump seat and, checking for vehicles, let him out. Stanley, who all day had been as sluggish as she felt, shot out, wriggled under the gate and galloped off across a ploughed field. In the dwindling light, his champagne-coloured coat was a smudge against the ploughed soil. Stella climbed the gate and stumbled along a claggy furrow. No panic, she knew exactly where he’d gone.

Crow’s Nest stood in the middle of the next field at the end of a track. When she and Jack had stayed there, initially Stella – rarely afraid – was spooked by the darkness and silence. A townie, every field looked identical and, for the boss of a cleaning company, too muddy. Regardless, with Jack there, Crow’s Nest had soon felt like home. She had come to see the specificity in wild flowers, the hedgerows and clusters of grasses. She could appreciate blackthorn, beech, teazels and sedum.

That was then. No longer the boss of a cleaning company, now she was in the countryside alone and again she saw only fields and mud.

When Stella reached the track, she found Stanley rigidly staring into the gloom. She saw why. He did not recognize where he was.

In place of the ramshackle mock-Tudor house with a sagging roof and rotting timbers was a glass and steel cube with wrap-around balconies.

Stella’s ghosts had fled. She