Archie Young opened the front door with his key, pushed it, then stood aside for her. The WPC went in. ‘Mrs Tiler?’ she said softly. The two men followed her in.
In front of them was a small hallway with three doors opening off it and a staircase rising from it. All the doors were closed.
As with all houses that have been shut up in the summer heat, there was a strong, stuffy, stale atmosphere.
There were only three of them in the hall but it felt crowded.
Young was closing the door, but Coffin stopped him. ‘Leave it open.’
‘The wind is strong, I’m afraid it might bang.’
‘Leave it.’ He raised his voice: ‘Mrs Tiler, are you there?’
Silence.
‘She’d come now if she was,’ said the girl.
‘Perhaps not. Have you ever been frightened rigid?’
She shook her head. ‘I think I’d always manage to scream.’
The Inspector and John Coffin looked at each other. The house was silent, yet not empty.
One by one the ground floor doors were thrown open. An empty kitchen, tidy yet neglected at the same time, with half-washed milk bottles in the sink and a bag of litter by the back door. A white door with a latch closed what looked like a broom cupboard. A small dining-room where four chairs stood sentry-like round a polished table with an embroidered runner down the middle and a vase of artificial flowers placed dead centre. A fly buzzed in the window.
The sitting-room, which faced on to the front garden, was less tidy. Someone had been living here, drinking tea, eating biscuits and leaving crumbs and dirty cups around the room. A newspaper lay on the floor. Coffin picked it up. It was several days old.
Silently he handed it to Archie Young.
‘We’d better go upstairs.’
One by one, they went through the upstairs rooms. One small room was clearly used as a dumping ground for old luggage, broken furniture and clothes that seemed to have been worn so often they now had bodies of their own, thickening the legs of old trousers and wrinkling the bodices of torn cotton dresses. A second bedroom was empty except for a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. The third bedroom had a large bed and a dressing-table. The blankets and sheets had been drawn up carelessly.
There was no one in the bathroom. But towels and soap by the handbasin.
‘Not here,’ said Young blankly.
The house was empty but did not feel vacant.
Effie Fisher said suddenly, the words jerking out: ‘That door in the kitchen, it’s not a cupboard, leads to a lobby, and then there used to be a washplace with a boiler. I know these houses, my gran lives in one like it. Most people turned it into a downstairs lavatory.’
The value of local knowledge, thought Coffin, you couldn’t beat it. He gave WPC Fisher a good mark.
This time it was Coffin who opened the door, which was not even latched properly so that it swung forward at once. The inner door was not closed.
Edna Tiler hung suspended from a hook above the lavatory, a thin cord round her neck, she was sagging against the lavatory seat, her feet just brushing the floor. Beyond her was a half-opened small window.
Perhaps because of the flow of air, or possibly because of the uniquely arid summer, the body was dry and shrivelled, in a state of desiccation, almost mummified, the face brown, her hair falling free.
Suddenly Effie Fisher screamed. Edna Tiler had started to move, her feet swinging, her face turning towards them.
‘Shut the front door,’ said Coffin abruptly. ‘It’s the through draught.’
*
He waited in the garden while the investigating team came in to measure and photograph, and while the police surgeon undertook a first examination.
He paced slowly up and down the garden path, wishing, not for the first time, that he had not given up smoking. Across the garden fence a head appeared, then the rest of the body. A sturdy, elderly woman with her head tied in a scarf. Very few women wore scarves like that now, he thought.
‘Just doing a bit of gardening,’ she said. And then, more honestly: ‘And watching to see what went on. I’m Mrs Armour.’
Coffin remained silent.
‘She’s in there, isn’t she?’
‘You mean Mrs Tiler?’
‘Yes, I mean Mrs Tiler, as you well know. Who else? She’s dead, I suppose. You needn’t say. I recognized Doc Ferguson. We all know he’s the police surgeon. Not the first time he’s been seen round here.’
That was interesting, Coffin thought, but not surprising.
‘He’s gone too, hasn’t he? Oh, go on, you needn’t worry. Found his head in a pot, didn’t you? Of course we know. You can’t keep a thing like that quiet. You don’t think she did it?’ Mrs Armour nodded towards the house.
Coffin remained impassive.
She peered in his face. ‘Don’t know you, do I? You’re new here.’
Coffin nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘What are you?’
Coffin managed an evasive answer.
She did not appreciate it. ‘You’re not talkative, I’ll say that for you.’
‘Is the black cat yours, Mrs Armour?’
‘No one’s cat. Not that sort. Likes his independence. I feed him, though.’
‘How well did you know Mrs Tiler?’
‘Not well enough. No one did. He did a power of talking when he was in the mood. Reckoned himself, he did. Especially when he got in with those theatre people.’
‘Any of them ever here?’ said Coffin alertly. The whole cast appeared before his mind’s eye as if on a film, from Little Billy to Stella Pinero herself. JoJo Bell, Charlie Driscoll, Lily Goldstone, and that unhappy young couple, Bridie and Tom. It was hard to think of them visiting in Hillington Crescent.
‘Might have been. Can’t say I ever saw them,’ said Mrs Armour as if she regretted the omission. ‘No, they didn’t have many visitors. Any visiting he did, I reckon he did elsewhere. Away from home, as you might say. Not that I would have fancied him myself
‘I see.’ He supposed she meant what he thought she did.
‘Kept herself to herself, that was Edna Tiler. Nothing against that, I like to myself. But it means you can’t help when help’s needed.’
‘And was it needed?’ asked Coffin.
‘A funny household,’ she answered obliquely. ‘I don’t sleep well, so I see things others might not see. I’m a gardener too. No garden ought to look like that one.’
It was true that there was a striking difference between the neglected Tiler garden and the flowered borders next door.
‘What do you mean, Mrs Armour?’
‘There’s a chap looking for you at the back door,’ said Mrs Armour instead of answering. She disappeared behind her own hedge, bobbing away. Apparently she had been standing on something.
The police surgeon was standing at the back door, waiting for Coffin.
‘Suicide,’ he said. ‘Probably.’
‘Only probably?’
Dr Ferguson shrugged. ‘You know how it is. Needs some more work.’
*
Shortly afterwards, after satisfying himself that all was in train, John Coffin left.
At the door, he turned to Archie Young. ‘Get the garden gone over,’ he ordered. ‘Dig it up. Spade by spade if you have to.’
As he drove away, in the garden behind him, the black cat approached the garden shed, now closed against him, and in which he had been in the habit of sleeping.
It was his territory. He was cross.
CHAPTER 5
Behind him Coffin had left a house under search and a garden about to be excavated. The days when he might have stood by and directed the investigation himself had long gone. He had been photographed by stringers for several major dailies as he left the house and that was about it. He must get back to his desk. But his strong interest remained.
As he chaired a committee, went through several significant interviews with people important to his new Force, and promised to appear
on the local TV station, London River, to discuss peace-keeping in the district (always a thorny subject since Dickens’s day and no easier to answer then than now), underneath all the time, he was thinking about the severed, the headless and so far undiscovered body, and the dead woman in Hillington Crescent.
Do names count for anything, he asked himself, and is there any significance in the way the street echoes Rillington Place of ill-fame?
Houses have histories and those histories can influence the lives of those who dwell in them, of that he was convinced, but can names affect houses?
He had a strong sense of the ramifications of the Tiler case. It was one of those cases that stretch out long fingers to touch many lives, he could feel it. Already his own had been touched by it, he was fascinated. He ought not to have been giving his mind to it, he had other responsibilities, but he found he could not stop.
There was one big question to answer first: was it suicide or murder in that house?
On the answer to that question depended others. If it was suicide, then had Mrs Tiler killed herself because she was guilty of the murder of her husband? It was a possibility that had to be considered.
The position of her body suggested she had taken her own life.
If so, and she had hanged herself because she was guilty of killing her husband, why had she done so?
Well, domestic murders were commonplace enough, and perhaps one might not have to look far for an answer. He might have beaten her, or been a drunk, or unfaithful. Or sexually exacting in a way she did not care for. Or any mixture of all these things. Coffin had enough experience to know there might never be a complete answer.
But why had she cut off his head and hands? And where was the rest of the body?
We’ve got to find the body, he told himself. And with a sigh, went back to his own labours. Then by way of reminding himself what his job meant and at the same time postponing the actual performance of it, he went to the office window to look out.
From this viewpoint, John Coffin could see the top of St Luke’s tower on one hand and the distant spire of a Hawksmoor church on the other. This part of London had always been well provided with churches.
He wondered what the tally of historic churches was in his patch? The blitz had claimed a few, but on the whole they had survived. He had an idea they would survive the neo-paganism of the end of the twentieth century.
As well as churches, he had under his jurisdiction six hospitals, two very large and one a specialist hospital for children, founded two centuries ago and now world-famous for its operations on neonates, the newly born. In addition he had four football teams, a selection of fire-fighting forces, more schools than he could count, a polytechnic and the beginnings of a university. And, of course, several art galleries and museums, their number including the Black Museum. There was an old railway, a new railway, a network of roads, and the site for an airport where excavations had uncovered several Roman warehouses and the remains of a Neolithic hunting camp, thus holding everything up while the archæologists got to work.
Accordingly, his authority crossed that of the DHSS, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of the Environment, and, since there was a Naval establishment on the patch, that of the Ministry of Defence as well.
Not monarch of all he surveyed then, but just one baron among many, and by no means the most powerful.
Far below he saw an urban fox, inhabitant of the railway embankment, slide slowly out from behind a row of dustbins belonging to the Czar of Russia public house and speed with circumspect caution across the main road and into the People’s Peace Park, the park named after no particular peace and no special people, just a generalized gesture of goodwill from the Depression years. The fox looked sleek, healthy and confident. By comparison, the old man sitting on the park bench looked derelict. Coffin thought about the statistics of the homeless living rough, the muggings, the rapes and the Dead on Arrival contained in files on his desk. He had them all, had all the figures.
He caught the arrogant flash of a ginger tail and he could imagine the rank emission marking the bushes. The old man got up and limped away.
It was really hard being a primate in this jungle, Coffin thought.
With new energy, he got down to his work. It was one way of fighting back. You didn’t have to dig in the dustbin like that fox and send out an urgent stream to define your territory.
Not a bad idea, though, he thought.
A dozen letters dictated to Celia. Three long telephone calls to colleagues. An interview with the Bishop, who was too conservative on some issues while being too radical for the district (which returned a left-wing MP yet was essentially conservative in spirit) on others, and who alarmingly told him that he would like to have been born a woman.
The Bishop had met Lætitia, knew the Frasers, Ted and Katherine Lupus, Little Billy and his parents, and had heard about the head. On which subject he seemed to feel it necessary to make an episcopal pronouncement.
‘A very strange business,’ he said. ‘The cutting off of the head makes a very strong statement.’
Yes, of death, thought Coffin.
But it turned out the Bishop meant pictorially. ‘Have you seen the Caravaggio of the Beheading of St John the Baptist?’
‘No.’ Had there been any symbolism in the delivering of the head to the church? There was a St John’s Church not so far away, but the head had come to St Luke’s, so it must have been meant. Not for him personally, he hoped. There were enough queer sides to this case as it was, without the Commander of the Force getting a severed head as a present.
After the Bishop departed, he was on his own. The afternoon sun came though the open window. With it came the smell of the Thames. Centuries of being London’s workhorse had given it a smell all its own, compounded of wet wood, coal dust and oil, and just plain dirt. No, not compounded, a vegetable growth of all those elements that could have been bottled. A dark green-brown broth. It was said to be a clean river now in which fish swam, and indeed you did see the odd angler, although it was hard to know what fish ate the bait, or who would choose to eat the fish that ate it.
In stormy weather a porpoise sometimes came as far upriver as the Tower, but Coffin did not expect to see one himself. He was not the sort of person who saw dolphins dancing, or porpoises playing.
The body could be in the river, of course, he had come across bodies in the Thames before. At the beginning of his career, one terrifying murderer had used the river as a hiding-place. But the river always delivered back its burden in the end.
He telephoned Inspector Archie Young, and being who he was, got through to the harassed young officer at once.
‘Have there been any reports of a headless body washing up along the river or in the estuary?’
‘No. I thought of that, of course, but nothing.’ Young added cautiously: ‘That’s not to say there won’t be. The river has its own way of sending bodies back. It can sometimes hang on longer than you’d think likely. And the body might have been weighted down, in which case …’ Somehow he managed to convey a shrug across the telephone lines. ‘It would turn up … sometime.’ He didn’t feel hopeful about the river, and he managed to convey this, too.
‘No, I don’t think Tiler’s body is in the river, I agree with you,’ said Coffin, answering the unspoken comment. ‘What about the garden?’
‘We’ve made a start, sir.’
‘And about Mrs Tiler? Any news from the pathologist?’ Murder or suicide, he meant.
‘Nothing yet. I’ve tried to get something but he isn’t giving.’ To his mind that was significant in itself: the chap, usually so quick, was finding it hard to come to a conclusion. ‘He might say more to you, sir.’
‘Yes.’
Coffin considered telephoning the pathologist, whom he knew, a friend from the old days. He looked at the telephone. But Bill Baines was well known for resenting an interruption in the middle of his working day.
Then Celia came in with a letter. �
�Delivered by hand. A boy. Got through everyone right up to here with no one stopping him!’ She sounded more amused than shocked.
The letter was an elegant production in a long pale blue envelope, it was inscribed in Stella’s flowing handwriting.
‘Little Billy will deliver this note. He has made himself a sort of Ganymede. Or do I mean Ariel?’ Stella had left school very young and gone straight on the stage, as Coffin knew very well, no classical education there, but the theatre had educated her. ‘Anyway, he is acting messenger. He says he knows where to find you.’ Does he indeed, thought Coffin. ‘This is to remind you about the rehearsal tonight. We start about six. I have invited a few other people. Don’t worry about food. There will be sandwiches and coffee for all. Be punctual.’
I’ll get there if I can, he muttered. Stella had never really understood about anyone’s work but her own.
At the Theatre Workshop, they were into what Stella called ‘neurotic time’: that period when the cast, their first exuberance at getting their parts at all diminished and they had had time to get nervous, begin to feel depressed, imaginative, full of small ailments and apt to quarrel. This state had not been improved by the fact that she had had to tell them earlier today that the police would be interviewing them. Perhaps she should have left it until after the rehearsal. The cast was fidgety, anyway, at having an audience, however small.
Stella had developed the habit of asking local people of standing and importance to ‘drop in’ to watch rehearsals. She knew the cast did not like this but she had a very good reason for it, as they had been told.
Lætitia Bingham was financing the theatre as a tax loss. Goodness knows if she was rich enough, but she seemed to think she was and Stella could only trust her. But it was a circulating trust; hardheaded Letty gave them only enough to be going on with and then they had to ask for more. She had enrolled unpaid trustees, of which the Lord Mayor was, ex officio, one. Mrs Fraser was there on her own account, which was a cunning move on Letty’s part because Agnes would stay even when her husband retired after his year of office. Ted Lupus as an important local figure was another trustee and Little Billy’s mother was angling to be one.
Coffin in the Black Museum Page 7