‘Well, yes.’
‘It might have been better not to.’
‘She just denied it.’
‘And you don’t think you are mistaken?’
Stella would have none of that. ‘Why do you imagine I’ve been fussing all day? I know what I saw. And Bridie was upset when she denied it. She covered up; after all, she can act, and not badly, but she couldn’t fool me. Besides, she looks ill.’
‘You don’t think she is ill?’ Going down with whatever this disease was. A virus infection, they were calling it. More reports about the epidemic were filtering on to his desk, adding to his worries. Everything pointed to the Black Museum as an important centre of the infection. The words Virus Mechanism (they seemed to merit capitals), were beginning to haunt him.
‘Not that way. In the mind.’ Stella was short.
‘Right. You leave it now, Stella. I’ll get someone to question her.’
He put the receiver down and went back to work.
It had to be a man’s crime, though. Women did not do such things.
It was only after a prickly interview with his parents that Little Billy had got permission to join his friends of the Theatre Workshop. Since it was his half-term holiday, he was a free man, so why not? But his mother was nervous of his safety, she didn’t like all these murders and there was a lot of sickness about, while his father thought if he was going to be around there so much and doing so many odd jobs as well, then he ought to get paid for it. Negotiate a rate, was his advice.
But, although absent-minded parents with their minds on other things, such as Keith Larger’s new factory and the sale of the apartment in Spain and, in his mother’s case, her new clothes for Ascot, they were also loving and indulgent, so with very little pressure from him, Billy got their permission to hang about his friends on condition he was home for supper. He would probably have gone anyway, having come to a silent compact with the au pair that if she wouldn’t say, he wouldn’t say either. He knew all about her boyfriend who worked for Ted Lupus.
For their part, the cast of Hedda Gabler were so used to his constant presence that they took him for granted. Moreover, he was useful: he would run errands, make coffee, go round to Max’s for sandwiches and cold drinks, take telephone messages and give cues if one of them wanted to run through their lines. Little Billy himself reckoned that he knew everyone’s lines and could have acted every part. In imagination he did just that. The role he preferred was, naturally, that of Hedda. The young poet Lovborg was wet.
After the breakfast coffee at Max’s it was an anxious, tense day on which the cast hung around the Workshop, avoiding the police as much as possible while trying to get support from each other.
Little Billy was the silent, interested spectator at several uneasy interviews. He watched from behind a piece of scenery (the dark porcelain stove of the Tesman drawing-room, Act One, Hedda Gabler) while Stella had a short but worried talk with Ted Lupus. As far as Billy could follow, Ted was explaining how the building operations would be held up while the police investigation went on, but he would make up for lost time as soon as he was permitted. Gloomily, Ted expressed the hope that he would not lose some of his best workers because of their inherited dislike of the police.
‘People round here don’t like being questioned, Miss Pinero,’ Billy heard him say. ‘Can’t say I like it myself.’ He sounded depressed.
Shortly after this, Billy carried a chair for Stella to sit on while she took a long telephone call from Letty Bingham in New York. Mrs Bingham was flying back to take charge. He heard that much before Stella glared at him and he left.
Charlie Driscoll was heard consulting JoJo as Equity rep and Lily Goldstone, who was well up in these things, about the legal services due to Equity members if arrested. He gave Little Billy, who was helping the stage manager with her props by moving the bookcase from Act Two from one spot to another, a stern look saying, Hop it, you. Billy moved away behind the bookcase where he could still hear and not be seen.
Resting here, and chewing an apple, he heard JoJo on the office telephone talking to her homeopathic doctor, and Ted Lupus having a conversation with his wife. All was grist to his mill.
Later, carrying lettuce sandwiches in for JoJo, the boy observed Bridie and Will muttering in a corner. He met Bridie’s troubled eyes and wished he hadn’t. Better give them a wide berth in future. Hear no evil, see no evil, he thought.
Everyone saw him, no one saw him.
For some time now, Little Billy had been uneasy himself. It had been unwise to say he knew who killed Peter Tiler. Let himself get carried away there, he had, but it had been stupid. He considered talking to his father and decided against it. Go straight to police. Speak to John Coffin tomorrow. After all, he, Billy, was an important witness, he had helped find the head in the urn.
Slowly the theatre emptied. People had hung around for company and because they were miserable, but now, one by one or in groups, they were drifting off.
Because of the heat following a period of rain, a white mist was growing up as evening came on. Nearest the river it was dense.
Little Billy made his way home through it with his mind on the sausages and chips that Karen, the au pair, had promised him for his supper. He felt a bit queasy actually, not really up to sausages. He had a really bad headache, too.
As he turned towards the river, passing an old factory in the process of being reconstructed into luxury maisonettes, he thought he heard footsteps behind him. They seemed to keep pace with him. Well, he could guess who it might be.
Not really frightened, he slid behind a large builders’ skip filled to overflowing with rubbish. He crouched there, eyes on the ground, waiting for the feet to pass.
The footsteps came on. He could see the feet beneath the edge of the skip. High heels. A woman.
Then he realized that he was very frightened, because it wasn’t who he thought it was behind him. And he knew those shoes. This person was very difficult to protect himself from. This person had power.
Feeling sick, he decided he must hide. He knew a hiding-place.
CHAPTER 10
The unwinding of the case began at a time when Little Billy had just gone into hiding but before his parents knew he was missing. Before Bridie and Will had been questioned, but when tension, even anger was growing between them.
Most major investigations reach this point, a climax, from which they gradually unwind. Those that do not are the failures, the cases where the file is never closed.
In this case, now known in the press as the Spinnergate Murders, the process began in a bedsitting-room overlooking the river. Not a smart room, but with a cosiness that reflected the tenant. Pink curtains with a matching frilly bedcover, a fluffy bedside mat of some unidentified longhaired animal, and a comfortable armchair in front of a large television set. There was scent on the air, a strongly floral smell with a lot of rose and a touch of hyacinth. The owner of all this was sitting at her dressing-table, also well frilled, wearing a satin housecoat with fluffy mules on her feet. Such an outfit had represented luxury to her as a teenager and still did, although she was, in many ways, a highly sophisticated lady.
She was talking to herself. She was also putting mascara on her lashes.
‘Oh, you do make me laugh, Paulie.’ But she was not laughing, conspicuously not laughing, not at all. ‘You do have silly thoughts.’
Pauline Cochran, a woman not known to John Coffin, although he had her name on a list somewhere, but known to a number of people connected with the case.
She sat back, studying her face in the glass on her dressing-table. ‘I’m not sure if this mascara does anything for me.’ It was silvery blue, tipping her lashes with bright colour. She put her head on one side. ‘Paulie, you know you’ve got to say. To someone.’ She put on another layer of mascara to see if that improved things, her lashes looked like a fly’s legs now, thick and iridescent. Not bad. ‘The truth is, you’d rather not, wouldn’t you? Let’s be honest.’ S
he held out her hand to see how her nail varnish was holding up. The deep rose tips seemed unscratched. ‘You know what your mother would say? Keep your nose out of it, that’s what Mum would say.’ She had erected her mother, now dead, into a sort of oracle figure, although in life she had never consulted her at all. ‘I mean, the police aren’t exactly a girl like you’s best friend.’ But curiosity and a kind of obstinacy drove her on.
She finished her make-up job, then dressed to go out. She did not have a telephone in her room, but there was a pay-phone in the hall which all the tenants used when it was working.
‘Amelia? There’s something I think you ought to know.’
Amelia Marr, the proprietress of an establishment of discreet ill-fame in a street near the Tube station, listened. Her taste in rooms ran to blue with touches of gold because that was welcoming and pleasing was her trade. ‘Oh dear. Are you sure, Paulie?’
‘’Course I’m not sure. Not being a detective and an identifier of dead bodies rolled into one, but I think it could be her. As soon as I heard about all those dead women being found, I thought: One of those could be her.’ The district grapevine had worked fast. ‘I bet I’m right. Mind you, I don’t know which one.’
‘But I thought she said she was going back home to Durham?’
‘That’s what she said, but I don’t think she ever went. I’ve still got her pale mink stole she lent me to go to Les Mis’ in.’ They were a classy lot, Mrs Marr’s girls, and liked a musical with a bit of social comment. ‘And I know she’d have come back for that.’
‘I think you’re right, dear.’
‘I know I am. So what do we do?’
‘Leave it to me, dear,’ said Mrs Marr. ‘I’ll put my thinking cap on.’
Not much thinking was required, and although it nearly broke her heart-to cooperate with them, she telephoned the police.
‘Not that the young CID chap I spoke to was much use,’ she said later that day to Mimsie Marker, everyone’s friend and universal confidante. ‘But I suppose he took it in. In my position it wasn’t so easy to speak up, you know, I have to be so careful, and keeping quiet is usually the best way to do it, but I’m sure I did the right thing.’
‘And you think it was her?’
‘One of them, one of the bodies, poor souls. Yes, there’s a chance. A strong chance. She was a girl who took risks.’ Mrs Marr sighed. ‘And then there was her line. They’ll be round asking questions about that, I suppose.’
‘Uniforms, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right. There’ll be talk.’
Mimsie nodded sagely, while repressing a grin. Who did Amelia think she was? There was always talk where she was, she lived on it, it was how she recruited custom.
‘There was always a chance it was one of your girls.’ No one knew better than Mimsie the dangers of life as Amelia Marr’s girls lived it. And on the whole, they were the lucky, protected girls, looked after by Mrs Marr who was a canny one.
‘Ex girl,’ said Mrs Marr sharply. ‘She’d left me, remember. We’ve never had a death. Not on the premises, anyway.’
One or two customers had been despatched in a hurry, but always breathing.
‘You’re in the clear,’ said Mimsie soothingly. ‘You did what was right according to your conscience, no one can say you didn’t.’
‘So I did,’ agreed Amelia, although her conscience was an elastic one. She took comfort in her very strong local connections.
Because of Mrs Marr’s telephone call an identification of the first woman’s body, that skeletal one, still wearing jeans and lying so close to the body of Peter Tiler, was made by her dentist.
She was Alice Mary Marchant, known professionally as Amy March.
The news was passed on to John Coffin by Inspector Archie Young, who had first informed Superintendent Paul Lane.
‘Marchant or March was one of Mrs Marr’s girls for two years. Very reliable, Mrs Marr says, whatever that means in the context. Then she said she was going back home to get married, although Mrs Marr didn’t believe that, and left. There’s a fair turnover of girls and she thought no more about it. Till today.’
‘How long ago did March leave?’
‘Mrs Marr was professionally vague. Said she couldn’t really remember and she never kept records. Of course not, I said, but I bet she had a jolly good memory. She said she thought it was about eighteen months ago. The path people say March could have been dead about that long. The conditions where she was buried could have promoted rapid decomposition. Something to do with the soil.’
‘What made Mrs Marr think one of the bodies could have been March?’
‘Bit vague about that too, sir, but something to do with a mink wrap.’
‘And the name, Amy March?’ asked Coffin, mindful of his Little Women. ‘Does that denote anything professionally?’
‘No, sir, rather the reverse. It was a kind of in-house joke. Her speciality was uniforms. Yes, if you fancied a uniform, she was the girl you asked for.’
‘Any uniform?’
‘They had quite a collection.’ He sounded admiring.
‘Police included?’
‘Yes, sir, I’m afraid so.’
‘Does Marr think one of her customers did the job?’
‘No, sir, she says all her customers are fully satisfied.’
‘A lady with a sense of humour. She’ll have to provide some names, all the same.’
‘Oh yes, we’ll get them out of her in the end.’ If we don’t know some of them already, Young thought, if rumour told the truth about one of his colleagues.
‘It’ll be a start,’ said Coffin.
But he did not expect them to find the murderer from among Mrs Marr’s clients. Somehow, it felt a stranger, wilder case than that.
He told Stella Pinero what he knew and he spoke to his sister Letty: he felt they had a right to know. And it was not as if it was going to be a secret for long. Mimsie Marker informed him of what she knew about Amy March as she handed him his evening newspaper on his way home, and what Mimsie knew, quite a number of other people soon knew as a rule. Mimsie played a vital role in the local communication network.
‘She had a council flat over Leathergate way. Under her married name. Didn’t like people knowing, but I knew.’
Of course you did, Mimsie, Coffin thought. ‘So she was married?’
‘Had been. Divorced, from what she said. Hamilton, that was the name. Talbot Buildings was where she had the flat. Still has, I expect. They don’t care if you’re alive or dead there.’
‘In two years they’d notice, wouldn’t they?’
‘Wouldn’t count on it. Why don’t you take a look?’
Quietly, selfishly, Coffin went himself to Talbot Buildings, named after a local Labour MP, now dead, who had been a celebrated figure in early post-war Britain. Few people remembered him now, and almost certainly the inhabitants of Talbot Buildings knew not the man after whom their homes were named.
The estate, of which Talbot Buildings was but one block, had an estate manager and a social worker, with adjoining offices. Both of them were new to the job.
The estate manager, a bright young man, new from college and still keen on his job, consulted a list.
‘Hamilton? No tenant of that name.’
‘Not now,’ said Coffin patiently. ‘A year ago? You keep the records? Look back.’
‘We could do with a computer here,’ said the young man, obligingly pulling a card index towards him. ‘Hamilton? Yes, here it is. Mrs H. A tenant for four years, always paid her rent on time, then cleared off, leaving a month owing.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I wasn’t here, but what I imagine happened was that after an interval we re-possessed her flat.’
‘Weren’t you worried, when she didn’t come back?’
The estate manager raised a weary eyebrow.
‘No, all right,’ said Coffin, ‘don’t answer that. I suppose it happens all the time.’
‘If
you mean did we consult your lot, the answer is, I don’t know, but if we did, then I doubt they did much. Not interested.’
No, thought Coffin, not until it is too late.
‘So what did you do with her possessions? There were some, I take it?’
‘See our social worker, Sue Armstrong. That’s her, just going to her car. Grab her while you can, we don’t see much of her round here, always on the wing.’
Sue Armstrong was a thin girl with a long, narrow, sceptical face, wearing the obligatory jeans and scruffy sweater.
She did not like policemen, very senior and distinguished policemen least of all.
‘I hadn’t been here long when Amy Hamilton left.’
‘But you remember her?’ He noticed her use of the Christian name.
She opened her car door. ‘She must have had her reasons for going off. I don’t feel it’s my job to harry her.’
‘You won’t be doing that.’
She gave him a wary look. ‘Why are you looking for her?’
He did not answer. Let her find out, as she would do. ‘What happened to the things she left behind?’
‘There wasn’t much.’ She was giving ground, perhaps becoming aware of the seriousness of his inquiry. ‘They were put in store. My store. Eventually, I suppose, they will be sold or destroyed.’
‘I’d like to see them.’
‘All right. If you must. But they’re hers, remember. Her property. Not just jumble.’ She was being protective.
There was not much to see, just two plastic bags full. One contained clothes, the other a collection of small household goods. Among the electric kettle and the toaster was a small collection of paperback books. No letters.
Coffin picked up one of the books and from it fell a photograph. A snapshot of two women with the Thames and Tower Bridge in the background.
Sue looked at it. ‘That’s Amy. The one with curly hair. Pretty, wasn’t she?’
‘And the other girl?’
‘Oh, that was her cousin from Newcastle. She came down to see the Royal Wedding. I don’t think she ever came again.’
Coffin looked at the other girl, the visitor from the North. This girl was shorter than her cousin, a fatter, heavier figure, who had one foot in a built-up surgical boot.
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