Coffin on Murder Street

by Gwendoline Butler

  But the Superintendent and the Inspector still quietly stuck to the view that it was Duerden, and whether there was hope in that thought or pure despair they dared not weigh up. Duerden was a bastard.

  The repercussions of the records, the names and addresses, discovered in Forge Street spread around the country, up to the Midlands as far as Birmingham and Coventry, to the west to Oxford and in London to districts as far as Hampstead and Woolwich. The house in Regina Street was quiet, the proprietress of the simple lodging-house being in hospital. Archie Young tried a call, but the neighbours said she might have gone to stay with a sister after getting out of hospital, and no, they didn’t know her address. He left it there.

  A solicitor, and a van driver, a journalist, and a photographer who had won many awards, all these found their lives disorganized in a way they did not care for.

  A civil servant and an engineer similarly found their day disturbed. In Woking, a middle-aged man was interrupted while writing a letter.

  My dear boy, he had begun. How I do thank you for introducing me on Friday? A mark of true friendship. I don’t know how to thank you for procuring for me what was a truly blissful occasion. I still dream about it. Give me another chance, will you? And send the photographs you promised, they will make it all seem real again.

  At this point his wife knocked on the door. ‘Sorry to disturb you, dear, but there’s someone to see you.’ She hesitated. ‘He says he’s a policeman.’

  The letter was never finished.

  They were all ordinary men, mostly middle class and well educated. Highly respectable members of society, you would sit next to them on the Underground without alarm.

  Shortly before this day, the arsonist of the papershop, who had so triumphantly sped away north, looked to be on the point of resolving his own problems, great as they were, in a terminal way.

  His doctors thought so. It was the sort of accident, they said, from which no one recovers.

  Looking for evidence of identity, they found his driving licence which named him as Trevor Hinton with an address in Derby. But what they also saw in his wallet gave them pause for thought.

  Two photographs: one of a girl child with a smiling face decked in a sunbonnet, and the other, an instant contact print of a man. Or it had been a man.

  A consequent search of the wrecked car found an empty petrol can in the boot, together with a length of rope and a spade. There was earth on the spade.

  It was not only John Coffin who wanted to see Nell Casey. Stella Pinero was equally anxious to speak to her. As she kept telling everyone, she had a Festival to run, and although she had recast Nell’s part in French Without Tears, she had hoped to use Nell later in the season in a contemporary piece about women in the police called Wearing Blue. She had been keeping quiet about this since she had an idea, (not misplaced) that it would not go down well with John Coffin. The play had won a prize in a drama competition sponsored by their new Thames University, who were financing the production and helping with the cost of mounting a new King Lear later in the season. Gus Hamilton was being lined up for Lear, although there was a malicious groundswell that was saying what about him for Goneril? Jealousy and rage, he was good at these emotions.

  When several calls at The Albion got no response, Stella became worried and called on John Coffin in his tower retreat. They were neighbours, after all, and old friends and lovers, and if relations were not good just now, if in fact she was madly jealous of that Barclay woman (who was young, young, young), that did not mean she could not call on him in need.

  It was the evening of that day on which the conference had been held in his office. As yet the media did not know about the raid on the house in Forge Street, although various lives up and down the country were already being upset, but he knew the silence could not last much longer. He expected there to be a short something on the late evening news and then the media onslaught would begin. He was sitting watching television with the cat on his lap. Tiddles was not pleased to be woken up by the doorbell.

  ‘Hello, sorry to disturb you, but I’m worried about Nell.’

  Not the only one, thought Coffin. ‘Come in.’ As he held the front door open, there was a swish of tail and Tiddles sped through without a backward look, as one escaping from prison, although until that moment he had been wrapped in easy sleep.

  ‘I need to see her,’ said Stella. ‘God, these stairs, why don’t you have a lift put in?’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘Ask your rich sister.’

  Ah yes, thought John Coffin guiltily, but how rich is Letty? Still going quietly bankrupt?

  ‘I mean, I’ve got this casting to settle,’ said Stella, reaching the sitting-room and collapsing on the sofa. ‘And if I can’t get Nell for Judith, then I must look around me.’

  Coffin was always surprised how life roared on, heedless, when a major inquiry was taking place. Stella was close to Nell, liked the boy, admired Gus, but still the casting of her plays moved her more passionately. You couldn’t call it callousness, it was just business. We do mind more about our own torn fingernail than a death next door. It was a kind of tunnel vision.

  ‘I can’t get her to answer the telephone or the bell.’

  ‘Perhaps she isn’t there.’

  ‘That’s what’s worrying me.’ She gave him a measured look. Or she might be there.’ Tied up, unconscious, dead?

  So Stella was thinking of something other than her play. As so often, he had underestimated her.

  ‘I want to go into the apartment. I don’t want to go on my own, I want you to come with me. If she’s there, hurt or whatever, we ought to find her.’

  ‘I’ll come … How were you planning to get in?’

  For the first time, Stella looked embarrassed. ‘I have a key … As a matter of fact, the apartment is mine. A little investment. I thought my daughter might live in it one day, and meanwhile, I let it out on short lets.’

  I do underestimate you, Stella, Coffin thought again. You’re a good business woman. Always have been. Letty knew what she was doing when she let you run the St Luke’s Theatre Complex.

  As they went into the apartment in The Albion, he realized he ought to have known that Stella had done the decorations. It had her touch, cool and positive with no dark corners. No wonder it had felt familiar.

  It was quiet and still with just a faint memory of the scent Nell used. No sign of Nell herself. They went through all the rooms. Empty and still.

  Stella ran a finger across the table. ‘Dust.’ She walked through to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. A bottle of fruit juice and a withered lettuce. ‘Not much there that’s eatable.’

  Coffin had gone across to the telephone. A note addressed to Nell was lying near it. The envelope was sealed. Coffin opened it. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  It was from Sylvie. ‘I’m going to stay with friends, you know the address. I’ll be in touch. I know you’ll understand.’

  ‘Nell hasn’t read it,’ said Stella.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And Sylvie’s been gone a few days now.’

  Three days since the note had been written and Nell had never been home to read it.

  Stella had a good look round Nell’s bedroom. She ran her hand through the wardrobe, moving the clothes. ‘Not a lot here, but I don’t know what she had.’ It was all good stuff, very good, not what she herself would leave behind if doing a bunk. At the bottom of the wardrobe was a selection of handbags and a few pieces of luggage. ‘A small case might have gone,’ she said, emerging from the wardrobe, hair ruffled. ‘I remember a shoulder-bag. Don’t see that.’ She had disturbed an album which had been placed with the shoes and bags. It was large, and black. She opened it for a look. ‘Left her reviews behind. Goes way back. Begins with a trumpet when she got a medal. Praise from EE. That’s Ellice Eden.’ She read it with a dash of envy. ‘God, he really went over the top there, but he always loves her.’ She flipped the pages ‘And includes a cutting from The Times of last
month calling her “a quiet genius”. She’ll be back. No actress would ever be parted from that little heap.’

  Coffin had also been doing a little search. All the stuff that had looked like a shoplifting hoard had disappeared. Quietly disposed of when the police started questioning her, no doubt.

  ‘I’m sure she means to go on performing,’ said Coffin, wondering if Nell Casey had ever stopped. ‘But where the hell is she now?’

  That endless day was still with them. Lane and Young had been dragged from their homes and summoned to St Luke’s Mansions by the Chief Commander. No coffee and sandwiches now.

  ‘We should have kept an eye on her,’ said Superintendent Paul Lane. ‘We should have watched her.’

  That they had not was a bad error, but you couldn’t do everything. He didn’t quite say this but he wanted it to be understood.

  ‘We had no reason to believe she’d go off,’ said Archie Young defensively. ‘And we had other things on our mind: the Papershop Group, and it looked as though they would lead us to the boy.’

  ‘I thought Mary Barclay was supposed to be keeping in touch with Casey?’ said John Coffin.

  ‘I pulled her off that,’ admitted Archie Young, ‘wanted her to join the unit looking for the boy in North Spinnergate.’ It had seemed the right thing to do.

  ‘So what do we assume now? That Casey’s gone off with the boy somehow?’

  ‘I think we’d better get hold of Mary Barclay and see what ideas she has to offer,’ said John Coffin. ‘She’s been as close to mother and child as anyone. She might be able to make a guess where the woman could have taken herself.’ And if she was likely to have the boy with her. A subject on which, as he remembered, Mary Barclay had remained quietly neutral.

  ‘Miss Pinero must know Casey pretty well,’ said Superintendent Lane.

  Coffin turned to the fourth member of the party, who had so far not spoken and who was sitting miserably in one corner of the room. Stella looked as though she had been crying.

  ‘What about it, Stella?’

  Stella shifted uneasily in her seat. ‘Well, you know how it is with actors. Yes, I’ve worked with her. Once on a series and once on a play that was touring before coming into London. You work together, you’re buddies, but then the series or the tour ends and you don’t see each other again. I don’t know Nell that well.’ She shook her head. ‘I knew her in the theatre as a theatre person; what she was outside it, and how she grew up, what friends and relations she had, that I don’t know.’ In a wretched voice, she said: ‘I suppose that makes us all sound thoroughly superficial and selfish, but it’s the way we have to live … You could try Gus Hamilton, but I doubt if he knows much more. Falling in love isn’t always an introduction to someone’s life. There’s Ellice Eden, he’s the sort that does research on people, he might know more.’

  Gus Hamilton said angrily that no, he didn’t know where the bloody woman was and he didn’t care. She’d caused enough trouble in his life as it was. Find her and you’d find the kid, that was his opinion. And thank you, he was tired and he’d had a long day, if they cared.

  Ellice Eden said he admired Nell Casey enormously as an actress, she had such great potential, but he thought that as a person she was a disaster, and had therefore kept his distance. Neurotics killed you in the end. He feared he could be no help, good night.

  *

  The Chief Commander took pity on Superintendent Lane and Inspector Young and closed the meeting. ‘I’m off to bed. See you in the morning.’

  There’s a lot happening here, he thought as he turned out the light. Perhaps I’ll give Jumbo Best a ring in the morning. Get him round. The former Chief Inspector was now the head of a security firm. He remembered Nell Casey when she was a teenager. He might dredge something up.

  CHAPTER 18

  March 26

  He did not forget Jumbo but the next day was a busy one. The story of the house in Forge Street and the men who had used it had hit the headlines. At least two TV crews were touring this area of North Spinnergate interviewing those inhabitants who would submit to it (most did so eagerly and incoherently), and a press conference had been called for midday over which he himself must preside, fielding all awkward questions. The name of William Duerden and of the lost boy Tom had already started to appear. Articles on both subjects, strategically placed near to pictures of the house in Forge Street had appeared in the early editions. He had heard that a London evening newspaper was already printing a special supplement on child abuse. (Must have had it in cold store, he thought.) And he knew for a fact, that his MP critic, Harry Guffin, was about to ask a Question in the House.

  In the turmoil, although he never forgot the missing boy and his mother, he almost forgot Jumbo.

  But Jumbo came to him. Picked up the telephone and spoke to him. ‘Saw the papers. You linking this outfit with Duerden?’

  ‘Not sure,’ said Coffin carefully.

  ‘I heard you were. Still have my contacts. And Duerden is holed up with the missing kid, so it goes?’

  ‘Not ruling it out,’ said Coffin. ‘If you’ve got anything …’

  ‘Can’t help with that.’ Jumbo was regretful. ‘But remember talking about the Casey girl?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Something odd that I remembered … There was no prosecution, she just walked out.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘But she’d given an address, and later on, out of curiosity I went to have a look. It was the right address, she hadn’t given a false one or anything like that, she’d been there. But she hadn’t been there long and wasn’t there any longer. And it was just one room. She was there all on her own, just a kid.’

  ‘Perhaps her parents were dead.’

  ‘Or kicked her out. Or she kicked herself out. Just a kid in that one room. Abbey Street, it was, back of Costelow’s. Remember Costelow’s? The old Costelow’s,’ he said. For there was now a new Costelow’s store in a new place, very brassy and bright in a spanking new shopping complex that owing to bad timing and a sales recession had more shops than customers. ‘Just thought it might be worth mentioning. It says something about her, doesn’t it? Background does help.’

  ‘Certainly does … Well, thanks. I’ll pass it on to the right quarters and see what comes up … You sound very cheerful, you old devil.’

  ‘Not my problem, is it? Yours. Others as well. I hear things.’

  I bet you do, thought Coffin as he put the receiver down. The Chief Commander bites the dust. New Force in New City in Trouble, he could hear the voices in the pubs and wine bars.

  In the St Luke’s Theatre Complex (it’s new grand name since the Theatre in the church was now well under construction), the gossip was swirling round and round.

  ‘Probably all set up by Casey for the publicity,’ said one lad who had only just got his Equity card, but he was shouted down for his bad taste.

  Nell was popular and although no one wanted to act with children (scene-stealers all), they did not approve of child abduction or child abuse. ‘And Nell loved that infant,’ that was one thing clearly stated and believed. Some people were suspicious of Sylvie who had been hands off with all who had tried, most people defended any attack on Gus Hamilton on the grounds that he was a marvellous actor and also a powerful and rising figure whose patronage could be valuable and whose animosity (he had the reputation of a long memory) was not to be lightly aroused.

  Inspector Archie Young took note of the lodging-house in Abbey Street, back of the old Costelow’s, and said he would send someone round for a look, but he doubted they would find Nell Casey there.

  She was proving an elusive character, who appeared to have no family and no background. She seemed to have come from nowhere. A brief glimpse of her as a young shoplifter and then nothing before she turned up in Drama School.

  Even that had been no help, for according to the college records, she had received no local authority education grants, her fees had been paid in cash.

  That was interesting, Y
oung thought, and raised questions but gave no answers.

  Abbey Street, as expected, proved as a source null and void. No one remembered Nell Casey there, it wasn’t that sort of street.

  ‘You can’t keep Nell down,’ said Stella Pinero, when she heard all this. ‘She’ll be back.’

  Just about this time, two lads, home from school on various excuses or none, were out fishing when they saw what looked like a roll of carpet, slowly moving in the water. It was a thin, narrow roll.

  The River Thames, as John Coffin had reason to know from earlier cases, is very reluctant to give back its victims. Watermen know that the river hangs on to its bodies, carrying them up and then down the river before depositing them where it fancies.

  But this body had got caught in some weeds at the river’s edge and did not travel so far from where it had gone in to the water.

  The boys were fishing in that part of the Thames which runs between Staines and Wraysbury. After a while, one of them investigated the floating object further, then came back with a white face.

  ‘It’s a floater,’ he said.

  ‘Better tell someone. The police or something. Telephone. Nine-nine-nine.’

  ‘You go. I’ll stay here.’

  The one boy went for the police to tell them that they had got a floater, while the other stayed on guard. He kept his distance and sat on the riverbank with his back to the body. All he had seen was blue jeans and a flash of red hair, but he had caught a glimpse of the face. That was enough for him.

  The body carried nothing to identify it, nothing in the pockets of the jeans or jacket, and there was no handbag. But it was a woman, and the Thames knew many such.

  The police surgeon who was called to certify death was cautious about the cause of that mortality and when it had happened.

  ‘Not a typical death from drowning,’ said Dr Salt. ‘And I’d say she’d been in the water over a day and less than a week.’ He was famous for his circumspection. ‘The pathologist will get you much nearer.’ He moved his hands delicately over her head, moving the hair aside.