Coffin's Ghost

by Gwendoline Butler

‘Not at the time, she always seemed to be on the move. She came and had a look round, of course, so I suppose she spent the odd night there but practically speaking, he lived alone in Moorbank House. It had been a doctor’s house. Or was it a dentist’s? Been both, I think. Called something else now.’

  ‘So when he moved out, it became a women’s refuge?’

  ‘I think it was something in between.’ Archie frowned. ‘Yes. We used it for CID offices. We were all busy creating the Second City Police Force. Some of us came from the Met and others were local to the old Docklands.’

  ‘And some were completely new to it like me.’ Phoebe had come later from Birmingham. By the time she had arrived, the theatre complex was almost complete with only the smallest theatre waiting completion. The Coffins’ home in the converted tower of the old church was lived in. Must have been expensive, she remembered thinking.

  ‘You’ve been in touch with Stella, haven’t you?’ Archie Young put a question to which he knew the answer.

  ‘Yes, sure, she was what you might call a character witness for George Freedom. I had to come at it sideways, as it were, not to make too clear what I was after. That I thought Freedom was a killer.’ She was cagey, careful with what she said. Anyway, she thought he was the sort that got off. There were types like it.

  Justice or not? She didn’t know.

  ‘Hit a girl on the head, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, his secretary, hit her with a log. He claimed it was an accident. But they had been quarrelling. He’s out now.’

  ‘What did you make of him?’

  Phoebe shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t care to be shut up in a dark room with him.’ But there were plenty of men you could say that of, although with some it might be a treat. She looked speculatively at the chief superintendent. No, probably not.

  And Freedom had a history of violence behind him. Used to shoot, just for a hobby. But more of that later, Phoebe thought. She never liked men who used guns as a hobby, even though they only shot at paper targets. They had faces and bodies, those targets, and the thought was there, wasn’t it? This reminded her of something else the Chief Commander was not going to like. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard yet about the trouble at the Abbey Road Gun Club?’

  He nodded. ‘I have the report. No more.’

  ‘Two of our men belong. Uniform. A PC and a sergeant, both from Cutts Street.’ Cutts Street was a substation not far from Abbey Road which was near to the tube station. She would like to have said that both the constable, who was known as Loverboy, and the sergeant – Sergeant Will Grimm, known naturally as Death – were on her worry list, but she kept quiet. With Grimm she always wondered if she ought to wear a necklace of garlic. Attractive but horrible. Unluckily, it was something she went for.

  ‘Got a puzzling side to it.’

  ‘Certainly has. Bill Eager, who is the club sec, runs it, really, blames it on the flood they had. I’ve read his statement. Does seem to have done in all the security they should have had.’

  ‘You’d better talk to him yourself. And the two men from Cutts Street. I want those guns back.’

  ‘I’ll see him again. I did go there at once, he was cleaning up the place, he had an outsider cleaning team in there.’ She frowned. ‘Perhaps that wasn’t wise, but he’s a careful chap, is Bill Eager.’ She went on to another of her problems, keen to talk to him because she did not get many chances of easy talk with Archie Young. ‘The Health people are going on about the sale of illegal beef . . . stuff from beasts slaughtered as suspect of BSE. They think it’s coming from the Second City.’

  Archie Young nodded. ‘We would get the blame.’ He knew it was the sort of investigation that went on and on with everyone lying.

  Phoebe came back to the packages containing severed limbs on the doorstep of the refuge. Not the kind of crime you would ever pin on George Freedom, she thought. If he packaged up a woman’s limbs then they would probably be packed in Hermès bags.

  There was a handbag, as it happened, round the corner, propped up against the wall of the house. Not Hermès, though. And the legs, otherwise bare, had painted toenails. A touching bit of vanity for such battered, bruised legs.

  ‘It’s sex, isn’t it?’ she said to Archie Young. ‘A sexual crime. You don’t chop a woman up like that without there being a sexual involvement.’

  Archie Young nodded, and Phoebe came back to what worried her.

  ‘Surely the fact he lived there for a bit will have been forgotten.’

  ‘It got a bit of publicity at the time; the local news rag, the Docklands Daily, was still running and it had an article about the Chief Commander and the house.

  Pictures. Coffin had obliged with reluctance but knowing that his new force in the new Second City needed all the help it could get. As he had done so lately: Coffin and his actress wife. ‘The love of his life,’ he had allegedly said not so long ago. All in the paper.

  Wrapped in layers of brown paper, the limbs came in two parcels, legs in one, arms in another.

  In blood, a message straggled: J.C. TO REMIND YOU, SIR.

  And underneath, in pencil, not blood: I send it back from me to you, although it was yours before.

  Archie Young was serious. ‘We haven’t spoken of it yet to the woman who runs the refuge. I don’t know what she will make of it. I think she read what seemed to be the message but she is playing it cool. Her name is Mary Arden. And we may be getting it wrong. But I think we have to tell the Chief.’

  ‘Oh sure,’ said Phoebe. ‘And won’t he be pleased.’

  She wondered a little bit what Stella Pinero would make of it. Still, no one really knew what went on in a marriage.

  You are not suggesting, she said to herself, that the Chief Commander knew those limbs intimately in life?

  She caught the chief super’s eye and knew that he was suggesting exactly that to himself.

  Two high-ranking police officers thinking the same thing.

  The governor of Sisley Green Prison was thinking something even worse.

  2

  There was a police van outside the house in Barrow Street and several police cars parked along the road. Outside the big Victorian house there was an area taped off around the steps and the front door. A police constable stood on duty.

  He looked bored and cold. A colleague who had been examining the ground around the house joined him.

  ‘You knew one of the women here, didn’t you, Ron?’ he asked PC Ryman-Lawson, whose double-barrelled name, itself the subject of jokes, got reduced to Ron.

  ‘Yeah. She worked here.’ Henriette Duval. Long-legged, and very pretty. She had come over to learn and she had certainly learnt it. ‘We went around for a bit. Then she dropped me. Said I was too young and she liked older men better.’

  ‘Not usually that way.’

  ‘I think she meant I didn’t have enough money to spend on her.’

  ‘Ah, that figures. A bit of a goer?’

  Ryman-Lawson did not commit himself. ‘Bloody cold here.’

  ‘What’s become of her?’

  Ryman-Lawson shrugged; the rain was running down his collar. ‘Gone back home, I expect.’

  Barrow Street not being a place to ignore anything exciting was providing an audience even though it was raining and not warm. Barrow Street knew a good thing when it saw one and was making the press welcome also. There was lively expectation of a TV van. You might see your own face on the screen in your own living room.

  ‘Always trouble there,’ pointed out a sturdy woman as she pushed her bike past on the way to work. ‘Trouble House or my name’s not Mona Jackson. Shouldn’t be here in a respectable street. Police, we don’t want them.’

  She achieved a small triumph by running her bike over the toes of an approaching police constable, who leapt back. ‘Watch it, missus.’ He added something under his breath.

  ‘Mrs Jackson to you, sonny,’ and she passed on in splendour. ‘And don’t think I don’t know you, Tad Blenkinsop, and I could report you f
or that language.’

  Not everyone thought Barrow Street so respectable, and by his expression, he was one of them.

  ‘I suppose we might be more popular if we were a nunnery,’ said Mary Arden, warden of the Serena Seddon Refuge, a hint of a wail in her voice. Mary had a distinguished record with a degree in social studies from a famous college in the University of London, a period nursing in a hospital, and another time working as an assistant in a care centre. ‘Although goodness knows, no community could be more off sex than we are here. Had too much of it.’

  ‘Cheer up,’ advised her fellow worker and assistant. Eve Jones was also a nurse and often needed in that capacity.

  ‘I could call myself Mother Mary.’ She was making some coffee. ‘Have a cup? It’s the real stuff, extravagant, I know, but I need it today.’

  ‘I don’t fancy being Sister Evelyn.’

  ‘You’ve been called worse.’

  ‘True. But being a nun means not just being off sex but also a vow of chastity. Don’t see most of our lodgers taking that one.’

  The police were already in the house, moving from room to room, trying to be tactful as they questioned the residents. Mary and Evelyn had already been interviewed. But they knew more would be coming their way.

  Mary had handed over her records to be studied.

  They were in Mary’s small office and sitting room – they were too pressed for space for even the warden to know much privacy. Her comfort, too, was modestly allowed for, with one cupboard for clothes, and a divan bed. There were two bathrooms in the house and Mary took her turn with everyone else. ‘At least it means I know if there is hot water and the bath is clean.’

  Ready hot water, clean linen and a little, a very little, privacy, was the best she could do for her guests. It helped some more than others.

  The residents helped to keep the house tidy and clean, but Mary employed a pair of contract cleaners once a week as well.

  Her one luxury was a small flat of her own which she used when she had time off. She did not grudge herself this because she had to have somewhere to retire to if she ever reached that haven.

  Evelyn did not live in, she was married, to a man who worked backstage in the St Luke’s Theatre Complex, and she went home at night. A night assistant came in then to be on duty till morning. The Serena Seddon House was not one in which nights were necessarily peaceful. There was a telephone line straight through to the local police station in Pelly Row for emergency use.

  Evelyn took two lumps of sugar to give her strength, while wishing that she still smoked. ‘I suppose we shall have the police all over the place for days.’

  She had been the first to find the bundles when she arrived for work that morning. ‘As soon as I picked one up, I guessed what it was. It just felt dead and heavy. Thank God, I didn’t do more than pick it up and put it down.’ She went to the window to look out. ‘Gone now.’

  Mary pushed a tin towards her. ‘Have a biscuit. Fortnurn’s best . . . it’s all right, a present from my mother.’ Her mother always chose the best she could afford. And this went for clothes and scents. Her mother thought she was mad to work where she did, while saying fondly that she admired her for it.

  Mary chose a biscuit with nuts in it. ‘I suppose the forensic lot will be in and looking us over. Depends what they find in the bundles.’

  ‘Two legs, two arms. We know that.’

  It was just guesswork, no one had told them, but Evelyn was an experienced nurse. ‘Didn’t have to be human,’ she said, ‘but I guess they are. Right shape, right weight, right feel.’ She shook her head. ‘I think I felt a finger.’

  ‘Phoebe Astley made it clear she thought it was one of our former lodgers, poor soul. I hope she was dead when it was done to her.’

  ‘Mary.’ Evelyn gave a shudder.

  ‘You can’t count on it, the men some of the women here attract. I’m not joking.’

  ‘And I’m not laughing.’

  ‘There was something written across the packets – did you read it?’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  Mary was silent. She answered after a pause. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Make anything of it?’

  ‘No.’ The best thing, the easiest thing to say. ‘Some things you don’t, do you?’ Again the easy answer. ‘Phoebe Astley will tell us something, perhaps. She’s a decent sort. More coffee?’

  Evelyn held her cup out. ‘You ought to go in for mugs, they hold more. She a friend?’

  ‘We belong to the same club.’

  Evelyn waited, and eventually asked, ‘Which club is that?’ She did not have a club herself, not being clubbable. I suppose I have a husband instead, she told herself.

  ‘The University Club in Lomas Street. Not the same university, she was Birmingham, and I was St Andrews, but the same club.’

  ‘I always knew you were more of an intellectual than I am. I knew it when I heard your mother crying about your hair.’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’ Mary shook her unshorn locks indignantly.

  ‘Yes, she did. Implored you to go to her hairdresser.’

  ‘So I would if I could afford it.’

  Evelyn smiled. She knew all the signs of comfortable private income when she saw it.

  ‘Anyway, you know yourself that it wouldn’t do to look too . . . well . . . too groomed here.’

  Evelyn laughed. ‘Have a go, they might enjoy it. Don’t be patronizing.’

  Mary looked shocked. ‘Do you think so?’

  There were bangs and sounds of screaming from above.

  ‘Oh, screw it.’ Mary jumped to her feet. ‘Come on. You too, in case there is bleeding.’

  Side by side, they ran up the stairs in the direction of the shouting. On the stairs they passed a young WPC who gave them a questioning look. ‘Leave this to us,’ said Mary as she passed. ‘Our job, we cope.’

  As she sped on, she muttered:

  ‘Whenever I hear two of our residents going on at each other like this, I think that maybe they were not the only ones in the marriage to get battered. Not an acceptable PC view, I know.’

  The noise was coming from the communal sitting room on the first floor.

  ‘Miriam, Miriam,’ said Mary as she pushed open the door. ‘At it again.’

  A small, sturdy figure, a round face with short, cropped hair, swung round. Miriam Beetham; she called herself Mrs Beetham but no marriage ceremony had taken place with Tommy Beetham and the title was purely honorary.

  The room showed signs of battle with a chair overturned and a sofa shoved at an angle against the wall. A small child was sitting on the sofa, looking interested rather than frightened. Billy Beetham recognized Mary.

  ‘How do you know it’s me?’

  ‘I recognize your voice. And you, Ally.’

  Ally was tall, thin, but capable of swift physical action if required. Learned behaviour, Mary thought sadly.

  The two women had been friends and enemies since schooldays, the relationship not improved by the fact that Ally was indeed Mrs Beetham, although she called herself Ally Carver. Husbands and lovers had shuttled between the two since they first took up sex. It was bad luck that had brought them into the refuge at the same time.

  Or had they fixed it between them? With this pair, you never knew.

  Evelyn was examining Ally’s nose. ‘Not broken. It’ll stop bleeding soon.’ She produced a wad of tissues which she held to the nose. ‘And keep quiet.’

  ‘What’s it all about?’ demanded Mary. ‘No, don’t tell me. Come to the office later. I wish we had a vow of silence in this place.’

  The battle was over, showing every sign of starting again. ‘Her fault,’ muttered Ally through the tissues. ‘And you can’t say we’ll have the police in, ‘cause we got them already. And they will know about whose fault it is . . . they know.’

  ‘She said my Billy was simple.’ The rejoinder came from Miriam in a loud voice. ‘So I hit her. Do it again.’

  ‘He is simple.’


  Looks sharp enough to me, thought Mary, ageless too, six coming on sixty and the devil kissed him. Now what do I mean by that, she asked. I mean he’s wicked through and through. Shouldn’t think like that, should you? Children can’t be wicked.

  But she knew they could be.

  ‘Tidy up the room,’ she said. ‘And get Billy to help you. And calm down. Have a cup of tea.’

  There was always tea and milk left ready in the sitting room.

  ‘It’s because of what was left on the doorstep,’ called Miriam after them. ‘We’re all upset.’

  The child Billy gave a cry, something between a wail and a hiccup of laughter.

  I think he likes bits of bodies, Mary thought. But no, he can’t know anything about it. We haven’t said: Keep quiet, the police told us.

  On the stairs, she said to Evelyn, ‘What is wicked?’

  Over another cup of coffee, Evelyn said she thought it was a matter of feeling. You felt something or someone was wicked.

  ‘Even a child? I shouldn’t have been so sharp with those two. Not professional. Gentle does it.’

  ‘You mean Billy, I suppose?’ said Evelyn, crunching a biscuit. ‘The wicked bit?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He’s a mite young to get the full judgement, but he’s coming on nicely.’

  ‘They all know about the parcels of limbs on the steps. When they asked, I said I had no idea. But they know. They know there wouldn’t be all that police activity for just a dead dog.’

  ‘Probably making guesses who it is.’

  ‘Oh God, yes.’ Good accurate guesses too. On such a subject they would be well-informed.

  ‘Phoebe Astley will know how to handle it, she’ll assess what they say, work out if there is anything in it.’

  ‘They’ll say plenty.’ Mary continued to be gloomy. ‘Make it up if they have to.’

  ‘Phoebe . . .’ began Evelyn.

  ‘Yes, she’ll know how to weave her way through it. If she does it herself. You know how it goes.’ They were not without experience in police visits. ‘Uniformed branch first, then CID, it’ll be women because of what we are, and then, if it’s important, we shall get the top brass. Or toppish. Remember how it was when Jodie Spinner hid the stuff her husband had stolen in her bedroom?’