Coffin's Ghost

by Gwendoline Butler

  Some hours later, he called back to say, Yes, Anna had gone to a London paper, thought to be the Independent, had worked there for over a year, and then left.

  It was thought she had come back to the Second City. ‘Over to you, love,’ was his message to Phoebe, received with a grinding of teeth.

  On the streets, as many officers as could be spared were searching open ground, empty buildings, old factories and warehouses (not so many of these, most have suffered conversion into smart apartments), along the railway embankment.

  Nothing had been found relating to the limbs deposited on the house in Barrow Street, although one or two items had surfaced which related to earlier crimes. Such as the old mailbag, a relic of a PO robbery, and a cache of silver, small stuff but pretty, in a tin box in a dustbin down by the docks, a theft from somewhere. An antique shop, maybe, was the suggestion and Henry Hemmings, their antiques expert, was being consulted.

  We just need a tip-off, thinks DCI Astley. A hint, just a something, to get us going.

  Better give Tony Davley a prod, time she came up with something.

  Before doing so, however, she telephoned the Chief Commander to tell him what she had learnt of Anna Michael’s career.

  ‘I think she did come back,’ said Coffin. ‘Thanks for finding out.’

  No result had come from the questioning of the residents of the Serena Seddon Refuge House. All had been asked but not one of them had any useful ideas other than those handed around already. Mary had come back to report that she did not, could not, believe the limbs to be those of Henriette, known as Etta. One by one the women relaxed and settled down to their usual occupations. In some cases, of course, this meant a quarrel over the cards as they played whist – a particularly cutthroat version of the game with their own rules. Not much money changed hands because no one had much, but the feeling was intense. Miriam Beetham and Ally Carver could be relied upon to row, but they had met their equal in a new arrival, Mrs Ellen Newbattle, who was not badly named.

  ‘She’s a cow, that woman,’ said Ally with admiration. ‘What a tongue on her.’

  ‘She’ll be gone soon, she’s not a stayer, you can tell.’

  ‘Not like us, eh? We know the ropes.’

  ‘Aye, and where to pull on them.’

  It was a shifting population in which Miriam and Ally were the old residents. There was a housing association, part of the Serena Seddon establishment, which owned properties into which residents could move. If they so chose – some houses were less popular than others.

  ‘We’re a full house now,’ said Ally. She had turned down the offer of a flat in Bellhanger Road as ‘shimmy’, and was waiting for one to come in Cheeseborough Place which was more upmarket.

  ‘Joan Benson upstairs is going,’ said Miriam, who was always first with the news, because she listened to all telephone calls and read everyone’s letters. ‘She’s going to Bellhanger, the one you turned down.’

  ‘She’s welcome. They say they’ve got rats the size of rabbits there.’

  One family was on the point of being rehoused and another was arranging to go to stay with Grandma.

  ‘And I hope Grandma will be pleased,’ was Evelyn’s comment to Mary, even as she set up the travel arrangements, ‘because they are a difficult bunch. D’you know, Mrs Addington asked me if they could travel first class because of the cat.’

  ‘I didn’t know they had a cat.’

  ‘It’s been living with the old neighbours . . . I bet it would prefer to stay there. I pity Grandma, if the cat’s as fertile as Mrs Addington.’

  Mary agreed absently and said that it wouldn’t last long but was worth a try. She is busy catching up with business, checking the bank accounts, paying bills, and then working in the kitchen.

  ‘You know the police went over the house for drugs while they were here.’

  A police call on the Serena Seddon House was not unusual. Things just happened; vandals breaking windows or pouring paint down the basement, the lost and drunk trying to break in, the man from Glasgow who thought it was a brothel and would not be turned away; the police took their chance and had a quick look round. After all, some of the residents were old acquaintances with interesting pasts.

  ‘They usually do.’

  ‘Pretended it was just a routine check-up, but I knew.’

  ‘As long as they didn’t find anything.’

  ‘We’ve been lucky,’ said Mary. ‘The worst trouble was when Serena herself was warden, she really fell for that girl who was on heroin.’

  ‘On anything that went,’ said Evelyn. Both women had worked in the hostel with Serena. In the end, Serena had been losing her grip. ‘She was dead attractive, that girl, Phyllis something, poor Serena couldn’t resist her. She was lucky when Phyllis moved on. She’s still around and not so lovely. Drossers Market is where she hangs out.’

  Drossers Market was the real, dirty centre of drugs, prostitution and violence in the Second City. Coffin was trying to clear it up. But it was also lively, and attractive to many, which made the task harder. Nor was he quite sure of some of his own officers. One or two names were in the frame and being watched. DC Radley, from the Met, and PC Ryman-Lawson of the uniformed lot. Nothing proved, and there might be others.

  Mary shrugged her acceptance; Serena’s sexual tastes were well known to her. But she wouldn’t dwell on the past, she knows that in her office, the answer machine is flashing its little red light. Mary hates attending to the answerphone since it always means more work.

  Let it wait.

  ‘She was standing up and suddenly she dropped like a stone.’

  ‘Dead,’ said the gravelly voice.

  ‘Dead in the middle of the car park on Vestey Road and no one there.’

  ‘Who said?’ asked a sceptical Tony Davley. She was supposed to be following what leads she had on the limbs affair – precious few, as it happened, and she shouldn’t be dealing with this business, but she had been unlucky enough to be around in the office when the message about the killing came in so she got it.

  She had come in early to clear up some notes left over from last night, she had been standing there drinking a mug of lukewarm coffee as breakfast and mulling over some of her own writing which she could not read, when the phone went and her immediate boss, Sergeant Jimmy Silver, took the message, nodded at her and said, You might as well take this one as you are here.

  That was how life went: you got the jobs by standing around and being there. It was taken for granted that you not only could but would work on two investigations at once and not get them muddled.

  But she had to admit that this one was not without interest. In short, she did not realize that what she had got was a snip.

  ‘I said’ – the voice was firm, putting a firm underlining beneath the I – ‘I telephoned for the ambulance and the police.’

  He repeated the story. There was a van there which drove away fast, and there was a Post Office van which stayed. This was his van.

  He was a short and sturdy figure with a crop of dark curly hair. Bright blue eyes behind spectacles took in DS Davley and flicked round to the scene behind her where the body of a woman lay on the ground.

  The police surgeon had arrived and certified her dead, and the pathologist was this moment making a careful, preliminary investigation before taking the body off to his laboratory for a closer investigation.

  It was murder and not suicide, that was clear.

  ‘So there was someone there: the other van, the one that drove away fast, and your van.’

  ‘Now don’t you start griping at me, miss. I waited there till the ambulance came, but she was dead. I knew she was. And I knew she was shot.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I heard the noise and I saw the blood on the side of her face.’

  ‘And you didn’t see who shot her?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  ‘What about the van that drove off?’

  ‘Wasn’t from the van. I ha
d my eye on it because it shouldn’t have been here. I am allowed to bring my van in because it is PO business, but otherwise private vehicles only.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Mr . . .’ She hesitated.

  ‘Terry Jones.’

  ‘You’ll have to come into the station to make a statement, Mr Jones.’

  ‘It’ll have to be when I’ve finished work, I’m all behind now.’

  DS Davley longed to say: It’ll be when we want you, sir, but she restrained herself and said nothing. She longed to have been able to snap out the sort of sharp remark that DCI Astley excelled in, but she was still too junior (and ambitious, the two went together) to allow this to herself. So she contented herself with a nod and the suggestion that it was always best to get things over, wasn’t it?

  By which she meant, You are bloody coming with me, chum, if I have to drag you there.

  In the event, a stand-in driver (complaining bitterly that he was off duty and needed the rest) arrived to take over Terry Jones’s duties for the day, thus allowing Jones to come into the central police station and give his statement.

  She despatched them in a police car herself. All the while he was insisting that he had not seen who fired the shot. Nor did he know what the woman was doing in the car park, but he thought the fairest assumption was that she was taking a short cut across it from Victoria Street to the tube station to get a train.

  He muttered that he could be no possible help.

  ‘Don’t be long,’ he grumbled.

  ‘You’ve got the day off.’

  ‘It’s my day,’ he shouted after her.

  Can’t deny that, she thought.

  Tony Davley took the statement herself, having handed over the scene in the car park to the SOCO team and the forensic scientist. A gun expert was on the spot to work out the angle of fire, using the latest laser equipment, and hence the most likely place from which the shot had come.

  On one side of the car park was a patch of roughish ground, and on the other a low block of flats due for demolition, while the back of a row of shops formed the third side. The fourth side was huts and sheds belonging to various associations like the Scouts and the Sea Cadets and the Bottle Banks.

  ‘Check the flats,’ Davley had said as she left. It seemed likely that the shot had come from there.

  She had waited till the woman’s body had been photographed, and then taken off to the pathologist’s department.

  Murder had its rituals and rites which had to be observed.

  Even though it was still early there was a crowd by that time watching and listening. One of the crowd was Mimsie Marker who sold newspapers from her stall hard by the tube station. She had abandoned her stall to take a look. The body was hidden beneath a white sheet, but as it was lifted to be taken away, the corpse’s feet peeped out.

  She went back to her stall where she sold a copy of that day’s London Times to Robbie Gilchrist on his way to an important meeting in London, passing on to him the news of the dead girl in the car park.

  ‘Quite young, poor kid.’ She didn’t really know this, it was a guess. Not everyone listened to Mimsie, since she was a well-known gossip, but they were well advised to because she was right.

  Robbie did listen, and then worried all the way to London that this dead girl was his lost stepdaughter. She might well be her, he said to himself.

  Terry Jones did not change his statement when Davley eventually got back to him.

  ‘I was sitting at the wheel, checking what I had to do, as I always do, I like to get things right. I saw the woman, wearing a bright red coat. She was crossing diagonally towards the tube station.’ He paused.

  ‘And then?’

  Terry put his head on one side. ‘I can’t say I heard the shot, shut in the van as I was; I may have heard something, perhaps even been aware of the passage of the bullet, because I looked up and saw the woman. One minute she was standing. Next she dropped to the ground. Like a stone. You’re dead, I thought. And I wasn’t wrong, was I?’

  ‘No.’ This chirpy fellow irritated Tony Davley and she would like to have told him he was wrong, but this comfort was denied her. ‘So you didn’t see where the shot came from?’

  ‘No, I’ve said so, haven’t I?’

  ‘Not from the white van that drove away so fast?’

  ‘No, couldn’t have. Because if it had come from the van then the wound would have been on the left temple, and it wasn’t. The hole and the blood were on the right side of the face. I was there, remember.’

  ‘On the right temple,’ repeated Tony.

  ‘Yes, and it wasn’t me that shot her. There are security cameras in that car park and if you look you will see a picture of me in the van and getting out and running across to her.’

  There were security cameras but they were not working, an economy measure on the part of the owners of the car park, who thought a threat was as good as an actual picture.

  ‘No,’ said Terry Jones. ‘That shot came from the block of flats. Empty, they are, we all know that. Someone got in and fired at her from there. Hit her. On the right side of the head.’

  There was an exit wound on the other side, though, much larger than the entry wound, commented Tony Davley silently, but he would not know that, not having touched the body. There usually was in a head wound, so both pathologist and forensic expert had agreed, unless the bullet was deflected by bone and coming in at an angle.

  Not so in this case.

  ‘A nice clean shot,’ the forensic man had said, half admiringly.

  The ground and the bushes beyond were now being searched for the bullet. The soft, blancmange-like tissue of the brain often deflected the bullet more than the hard bone of the skull. This might be the case now.

  She ran Terry Jones through everything once again, but he did not change his story.

  A first forensic test of his van had been made already, which showed nothing that pointed to the shot having come from him.

  Reluctantly, Tony told him that after his statement had been typed, he could read it and then sign it. Then he could go.

  Still grumbling, he was offered, and took, a cup of tea. No biscuit, he noted that and gave a black mark.

  He said goodbye to DS Davley without regret. The two of them were not sorry to part, he did not like what he called lady policemen and Davley wanted to hand this business over and get back to the Barrow Street affair. Chief Inspector Astley was a good boss and easy to work for, but she was also one of those who thought you could produce results on two cases at the same time and just as fast. Perhaps she could, Tony knew she could not. Accordingly, she wanted to get back to what was her priority.

  She had no idea of the gold about to drop into her hands.

  By the time he got to London, Robbie was so disturbed and worried that he went to a telephone booth on Charing Cross Station. For a moment, he was undecided whom to telephone. His estranged wife or the police?

  Coffin, the Chief Commander, Stella Pinero’s husband. That was the man.

  He caught the Chief Commander at his desk, checking letters and reports.

  ‘Coffin? Robbie Gilchrist here.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You know about the dead woman in the car park?’

  ‘I do,’ said Coffin thoughtfully. ‘Just about.’

  ‘Is her identity known yet?’

  ‘I think not. Not as far as I know.’ His report had mentioned a handbag but no identification in it.

  ‘I’m worried it’s Alice.’

  Coffin looked at what he had in front of him. ‘She was a young woman between twenty and twenty-five years. Long curly hair. Blue eyes.’

  Robbie groaned. ‘Could be, could be.’

  Coffin hesitated. ‘Where are you speaking from?’ He could hear noises, voices, people moving around, an announcer proclaiming something difficult to pick up.

  ‘Charing Cross Station.’

  ‘You could come back and see for yourself.’

  ‘You mean identif
y her?’

  ‘Don’t jump in. If it is her.’

  ‘I will come back.’

  ‘You can cross Barrow Street off your worries: that victim was a much older woman.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Gilchrist. He hesitated, then made one more call, this time to his former wife. ‘Liz, it is possible, just possible, that Alice has been killed . . .’ He listened to her outburst of shock and anger. Liz was always articulate. ‘No, of course I’m not sure, but I must check.’ Then wearily: ‘No, George Freedom is not my closest friend, I have known him a long while and we work together. If you want to know, I don’t trust him. And you were the one who married him and that was how he met Alice.’ He eats young girls, and she was ripe for him. ‘And I am going off to see who this poor dead bitch is.’

  He just caught the train back to the Second City.

  Mary Arden stopped her work in time for a cup of coffee with Evelyn in the mid-morning.

  She pulled a face. ‘Better hear my messages before I enjoy my coffee.’ She switched on the answerphone.

  The first message was from the plumber with an estimate for repair to the washing machine. And yes, he was afraid the price was high but someone had put football boots in the washer and that did the damage.

  Mary groaned and took the next message, which was from her mother, recommending a good hairdresser’s just off Bond Street and why not have a tint, dear, like I do?

  There was a bit more about how important it was to ‘look good’, as Mother put it, and to keep her weight down because you really needed a waist this summer, the bust wasn’t so important any more.

  ‘I laugh,’ said Mary to Evelyn. ‘I really do laugh. If I didn’t I might cry. I can get my hair cut in the Second City, this is not Timbuktu.’

  Those two messages had come in the course of the morning, and so had the next message.