Coffin's Ghost

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘Oh, through that broken window,’ said Dave with confidence.

  This was not the story that the Chief Commander was hearing.

  ‘He got out that way, yes, possibly,’ the forensic man was saying, supported by mutterings from the scene-of-the-crime officer. ‘But not in . . . you can see from the way the glass was shattered. Done from the inside.’

  ‘Thought so myself,’ agreed Coffin. ‘That glass was meant to be shatter-proof.’

  ‘Nothing is ever what it’s supposed to be,’ said the man from forensics. ‘And I ought to know . . .’

  ‘How was the window broken?’

  Forensics put his head on one side and adjusted his spectacles. ‘At a guess, I’d say with that bronze bust of Miss Pinero which is on the shelf behind you.’

  Coffin looked behind him. There was the beautiful portrait bust of his wife done about two years ago, by Henry Mister. She looked happy and young.

  ‘I’ve had a first look, but there are marks on it where it smashed into the glass . . . don’t worry, it isn’t damaged.’

  Coffin thought about it. ‘So . . . he, if it was he and not a woman, got in with a key . . . He didn’t know how to deal with the alarm system, so that went off, but he got in.’

  He left a head and used a head.

  The head of Stella Pinero.

  And he had a key.

  In Max’s, Stella was sitting drinking a dry white wine and talking to Robbie Gilchrist. Max was hovering, trying to persuade them to choose what they wanted to eat.

  Coffin walked in, not too pleased to see Gilchrist there. In his mind, Gilchrist, although less questionable than George Freedom, was not a man he cared to see near his wife.

  Business, she would say, nothing personal. They are willing to invest and I want their money. But what did they want, he wondered? Too many pretty young girls, and lads (because to his mind Freedom was up for anything) came into the St Luke’s Theatre Complex.

  ‘Freedom not here?’ Coffin asked as he sat down.

  ‘No.’ Gilchrist gave Coffin his charming smile, a smile which never reached his eyes. ‘He’s gone to London . . . We don’t call here London, you know.’

  Max bustled up, eager to talk, to pour a drink, to help Coffin choose his lunch.

  ‘Bit later, Max. Not sure if I will be able to stay to eat.’

  Max looked disappointed. ‘You should eat, sir, feed the brain.’ He shook his head. ‘Miss Pinero, can I suggest a light omelette as you are not hungry?’

  Stella agreed and Gilchrist announced that he was hungry and would have a steak, pretty rare. ‘Ashamed to say I like blood,’ he confided to Stella.

  Stella paled but was gallant. ‘We were talking about money.’

  ‘Oh?’ Coffin motioned to Max, after all, he would eat. He began to feel he was going to need food. ‘Whose money?’

  ‘Spoken like a husband.’

  I’m going to be even more like one in a moment, a husband who is a copper, a husband who is a copper from whom a relevant fact has been kept.

  He leaned forward.

  ‘Stella, tell me, have you recently lost your handbag?’

  Stella gave him the look which he had learnt to recognize meant she was considering telling him a lie. Or at least wrapping up the truth.

  After a pause long enough for Coffin to order steak and for Robbie to suggest with false tact that maybe he should leave them alone to sort it out, she settled for wrapping it up.

  ‘Mislaid it. I mislaid it.’

  ‘And where did you mislay it?’

  Another pause.

  ‘In the public library in Cater Street . . . I was getting some books on the French Revolution. Might be doing a play . . . No, not A Tale of Two Cities . . . A woman, one of those who takes up the space of two, jogged my arm and I dropped the books. I think that’s how I came to forget my handbag.’

  ‘And?’ he probed.

  ‘I came out with an armful of books, went straight into my office in the theatre and did not notice I had left my bag behind.’

  ‘And how long before you noticed?’

  ‘It might have been a couple of hours. Or a bit longer.’

  Say four hours, Coffin doubled it quietly. ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I went back, and retrieved it. A nice man had found it in the reading room there and handed it in to the librarian,’ said Stella triumphantly.

  I always knew a handbag was going to come into it somewhere, he told himself.

  ‘Thank you. Forgive me while I make a call.’

  He went into the lobby where it was quieter and called Phoebe Astley. ‘Phoebe, send someone, or go yourself, to the library in Cater Street and find someone who can tell you who it was handed in Stella’s handbag. Which,’ he said, with measured irritation, ‘she left there.’

  ‘Right,’ said Phoebe. ‘I know the librarian in Cater Street, I use the place myself. You want the name of the man who handed in Stella’s bag – it had the keys to your house in it.’

  ‘He may be our killer.

  ‘Any news on the head, the other head?’

  ‘No, sir. Still looking.’

  ‘It’s out there somewhere. That bugger wants us to go on looking, he’s taunting us.’

  ‘Does he want us to find it, though?’ asked Phoebe.

  ‘Yes.’ Coffin was decided. ‘He wants us to find it.’

  One more query for Phoebe, who felt she was fielding all unwelcome oddments that worried the Chief Commander.

  ‘I’ve been talking to Gilchrist . . . he didn’t mention the daughter, worried but not worried enough. Too cool altogether. Do you have anything?’

  ‘No, sir. As far as I know, the girl is still untraced. Do you want me to push?’

  ‘Leave it for the moment.’ He wasn’t himself sure why he was worrying over the girl. ‘Get on with the other thing.’

  Phoebe skipped lunch and made her way to the library where her friend would be on duty. She bought a sandwich at the deli round the corner from her office and sat in the park just opposite while she ate.

  She was not deliberately going slow on her errand. But I am deliberating, she thought. Trying to make some sense of what has been going on.

  She ran it over in her mind, making a mental list, giving little ticks when she felt she had got something right.

  From where she sat, her mouth full of tuna salad and dark-brown bread, she could see a low line of buildings beyond the trees. This had once been a brewery, Daker’s Ale, and made Mr Harry Daker a rich man. But a couple of centuries had passed since his apotheosis and the buildings had afterwards become a warehouse for cottons from India, and then a poorhouse and now was a listed building housing a museum of local trades and manufacturers.

  Phoebe knew all this because she had gone round the museum with her friend Monica, a passionate student of the history of the district. One of her topics, subject of a book she was planning, was the making of fine china in a factory near the docks and that this factory had produced a teapot, particularly popular at the time, known as the Deacon’s pot, after the maker Mr Deacon. Round and fat-bellied, Monica had explained, as Mr Deacon was himself.

  It hadn’t meant much to Phoebe at the time, other than a pleasant trip with a friend, and yet there was something about this place, the Second City, that got into your mind.

  She brushed the crumbs from her skirt and walked on, reciting a kind of litany in her head.

  The limbs of an unknown woman, still no head and trunk discovered.

  A young woman shot dead in a car park near to the station. She is identified as Henriette Duval, and she seems to have some dangerous knowledge that caused her to run away.

  She hadn’t got far.

  And then the attack on Albert Touchey. How was Touchey? Holding his own, whatever that meant. He too seemed to have some information. He was willing to pass it on, unlike Etta who had hung on to hers and preferred to run.

  Much good had it done her, poor girl.

  And now the head o
f a cat on the staircase of St Luke’s Tower. Actually inside his own home.

  Oh yes, and another shot fired.

  She walked on to the library; she could have driven but it was always difficult to park and she had found herself wanting to be in the air. You could hardly call it fresh air here in the Docklands, and while it no longer stank of stale drains and burning coal and the smell of the tin works that had once been here, yet it was still heavy with diesel and petrol.

  She reflected that through the centuries the inhabitants of the old Docklands must have been heavy smokers ever since the first tobacco came across the seas. Indeed, Tobacco Dock was just up the river. The smell of tobacco still seemed to float in the air.

  Monica was busy when Phoebe pushed through the swing doors. She was the senior librarian in this busy library. She saw Phoebe and gave a little wave of her hand before turning back to deal with a reader with a query. Or complaint. From where Phoebe stood it sounded like a complaint. Something about waiting over a month for a special book.

  ‘Miss Pinero’s handbag? Oh, we got that back for her, someone dropped it in, said it had been found, and I telephoned her. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing wrong,’ said the cautious Phoebe. ‘I expect she just wants to say thank you.’

  ‘She did that at the time.’

  ‘To the person who found it?’

  ‘Oh.’ Monica started to tidy up a file of papers; she was busy. ‘I’ll ask around.’

  Phoebe reached out to put her fingers gently but firmly round Monica’s right wrist. ‘Now, please.’

  Monica remembered what her friend was: a policewoman. You could call her other things, like a Keeper of the Peace, a Law Preserver, but what she really was, to Monica’s mind, was a chaser of criminals.

  ‘This is serious business then?’

  Phoebe just increased the pressure on her wrist.

  ‘OK, I think it was Lizzie Chatham who took it in.’ She looked around. ‘You’re lucky, she’s just going to lunch.’

  Across the room, Lizzie was just hitching her shoulder bag over her arm and preparing to depart. She had a date to meet her young man for a sandwich then off to house hunt; they were looking for a flat to share.

  ‘Catch her before she goes,’ ordered Phoebe.

  ‘She’s entitled,’ protested Monica, who did not like being ordered around, even by a friend. Come to think of it, less by a friend.

  If Lizzie had seen them coming her way she might have escaped but she was busy dabbing a little of her new scent on her wrists: Escape, it was called.

  They bore down upon her. ‘Liz,’ said Monica. ‘You took Miss Pinero’s handbag from the person who found it, didn’t you? Know who it was?’

  Liz gave a brisk answer before making her move to the door. ‘It was Mr Copley, dear old Copley. He said someone handed it to him.’

  ‘Oh, it would be Copley, wouldn’t it?’ Monica turned to Phoebe. ‘You’re in luck again. You won’t have far to go.’

  ‘Local, is he?’

  ‘Nearer than that. He’s always here. Don’t think he has much of a home, or much to do in it. Where is he, Liz?’

  ‘In the reading room,’ said Liz, already on the move. ‘Or it might be the audio book listening room.’

  ‘Good, just want a word with him. Checking. Get him to tell me who gave it to him.’

  Name and description, Phoebe thought. Be a start. Enough to tell the Chief Commander.

  ‘Might not do you much good,’ said Liz, making her escape at last.

  Phoebe understood what she meant when Monica took her to the reading room and pointed out Mr Copley.

  He was certainly studying a newspaper. But with difficulty. Oldish, tall with grey hair and neatly dressed, he was wearing the darkest and thickest spectacles she had ever seen. More, one lens was covered with a patch.

  ‘Can’t see much,’ said Monica helpfully. ‘He does try though. The magnifying glass helps.’

  Mr Copley smiled when questioned and said that he had indeed been given the bag to hand in, he had just been going up to the desk to talk to one of the nice young girls there when this chap had tapped him on the shoulder, said he’d picked this bag up in the hallway and would he drop it in.

  He screwed up his eyes. ‘Didn’t get a good look. Taller than me, the light wasn’t good, never is in here.’

  Monica looked around her brightly lit library and gave a shrug.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Phoebe. ‘Think you’d know him again if you saw him?’

  ‘If he came close,’ responded Mr Copley. ‘Real close. And the light was good. I’d enjoy to do it.’

  Phoebe accepted his good will. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And he had a lovely voice. I’d know that.’

  ‘So what we have,’ Phoebe began when she got back to the incident room, where Tony Davley was taking a call. ‘Yes,’ she was saying. ‘What I expected really. Seemed likely. Thanks for the quick work. Yes, quite right, you do have to be quick with this one.’

  She turned from the phone to Chief Inspector Astley. She did not speak first, with chief inspectors you waited to see what they had to say.

  ‘What we’ve got,’ went on Phoebe, ‘is that the bloody bag was on the loose for about two hours, plenty of time to get keys copied, when it was returned by a man with a nice voice, who might or might not be the killer, to the almost blind Copley.’

  ‘Who couldn’t shoot anyone.’

  Phoebe agreed not. ‘No, he certainly couldn’t. Even have difficulty shooting himself,’ she said savagely. ‘So what are you leading up to?’

  ‘That was a call from forensics. They wanted you but you weren’t there, so I took the call. A bullet which was found outside the tower matches the one found earlier which hit Mr Touchey and which matched the one that killed Etta Duval.’

  John Coffin received the news with interest but equanimity. For once he was in a very, very strong position with his wife: she was apologetic about the loss of her bag. Should have told him, but hadn’t. That was worth an apology and he had got one, with the hint of a more loving one that evening. He was content to rest on that promise.

  ‘The locks are being replaced,’ he told Phoebe, who knew it. ‘And the head of that poor beast removed. I hope it gets a decent burial with the rest of it if that ever turns up.’

  Yet another torso to look for, he reflected. One easier buried.

  ‘I’m going to talk to the gun outfit. See where that leads.’

  He was proud of the Second City’s Police Gun Range. He had set it up himself.

  ‘And Phoebe, go back to Copley and see what you can get on the voice of the man who gave him the bag. He may be almost blind but he seems to have sharp hearing.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I thought of that myself . . . he’s a careful, sensible man.’

  ‘Don’t do it yourself. Send someone you trust.’

  ‘I shall send DS Tony Davley. She’s good.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed her.’

  Oh, have you? Trust you to notice an attractive woman. I think she’s spoken for.

  Then she felt ashamed of herself. She knew how deeply the Chief Commander loved Stella Pinero: she had learnt the hard way. By observation.

  ‘She’s clever, hard-working, doesn’t miss much.’

  ‘Use her.’

  The Police Gun Range was in a converted warehouse by the river, not far from the tube station where Mimsie Marker sold newspapers and controlled the gossip of the neighbourhood. She kept a close eye on the Gun Range too as being a fruitful source of rumours. She claimed she could hear the shots, but Coffin knew that all departments were soundproofed.

  He went down there now with Chief Superintendent Archie Young who was a good marksman, better than Coffin.

  ‘Time I had a look round here,’ Coffin said. ‘I’ve had guns on my mind lately.’

  On your right as you went in was the firing range with booths and electronic targets for the police to shoot at. The Second City Police was proud of its marks
men and had sent a team to Bisley. There was a baffling range of targets to choose from: a film at which they could aim, the target being a moving car, their success being checked by a sophisticated arrangement of screens divided by a stroboscopic light to a beer top hanging by a thread. The thread being the target.

  The latter target was the one most used by Coffin.

  There was a third target, one in which the marksman had to run, fully togged out, for several hundred yards, before entering a darkened range where a target would be illuminated suddenly for just two seconds in which time the marksman had to decide if it was friend or foe and then take aim. This was known among those who used it as the Kiss me Quick.

  But not by Coffin, who had drawn his gun, and shot and killed his mark. In his case, a woman, which ought not to make a difference but somehow did.

  Another department was where the officers tested out the guns to see if the riflings tallied with those on a bullet extracted from a body. Armed with practice earmuffs plus earplugs, the officer fired into iron boxes filled with sawdust or nylon padding.

  The third area, locked behind metal doors, and electronically protected, was where the main supply of guns – hand guns, rifles and even Kalashnikov repeating rifles – was stored.

  Archie Young had already been consulting with Sergeant Draper in the testing department.

  ‘Definitely the same gun used in the three shootings,’ Archie announced. ‘Draper tells me that our chap is not one to make mistakes . . . in the three instances in which this gun was used he picked up his cartridges.’

  ‘And what about the gun?’

  Archie sighed. ‘Not as straightforward as you might think. We all know that most ammunition, from the cheapest Yugoslav bullets to the choicer K & T and H & N, are meant to fit a wide range of automatics. They threw the list at me: Smith & Wesson, Rossi, Walther, Beretta . . .’ He paused. ‘And Heckler and Koch.’

  ‘That’s what the German police went over to in 1980.’

  ‘Right, and this one they think . . . only think, mind . . . was used here. A P7K3.32 pistol.’

  Coffin sighed. He knew the gun: it was small, hammerless, semi-automatic. It could be fired by either hand even with gloves on. He looked back wistfully on the days when the perp hired a gun, for several hundred pounds, and returned it to get most of his money back.