Coffin's Ghost

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘If he named me then he was wrong.’

  ‘I didn’t say so.’

  ‘You didn’t have to; I know you lot. It’s what you are hinting and you want me to react.’

  Which you are doing, thought Coffin. He looked blandly at his foe. Yes, he felt Freedom was his enemy. Then he stopped himself in mid-thought: he was professional enough to know how dangerous the concept was. He swallowed back the thought and it went down like a hard, hot pill which went cold as it passed down his gut.

  Coldness was much less dangerous.

  ‘If this is how it is going, then I want a solicitor.’

  ‘Of course.’ Coffin was all courtesy. ‘And I will not be questioning you myself.’ He stood up, he was tall and Freedom was short, he could look down on him. ‘But I will take you down myself.’

  For a moment, Freedom hesitated, as if he would not move unless forced. He turned to Gilchrist. ‘What about you, then?’

  Robbie took a step as if making for the door. ‘Not you, Mr Gilchrist,’ said Coffin. ‘I want to talk to you.’ At the door, he paused and said to Gillian, his secretary: ‘Make Mr Gilchrist comfortable and give him some coffee.’

  Gillian came forward with the nervous smile which afflicted her when the Chief Commander was in an awkward mood. He was always polite, but when he was like that, you had to watch your step.

  Here, she rightly interpreted the Chief Commander’s words as, Keep an eye on Gilchrist and make sure he doesn’t see or hear anything that he shouldn’t. So she gave Robbie a cup of strong coffee in the best china while watching that he didn’t read anything that was on the computer screen. The telephone she would not answer while he was there and listening.

  He was listening and watching, for which she could not blame him.

  ‘Might get a scene or two out of this one day,’ he said. ‘Comedy. Oh yes, it has its comic side.’

  ‘Not everyone would find it funny,’ observed Gillian.

  ‘Depends where you stand, comedy, tragedy, thin dividing line.’

  I’ve heard people say that and never believed it.’

  ‘Take it from me.’

  He was the tiniest bit drunk, she decided, an opinion reinforced when he poured something from a hip flask into his coffee. ‘Medicinal,’ he said.

  Coffin came back, he nodded at Gillian and swept Robbie before him into his own office.

  Why am I nervous? Robbie asked himself. I haven’t done anything. I HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING.

  ‘All set up,’ said Coffin.

  ‘He’s being interviewed?’

  ‘He will be. He may have to wait some time.’ There was a delicate cruelty here that made Robbie understand why he was nervous. This man here was more formidable than when met at dinner with Stella Pinero. And it was anger that gave him force, Robbie suddenly grasped, not cruelty.

  He remembered what he had read in the newspapers and heard on the television news and picked up from the gossip of the theatre.

  The limbs, arms and legs of a woman, left on the doorstep of that house in Barrow Street. A house in which Coffin had once lodged.

  The woman shot dead in the car park. She had lived in that house too.

  Albie Touchey, Prison Governor, shot and seriously wounded outside the tower in St Luke’s.

  And there was something else too, not yet in the papers or on TV but talked about, all over the theatre, the head of a cat left inside the tower home of Stella and John Coffin. There were other rumours going round the theatre too, some wilder than others.

  Make a great Gothic, he thought, a play or film.

  He shook his head. Not his style. Not really Freedom’s style either. Too Grand Guignol.

  ‘He’s a skunk, a bloody good writer but a skunk. Not a murderer though, anything else, rapist, seducer, wife-beater, oh yes, but not that, not a murderer . . . A coward, you see, in the final countdown.’

  Coffin did not answer.

  ‘And if he did do it, you’ll never get him, he’s as cunning as a fox. I ought to know.’

  ‘I asked you to stay behind because I wanted to tell you about Alice, your stepdaughter. She’s turned up.’

  ‘Everyone’s stepdaughter,’ said Robbie, ‘with a mother like that, always moving on. I’m glad the girl is back. I’m fond of her.’

  ‘I thought you were.’

  ‘She’s all right?’ Robbie had caught a note in Coffin’s voice. ‘Turned up . . . you don’t mean she’s dead?’

  ‘No, she’s safe enough and well enough. She’s at the Serena Seddon being looked after by the people there.’

  ‘Come on, there’s more than this. What is it?’

  Briefly, Coffin told him what Phoebe Astley had passed on to him.

  ‘She’s an innocent,’ groaned Robbie. ‘Couldn’t take the pill, made her ill. Wouldn’t remember anyway. Some bloody man took advantage of her. Did she say?’

  ‘She’s a bit confused. And frightened.’

  ‘It’s Freedom, that’s what you think. I’ll kill him.’ And then: ‘What happened to the baby?’

  ‘It was buried,’ said Coffin in a neutral voice.

  ‘There’s a lot you’re not telling me.’ Robbie glared at him.

  ‘She can’t stay at the refuge,’ went on Coffin, ignoring what Robbie said. ‘Can you arrange to take her away . . . not far, because we shall need to talk to her.’

  ‘Now I know there is something,’ cried Robbie.

  Coffin suddenly felt very tired.

  Robbie stood up. ‘I’ll get off to see Alice. That’s allowed, I suppose? I’ll find out what went on from her, she trusts me. And I’ll look after her.’ He got to the door unchecked. ‘And what about Freedom?’

  ‘Leave him to us,’ said Coffin. ‘We will look after him.’

  George Freedom sat for over an hour, alone, in the room where questioning went on, while he waited for his solicitor to appear. His solicitor, Edward Tremain, had offices in the city of London off Fleet Street, though near to the Law Courts, but lived in Epsom. He was working at home that day so he took some time to arrive. Traffic hold-ups, he explained when he arrived in the Second City.

  Freedom, increasingly angry as time went by, was offered coffee and tea but refused everything. He accused the police sourly of delaying things on purpose.

  ‘He’s on his way, sir,’ said the constable who had brought the tea. ‘He rang through on his mobile to say he was held up on the motorway, and would be here soon.’

  Freedom glowered and managed to upset the teacup so it went over the constable’s trousers.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Oh dear, did it burn you’?’

  When Edward Tremain hurried in, Freedom swore at him and demanded the police get on with it.

  ‘Glad to, Mr Freedom,’ said Phoebe Astley, who had come back from Serena Seddon, leaving a sleeping Alice and an exhausted Mary Arden.

  She questioned Freedom for a couple of hours about his movements in the Second City on the four days which were important.

  The evening on which the legs and arms were deposited on the doorstep of the refuge.

  The morning on which Etta Duval had been shot and killed.

  The evening on which Albie had been shot, possibly in mistake for the Chief Commander.

  And the afternoon on which a cat’s head had been left inside the home of the Chief Commander.

  Freedom, after a quick look at his solicitor, denied any knowledge of these events. Couldn’t even remember the dates.

  Phoebe had thought of this. She pushed over a sheet of paper with the dates on them.

  Freedom pushed it back.

  The solicitor started to make a deprecating noise.

  ‘And don’t you say anything,’ said Freedom, rounding on him. He produced his diary from his pocket and threw it at Phoebe. ‘Here you are, read it, see for yourself where I was and what I was doing. Damned if I can remember.’

  The solicitor made a quiet, moaning noise.

  ‘May I keep this?’ Phoebe asked politely.
‘I will, of course, return it to you.’

  She then questioned him about any knowledge he had of Henriette Duval.

  ‘Didn’t know the girl.’

  ‘Are you sure? Be worrying for us if we found you did.’

  She showed him a photograph, procured from Mary Arden, showing the girl in a summer dress with her hair flowing over her shoulders.

  He looked. ‘Might have seen her around. Seem to know the face.’ He returned the photograph. Then he reached out to take the picture back. ‘Might have seen her around.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Phoebe made a note, carefully and deliberately, since she had observed that the sight of her making notes made him jumpy. Jumpier the better, she thought.

  ‘You know Mr Touchey, of course.’

  ‘Of course I do, you know that. I’ve been asked it once and said I knew him, and I didn’t shoot him. I don’t like him but he’s a fair bastard and I wouldn’t and didn’t shoot him. Haven’t got a gun.’

  He looked at his solicitor, who murmured that the chief inspector had no evidence.

  Phoebe made an excuse, suspended the interview, and went back some twenty minutes later, to take him through it all again. She kept a wary eye on the solicitor and framed her questions carefully. ‘Just checking.’

  Then she let him go. ‘Your stepdaughter Alice has been found,’ she said, as he left. ‘I expect you will want to see her. And I believe Mr Gilchrist wants to see you.’

  ‘And he went white,’ said Phoebe as she reported to Coffin later.

  Coffin raised his head from the sea of papers on his desk, then switched off his computer which seemed to be telling him things he did not wish to hear about a bomb in Central London. His turn in the Second City next, he thought.

  He was glad to give his attention to Phoebe Astley who had pushed her way past the protective Gillian.

  ‘What did he say about the girl?’

  ‘Just: silly bitch.’

  ‘Charming.’ He added thoughtfully. ‘Someone will beat him up one day and I think it will be Robbie Gilchrist.’

  ‘I don’t think we will get him for anything, more’s the pity. He’s in the clear. Still, we put the wind up him.’

  ‘Do you think just one person did all three crimes?’

  Four, if you count breaking and entering and leaving the feline head.’ The dog, Gus, had not settled down yet after this intrusion and still went around snuffling and whining gently. ‘No. I’m not sure about that.’

  He had three teams working on the different crimes, each of them throwing specimens at forensics and begging for answers.

  ‘I keep hoping forensics will come up with something,’ said Phoebe Astley. ‘So far nothing.’

  ‘I had noticed.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘There was one thing,’ said Phoebe slowly. ‘At first he denied knowing Henriette Duval. Then he said he might have seen her around.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Just as he was leaving, he told me he associated her with food, with eating.’

  Coffin looked doubtful. ‘Invention to get you going?’

  ‘He’d got me going already, he knew I disliked him . . . No, the thing is, I think he believed it.’

  Phoebe went off on her next mission; find out where Freedom eats. Start off by asking him, said common sense.

  He had left the building, in the company of his reluctant solicitor. He had left behind him a threat of an action for harassment, using language which made his solicitor pinch his lips.

  Called by Tony Davley on his mobile phone, he answered in a thick voice. ‘Hello.’

  Sloshed, pissed, drunk, thought Tony as she introduced herself.

  ‘God give me strength,’ said Freedom. ‘What is it now?’

  Tony put her question.

  ‘Where I eat, damn you? I eat in New York, Paris, London, and this bloody Second City. I eat wherever I am, and no, I can’t remember where I saw that face. Maybe I didn’t.’

  Tony ground her teeth. Over the line, she could hear the solicitor making plaintive noises, and Freedom shouting, OK, OK. Then he came back to her:

  ‘It seemed cheap and cheerful, so it was round here somewhere. Best I can do and you’re lucky to get that.’

  John Coffin, Chief Superintendent Archie Young (called away from his preoccupation with the Russian visit) and DCI Phoebe Astley met for a drink in the bar in the basement of the building. It was an egalitarian bar in which rank got you a drink no quicker, but there was a certain corner which was left for the Chief Commander and anyone he might be drinking with. Now in a crowded room, they were left alone. Watched but not spoken to. This was a democratic force, but few went up to the Chief Commander with a breezy Hello.

  ‘Got a face of doom on him,’ said one uniformed coffee drinker. ‘And don’t I know why.’ There was plenty of speculation and bawdy jokes about what the Chief Commander knew about the owner of the legs and arms left where he had once lived.

  The mood of all three in the select corner was depressed. Stella had spoken to him from the refuge, saying that the girl Alice was recovering and it was a lousy business.

  ‘Stella,’ he had started to say, longing to speak to her, but she had put the receiver down pretty quick. Not a good sign for future relations.

  He himself had telephoned the hospital to see how Albie Touchey was, and the answer was, No change. He was murmuring odd words and was coming round, but not yet.

  Not yet, words of doom, thought Coffin gloomily.

  ‘We’ve been at it for some time,’ said Phoebe. ‘And we don’t have a suspect.’

  She hated this thought: she usually had a suspect in her mind, even if later it turned out to be the wrong one, that was police work, you worked on.

  ‘Even George Freedom didn’t qualify. I don’t like him, but I don’t see him as guilty.’

  Knowing that the media was yapping at their heels, Coffin ordered Phoebe: ‘Get a notice in the papers saying we are pursuing an important line.’

  ‘And hope for an announcement soon?’

  Coffin was a realist. ‘No, that would be pushing our luck.’ He gave Phoebe a sharp look, and to her that look said, Get on with it.

  He had given her quick promotion and now he wanted results.

  Phoebe Astley went back to her office, she felt lonely and lost, she had few friends in the Second City and now it looked as if her career was going down the drain fast.

  In the big incident room she had two separate teams working, one searching for the torso and head, still missing. The second team was working on the shootings. The break-in at the Chief Commander’s home, and the depositing of the head of the cat, was shuttled between the two as officers completed one task and reported on it and moved on afresh. The third team sat at desks and computers and collated everything.

  The total result so far was a pile of reports and photographs, all carefully studied by Phoebe who also discussed them with the officers concerned.

  She was summarizing her thoughts aloud, bemoaning Freedom’s regrettable way of giving information. ‘You can tell he writes comedy,’ she complained.

  ‘I’ve had some good laughs from him on TV shows he’s put on,’ said a constable, handing her yet another bundle of reports.

  ‘Chopping Tree Lane.’ A voice spoke up from the table in front of Phoebe. ‘Cheap and easy eating there. And everything else,’ the young woman added thoughtfully. ‘Samuel Pepys said it had the most liberal stews and pimps and whores in the whole of East Hythe. The lane that runs between Drossers Lane Market and where Freedom lives is the old Chopping Tree Lane.’ She stood up to face Phoebe, a tall, solid girl, not beautiful but taking. ‘I don’t think its character has changed all that much. It’s called Pepys’ Alley now.’

  ‘I thought that was Inches Street,’ called a cheerful baritone from across the room.

  ‘It was until that Know Your Own History Month last year and then it was changed to commemorate Pepys.’ She added thoughtfully, ‘He called it Piss Alley.
’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about it, Liz,’ came from the baritone. ‘Go there a lot, do you?’

  ‘No, clever clogs. I’m just interested in the past. More your sort of scene than mine.’

  Phoebe was remembering that where the child’s body had been buried and where George Freedom lived in the old warehouse were close together too, both near Chopping Tree Lane and both near Drossers Market.

  She made a decision: ‘Concentrate on that triangle; Drossers Market, Pepys’ Alley or whatever it is called and the road where the child was found. Question people, search it, photograph it, dig it up.’

  The room went quiet.

  ‘Anything from pathology about the child yet?’

  ‘Natural death . . . report is on the way,’ called a voice. ‘It’s being faxed. Coming through now.’

  Phoebe walked across to pick up the pages as they appeared. Her eye fell on the comment that DNA specimens would be necessary if there was an attempt to prove paternity.

  Back to Freedom again, then.

  A few hundred yards from Chopping Tree Lane was the canal, now unused, built by Irish labourers before the railways came. It had had an industrial life until after the last war when the factories along its banks closed one after another and fell empty or were converted into luxury apartments. The canal then became a selling point and the word Venice was mentioned. Freedom and Gilchrist had debated using the scene for a television comedy: Watermen at Play . . . provisional title only. Both of them could see the canal from their bedroom windows.

  Now it was occasionally used by pleasure barges, and there was talk of ‘kind of a marina’ being constructed further down the canal towards the Essex coast, but at the moment children played on the canal path and rats lived there in some peace. It was a health and safety hazard by any standard.

  This being so, a police constable patrolled the path at irregular intervals. Irregular because if the kids knew the time you were coming, they stopped whatever wrongdoing they were up to. It was a favourite police walk because you could stop and have a fag.

  WPC Winifred Darby was just about to do that when she saw a cluster of kids on the canal bank. Experience suggested she go to look. WPC Darby was a sturdy, matronly lady with a family of her own.