Coffin's Game

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘They’re a clannish lot round there. They dislike people prying. Can’t say I blame them, really, but it can make investigation tough.’

  ‘You had a look at the house?’

  ‘Twice. First time I just stood there looking. Second time I rang the door bell and got no answer. Thought I might go back, third time lucky. I didn’t know what to make of the house last time, to tell the truth. The neighbours said she might be away, but they could have been saying that to get rid of me.’

  ‘They knew you were a police officer?’

  ‘Knew me a mile away,’ said Phoebe cheerfully. ‘I had the feeling that Maisie might have been there watching from behind a curtain.’

  Gosterwood Street, like Chislewood Street which ran behind it, nearer to the river, was a row of small, flat-faced houses, some brightly painted and well kept up, and others down at heel. Maisie lived in a house painted red and white, these being her favourite colours in which she had felt free to indulge when her mother died, leaving her a sum of money in an insurance policy. Maisie had painted the house and bought a new bed, thus far her ambitions reached.

  ‘Maisie’s popular,’ Phoebe said. ‘They had an epidemic of scarlet fever down the street last year – wouldn’t think it, these days, would you? But it happened, and Maisie went everywhere nursing the sick and helping them.’

  ‘Didn’t they go to hospital? There’s one close, isn’t there?’

  ‘Not far. Some did, but others stayed at home and kept quiet about it.’

  Coffin did not answer, he was already thinking about Maisie and what she might know about Stella. Their relationship was close, but exactly how much Stella would tell Maisie was a mystery. She had known Maisie a long time, they had worked together for years, and theatre people had strong bonds. But Stella could be reserved, she might not have said much, possibly not much at all. They might get nothing from this call, even if Maisie was there.

  He parked the car in the only space available in Gosterwood Street, which was lined with battered old cars, few of which looked roadworthy. ‘We will have to walk from here.’

  ‘It’s just down the road, the fifth house.’ Phoebe had it clearly marked in her mind.

  ‘Looks closed up,’ said Coffin, as they approached.

  ‘Can’t tell, she could be in the back.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘It’s worth a try. Let’s see what happens when I ring the bell. Loudly.’

  Coffin watched her walk up the narrow path and ring the door bell. There was no answer. But Phoebe would not give up. She walked round the side of the house. ‘I am going to look round the back,’ she called over her shoulder.

  ‘You think she’s dead, don’t you? Stella, I mean.’

  ‘Fiddle. Of course I don’t.’ But although Phoebe did not say so aloud, she did think that Stella Pinero, the lovely, successful actress was dead. She only hoped that her husband had not killed her. ‘I couldn’t think that,’ she said to herself. But alas, she could.

  ‘Why do you think she’s dead?’ she asked herself as she rounded the corner of the house. ‘I don’t know. Just one of those terrible feelings one gets. Also, I don’t believe Stella would go missing. Not her style.’ She shivered. ‘I feel as if a helicopter was hovering low over me.’ But there was nothing in the sky.

  There was a big black dustbin waiting to be emptied by the side of the house. Phoebe lifted the lid automatically. You never knew with dustbins. There was room for a body inside, but she did not expect to find one.

  Coffin came up behind her. ‘Empty?’

  Phoebe held the lid back so he could see. ‘More or less. There is a streak of something on the lid … could be blood.’

  ‘Yes,’ Coffin observed, ‘but it may not be human blood. Nor is it new blood, it’s dried and dark. Several days old. Forensics won’t be able to do much with that.’ The thought was not pleasing to him. ‘Let’s have another go at rousing Maisie.’

  He walked back to the front door and rang the bell. The noise could be heard echoing through the house, but no one came. Coffin pointed: ‘Streak of blood by the bell. Someone with blood on them rang the bell …’

  Phoebe opened her mouth to say something but thought better of it.

  ‘And don’t say the butcher,’ said Coffin.

  ‘I wasn’t going to. Butchers don’t deliver these days.’

  Coffin turned away. ‘There ought to be more blood or less.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’ She caught up with Coffin. When she got a look at his face she thought: You have become a terrible person.

  ‘If Stella is dead, there would be more blood. If the blood is hers, then Maisie knows where she is and I do not. But get the blood checked all the same.’

  Bitter, too, thought Phoebe. ‘I don’t think there is enough blood, and it’s too dry.’

  ‘Bang on the door. Maisie may be inside.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  He was already walking away. He drove back in silence, but not to his home. He took them both to his office at police headquarters. Phoebe thought this was a marginally good sign; better to go there than sit alone in his tower.

  He strode through the outer office where Paul Masters was working quietly, head down, in the little hutch he called his private office. He saw Coffin come in but said nothing.

  Gillian was occupied with filing, and also kept her head down. The efficient Sheila was not to be seen.

  Phoebe hesitated for a moment, met Paul Masters’ eye, gave him something between a nod and shrug, then turned to go back to her own office where, as always, there was plenty of work waiting for her. He needs leaving alone, she said to herself.

  He did not notice she had gone.

  Coffin worked quietly on the sort of routine matters that bored him but went with the position; they occupied only the surface of his mind.

  Paul Masters tapped on the door and came in quickly. ‘Chief Superintendent Young would like to speak to you, sir.’

  Archie Young was right behind him and in the room before Coffin could answer.

  ‘Forensics have been over where the dead man lived. He had a one-room flat down by the harbour, Jamaica Place. Dennis Garden obliged with the address, he had visited him there. We would have got there anyway, of course.’

  ‘I know Jamaica Place, it’s an old warehouse.’

  ‘That’s right. Turned into dwelling places about ten years ago. Anyway, the dead man had lived there for three years or so. Francis di Rimini, he called himself. Edward Bates he was born. Did a bit of acting. Worked as a model. Drank a lot, lived a bit rough … Didn’t mind who he picked up.’

  ‘I get the picture,’ said Coffin.

  ‘Dennis Garden says he had been dead for several days when he was discovered. Signs of a struggle in the flat, so there was a possibility that he had been killed there, but the video set us right there. All the same, he was meant to be found.’

  Coffin stood up. ‘I want to see the flat.’

  Archie Young nodded. ‘Thought you might say that. I’ll drive.’

  No one stood on guard outside the flat in Jamaica Place, but a young policewoman was inside. She recognized the Chief Commander, saluting nervously.

  Coffin smiled at her but said nothing. An open door led to the main room from which opened the small kitchen on one side and the bathroom on the other. Two white-uniformed forensic workers who were on their knees by the window rose politely as he came in.

  He walked into the middle of the room where he stood looking around.

  The room was plainly furnished and none too tidy, with the remains of a meal on the table where an almost empty wine bottle stood. The air was stuffy. A chair was overturned in one corner.

  ‘A splash of blood on the back of the chair,’ said Archie Young. ‘More in the bathroom. Someone did some bleeding. Probably the dead man himself, shaving possibly. Garden says he was dead when his face was bashed in. He wasn’t killed here, we have him on the video, walking d
own Jamaica Street. Pity we didn’t have a camera on Percy Street, but that’s economy for you, can’t have them everywhere.’

  ‘Yes, I know. So Garden thought he might have been picked in the street, and made use of.’ Coffin was walking round the room. ‘I’m not so sure, life is not usually so obliging. I wonder whether Garden might rethink the drugs side of it … Someone might have seen to it that he needed a fix and got at him through that.’ Or just wanted him in the mood.

  ‘I’ll get him to check again. He won’t like it, though.’

  Dennis Garden was well known for claiming omniscience. Archie Young knew him of old, a hard man to convince of an idea he had not thought of himself.

  ‘Even Garden can make a mistake.’

  Coffin stood in the middle of the room. ‘So the picture is that Francis or Frank or Ed Bates, or whatever he called himself, left under his own steam, less conspicuous, then his face was smashed when he was moribund … some blood. The fingers were then cut away – that must have taken some doing.’

  ‘Chop, chop.’ Archie allowed himself a moment of flippancy which he at once regretted. It was all right for Garden to make jokes about dead bodies but not for Archie Young. Although, as he remembered, Dennis Garden had been quiet about this dead man, whom he had clearly liked.

  ‘I wonder where the bits are, by the way.’ Coffin was not smiling.

  ‘A search is being made,’ said Archie. Probably inside some pig by now.

  ‘He was dressed in pants and jeans, clothes that must have been brought in on purpose. Oh, and a wig popped on his head and a handbag belonging to my wife tucked beside him.’

  ‘That’s the picture.’

  ‘So he was ready to be found in the bombed building, all dressed up in the clothes that did not belong to him. Was it meant to be a joke on us?’ Coffin gritted his teeth. ‘If so, I’m not laughing.’

  He went into the kitchen, where there was a mess of dirty dishes in the sink and the smell of generations of curry takeaways.

  In the bathroom, one more forensic worker was standing by the lavatory. Even beneath the tight cap and buttoned whites it was clear that this one was a woman, young and attractive.

  She looked at him gravely, then indicated a plastic envelope, the contents of which she had been studying.

  ‘You were talking about the fingers, sir – I couldn’t help overhearing …’ she paused.

  ‘So?’

  ‘There is the tip of a finger in this bag; a little finger, I would say. It was tucked away behind the lavatory.’

  Archie Young had come up behind the Chief Commander. ‘What’s it wrapped up in?’

  ‘It seems to be a handkerchief, a woman’s handkerchief. There’s an embroidered initial S.’

  Coffin had a habit of summarizing events in a case at a certain point, sometimes in a notebook, sometimes in his head. When in his head, he saw it like a blackboard with his own writing in large letters, headings underlined. He realized that it derived from the easel in his schoolroom of long ago. Did schools still use boards? He bet they still used underlining and listed points: one, two, three.

  He was running over his mental headlines now as he and Archie Young drove away.

  Maisie, that was his first headline. Maisie knew things about Stella that he did not. They had been friends, those two, for a long while. She trusted Maisie.

  Why not me? was the painful question he could not help asking. The answer came quickly: because it concerns me.

  Better find out what there was to find out about the blood on Maisie’s door. By asking Maisie, if she could be located, how it got there. If she knew. People did not alway know what was in their bins.

  Then there was the finger in a handkerchief with the intitial S on it. But not Stella’s – never Stella. Put there on purpose to drag Stella in, he told himself savagely.

  The underpants on the body aping Stella.

  Stella, always Stella.

  It was something more deliberate than a connective coincidence.

  ‘It’s like a Victorian melodrama,’ said Coffin. ‘The heroine’s handkerchief turns up to incriminate her.’ Archie Young made a sympathetic noise, but kept his eye on the road where the traffic was heavy. It was hard to know what to say. ‘Plenty of people with the intial S,’ he managed.

  ‘I never see Stella with a handkerchief,’ went on Coffin, his voice irritable. ‘She’s always leaving little bits of tissue about the place.’

  Then Coffin started to laugh, not loudly but with genuine mirth. ‘What a fool I am! Good sense is coming back. Stella has been my wife for a long while now. She has learnt the rules. Whatever crime she committed, she knew not to leave so many clues around.’

  ‘We’ll find out who is behind it all, but it looks personal, sir. Either aimed at you or Miss Pinero.’ Archie always had difficulty in knowing how to address Stella. He never felt happy with whatever he managed: Stella was Mrs Coffin and no doubt would be Lady Coffin quite soon, but she felt more like Miss Pinero. She would never, as Congreve had it, dwindle into a wife. Archie Young’s wife was attending to his education and recently she had taken him to a production of Congreve’s The Way of the World.

  He watched the Chief Commander walk towards his front door. The tower was dark, but there were lights on in the theatre. Coffin looked tall and too thin; Archie wished the man had someone to come home to. Where was the dog? Distantly, he heard the sound of Augustus barking. Not as good as a wife, he thought, as he drove away, but better than nothing.

  Coffin let himself into his tower and stood at the bottom of the staircase. There was a faint smell of scent on the air. He took a step forward.

  Stella came running down the stairs. She was carefully made up, her hair looked newly washed and set, she was wearing jeans and a soft cashmere sweater which looked new.

  ‘There you are, darling. Here I am back. How are you?’

  He felt both relief, a powerful happiness, and a wave of anger. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘At a health farm, darling. I told you.’

  That’s a lie for a start, Coffin told himself. She came right up to him and threw her arms round him. He held her tight. He thought she winced as he gripped her arms.

  Chapter 6

  Young and Lodge, who had a tactful, remote relationship as men who handled tricky jobs, were drinking together in the bar favoured by the Second City’s top-ranking CID officers. Without being friends they had a quiet respect for each other, although Archie Young would have preferred not to have the Todger on his patch. But in the present situation, the ways things were with bombs and terrorists around, he recognized the necessity of someone like Lodge and that perhaps they were lucky to have him and not one of the rougher boys. There was a look about their eyes that he did not like: seen too much, heard too much, done too much, trust no one, it said. And, in consequence, I don’t trust you, Archie said to himself. Liking did not come into it. There was certainly this side to Inspector Lodge, but he kept it hidden better. (As also to the Chief Superintendent himself, but deep, deep down.)

  The chosen pub, the Sevastopol Arms had earned its name because of its position. There, in a straight line across the river, but not visible because of the buildings that were in the way, stood the Woolwich Arsenal in whose sheds had been forged the guns and armament that went to the Crimea. The Sevastopol was an old dark brick building, deceptively small from the outside and larger within. It had defied being modernized and brightened, remaining sombre but comfortable, which pleased its own peculiar clientele who did not want dancing, music or karaoke, but did want excellent beer and good whisky.

  ‘What do you make of Miss Pinero?’ Lodge kept his voice down. He had been introduced to Stella, he had seen her act, but he knew that there were reservations about her in the Second City Force. She was treated with a certain formality since it was felt it distanced the Chief Commander from what was viewed in some quarters as an awkward relationship. She brought trouble, didn’t she, from her different world?
/>   ‘Lovely lady,’ said Young, loyally.

  ‘To look at, yes.’

  ‘She’s generous and kind,’ Archie persevered.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I didn’t know too much about her life and interests till recently. My wife’s a pal of hers.’

  ‘We know a touch more now,’ said Lodge grimly.

  ‘That photograph was a fake.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we’re agreed upon that. But she is there, in the picture. It does suggest she has some strange friends. Or has had in the past; the picture of her looked a mite younger than she is now, so, an old friend.’

  ‘They don’t have to be friends,’ said Young stoutly. ‘Or even known to her. Actresses have a lot of photographs taken, matter of business, and hand them out. Publicity and all that.’

  ‘If she wasn’t away, we could ask her.’ Lodge stopped short of using the word question. You did not talk about the Chief Commander’s wife except with care.

  ‘Sure,’ said Archie. ‘Like your chap. Not nice for him having his pants used that way. Not nice at all.’

  They looked at each other in silence.

  ‘Point taken,’ said Lodge. He got up to go to the bar. ‘My turn, I think. Same again?’

  Archie nodded. He was breathing heavily, as if he had been running. He was aware that Inspector Lodge had access to information that he did not have, and he suspected that John Coffin also knew more than he had talked about. Sat on all the right security committees, didn’t he? Damn the woman. If she ruined the boss, he, Archie, would want to kill her.

  The Todger came back with two glasses, together with a sandwich for each of them. He put them down carefully, then sat down himself. ‘I’ll come clean with you. I am worried about my man’s probity. Checks in when it suits him, tells me something, mentions seeing Miss Pinero … then he’s off again. Silence.’

  Telling me this, because he knows it’s what I want to know, thought Archie Young. Of course, he knows we are worried sick about the Chief Commander’s wife. I don’t want her to be dead, but, by God, if it would make things easier, I might be up to doing it myself. Then he laughed. Probably not, though; there are things you will do for a mate, but not kill their wife for them.