Coffin in Fashion

by Gwendoline Butler

  Rose said it as if she did not realize what a strange but interesting thing she had said. Gabriel did realize.

  If I knew that policeman better, the one I met at the bus stop, she thought, I’d be tempted to tell him, because it tells you how Rose felt about her son. She fears him.

  Not that it would help the policeman understand Steve. Rose had a problem there. Manipulative, that boy. She thought anyone who loved Steve would be getting a very poor bargain indeed. But then, in matters of love and war, it is caveat emptor: Let the buyer watch out.

  She could see behind Rose’s phrase a fear that Steve might indeed know something about the bodies.

  It was a nasty picture of family life.

  Gabriel herself had not had a happy family life, but a merciful providence, as she now saw it, had orphaned her early. She was a person it suited. No past, only a future.

  As they drew up to Belmodes, Rose said, ‘I know you’re a rotten little tyke in many ways, but professionally you’re the tops. If I’m temporarily taken out of circulation, then you’re in charge. I don’t want Dagmar or Shirley.’

  ‘But what could take you out, Rose?’

  ‘Like being murdered or taken in by the police,’ said Rose, getting out of the car.

  As Gabriel trailed behind her boss’s resolute stride she ought to have felt angry at the words of abuse, but she knew that they represented Rose’s own fury and fear and she felt sympathy.

  ‘At this rate, I may not be able to behave badly to her.’

  At the entrance to Rose’s office a plainclothes policewoman was standing. She spoke to Rose and the two women went into Rose’s office.

  Gabriel hurried up to try to hear what was said, but the door closed in her face.

  After a short interval, the two came out again. As Rose left she cast a meaning glance at Gabriel, but she did not speak.

  All that day Rose did not come back, nor was there any message.

  Gabriel carried out Rose’s instructions and kept the process of work going, ignoring the intense excitement of all the women. The sense of violence and anger, together with passionate interest, spilled out all over the place.

  This is what it is like being on the outside of a murder case, thought Gabriel. Close to, yet outside, and it’s not good.

  ‘Don’t you think someone should go to tell Steve that his mother is not there?’ she said to Dagmar, as the day drew in.

  ‘You do it.’

  Gabriel picked up the telephone. ‘Hook Road School, isn’t it? I’ll ask for the headmistress.’

  A few years ago she might have found this impossible, the old London County Council preferring to keep its heads of schools at a distance without a telephone. This had changed; Miss Fraser could be reached.

  She put her problem, then listened to the answer, her face changing. Then she put the receiver down, turning towards Dagmar.

  ‘He isn’t there. They haven’t seen him all day.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘What’s she like, then?’ said John Coffin. ‘I mean, to work with.’

  Having had the good fortune to fall in with Gabriel outside Cat’s Coffee Shop as she was on her way home, he had seized his chance and asked her for an early supper.

  Gabriel carefully buttered a roll. ‘She’s a good employer. I have to admit it, though in many ways she’s a pain.’

  She chewed her way though a good piece of the roll; she had eaten little that day.

  ‘I wouldn’t want her to go to prison.’

  ‘Hasn’t come to that.’

  Gabriel leaned across the table to grip his wrist. ‘You’ll find out for me what’s going on, won’t you? You promised.’

  Coffin looked thoughtful. ‘I might give someone a ring.’ Carefully he sorted out a few chips on his plate. ‘It’s not my case, you understand.’

  He was to find himself repeating this often as the days went by.

  ‘I’m going down to Mouncy Street now.’ He was going to collect a few possessions and move into Mrs Lorimer’s for a bit. Impossible to live in his own house as things were. One body too many. ‘I’ll ring from there.’

  ‘See what you can do. Someone’s got to tell her the boy’s not been at school, isn’t at home,’ Gabriel said, as if that was what it was all about.

  ‘I’ll have a go.’ He looked at his watch. ‘You stay here and eat slowly. I’ll be back.’

  Gabriel looked at the wall. ‘Can’t you phone over there?’

  ‘Too public.’ She didn’t have any idea of the way you eased into queries of this sort, and to have a jukebox banging out the Rolling Stones would not provide the right background.

  When he had gone, Gabriel went to the telephone herself.

  ‘Charley?’ The Beatles had taken over from the Rolling Stones, but Gabriel, used to pop boiling over all around her, did not notice.

  ‘Speaking,’ he said absently. At least he had answered the telephone. Quite hard to get through to Charley sometimes; when pressed he would simply say he was thinking. She called it Charley going incognito.

  ‘Have you heard what’s happened?’

  ‘No, what?’ He had been out working all day on a commission job for a fashionable hairdresser who was creating a branch in Los Angeles. He listened while Gabriel told him the day’s events. ‘You shouldn’t have interfered. Stay out of it, Gaby.’

  ‘Rose is my employer, Charley, I want to know. I need to know. And then there’s the boy.’

  ‘Oh, boys that age are a law unto themselves. He’s got friends somewhere, I expect.’

  What he said seemed to open up vistas, disquieting views into a landscape she did not like. She did not think boys did go off on their own like that.

  And across her mind, like a slug, trailed a stream of unease.

  ‘So there’s this, Charley, I’ll have to forget working for Touch. Rose has fixed that. For the time being I am all Rose’s property.’

  And what would she do with all the pretty clothes she had created, using Rose’s time and Rose’s machines, and which were now stored in what Charley called his Wardrobe, a deep cupboard in his studio in Mouncy Street?

  ‘So that’s all off?’

  ‘I’m thinking it over.’ She might as well let Rose have the designs, next season they would be out of date, but the price would have to be negotiated. ‘Keep my products for the time being, will you?’ She could hear his dog Mop barking and whining in the background. ‘What’s up with Mop? He’s usually so quiet.’

  Gabriel went back to her table, conscious that Cat had been listening, but probably couldn’t make more of it than he already knew.

  He leaned across the counter. ‘How’s Charley, then?’

  So he had been listening. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Haven’t seen much of him lately.’

  ‘He’s been very busy.’

  Cat gave his counter a polish with a soft duster; he liked everything he owned to shine.

  Gabriel sat waiting for John Coffin to come back. He was taking his time. Why didn’t she go down to his house to see for herself?

  But she shied away from the idea. Somehow, it wasn’t a house she wanted to go into. ‘Bring me another cup of coffee,’ she called to Cat.

  John Coffin came in just as she took a sip. Over the years, as a young detective he had lost weight at a time when a lot of men put it on, and now looked thin and wiry, reproducing in himself, as he half knew, the family look. Generations of his forebears had lived in London, with his bearing and bone structure. Genetically speaking, they were strong stock.

  He sat down across the table from Gabriel, thinking what to say. As if to aid him in his thought, Cat changed the music and let a waltz in.

  ‘One worry’s off your mind,’ said Coffin quietly. ‘They’ve let Rose go home. And she knows about the boy.’ He picked up her coat. ‘I’ll see you back.’

  Gabriel obeyed him, dutifully and suddenly quiet, asking no question. That ribbon of distress had knotted itself about her, tightening around her stoma
ch which suddenly felt overfull of coffee and food.

  Pictures of Lily showing that bit of bloodied rag, of Lily’s face as she launched her attack on Rose, came into her mind. She recalled Rose today in the shop, how brutal she could be in attack, but how straight. And as a background she could still see those policemen going in and out of the house in Mouncy Street the day she had seen John Coffin sitting outside. In retrospect they were predators moving in to destroy a site.

  So she found herself, a young hopeful woman, with Coffin holding her hand, entering a world whose nastiness would never go away now. Once seen, this world stayed with you forever.

  He did take her hand as they went towards the bus. Not for the first time she wished she had a car. Might get a Mini.

  ‘Well, talk me through it.’

  ‘Told you.’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was firm. ‘You didn’t.’

  Perhaps policemen never did. He could hear his colleague Jordan’s voice, unemotional on the telephone, not telling all even to him.

  ‘She’s a cool one all right. Yes, here all day.’ It was the way of things, always easier to get into a police station to answer questions than to get out again.

  As John Coffin had listened to Jordan’s voice, he had a clear picture of the scene being summoned up so that Phil Jordan must be more of an actor than he had supposed.

  ‘In a way, the laugh was on us.’

  Rose Hilaire had sat stiffly upright, feet together, hands in her lap, refusing a cigarette – ‘I don’t smoke – ’ although eventually accepting a cup of tea, during the drinking of which her hand was observed to shake.

  ‘Yes, that was Uncle Mosse’s AFS tunic. He wore it when he was doing any mucky jobs. Towards the end when he slipped out of himself a bit … Perhaps he thought he still had the right to wear it. Didn’t they ever give their uniforms back? Anyway, he hadn’t.’

  She had examined the tunic, looking at it carefully, but not touching it. She did not have to, where clothes were concerned she knew what she was talking about.

  One or two other questions, of a routine kind about the house in Mouncy Street, more to keep her talking, open her up, than anything else.

  They were working up to the crucial (as it was then) question of how and why she had come to identify the first body as Uncle Mossycop’s.

  Rose Hilaire herself had nothing much to say. ‘I only took a quick look, he’d been dead a long time, it wasn’t nice, and yet – it looked like Uncle Mosse.’

  This had been a perfectly human reaction: to look quickly at a dead relative, loved or otherwise.

  But they had to dig, and wanted to, because the cool Rose with the shaking hands irritated them.

  All the same, it was an unusual situation they were in and they wanted an answer, said Phil Jordan to John Coffin on the telephone.

  ‘Of course, I was not conducting the questioning, John, but I was sitting in on it.’

  All this time the bodies found, one after the other, in Mouncy Street, were being examined by the pathologists. Because of the composition of the soil underneath the Mouncy Street houses, decomposition of the bodies had been swift. This had been assisted by the existence in abundance of certain forms of animal life in the foundations: ants, cockroaches and flies had done their bit, but the mice and rats had had their flesh encounters too.

  The scientists were working in one place and in one way, the police in another. Between the pathologists and police communication was intermittent, for they were parted by more than space. They were separated by the figure of Mossycop. The local police knew the legend of Mosse; to the scientists he was not even a name.

  ‘Then the telephone rang,’ said Jordan, ‘and that set us back on our heels. Gave Rose Hilaire the laugh all right. Not that she did laugh.’ Rose Hilaire had sat there, still bolt upright, to hear what they had to say. ‘It wasn’t Mossycop after all,’ Phil Jordan went on to tell Coffin. ‘Not him but someone else wearing his uniform. A young lad, a boy; probably still an adolescent and little for his age at that. Another dead kid, and all dressed up in Mosse’s old clothes. That’s a problem in itself.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘We told her.’ Another pause. ‘Then we told her about Steve being missing. And she took it all cold – she wasn’t surprised.’ His voice sounded shaken. ‘She was not surprised.’

  John Coffin let this scene run through in his mind like a bit of a film while he walked beside Gabriel.

  ‘Don’t worry about Rose,’ he said. ‘She knows about Steve, she knows as much as anyone can know about the deaths at the moment.’

  And perhaps a little more, he thought: she was not surprised.

  Chapter Five

  Rose was sitting by her big window that overlooked the Thames when Steve came home. She had a glass of gin in her hand, but she was not drinking it, just holding it as if it might offer her the cheer and support that she might not otherwise find elsewhere. Gin had been the great popular comfort of Paradise Street in her childhood, gin and tea, so she took it as someone from another background might have made a dish of bread and milk.

  She heard his key in the door, and sat alert. She knew she had made a mistake in not showing more surprise to the police. They had noticed and she had seen them notice.

  Steve went quietly into the kitchen, she heard him opening the refrigerator door.

  Hungry. But of course, he wouldn’t have eaten.

  ‘Steve?’

  He didn’t answer, naturally not. But he stopped what he was doing and came into the room. That much relationship she still had with him, she thought. His feet in the heavy studded boots he insisted on wearing, clumsy on his thin ankles, marked the pale waxed wood of her floor. Normally she would have screamed at him for the minute splinters she knew he must be creating, but now she kept her anger for other matters.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  No answer.

  She looked at the huge sandwich in his hand. ‘Wherever you go, they don’t feed you.’

  She saw him flinch; she’d scored a hit, then. It gave her no comfort. ‘So what have you been doing?’

  ‘Just walking.’

  A little grudging speech was allowed, then.

  ‘You know you put me in a bad position going off like that. I was told by the police in the police station.’ He did look surprised at that. ‘Yes, I was down there because they were questioning me about some old clothes. Uniform.’ She looked him full in the face as she spoke. And you’re not surprised either, not totally, absolutely surprised. Somewhere at the back of your eyes is a show of recognition. ‘You don’t ask whose clothes,’ she said. ‘Or why I was looking at them?’

  Steve put his uneaten sandwich down on the table.

  ‘Why don’t you ask?’ Rose knew she should stop, she could hear herself shouting. This was not how to behave to your young son, but there was something about Steve’s behaviour now that drove her on. In his own way, he knew how to pull her strings. She lowered her voice. ‘There was another body under that first poor boy’s. It looked like Uncle Mosse; it was wearing his old uniform. So naturally the police thought I’d identified the wrong body as Uncle.’ She added briefly, ‘Well, it turns out I hadn’t, not in the present state of the game. But they were his clothes.’

  And why hadn’t I felt that shock of surprise I should have felt? I could tell you why, Steve, but I won’t because I’m afraid you might know. Because Uncle Mosse left his door unlocked all the time at the end and he did not mind who came in and out, as he said. He liked company. Who’s to say who drifted in, and then drifted out? Or sometimes, did not drift out? What do you know about that world, Steve?

  ‘I remember that uniform,’ said Steve unexpectedly. ‘It was fab; it had style.’

  And what did he know about style? But he did; he was her child. She knew about style, so did Steve.

  ‘I saw you put it on once.’

  ‘Yeah. It was great.’

  So he was talking, but not saying things she wanted to
hear.

  ‘And that’s why I kept you apart. He was not good for you, Steve.’

  I am a grown woman, I lived in Paradise Street, I know about Uncle Mosse. Oh, perhaps they aren’t bad in themselves, people like that, but they let the dirt in.

  Steve shrugged. Your view; I have my own, he seemed to be saying.

  Irritated, Rose returned to her main worry. ‘And where were you walking, and why? Why not school? What excuse am I going to give there?’

  Awkwardly he said, ‘A person has a private life. Even a young person.’

  Rose drew in a sharp breath. ‘You’ve silenced me there, kid.’

  Steve picked up his sandwich and went over to the television set where he sat eating it while he watched the news. At home the new Labour Government was settling itself in. Abroad the Americans were bombing in Vietnam, Hanoi had been hit by American fighters.

  Without wanting to, Rose was drawn to watch. Mother and son sat in silence watching the scenes of violence unfold.

  The violence on the screen seeped out, rambled round the room like an animal, then joined them in the seats.

  On the screen a taker of LSD, the Vision-of-Hell-drug, was borne off on a stretcher, after having hallucinated he could fly. They all think they’ve got wings, thought Rose.

  ‘If I ever thought you were mixed up in anything bad, Steve,’ she said, ‘I think I’d kill you.’

  Then she went and stood by the window, looking out.

  I am not pregnant, I have not taken a hallucinatory drug, and I have never killed anyone.

  If she said it often enough it might be true.

  She knew that, without meaning to, she had given away a lot of her life and thought, and wished she had not.

  Coffin and Gabriel (it was surprising how quickly he thought of them as a couple). ‘Let us – ’ he paused ‘ – let’s meet tomorrow.’ He thought about it. Tomorrow looked like being a day with a heavy workload, nor was dinner at Mrs Lorimer’s entirely to be recommended. ‘Let’s go to a place I know. Little Italian restaurant.’ Whose proprietor was currently, as they say, in prison, but whose wife, mother and seven sisters were running the place. ‘La Piazza: used to be called the Padovani.’