Coffin in Fashion

by Gwendoline Butler

  He had arrived by bus, now he decided to cut across the Heath, through Greenwich Park and to Rose’s flat. He could relieve Gaby and Charley of baby-watching Steve, and perhaps do some clue-hunting in the flat. Did Rose have a passport? And if so, where was it?

  He minded about Rose, too. He was beginning to get the idea that he wasn’t meant to have a happy future with women. If he ever married, then it would be an unhappy marriage. He could see it ahead of him, like a rock you could not miss.

  Perhaps he should stay with his family history and forget anything else.

  It was a longish walk on a warm evening so he took it slowly, letting his mind roam over the case as he walked. He strolled deep in thought.

  On a seat beneath General Wolfe’s statue, which looks down on the river and is still scarred by the bombs of a war later than the one in which he died, Coffin rested for a while. I’ve lost my way, he thought. Not with my feet, they know the way to go, but with my mind. There’s something I ought to have sorted out, I can sense it, but I need to think.

  Forensic evidence was all well and good. Some cases, the easy ones, were solved by it like an intellectual puzzle.

  Into other cases emotion and imagination came into play. There was the profile of the murderer and the profile of the victim and the one should tell you about the other. They had to match.

  He thought about what he knew of the victims.

  Boys, young lads, not happy boys or they would not have sat so loosely to life that they could come the way of their murderer. Not quite vagrants, but little lost boys. Boys away from base, curious boys willing to make strange friends in Mouncy Street. Boys willing to try drugs.

  Drugs did come into this story, that had to be recognized, and no doubt the police investigating team knew more about that than he did. But he knew enough, because he knew about Rose and Joe Landau. Drugs were floating around this case.

  It was something about the times that drugs should be so easily come by. LSD was the new one. All you seemed to need was the right ingredients and a competent chemist. Make it in your own backyard.

  So in the profile of the murderer came drugs, and Mouncy Street and boys. Sex and death. Death and sex. Which way round had they come, and which had been most important to the killer?

  He got up to walk down the hill in the golden light. He could see the River Thames below with the new high-rise housing blocks already beginning to show up on the skyline. He wasn’t sure he liked what he saw, but they did represent homes, good little ones, he hoped, and if you did not accept change then the human race would still be running in caves.

  As he walked he reflected that he had one other item to add to the profile of each boy. In the family background there was a death. They were boys who knew that death could come close.

  So should you look for this too in the youth of their killer? Come to think of it, you did not have to look far. Just over twenty years ago the war had ended. Every adult then alive knew what violent death meant. This was even more true of the children. A child then might have seen or heard talk of acceptable violence because that was what war was. Taken in with his bottle of National Dried Milk and vitamin drops that it was all right to kill. So you had to look for someone who had grown up with the idea that you could kill. Someone like that might even find it a pleasure.

  Absorbed in his thoughts, he stumbled on.

  He was beginning to form a picture of the murderer and even beginning to wonder if he had a match. No face, of course, no actual person, just a type.

  A young, but possibly not a very young person, probably male. Able to dissemble, because those lads had not expected to be killed. Or so one had to assume. A bit of an actor then, able to hide his or her true face from friends and relations. Probably not very close to anyone. But a householder.

  He thought about that: perhaps not actually a householder, just someone with access to the two houses in Mouncy Street, his own house and the one next door.

  And someone who had come into the district recently. This was his own view, because the time-span of all the deaths was so close. Or, if an old inhabitant, and you had to consider this, although he hated to think of Mouncy Street and Decimus Street and Paradise Street in this connection, then some twist, some accident, some encounter had set the killer off.

  At the bottom of the hill there was a telephone-box. He knew Phil Jordan’s home number and dialled it, hoping Jordan had been telling the truth about going home. The two of them had once shared a mistress in Lewisham, but only for a little while. Still, he knew that number too.

  Jordan was there, and eating supper. It was still in his mouth.

  ‘Oh, you,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘When you said “household fragments”, what did you mean? You meant me to guess, but I can’t. Was it dust?’

  ‘There might have been. I dare say there was. Dust is only particles of other stuff, after all. But you’re reading too much into it. I don’t know that I meant you to guess anything,’ he said grudgingly.

  Coffin waited: he knew his man.

  ‘As it happens, there was something else. I believe there are glass fragments. Forensics can identify the refractive index of a sliver.’

  It was something to think about as he walked on, hurrying now.

  Glass? There was plenty of glass around in houses, and a selection of broken glass in his own house and others in Mouncy Street. Not only houses had glass, of course. So did motorcars. Briefly, he recalled Rose Hilaire’s voice saying of her nightmare vision, ‘But it moved.’

  Rose, he thought with sudden agony, where the hell are you?

  He could see the roof of Belmodes as he turned towards where Rose lived. Her car was still parked in the same place, already it looked dusty and unused. Around the corner of the building he saw a figure on a bike speeding away.

  He looked up to the windows of Rose’s flat. Gabriel had the window wide open and was standing there looking down at him.

  He called up. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Waiting.’

  ‘Where’s Charley?’

  ‘Oh, he’d some work to do.’

  She let him into the flat, where the television was on.

  ‘Where’s the boy?’

  ‘In his room still. He might be asleep.’

  ‘Have you looked?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  He went along the hall to Steve’s room and pushed open the door. The bed was empty. He went back to Gabriel.

  ‘He’s hopped it. I think I saw him on a bicycle.’

  ‘But why? Where?’

  Coffin thought. ‘He’s gone to the factory, I’d say. Or that way: Mouncy Street. We’d better go after him.’

  ‘That’s just guessing.’

  ‘Got a better idea?’

  Gabriel was silent. Then she said, ‘Let’s take Rose’s car. The keys are in it. I had a look.’

  He should have looked himself; he might have got some indication. ‘Rose would never leave the keys in, would she?’

  ‘You bet,’ said Gabriel with conviction.

  ‘Can you drive this thing?’ He looked at the foreign controls. No broken windows or splintered windscreen?

  ‘Drive anything,’ said Gabriel, which was a complete lie, but she had always longed to get her hands on Rose’s car.

  ‘Rose ever have an accident in it?’

  ‘Not that I know of. No, I’m sure not. Why?’ The car was already on the move.

  He answered with another question. ‘How was Steve? Did he seem frightened?’ Coffin was already beginning to wonder if he could fit a face to the type of killer he had imagined.

  ‘Didn’t say a thing after you left. He never does. He could have been scared rigid for all I know.’

  ‘I think he was.’

  ‘Is he running away, then?’

  ‘I think he’s looking for his mother.’

  Gabriel gave him a puzzled look, then concentrated on her driving.

  ‘I think a boy would,’ he sai
d, half to himself. ‘She is his mother.’

  ‘You would, and I would,’ said Gabriel. ‘But Steve?’

  ‘She’s all he’s got.’

  The traffic lights at the corner of King William’s Walk held them up.

  ‘How did the Cuban Missile Crisis make you feel, Gaby?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Awful. I wanted to run.’

  ‘And did you feel you wanted to take what pleasure you could while you could?’

  ‘Oh yes. I felt I had a right. I had a fantasy. I’d go into Fortnum’s and try on a sable coat just so I wouldn’t die before I’d worn one. Why?’

  ‘I think times like that affect people profoundly.’

  ‘So what happened to you, then?’ The lights changed, Gabriel pulled away.

  ‘I found out, by chance, that the girl I was in love with and hoping to marry was having it off with a colleague. So I went to bed with her too. Insisted on it. Not nice, was it?’

  Gabriel said nothing; she had not been looking for a life-story.

  Right, then right again, then left into Mouncy Street. No sign of Steve, no sign of anyone, the street was deserted in the dusk.

  Gabriel drove slowly towards Belmodes. She stopped the car, preparing to park it in Rose’s special slot. They both got out, looking around.

  Coffin saw the boy first.

  ‘There’s Charley’s van,’ said Gaby in surprise.

  Slowly, round the corner of the passageway that ran behind Belmodes, came a blue and white van. The van’s progress was unsteady.

  ‘What is Charley doing?’

  Half way down the passageway, the van stopped moving. At the wheel was a short figure, arms at full stretch.

  ‘It’s not Charley,’ said Coffin. ‘Can’t you see? It’s the boy.’ He saw Steve’s small pretty-boy’s face set like a hard little mask. No expression and drained of colour, the eyes stared past him.

  He was no longer certain he knew what Steve was about.

  The van began to move forward again.

  ‘Stop him!’ cried Gabriel. ‘Watch out. He knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Charley, Charley!’ shouted Gabriel. She began to run away from the van, round the side of the building in the direction of Charley’s place.

  He might hear or he might not, reflected Coffin. Gabriel had lost her head.

  But he had heard. Charley came running round the corner. Gabriel threw herself towards him. ‘He’s in the van, he’s in the van,’ she screamed. ‘And he knows how to drive. Stop him!’

  Charley did not answer. He looked surprised at the scene that confronted him, with Gabriel screaming, Coffin silent in the road staring at the van with the small tense figure at the window.

  He would have been even more surprised if he could have read Coffin’s thoughts: If the lad wanted to drive away, why didn’t he take Rose’s car? And the answer: Because the van was what he wanted.

  Gabriel grabbed his arm. ‘Do something!’

  ‘Do what I can.’ He began to run towards the van. He’s only a kid, he thought, remember that, he’s only a kid.

  Behind him Charley was in the middle of the road, also beginning to move towards the van.

  Suddenly the van accelerated and shot forward at speed. It missed Coffin, who jumped back, then drove straight at Charley.

  There was a thud as it hit his body, which rose in the air, fell across the bonnet of the van, then was tossed forward on to the paving stones. The van drove on, pressing the body beneath.

  Gabriel was screaming. ‘He’ll kill us all, he’ll kill us all,’ she was repeating.

  Coffin put his arm round the trembling girl, he felt none too steady himself. This was what it felt like to win a victory and lose the war. He knew the murderer now and he felt like hell.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘He won’t. He’s done the job he came for.’

  Marvellously, the van had stopped. Steve was sitting at the wheel. He let Coffin go up and drag him out.

  His gaze met Gabriel’s. The girl was kneeling by Charley’s body. ‘It was an accident,’ he said without expression. ‘I can’t drive; the van got away from me. I shouldn’t have been let touch it.’

  ‘What are we going to do with you?’ said Coffin. What would anyone ever do with Steve?

  For answer, Steve jerked his head towards the van. ‘Mum’s inside. I guess she’s dead.’

  Gabriel looked into his pale eyes, so hard to read. What a scheming, clever, manipulative little beast. Whoever loves that one, she thought, will know what pain is.

  But then, in matters of that sort it was always the same, and thinking of Charley, she began to cry.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rose was not dead. She was trussed up inside the van, rolled under the seat that ran along one side and covered with old newspapers, unconscious but not dead. It was this seat that was being repaired with new wood, which was then stained and waxed.

  Nor was Charley dead, but with a ruptured spleen, damaged kidneys and a splintered back he was not likely to live long. There are some injuries that are mortal however hard you fight. Charley was a fighter, but this was one he would not win.

  Gabriel sat by his bedside, uncertain if she wished him to live or die.

  It was hard for her to believe that it had been Charley, her Charley, who had killed three boys.

  ‘Why did you do it, Charley?’

  There was a policeman at the bottom of the bed, so perhaps it was a silly question to expect Charley to answer.

  ‘Oh, kid, there’s not always a Why, just a How and a When.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’

  It was the killing of Ephraim that troubled Gabriel most because she could see the mechanics of it so clearly: the boy killed in Charley’s old place, hidden in Belmodes during a public holiday. (Probably because she had been in and out of Charley’s so freely at this time, working on her portfolio.) Then taken over the back way, through the back road into the garden in Mouncy Street.

  ‘How could you do it, Charley? How did you do it, all on your own?’

  The van, she supposed, had come in handy there, besides giving Rose Hilaire her nightmare vision. That had to be what Rose had seen.

  ‘Did the boy help?’

  ‘Not a lot.’ Sometimes it seemed as if Charley did not distinguish between a live body and a dead one. ‘I had to help him.’

  ‘Not him. Steve.’

  Charley did not answer.

  ‘I blame the drugs,’ said Gabriel with tears in her eyes. Joe Landau had been arrested. He had confessed to supplying Charley with hallucinatory drugs, and also to alerting Charley to the danger of Rose Hilaire talking to the police. It was this that had precipitated Charley’s act of violence towards Rose, whom he had grabbed as she parked her car, forcing her to drive to the van. He then drove the car back. Charley was high himself by then. The police had rounded up a circle of drug users and suppliers. The house in Mouncy Street had been known in this casual society as a place to go.

  ‘Or else I blame myself,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Nothing to do with you and me, Gaby. Killing is something private between me and what I feel. We were friends, Gaby.’

  She did not believe him.

  ‘In those Go-away times that I knew you had I should have guessed you needed help.’

  Between the utterly sane and the sanely mad, there is a gulf fixed. Gabriel would never understand nor Charley offer an explanation except to say, ‘Better than sex, Gaby, better than anything except creation. You are a god.’

  The prosaic police explanation was sex plus drugs, the one liberating the violence implicit in the other. No philosophy of death for them. There had been plenty of pornographic literature and photographs found in Charley’s room to support this view. Among the photographs were some sickening photographs of the dead or dying boys. ‘Would he lie to Gabriel when he thought he was dying?’ Coffin asked, and got the answer that of course he wo
uld, especially to a woman. A straight sado was their judgement.

  And one who did not want to be punished, either, was their other comment, as witness the way he was prepared to kill Rose Hilaire once he saw that her tie-up with Joe and John Coffin would enable her memories of what she had seen of Ephraim’s body to go straight to dangerous quarters.

  Rose Hilaire was in a side ward on another floor, but in the same hospital as the man who tried to kill her. She had two policewomen with her, one sitting by her side holding her hand, and the other at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Why did Charley try to kill me?’ Then she answered her own question. ‘I suppose because he got to know what I had seen and how much I remembered. I wonder if he was there when I blundered in upon Ephraim’s body in my wanderings? I don’t remember him, I suppose he could have left the van unguarded for a moment. I’ve remembered why I was there. The van was in Belmodes and I’d asked Charley not to park it there, but he always did. He must have been pretty close all the time. Saw me, I suppose. Do you think?’

  She was talking too much, Coffin knew that, but he also knew she needed to talk. She had a heavy burden to unload.

  It was heavy on him too; he was carrying it all in his mind, the whole picture of Charley, coming into the district, moving into the disused back of Belmodes; and perhaps because Mouncy Street was what it was. But you could not blame it all on the place or on the drugs scene. Charley had to be what he was, too.

  ‘Something I want to ask,’ she whispered. ‘Did Charley do all of it on his own?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ But he knew what she meant. It was a question he had asked himself. One you couldn’t help asking.

  Rose said softly, ‘I think he made Steve an accomplice.’

  ‘We’ll never know,’ said Coffin.

  Not out of Steve, anyway, who was saying nothing much, only affirming that he had bashed Charley to save his mother; he had ‘guessed’ where she was. But he had admitted that he had ‘poked around’ enough in Charley’s van in the past to make his guess a possible one.

  Steve, not in police custody but not free either, was in the care of an officer from the Greenwich Children’s Department. He was in a small home reserved for ‘difficult’ juveniles, where the matron in charge reported that he wet his bed on occasion and had bad dreams but showed no other signs of disturbance. He did not steal, refuse food, or attack other inmates or himself.