She thought it over. ‘No. I ought to go down to the police station. It would be more suitable.’
‘Are you up to it, Rhoda?’
But she thought she was. ‘If you come with me.’
Ben Brocklebank was a tall, well-built man, but his wife was as tall and nearly as sturdy. Side by side, a matching pair, both in their best clothes, they set off for the police station on Royal Hill.
She took his arm. ‘There was nothing really wrong in what I did, Ben.’
‘Of course not, Rhoda.’
‘Just taking a liberty. Nothing worse. I’m glad I told you all about it at the time. That sets me right with myself.’
Before she left she had gone into her kitchen, ostensibly to lock the back door, but in fact to look at her new refrigerator, her automatic washing-machine and her food-mixer. She had a new sink and new bright yellow cabinets to go with them. She had given the food-mixer a pat; it was the new object she loved best. She had never used it.
Royal Hill police headquarters was housed in a new building. Opened last year, it had been designed by an architect who was a follower of the new brutalism in architecture for which a police building gave full scope. It was an uncompromising block which looked as though it could withstand a siege. The set of rooms assigned to the TAS unit was at the rear with its own entrance and allocated car parking. Offered to allow them a kind of autonomy, Coffin knew it had been meant originally as a Traffic Inquiry Unit. It was furnished with a certain meanness of equipment that made them feel like poor relations. Coffin was fighting hard for all he needed, but cuts and economies were the rule of the day, and this was 1978 and no one liked the police.
He was surprised to see Mrs Brocklebank and slightly more surprised to see Ben Brocklebank whom he had never absolutely believed in before, thinking him more an excuse than a man, someone Mrs B. sheltered behind when it suited her not to do something.
He listened to what she had to say. ‘So you hid William Egan in No. 22? Exactly why did you do that?’ He was not disposed to be easy with her.
She muttered something about knowing him all her life, and he hadn’t got any money. Come out of prison and look for a living in 1978? Well, you couldn’t. He hadn’t a penny to his name.
‘So he came to you and said can you put me up and you did?’ asked an unfeeling Coffin. ‘Pretty generous-minded of you. With your employer’s property.’
So now he knew where the mouse droppings had come from on Egan’s clothes. From the basement of the Pitt house. And that was why he had dirty boots from the road works in Church Row. He had walked in the muck. Just as Coffin had himself, and others too for all he knew. (Sarah Fleming could have confirmed this from her observations of the boots of Weenie and Co.)
‘I didn’t know where else to put him.’
He had something on her, he thought. A weak woman who looked strong, he thought. Blackmail, that had the mark of William Egan. But he would not find out more while the husband was there. Was she the third person, whose presence he had always sensed?
She muttered something about him paying what he could.
Oh, so he did pay something?’
‘You didn’t tell me that, Rhoda,’ said Ben Brocklebank alertly.
‘It wasn’t much.’
‘And what did you do with it?’
‘Yes,’ said Coffin. ‘What did you?’
‘I had a little debt.’ She did not meet his eyes. ‘I was clearing it off.’
A lie? Or part of the blackmail?
‘And then I found out,’ said Ben. ‘Caught the old girl with a bottle of whisky in her bag. What’s this? I said. Who’s on the bottle?’
‘So you went round and turned him out?’
‘Well, no. By that time he’d upped and gone. Left a note saying the mice were getting him down. And that night he was killed.’
So he had probably left exactly when he meant to leave, intending to attack Terry Place but being killed himself.
‘All that rigmarole about the house being a haunted house was just to keep people from inquiring if they saw any signs of William Egan’s habitation?’ Infestation, he nearly said.
‘Perhaps I put it on a bit, but that’s a bad house.’ She spoke earnestly. ‘And I mean it.’
‘Now don’t go back to that, old girl,’ said Ben. ‘Just forget talk like that. She’s not herself,’ he said, turning to Coffin. ‘But no one could call it a lucky house, could they?’
‘No.’ Coffin turned to Mrs Brocklebank. ‘You had a bad shock. How are you now?’
‘I’m not thinking about it. Trying not to. I still keep seeing them, though. And it had a sort of smell, that room. I can still smell it … Do you know how they died yet, sir?’
‘It was probably poison.’ He could tell her that much, and he owed it to her to say something. She had cleared up a few worrying points about William Egan.
Then he had a thought. ‘Did you know Terry Place too?’
She nodded.
‘Well?’
She shook her head.
‘Roxie’s your friend, isn’t she?’ said Ben, who seemed determined to open up channels in Coffin’s mind. ‘Thick as thieves.’
‘It must have been difficult for you, hiding Egan when Place was living with his sister.’
‘I never said and she never said. We know when to keep quiet.’
So you do, thought Coffin, so you do. The interlinked circles of this part of London, declining and changing now as social patterns altered and moved people away, but still strong in those groups which had gone to school together, married within their peer group and worked side by side, struck him afresh.
But I’m one of them, he thought. Look at me now, back here, and with Rhoda Brocklebank working for me. It was really better to be like Paul Lane, about as rootless as you could be, moving easily around as served your ambition and owing no one anything.
Perhaps he and Lætitia should forget their search for their missing brother or sister, who, after all, might not want to be found, and let the past look after itself?
There was the younger generation, the Flemings, they were another case of it; they certainly had their roots here, but they were different again. Sarah Fleming would break away. Brains and education and character would do it for her. She was bent on it.
Perhaps a community like this resented outsiders and would always try to throw them out? Was this what had happened with the Pitts? But there was another factor in their case, as he was well aware.
He had had Bernard Jones on the telephone muttering about a ‘neighbourhood’ crime and he had found the idea disquieting. To accept it required a whole sociology of crime. But perhaps he preferred it to a haunted house, because, as he saw it, that would require metaphysics as well.
‘You go on home,’ he said to Rhoda Brocklebank. ‘Don’t bother to come in to work tomorrow.’ It was one of her days for him.
‘Oh, I’m going to.’ She had given up calling him ‘sir’, he noticed. ‘I’ll come to you and glad to, but never to that other house. Never again.’
She saw a haunted house, a superstition she had perhaps used for her own account, and he saw something more human, a complex web of relationships, interlocking and interacting in a way he could not yet fathom, and in which people got caught up and destroyed. She was thinking about the Pitts, and he was thinking about his sister.
Paul Lane came into the room just as he had finished telephoning Lætitia. His third telephone call of the day to her, she needed his words.
‘It was potassium cyanide. Powder form. In the soup. Curry soup would hide the taste until it was too late. How and when it got in there we don’t know as yet. Could have been an accident.’
‘Irene Pitt was planning to cook curry soup,’ said Coffin. ‘Told me so herself. I met her and she told me. She made the curry powder herself.’
‘Then she may have taken the poison for one of the spices. Mistaken it somehow.’
‘She was going to shop for spices in Greenwi
ch Market. I told her it was a good place.’
‘Well, we’ll ask. It’s a start.’
Roxie Farmer and Shirley Place, unlikely sisters-in-law, were under one roof for the time being. They were sitting in the kitchen over a cup of tea. There was no pretence of grief on either side for the death of William Egan or the predicament of Terry Place. As far as the women were concerned, they had wiped each other out and that was that.
‘While they needed us, we did what we could,’ said Shirley. ‘As far as we could.’
Their eyes met. Roxie assented: ‘As far as we could.’ They understood each other.
‘You had your Terry here when he got out, and I’m grateful to you because if it hadn’t been you, it would have had to be me, and with Dad the way he was, I was better out of the country. He’d have beat me up as well as Terry if he could. I’m sorry he had to go the way he did, but it was always going to happen, the sort of man he was. Dad, I used to say, you are your own worst enemy and someone’ll kill you for it one day. Of course I didn’t think it would be Terry when I married him. You don’t think of things like that on your wedding day.’
‘No,’ Roxie nodded. She never talked as much as Shirley. ‘Another cup?’
‘If you like, dear.’
The kitchen was bright and newly furnished with the best of domestic equipment. Dishwasher, automatic washing-machine, a luxury freezer, even Rhoda Brocklebank hadn’t got more.
‘You’ve got this place lovely.’ Shirley stirred her tea. A crocodile handbag lay on the table and she had just slipped off her new Italian shoes. ‘You’re the homemaking type. I’m more of a party girl, myself.’
‘Mmm.’
‘But I don’t think it matters what you are, as long as you’ve got the money to do it.’
From where she sat, Shirley could see the street. ‘Oh look, visitors. Now that’s a car full of cops, if ever I saw one.’
Roxie looked and saw Chief Superintendent Coffin and Inspector Lane. ‘I think they’ve come to see you.’ She felt quite calm after her talk with Shirley, who was a good sort, if rough. ‘After they’ve gone, shall we have our little bonfire?’
It was a routine call on the bereaved Mrs Place who had lost her father and who might soon be a widow, who had perhaps shed a few tears, but not very many.
Yet it was Shirley Place who kept the interview firmly null and void. No, she couldn’t help them at all. She had been away on a little holiday in Spain and knew nothing. A total shock. Yes, she was very shocked. Hardly knew how to conduct herself, but Roxie was being so kind.
Yes, it was terrible what her husband had done, and she couldn’t explain it. He had been a violent man and her father had been a man even more violent, it was a pity they had ever met.
‘They met in prison,’ Coffin reminded her sharply, ‘apart from anywhere else.’
A deep breath and a pat with her handkerchief at her eyes. Roxie looked more grieved than she did, much more. There was a heart in Roxie somewhere.
As they left, Coffin said to Paul Lane: ‘I’d like to know what they were talking about when we got there. Something was going on.’
‘Is there anything more to go on? Egan is dead, Place killed him. We’ll probably get a confession if he ever comes round. End of case.’
‘Oh, you’re such a realist, Paul. You’re sometimes so busy looking at the wood that you don’t smell the trees are rotten.’
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’
I’m not sure I know myself.’
But there was that house in his mind, he was building it again, putting room after room. It was getting to be as big as a cathedral.
No, not a cathedral, nothing like a cathedral. A great chambered tomb.
Chapter Seven
‘And what is it that’s so rotten?’ Paul Lane was showing a mild aggression. Sometimes he found his boss’s utterances too cryptic. Coffin the seer. In one of his Delphic moods, he told himself, which was unfair, since the boss must sometimes puzzle himself as much as his underlings.
They were driving away from Roxie Farmer’s house through Marlowe Street, one of the meaner streets of Greenwich. A high-rise block of flats had been clamped down on a street that did not think well of itself at the best of times. Paradise Street, next to Decimus Street and round the corner from the area known as the ‘Dirty Wick’, was a hard place to call home. The flats had been built ten years earlier and showed wear badly. The pale cement-coloured walls were streaked with dirt like snot running from a thousand noses. Here and there old cars littered the streets like debris from a civil war.
Coffin answered: ‘Just what’s rotten I don’t know. But there is a little something I can detect in the atmosphere between those two that might or might not have something to do with the murder of Egan by Place.’
The streets seemed dirtier here than anywhere else, dirtier even than normal, with paper, empty beer cans and dog dirt distributed lavishly on the pavement and gutters. There was a street market here at weekends, and a few days ago there had been a fair to celebrate some local festival. Hygiene was never high on the priorities of Marlowe Street.
‘But whatever it is, it can have nothing to do with the death of the Pitts.’ Paul Lane was driving, and far too fast as was his wont.
‘It has something to do with all these lives. It’s part of the background.’
Now that was not the way for a modern police officer to speak, Lane felt.
The car swung round a corner into the dusty main road. A large new foodmarket was being built on the opposite corner, with the land around it open for parking. The line of small shops across the way already looked depressed by the opposition. One or two were empty. A bakery had become a betting shop and a draper’s had turned into the offices of a building society.
‘So you do believe in a “community crime”?’ Lane preferred this way of putting it. Neutral, euphemistic, alliterative, you distanced yourself from the idea of neighbours killing each other. Anyway, it didn’t happen like that, and Coffin knew it. That sort of killing was done by lighted petrol thrown through a window, or a kicking to death in a dark street.
‘No. It’s not the business of the TAS squad to prove a community crime.’
‘So what is?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Coffin made an irritable response. Usually calm and reflective, he was showing tension. Lætitia came into it, he found himself thinking about her. To show that crimes happen to people for a valid motive and a valid despair, not just prejudice. Not the colour, race, religion or class of the victim as the triggering factor.’ Did he believe it? ‘Watch that bus,’ he said sharply, as Lane shot forward.
The neighbourhood changed about here as a stream of heavy traffic turned towards the old Woolwich Arsenal, depression on one side and the beginning of suburban prosperity on the other. A wine bar and a smart hairdresser marked the divide. Lane did not take offence at his boss’s comment, nor did he slow down. The bus swung away, unscathed.
‘Well, I hope you are right. Has it struck you that you could be wrong?’
‘Yes.’ A bleak admission. ‘All the time.’
Chapter Eight
It was the sort of night on which questions would not go away. Something of the atmosphere in Roxie Farmer’s house seemed to go home with Coffin and give him a restless night. He had his own worries: there was going to be an official inquiry into the shooting on the arrest of Terry Place. But Terry was now conscious and might possibly admit that he had fired first.
He went into his kitchen to make a pot of tea. The kitchen was tiny, but newly furnished and painted. As he stood waiting for the kettle to boil, he reflected that he had nothing so good and lavish as he had observed through the open door of Mrs Farmer’s kitchen. Good stuff there. The same with Mrs Place’s clothes. Interesting that both women seemed to have had access to more money than you would expect. A problem with Mrs Brocklebank and money too. Now he considered, it was the signs of money spent, taken together with some looks exchanged bet
ween Roxie and her sister-in-law, that had worried him.
Those three women knew each other and knew two victims of violence and one of them, his own Mrs Brocklebank, knew all five. She even had thoughts about a sixth person who had died. Malcolm Kincaid. What about asking some questions?
He poured the tea, strong and thick, the way he liked it. Automatically, his hand went out for a chocolate biscuit.
Then he started to think about the other case, the poisoning of a whole family group at No. 22, Church Row. Questions, questions again. The whole of his work depended on asking the right questions. How much was he getting wrong?
If it was not a community crime, if the Pitts had not been slaughtered because they stood out from their fellows in a way the neighbourhood resented, then why had they died?
And who was the killer?
Coffin listed the possible people.
The husband.
The lover.
The wife.
Or some other person, unknown.
That made it a crime within the family. Murder and then suicide. There was also the daughter, but he exempted her. He could not see Nona Pitt as the poisoner of her parents. Interesting that the boy had been spared. Was that significant? But then, of course, he had not been at home. So chance played a part in the mass murder, did it? Those who happened to eat that meal died.
Was the killer an outsider, then? A person whose identity was not known to him and whose very existence remained to be proved?
Coffin Underground Page 10