He glanced around the kitchen. Unlike yesterday it was untidy, with children’s clothes littering the chairs, a doll which must belong to Weenie on the floor and unwashed dishes in the sink.
Peter saw him looking. ‘My day for clearing up, Sal’s day at the Poly. I ought to get started.’ He began to tidy the muddle, moving with the same economic efficiency his sister had shown. The brother and sister had a lot more in common than was at first apparent. ‘I ought to collect the little ’uns from their minder, too.’
‘Sarah’s out all day?’
‘Yes, we have turns.’ He was taking a dish out of the refrigerator. ‘Shan’t see her for hours. She leaves a supper for me to cook.’ He was running water over the dishes in the sink, swilling them round rapidly and then placing them on the side. That’s it, eh? I’ll have to get on with this.’
Coffin thought the boy was glad to have an excuse to close the interview. He moved a pace, as if to go.
‘Efficient girl, your sister.’
‘Oh yes, Sal’s pretty good.’
‘It must be hard on her taking on all this responsibility.’ He picked up a toy and placed it with the others on the pile. ‘Especially with the children.’
‘Sometimes she says she’ll take the kids out to the middle of a lake and drop them in. I don’t think she’d do it, but you can never be sure with Sal.’
Coffin gave him a long look and he wasn’t laughing.
‘How do you get on with her?’ he asked drily.
‘Oh, fine, but I’m a bit big to drop in a lake.’ Now he was smiling.
At the door, Peter said: ‘She didn’t like Nona. Didn’t really like the Pitts. She may say she did, but she didn’t.’
He saw Coffin to the door politely, holding the door open.
Coffin went away to his own home, feeling miserable and puzzled.
He wasn’t sure he enjoyed what he was turning up.
Peter had made an attack on his sister. He had not accused her of killing the Pitts, but he had certainly hinted that she was capable of it.
He turned round at the corner of Queen Charlotte’s Alley to look back. Peter was still at the front door, staring at him.
It seemed inevitable after this that he should take himself to the nearest fish and chip shop to eat his supper. There were a series of small booths in which you could crouch to eat. It was necessary to do this since the roof was both low and decorated with swags of imitation seaweed; a tall man was at a disadvantage.
He ordered his meal of cod and chips and no vinegar, then sat down to await its arrival. No one knew him there, which was just as well. It was not the thing for a high-ranking police officer with still rising ambition to be eating his supper in Jack’s Fish Bar. At his age and with his rank, he was supposed to have a happy home life with a cheerful wife and two children, both enjoying higher education. He seemed to have missed all that somehow. His ex-girlfriend was no more of a cook or a home-maker than he was. Her speciality was a kind of uncooked avocado mousse that was better avoided, although her martinis were good. She was a celebrated actress whom he had known and loved, on and off, almost since her first appearance on the stage. They had drifted into a brief alliance now because she was out of work and he was at a loose end emotionally, but it had not worked. It never would, she was too sophisticated for him, and he was too clever for her.
The cod arrived, and was enjoyable. The place was almost empty except for an old man in one corner and a boy and a girl eating chicken and chips two booths away. He was too late or too early for the main trade.
‘Like some tomato sauce, dear?’ The waitress leaned across the counter.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Brown sauce? Bread and butter?’ She was bored, longing to talk to someone. After an evening of work here, she felt she must look like a cod or haddock herself with dull eyes and open mouth. Frozen too. They all came frozen, in packs ready to cook. Two nights a week she worked here and then on the third night she washed her hair and all her clothes to get rid of the smell of fried fish and went dancing. The other four nights she stayed at home, studying, since she was a student at the same Polytechnic that was educating Sarah Fleming and Sergeant Jones’s son, but she knew neither of them as she was a year older and taking different subjects.
She could tell she was going to get no response from Coffin, although he was being polite, when a crowd of youngsters swarmed in from the local youth club. Gratefully, she went across to take their order. On the way, she put an evening paper on the table for Coffin. Let him amuse himself. ‘Here you are,’ she said kindly. She dropped the dear, she had made a mistake there, he was not the sort you called dear. She knew how to adapt her manner. She was studying anthropology, and was the first member of her family to enter higher education.
Coffin sat eating and reading. He could hear snatches of conversation from across the room. They seemed to be talking about a pop star called Sid Vicious.
In the newspaper the headlines were still speculating about a General Election and Mr Callaghan was once again promising to make an early statement. The Election had been on and off for weeks now. He knew where his vote would go, expected no good to come of it and wasn’t worried. He had long since gone dead on politicians. He turned the pages. Films, theatre. A play about Elvis Presley had opened, and Sleuth was still running. And yes, here was a preview of Stella Pinero’s new play. Praise for her performance, critical reserve about the play, the welcome suggestion it would run and run. Good. Stella needed a solid commercial success. She wouldn’t like that photograph of herself, however.
He sighed and turned a page. He was into the crime page now. The usual run of mugging, housebreaking and shoplifting. What he summed up as amateur crime. None the less nasty, some of the cases, for all that. One major bank robbery had just come to trial. He cast a professional eye over the report. A bungled job, the gang deserved to go down. Reading the judge’s summing up, they were obviously about to do so.
In America a lady had been sentenced to death for hiring an assassin to shoot her father and her stepfather.
At the bottom of the page, one case had a wide spread to itself. A strange picture as well.
EXECUTIONER’S AXE USED IN SLAYING, ran the headline in heavy print.
There was a drawing of an axe with a hooded figure swinging the weapon over his head. The figure was markedly masculine, with all sexual characteristics stressed.
He sat back. The effect produced was unpleasant, nasty.
A young man, eighteen years old, a student at Essex University, had cut off the head of one of his teachers, accusing him of handing out unfairly poor marks. He had then lain in wait for the man’s wife and daughter and knifed them to death as they returned from a shopping trip. He had cut off the girl’s head and put it next to her father’s on the garden path, where they had been found by a neighbour. The so-called Executioner’s Axe was really a woodman’s axe on a long handle. He had been a bright student, but his work had deteriorated over the past year, and he had thoroughly deserved his poor marks.
‘Bring me a cup of tea, dear,’ said Coffin to the waitress as she passed, absently reproducing her own tones. She gave him a surprised look, but did so.
‘Tea, sir,’ she said. ‘Sugar is on the table.’ The tea was heavily milked and pale brown in a thick white cup. Coffin drank thirstily, and read on.
The student’s friends said he was ‘wacky’ and ‘into violence’, but until his murderous frenzy they had believed it to be entirely in his mind. A verbal game, showing, they had thought, its only physical manifestation in certain tattoos of dragons and executioners on his arms.
‘Now we know it was not,’ his best friend had said. His girlfriend said she had loved him.
He had tried to kill himself before being arrested. His mother said he had been a ‘normal boy’. He had lost his father through an industrial accident the year before he went to university. She blamed his breakdown on the university, where he had become ‘a different boy’.
His mother spoke as if she believed an unnatural weight of learning had fallen on her son’s head and knocked him into madness.
His girlfriend, a fellow student, said he was normal about sex, but they ‘hadn’t done much’. Reading between the lines, Coffin sensed she felt lucky to be alive.
He drank his tea, paid his bill, left a good tip and walked home. He took the evening paper with him.
Back in his flat, he read the news item again. He considered whom he knew in the Essex CID and whom he could tap for information.
He dialled Paul Lane’s home number. To his surprise the Inspector answered himself.
‘Sorry to break into your evening at home.’ He could hear the sound of music in the background. Mozart, he thought. ‘Just a query. Didn’t Ben Horridge go to Essex?’
‘Yes, transferred for family reasons. So he said. Think he really got fed up with where he lived. His wife came from that way. Near Braintree, I think.’
‘Do you have his number?’
There was silence for a moment. Then: ‘Might dig it out. Give me a minute. I’ll call you back.’
‘Thanks, Paul. Do the same for you one day.’
While he waited, Coffin went to the window to look out. A smart car was moving down the road. Something familiar struck him. He moved his head to get a better look at the driver.
It was the MP, Christopher Court.
Now what’s he doing here?
The telephone broke into his thoughts with Paul Lane triumphantly coming through with the Essex number.
‘Why do you want it?’
‘Just something I’m checking.’
Lane accepted it without comment, although at another time he might have pressed for more of an answer; he wasn’t a man who liked to be kept in the dark. But there was laughter, and there were children’s voices in the background as well as music. Coffin sensed the other man wanted to be quietly at home with his family tonight.
He stood by the telephone, his hand ready to dial the number in Essex. He should have been like that, happy with a wife and children. It hadn’t worked that way. Not that he hadn’t tried, perhaps he had tried too often.
Instead, he was alone with what could be the beginning of a collection of oriental carpets, and pining, however slightly, for a young girl one-half his age.
He dialled Essex and, the gods relenting, got through at once to the man he wanted.
‘Ben? John Coffin speaking.’
Silence for a moment, and then a surprised voice said: ‘Oh yes. You’re a kind of Supremo now, aren’t you? What can I do for you?’
‘I wanted some information about a local case of yours. It might just be of help to me. The student who killed his tutor and then cut off his head.’
‘Oh, that one. Daniel Moore. Killed more than his professor. Did in the wife and the daughter as well.’
‘I suppose he’s mad?’
‘Well, I don’t know about that. Not normal, but not certifiable. Or so the medics say.’
‘I’ve got a case here that worries me, and I wondered if there were any parallels.’
‘Not my case,’ said Horridge cautiously. ‘I’ve been busy mopping up a crowd of drug smugglers.’
Coffin ignored this precautionary retreat. ‘Did he give any warning this could happen? Anything significant?’
‘I heard a tale that he and a couple of friends used to meet and act out stories.’
‘Amateur dramatics, you mean?’
‘I suppose you could call it that. Pretty violent tales by all accounts. But I don’t know how much truth there is in it. Been lots of stories going round, as you can imagine.’
‘A kind of club?’ asked Coffin.
‘Don’t know about that.’ He paused, then said: ‘What hasn’t got in the papers is another case like it. Six months ago. Involved a girl, this time. She killed her mother with an axe. Said mother had been marked for termination.’
‘Did they know each other, Daniel Moore and the girl? What was her name?’
‘No evidence. She was Evelyn Bond.’
‘Did they correspond?’
‘No evidence.’
‘And she didn’t go in for violent amateur dramatics with a bunch of friends?’
Horridge laughed. ‘Not that I heard, but I believe it was looked into.’
‘She didn’t play any sort of game?’ Coffin said hopefully. He did not want to provide the name. Tombs and Torturers. He was not quite sure how far he could trust Horridge. Besides, he was beginning to guess that there might be other games, and if so, he would like to know.
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Did the girl say anything herself?’
‘Suicide. She poisoned herself.’
Then he added: ‘She had her head on a pile of paper comics. Nasty imports. Very full of violence. She may have got the idea from them. So may Moore, because he had them too.’
‘Can you give me her details? Address, dates?’
‘Don’t quote me.’ But he went away to look and dates and the address of Evelyn Bond were provided. She had come from across the county in Southend.
They talked for a while longer before Coffin put down the receiver and returned to look out of the window.
He could not see where Terry Place and his killing of William Egan, nor the idea that he might have been a poisoner, fitted into all this, perhaps nowhere, but his violence seemed to have a kind of a parallel in the Essex cases, which might illuminate his own problem.
Once again he telephoned Lane. This time he could almost hear a patient sigh coming down the telephone.
‘Tomorrow I want you to send young Evans down to Essex.’ He quickly ran over the story of the Essex murders. ‘Here are the names and addresses.’ He waited while the Inspector got them down. ‘I want all the background detail he can get. And tell Evans to be as quiet as possible about it.’
He felt more cheerful as he pottered about the flat. He could feel ideas moving in his mind and he knew that was a good sign.
A block was going to shift. He wondered what Phyllis Henley had got from Rhoda Brocklebank.
He put the television on to watch a news programme, but before it had started, the telephone at his elbow rang.
It was Phyllis Henley herself. She was not a woman to sound excited, but he picked up a thread of something like it in her voice.
‘Sir, could I come round to have a talk? I’ve got on to something.’ She was speaking from a call-box, he could hear the noises of the road, traffic, an aeroplane passing overhead. ‘No, not Rhoda Brocklebank, although I have seen her, in fact she has helped. This is something else.’
‘Come round,’ Coffin said.
‘I’ve just got one more thing I want to do. Be seeing you.’
And she was gone; she sounded triumphant.
He watched some television, then sat back to read a book about oriental carpets. He was interested, but the room was warm and he was tired; soon his eyelids drooped.
When he woke up, stiff and uncomfortable, the early summer dawn was lighting the room.
He moved, turning off his reading lamp and yawning.
Phyllis Henley had not turned up. Probably she had been kept late by whatever it was she was doing and had decided to leave it until the morning.
Still yawning, he made himself a cup of tea and took it to bed. He was asleep within two minutes.
Outside in the road, a cat yowled.
Chapter Twelve
For the first hour of that morning, from eight until nine, Coffin worked at home, drinking tea and making forays to the telephone. He had discovered how to make reasonable toast. You simply stood by the grill and never took your eyes off it until it was the colour you wanted. The trick was to keep watching. Remove your gaze for a second and the whole process got away with you. He had charred a good many slices of bread and sent several up in flames before he discovered this simple device.
He was in a good mood, it looked like being one of those easy days. You could always tell. F
or instance, he didn’t burn the toast.
With tea and toast and telephone calls he was busy. He rang Inspector Lane to check that Sergeant Evans had been sent off on the business in Essex, to be told Evans was already on his way there.
Before shaving, he rang his office and spoke to the woman police constable who acted as his secretary. She told him what calls he had received and what was waiting in the post.
‘Any message from Sergeant Henley?’
‘No, sir.’ Then she remembered something. ‘Wait a bit, there was a call from her husband. But he wouldn’t leave a message.’
People could be very tiresome like that, he thought.
He tried several times to talk to his sister Lætitia on the telephone, but she continued to be elusive. He had no doubt she was in Scotland. It was time she surfaced and told him what she was up to.
He had a bath and shave and spoke to his secretary again. She relayed several more messages, conveying by her voice that she thought it was time he appeared in his office. She was a careful, punctilious girl but one who did not like responsibility, not even the responsibility of knowing when and how to lie for her superior. But she was clever, Coffin thought her very clever, and he was training her.
Chief Inspector Salter was anxious to see him and she had made an appointment for him to see the Chief Superintendent later that day. She hoped it was all right?
‘You’ve got my diary, Jean. If the time is clear, then he can come in.’
He wondered what Salter wanted. He knew by now that Salter had plenty of sins both of omission and commission on his conscience and he felt no compunction in letting him worry.
‘No message from Sergeant Henley?’
‘No, sir. But I saw her husband crossing the car park.’ James Henley worked in Records. ‘She must be around. Her bike’s there. Been there all the morning.’
‘Well, try and get hold of her. Tell her to get in touch with me.’
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