Gratitude did curdle inside you sometimes.
‘You get a buzz out of action like that,’ said Dean reflectively. ‘Or I did. I suppose I recognized the danger signals, you get hooked on that sort of thing …’
‘Was that why you resigned?’
‘No, not really.’ Dean was thoughtful. ‘Just seemed like the end of one life and the beginning of another … I’d met a girl … Her dad offered to put me in his business … I didn’t marry that girl.’
‘So I’d heard.’ There had been the usual gossip.
‘It wasn’t me that jilted her, she threw me over, but it gave me a start. Her father felt guilty. I always got on better with him than her, sex apart … When I did marry, that was a bit of a disaster. Suppose I hadn’t got the trick of being married, it’s not a skill you pick up in the Force. But I did better second time round. She died, though. I expect you heard that too. You had a bit of a bad time yourself, from all I’ve heard.’
‘Sort of,’ said Coffin. The doctors had kindly said that he had reacted badly to some drugs.
‘You married, didn’t you? Not too good from the word I got.’
‘You hear a lot.’
‘Things get passed round. There’s a network, you know that … You didn’t trust me, did you?’
Coffin looked at him silently.
‘And you don’t trust me now.’
‘Is that what you think?’ True and yet not true.
From below Coffin heard Stella’s voice floating up from the garden where she was calling for Tiddles who was up with him, and the past receded and the present came back into full view. Darling Stella, always real.
‘That’s your woman, isn’t it?’ Dean stood up. ‘Seen her act. Brilliant. I must be off. I’ve said what I wanted to say. We’ve finished the champagne and the cat’s had the smoked salmon.’ He put on his coat which was of cashmere, soft black, with a dark velvet collar. Inside it, he looked tougher than ever, like a successful boxer out for the day.
Coffin said: ‘Hold out your hands, will you?’
Dean hesitated, then did so, stretching out both hands in front of him.
Coffin examined them, turning them over. Clean, white, the nails carefully trimmed. No sign of recent manual labour.
‘So?’
‘Someone made that coffin.’
‘You can’t suspect me.’
‘Murder is very often a family crime, Jim. You and I know that much.’
Dean buttoned his coat with careful hands and put on his gloves. For a moment he said nothing. Then: ‘I wasn’t her family any more. Have you found that out? Her family was the university and Star Court.’
He turned towards the door. ‘I’ll see myself out.’
Coffin followed him down the twisting staircase. At the bottom, he said: ‘Jim?’
Dean turned. ‘Yes?’
‘I’ll remember what you said.’
Coffin held the door open. ‘One more thing.’
He held out his hand. ‘My key, please?’
News of the discovery of Amy’s body, and of the circumstances of her burial, lapped in wood, soon spread throughout the campus. The news travelled fast from Armitage, where it had been heard first from Angela, to Barclay and Gladstone. The further it got from Armitage, where Amy had lived, the more the story got distorted (she had been raped, tied in bonds, buried alive, and cut in bits), the more the guilt of Martin Blackhall was held to be obvious.
The fact that he was the son of their Rector made the gossip hotter and sent more of it underground. But Sir Thomas was liked. Not much known by the student body, but liked. He meant well by them, they thought.
Some decades earlier when, on what in retrospect seemed like the whim of the then government, many new universities had been conceived and brought to difficult birth, it had been suggested that one such university could be sited in that very area of dockland (already running down into decay and needing something to give it life) which was to be the heart of the Second City. It hadn’t happened then, but twenty years later and another government, another desperate need to upgrade an area that had outlived its original reason for being, and there it was.
At the time of the first suggestion, Thomas Blackhall had been an ambitious young academic in Oxford, his eyes set on achieving a chair somewhere. Professor Blackhall, he thought, had a good ring to it. He was not married then and living in college. Tom was the son of a butcher, not a rich man but a good one, who had handed on to his son a fine physique and a beautiful voice. From his mother he had inherited brains. It was a winning combination. A professor in Cambridge at 32, which he had achieved by a judicious move, married to a prizewinning medic, with a child, he had begun to look around for the right university to head. One or two near misses had discouraged him. His timing was wrong, he thought. But he sat industriously and intelligently on several important committees and chaired at least one with distinction. Things were looking up.
One evening at a college Gaudy night he sat next to a cabinet minister. The minister knew that the University of the Second City was about to be put together (cobbled, was the word he had used in Cabinet), and he thought Tom was the man for it. Especially as the Minister for Education had another candidate for the post and it would be a pleasure to defeat his fellow minister. He had met Tom Blackhall before, they had sat on a committee and crossed swords but the minister liked a fighter.
Blackhall’s name was put forward and he was asked to apply. He talked it over with his wife.
‘Never going to be in the first rank, not in this century, that has to be faced, but I might make something of it.’
‘And then move on?’
‘I like London,’ he said evasively. ‘It might suit me.’
So he had come, just a little later than John Coffin. He had welded together the disparate and sometimes warring elements of his new institution into a whole.
It had not been easy. Student trouble, drugs, drink, rent strikes, he had survived all those, only to run into trouble with an indigenous population which eyed with some envy those it thought were having it easy. Town and Gown do not make good neighbours. But in the end the Second City was coming to be proud of its university. One Nobel Prize, several illustrious Gold Medals in the arts and sciences, made everyone happy.
The university was helping to create the very city it was planted in, giving it a character, a status, a sense of corporate identity.
I keep the peace here as much as you do, he had wanted to say to John Coffin, and you’d better know it. I am part of the balancing act.
Not unnaturally, when they met there was a slight sense of rivalry between the two men. They were polite, even friendly, as men can be when they are eyeing each other with care.
The relationship between Tom Blackhall and his wife had undergone strain now that they were thrown together more than they had been for years.
‘Coffee?’ Lady Blackhall looked as though she had slept badly, but she was dressed and made up expertly as usual.
‘Thank you.’
They were always polite to each other, never more so than now. Old friends used to wonder how they talked to each other when they were alone, but no one ever heard shouting matches or even anger.
But there was one subject that was never raised between them, although it was the cause of constant silent combat. He wasn’t, you see, her first husband. She was always conscious that she was older than he was in a quiet, unobtrusive way that might show up more as the years went on.
He couldn’t quite avoid that topic now, though. It had to come up.
‘Things like that don’t happen, do they? I know guilt seeds itself but not to the children. We’re not living in a Greek drama, are we?’
‘I don’t know, you’re the historian. I’m just a scientist.’
‘Blood.’ He had taken a sleeping tablet the night before and it had loosened the tongue as it was apt to do lately. ‘Blood guilt. That because I behaved badly, I will be punished through Martin.’
‘Sorry.’ He tried to take her hand, but she moved away. ‘I didn’t mean it literally, it was that sleeping pill last night. Gives me bad dreams.’
She went back to her coffee. ‘I’ll prescribe something better for you,’ she said briefly. ‘And don’t think like that. Don’t touch the idea. Martin is not dead.’
‘I don’t want him to have killed the girl.’
‘Not that either.’
‘She was trouble. I always saw that.’
Victoria Blackhall was surprised. ‘I didn’t know you knew her.’
‘Of course I knew her. I’m the Rector here. I try to know them all.’
‘I’ve heard you say so.’ Her tone was neutral.
‘Over three thousand here. About three hundred of them, I do know. Faces, anyway, damn it. I try …’ It was a lot of faces. They were all photographed on arrival, and these pictures he studied carefully before meeting a group. ‘Once I knew Martin was interested, then I took a good look. And I didn’t like what I saw.’
‘Oh, with a rich father like that she would be spoiled.’
‘No, not spoiled, not indulged in the way you mean, but something wrong with her.’
His wife said: ‘I thought she sounded a nice child.’
He ignored that. ‘And you know what Martin’s like.’
‘I do know,’ said his mother, who loved him. Tall, blond, handsome, and not stupid. Physically, the image of his paternal grandfather, the handsome butcher. ‘And don’t go on about blood. It’s just an organ of the body. It’s the genes that carry inheritance, not blood. I know about blood. My job.’
‘I know about blood too. I’m the butcher’s boy, remember?’
He went back to that bit of their past before they had married. He couldn’t leave it alone.
‘I wonder if the police will dig it up.’
‘Why should they?’ She wanted to say: ‘And nothing happened,’ but that would not have been quite true. They had committed adultery but not murder.
‘Plenty of talk at the time.’
‘All forgotten. No one remembers now.’
He laughed without amusement. ‘If you think that, you don’t know the academic world … It will all be neatly tucked away in someone’s letter, some diary somewhere, ready to be brought out at the right time. We shall be publishable.’
‘Stop going on about it, and let’s concentrate on Martin.’ She began to move about the room in a restless way, unlike her usual careful poise. ‘I’m sure he’d telephone if he could. I wonder if he’s gone away … Scotland, he loves Scotland. Or Italy.’
‘He didn’t have any money, no wallet, no credit cards. All left behind. He can’t have gone far.’
‘Do you think … a friend could be hiding him? Perhaps on the campus? No one checks on the student rooms, do they?’
Tom Blackhall shrugged. ‘The student feeling is that he killed Amy. He wouldn’t get help here.’
The telephone interrupted them. Tom Blackhall picked it up. ‘Dean?’
‘No news of your son, I suppose?’
‘No, none.’
‘You’d tell me, I hope, and not cover up?’
‘I would not cover up,’ said Sir Thomas with cold anger.
‘I’ve given the police a week in which to find Martin, then I’m going to bring in my own detectives. Will you join me?’
‘No.’ Tom Blackhall was brief. ‘I’m leaving it to the police.’ He put the telephone down. ‘Dean,’ he said to his wife. ‘He wants to hire a detective.’
‘And?’
‘You heard. I won’t.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘Oh God.’
‘Stop worrying about the past.’
The Rector picked a Meissen dish from the table by the telephone, aimed deliberately at the window and threw it. ‘You fool,’ he said. ‘I’m not worrying about the past. I’m worrying about the future.’
It was a long time since his wife had seen him indulge in such violence, and she knew that it was usually she who brought it out in him.
A student, passing below, heard the crash of glass and looked up in surprise.
No explanation about the broken glass and china was made by the Rector nor by his wife and the mess was cleared up by the usual cleaner. The glass was restored by a member of the Works Department, a quiet man who never speculated about anything, having found that in his job a lack of imagination was an asset.
The only comment was made from wife to husband. Tight-lipped, Lady Blackhall said she would be claiming on the insurance for the piece of porcelain and that now she was going out.
‘Where?’
‘Work. You’ll be better without me for a bit.’
‘Leave your telephone number so that I can get in touch with you if I have to.’
‘I shall be at St Luke’s Hospital all the morning. I have a clinic there.’
‘I have the feeling that something, anything, might happen.’
His wife went away, having assessed her husband’s mood with some anxiety: he might be on the edge of a breakdown. She would watch him, she loved him, as she loved their son, but they were not easy men. As she drove herself to work, she wondered if the old man, the butcher, was to blame, handing down to them a complexity of spirit they would not own up to. There was an edge, a boundary, in life, and both of them would, on occasion, leap over it. Tom had done so once. A tough man, Sir Tom was called, but his wife knew better.
He thinks of what is happening as a kind of punishment, she told herself, but it is not. There is no connection between what is happening now and our past, unless we choose to make it so.
She slowed down as she approached the hospital, and felt better. The sight of the old grey brick building was familiar and friendly.
St Luke’s Hospital, as with so many institutions in the Second City, was made up of a clutch of new buildings tacked on to an aged centre which had been a Poor Law Infirmary and was thus a monument to solid, sensible, uncomfortable Victorian building. Several wars and many bombs had not dented it. During the war against Hitler, the basement had housed the Auxiliary Fire Service, while those patients not evacuated had nested above.
Dr Blackhall’s clinic was held in the older part of the building about which the smells of generations of patients and disinfectants still seemed to hang. In spite of this, she enjoyed her work there. She came only once a week but they counted as good days. St Luke’s was an excellent teaching hospital, attached to the university and with a growing reputation. Dr Blackhall’s clinic attracted interesting cases, referred there from other hospitals for her speciality which was disorders of the blood. A first-class team of registrars and housemen was attached to her.
She worked on that morning, her ear always on the alert for the phone call that might come. One of the good results of having committed several sins yourself, she thought, was that it made you sympathetic to the oddities of life (and she got plenty of those in her clinic in that district), you were tolerant of those of your patients whose ways were not as yours.
It was a big clinic that day, so she was able to avoid lunch in the canteen without comment, only stopping later that afternoon for a cup of tea. She was sipping it, and signing some letters at the same time when she was interrupted.
‘Dr Blackhall?’ She looked up, it was Agnes Fisher, the Ward Sister from another department. They were old friends, she had trained with Agnes’s mother, now retired into a happy marriage. ‘May I have a word?’
Victoria Blackhall swung round in her chair. ‘Of course, Agnes. What is it?’
‘I’ve had a few days’ leave,’ began Agnes nervously, wondering if Dr Blackhall knew that she had put on one brown shoe and one black, but deciding not to mention it. ‘Just before I went off, we had an emergency admission: a girl had been attacked in a robbery in a shop in Spinnergate. She was brought in here, together with one of her attackers.
He had no ID on him. Badly hurt and unconscious, both of them.’
She hesitated. ‘I didn’t see either of them then, and now I have done … His face is very swollen and bruised still, but I think the young man may be Martin.’
Victoria Blackhall stood up quickly, knocking over her chair. Agnes put her hand on Victoria’s arm, checking her. ‘Of course, there is a police constable sitting by his bed … I suppose he is under some kind of arrest.’
CHAPTER 6
The day continues
As she hurried through the corridors of the hospital, Victoria Blackhall summoned up in her mind the names of all those who might be useful to her and her problem son.
This was a crisis to be tackled as well as she could and she must rely on herself, she had the feeling that Tom was going to be of no use. It was woman’s work here.
I don’t know Commander Coffin, she told herself, but I have met his sister Letty Bingham, and I know Stella Pinero pretty well. And then there was Philippa Darbyshire, we’ve sung in the Bach Choir together.
People who sing together, hang together, the chant went through her mind as she turned the corner.
No one hangs these days.
Her destination was a small side ward off the Albemarle Ward in which the Intensive Care Centre was placed. This was part of the new building. A policeman was sitting outside the door. Along the hall was another constable, a woman, and she rightly concluded that here was the attacked girl, the victim.
The room was small, painted white with green curtains. There was a nurse by the bed, who looked up from her task of adjusting a drip. Seeing a white-coated figure with a familiar face, she smiled and got on with what she was doing.
Another police constable sat by the door; he stood up as Victoria passed him. ‘Sorry, doctor, you can’t come in.’
She ignored him and went to straight to the bed.
‘Doctor, please …’
A bruised face, hair which had been cut back from the forehead, a helmet of white bandages. It must have been a bad injury. He had fallen backwards, it seemed, hitting his head. Eyes closed.
She took his hands, they were pitted with little flaky wounds as if something had been chipped out of them. She looked at the nurse.
Cracking Open a Coffin Page 8