Cracking Open a Coffin

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘Like what?’ Dean laughed. ‘You’re paranoid, you are.’ He added: ‘Oh yes, I’ve heard about your little muddle.’

  And helped it along, thought Coffin sourly. The jibe about paranoia, so closely echoing Stella, stung.

  ‘Can I have a drink?’ Dean asked.

  ‘I can give you water.’ There was mineral water on his desk, he pushed the bottle across.

  ‘I’ll take it. Give you time to ring that little bell of yours again.’

  ‘I’ve done that already,’ said Coffin.

  ‘You should train her better. My girls jump when I say jump. They like it that way and so do I. I choose the ones that like to jump and I know how to choose.’ He leaned across the desk so that Coffin could smell the whisky on his breath. ‘I know what you’re thinking about me this minute, I could always read you and I can do it now. You think I’m a mucky jock, smelling of drink and sweat. Well, I’ll tell you: I shall go home, have a shower and change my clothes and take the chair at the board of one of my companies and see me then.’

  Coffin was silent. The putdown rankled. He knew that he commanded many more men than worked for Dean, that he was the executive head of a larger and more complex concern than any Dean handled. But Dean was a rich man and he was poor and Dean’s money was shouting.

  Dean took another swig from his glass. ‘Tastes bitter. You haven’t put arsenic in my drink?’

  ‘No. Just insecticide.’

  ‘Oh clever, clever. I’d kill you if I could, and I believe you would me.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe yes.’ Dean gave another laugh, he stood up and patted his old colleague on the shoulder. ‘The difference between you and me is that you are a decent chap and I’m not.’

  Lysette came in, carrying a pad as if ready for dictation. She was good with her props and knew how to make them convincing.

  Dean waved her back. ‘Just a sec, darling.’

  He turned to Coffin. ‘You know Tom Blackhall’s the son of a butcher? Of course you do, everyone does, and he’s a butcher himself, his wife’s first husband killed himself, his fault. Did you know that too?’

  ‘I’ve heard something.’

  ‘To me that makes him a killer, a killer by acquaintance. He’s handed the gift on to his son. Nice little inheritance there.’

  ‘You really are a swine, Dean.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ He went to the door. ‘You can come in now, darling.’ He pushed past her and was gone.

  I wonder whom he hates most, Coffin asked himself, me or the Blackhalls? And what have we ever done to him? He nearly got me killed all those years ago. There was some golden handshake there, I swear; he didn’t leave the Force for the reasons he said. I wish the bullet had killed him.

  But his memory told him that Dean had pushed him down even though he tried to deny the memory.

  ‘Any calls of importance?’ he asked Lysette.

  ‘Oh yes, one. A woman.’ She looked down at her pad. ‘A Miss Farley. Edith Farley. She is an assistant librarian in the university and she has something she wants to tell you. She will ring back unless you telephone first.’

  But not Stella, Stella had not sent any message.

  ‘Call her for me.’ Better get Miss Farley over first, then he could think about Stella.

  Edith Farley was sitting by her desk, hoping he would ring. She answered promptly and with satisfaction. I knew he wouldn’t let me down, she told herself. Some people never ring back, I knew he would.

  She heard his voice with pleasure. It was as agreeable as she had thought it would be. How nice of him to ring back to little, unimportant old me. But there were ways of being important, and she thought she had found one. Besides which, it would get even with that shitty pair of students. This was not an adjective you said aloud (so mother said), but it had great power in private. Especially if said twice. Shitty pair. Not like fuck, a word she had never used and never would, not even in the darkest recesses of the night when anything could be done and said.

  ‘You have something to tell me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘I’m sorry to bother you but it seemed important.’ Truly, she was loving every moment and Coffin could tell this but she told him succinctly, not wasting words, which made him think that what she had to say must be of value.

  She named names: two students, Rebecca North and Michael Frost, nicknamed Beenie and Mick. ‘They were talking about the murdered girl Amy Dean and their friend Angela. I don’t know her surname.’

  But I do, Coffin responded silently.

  ‘They knew something about Amy’s death, and from what they said Angela knows more. You ought to talk to them. They really know. They thought I couldn’t hear, wasn’t listening.’ A non-person, that’s what she was to them; for a moment her grievance rumbled away inside her like indigestion. ‘Of course I could hear, the acoustics are that good in the stacks, you wouldn’t think so with the books deadening the sound but it is so. And of course it’s dead quiet down there …’

  And very boring, thought Coffin.

  ‘Have you spoken to Chief Inspector Young?’

  ‘No, I thought of it, but decided he would not listen and that you would … There’s something else …’ She paused, hanging on, waiting for him to make a response.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘As they left, the girl Rebecca, Beenie, they call her, whispered to the other one, Angela was mad. Mad and might do anything. That’s an accusation, isn’t it?’

  The conversation ended there. It had been taped. You shouldn’t listen to hearsay, Coffin told himself, but something inside him told him that however wrong she might have got it, what Miss Farley had handed over was gold.

  But how to handle it? Lane and Young must interview the two students, but they must be sent on their road tactfully.

  In the end, he did it the straight way. He told Chief Superintendent Paul Lane about the telephone call and suggested he interview the two students. Ordered, really. It would not make him any friends but it would get the job done.

  He remembered then that Josephine had wanted to talk to him about Angela. Stella had told him so. There had been no message from Stella as yet. She was working, she was busy. Why should she telephone? He would telephone her.

  He put a call through to Star Court House and asked for Josephine.

  Maisie answered that she hadn’t seen Josephine all day. She sounded worried. And as to Angela, she had not been at Star Court House, she was not expected, and never had been expected. Whatever Angela was doing with her life, whatever lies she had told, Star Court was not responsible for them. Sometimes things go very fast and sometimes they move slowly; as he talked to Maisie, he had the sensation that although the conversation seemed to creep, getting nowhere, yet things were really moving very fast indeed.

  If he was a real detective still, he would go out and do something about it, but as it is, it is time to go home. He signed a few more letters, then collected himself together.

  Lysette came through the door with a letter. A letter in a stiff white envelope, the look of which he did not like.

  ‘This came by messenger.’

  Since it had come by messenger, he knew it was important. The letter was from the Chairman of the Police Committee summoning him, no other word for it, to an informal meeting of the committee. There would be an agenda.

  And a hidden one.

  How had he got to this point? It seemed a moment to look back.

  He unlocked the bottom drawer in his desk and drew out an envelope from which he took several pages which he had typed himself.

  His curriculum vitæ. His CV in common parlance.

  Born … a post Big Depression baby which made him no baby now … Born South London. Exact address not known to him, owing to the wayward habits of his mother, but his birth had been registered by his aunt, for that was the given address. Father was a blank. Not unknown to his aunt, he suspected. Later, his mother’s memoirs had provided different and no doubt equa
lly false stories.

  ‘Worked for a bookmaker, dear,’ his aunt had said, ‘and then in the Docks. Then we think he went to sea.’ That was her story, while Mother, in her dubious memoirs, had called his father ‘a romantic adventurer who loved and left’.

  A disappearing man, at all events.

  Coffin ran his eye down the page.

  Educated The Roan Boys’ School. No university. He had done his National Service, though, without much distinction but with no trouble.

  Joined the Metropolitan Police Force and started as a constable in Greenwich, South London. Transferred to the CID.

  Part of the investigation team dealing with a nasty series of murders in Greenwich at that time.

  Coffin went to the window and looked out. A time to think of with a mixture of pleasure and pain, for it was at this time he had met Stella Pinero. He got promotion: Sergeant, Inspector, was moved to a difficult division. Got shot at once or twice, stabbed once, drugged on another. A bad time, as he remembered when he drank too much and a marriage sank.

  A brilliant career with black spots on it. He had made friends and lovers, and made enemies.

  It was a jungle out there, he had moved through it, was still walking through it, and someone, a friend turned enemy, a disappointed colleague, a former lover, wanted him down like a caught pigeon.

  The name of his enemy and friend would be there stuck in his history; it was up to him to recognize it.

  He got a driver to take him home, not trusting himself to drive. He walked in through the arched entrance to the quadrangle. Across the way, he could see Stella’s door, and draped across the step, a big bunch of pink and white roses.

  Neglected, unloved, delivered but never taken indoors, special roses. His roses.

  He resisted a temptation to pick them up and throw the lot into the road. Let Stella find the flowers, whenever, dried out and faded. Sod Stella.

  He let himself into his own front door and walked up the stairs.

  CHAPTER 11

  The day goes on

  In a state of crisis depression (it’s a special mood, deeper than the average depression, fiercer than anxiety, although of its nature it can be transient), you do one of several things: you can take a drink, a strong one, and repeat it indefinitely; you can have a hot shower and forget it; or you can kick the cat.

  Tiddles did indeed appear, presenting a broad tabby form, but this option was not open to John Coffin. He considered the whisky, but he had gone that way once before, so he took the shower and played some music. No highbrow, he liked Verdi and was in the mood for Nabucco.

  The music travelled in to the shower, rising over the top of the splashing water and drove right into his mind. That was what music was all about: an entrance, an opening up.

  Sometimes it opened up more than you cared for. On his way home he had heard music and voices from the Theatre Workshop, now used for rehearsals. Still thinking of Stella, he had walked across and stood at the back as a full rehearsal, choir, orchestra, and soloists, of the last part of the extracts from The Ring was taking part. The music rose above him and tore into him, pain and pleasure all at once.

  He knew the plot of this part of The Ring: Wotan, King of the Old Gods, had imprisoned his Valkyrie-daughter, Brunnhilde, inside a ring of fire, from which she was rescued by Siegfried’s kiss. Later, through the machinations of Gunther, Siegfried betrays her. He is killed and Valhalla and the Gods go up in flames.

  Love, betrayal, death, all organized by a malicious intelligence with greed the motive. Love does not prevail, evil does. That was how Wagner saw the world.

  There was more hope in Verdi; now he reached out a hand and turned the volume up. The Israelites were just sitting down by the Euphrates and raising their voices in vibrant threnody.

  Coffin liked that chorus to be played loudly, very loudly.

  Tiddles, sitting outside, withdrew, his ears flicking.

  Coffin emerged, wet, clean, and if not relaxed, at least in a marginally better mood. His mind was working.

  Outside, all the police machines were operating. The pathologist, as Coffin knew from past experience, would not have finished with the body of Amy Dean, but would have handed over various organs for examination by his assistants. (Jim Dean knew this too and possibly this was what was causing him such anxiety that he was expressing it in rage.) The forensic experts, the crystallographers and those the police nicknamed ‘the scrap merchants’, would be going over the skin, hair, hands and nails, as well as every item of clothing that Amy had worn. Other scientists would be concentrating on the wood of the casket, and still others examining specimens of the soil and leaf mould in which that casket had been buried.

  As well as all this activity, other men would be trudging around the area, talking to possible witnesses, questioning them and taking statements. Very often this process led to other contacts being discovered, who must be questioned in their turn.

  There would be men at the bus station again, trying for what they could get. The passengers on that bus would be questioned again. There was still thought to be one more, the one they called Coney, whom they had not flushed out yet. Perhaps never would do. It made a maddening hole which took up valuable time while they tried to fill it.

  Careful scientists, methodical detectives, it all took time.

  No doubt other interviews were taking place of which he knew nothing. Every so often, Joe Public joined in with mad telephone calls offering information, or sensible telephone calls with something relevant, or just bored people seeking diversion. There had been the usual number in the case of Amy Dean, all of which had to be followed up. People like the librarian to whom he had spoken himself. This was just one call that had got through to him, unusual in itself.

  Martin Blackhall’s involvement in the Spinnergate robbery complicated things too.

  Coffin towelled his hair and admitted to himself that he had a strong desire to interview Martin himself.

  Archie Young and Paul Lane would be making notes, reading other people’s notes, studying the computer screens. Talking, always talking. Searching out other witnesses, other contacts.

  Coffin made a list of crucial sites:

  The University of the Second City.

  The St Luke’s and Fisher Dock Hospital where Victoria Blackhall worked.

  Mimsie Marker down at the Spinnergate Tube Station. (He knew from experience that Mimsie was always valuable as an informant.)

  The bus station. Yes, that missing passenger worried him.

  They were still looking for the wood which had made the casket.

  As always, the job was made up of waiting and looking.

  Waiting for Our General to confess that she had beaten up and nearly killed Martin Blackhall, and not only because she thought he was attacking the girl in the shop, but because she didn’t like men and wanted some of her own back.

  Only she wasn’t going to confess. They might have to make her.

  Waiting for that vital bit of information, as yet unguessed at, which so often brought an investigation success.

  Waiting … a hard game to play.

  Coming out of the shower, he knew all these things. He also knew that Josephine was important, and that he should not have left the matter undealt with. Time mattered.

  And all the while, the fear. The fear that what had happened so far was nothing to what might be going to happen.

  This was an irrational fear, founded on nothing that he could point a finger at, or tell Lane or Young. Lane for one dealt in logic and hard evidence, not intuition.

  He dressed in the silk pyjamas and dressing-gown from Charvet that his sister had given him for Christmas because she wanted something out of him and thought they would be a bribe. In the kitchen he looked about for food. Mrs Fergus, at present on holiday, had arranged for her sister to do some cooking for him. The sister was kind but unpredictable, she moved his possessions around according to rules of her own. Hid things, he thought crossly. She was a good and tasty
cook but you had to accept what she offered, no choice about it. Tonight she had prepared an evening meal for him to put in the oven.

  She too was a vegetarian; he could have anything he wanted for supper provided it was made of vegetable matter.

  Tonight it was one of her cheese and potato concoctions. With possibly a touch of basil. She was great on basil which she grew for him in his kitchen. He was probably the only policeman in the Second City with a pot of basil in his kitchen.

  Coffin put the casserole in the oven, gave Tiddles some more food (Tiddles was allowed even by his cook to be a meat-eater), and went back to his sitting-room to telephone Star Court House.

  ‘Maisie?’ He had promoted himself to calling her Maisie, nor did she seem to object. ‘Is Josephine there yet?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by yet … I never said she’d be here at all. She doesn’t live here, you know.’

  Pretty well, he thought. Also thinking that if Maisie Rolt was so irritated, then she was probably worried.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen her.’

  ‘Give me her address, then.’

  Maisie Rolt hesitated; life had so instructed her that she was wary of passing on any woman’s current address to any man. Like Brunnhilde, she would have slept in a ring of fire if she could.

  ‘Well, I don’t know …’

  ‘I can get it from Stella Pinero.’

  ‘A man like you always knows how to get an address, just pick up the right telephone.’

  ‘I’m not an enemy, Maisie,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry.’ Her voice was weary. ‘It’s been a rotten day. Betsy Coleridge has gone. He came round with a car and took her home. She just went. I tried to persuade her … Give it a day, I said. But she went. He’ll kill her one day.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can, keep a lookout,’ he promised.

  ‘Yes. Thanks. Well, Jo lives at George Eliot House. It’s that big block behind the swimming pool on the Irene Iddesleigh Road. You’ll see her number by the lift, which doesn’t work, so don’t try.’ She hesitated again. ‘I hope she’ll be herself.’

  ‘And what might she not be herself on?’ he inquired, ungrammatically but pointedly. Drugs? Drink?