The printed cotton had been home made. A lot of girls saved coupons by making over an old dress into a little floral skirt to wear with a little white blouse. Over the blouse she had worn a woollen cardigan.
John Coffin had noticed that the cardigan had been replaced after death.
It had been replaced to protect the envelope pinned to the pocket of the blouse.
Inside the envelope was a card. It said:
A PRESENT FOR MY MOTHER.
The message was set out in capitals cut from a newspaper. In which it was unlike the letter received by Rachel Esthart. The murderer had, perhaps, had some prudent thoughts.
Or perhaps he had thought about the water on the ink.
As it was, the card was sodden but legible. It was well stained, picking up various tints in the process. All the colours of the rainbow seemed to be there to Coffin’s gaze, but a pallid, muddy rainbow, which had made itself up from green and blue drained from the coloured cotton to a reddish stain which reminded him of something. Coffin found himself staring at it with some thought.
The red stain on the card echoed the stain on the card sent to Rachel Esthart, and it prodded him to think something else also. A nonsense thought, probably. But there.
He was remembering a story heard in childhood. Not a story read by his mother as he went to bed: she hadn’t been that sort of mother, more apt to read the News of the World than Hans Andersen. As a matter of fact, he’d learned to read from the News of the World, and still read it.
He was remembering the story of the child with the innocent eye and the Emperor’s clothes. In this case his new sharp gaze seemed to see not a naked Emperor, but just a glimpse, as if the murderer were a fox, just a glimpse of the killer’s tail. Not just the sight either, he got a whiff of the rank animal itself.
Then the experience faded, and all he was left with was a feeling as if something had gone back into hiding.
It had been a long, hard day, and when work was over so that he could return to Mrs Lorimer’s, he was tired.
He had the notion that he had, that day, seen the shape of the Murderer. Not yet the face, still less the name, but an outline.
A man, strong, tall, with powerful hands, because the girl had been manhandled. A man who when he stood up against the window would block out the light. He looked like this himself: policemen did.
This sense of what he could see made him uneasy, restless. He wanted to shift.
At the end of that day Coffin had come to a conclusion.
He would not be staying at Mrs Lorimer’s lodgings.
‘I’ll be moving out. Find something else. Better that way.’ It would not be easy but as he trudged around South London he would be looking. Morally and imaginatively, anyway, he would be gone. Although he had the feeling one was not so easily shot of Mrs Lorimer’s outfit. Staying there was probably an experience that stayed with you for life.
He stomped up the stairs to bed. Lady Olivia was not singing tonight, but Chris was banging away on the piano, something vaguely martial, a march perhaps.
He had one last look at the page of the Kentish Mercury for his private archives. He had a look most nights, nothing had emerged, but tonight, of all nights, he noticed a tiny row of ink dots underneath an advertisement. W. Clarke, the Butcher, Waller Road, S.E.8. He would think about that tomorrow.
Before going to sleep he looked out of his window. He could just see the roof of Angel House. He knew now that inside it was Stella, together with an eccentric woman to whom someone, who might not be her son, had sent a murderous present.
That evening Tom Banbury and Charlie Dander were having a drink in Charlie’s local on Charlie’s home ground. They met more often than anyone guessed. Not exactly friends, but people who needed to keep in touch.
They talked family business, but they also talked work.
Dander finished his drink. ‘Better get home – about the message on the body: it may tie Rachel Esthart in some way with the murderer. But don’t take that for granted. It’s the romantic view. I saw your young men’s faces: that’s what they want. And it’s because they’re young. But what you’ve got to consider is that what you might have is a joker.’
He got up to go. ‘I’ll make a bet with you: you won’t keep both your young men, keep one, lose one.’
He was off, making his usual splendid departure, leaving Tom Banbury in thought.
A joker, someone who had no real interest in Rachel Esthart, no love, no hate, no relationship, but who was using her as a joke, to give a bit of panache to his murder. Also to mislead. It was a thought.
CHAPTER THREE
The Stance of the Murderer
Coffin was single-minded. He sensed almost at once that Stella, going between Angel House and the theatre, and eating as she often did at The Padovani restaurant with the three young men in her life John Coffin himself, Alex Rowley and Chris Mackenzie, was really at the centre of everything, much more than she realized.
He stayed as close to her as he could so that he could be on this inner orbit himself. He was definitely on the perimeter with Tom Banbury, who saw he did the maximum leg-work and the least quiet cogitation at his desk. Not out of malice or anything of that sort, Banbury just liked keeping his thoughts to himself. And the young men out of his way.
He knew the outer side of what his boss Tom Banbury’s investigation was because his activity was part of it. He knew that they were pushing out lines of inquiry on the clothes, physical details to establish the girl’s identity. (She was only a girl: the pathologists put her as in the very early twenties.) He knew that Tom Banbury had interviewed all three women at Angel House. He had seen a transcript of all three interviews (Alex Rowley had been present, he had not) and saw that the women knew nothing of the dead girl. They were strangers. Nor did Rachel Esthart have anything to say about the card which had come with the girl.
The girl, her present, had been delivered. Rachel Esthart flinched from that thought: she took her refuge, as once before, in hiding behind a wall of silence.
Who wants a son who sends his mother such a present? Perhaps she did not any more.
And if not a son but an unknown enemy, is that any happier a solution? Did Rachel Esthart deserve such an enemy?
She would not say, admitted no idea of who it could be. No answer was more or less what Tom Banbury got, according to the written word, taken down by Alex Rowley in his somewhat poor shorthand and then typed out. It was on the record.
Stella the same, she knew nothing.
Florrie was even more terse, if that was possible. The few sentences Tom Banbury had extracted from her had been valueless, she was like all three wise monkeys combined: she had seen nothing, heard nothing, and could tell nothing.
So Coffin knew what Tom Banbury had got so far, but did not know what he made of it.
In Coffin’s book this was a black mark. Banbury ought to talk to his young men. He was supposed to be training them, wasn’t he? It was a kind of apprenticeship.
Some details appeared, however, even in the bleak Banbury-Rowley transcript.
The letter had been a real letter, sent through the post, not delivered by hand. The post had been collected by Stella Pinero and handed to Florrie who took the letter in to Rachel Esthart.
The postmark was Greenwich, thought Florrie Padovani. Stella could not confirm this. She thought not: she thought you could not make it out. Rachel Esthart had not looked, but had taken out the card and used the envelope to light a cigarette.
When the news of the second card found on the dead girl was taken to Angel House by Tom Banbury himself, Rachel had gone into a shocked silence, something approaching a catatonic state, Coffin surmised. She could not speak.
Stella Pinero had attacked Tom Banbury for giving her friend the news so roughly.
Florrie Padovani, oddly enough, had had hysterics. Very Italian.
What Tom Banbury made of all this John Coffin did not know but what he could extrapolate was that the two linked
incidents were ‘genuine’.
In other words the three were truly surprised by the delivery of the first card, and appalled by the arrival of the second. They had no guilty foreknowledge; when Tom Banbury had asked Rachel Esthart why she believed her son to be still alive all she could reply, as far as she was able to talk at all, was that she had never accepted his death.
Tom Banbury’s line was the orthodox police view: he had gone into the case, seen the case file, and knew that the coroner and police investigations had identified the drowned child of so many years ago as her son. His own father had identified him.
The father was now dead; killed in one of the first bombing raids in London.
So the two views of Peter Esthart’s death met head on.
‘Impasses,’ as Alex Rowley said. ‘But intellectually interesting.’ He was fond of making remarks like that. For instance, he said that he thought Tom Banbury was more preoccupied with the missing Shepherd child and did not want to devote time to the new murder.
A bloody baroque business, he called it.
But to John Coffin it was a human problem that had to be solved and he wanted to solve it. This was how he put it:
The dead body with the inscribed card, was one problem.
Rachel Esthart’s son was another. So Coffin saw it.
Somewhere the lives of the two mysteries must meet.
Where, how and why, was what interested Coffin.
Somehow, it was not two problems but one.
To Tom Banbury it was a police matter.
To Coffin it was a practical and a human problem and he wanted to know what it was all about.
That was when the duel between them opened. That was it, then, and not to be escaped.
Or so he thought. Because he was anxious, he discussed it over a pint with Alex Rowley in the Green Man, which they had adopted as a refuge from Mrs Lorimer’s spartan hospitality. When you wanted an easy half-pint now you went to the Green Man. When you wanted something livelier, you went to the Padovani where you found the Theatre Royal company, drinking coffee, learning their parts, or engaged in one of those confidential discussions which made up their life. Since meeting them Coffin had learnt how difficult it was to put on false eyelashes. How a girl felt these days wearing a bustle (Indecent, dear) and the best place to get an abortion. (But I haven’t tried personally, love. The nuns educated me.)
A day and a half after seeing the body and its clothes, it was the Green Man they went to.
To his surprise Alex started on the subject.
‘What do you make of the Guv?’
‘Banbury? Not a lot.’
‘He’s a good copper.’
‘He’s too housebound.’
‘Deskbound, d’ye mean?’ asked Alex.
‘Housebound. He doesn’t see out of the window. No imagination. And he shuts us out. We ought to be in there, right inside, know what he’s thinking, working with him. And we aren’t.’
Alex was silent. ‘He didn’t stay in the army long. Came out. Don’t know why. We’re new, fresh blood. I think he resents us.’
He did not seem to mind too much, but Coffin did.
He was very much aware of being on the edge, especially in this case. Excluded. He thought it was because Tom Banbury didn’t like him.
Later, he learnt there was another reason. If he had been a more experienced policeman he would have taken a second look at that exclusion. And then a third.
The sociable habits of the theatre made it easy for John Coffin to see Stella and the crowd at the Theatre Royal. He and Alex dropped in after work more or less as they liked, either to see Stella play, or to gossip with her in her dressing-room.
He got to know her friends and enemies in the company. Impossible to be like Stella and not have enemies. Her sparkle, that star quality which she had been born with, aroused jealousy as well as admiration. The two went hand in hand. Moreover, Stella’s place at Angel House, with the patronage of Rachel Esthart that went with it, made for envy.
But on the whole they were a generous, if emotional, company of players and if quarrels were sparked off, then they were made up soon.
Coffin saw that alliances came and went at the Theatre Royal, Nelson Street. Enemies today, friends tomorrow, lovers possibly all the time. There was usually a sexual bonfire burning somewhere at the Theatre Royal.
It was the third day after the discovery of the dead girl, who was still unnamed and with no known provenance except her connection with Angel House.
This fact was known, at the moment, only to a small group of people, but would seep out in the end, probably through Florrie and her Padovani cousins.
Nameless and homeless, the girl had acquired a medical history.
She was a virgin; she had not been raped. There was no sign of an attempt at intercourse. Her age was probably in the early twenties. She was five feet and two inches, and in life weighed seven stone. A thin, small girl with blue eyes and brown hair.
Her injuries were striking: she had been manually strangled before immersion, for there was no water in her lungs. But after death she had been stabbed repeatedly and her genital area slashed.
The time of death was hard to establish, but she had probably been dead for three days. Or a bit more.
As he legged it about South London, half grumbling, half happy, the other part of his mission came into place: he was relearning London’s face, and with the learning rebuilding a little of his own life. Your life is a structure and it’s up to you to put on the bricks. He had lived here as a child, forgotten it, now he was finding it again. Putting bricks back in a wall.
The river, the docks, the factories and warehouses that lined the wharves, these were his London again. With them he discovered London’s countryside in the parks, scraps of common land and the bomb-sites, greening over as summer came on, blooming with wild plants bedding themselves down in town and domestic flowers flying wild.
The Theatre Royal in Nelson Street was an old theatre. Not old enough to have played to Queen Elizabeth the First or her Stuart successors, but old enough to have welcomed their Hanoverian cousins. The present building was Victorian, the time of its greatest prosperity, when London stars had not disdained to appear. Sir Henry Irving had appeared in The Bells, and Ellen Terry had briefly graced the boards in Twelfth Night. At the turn of the century it had become a music hall, and in the 1920s had lived under the threat of being a cinema. But it had survived. Albie and Joan moved in and the theatre was saved for drama. But the atmosphere of the old music hall still hung about. Coffin always felt it when he went in. The ghosts of Marie Lloyd and Albert Chevalier seemed to be walking there still.
The stage door opened directly into a narrow dark passage leading straight backstage. You could walk off stage and be drinking a pint in the pub in Nelson Street before the curtain had properly come down, and many had. Marie Lloyd, for one.
Coffin loved this dark hole, it seemed the entrance to a mysterious and vivid world. Symbols, left-overs from the activity of this world, littered the passage. An old pram that had been used by Widow Twankey in the last pantomime and was to play a part in Candida, stood against one wall. A sunbonnet hung on a hook with a crinoline skirt suspended beneath it. A fire-bucket left over from fire-bombed days now held a wilting bunch of flowers, a forgotten present from an overlooked admirer.
The stage door keeper, a wizened small man of lizardlike appearance, greeted John. ‘All gone, sir. Curtain came down sharp tonight and off they went. Something to celebrate.’ He shook his head. ‘Theatricals. Always celebrating. And half the time what they’re celebrating doesn’t come off. Actors are very melancholy people, you know, sir, when they haven’t got something to celebrate.’
Coffin inserted himself inside the warm hole which was the stage door keeper’s office. He offered a cigarette. ‘Where did they go?’
‘Up the hill to the Italian place.’
The walls of his office were lined with theatrical photographs from long past show
s. Suddenly Coffin saw one that interested him. A young woman dressed in period costume together with an even younger man. ‘That’s Mrs Esthart, isn’t it? And Edward Kelly with her?’
‘Yes. Mad in love with her then, he was, you can see it in the photograph, but she never had any time for him. Just before her trouble hit her, poor lady.
Rachel had written, in a large, dramatic hand: ‘Love from your Nina’ across the photograph.
She sent him love then, thought Coffin, and then she took it back. A man might mind that. It did not look like love in Eddie’s face. Admiration, but love, no. Not direct, sexual love.
The Padovani was reminiscent of a Soho restaurant of the 1920s when Pa Padovani had arrived in London as a young waiter. He had reproduced his first workplace faithfully from the hand-written menu in the window to the draped red curtains. Inside, the tables were covered in coarse white cloths with spindly black chairs for the diners. On the air was always the smell of grilled meat and cigars. God knows where the smell came from these days. He probably had it bottled. The Padovanis had prospered, returning from a short sojourn of internment to carry on their restaurant. Several Padovani daughters had married well. Vic Padovani, the one son, possessively spoilt by his mother and bullied by his father, had gone into the army, where his extreme good looks had not made his life easy. He was now back, assistant manager and general dogsbody.
Coffin always enjoyed a visit there. It brought back for him too that pre-war world he was to find again, as well as the new one he was looking for. Another brick in his wall.
The entire Theatre Royal company sat round a long table, drinking coffee and eating the sort of sandwiches that The Padovani produced at this hour of the evening. They probably had horsemeat in them. Or whalemeat, someone said, because they did taste fishy.
It had been a bad day for food at Mrs Lorimer’s, perhaps she had quarrelled with the butcher, so that Coffin and Alex Rowley were glad to eat at all.
Stella waved to them as they came in. ‘Join us, darlings.’
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