Coffin on the Water

by Gwendoline Butler

  There was silence.

  ‘You understand what I’m doing? I’m apologizing and explaining. I have no son. He is dead. He died as a child. Years ago. I accept it.’

  There was a noise outside, and John Coffin came into the room.

  He went straight to Dander and Warwick.

  ‘Another body, sir. At Convoy Wharf. Found in the river. Stabbed like the last one. Only this time I knew her name: Shirley Cowley. But with the same message on her as before.’

  He looked at Rachel. ‘Sorry, Mrs Esthart.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Sight of the Murderer’s Hands

  For one moment John Coffin felt he held the ball in his hands, he was at the centre of the whole case. They were all listening to him; every word counted. Banbury, Warwick, even Chief Superintendent Dander. They were listening to him.

  For a moment they were frozen into a position; the still life of a dramatic, devastating second.

  Stella’s face registered shock and surprise, but she retained enough presence of mind to go straight round to Rachel. They stood together in silence. Joan and Albie moved closer together with an instinctive timing. They didn’t have to tell each other what their basic reaction was! Damn, this won’t help the returns. Murder on the streets was a no-sale position.

  Eddie Kelly and Chris Mackenzie froze into position as if this was a part of the play they had not rehearsed.

  At that time he did not know Vic Padovani was present, because Vic was in the kitchen behind the door, listening, but he learnt later.

  Then the scene broke into fragments, he caught snatches of conversation.

  A phrase from the policemen, Warwick to Dander as they waited for the car:

  ‘Mrs Esthart’s scene; what did you make of that?’

  ‘She was acting, of course.’

  ‘Sure,’ Warwick said. ‘They all were.’ He did not like actors.

  ‘But she meant it for all that.’

  ‘And she had something more to say. Not important, I doubt. But there was something else coming, I swear.’ This was Dander again.

  What had Rachel said? Coffin did not know yet. Something he had missed with his dinner.

  The theatre group moved towards the door, as anxious now to leave, but for different reasons, as the three policemen.

  Stella whispered in his ear. ‘Come back as soon as you can. Here to Angel House. Rachel has something to say.’

  To me! Coffin said to himself. Why to me?

  He murmured something about being late.

  ‘Never mind how late. It won’t matter.’

  Who was going to sleep tonight? Probably no policeman.

  He didn’t make a promise to Stella because he could not. Already he could see in Warwick’s face that he was about to issue instructions to both Coffin and Alex Rowley.

  When they came they amounted to no more than follow me and say nothing. He supposed he sounded like that to Eagle Scott, the laddie detective. There is a pecking order, boy, he decided, and you and I had better learn it. We are like utility furniture, you and I, we have our place, we are serviceable, but we are not greatly valued. You get us on a docket if you can show the need.

  Feeling like a utility bed, he lumbered after his superiors.

  Inspector Warwick had heard what Stella whispered, and before departing, said to John Coffin, ‘So what’s the old witch going to tell you? That she did the murder?’

  ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

  ‘Know her well, do you?’

  ‘Not really, sir.’

  ‘And what about the girl?’

  ‘A bit, sir.’

  Warwick said, ‘Well, let me know what she says.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ If I can, sir. If I don’t forget, sir.

  Vic Padovani and Florrie were standing in the hall by the open front door. It was the first time Coffin realized Vic was present. Vic’s face alarmed him.

  He looked frightened. It was a look Coffin knew well; in their army days Vic had often been frightened. In battle, of course, but no more than most, only always when he had to say No. Vic hated saying No. He loved horses, dumb animals and kids.

  ‘Vic?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh well, nothing now. See you later, Vic.’

  If you are a policeman on the outside, perhaps it is safer to stay that way and not try to get yourself and your friends inside anywhere.

  ‘It’s the same MO as before,’ said Coffin to Alex on the way down. ‘Same strangulation – manual, same stabbing and mutilation, and the card. Ditto, ditto. I saw, so I know. At the moment I know more than that lot.’ He nodded towards the big police car, full of his superiors, rapidly disappearing down the hill. ‘But that won’t last.’ It rankled.

  His dark, black thought was prominent in his company as he walked down hill with Alex. No longer inchoate, it had taken on a shape, turning itself into a little animal or a bird which crouched upon his shoulders or sat upon his head. In either case it was unpleasant to look upon and better avoided. He remembered now that the migraines which had followed his war injury had sometimes, or so he felt, assumed an animal form; biting into his head with teeth. This feeling must be related, somehow.

  A part of his recovery, but a nasty bit. But of course there was a reason for it, as there had been for the migraines. Something, not a bit of bone this time, but an awkward fact, was pressing on his mind. Alex saw this.

  ‘It worries you?’

  ‘I notice you are on the job this time and not sent off with Tom Banbury to check on infinitesimal bits of what might be the Shepherd child or her clothing.’

  ‘That’s because he hasn’t got any. But as it happens, I’m not.’ His tone was dry. ‘I’m a kind of records clerk.’

  The figure of the dead Shirley was going to absorb Coffin for a long time. Her hair, once so soft and curly, had fallen across her face in long strands. Her pretty dress was stained with blood and blotched with river muck. Her face was discoloured and swollen. As she had been dragged from the river he had made one quick examination to see the knife injuries to the genital area. For there the clothes had been removed. The stab wounds to the rest of the body were through the clothes.

  He would not see her again. By now the body would be on its way to the mortuary in Greenwich, where the police surgeon would make his examination before handing over to a forensic team for further study.

  But Coffin had seen enough.

  Then he said what he had been wanting to say for some time. ‘It was funny where the message card was attached this time.’

  ‘Pinned to the brassière?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘But it’s understandable: no cardigan pocket. So it had to go somewhere that would protect it a bit.’

  They carried on walking. At some point on that walk downhill to Greenwich the murderer was walking too, but it was too dark to see his face.

  Two hours later a tired man climbed up the hill. He had spent the time on all the routine tasks of documentation and recording that fall to a junior detective.

  He looked up at Angel House, praying that the lights would be out and he could walk on past. They were not, and he gave a small groan. All it needed now was for Eagle Scott to appear from the darkness.

  In his exhaustion it suddenly seemed as if the whole evening had presented itself specially in drama form with carefully mounted scenes and he now had one more act to go, although afterwards he realized that this was not so and there was nothing unusual about it, just the mind doing its usual conjuring tricks of making order out of chaos, as if life was a story with a beginning and an end. Which it might not be.

  Stella was waiting for him, on the lookout, and then Rachel.

  They sat him in an armchair, then gave him whisky, which made him even sleepier than he was, thus turning Rachel’s confession into something heard at a distance as through a tunnel, a small sound but very distinct. The verbal equivalent of a camera obscura.

  In his state of semi-intoxicated, hei
ghtened awareness, she seemed a terrifying figure.

  This figure was telling him that she had killed her own child. Let her son drown. This was what she had hidden from all these years, this the memory which for so long she had blacked out. This was the trauma of which her psychologist had so aptly spoken.

  ‘You mustn’t think I have known this all the time. In the beginning it was just as I told you. My son seemed still alive. But then, in bits, memories began to come back. Snatches. Little scenes, like the two of us having a picnic by a river, I was drinking wine. A lot, I suppose. Then a picture of him falling into the water. Someone was screaming. Me, it must have been. Just these bits, you see, that come back at intervals. I hated them. Didn’t believe them.’ She paused. ‘Then one day, after one of the Blitzes, I saw the whole thing: myself on the river bank, the boy going in and never coming up. The current is very strong in that river at that place. It sucks you under. I saw myself leaving. I left the car, the picnic things. I took a train.’ She was telling the tale in a monotone as if she had seen the whole thing like an old black and white film. ‘I ran away and I have been running until now. Here I stop.’

  Out of this tragedy, history had produced a murderer from Rachel Esthart, not from her womb but from her own psychosis.

  Like Jack the Ripper he just arrived on the scene, nimble, quick and active for revenge.

  In bed that night Coffin found a jingle running round his head.

  Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,

  When the rope swings, you will kick.

  Jack the tailor, soldier, sailor,

  Stranger, lodger, friend or neighbour,

  With every victim of your fun

  You show you are your mother’s son.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Way the Murderer Walked

  The murderer was out that night in the dark, not doing anything special, but retracing old footsteps, and thinking. Not worrying exactly; in this mood the murderer did not worry, or feel anxiety, only desire.

  But he did not say to himself, What a good chap I am, how right in my doings, how satisfying in my skills. The mood of holy happiness that had sustained him during the murders was beginning to fray at the edges.

  The murderer went down to the river. He liked water. It was cleansing, concealing, but also a means of transport. He was knowledgeable about the tides. There was no mystery about it: you could look them up. The passage of water up and down the Thames in response to the motions of the moon was regular and predictable. Every day had its twice high and low tides as measured from London Bridge. Seasonally, there are also exceptionally low tides called neap, and high known as spring.

  On Thursday, May 3, the high tide had been 2.54 a.m., and 3.17 p.m., as measured at London Bridge, some fifteen minutes later at Greenwich. On May 11, the tide was running some three hours earlier.

  He had absorbed this knowledge before he knew what use he would make of it. Indeed, it was because he knew, the use ensued. It came to his hand, as it were.

  It would not be true to say that anything might be grist to his mill, but he was, so to speak, a creative murderer. In which he would surprise the detectives chiefly concerned, Inspector Warwick and Chief Superintendent Dander, who believed that killers like this did not alter their modus operandi.

  In one crucial respect his presentation of the murders changed: he added an extra detail, but they do not know that yet. He himself is not aware how illuminating this dfference will be to one mind closely attuned to his own. This is because the murderer is sensitive to himself but not to other people, whom he consistently underrates. Not so that they notice, he is quite bright, but underneath he does not think that most people he meets and works with are as clever as he is himself.

  Deep inside himself, he realized that the matter of the black-market shoes worn by Shirley and Eileen and Lorna pointed towards him. He did not mind this pointer. In his arrogance he wanted, in a way, to be known.

  To be known and yet not to be known: that was his game. He wanted to parade himself, give the pursuers a pointer, yet to dance ahead, forever elusive. He thought he hid himself rather well.

  If he did not elude the chase then he knew what lay ahead: death by hanging.

  Tom Banbury was still thinking again about the execution room and the condemned cell; he wished he could shed the thought. The only comfort he had was that people could not see inside his face so they did not know what he was thinking.

  He was a working policeman and as such was well aware that there was something selective about his present position. His workload was surprisingly light. He was being sheltered. Or pushed aside. He reached out his hand for the whisky bottle.

  It was a pity Dander knew about the whisky.

  He took up a file of papers connected with other tasks such as the security of the royal family while in Greenwich, Greenwich Hythe and Greenwich Wick. Plenty of crooks, few traitors, was how he expressed it. The King and Queen were more in danger of having their pockets picked than being shot at.

  Finishing his drink, he went to bed, a business easily accomplished by him these days as he simply took off some clothes and crawled under the sheets. His stepmother, whom he disliked, came in once a week to clean. She called it her service to God. Banbury sometimes got the impression she disliked God as much as she disliked him and he disliked her.

  Tonight he didn’t sleep. He kept company with all his dead.

  All the Padovani family slept like the dead, Vic among them. But he, poor lad, had one idiosyncrasy, he shouted in his sleep. His mates in the army, Coffin among them, could bear witness to this.

  On the night of Rachel’s party, when so many others were restless, he was asleep but bellowing.

  His father came and shook his head, which was the family’s technique for arousing him.

  ‘You’re at it again. That’s too much of it lately.’

  ‘I thought I was walking,’ said the wretched Vic. ‘Up and down, up and down, by the river with weights on my feet.’ He didn’t say he had the double murders on his mind, but he had.

  ‘Stay awake, then, and give us some peace.’

  Papa Padovani departed: he had his own worries, such as black-market shoes and the tenor of the Food Inspector’s report on the nature of his wine. Mama Padovani stayed awake; she was worried that she might know the identity of the murderer.

  In Angel House, Rachel Esthart, purged of her guilt at last, slept like the angel on the roof. She was worn out, exhausted, temporarily dead to the world.

  But inside vitality was bubbling. She had plans. These plans no longer included Stella.

  Eddie Kelly was among those others not sleeping well.

  He had a smart flat within easy driving distance of the Theatre Royal, Nelson Street, where he now sat in a striped dressing-gown, smoking an Abdullah. ‘Doing his Noel Coward act,’ was how he expressed it.

  He had the sense that one period of his life was drawing to an end and another about to begin.

  The time at the Theatre Royal had been formative, shaping. His life after would never be the same; but it was time to move on.

  He would miss Stella Pinero. He had loved her more than he would ever admit, but she was not his future. He hoped she would not mind. Probably not. A tough young lady.

  As for Rachel Esthart, she had laid hands upon his life and marked it. He’d be glad to leave her behind. If he could do. If. He had an idea Rachel was stronger than he guessed.

  He lit another cigarette. It was time for relationships to end, time to go.

  Other characters from the Theatre Royal were having a restless night. Chris was trying to compose music in his mind. Silent music. Beethoven could do it, why not Chris? But Chris couldn’t. Too many emotions were wavering inside.

  Love. Hate. Despair.

  Bloody, bloody women, he thought, and wanted to kick the wall. But that would waken Mrs Lorimer who slept next door.

  He got up and started to carve a bird, a seagull.

  Joan and Albie shared
a double bed as they had done all their married life. Perhaps each had had adventures outside the marriage-bed but they had been passing: their relationship with each other and the theatre was what counted.

  Joan whispered, ‘We’re nearly done, aren’t we? Funny, isn’t it? Six months ago we had a profit and today we’re in the red. That’s theatre for you. Why do we bother? Why do we bother?’ She shook her sleepy husband. ‘Albie – I can think of how we could raise money. And it might be a whizz. A risk, though.’ Albie did not answer, and Joan lay on her back, thinking. I think the Queen would like it, she decided. A compliment, really. If I worked it right.

  In Mrs Lorimer’s Coffin eventually slept lightly and uncomfortably. He had the feeling too much life was stirring in the house below, who was still up and around?

  He too feared that he knew the identity of the murderer.

  In the water the third yet first body drifted free, and floated upwards. An early worker, a stevedore, saw her there as the summer dawn made the water rosy. He looked in horror at the face rising to the top of the water. It was a face, recognizably a woman’s face.

  The third, last, yet first body had arrived. The tiny woman who had crouched in the recess in the stone river wall of the Isle of Dogs had finally come floating free. The belt of her dress which had caught her there on a piece of projecting metal had rotted apart. She was loose. Eileen Gaze was floating at last.

  The stevedore telephoned the police and then the local newspaper. This man had an instinctive grasp of the needs of the situation. The newspaper office was closed at that hour, but he knew the home number of the girl reporter. ‘Here, Julia, I’ve got this for you.’

  The girl listened with interest, making notes. Yes, I’ve got that. I know the place. I’ll be down there. Have the police got there yet? No? Good. I’ll bring a photographer. If I can.’ She kept her fingers crossed.