Coffin walked to the door. ‘Darcy, this is for you now; I would like to see you when you have a chance to get on top of things. Tomorrow, sometime.’
Darcy was brisk. ‘Right, sir.’
Coffin turned to Phoebe Astley. ‘Chief Inspector, I would like a word now.’
Phoebe followed him to the door, and Jack Bradshaw moved after her.
But Darcy checked him. ‘No, Dr Bradshaw, don’t go, you stay. I need to ask you some questions too.’
Jack Bradshaw, Clara Henley and Martin Marlowe watched the door close behind Coffin. Bradshaw, who was not without humour, told himself that this was how the sheep felt when the sheepdog rounded them up.
Clara had been here before, and knew that now the questioning began. She looked at her brother, who did not look back.
***
Coffin faced Phoebe in the corridor. ‘Up to my room, I want to talk.’
‘Sure.’ She followed him to the lift.
In his office. Coffin poured them both a drink. ‘You realize what has happened, don’t you? Two have become one: your digging into Richard Lavender’s serial-killer father and the investigation into the death of Jaimie are now joined at the hip. Like twins. You understand the implications of what I am saying?’
Phoebe took her drink. ‘I certainly do: I saw Jack Bradshaw’s face when he saw Jaimie and again when he said she had black hair: he was in love with her.’
‘Yes, I think so. Strong emotion there, anyway. Well, George Darcy will get it out of him.’
‘He saw. He took it in. Martin Marlowe and Dr Clara Henley too, he’d heard of them. I saw it in his face.’
Coffin picked up his telephone. ‘I must tell Stella I am on my way home.’
Phoebe finished her drink. ‘And what do I do about my digging into the past of the Lavender family? Do I go on with it?’
‘Yes, carry on with it. But remember, this young woman may have been killed because of her investigation, so look after yourself.’
‘I can look after myself,’ said Phoebe.
‘Phoebe was not pleased that I recommended care,’ said Coffin to his wife, when he got home not long afterwards. Stella was in bed, reading, with the cat looking out of the window and the dog on the bed with her. She was wearing big horn-rimmed spectacles as she read a script.
‘You are taking this business seriously.’
‘I am. You realize what this murder means, don’t you?’
Stella took off her spectacles, she knew her husband, he was about to walk up and down the room, talking to her, clearing his own mind while throwing ideas at her. If she followed his movements while he paced she would become dizzy, so she had developed a technique of listening while not looking.
‘No, tell me,’ she said. You are going to do so, anyway.
‘Two investigations have joined, not exactly become one, but twinned. Siamese twins, joined at the hip.’
‘Has anyone told Dick Lavender yet?’ Stella asked the question that interested her.
‘No. Jack Bradshaw will do that, but George Darcy will be calling on him, I suppose. I shall go myself.’
‘Is the old man mobile? I suppose he couldn’t have nipped out and killed Marjorie-Jaimie?’
Coffin stopped walking to look at his wife, he gave a small laugh. ‘You saw that guy.’
‘All dressed up and nowhere to go? No, he could not have done that, but someone might have helped him out.’ She laughed herself. ‘No, life isn’t like that, is it? It might happen on the stage but not elsewhere.’
‘I think the same person killed Jaimie as dressed her up … let’s settle on that name for her, shall we? It was her real name and we might allow her that dignity … the person who killed her, also turned her into a guy and wheeled her into that car park. There is real, personal hate.’
‘I wonder what she did to deserve it?’ Stella saw with relief that Coffin had ceased his walk up and down to stand looking at her. Perhaps she really served a useful function, lying here, asking questions. She looked at him with sympathy and respect.
We will stay together, she thought, in spite of all my sinful behaviour of which he is too clever not to know, but far too clever to show me he knows. There are his occasional fancies towards people like Phoebe Astley, but I forgive him for those.
She looked down at her hands, stretching the fingers. She had to accept that she did feel jealous of Phoebe. Quite strongly on occasion. Jealousy was a powerful emotion, irrational, too.
‘What about jealousy as a motive?’ she asked. She patted the bed. ‘Come and sit down.’
Coffin sat on the end of the bed. ‘She had charm, I admit it … Jealousy is such an unfair motive.’
‘Charm is unfair.’ The cat sprang down from the window to leap on the bed, giving the dog a cuff on the ear as he passed. ‘What about Martin?’
‘Darcy will have put him through it and sent him home. You had better keep him busy tomorrow.’
‘I will do that.’
‘I was glad you turned up today with Jack Bradshaw.’ He was undoing his tie and taking off his jacket. ‘Oh God, I am tired … Funny how it all happened, everything and everyone all rolled together to find the girl. Fate. It happens sometimes. And then I feel that there is someone or something sitting up there pulling strings and maybe laughing. Smiling, anyway.’
‘That’s called irony. You get a lot of it in the theatre. Although,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘not as much as you used to, writers being against what they call contrivance. But I like a bit of it myself.’
‘You’re talking for the sake of talking, aren’t you?’
‘Well, sort of.’
‘Calming the old man down … I do love you, Stella. So you did get your actor? Good.’
‘I did. He’s joining us tomorrow.’ She smiled reminiscently. ‘Now, he has charm, his own peculiar unusual charm.’ She laughed. ‘He’ll make an impact, I think.’
‘I’m coming to bed.’ Coffin took up his jacket and disappeared through the door.
‘Take a shower,’ called Stella after him. ‘You smell of the police station.’
But I work there all the time, he thought as he plodded away, so I must smell of it all the time.
He went back to the bedroom door. ‘That smell, Stella …’
She raised her head from the play script. ‘It’s an emotional smell, love, nothing more. You are emotional tonight, don’t let it worry you.’
He went away, wondering what an emotional smell smelt like: sharp and lemony, he decided. Better than vanilla and custard.
***
In the morning, he came down to the kitchen to make them both some tea. Briefly, he wondered what he smelt like now. Love had its own smell, he knew that.
The tea was just made, in the special Herend pot that Stella liked so much, when the telephone rang. It was Chief Inspector Darcy.
‘This is early.’
‘Been up most of the night. Dennis Garden did the postmortem on the girl in the small hours. He’s off to a medicolegal conference in Toronto tomorrow for twenty-four hours and he wanted to get this done before he went off. She died from a blow to the back of the head. A blow in the posterior parietal region, he says. Produced diffuse neural injury, followed by oedema and massive haemorrhage. Stabbed as well, more blood.’
‘Right.’
‘Caused by a heavy object but a smooth one. Could be a stone wrapped in a cloth. We’d be lucky to find that, but we will go on looking. When we know where to look. We made a start on her own flat in the City. And I sent a man round to Marlowe’s place in Spinnerwick. Signs of a bust-up there, but he said they had had a quarrel.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Staying with his sister in his own flat. Not charging him, but he knows he is under suspicion.’
‘Right,’ said Coffin again.
‘No evidence yet, but there will be some circumstantial evidence in due course … And that guy business and the hair … theatrical, isn’t it, sir?’
In the middle of the night, Darcy had stood looking at the clothes removed from the body for forensic examination. The tweed jacket which had covered the top of the body, the soft felt hat and the old blanket tucked around her. Old clothes all, they had belonged to someone once and might yield a clue. He stared with particular interest at the jacket.
‘Something about the jacket,’ he said to Coffin.
Coffin did not answer. Outside, the early sun was reddening the sky and casting long shadows on the old churchyard across the road. I have an obligation there, he told himself. To look for another dead woman. How strangely events wove in and out of each other. Would Jaimie have died, but for the earlier death?
Supposed death, he said to himself. You don’t know for sure as yet that there was such a death. Perhaps old Lavender was being theatrical in his old age.
George Darcy was talking on: ‘There is something, sir, that came out of the postmortem.’
Coffin listened. ‘Really? I am surprised.’
‘I’m never surprised at that sort of thing,’ said George Darcy.
‘Keep me in touch.’
‘I will, of course, sir. I’ll be seeing Marlowe, hear what he has to say on it.’
Coffin put his hand on the teapot, it was still hot. He carried the tray up to Stella. She was awake, lying looking at the ceiling.
‘I heard the phone.’
‘Yes, it was Darcy.’ Coffin poured the tea into the matching cup which he handed to her. ‘Garden has done a postmortem … She was killed by a blow to the head.’
Stella nodded.
‘He also discovered that she was pregnant. Very early. About six weeks.’ He stirred his own tea. ‘She must have known, though. Damn, and damn and damn.’
7
The old churchyard across the road from St Luke’s was shrouded in the mist with the hint of a feeble sun. It was early morning, light had only just appeared across the sky and was struggling to break through the thick haze.
‘Almost a good old-fashioned peasouper,’ Coffin said aloud as he drank his morning mug of tea, staring out of the kitchen window. Stella was still in bed, although she had politely welcomed the hot tea he had taken in to her.
The news that had come with it about the pregnancy of the dead girl was less welcome. She did not say anything but he could see by the troubled look on her face that she was thinking of Martin. Whether he was the father or not, it didn’t look good for him. In her experience, and Coffin’s too, for that matter, the lovers of pregnant murdered women were in for a rough ride.
‘May not be Martin’s child,’ Coffin had said to her. ‘We shall have to find out.’
‘You can ask him.’
‘He may not know … but either way …’ He paused.
‘Oh, go and walk it off,’ said Stella, turning her face into the pillow. ‘Take the dog.’
He put the dog on the leash, walked down the stairs into the churchyard. He still thought of it as that, as did most of the neighbourhood, although officially it was now a small park with a swing and a roundabout for children, with seats for their parents. In fact, few children ventured in, whether they had their parents with them or not, but the seats were popular with pensioners on their way back from collecting their pensions at the post office round the corner.
Coffin walked towards the park, remembering how, when the church itself was turned over to secular use, the old churchyard had known neglect, and how as a result of pleas from Stella Pinero and Coffin himself, as well as his powerful sister Letty Bingham, it had been given a new life; a special dispensation from the Archbishop of Canterbury himself had allowed all the dead to be disinterred and buried in a new cemetery, lying in one great companionable grave, friends and enemies alike.
And now he thought: And maybe they left one behind. An unshriven soul, murdered by a man long dead himself.
On this cold November morning. Coffin and his dog were alone. Keeping Augustus close beside him, Coffin stepped off the narrow path to walk through the wet grass towards the area to the west which had been left with thick, uncut grass, dotted with aged shrubs and trees. It was a little crescent of rough ground that might go back to ancient woodland.
The ground under his feet was bumpy. He walked on, dragging a reluctant Augustus (who found the trees inviting) after him. A trio of bushes had grown together so that they formed a little thicket. Behind them was a plane tree, up whose trunk ivy was growing.
It was its own little world here, he thought, stepping carefully, keeping his eyes on the ground. The ground was particularly irregular under the tree, and to his imaginative eyes, the grass looked ranker.
No, he wasn’t wrong there: the grass was taller, and thicker. He prodded the soil with his toe, not frozen but stiff and hard where it had been left untouched for years. He thought he saw signs – a grass thicket trampled down, a branch hanging loose on a bush – of other feet having pushed in here. The ground was too hard for a footprint but the frosty grass had been pressed down.
He could see where the feet had gone: round the tree, up towards the stone wall which was hidden by a belt of bushes and shrubs. Vegetation was triumphant here.
He could imagine what it must have been like here when the streetlamps of the early twentieth century had been lit by flickering gas jets, and when terraces of small houses had filled the streets. It would have been dark and quiet here among the trees. People probably minded their own business around here. A police constable would have walked the beat, but nothing would take him into the churchyard. If any noises or any movement was noticed then a pair coupling would be shrugged off as the answer. No one except a Peeping Tom would go to look.
Dick Lavender said he and his mother had buried the body in the autumn of 1913; a year later in 1914, there was war. Fighting in Flanders, and streets darkened against zeppelin raids. This would have been a dark and private place.
There were always animals, of course, he thought, looking at Augustus. Animals scrabbled and dug, but that did not seem to have happened here.
As if picking up his thoughts, Augustus sat down, raised his head and howled.
Coffin took the hint, he was cold himself, and turned back towards the road. As he walked forward, he heard a car draw up.
He thought he had found what he wanted in any case.
George Darcy was just getting out of his car. He saluted Coffin.
‘I suppose 1914 was a pretty bloody year,’ Coffin said, staring into the thicket.
‘’Morning, sir. Yes, pretty bloody.’ Darcy walked towards the Chief Commander. ‘The casualty lists soon started. Wiped out the old, professional British army. I see what you are getting at.’ Darcy came up the path. ‘You’re out early, sir.’
‘1914 … a terrible war, the victims of murder might get overlooked.’ Missed but forgotten, he thought, not important when the slaughter in Flanders was racing on.
‘There was a chap called Ball, hung in 1914,’ said Darcy. He was a student of crime. ‘So murders were investigated.’
Coffin said: ‘I guessed it was you arriving.’
‘Been up all night, as I said. I was driving past when I thought I saw you.’
Don’t believe a word of it, thought Coffin, you were looking for me.
‘I have been talking to Phoebe Astley … she’s been around most of the night too, the work she is doing …’ He did not look at the Chief Commander, tactfully looking into the distance. ‘Kind of secret.’
‘Confidential,’ said Coffin. ‘If she hasn’t told you, then I will fill you in.’
‘She mapped it out,’ admitted Darcy. ‘Anyway, word had got around, you know how things are … the upshot is that we agreed to keep in touch, if that’s all right with you, sir.’
Coffin nodded. ‘I agree …’
‘She’s got her line of enquiry and I’ve got mine, but that dead girl comes into both.’ Darcy took another step into the churchyard. ‘Phoebe wants to dig up here.’
‘Someone has been in here already, trampling do
wn.’
‘Might have been Phoebe Astley.’
‘Looks like bigger feet,’ said Coffin thoughtfully. Phoebe was a tall woman but her feet were elegant and slender, whereas the feet that had left marks on the ground in the shrubbery had been big: boot-sized was how Coffin put it.
‘She needs my help here with the digging. If you agree we will start digging today.’
‘You don’t need my permission: do it.’
The two men were pacing the path, side by side. Coffin was dragging Augustus, who would have preferred to go home.
‘Come and have a look round,’ said Coffin, leading the way into the rough ground. ‘Tell me what you make of it.’
‘Is this where Phoebe plans to dig?’
‘It will be, I think. I have walked over the ground, and I think these’ – he searched for the right words – ‘either of these humps might be worth a look.’
‘Could be anything.’ George Darcy’s natural reaction to almost everything was scepticism. It made him a good and cautious police officer, but a wearing colleague. He looked around. ‘No cover, but I suppose you wouldn’t be seen from the road.’
‘I don’t know what it was like over eighty years ago,’ said Coffin. ‘But I guess it was dark enough. Lavender says they came here.’
‘Does he really remember all this?’ asked the sceptic.
‘God knows.’ Coffin shrugged. ‘He believes it himself, I was sure of that. I wasn’t sure if Jack Bradshaw believed him, or if Janet Neptune did. Have you interviewed her yet?’
‘No, she has been seen by Sergeant Belle Dixon. Dixon said she seemed vague, she didn’t have much to say about Marjorie Wardy … she knew the girl as that, but Dixon thought she might know more than she was saying. I shall see her myself.’
‘I got the impression she would be jealous of anyone getting at all close to Dick Lavender. I wasn’t sure how she felt about Bradshaw.’
‘Tricky customer, himself,’ said Darcy.
‘Oh, you think so? You could be right.’
‘He had no reason to like Marjorie Wardy, who was encroaching on his own work and probably about to make more of a splash, not to mention more money.’
A Double Coffin Page 9