A Double Coffin

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘As you like,’ said Miss Flint, buttoning her coat. ‘You do go on about bottoms.’

  He watched her go. It was going to be a bad night.

  Miss Flint stood in the hall listening: she hated that sound he made, rasping and low, call it a growl if you must. She considered going back in, but no. She had done all that could be required of her.

  She sped to her car, it was raining and cold. It was going to be a bad night.

  Dick Lavender read for a while – Lady Thatcher’s memoirs. She had it easy, he thought, should have been PM when I was, I had more vultures around. Outlived them all, though.

  He dozed, and then woke up. He could hear noises as of bones cracking and a woman screaming. A little muted scream, suppressed.

  He tried to get up but he could hardly move his legs. He did stagger to the door, which would not open, and then found he was floating, flying, sinking, swimming. When he got back to bed his hands felt sticky.

  No more noises. Was he awake or still asleep? Were the noises outside him or inside?

  Was he a performer or part of the audience?

  When he woke up there was blood, dried blood, on his hands.

  It had been a bad night. A very bad night.

  14

  There was a faxed message waiting for Coffin when he got back to his tower home in St Luke’s. A tiny office had been created for Coffin on the ground floor and in this little room the fax machine and a secret, dedicated telephone lived. Stella picked it up and handed it over, there was a fax for him coming through at that very minute. See you at the E and B, Phoebe said.

  ‘What is this E and B she’s talking about?’ Stella asked, having caught sight of the phrase. ‘Some sort of secret society?’ She was only half joking because heaven knows, she knew how many secret societies there were, some having hundreds of members and some only one or two. Sometimes you found yourself a member without knowing you had joined. Men usually had more secret societies than women but women had some very, very secret ones, hardly guessed at by the masculine world.

  Coffin picked up the fax from Phoebe and shook his head. ‘No, just a supper … Egg and Bacon supper.’

  Stella raised an eyebrow in enquiry. ‘Do you eat egg and bacon at it?’

  ‘I suppose we might do,’ said Coffin vaguely, his eyes on the long fax from Phoebe. ‘Everyone comes.’

  ‘Everyone?’ Stella, used to the casual world of the theatre, remembered how surprised she had been at the rigid class structure in the police service, one in which different ranks ate in different rooms and did not meet socially. You had to remember that the police service was a Victorian invention and one on which the army had laid a strong hand. Officer class and other ranks was the pattern deeply imbedded in it. She knew that her husband was trying to break this up, that he had instituted a table in the main canteen for the higher ranks at which he ate himself on occasion. But the higher ranks still had their private room in which she herself had once been entertained. Only once, women, especially actresses, need not be encouraged.

  ‘I suppose there will be a bar,’ she said, naming the one institution that no club can be without. She was leading the way up the narrow winding stairway which was one of the hazards of living in a tower. But it keeps you thin, Stella used to say to herself, as she ran upwards; she usually ran, somehow it seemed easier as your own momentum carried you forward.

  ‘Of course.’ He was still studying the fax from Phoebe, as he followed her up the stairs. ‘You could come yourself one time if you liked, as a distinguished visitor … I have bolted and locked up, by the way, so I hope the dog won’t want to go out again.’ The sound of the big old locks and the heavy chains had been very audible. They were only decoration, though, a legacy from the past. Their real security was electronic.

  Stella was carrying Augustus, who sometimes made heavy weather of the staircase. ‘No, he attended to everything while you were putting the car away.’ There was a small patch of grass and bushes this side of the road and facing the old churchyard which Augustus was licensed to use. She had noticed that there was still a barrier up over the road and one lone uniformed man still on guard. It had not been so long after all since the skeletons had been found.

  She guessed that the fax from Phoebe Astley concerned the case of the bodies in the old churchyard. She had trained herself not to ask questions, but she knew a little of what lay behind the digging. Stella did not like Phoebe overmuch, but she had trained herself not to be jealous of a woman who worked so closely with her husband and whose brains and professional skills could not be in doubt. Stella never thought of herself as clever but she had understandings and intuitions that worked as well. Her mind was moving now.

  Almost at the top of the stairs, she paused for breath; she deposited Augustus by the kitchen door where he made his way promptly to his water bowl and began to lap noisily, casting reproachful glances at his owners for having eaten and drunk while forgetting their dog.

  ‘Has it struck you,’ said Stella to her husband as he joined her in the kitchen, ‘that old Lavender made up this story about his father to take your mind off other things?’

  ‘It has indeed.’ Coffin threw the fax on the table. ‘I have thought about it constantly.’ He stood for a moment in silence. ‘But what was found across the road does support his story so far.’ He frowned. ‘It’s not straightforward though, by any means. You could say that we found more than we expected.’

  The skeletal remains of a woman with the fragments of an unborn child; and close by the skeleton of a man. These were part of his puzzle. Dick Lavender had not been questioned yet about the finds, but that must come.

  ‘I will just read through what Phoebe has got to say. You go on up, Stella.’

  Stella took the dog and went up to her bedroom, where she found the cat already installed on the bed. Dog and cat eyed each other, assessed the best sleeping territory, but decided it was too late at night to fight over it.

  I won’t be jealous of that woman, Stella told herself as she creamed her face. ‘She is a good professional, John needs the work she does, probably no one but Phoebe could do it. I admire her.’

  Stella studied her face in the looking glass, focusing the light on her dressing table directly on it. A few lines here and there, not really important, the general effect was still good. Phoebe was younger than she was, many years younger, not pretty but attractive.

  ‘He needs her in his work, I suppose. She supports him, plays the good sister. I can’t do that, I back him up, but not on the work front. Very often we are at odds there.’

  As now. He suspected Martin of murdering Jaimie, he probably believed that the sister Clara had helped.

  Some cleaner got into her eye to make it sting. ‘Damn.’

  There was Jack Bradshaw lined up as a suspect; Stella decided that he would not do, he had loved the girl, and Stella herself had seen the shock on his face when Jaimie was discovered in that terrible disguise. He could not have done that to Jaimie.

  To herself, she would admit that Martin, the actor, could have done so. It would have been a performance to him.

  Downstairs, Coffin sat reading Phoebe’s fax. ‘I have been working on the newspaper records, all of which are on microfilm, so easy to read. There are gaps, due, I suppose, to accidents of life and war. The Spinnergate paper, which was daily until the 1920s, and the East Hythe weekly paper have been the most useful. Both papers still exist but both now are weekly papers, run for the advertising revenues and not for the news.’

  This Coffin knew, a copy of his local newspaper, full of advertisements for the sale of houses and offices, was on the kitchen table in front of him. The cat had shot in, leaving his bed, and was drinking from a saucer of milk placed on the table. As far as he could see she was spilling milk on a tactful and oblique but obliging advertisement from the local madam advertising her girls. As the cat slopped another drop of milk, Coffin registered that action might have to be taken on Madame Biddy LeSalle.


  He turned back to what Phoebe had to say.

  ‘I followed up all items about the names of the murdered women, Mildred Bailey, Mary Jane Armour, and Eliza Jones, shop girl. The bodies of the first three women were found over a period of some months. Going on the newspaper reports, each of the first three victims died in similar circumstances: each woman was raped and strangled. In each case, a piece of underclothing was removed.’

  Phoebe added: ‘Newspapers in those days were too decorous to name the piece of underwear, so I think we must conclude that the killer whipped off his victims’ knickers. None was found with the victim so he must have taken them with him.’

  Coffin stopped reading for a moment to stop the cat walking all over the fax as it spread across the table.

  ‘The newspapers were similarly discreet over the lifestyles of Bailey and Armour, they are called married women, but Bailey was said not to be living with her husband, and Armour said to be living in a lodging house. I think you draw your own conclusions from that.

  There was a suggestion in the Spinnergate paper for September 23, 1913, that a fourth woman, Isobel Haved, might have been murdered by the serial killer, but although I am going through the papers carefully once again, I can find no other mention of this woman. No date, no name and no place.

  ‘How many women did Richard Lavender say his father had killed?’

  Coffin scrawled a note on the fax to this effect.

  Phoebe’s fax went on: ‘The odd woman out is Haved; she is named as a likely victim because she is missing from where she lived, a house down by the old Flemish Docks. There is an interview with a neighbour, a woman who worked in a fish shop, who says how worried she is but there is no further mention of her.’

  Coffin wrote in the margin: Is she perhaps the woman that Lavender claims he and his mother buried? And if so, can she somehow be linked with the skeleton already found?

  ‘There are certain facts that make me wonder how true the story that old Lavender told us could be. I mean, it’s so odd that his mother should recruit her son for the job when all she wanted to do was to keep secret her husband’s crime. Could she trust the boy not to talk?

  ‘And then, how was it SHE HAD THE BODY? If I write this large it is because for me it is a large question.

  ‘In a smaller kind of way is the worry how they got through the streets and did the burial.

  ‘And where was Dad?’

  Coffin wrote another note: I think he said that his father had run away.

  Phoebe went on: ‘I can’t think why Lavender should lie, it’s all so far away and long ago. Also, he got us into it – I wouldn’t have been digging in the old churchyard but for his tale … All the same, it doesn’t quite fit … Perhaps it is because it was so long ago, and he is old. Memory, you know, plays tricks.’

  Coffin wrote: I think both of us should question Richard Lavender once more.

  Phoebe continued: ‘I don’t pretend to understand his mind or what lies behind the story, but whatever it is this is important to him.’

  Phoebe added: ‘I have kept a more complete run of events in a work diary, as usual.’

  Somehow, Coffin thought, he got his need across because I listened and you are working on it, Phoebe. He sat thinking, putting out a hand to stroke the cat who had appeared again, and finally walked over to the telephone.

  It was late but he did not mind disturbing Phoebe’s sleep if she was there; he had done it in the past but better not to dwell on the past.

  Phoebe was not there, so he left a message on her answering machine, telling her to get a copy of her diary on to his desk early tomorrow. And yes, they would meet at the Egg and Bacon supper where they would be able to talk about Richard Lavender. More and more the strangeness of the whole business was unfolding before him. He had been hypnotized by the old man. No wonder he had become a Prime Minister, he was a spellbinder.

  He sat thinking about Richard Lavender while continuing to stroke the cat. ‘There’s death, there, cat,’ he said, looking into the bright-green eyes. ‘I can smell it.’ He had learnt in his years dealing with murder to recognize it: you didn’t get it in your nose like ordinary smells but down your throat and on your chest, miasma ascending to your brain.

  You could call it conviction, if you liked, but to him it had always been a stink.

  The cat sped down from the table and disappeared. Then Coffin went to bed. As he cleaned his teeth, which always seemed a vital preparation either for sleep or insomnia, and he was practised in both, he allowed himself to wonder where Phoebe was spending the night.

  Stella was asleep with her arms tucked neatly around her. Even in sleep she was neat and graceful. She had left a bedside lamp on so she wore a black silk mask to shield her from the light. This gave her an air of mystery.

  She dispelled this instantly by remarking: ‘I’m not asleep.’ She did not remove the mask. ‘Phoebe all right?’

  ‘I reckon she is.’

  Stella laughed. ‘I reckon she always is. But tell me, I must ask again or I won’t sleep, are you planning to arrest Martin?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘God may,’ said Stella, ‘but that won’t help me with my new production, will it?’ She rolled over on her side and composed herself for sleep. ‘Oh well, if you won’t help me I shall have to have a word with God. Please send me a handsome young actor, English-speaking, please. Oh yes, and thin, as the costumes are already made.’

  Coffin touched her on the shoulder. ‘Take that mask off and look at me. You don’t believe Martin is guilty, do you? Or you wouldn’t be joking about it.’

  ‘I don’t know if I was joking, my productions are a serious matter to me, but no, I don’t think he is guilty, nor his sister. Not that it would stop your lot arresting him.’

  ‘I can’t just act on your faith,’ said Coffin gently. ‘I wish I could. But I will remember it, I call you a good judge of character.’

  Stella allowed herself a laugh. ‘I don’t know about that, but I am a jolly good judge of a character actor.’

  ‘Do you mean Martin is acting?’

  ‘No, I don’t. As a person he is what he seems to be. I mean Phoebe Astley: I judge she is acting a part all the time when she is with you and you ought to think about that.’

  They lay in bed side by side, coldly separated by Phoebe Astley.

  In the morning it was better. Over the coffee and hot toast which Coffin had learnt to produce, they talked. Not mentioning the murder of Jaimie or whether Richard Lavender’s story about his father had somehow provoked this death, but tacitly admitting that both of them were disturbed and anxious.

  ‘You’ve kept your nerve better than I have,’ admitted Coffin.

  ‘Did you have a nightmare?’ asked Stella with sympathy. ‘You were muttering in your sleep.’

  ‘I don’t need nightmares, I have them during the day.’

  ‘I have to go to a meeting in London this morning,’ said Stella. ‘My agent, you know how it is. And then I will get my hair done. It needs it badly.’ She reached out to put her hand on his. ‘You know who Jaimie’s killer is, don’t you?’

  ‘Think so. No proof, though.’

  ‘But you will get it,’ she said, studying his face.

  ‘I think I let the killer guess … and that could be dangerous. You can never predict what an unstable person will do.’

  ‘This killer is unstable?’

  ‘My guess is yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘By direct observation, but there is a powerful emotion at work.’

  Stella looked at him. ‘You couldn’t name it?’

  ‘Self-hate, I think,’ said Coffin.

  Stella drove away for her appointment, thinking that sometimes her husband frightened her. Not for herself, exactly, but for the human race in general: he was so alarmingly clear-eyed.

  She parked her car near the Spinnergate underground station where her old friend Mimsie Marker was, fur-hatted for the winter, but ears alert
for the gossip she collected and passed on. Invented it sometimes, perhaps.

  Mimsie handed over The Times and a copy of Vogue, the American edition, Stella’s chosen, and smiled at her.

  ‘Lovely morning, dear, isn’t it? Cold but bright.’

  Stella nodded.

  Mimsie was pleased with life. ‘Off to town? Lovely, give Piccadilly Circus my love.’ Mimsie acted as if she was stuck in Spinnergate but she was believed to be rich. ‘What a blessing your husband has been since he came here.’

  ‘Oh good.’

  ‘Some smashing murders we’ve had since he came. Very good for trade. Selling papers like hot cakes.’ Mimsie looked down at the racks, which were already nearly emptied, early as it still was. ‘Dead Dolly Murder,’ she read from one newspaper.

  ‘But that’s revolting,’ said Stella.

  “Course it is, people like being revolted.’ Mimsie was forthright. ‘At second hand, mind you, not face to face, but something to think about on the train, that’s it.’

  Dead Dolly, Stella thought, a circulation raiser.

  Phoebe’s diary itself was on Coffin’s desk when he got there that morning. He was familiar with the physical appearance of the book, smallish, dark blue, heavy, because all his officers kept one.

  ‘Couldn’t manage a photocopy in the time. Have the original.’

  He picked it up, it smelt faintly of Phoebe’s scent. Also of cigarettes – so she was smoking again. After a cancer scare she had given up the weed but her nerve must be back again, or she had given up worrying.

  He turned the pages, searching for the entries he wanted because Phoebe had been engaged in other enquiries at the same time as the skeleton in the old churchyard.

  He observed gratefully that the arson and fraud case, for it was both, on which she had been occupied was on the point of going to the office of the Public Prosecutor and thus, he hoped, to the courts. He had taken a dislike to the mean-hearted entrepreneur who had embarked on the fraud. She had also, and here his feelings were mixed, got quite a way into the investigation into the possible corruption of a colleague of them both. Hell, he thought, it’s coming positive.