A Double Coffin

by Gwendoline Butler

  Coffin wrenched his mind away from the Lavenders. ‘I did. Please come in.’ He led the way into his own office, thinking that Paul Masters looked disappointed at losing the good-looking doctor.

  Clara began hesitantly, as if speech was still a problem with strangers, but once started it began to flow.

  ‘I brought you the disc I took from Jaimie’s office. If you wonder how I got in, I had had a copy made of Martin’s key while he still had it. I always intended to search her flat. I thought she was using Martin as well as encouraging him in violence … she clawed his arm, you know, you could see the nail marks, she was like a cat. No, I like cats and I didn’t like her. I thought she was seeking violence to make a good story when she wrote it up … I took what I could. The police changed the lock later … I did not know she was dead, of course.’ Clara put the disc on the table in front of Coffin. ‘I wiped out what she had on the hard disc. One thing about a scientific training is it teaches you to cover everything.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Coffin took the disc. ‘But you haven’t wiped this?’

  Clara shook her head. ‘Science again … I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it … I ran it through. Some stuff about Richard Lavender, not a lot and bit cryptic, she was still working on it. But a lot about us, Martin and me and our mother.’ She paused, then said in her soft voice: ‘She had caught on to something that I thought Martin did not know, or had forgotten, because he was so young at the time. I didn’t want it brought out. It was all so horrible but in the past. I wanted it buried.’

  ‘The past won’t always stay buried,’ said Coffin.

  ‘There was something else too in the tape. She noted that she was pregnant. By Martin. Or so she guessed. But that she would have an abortion. She didn’t want a child at the moment and certainly not the child of a murderer. I hated her for that. Did you know about the pregnancy?’

  ‘Oh yes, it came out at the autopsy. We kept it quiet.’

  ‘Thank you, I haven’t told Martin. I am not sure how he would take it. I admitted killing my father and I was punished for it. But I didn’t do it. My mother did it and I knew I could bear punishment and survive whereas she couldn’t.’ Clara looked up at Coffin and smiled. ‘I was young, there was a lot of sympathy for me and Martin, I knew I would come through and so would he … Besides, we had done a terrible thing too.’

  ‘What was it you did?’ A tough lady. Coffin thought, lovely to look at, as Martin was.

  Clara’s voice, always soft, dropped even lower so that it was almost a whisper. ‘My mother stabbed my father, she stabbed him three times, and then she made first me and then Martin pick up the knife and stick it into each wound. “Dig hard,” she said. “Dig hard.” I thought Martin had forgotten; he had not, or he remembered after a while. As you say: the past won’t lie down.’

  ‘It would have cleared you.’

  ‘But at what price?’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t face it. I have built a new life, and so has Martin. We know the truth and that is hard enough to bear.’ She stood up. ‘I would like to have the disc back.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, I’m not sure what the legal position is, you may have to talk to Jaimie’s executor. If she made a will. You may be able to get a copy.’

  Clara thanked him, told him how happy Martin was now he was working for Stella and left. Outside, Coffin heard Paul muttering something about a drink, or lunch.

  Coffin worked on through the day. He skipped lunch, did not open the drawer with the whisky bottle in it, cleared his desk of all current letters, chaired a committee meeting on pay, and, finally, in the early evening rang up the hospital to ask if he could talk to Richard Lavender.

  Consent was given. The old man was more himself, he had calmed down and was in no need of sedation. The doctor implied that a lot of the violence might have been a reaction to some of the sedatives given him previously. ‘We are not quite sure what drug was given to him the night of the so-called attack on Miss Neptune … but it could have disturbed Mr Lavender. Age does make a difference to how you can take drugs.’

  And I am about to disturb him even more, Coffin thought, as he put on his thick overcoat, and went out into the November night. It was the worst sort of November night with rain turning to sleet, backed up by a hint of fog. Thameside weather at its worst.

  Richard Lavender stood up when Coffin came in; he was dressed, there was a book on his bedside table, while he had the evening newspaper in his hands. A small television set was on the table.

  ‘Jack brought me in the TV,’ he said, seeing Coffin’s eyes rest on it. ‘I didn’t realize how much I missed it. An old man’s best friend.’

  Richard Lavender had rejoined the world.

  ‘I understand that I have been behaving badly … It’s all a blur. A little whiff of madness, I suppose. I must hope it won’t come back.’

  ‘No reason it should.’

  ‘No … it’s bad about Janet. I feel to blame.’

  ‘You were not. She was caught up in a muddle over her own sexuality, that was the root of it.’

  ‘I’d be glad to believe it.’ He sighed. ‘She has been good to me, now it is my turn to help her. I mustn’t talk as if she was dead.’ He straightened up. ‘Well, you come with news?’

  ‘Yes.’ Coffin patted his briefcase. ‘I have had a very short report made of the work Chief Inspector Astley undertook on my orders. I will leave it with you to read.’

  ‘You are formal.’ Lavender frowned.

  Coffin got the report out, it was neatly bound together. ‘A skeleton was found where you believed you and your mother had taken a body. There was the remains of a foetus with that skeleton. Your father did not kill any women, the so-called Spinnergate Ripper was found in 1914 and confessed. He was hung.’

  ‘I was sick then, in hospital. I had diphtheria, and I was in the Old Brook Fever Hospital,’ muttered Lavender.

  ‘So you didn’t hear, and if she knew then she did not tell you why she had lied to you. Because she did lie. Other evidence, all very slight but suggestive, leads us to believe that your mother acted as an abortionist. The woman buried, probably a woman called Isobel Haved, died as a result of an illegal operation. Probably in your house.’

  Richard Lavender leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘I have to believe you,’ he said. ‘But I must come to terms with this. It will take time.’ He opened his eyes and Coffin saw pain in them.

  ‘It’s not all. There was another body nearby. The remains of a man, probably a soldier, he had a lame leg.’ Coffin looked at Richard Lavender. ‘Do you know anything about that body?’

  Slowly, Richard Lavender heaved himself up from the chair to hobble to the window. For a moment, he stood there in silence, then he turned.

  ‘Who sups with the devil, should take a long spoon. You are not a devil, Mr Coffin, but you have a mighty long spoon.’

  Coffin did not answer, this was something the old man had to get through on his own.

  ‘You must remember that I loved my mother and believed what she had told me. My father had left us both. In the winter of 1914 the war had only just started but the killing fields of Flanders had started to reap the dead. My father came back to Spinnergate … he was in uniform and limping. He was a deserter, self-injured and wanting shelter. Remember, I only knew what my mother had told me … he seemed abhorrent to me both as a murderer and as a deserter. My mother was not at home, so I got behind him and throttled him, I was a big strong boy and he was a littleish man. Lame and frightened.’

  ‘And you buried him in the old churchyard?’

  Lavender bowed his head. ‘I put him in the pram we had used before, wrapped him up in an old jacket of his own … it was a dark night, and I buried him in the old churchyard … I buried the coat, then I remembered that it had his name in it, so I dragged it out and took it home … It’s amazing what you can do when you have to and I have always been strong and determined … Later, much later, I told my mother, and she packed up the house and too
k us away.’

  Coffin stood up. ‘It’s what I thought. If you hadn’t told me, I would have told you.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t believe any case could be brought against you, so I will leave it in your hands, to do what your conscience tells you.’

  He walked out, leaving Richard Lavender, once a Prime Minister, staring after him.

  Stella was at home wearing bright-pink silk trousers with a cream silk shirt; she was pretending to cook dinner. Which in her case, meant ordering it from Max’s and putting it in the oven. Or, if it was meant to be eaten cold, in the refrigerator. Tonight, because of the raw evening, it was the oven. She had already burnt a finger and was looking thoughtful.

  She was pleased to see her husband and greeted him with a kiss. ‘You can open the wine.’

  He returned the kiss, adding a hug of his own; he was glad to be back in the world of loving relationships. He picked up a stick of celery and began to chew it. ‘I am rather off family life at the moment. It’s lethal.’ He swallowed the celery, which was bitter. ‘What do you say about a man who kills his father, a mother who makes her children stab their father and a woman who kills another woman and sends accusing letters to an old man with cut-out letters from a newspaper, and gives a packet of bloodstained hair to a young man?’

  ‘Is that what she did?’

  ‘Yes, leaving fingerprints. Those prints and forensic evidence from the cloth fragments and blood on a dark cape she wore will convict her. Do you know, she said she went tramping round the old churchyard before we found the skeletons; I knew someone with big feet had walked there, I saw the tracks. She came back later too, just to stare, a real night walker. She knew so much all the time about old Lavender; there was more family talk, I guess than he ever knew. His mother may have talked to her sister and so on down the family. Janet knew what the old tweed jacket was when she found it in the trunk, that’s for sure.’ He took a deep breath; he was glad he had all that out to Stella, it wrapped this horrible business up and put it in the past. ‘I suppose you want me to take the dog out?’

  ‘No, Martin and Eden took him out for a lovely walk by the river before they went off to dinner.’

  She kept a straight face as Coffin spun her round to take a look. ‘Remember the little animal that was going to crawl out of the undergrowth to capture Martin? I think she’s started to crawl.’

  They both began to laugh, that was how life went on. Eden had it right after all.

  Suddenly Coffin stopped laughing. ‘We never found out where the empty coffin came from, and Phoebe was so sure she would … Damn, there’s always something you don’t get clear. The missing bit of the jigsaw.’

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  About the Author

  Gwendoline Butler is a Londoner, born in a part of South London for which she still has a tremendous affection. She was educated at Haberdashers and then read history at Oxford. After a short period doing research and teaching, she married the late Dr Lionel Butler, Principal of Royal Holloway College. She has one daughter.

  Gwendoline Butler’s crime novels are very popular in Britain and the States, and her many awards include the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger.

  When she isn’t writing, she spends her time travelling and looking at pictures, furniture and buildings.

  Author’s Note

  One evening in April 1988, I sat in Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, near to Dockland, listening to Dr David Owen (now Lord Owen) give that year’s Barnett Memorial Lecture. In it, he suggested the creation of a Second City of London, to be spun off from the first, to aid the economic and social regeneration of the Docklands.

  The idea fascinated me and I have made use of it to create a world for detective John Coffin, to whom I gave the tricky task of keeping there the Queen’s peace.

  Also by the Author

  A Dark Coffin

  The Coffin Tree

  A Coffin for Charley

  Cracking Open a Coffin

  Coffin on Murder Street

  Coffin and the Paper Man

  Coffin in the Black Museum

  Coffin Underground

  Coffin in Fashion

  Coffin on the Water

  A Coffin for the Canary

  A Coffin for Pandora

  A Coffin from the Past

  Coffin’s Dark Number

  Coffin Following

  Coffin in Malta

  A Nameless Coffin

  Coffin Waiting

  A Coffin for Baby

  Death Lives Next Door

  The Interloper

  The Murdering Kind

  The Dull Dead

  Coffin in Oxford

  Receipt for Murder

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