A Cold Coffin

by Gwendoline Butler

  Then Phoebe’s voice, deeper and huskier than usual, floated out of the telephone.

  ‘Sir?’ And into the silence, ‘Sir? Phoebe Astley here. You called?’

  Behind they could hear a female voice proclaiming it was a wrong number and not to answer.

  ‘Is she still living with that girl who used to run a dress shop and then took a job in the theatre wardrobe?’ Stella allowed herself this query, although she knew the answer was no.

  ‘Oh, it’s none of our business,’ said Coffin irritably, in an aside.

  ‘Can you hear a cat crying?’ asked Stella.

  ‘No,’ said Coffin briefly. ‘Phoebe? The Chief Commander here.’

  As if I didn’t know, thought Phoebe swiftly. And CC too, not just, ‘Coffin here.’ It’s serious then. But it always was, one way and another, with him.

  The voices in the background on both sides died away.

  ‘I want you to get the forensics team down to the skulls under water. Also a photographer and SOCO.’

  ‘But I thought,’ began Phoebe . . . She could almost hear

  Coffin saying, ‘Don’t think, just do as I say.’ ‘I thought the archaeologists wanted to be first,’ she persevered.

  ‘The forensics first, please, Phoebe. I think there may have been a crime.’

  The conversation was over, as Phoebe recognized.

  ‘No sex,’ she said, turning towards her companion. ‘No sex till morning.’ And possibly not even then. ‘Crime first.’

  2

  Thursday, on to Friday. Not Christmas yet, maybe never.

  Phoebe Astley said to the chief of forensics, Dr Hazzard, that yes, she often thought that the Chief Commander had precognition.

  It was late evening, two days since she had passed on Coffin’s request. She had done her bit, but she thought forensics had been slow.

  ‘You took your time.’

  ‘I had a lot on hand. If you remember there was a bad fire in a supermarket – several bodies could not be identified. All comes our way. Also, I had a moral obligation to let the archaeologist have a brief look to draw, map and photograph before anything was touched.’

  But the forensics expert on what might now be called late-night duty, Dr George Hazzard, had delivered a tentative judgement. Dr Hazzard and Phoebe met professionally with some regularity. There had been a short but intense relationship between them when Phoebe first came to the Second City, the memory of which still hung over them like a cloud. A thundery one.

  Almost put me off men for life, she thought. Almost. The question was still open, she was working on it. She did not count the Chief Commander as a man. He was sui generis, himself, unique. And just as well, possibly, as the possessor of precognitive powers.

  Or the Chief Commander might just be a good guesser.

  Without inspecting it closely, he had guessed that the ‘different’ skull was not as old as the others.

  ‘Not by a long way,’ said Dr Hazzard. ‘I can’t give a precise date. We’ll need the pathologists and the medical chaps to help there.’

  He was staring down at the skull, which had been carefully abstracted, under the watchful eye of one of the junior archaeologists, who took photographs and drew diagrams, leaving the other skulls in situ. The water was slowly draining away. And yes, Coffin had been right, there was a touch of blood on it, caught in a crack in the bone and therefore not washed away.

  ‘Medical?’ Phoebe was surprised. ‘How new is it?’

  Dr Hazzard smiled and shrugged. He liked to see his police colleagues taken aback.

  Phoebe sought for words. ‘Not contemporary?’

  He shrugged again. ‘It’s an interesting question. Age and provenance. Where did it come from, and how? I like that sort of a problem.’

  ‘It’s not a game.’

  ‘Who said it was?’

  ‘You know what I mean: if the skull is beyond a certain age, then there’s no case to worry CID.’ She looked hopefully, then speculatively, at Hazzard who appeared to be thinking. Provoking bugger, she thought.

  After a quiet second, taking a deep breath, he said: ‘I think CID might have a case.’

  ‘What was the age of the owner of this skull? It is a baby’s skull, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh yes, I think so. But we will have to get the medical pathologist in on this to help us date and age the skull.’

  ‘So how long has it been in the water?’

  ‘Possibly not so very long. I am still guessing a bit.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’ And enjoying it. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t call the skull “it”. A person once. A baby person. Maybe not so long ago either.’

  She looked at Hazzard, a nice man at heart, even if the heart had to be excavated. ‘Couldn’t you make a guess?’

  ‘I could guess . . . don’t hold me to it.’

  ‘Out with it. Let me have it.’

  ‘The skull might be recent,’ Hazzard said carefully. ‘Contemporary, possibly. Tests will show.’

  ‘How contemporary?’

  Hazzard was silent.

  ‘Where did the hair and flesh go? The child had hair and flesh.’

  Hazzard remained silent. Then he said hesitantly, ‘It could have been . . . treated.’

  We’ll have to talk about this, thought Phoebe. Meanwhile, a cold shiver ran through her.

  ‘So what was the age of this dead child?’ She was determined to get more of an answer than she had done so far.

  Hazzard put his head on one side. ‘Not my sphere. You’ll have to ask a paediatrician or some such.’

  He kept saying that; she was getting tetchy.

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Very young,’ he allowed. ‘Weeks only.’

  ‘Infanticide then.’ Phoebe said heavily.

  ‘We don’t know that. The child may have died naturally. Even been born dead.’

  ‘So the child was as young as that?’

  ‘Just could be. You’ll have to get an expert in that field to be sure. Which I am not.’

  ‘Took a long time to shell that out of you,’ said Phoebe. ‘Put it in writing, will you?’ she added vindictively. She knew he hated writing reports. Well, who didn’t, but it was part of the job. She took a certain pleasure in handing this one out. ‘I will let the Chief Commander know. It won’t be a surprise to him, he must have suspected it.’

  ‘Clever fellow.’

  He is that, thought Phoebe. ‘I don’t know what sort of enquiry will be started.’ Coffin wouldn’t leave it there.

  Whose baby’s head was it? Why was it there in the pit with the Neanderthal babies? And what had been done to the skull?

  He would ask all those questions and want answers.

  Likewise, where was the body?

  She was so deep in these thoughts as she walked Dr Hazzard to his car that she failed to notice his troubled, thoughtful face.

  He had noticed something about the infant head.

  Next day, in his own office, with the rain beating on the windows, Coffin received the news in silence.

  Phoebe had come to see him herself, making a late-afternoon appointment and keeping scrupulously to the minute.

  ‘Hazzard thinks the head may have been boiled.’ She saw his look of comprehension. ‘Or stewed, to get rid of the flesh and the hair and create a skull. There is a little hair left.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  There was something pathetic and terrible enough about infanticide without this extra horror.

  He had had plenty to think about as he had studied the papers in the files on his desk, took the various telephone calls that constantly interrupted his reading, and looked at his e-mail. Letters too, all opened with a noted observation on them for his secretary. Not all opened. Still there, one last letter, which he did not want to open at this time full of murderous thoughts.

  The Minden Street murders, Jack Jackson and the missing Mrs Lumsden. If she was missing. Pray God, she might yet come back. Phoebe Astley was in charge of the Minden Street mu
rders, and Sergeant Drury was attending to Arthur Lumsden and his missing wife. Why not let them get on with it?

  He was alone all day in his office in the big dusty building in the Second City. In the outer offices, of which there were two, were his secretaries – he had two of them, as well as his personal assistant, Paul Masters. There was a constant staff turnover. The days of devoted assistants who stayed for ever were gone; ambition brought people to work with him (he was the source of power, wasn’t he?) and then dragged them on and up. He was never sure what this building had been before the Second City and his Force were created. Sometimes he had thought it must have been a school, one of the solid, typecast Victorian erections in which the poorer classes were imprisoned to be educated: babies on the ground floor, then mixed-sex older children, then senior girls on the top. Senior boys, being dangerous, were weeded out at this stage and sent off to a separate building.

  In addition there was the blunt-faced, architect-designed new building where most of the staff worked. He preferred the old part, liking the sense of history, even the dust of ages that came with it. Whatever history it was.

  Or was he imagining all this? Possibly the building had been the head offices of some shipping company from the days when the docks were full of ocean-going steamers.

  He had once asked Sir Harold Bottome, the Chief Administrator of the Second City, a kind of perpetual Lord Mayor, a gentle but much harried man. Sir Harold had looked vague. ‘Don’t know, my dear chap, the present of this bloody Second City is as much as I can keep up with, but I will send you some of the history books with pictures.’ He had done so and Stella had read them and said there was nothing about Coffin’s HQ being a school and she guessed it had always been a police building. If not a prison.

  Of course, now he knew that a group of Neanderthals had lived and died here, it helped him have a feeling for the place.

  ‘Is Hazzard sure of this?’

  ‘No, not sure, he wants to take advice.’

  Coffin nodded. ‘Give me news, when you get it.’ What a world. ‘Makes you feel sick, doesn’t it?’

  Then he thanked Phoebe. Clearly, she expected something.

  ‘We can’t leave it there,’ she said.

  ‘No, indeed.’ He was going to put the job on her shoulders but he was thinking of a way to tell her. Issuing orders to Phoebe, which as her chief he was certainly able to do, could make her very awkward indeed.

  ‘I haven’t said anything, but somehow the local paper has got hold of it.’

  ‘It’s a good story, you can’t blame them . . . Makes the flesh creep a bit. Or is your flesh too strong?’

  Phoebe laughed. ‘No, creeps with the best.’

  ‘Phoebe, you are the only person I can think of at the moment who can handle this.’

  Phoebe knew blandishment when she heard it. ‘I’ve got a lot on, you know. It’s not just the Minden Street killings.’

  ‘Who knows that better than I do? But it’s the job, Phoebe. Crimes don’t come just when it suits us and we are free to handle them. You know what Bernard Shaw said about Romeo and Juliet? He said it was “all butchers and bones”. Crime is like that, hard but true. You know it as well as I do. All working policemen know it.’

  The Force in the Second City had grown since Coffin had taken over, but it was now under financial pressure. It had expanded, but must now contract, and do all the same work, if not more.

  Blood and bones, thought Phoebe; the Minden Street murders were like that. She had gone to inspect the dead with the SOCO before they were moved. She closed her eyes for a second, shutting out Coffin’s worried face (he was wearing spectacles for the first time, she noted, and distantly she thought she could hear him explaining how pressed they were), and seeing the dead sisters. Amy and Alice, on the floor of the hall, blood everywhere, and the bones . . . For a moment she could hardly bear to recall it . . . the bones of arms and legs showing white where a bullet had torn through the flesh. The mother had had her throat penetrated by a bullet so that her backbone showed. Who had hated them so much?

  ‘You all right, Phoebe?’ Coffin’s voice cut into her.

  ‘Yes, sure,’ Phoebe answered quickly. ‘It was just the thing about bones.’

  There was a moment of silence.

  ‘Yes, I’ll do it. Or do what I can. The rape business is almost tidied up. I think the girl was lying, and it was sex by consent, and she is on the point of admitting it. But I will need some more hands with the the Minden Street case.’ Grab what you can, when you can, a hard little voice inside her said.

  ‘I’ll see what we can do,’ said Coffin, almost humbly for him.

  ‘You do realize we may never learn about the baby? In fact, most likely not.’ She decided to get on to Dr Murray to see what help she could give.

  He nodded. ‘Let’s do what we can for the poor little soul . . . the Neanderthal babies . . . well, that’s too far away and long ago.’

  Phoebe looked down at her shoes, noticing that she had put on odd black and brown ones. It showed her state of mind: busy and overworked, and more than lightly involved with a new love.

  ‘I’ll be off.’

  Coffin nodded and saw her to the door, still talking. ‘You know, all these cases touch me in my own person: the baby, the Minden Street murders . . . that’s because of Stella, and Arthur Lumsden, because I’ve been a copper and plodded the street and had trouble with a wife.’

  Had he said all that aloud to Phoebe? He hoped he hadn’t.

  On his desk there was the one last letter that he had not yet opened. The envelope, crisp and white, was handwritten.

  He now opened and read it. Then he made a telephone call.

  ‘Archie? Glad to get you. The letter you told me about has arrived. And the answer is yes.’

  He bought some flowers for Stella from Mimsie Marker on the way home.

  Mimsie’s stall outside Spinnergate tube station had expanded over the last year.

  ‘You could live off all this, Mimsie,’ he said looking around at hot coffee, cold drinks from a mini-fridge, hot dogs, sandwiches, croissants and delicious-looking cakes. ‘The newspapers are getting squeezed out.’

  ‘People don’t read like they used to,’ said Mimsie sadly. Then she smiled radiantly. ‘But they eat, so I diversified.’

  Coffin chose roses and irises and big narcissi; he had no idea where Mimsie got her flowers – possibly she went to the New Covent Garden Market herself – but her flowers were always fresh and lovely.

  He hesitated, wondering whether to talk to her about the Minden Street killings. She’d have an opinion, because she always did.

  But she got there first. ‘Miss Pinero’ll miss the Jackson twins.’ She didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘Mind you, I can’t believe the brother did it. I didn’t like the man, who could, although most of the things he claimed to fancy doing, I never believed in. One of those fellers who likes to be thought wicked. Not the only one I’ve known. A bit of an actor.’

  ‘He had a key,’ said Coffin. ‘Looks as though whoever killed them had a key.’

  Mimsie nodded and pursed her lips, but all she said was, ‘See the flowers have a good drink.’

  Stella was already at home when he got back. In the beginning of his life in the Second City he had just had one flat, but as money got easier and Stella became his wife, the whole tower became their home. Stella had made it beautiful, elegant, liveable, with a slight yet attractive touch of theatricality. She came up to him and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘You’re actually home when you said you would be. And with flowers. Beautiful ones.’ She carried the bunch through to the kitchen, where she began to arrange them in a crystal vase.

  Coffin followed her in. ‘Mimsie says the flowers need a good drink.’

  ‘She always says that. And I always take it she means water, not black coffee followed by a strong brandy.’

  For once, Coffin did not laugh at her little joke. ‘Have you got dinner arranged?’
/>   Stella opened her mouth to explain, no, not really, not yet, but . . .

  Before she could speak, Coffin said, ‘Let’s go to eat at that place in Greenwich that we both like . . . I can ring up and book a table. And then we can go for a drive.’

  Stella opened her mouth, but once again Coffin got in first, ‘It’s stopped raining, and there’s a moon.’

  She could see in his face that he wanted to go. ‘Greenwich it is then.’ She was not always a sympathetic wife but she was one who could read his face. ‘Farmers?’

  ‘Yes, I feel like a nice straightforward English meal.’

  Farmers was a small restaurant not far from Greenwich Park that they had discovered together. It had a faithful and discriminatory clientele.

  ‘We haven’t been for a bit. We used to take Gus there.’

  ‘When he was up to it.’

  ‘Oh, he will be again.’ Gus was the dear old dog who had just undergone a triple bypass in the local pet clinic, his heart attack brought on, so they thought, from shock at finding the body of their cat, who died peacefully and quietly in Gus’s bed. Coffin’s bed too, as it happened.

  ‘They liked him and brought him his special meal on a special dish. And he could eat under the table if he was quiet. They’ll remember us.’

  They’ll remember you all right, thought Stella. The last time you were in there you went away to a quiet corner and on your mobile phone arranged the arrest of one of our fellow diners. He went quietly too, no trouble to anyone.

  ‘If I see you pick up your mobile, I shall scream. Loudly.’

  Coffin smiled at her. He knew Stella had a good, strong, theatrical scream. Learnt, so she said, from Edith Evans.

  ‘I’d forgotten that episode.’

  ‘No, you haven’t. You never forget anything.’ Except anniversaries and my first nights. ‘But it’s why we haven’t been there for some time.’ But he grinned; they knew each other well enough and had loved each other long enough to know when to laugh. It was one of the reasons their union had survived.

  ‘I will now admit that I hoped that man, Jordan, would be there when I suggested we eat there.’

  Stella absorbed this, but said nothing until they were on the way there, driving through the tunnel. ‘So, what’s planned for this evening? Don’t tell me it’s just the pleasure of my company?’