A Grave Coffin

by Gwendoline Butler

When Albie is unplugged, I hope he is helpful to us, Coffin thought. He nodded. ‘So?’

  ‘So we had dinner and I went back. I nearly got arrested. I had the greatest difficulty in convincing them that I was who I claimed to be and still alive. But then they decided I must have brought the bomb with me. They weren’t sure if I was a bomber with bad timing or the victim. In the end, Archie Young convinced them.’

  The memory of Archie Young gave her pause for thought before she moved on. ‘Be nice if Albie comes up with something. That woman who died deserves justice. You realize what it means? Someone wants to wipe you out. So you were getting close to something. Only were you? All the signs are that there isn’t much to get close to. Not out there in what used to be called the provinces. The operations close down, then start up again. All right, there is someone planted somewhere inside the operation who talks to the suppliers, even the producers, perhaps, so they just move on and out. Always in a small way, but getting bigger, or anyway on a wider scale and making a profit for someone …’

  It was quite a speech for Phoebe, so Coffin refilled her glass.

  ‘I agree with every word you say.’

  ‘Oh.’ She was taken aback.

  ‘And I know where I am. Well, more or less. There are things to be tidied up.’ Like H. Pennyfeather. ‘But I shall get there, especially if Albie comes in with anything.’

  ‘If he does, I’ll let you know.’ Phoebe stood up. ‘Thanks for the drink.’ She moved to the door, then remembered what was worrying her.

  ‘Did Archie Young give you a letter?’

  Coffin said gravely, because a smile would not do, ‘Yes, yes, he did.’

  Phoebe took a deep breath, and covered her face with both hands.

  ‘Ever been embarrassed?’

  He said nothing further to Phoebe on the subject of the letter. Silence is always best. Or it suited Coffin to believe so.

  He gave Phoebe her letter back, sealed. If she looked at it carefully she would see that it had been opened and then closed.

  To Stella, he said nothing at all. No need.

  He did, however, telephone the hospital to find out how Jeff Diver was.

  Sedated, was the answer. He was on a drip because he had been so dehydrated, which possibly accounted for some of his mental state. More would be known about that when he was conscious.

  Meanwhile his wife had been in to see him, showing signs of affection and forgiveness. There was also a police constable sitting by his bed.

  He then rang Inspector Devlin. ‘Did you get anything out of Diver about how he got food?’

  ‘Not really. He seemed to think the fairies left it for him. Or the birds. He was not coherent.’

  ‘Let me know if you get anything more rational.’

  ‘Yes, of course, sir, but I don’t hold out hopes.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to him myself when he can talk.’

  ‘Of course sir. I’ll let you know.’

  He could tell she wondered what all this was about. A nice woman, good at what she did, lacking in imagination, perhaps.

  Coffin put the telephone down. He had a good imagination himself which seemed to have got better with the years. It was very useful when he had to deal with children. He had never used rollerskates or rollerblades himself, nor had the rollerblades existed when he was a kid, but he could see the use of them and imagine more.

  He ate a solitary lunch of a sandwich and a cup of coffee at his desk. Stella, he knew, was busy at the National, seeing this person and that and working out plans. It was the real reason she had come back to the Second City, he felt sure of it, whatever else she claimed.

  She had been very loving and comforting over what he called to himself ‘the affair Phoebe’: Phoebe’s reported death. Be nice to hear her voice. He reached out his hand to telephone her. Then he drew back. No, let her get in touch if she wanted to, bless her.

  There had been a bad time, not so long ago, when he had been obliged to investigate her relationship with one of her friends. That was in the past. Let her feel free now, not to feel he was always behind her back, watching and checking.

  The fact that he still did this automatically was a fact he was trying to change, but had not quite managed. He knew, for instance, that she had not been all the day at the National yesterday.

  And how did he know this? He knew it because, being his wife, the number of her car was known and its whereabouts recorded. She was on video leaving her car in Turk Street, Soho. Reports of such things came his way as a matter of course. Security, they called it. He did not dare ask what Stella would call it.

  He had better stop thinking about Stella.

  On cue, the telephone rang. He was shocked how eager he was to hear her voice. Shocked at himself, because he had made a vow long ago, now broken every day, not to hang on to Stella.

  The call was not from Stella, though, but from the secretary of a committee he was chairing. Yes, he would be at the next meeting, and yes, he had read and approved the minutes.

  He put the telephone down and took a deep breath.

  There were some papers he needed which had been left at home in St Luke’s; he decided to take Gus, walk home and collect them.

  Stella might, after all, be there, and perhaps he could say: ‘What were you doing in Turk Street yesterday, my love?’ And perhaps she would smilingly reply: ‘Mind your own bloody business.’

  He set off down the stairs, avoiding the lift, deciding it was certainly better to say nothing.

  Followed by the dog, he walked briskly towards the main entrance. As he passed through, he saw a short man wearing thick, dark spectacles, and a hat and a heavy coat talking to the constable on duty. A small, thin dog, a terrier of no pedigree, was attached to him on a string.

  Gus showed signs of interest, but Coffin let him linger for only a moment then urged him on. Together they passed out into the sunlight, which was certainly glaring enough to need dark spectacles.

  He enjoyed the walk through the streets of the Second City; he felt he had made an escape, leaving Paul Masters and the two secretaries behind. It was no great distance to St Luke’s, indeed he could see the tower already.

  Gus trotted ahead, but not too far, he liked to keep in safe touch with Coffin. Master and dog got different pleasures from a walk through the Spinnergate streets. Gus liked to appraise the smells of the streets, many of which he knew of old but which required a sniff to see what the days had added. Some smells dried out and lost his interest, these he departed from quickly, others had a new lustre and demanded his lingering attention.

  Coffin, on the other hand, used his eyes to watch the people walking, the traffic passing, the cars parked at the kerb, the cyclists pushing their way through any hold-up – frequent in the crowded streets. It was his city.

  School was out, a group of rollerbladers, fast and expert considering their youth, were skimming along the pavements, weaving in and out of pedestrians in a dangerous fashion. From behind a pair of skaters swooped past him on the other side, then crossed in front of him.

  Coffin stepped back quickly, while Gus barked in alarm. He had not been hurt, but that never counted with Gus: don’t wait to be hurt, complain first.

  Coffin swung round and grabbed each lad by the shoulder; he had moved faster than they expected.

  He stared into each face: ‘I shall know you again,’ he said in a hard voice.

  They were young lads, he found it hard to judge their age, but no more than nine or ten. Both were still short in height, so obviously the puberty growing period had not set in, but they were sturdily built, one with shining dark hair and the other with curly fair hair worn very short. Each had a brightly coloured jerkin with strange jokes across the chest, while the dark lad had an expensive-looking jacket on top. Come to think of it, those skates were not cheap.

  The boys stared at him without a word, blue eyes and brown surveyed him boldly, then they linked arms as they skated away. ‘Off, off, off,’ they chanted as they went.<
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  They had not been frightened by his anger, or daunted by his threat. Coffin walked on, a conviction dripping into his mind like cold water: They want me to know them again.

  He continued walking, assessing what this meant in his picture of the life of the Second City. These kids seemed to use their rollerblades as a means of communication.

  So what were they trying to say to him?

  ‘What do you think, Gus?’

  Gus never answered, it was one of the nice things about him that you never got, and never expected, a reply. It was a comfort in a world which so often answered back.

  The walk through the unheeding crowds, in the mixture of sun and rain which was the Second City’s allotment of weather at the moment, freed his mind for thinking. Every detective needed a Dr Watson figure, he believed, to whom he could pose intriguing questions and get innocent answers which were valuable. He had a highly efficient and sophisticated detective force which did not fulfil this function.

  He walked on, letting his mind roam, sometimes looking at the clouds moving across the sky, sometimes watching his feet on the uneven pavements.

  His thoughts fell into two parts. A and B groups, you could call them, although they overlapped.

  He believed he knew who was behind the pharmaceutical affair, he believed he knew why he had been chosen to investigate it. This was A, or part of it. He did not know who had killed Harry Seton, but he believed he could leave that to Inspector Davenport – it was his job, and from what Coffin had heard from him, he was the man to do it.

  Coffin was convinced he understood why he had been chosen to investigate the pharmaceutical mole, informer, call the person what you will. He knew who the informer was and how that part of the game was managed. Proving it might be tough, even painful, but he meant to do it. The actual manufacturing side was another problem, but he believed he knew how this was done. He did not yet know where, but he could guess at who and the rest would follow. The game would move on, of course, and never be quite resolved.

  Yes, he felt confident about the pharmaceuticals, but this was where Dr Watson would be so useful. He could be told and say: How clever, Holmes.

  You don’t have to be clever, Coffin-Holmes would say, you just have to see things. He, Coffin, had seen, and he would not be risking his life or Phoebe’s any further.

  Now for B. B was buggery and murder. Inspector Devlin was a good detective, but she was probably not enthusiastic about his intervention. Let’s not call it interference, he told himself, although she might do.

  He paced on, slowing down as he assembled his thoughts: four dead boys, all friends, all much of an age, all went to the same school on the same bus.

  One of their friends, Louie, said he had seen the first boy go off with a policeman … He was vague on details, but manifestly earnest and doing his best. Not a joker. That was the considered judgement on him and his evidence.

  So they look for a policeman: one goes missing after he claimed he was guilty. But guilty of what? Because when he is found he says to Devlin from his hospital bed that his guilt was an affair with another man. Or possibly two, or possibly more. Anyway, he felt bad enough to try to hang himself, but was not efficient enough to do so.

  Judgement open here. Probably not guilty.

  No evidence to be found against the driver, although he was under suspicion, and knew it. But the thought of the driver brought up the query of how the bodies were transported. He would like to have thought it was in the school bus, but such tyre marks as could be traced did not match those of the bus. No forensic traces of blood etcetera in the bus either, although constant use made examination unreliable.

  There was blood on the clothes found with Archie Chinner, one patch of which was possibly from his killer. This blood had traces of an oral morphine solution, a slow-release painkiller which metabolizes in the blood. We can test Jeff Diver, but his wife says he was not on a painkiller.

  What about the bus driver? said Dr Watson.

  Worth thinking about, says detective Coffin. And also, no doubt, Inspector Devlin. She must be asked if she has tested him. Devlin was very occupied with checking on all the deviants and pederasts known or suspected on her list, widening the scope every day, contacting Dutch, Belgian and German police. Not the French, because they were contacting her, having troubles of their own with a series of child sex and murder cases in Calais.

  ‘Those frogs are badgering me,’ she had said indignantly – she was not Europhile. ‘As if we’ve got their paedophile. We bloody haven’t; our man is British.’

  There were some more thoughts moving around at the back of his mind but he hadn’t got them sorted yet.

  He walked on. If he took the right route and didn’t mind the extra walk, then he could go past H. Pennyfeather’s chemist shop with its golden, green and sapphire-blue bottles. Unconsciously, his pace quickened, not to the pleasure of Gus who was panting behind.

  Along the road on his left, he could see the small row of shops, one of which was H. Pennyfeather. He strolled that way, followed by Gus, who was tired but game. Felicity Street was a short street with a terrace of small modern houses, together with six shops. Its name had nothing to do with any happiness of the inhabitants, but was the name of one of the three daughters of a former town councillor on the housing committee. The next street was Iris Street and round the corner was Rosamund Street.

  It was not a rich part of Spinnergate, as the row of shops revealed. Whatever the builders had had in mind when they ran them up – Coffin used the words advisedly since the shops looked to be put together in a hurry and with no design beyond a big glass window and a door – the shops now housed a Chinese takeaway, a curry restaurant, the window carefully veiled in off-white net, and a betting shop – here the window was coloured green to remind you of race tracks and horses, not the cigarette smoke and the television screen, which Coffin knew was inside. There was a cut-price grocers, and next to it, like a peacock in a chicken run, the shining, radiant, chemist shop.

  Gus advanced to the only shop that offered him the smell of what he fancied: oily chicken.

  ‘You won’t get anything there, boy,’ Coffin told him. ‘No free chicken legs for you.’

  Events proved him wrong: a boy came out of the takeaway with a paper bag under his arm while he chewed on a chicken joint. He met Gus’s envious eyes and threw it to him. ‘Here you are, feller.’

  Gus grabbed it to carry away to the gutter where he began to gnaw it. He wagged his tail at the same time. Dogs win, it said.

  The sight of Gus working away at the bone reminded Coffin uncomfortably of what had happened to Harry Seton’s body, and brought back a memory of the leg in Archie Chinner’s grave.

  Had an animal buried it for future use?

  ‘You beast,’ he said sadly to Gus. ‘But we are all beasts, aren’t we? And one way and another, we eat each other.’ His back molar gave a twinge, reminding him that men were that sort of beast too.

  Along the road, two young women with prams were stopping outside H. Pennyfeather’s for a gossip. Then an elderly couple came out together and stopped to talk to the children. The pharmacist’s assistant in her white coat came out to hand something to one of the mothers that she had forgotten.

  ‘You forgot to take the calcium tablets, Mrs Cook.’

  Mrs Cook extracted herself from her deep conversation over her pram. ‘Oh Lord, yes, thank you, Isobel. Forget my own head next.’

  ‘You don’t want to bother with those tablets,’ said the old lady. ‘Drink a lot of milk.’

  ‘A tablet is quicker to swallow. And it doesn’t put the weight on, Mrs Armstrong.’

  Mrs Cook’s friend touched her arm. ‘Come on, Bea, we won’t get to our exercise class if we don’t move.’

  ‘Should think you got enough exercise looking after the family,’ said Mrs Armstrong.

  ‘That’s work, that leaves you tired,’ was the tart response. ‘Exercise makes you feel better.’

  Mrs Armst
rong had no answer for this, although obviously searching her brain for one, and removed her silent husband with the order to stop looking at the girls’ legs.

  Coffin came up with Gus in time to hear Mrs Cook’s comment to her friend that everyone knew the old boy was as blind as a bat and couldn’t see beyond his nose. But the best bum-pincher in the road, responded her friend with a guffaw.

  Both of them were laughing as Coffin walked towards the door of the shop. He tried the handle, which did not give. The two women watched him.

  Mrs Cook spoke up. ‘You won’t get in. Mr Barley closes at one sharp.’

  ‘He opens again at two,’ said her friend. ‘Then closes again at five sharp.’ They were enjoying observing him, he was a new fish in their pool.

  Was he in pain? Did he need a painkiller? ‘Boots down the hill is always open. Till midnight,’ she volunteered.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ Coffin was looking through the door into the shop where he could see an elderly man with a crest of greying hair, in a black jacket with a stiff white collar. No nonsense about wearing white here, this was a professional man, like a banker. ‘No, I’m all right.’

  There was a strangled noise behind him.

  ‘Your dog’s being sick,’ observed both women with one voice.

  He turned round to see Gus heaving and straining, disgusting wretch, in the gutter, where he was depositing the remains of the chicken leg. He looked up at Coffin with sad, repentant eyes.

  ‘Damn you,’ said Coffin.

  ‘Inspector Devlin here, sir. I thought you would like to hear a bit of news.’

  He had walked home quickly to St Luke’s Tower, tidied up Gus, then made himself another sandwich, barely tasting it. After which, he had ordered a car to meet him and take him back to his office. Ruthlessly, he had left Gus behind, pointing out that he still smelt.

  Almost as soon as he arrived, Devlin had telephoned.

  ‘I hope it’s good news.’

  ‘Neutral, I’d say, sir, but something we needed. The man who first saw where the Chinner boy was buried has come forward. He came into Spinnergate, said he had heard we wanted him. Then he made a statement.’