‘And what’s she going to look like? And what sort of a performance will she turn in?’
As good as usual, if not better, thought Coffin, who had learnt to know the ways of actresses. Drunk or sober, sick or ill, they could act. And would.
‘Perhaps it’s all Yuppie ’flu.’
‘Have you seen JoJo, seen how she looks? Actresses don’t have neurotic illnesses that spoil their looks. She’s yellow, poor soul, and blotchy with it. The make-up girl is going to have a terrible job with her.’
‘I suppose you know that Dr Schlauffer is very ill?’
‘Of course I know. He was going to take me out to lunch, remember?’
‘I think he might die.’
‘I know that too. Oh John, I’m frightened.’ She came closer and he put his arms round her. Her head rested on his shoulder. ‘That feels better. I did need a bit of comfort. I’m all unnerved … It’s my first production, you see.’
‘I understand.’ Sickness, sudden death, murder, the odd body, that wasn’t what was upsetting Stella, not really, only her work.
‘And it’s all going wrong.’
‘I don’t think so.’
She didn’t answer.
‘That’s not the Stella I remember. The one that always fought back.’ Not always very prettily, but never without spirit. His arms tightened around her. ‘Is there anything else, Stella? Anything you’re not telling me.’
‘He was a foul man, that Tiler. Everything he touched has slime on it.’
He dropped his arms and stood a little back from her, studying her face. ‘Do you know anything about his death, Stella?’
‘No, nothing, of course not. What do you think I am? I thought you were supposed to be comforting me, not accusing me of murder.’
‘Not exactly what I was doing.’
Grudgingly, she said: ‘I might know where the pot came from.’ She had decided to tell him something if not all. There were layers of truth in her mind about that pot.
‘What pot?’
‘The urn then, the one that had the head in it.’
‘Oh.’ He was surprised. ‘Where?’
‘Out back. In the sort of yard behind the Theatre Workshop where we store odds and ends.’
‘How do you know it’s the same pot? Did you ever see the urn?’
‘One was there, and now it’s not there.’
‘How long was it there?’
‘I don’t know. I only just remembered it.’
‘Anyone else notice it?’
Stella shrugged.
Probably not, he thought, but the question would have to be asked. The stage manager, professionally in the habit of noticing objects, might possibly have seen the urn.
‘Thank you, Stella.’
‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ she said jauntily, as if she felt better now. But she had not told quite all the truth.
They parted, Stella towards the theatre and Coffin on foot to his office.
As he walked towards Spinnergate Tube station, he was thoughtful. He had caught the faint whiff of dissimulation about Stella. When she was at her most spontaneous and most charming was when you had to watch her most. You always had to remember she was an actress.
Mimsie Marker was on parade as usual outside the Tube station with her newspapers on display on a little tray. As the district had changed, so had the papers on sale there changed. Now Mimsie had to supply papers described by her as ‘nobs’ papers, by which she meant such as the Financial Times and the Economist. She continued to maintain a good supply of vigorous and gossipy dailies, all of which she read herself.
She hastened forward, paper in hand, to offer to Coffin. She knew what he read and prided herself on performing this personal service for her ‘regulars’.
‘Poor old Tiler,’ she said. ‘So you’ve got his head and not the rest of him. That’d be like him, somehow.’
Coffin knew the extent of her local knowledge. ‘Got any ideas where it could be, Mimsie?’
She shook her head. ‘Not me. Can’t help you there. But he was only a little fellow, so he wouldn’t need a big hole.’
‘Small, was he?’ said Coffin. No one had told him that. ‘You knew him, what sort of a chap was he?’
Mimsie pursed her lips. ‘Seemed nice enough. Didn’t notice him, really.’
‘Unobtrusive, would you say?’
‘Quiet. Too quiet for his own good maybe.’
‘Yes.’ Coffin was thoughtful. ‘That could be.’
‘They were all quiet little men, the Tilers. Mind you, they were a funny lot. Not liked. Never liked, and yet you couldn’t exactly see why. Of course, they had terrible bad luck.’
‘They had?’
‘Yes, well, Pete’s father died in an accident at work, then his mother had a stroke. She hung around a long while, poor soul, but she wasn’t up to much. ’Course it started before that, the grandpa was a proper tyke, I don’t know what he didn’t do, but it was the sort of thing that didn’t get talked about when I was a girl. A nice father figure, he was. And the uncles were the same, from all I heard.’ She took his money and gave him the change. ‘But it was the same with all of them, cousins, nephews, uncles, the lot. Empty men. Some were drifters, some fairly ran on the rocks. No good.’
‘What about the women in the family, the wives, mothers and sisters and so on?’
‘Not any sisters, they ran to men in that family. And they always married doormats. From what I’ve heard,’ finished Mimsie judicially, ‘not the sort to make trouble, whatever they had to put up with.’
‘Well, thanks, Mimsie, you’ve been a help.’ He decided to prod a little bit more, he thought she had things to tell him. Whether she would or not was another matter. ‘And did they have things to put up with?’
Mimsie showed no pleasure and no surprise either at this, but nodded reflectively. ‘Yes, funny things happened in that family and most of them were kept hushed up.’
‘That’s not so unusual.’
‘We’ve always done that round here, kept things to ourselves … That’s your train now, I can hear it.’
She couldn’t possibly hear any such thing, he thought. Apart from the traffic noises, the train was well underground. He couldn’t hear anything. ‘What sort of funny things, Mimsie?’
She shrugged. ‘Bit of cadging and pilfering, bit of arson. Bit of violent death and a bit of nasty sex. That sort of thing. I said that was your train.’ She fixed him with an ironic gaze. ‘Feel the vibrations in my feet.’
‘And do the vibrations tell you which way the train is going, Mimsie?’
‘Yes,’ said Mimsie without a flicker of a smile. ‘Clever feet, I’ve got. You don’t want to miss it now, do you?’
And the maddening thing was that when he descended the escalator after this dismissal, it was his train in the station.
Later that day, he made time to go and see Dr Schlauffer in the Thameswater District Hospital where he had been taken. The hospital was a big, handsome building, erected about ten years ago, architecturally bland but carefully planned to cut down cross-infections and to make both nursing and medical care simpler. Coffin thought it was a great improvement on the Victorian Poor Law institution it had replaced.
To his relief, Schlauffer was sitting up in bed and breathing normally.
‘I’m glad to see you looking better.’
‘They say I am coming on nicely.’
‘Breathing all right now? Tom told me you were having trouble.’
‘It threatened. You know, they tell I am having polio. But I say that this can’t be. I had all the usual vaccines. We do these things well in Germany.’
‘Of course,’ said Coffin.
‘Still, they say, this is what you have. Anyway, the same virus.’ He sounded almost proud, as if he was a specimen case of unique value, even if the exact mechanism by which the virus had got to him was not yet understood. ‘Somewhere you have caught it. Others also, I believe. And they are going to have an investigation of the
source.’
Coffin did not stay long, leaving before he tired the German.
He went out into the corridor where he found himself face to face with a tall, blonde girl in a white coat. He read the name on her coat.
‘Dr Nicholson?’ he said hopefully.
She smiled and nodded as he introduced himself. He was a friend of the patient, knew him professionally.
‘Dr Schlauffer seems much better?’
‘I believe he is,’ she said in an aloof way.
‘Don’t you know?’ Coffin was surprised at the offhand comment. ‘Surely you can tell?’
Dr Nicholson smiled. ‘He is not my patient. I am an epidemiologist investigating the case. It’s quite a nice little problem he has given us.’ Her smile increased in brilliance as she produced her notebook. ‘If you are a friend of Dr Schlauffer, then I must take your name and address. You may be an important witness. I shall probably want a blood sample from you. Yes, why don’t we get that done now?’
A few minutes later, minus a small quantity of blood, and with the suggestion that more unmentionable samples from him might be required should his blood provide interesting evidence, Coffin drove back to St Luke’s Mansions. Schlauffer was getting better; he himself felt much worse.
‘It’s a circle,’ he said as he coped with the traffic flowing all around him. ‘He’s a case, and I’m a witness. We are all a witness in someone else’s case.’
Or were ourselves a case, that was the other side of it. Even the cocky Dr Wendy Nicholson (he had read that name too) was a case to someone. He found that thought cheering.
As he passed the Spinnergate Tube station he saw Mimsie by her paper stall, sitting down this time, wearing a fine feathered hat. He got out to buy an evening paper.
‘About Peter Tiler, Mimsie. Any more to say?’
She hesitated. ‘When I was a kid, they said they had a ghost in that family. A kind of evil spirit that moved around with them.’
‘What sort of ghost?’
‘The sort of ghost that puffs itself up into old clothes, and throws furniture about and lights fires that don’t burn anything. So I heard. All tales, maybe.’
A poltergeist, thought Coffin. That reflected a disturbed family.
‘My gran said she saw it once when she was a kid. It was sitting on the doorstep, looking like an old overcoat and waving its arms at her.’
‘Really?’ It was an interesting insight into the superstitions and beliefs of the Docklands in the 1890s. No wonder Jack the Ripper did so well.
‘She was the one who said it got into them all. Like a kind of infection. Remember her saying it.’
‘Did you think that too?’
Mimsie laughed. He got no direct answer. Perhaps she did, perhaps she didn’t.
Finally she said, in a hoarse whisper: ‘People don’t have that sort of thing, do they?’
Possibly not. But if anyone was going to, wouldn’t it be a man born to have his head cut off?
The entrance hall where he had parted from Stella that morning was empty, but a note on the door suggesting that the milkman leave a pint and a breath of her scent suggested that she had passed through.
Beyond the door that led to the main church, he could hear voices. Ted Lupus came through the door, brushing dust from his jacket.
He noticed that Ted Lupus had a black armband round his sleeve. You didn’t often see one of those these days. Ted saw him looking.
‘A death in the family,’ he murmured.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. A close relative?’
‘No, distant.’ Ted hesitated. ‘It’s a mark of respect. Memory, really.’
Letty followed him through the door, accompanied by a burly man with a youngish face and what must be a prematurely greying beard whom she introduced as her theatre architect. He appeared to be completely under Letty’s control.
‘We are having a look at the crypt floor, seeing what’s underneath. Ted wasn’t keen, said we should wait a bit. I didn’t know there was a season for digging up floors but it seems there is. Something to do with the water table.’
‘If it’s what you want, Mrs Bingham.’ Ted Lupus sounded resigned. It was a tone that Coffin had heard before from those working with his sister.
‘It’s what I want.’ Letty was decided.
‘I think it’s all right to get on with it,’ said the architect easily. ‘I need to get to know all the problems.’
‘We have to look at the foundations, Ted,’ said Letty.
‘Couple of men down there now.’
‘The floor of the crypt took a whack in the war.’ To the young architect the war was not even a memory, just a piece of history.
‘Fire bomb, I believe.
‘And they only did a rough tidy up job after that?’
‘Nothing else seemed necessary then.’
‘Right,’ said Letty. ‘And now it is.’
‘Smells pretty earthy down there,’ said Coffin. ‘I’ve noticed it about the place. Seems to hang around.’
‘You always get a smell in these old places,’ said Ted Lupus.
Coffin picked up his briefcase and got out his doorkey. ‘Come up and have a drink, all of you, when you’re through.’
He left them, Letty giving tongue on some aspect of theatre planning while her architect murmured politely, and, opening his front door, he climbed his winding staircase, reflecting as he mounted the stairs that if he stayed in this place into old age, he would have to put in a lift. He could imagine the sort of old man he might become: difficult and irritable, with a tendency to prose. Then he laughed. Life never turned out the way you expected. He might not get an old age. He had come very close to sudden death in his life once already.
Stella and Letty, of course, would never age. It was something built in their genes. What you inherited was what counted. Later, when he got from Letty their mother’s diary, then he might know a bit more about his own chances. Letty had been very cagey so far about revealing what she had read. Interesting and amusing, she had said briefly. It could not be a question of style. He doubted if his mother was a literary stylist, so it must be have to do with the matter.
He was getting ice out of the refrigerator when his bell was rung loudly. Then again.
‘Coming, coming,’ he called, hurrying down. They were very eager for their drink.
Letty stood there alone. ‘John, you’d better come with me. The workmen have found something.’
Ted Lupus and the architect stood looking down at an area of the crypt floor from which the paving stones had been lifted. A third man, who appeared to be the site foreman, was with them. The two men who had been working there stood to one side. A strongly unpleasant smell was seeping into the air, colouring the damp earthiness already there with something nastier.
Coffin looked down. He saw a thick and suggestive-looking bundle, covered in an earth-coloured paper, tied up with rope. Through the paper, he could see what looked like a striped blanket.
He knelt down to study more closely what was there. A squarish, thick bundle. He thought it was a body. Certainly it smelt like one.
He put out a tentative hand to feel what he had: solid yet yielding, a strange sensation. Delicately, he traced out what could be an arm, a leg, hard to be sure which since the limbs had been bound together. Trussed up like a chicken.
Coffin stood up and drew back from the excavation. ‘I’ll get this looked at. You’ll all have to hang around. Sorry about that.’
He turned towards the narrow stairs that led up from the crypt.
‘Sir.’ One of the young workmen spoke up. ‘Was this crypt ever used as a burying place? Legit, I mean. Proper funerals.’
‘I don’t know. Why?’
The young man walked to the end of the area where they had been working. The floor was very broken, not all the old paving stones had survived the war, and of those that had many were cracked and in pieces. One or two of the remaining stones had already been levered up.
‘We had
a go here first, before the foreman told us to move down the room a bit to where we found what we did. But before that I saw this: look here.’
A small object could be seen through a thin veil of earth.
‘Is that a finger, sir? Is that a hand?’
CHAPTER 8
A thin skin of earth lay over the newly discovered body. The bundle which contained the trunk and limbs of Peter Tiler had been given a shallow burial place at the other end, as if he had no connection in life or death with what lay so close.
As he may not have had. There was no indication that the person who had buried this wrapped-up torso had known about the body next door. There was some slight suggestion that he or she had not. The Tiler parcel had been covered with earth and a paving stone placed on top. The other body was hardly interred at all. The style was different, said the police team. And if the burier of Peter Tiler had known of the other body, would he (or she, as the case might be) have bothered to set up such a careful disposal, stone and all? They thought not.
So they were thinking of two different killers, were they? speculated John Coffin.
The second body was carefully, painstakingly uncovered like an archæological find. A small brush was used to remove the last crumbs of soil. Even the soil itself was carefully bagged to see what it might contain of evidence.
They had found the skeleton of a woman. Almost all the flesh had melted away, but clothes remained. She had been wearing jeans and a shirt, so there was nothing archaic about this lady. The exact dating of her death remained open, to be discovered, but a piece of newspaper caught up in her clothing would be offered up for dating and might yield a result. The one thing that could be said at this stage was that she had been dead considerably longer than Peter Tiler. She had predeceased him by some years.
Another conclusion appeared also. It was suspected by experienced police officers that Peter Tiler had died after his wife. Scattered over his clothes were the dried remains of several flying ants. These winged insects had appeared only for a brief two weeks that summer, then disappeared. From other calculations they believed Mrs Tiler had died before they arrived.
Superintendent Paul Lane, the one in supreme command of the investigation, and now taking an increasingly active part in it, on which he or DI Young made daily, sometimes hourly, reports to John Coffin, stood by watching as the workers uncovered the body of the woman who had been wearing blue jeans and a white shirt. The cause of death was as yet unknown but he was going to take a bet that she had been strangled by the stocking round what had been her throat.
Coffin in the Black Museum Page 10
