Nice kid, he thought.
And then: So that’s what she brought with her.
And that wasn’t all she’d brought. Long years of experience had made his nose sensitive.
He could smell it, it was all around her: Trouble.
CHAPTER 2
March 5
Late that evening, March 5, Ellice Eden was reading the newspapers as he took his nightcap. He had been too busy that day to get at them before. He had all the dailies delivered as a matter of business, plucking out of them all the reviews of his fellow critics. He cut out those he did not like and stuck them on a board with a sharp and vicious pin. Those he approved of he put in a drawer and asked the writers for a drink at the Groucho after the next show. He liked some of his rivals, he had a kindly streak inside him, although not all performers would have agreed with this judgement if they had suffered from his acid pen. But it was universally acknowledged that he was more often right than wrong. Which was, as one unhappy victim had pointed out, no comfort at all.
There was an auction at Sotheby’s of the theatre objects he collected, such as costume, bits of jewellery, even the odd wig and piece of furniture or china connected with famous players or plays. He had a notable collection. He also had a modest collection of Victoriana, pictures mostly. He ticked what he might bid for.
He poured himself a cup of chocolate, which he drank with cream and very hot. Since the days of efficient servants (Oh Bunter, oh Jeeves, where are you now?) had long since passed, he had made it himself.
Today, however, he had finished with the critics (two to fix with a pin), and was reading the news. Something there troubled him.
He poured out another cup of chocolate and, after a moment’s thought, padded across his golden Afghan carpet to fetch a bottle. He had recently acquired a taste for malt whisky and was presently experimenting with Glen Fiddich.
It was a strong measure but was allowable tonight. Morning almost. This morning. He drank it, then went back to his chocolate.
Presently he reached out for the telephone. It was late, but theatricals never sleep early and he knew this one did not. His toes did a sort of dance inside the blue and white slippers which matched the blue and white silk dressing-gown from Turnbull and Assher. In his youth he had breakfasted once with Noël Coward in the house in Gerald Road and had decided that he too would look like that one day if he could afford it. (Although not so red of face.) Now he could afford spotted silk dressing-gowns, and he even had a maisonette in Gerald Road to go with it, and very convenient it was.
He was a man who liked to dress with style and present a well-manicured appearance to the world. Hair, face and hands all received daily attention with lotions and creams.
From his window as he stood sipping his chocolate, hand on the telephone, he could see the police station. He knew some of the faces over there and a very decent set they were.
‘Gus dear, there you are. Did I wake you up?’ He didn’t name himself. If Gus Hamilton did not recognize his voice, so much the worse for him. ‘How are you? What about lunch one day? We haven’t talked for a long while. Admired your work.’ Not perhaps you yourself, my dear boy, not your character and your ways, but you are a peerless actor. In the making, anyway, not perhaps Olivier yet. ‘But it’s about Nell. Yes, our Nell. Your Nell, my Nell.’
Gus could be heard muttering something.
‘All right, as you wish, not your Nell. But the child? The picture I have just seen in the paper of Nell, clutching a largish infant. How did that come about?’
Gus muttered that it was nothing to do with him. Very likely not, thought Ellice, won’t disagree with you on that, but babies are not produced by a kind of spontaneous conception whatever your views on virgin birth. Two parties are required, even if one is represented in a test tube. Not that he thought that was how it had been with Nell Casey. No, indeed.
‘She has said nothing about it. Kept very quiet. A mistake.’ Every woman was entitled to one mistake, but Nell had made more than her share in his opinion.
The explosion of anger that Gus delivered over the telephone surprised him.
He had meant to get some information from Gus, not to call up a storm.
Ellice began to put the telephone down, not having, as he had intended, asked Gus to lunch. He would invent some other treat for that young man.
He had not, of course, been quite truthful in what he said to Gus. With his excellent intelligence system he had picked up news about the child. She had not exactly kept quiet about it, but not spread the word either. Her own business, she had implied.
But what he had not expected was to see such a large, handsome and healthy child. Somehow a frail, delicate little creature would have been more suitable for Nell.
Nor had he expected to see Nell looking down at the boy with such evident love.
Sad, he thought. Very sad. Oh Gus, oh Nell, what a pair of star-crossed lovers you have been. It’s a tragedy. Shakespeare, Euripides, Racine. On that scale.
A new voice took over on the telephone. ‘What have you done to Gus? He’s in a terrible state.’ The girl Gus currently shared his flat with, a singer. Ellice knew all the gossip.
‘You ought to watch over that young man,’ he said seriously. ‘He’s dangerous.’
The voice went on at him again.
‘I know, dear,’ said Ellice, ‘I know you say Gus is a very private person.’ Whatever that meant, not a bright girl, this one, just lovely long legs and a way of picking up clichés. ‘But we don’t want any of this Here we go and Vengeance is mine says the Lord and I am his instrument, do we?’
Like John Coffin, he too smelt trouble. He was tired now, but he was glad he had looked in at Stella Pinero’s outfit that night, always nice to see Stella. Not a great talent but a real pro.
CHAPTER 3
Still on March 5
There was a special scent for trouble, Coffin thought. Somewhere between sour smoke and vinegar. The exact smell varied according to the quality of the trouble. The very worst of trouble took your breath away, it was so sharp, so acrid. He had smelt it once or twice in his life and hoped never to smell it again.
It wasn’t the sort of thing you mentioned, especially if you were a senior police officer, because other people might not smell it. Possibly did not. But everyone had something, he guessed, some little forerunner of trouble about. To some it might be a pain in their big toe. Or indigestion. Or even just a strong desire to quarrel with their wife. He had no wife himself. He had one once, but that was long since, and she lived now in another country and he bore her no grudge. Hell it had been at the time.
He walked home to his flat, Stella having eluded him, and considered what trouble Nell Casey could be bringing with her. Gus, certainly, was high on the list. In fact, he might be the trouble.
Certainly connected with it, he thought, as he put his key in the lock.
He did this with a certain pleasure. He liked his handsome oak front door, old as the church itself, with a great lock whose brass key weighed down his pocket. He liked his home, of which he was quietly proud, and of himself for owning it. He had paid his sister, who had converted the church, a pretty price for the place, but it was worth it. Up in his tower he felt at peace, and peace was not a thing that came easily in his life. In the course of his career, he had had many homes in different places, some decidedly scruffy. Now he lived in his church tower with a sweeping view of his bit of London.
He walked up the winding inner staircase, past his kitchen up to his sitting-room on the top. Above him he had the turret and a tiny roof garden where his cat sunned himself among the geraniums and daisies which were all the flowers that Coffin managed to grow. They were, he found, indestructible plants, which even he and the London climate could not destroy.
Tiddles, the cat who had chosen to live with him and who answered to no name or any according to mood, sidled up to him, suggesting a little snack would be acceptable.
Coffin liked to say he lived alone,
but while he had Tiddles he was never alone. Tiddles, although a quiet animal, had a strong presence. He was not to be ignored, as witness the feeding bowl in the kitchen, the sleeping basket complete with plaid blanket by the window (he rarely inhabited this but a cat liked to have a bit of property), and the supply of his favourite food, minced beef, in the refrigerator.
‘Later, boy,’ Coffin said to Tiddles, throwing his coat on a chair. He had decorated this room with his few good bits of furniture, several large bookcases, and his treasured large oriental rug. Letty had ordered him to buy a Chinese rug because she said it matched the ceiling, but he had resisted her advice and bought a Bokhara. On the walls he had three biggish oil paintings which he had bought himself, backing his own taste. You had to be strong with his sister Letty or she bullied you. He loved her, though, and was delighted to have her in his life.
For so long, he had not known he had a sister, although he had suspected he had a sibling. Then this beautiful, clever, enigmatic sister, Laetitia Bingham, had identified herself. Life had then delivered a bonus in the form of brother William. He did not love William, but he was prepared to like him and he certainly respected him. He suspected that his half-brother was, as they say in Edinburgh, a ‘warm man’, and Coffin who had never made more than his salary had to respect a man who could make money. Willy might be warm but his money was never burnt. William was both canny and cautious and that inheritance must have come from his father’s side of the family, from his mother’s it was impossible. Only in his marriage did William show a streak of that lady, for his wife was flaxen, buxom and extravagant. It was William who had come across his mother’s diary in some old property left for safe keeping with the family that had brought him up, read what she had written with a mixture of shock and amazement at her racy ease, and Letty who had suggested the diary should be published. ‘Not exactly the memoirs of an Edwardian lady but the frank, honest account of a real woman’s life before, during and after the war. That is how we must sell it,’ she had said.
Frank, Coffin admitted; honest, he doubted. He thought Ma might be a bit of an old liar. It almost seemed as if she had written for publication. A mystery there. He would probe it, and one day might get to the bottom of it. Meanwhile, it gave him something to exercise his mind on in the wakeful stretches of the night. A recent recruit to the ranks of insomniacs, he had plenty of those.
He checked his answering machine: no messages. His telephone remained quiet. Such inactivity was unusual, since he had instituted the rule that he received notice, even if briefly, of all important activities involving his force, whatever the time of day or night. He never wanted to be caught off guard. He was well aware that the social tensions in his area between those who had and those who had not, between the new inhabitants who had paid a lot for their property and did not want it sullied by the proximity of the old inhabitants who had ways of their own, not to mention various racial undercurrents, made for an inflammable mixture. If there was going to be a riot, he wanted to be the first to know.
As he handed out some food for the cat and then prepared for bed, he found he was more worried by the quietness than by a stream of messages. He checked again all the machines that ought to have been speaking to him, but found nothing wrong with them. Just a very quiet night.
Tiddles, fed and let out through the window which gave on to a roof so that he could descend, tail waving, upon the town like a Restoration gallant, had gone about his business, and Coffin poured himself a drink.
He would have to come to some resolution of his relationship with Stella Pinero. That was why he wasn’t sleeping. He loved Stella, had loved her for years, but Stella engaged in her own career and living elsewhere was one thing, Stella always on the premises was quite another. They had tried it once, in the distant past when they were both a good deal younger, and it hadn’t worked.
I jolly nearly did her in, he reflected, that night she threw the saucepan at me and I threw it back. Stella had missed; he hadn’t. It had been the instinctive action of a good games player, but it had brought him up short. Violence towards Stella was not something he wanted to exhibit. He had helped her up, asked her to forgive him and moved out. Shortly after Stella had gone on a long tour of a Rattigan play with the first company, and he had gone on a course in Cambridge. They had not met for years.
Over, he had thought, all over. But it was never over between him and Stella, it was like a disease they had both caught, in which there were many remissions (in one of which he had married, and in another, Stella had done so) but no real cure.
She was part of his life forever, and living, moreover, only a stone’s throw away. Those facts had to be faced and dealt with.
I’ll do that tomorrow, he thought.
Tiddles leapt back in through the window, his fur smelling of the fresh air.
Coffin turned his mind to other things. Odd about the child. No, not odd at all. Everyone, all young achievers, had one these days, in or out of wedlock, they were fashionable. Even if you didn’t fancy one for its own sake, then it was the smart thing to do. But this kid was loved, you could see that.
Was it Gus’s? The age was about right, according to the chronology of the story as transmitted by Stella, who was actually accurate about things of this sort. She could be madly wrong and ill-informed about matters of national importance but about personal details she could be relied upon.
A night without a single crime, he thought, a peerless, uncorrupted night. What a treat. Nothing to think about.
He and Tiddles were just about to go to bed, they shared one, not from Coffin’s choice but because Tiddles offered none, he was always there, soundly asleep with his head on the pillow. The utmost freedom allowed to Coffin was to take the other pillow. He had Tiddles and Tiddles had him.
He was just choosing which book to read in bed when the telephone rang.
‘Sir?’ It was the duty officer at his headquarters. ‘Just to inform you that a coachload of tourists on a trip through the City has disappeared.’
‘How many?’
‘Twelve plus the driver.’
Thirteen people missing, then. A bumper crop, the peerless evening effortlessly racing ahead of itself and creating a record.
Still, no reason to believe they were dead or otherwise harmed. Just missing.
‘No accident reported?’
‘No, sir, not in our districts or outside.’
Of course not, that would have been the easy answer and he would not have been bothered in the small hours. It was now nearly one o’clock in the morning.
‘Any messages, demands for ransom, anything of that sort?’
‘No, sir. Silence.’
‘There may be something later.’
‘Not a very rich firm that runs the tours, sir. And the people they get on the tours aren’t in the millionaire class.’
‘They’ll turn up,’ Coffin said confidently. They’d have to, dead or alive, you couldn’t easily dispose of that many bodies.
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Let me have the details,’
‘Just faxing them, sir.’
The sight of Tiddles’s well-licked food bowl made Coffin feel hungry himself, so he put together some coffee and a sandwich, not a neat one, which began to fall apart. He stopped in the window of his sitting-room to take a hasty bite.
By this time, the faxed pages were arriving, slipping out of the machine and neatly disposing of themselves. Along with them came information about several committee meetings tomorrow, a multiple accident on the motorway (not in his area, but a number of people had been killed and that was bad), and a survey, with graphs, of the fire risks in all the police stations in Thameswater. None of which statistics he wanted at this moment. A fax about a suspected child murderer who was believed to have moved into the district was different. He paused to read:
William Arthur Duerden, believed moved into this area. Suspected of several child murders (details attached) but no proof. He goes under sever
al aliase. (names attached). Born 1945. Five feet four, brown hair, blue eyes, no distinguishing marks. May alter appearance with wig and contact lenses.
All this paper just waiting there to spring out at him.
He picked out what he needed to read. That was the trouble with machines, the desire to take over was built into them. They always wanted to do too much. Otherwise they broke down and were called failures, and scrapped. Naturally no machine wanted that to happen, it was better to overdo it.
Whoever had kidnapped, murdered or mislaid thirteen people had overdone it. Thirteen was too many.
The missing coach belonged to Trembles Tours Ltd, a licensed operator having two coaches. The drivers were the twin brothers, John and Alfred Tremble, who owned the firm. The brothers always set out their route and approximate timetable and informed the traffic police. They had never been in any trouble and had no record.
Now one of the brothers, together with his coach and all his passengers, had disappeared.
‘Damn.’ His quiet night had gone. Crime in his bailiwick was like the rain over England: if there was one dry day, then it levelled up the next day with a steady downpour. The average was always the same in both cases: high.
He drank his coffee and went back to studying his lines. No doubt Maugham would send him to sleep. There was a kind of deadness behind its smart dialogue and dated good sense. He wondered if Stella and the ladies of the Reading Club had been wise to choose it? But they were supposed to know their audience and tickets were selling. He had a suspicion it had been chosen because a prominent member of the group had red hair … like Lady Kitty.
Over one of Lady Kitty’s speeches, he nodded off to sleep, but one last thought rolled across his mind.
So I was right, there is trouble, trouble in triplicate, but not Nell Casey’s trouble, not the trouble I smelt, that’s still on the way. This is extra trouble.
Coffin on Murder Street Page 3
