Coffin on Murder Street
Page 13
Three streets away from Lollard’s house, and over his own shop was the home of the chemist who managed the large pharmacy on the main road near the Spinnergate Tube station. An insomniac, as he took his nightly sedative, he remembered someone to whom he had sold a goodly supply of these excellent tablets, harmless yet helpful when used as indicated on the packet. ‘You’re going it a bit, Jim, aren’t you?’ he had said as the man had come back several times. ‘Too many of these won’t do you any good. They aren’t chocolates, you know.’ Although they were chocolate-coloured and tasted of vanilla. ‘See the doctor, if you’re that bad.’ The man had indeed looked strung up and tense. Not wild, no, but not relaxed, either, whereas with all the tablets he had he should have looked sozzled.
‘You can take them with a cup of coffee, can’t you?’ Lollard had asked.
‘Take them with anything,’ he had said, thinking that obviously Jim hadn’t touched one yet, which made his shopping even stranger.
Then a woman had come in the shop with a baby who had swallowed her contraceptive pill and in the anxiety to do the right thing by mother and child, Jim had slipped out of the shop and out of his memory.
The baby had been screaming and the mother weeping, not so much for her child, it seemed, but for her lost pill and the danger she was in of ‘falling again’ if she didn’t get the daily dose. As if the pill was magic and another pill wouldn’t do.
And the baby had proved not to have taken the pill at all, but to have had it mysteriously, and who knew how, wedged in his nappy.
But Jim Lollard was dead. Dead, so it was reported in the evening paper, from an overdose of sedative tablets which could be used as sleeping tablets.
The chemist guessed he had sold the stuff to Jim, so as he turned restlessly on his pillow he resolved to tell the police tomorrow.
In Regina Street there was one worried landlady who had not received the rent for the let of a room in the house next door, which she was looking after for a neighbour who was in hospital. She hoped she wouldn’t be accused of lifting it.
She had tried the tenant’s door, third floor back next door, and had got no answer. She hadn’t seen him for days and in a quiet way she kept a watch. No sign of Mr Lamartine. Or the other lodger. Where were they?
She found sleep hard to come by and got up to make a cup of tea. Her nerves were jumpy anyway, as she told herself with the self-sympathy of the lonely spirit. She knew about the death of Jim Lollard, and everyone was talking about the missing boy. It had been on the TV news, national, not local, and not to be missed. All of it made for uneasy nights if you were a sensitive soul, as she was.
A sleeping potion would be nice, but people said they were dangerous, habit-forming, and you were better off without them. In any case, she had always avoided anything chemical and artificial even in contraception, relying on luck.
One way and another there were a lot of worried people that night in Spinnergate in John Coffin’s territory. The rain disturbed the sleep of the woman in Regina Street, but the journalist was young and slept deeply with no aids, and the chemist was drugged.
The other participant, still more deeply dead to the world and underground, was stirring.
CHAPTER 12
March 20
There was an ancient Romano-British historian, by name Nennius, who said winningly that in writing his history he had ‘made a heap of the facts’. The tutor had mentioned Nennius in the course Coffin had embarked on called Tracing your Ancestors, although he could not now remember how Nennius came into it. Perhaps as how you should not do it. Coffin had only attended about two lessons out of six and had not been exactly a star pupil, even before chance had delivered a lot more kin to him than he had expected, but he had always remembered Nennius, for whom he felt a fellow-feeling. Facts did get into heaps. Untidy ones too, usually.
It was at this stage in the working out of the two mysteries of the missing boy and the death of Jim Lollard that John Coffin felt a whole heap of the facts had fallen on his head.
Back in his sitting-room in the tower of the old St Luke’s Church, now converted into his ‘living area’, as the architect liked to say, Coffin went to his desk. On it lay an open copy of The Circle, and the box containing his mother’s handwritten memoirs which he was editing in a determined but anxious way. Probably he would never submit the memoirs for publication to any publishing house, although they were an interesting social document, to say the least, of the years before and immediately after the war, but he had thought of getting them privately printed. His sister Laetitia had a daughter who might, one day, wish to know about her grandmother’s goings-on. He had no child himself and was, on the whole, grateful for it. Life was complicated enough as it was.
He looked down at these two documents: a play written nearly seventy years ago, and a diary whose jaunty, rambling observation on the pleasures of sex had been put down within the last two decades. Mum must have been pretty old by then, he thought, yet she’d been still alive and kicking up her heels and he hadn’t known it. Two voices to speak to him if he wanted to listen, Somerset Maugham’s and his mother’s, but his fax machine and his answering machine were both empty and silent. No messages there about the car or about Jim Lollard.
Tiddles, the cat, came climbing home over the housetops and into the open window, offering a silent mouth of greeting. Coffin picked him up and stroked him absently while he thought things over. Your coat’s a bit wet, boy, so that’s why you came in—it’s beginning to rain.
Either his CID were protecting him from overnight worry (unlikely), or they wanted him at arm’s length. He would know what was going on, but only when they told him. It was a hint, perhaps, if you liked to look at it that way, that detection was their business and no longer his.
Just as well he had met Mary Barclay. Not that he meant to let them get away with it. He didn’t blame Archie Young and Paul Lane for wanting him to keep his finger out of their pie, he would have felt the same himself in their place, but what they overlooked was that his was the ultimate responsibility. The grilling he had had in the House of Commons from the aggressive MP made him only too aware of this. The police were always now under fire, but he was the one who must be judged first and hardest. He accepted that as truth; it was his place; but the other side of the coin was that if he wanted to oversee some investigation, then he would. Bloody well would. He set Tiddles down, giving him an affectionate pat. He sometimes spoke harshly to Tiddles but his hands were gentle. Hands and touch told you so much more than voices and words.
‘I was retired once, puss,’ he said, ‘and then brought back for special duties, and because I had special knowledge I did well out of that, it’s why I am where I am now, if that’s a good thing, puss. I almost went mad once, Tiddles, only it turned out to be an unusual form of poisoning. I had a wife once as well, but perhaps we should forget about her.’ She was dead, anyway, poor girl. Gone to dwell in that other country with so many others.
His hands tightened around the cat. Tiddles gave a muted cry of pain and anger, delivered a sharp scratch and fled.
Coffin apologized to the empty air. ‘Sorry, boy.’ Tiddles, although officially neutered, was firmly masculine in temperament and behaviour and went courting regularly in the right season (and out of it too, he was not fussy) although nothing came of it.
So Jim Lollard had killed himself, had he? Or so Detective Barclay had said, wording it a bit strangely. The circumstances were strange enough in themselves. That case was going to be one for the books, and another score for Murder Street.
As a well-known local character, Lollard’s fame had reached the Chief Commander. Lollard had always been talking about murder and death, he was obsessed with the idea. If Lollard had killed himself then it might have been the death he was looking for.
He took one last look out of his high tower window before going to sleep. The rooftops below were gleaming in the rain, in the distance the street lamps shone in tawny blurred haloes of light, the air
smelt sweet.
Looks peaceful enough he thought, but he knew he was deceiving himself. In his wild bailiwick violent and unpleasant events were happening all the time whether he got to know about them or not. Statistics and experience taught it. Steady downpour, though, that usually keeps the gangs off the streets. Both the Planters and the Dreamers hated getting wet, it spoilt their hair and their clothes. Rain does quieten things down.
*
It rained heavily all through the night, seeping into the earth, so that the paper and cardboard around that which was buried in Murder Street began to split apart and the creature inside to burst forth. Still under the earth but soon about to be visible.
Meanwhile, the man who had put the torch to a little business premises in North Spinnergate had already packed his bags and was driving away. Mission accomplished.
In the early morning his fax machine delivered its messages and Coffin read them as he drank coffee.
Better late than never, he thought, and wondered if there was some sort of timing device on his machine so that messages were slow in getting through. Not likely, of course, just his fancy, though an interesting idea. Probably some despatcher tardy about his work.
Amid the usual supply of other messages about a car crash at a traffic lights, two dead; a fire (arson suspected) at a premises on the corner of Magdalen Road and Sweetings Lane, North Spinnergate, shop burned out, the proprietor being questioned; council tenants’ protest march over a rent rise (Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay); and the advice that a gang of Australian pickpockets had arrived as usual at Heathrow for the spring and summer season, were the two pieces of information he was looking for.
The fire in the Magdalen Road and Sweetings Lane area meant something to him, but as yet he was not sure what, and his thoughts were directed strongly to another item.
A fifteen-year-old, dark red Metro, answering the description of the car wanted in the Casey abduction, had been found abandoned on waste ground by the New Canal at 21.03 hours last night by a constable on the beat. The car had attracted his attention and he had examined it. Inside was a child’s shirt. Shirt provisionally identified as having been worn by Tom Casey. Blood on it not yet identified.
Get on to that, thought Coffin, it’s crucial. It was becoming apparent that this was a case where Forensics were going to be all important.
One last sentence caught his eye and seemed to stand out in large print: a woman’s shoe found in the car.
Well, what to make of that? One shoe, and a woman’s. A one-legged lady?
Somehow he did not like this discovery of a woman’s shoe. It didn’t seem natural. What was it Mary Barclay had said about the appearance of the boy’s shirt looking ‘contrived’? The one shoe looked contrived.
There was nothing more that was new about the missing boy. Or nothing reliable. The usual number of sightings from places as far apart as Cornwall and Berwick-on-Tweed. These would be checked, but would probably lead to nothing. And yet he knew that from one report in a hundred, some vital information might come.
A brief summary of the statement from coach driver Tremble appeared in the next item. Tremble had been questioned yesterday, March 19, in his own home by Inspector Archie Young and had finally admitted to knowing something about the mystery of his coach tour’s imprisonment en masse and the death of Jim Lollard. The police had suspected all the time that Tremble knew more than he would admit to. After all, he had been driving the coach, hadn’t he?
Tremble had confessed to having been paid to run his coach into the old warehouse. Yes, by Jim Lollard himself. Lollard had fed him this story about there having been a mass murder in the place, but he had never believed it. Or even if it was true, he wouldn’t have done anything about it. He had his set tour and that was that. But Lollard offered money. Why? Tremble didn’t know. No, he had no idea what Lollard had in mind, just thought he was cracked. He had accepted the bribe (if you wanted to call it that, which he didn’t) because he needed the cash. No, he didn’t know anything else.
Archie Young had added his own comment that he did not believe Tremble on this point, thought he did know more, and would be continuing with his questions. No one told all in a first confession, least of all people like Tremble (no record but one or two near misses and certainly known to the police in his own patch, Loding Avenue district, N.E. London). But it did look as if Jim Lollard had somehow contrived his own death. Couldn’t call it suicide, quite.
Progress of a sort, then, on his two main problems. Coffin had another cup of coffee and ate some toast. Tiddles appeared for breakfast and was satisfied with a bowl of dried cat biscuits and some hot milk.
He hesitated whether to tell Stella Pinero the news about the discovery of the car, but he was forestalled by meeting her in the courtyard outside.
‘Just on my way to get breakfast at Max’s. What about you?’ She was wearing jeans and a dark, blue sweater but had applied lipstick and a kind of shine on her face which could not be natural but looked good. Very good.
‘I’ve had something. Early for you, isn’t it?’ Like most theatre people, Stella preferred not to surface till the sun had been up some time.
‘Had Nell on the ’phone at what felt like dawn. She’d had a call from your Inspector Young telling her that the car had been found. Empty. Tom wasn’t in it. He let her have it straight out, he doesn’t wrap things up, that man. Poor Nell. I suppose you’ve heard all already.’
‘Ah,’ said Coffin. A rough brown form had rushed past them, giving a small bark as he went. ‘Did you know you’d let Bob out?’
‘He does what he likes. That means you did know? And probably wouldn’t have said.’
‘I would have done.’
‘Eventually.’
‘Now, Stella …’
Stella gave a short, unkind laugh which meant I bet, and You never do, and I don’t trust you an inch. Not all of which was quite true or even partly true but had some truth in it.
‘Nell said that she felt they weren’t telling her everything.’
Very likely not. Probably not telling her about the shirt, and almost certainly not about the shoe.
‘That was a question,’ said Stella, her temper frayed by having to wake up early, by a slight hangover from last night, and the general feeling that life was a bugger.
‘I know it was.’
‘No wonder they call you pigs.’
Their relationship was taking one of its rapid spirals downward as on a slide in a fairground. They got on a mat, any mat would do, and went swooping down, arguing strongly.
They reached the bottom together.
‘See you sometime.’ Coffin moved towards his car.
‘Right.’ Stella never swore outside the theatre (although frequently when inside, they all did) but her lips mouthed the unsayable.
You should always check your car for explosives before getting in, that was the latest security instruction. Coffin did so inspect his car, briefly and without interest. Nothing there. One day there would be, probably, and he hoped he noticed it.
As he drove away, he remembered what was worrying him about the fire in Sweetings Lane, which diverted his mind from the quarrel, near-quarrel, with Stella Pinero. He took the first opportunity that morning to see Superintendent Paul Lane.
Lane was in the temporary Incident Room, into which he had just moved his team, needing more accommodation as the case expanded. It was set up in a caravan in the parking lots across the way from the police headquarters in Spinnergate because once again they had no spare space. The building, a façade of red brick with its interesting air of being a Venetian prison, looked big enough but was proving remarkably inconvenient for modern policing. Temporary huts were often in use, but Lane had his computers and telephones all installed, so that heavy duty cables trailed ominously towards the caravan.
Lane was sitting at his desk contemplating a screen of information on the computer which seemed to be giving him little joy. He stood up as John Coffin came in.
‘No, and you shouldn’t either. What about the fire in Sweetings Lane? That is the papershop? On the corner of the Lane and Magdalen Road? Used as a letter-box by the paedophile group?’
‘Yerss,’ said Lane, making a long slow sound of it. ‘More than a letter-box, probably had meetings there. Yes, arson all right. A can of petrol popped through the shop window. The owner, he calls himself the manager, but he owns that shop and two others, is in hospital, baddish, but he’ll live. Someone had it in for him.’
‘Any ideas?’
‘He swears he doesn’t know who it could be or why. That’s lies, of course, he is aware of what his shop is used for. Probably belongs to the club. No, some citizen besides us has a good idea of what goes on there and has had a go.’
‘Or it could be the result of a quarrel within the group.’
‘Yerss … But they’re not usually rough with each other. All soft and serious there. No, I reckon it’s an outsider.’
‘Could be Duerden?’
Lane shrugged. ‘Be nice and neat if it was now, wouldn’t it?’
‘Who’s running the investigation?’
‘Farmer over the ’Gate, it’s his manor. Good man. But we’re keeping in touch. All linked up, anyway, because of the boy.
‘Yes, the car.’
Lane stood up again and shifted around uneasily. ‘Yes, it’s good we’ve got that. Still, I’d say it was delivered.’ He cocked an eyebrow at Coffin.