Coffin on Murder Street

by Gwendoline Butler

  Many of these river homes are weekend or summer places, deserted in the winter, left locked up and empty.

  One way and another, the police teams sent out had plenty to look at. No shortage of choice, especially, as one constable said to his mate: You didn’t know exactly what you were looking for.

  Trouble, was the answer. Something out of the ordinary.

  Coffin dealt with a series of routine matters, heard with some satisfaction that his MP critic was about to be involved in litigation himself—his wife was divorcing him—and took a message from his sister in New York that she was on her way over. Not to meet her at Heathrow.

  Wouldn’t think of it, he told himself.

  The news came in much more quickly than he had expected. Somehow he had thought that Gus Hamilton might get there first and that the place he was interested in would be found through him, but Gus had proved elusive.

  The call came through in the early dusk of that day. Which day was it? He too had not slept and was suffering a time wastage.

  ‘We have a choice of two places on offer. Want to hear the details sir?’ Archie Young had got his second or third wind and sounded cheerful. One is a houseboat on the river near to Eton. The locals say they have heard voices and seen lights at night, which was not what they expected as the owner is abroad. They were about to tell the police themselves: they think a young couple are squatting there.’

  ‘And the other place?’

  ‘It’s a small kind of villa, actually on one those little islands … Signs of life seen there at night and by day sometimes. Not usual, owner hardly ever comes.’

  ‘Access?’ asked Coffin.

  ‘You walk across a wooden bridge.’

  ‘And where is it?’

  ‘Not far from Runnymede and the John Kennedy Memorial. There’s a good road and car park not far away.’

  ‘That’s the place to go for. Are you watching it?’

  ‘Watching both.’

  ‘Hold on, I’m coming.’

  It would only take forty minutes with a fast car and clear road. A helicopter would be quicker. There was a helicopter. He justifed the use of the helicopter to himself.

  *

  A small group of police were there waiting for Coffin in the car park on the banks of the River Thames at Runnymede.

  A wind had got up and it was raining.

  ‘What’s he expecting to find?’ asked a sergeant of the local outfit.

  ‘A body,’ said Young, turning up his coat collar. ‘He’s lucky that way. A joke. Don’t bother to laugh.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  Young had a sergeant with him. Paul Lane was coming out with the Chief Commander.

  ‘They’re here,’ said the local man.

  The helicopter dropped neatly into the open field beyond the car park. Young saw that Mary Barclay made a third member of the party. He hurried forward. ‘We have to move on by car, it’s just down the road.’

  Quietly three cars left the car park and took the road which wound parallel with the river. Out of the corner of his eye, Young saw that Mary Barclay gave John Coffin a small nod, then got into another car and drove off in the opposite direction.

  ‘What the devil’s she up to?’ he asked himself as the car procession sped on. There was a right turn and they were in a cul-de-sac of houses on the river bank. A narrow lane led to the river.

  At the end of the lane was the bridge to the island.

  Coffin looked at in the moonlight. ‘Does it have a name, this island?’

  ‘Duck Island, I think,’ said the local man.

  But there was no ducks, or if there were then they were safely asleep.

  ‘Let’s go, then.’

  The party swept down the lane towards the river. A figure moved out of the shadows. The local CID Inspector acknowledged his salute, and a murmur of conversation passed between them. Then he turned to John Coffin.

  ‘The car you were interested in has been found. Parked on the road not far from here. No one in it.’

  ‘Hamilton can’t be far away. Let’s get to the house.’ Before Gus, if possible.

  Archie Young muttered: ‘What’s Hamilton playing at?’ The comment was to himself but Coffin heard him.

  ‘What would you be up to in the circumstances?’

  ‘Looking to protect myself,’ said Young.

  ‘I think he has something else on his mind.’ Something more violent. ‘Go on looking for him. He’s got to be close.’

  Across the wooden bridge, over the dark river and into the greater darkness around the low building in front of them. It was surrounded by a shrubbery and small trees. A path went from the river to a door set in a porch.

  There was a small boathouse with a name on it: Camelot.

  ‘Wouldn’t you know,’ said Coffin to himself. ‘“By the margins willow-veiled, Slide the heavy barges trailed.”’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a quotation.’ Tennyson, not the Morte D’Arthur but the romantic idyll of the Lady of Shalott.

  Another figure moved out of the bushes. ‘Someone has gone in. A man. Couldn’t see much detail, he went in through a window.’

  ‘How long ago?’ Coffin looked at the house which still showed no sign of life, but the curtains were drawn tightly at one window.

  ‘Barely a minute. I think he must have heard the cars and that gave him the push.’

  ‘Right. In we go, then.’

  No need any longer for silence or quiet. The door was forced open and they were crowding into the hall. The house smelt damp and sour. Unused, empty. But to the right a line of light shone under a door.

  John Coffin threw open the door.

  It was a room used as a bedroom. In one corner was a child’s cot and in it, tethered by a kind of harness, stood Tom. He was surrounded by various games and toys, there was a mug of milk and another of water within his reach. He looked bewildered, lost and frightened, and there was a strong smell suggesting that his toilet arrangements had been shifty, but he was alive.

  A door led to a bathroom. Coffin could see in and see a reflection of man’s figure in a looking-glass over the basin. The man was trying to hide behind the door.

  ‘You can come out, Gus,’ he said.

  Gus Hamilton slowly appeared.

  ‘You’re too late and in the wrong place. Ellice Eden was taken into custody a few hours ago, on my instructions as soon as I heard of this place.’

  As the newspapers reported later, he was helping with their inquiries. But he would not be walking free. The forensic evidence matching his blood to that on the shirt and on the model of a child’s hand was there, as was the fact that Ellice Eden’s handlotion, so carefully and lavishly applied, had left traces on almost everything he had touched.

  ‘I wouldn’t have killed him,’ said Gus Hamilton, sitting in the police car with John Coffin. ‘But, by God, I’d have beaten him up. As soon as I was told what had happened to Nell, I knew Ellice Eden had to be behind it all, although I didn’t know why.’

  ‘I think you do,’ said Coffin.

  Gus said slowly, ‘I suppose it was all to do with that boy who died in Australia. I knew that Ellice thought he was the great white hope of the future for the stage. I suppose he loved him, and he blamed me and Nell for his death. The boy was mad for Nell those weeks on the tour. He was a neurotic, had had a bad time as he grew up. Brutal father, that sort of thing. We didn’t know his history, his rages, his despairs, we saw those, but not through to the great depressions he had inside him.’ He looked at Coffin. ‘Not Nell’s fault, not really. I mean, I didn’t think people killed themselves over sex these days.’

  ‘All the time,’ said Coffin. ‘So?’

  ‘I remembered this place. I was never here, but I knew of it. And I thought of the boy … I wasn’t sure exactly which house but I was going to find it. In the end you lot pointed it out to me … I thought the boy would be here, but I thought he would be dead.’

  ‘No, I d
on’t believe Eden wanted to kill the child, he was looked after. Just to torment Nell. But when she came here looking for the child, then he was willing enough to kill her.’ Or perhaps he had meant to do so all along.

  ‘He’s off his rocker, you know,’ said Gus confidently.

  ‘Not for me to say. Leave that to the psychologist.’ Through the car window he saw Mary Barclay accompanied by a woman in a nurse’s uniform carrying Tom away to an ambulance. No physical wounds were apparent, but there must be some emotional ones. A tough little begger, though, he was smiling at the nurse.

  Archie Young came over to the car. ‘All tidied up, sir. Good job Barclay came along.’

  He sounded exhausted but relieved. ‘Pity we couldn’t have got here before.’

  But the long day was over.

  CHAPTER 23

  On several April days

  I have loved two things in my life [wrote Elliee Eden]. The theatre and that boy who died in Australia … I might have loved Nell Casey. Yes, I did love Nell, and I have been her helper. I saw her/him first in a bar off Piccadilly. A gawky adolescent trying to be a sophisticated female, all of sixteen acting thirty. So lost and touching. She said she was an orphan, but I have always had my doubts about that. But I pretended to believe her. I gave her a meal and got the story out of her. She went to Amsterdam for the operation, but I expect you know that by now, and then I paid for drama school for her. Cash, I didn’t want to be too closely linked.

  By that time, I had met HIM. Ah, that was different.

  ‘He never used his name,’ said Coffin to Stella Pinero, ‘never once, it was as if he couldn’t. And he has never spoken … Oh, asked for his lawyer and things he wants and thinks he ought to have in prison, but not a word of what went on.’

  ‘But he writes?’

  ‘Oh yes, all the time. Sometimes the same story all over again, word for word.’

  He was a genius, you see. Far and away the best hope of his generation. Nell was good but he was different. Nell met HIM through me. Came together to my house on the river, my little hideaway. Folly, folly, all is folly.

  ‘Gus Hamilton says everyone knew about his so-called hideaway but he’d never been invited there himself.’

  ‘Oh yes, we all know,’ agreed Stella. ‘I was never asked. You had to be a bit special for that. Poor Nell, poor Ellice. What a business, what a rotten business.’

  They were sitting in the bar of the Theatre Workshop. No one else was there.

  ‘I wouldn’t trust Ellice too far,’ she said. ‘He mayn’t be as mad as he’s acting. He is quite an actor. He liked a bit of drama. You can tell that from the drama he created for Nell and Tom.’

  As soon as I heard about HIS death, I vowed to get back at Nell Casey. I held her responsible for the death of a great and lovely talent. I had loved Nell too and helped her (although I liked her better as a boy). She was beautiful as a boy, immensely appealing, so talented. I was willing to help pay for what she wanted, an operation and tuition at a drama school. She seemed so vulnerable and lost. Or so I thought. I didn’t know her then. Or did the operation change her?

  I arranged and paid for her operation, while deploring it, and she repaid me by seducing HIM, lightly and without caring. Then she dropped him. She was a destroyer. It wasn’t Hamilton, it was her. I have letters from HIM to prove it. Pure anguish. Hard as nails, our Nell, but the boy was her weak spot. That and her career, and I thought I could get both. Torment her through the boy, and then break her career. Good tricks with the boy, I thought, I remembered what I’d been like as a boy and what my mother had feared for me. Hieronyms Bosch country.

  It all comes out of self, you know, truth and lies both. I like playacting and dressing up, cross dressing it’s called, isn’t it? I dressed up when I took the boy. Nurse Eden. When Nell was in the States she was out of my reach, but she came back. I got her the job over here with Stella Pinero. I didn’t want to kill her, though, I would have delivered the boy back, I rather liked him, but she remembered me going into her bedroom and guessed I had taken her shoe. The one shoe. I over-reached myself there, I freely admit. She knew this place and came here to look for Tom. Unluckily I was here too. I came regularly, of course. The boy was well looked after. A visitor, not a hostage. Nell should have behaved and he would have come back. She shouldn’t have attacked me. It was self-defence on my part, but I lost my head. I admit that freely too.

  ‘Did he?’ asked Coffin. ‘Did he get the job for Nell?’

  ‘No one influences me,’ said Stella. ‘But he might have given a push. He was a power. You have to admit that.’ She got up to get some coffee. No one was serving at the bar, they were looking after themselves. ‘He’s not claiming it wasn’t him, then?’

  ‘Hardly could. His forearms and hands are scratched, and there is a match with the tissues under Nell’s nails. It was his blood on the china hand and on the shirt. He cut himself on purpose. And in his bedroom we found a wig and a nurse’s uniform which he wore when he abducted Tom. I suppose the child, who one way and another had been looked after by various people, thought a nurse sent was safe enough. Eden’s defence will be that it was a revenge scheme that got out of hand.’

  ‘What about Gus’s scratches?’

  ‘I think that may have been the girlfriend,’ Coffin allowed himself a smile. ‘I believe she may have heard about Ellie Wakeman.’

  ‘I’d heard she’d got a temper.’

  ‘They’re a match, in that case.’

  ‘I’m told that Mary Barclay was the real star of the show. Arriving with a nurse and all equipment for the child … Where is Tom?’

  ‘In care.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to him?’

  ‘The best possible thing: he will probably go back to his mother. She is out of prison and reputed to be anxious for a reunion.’

  ‘Good. You’ve acquired a cat after one murder and I’ve acquired a dog. I don’t think either of us could take on a child.’

  ‘You’ve got a daughter,’ said Coffin.

  ‘Do you miss not having a child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Put in a bid for Tom.’ He shook his head silently. ‘Marry someone still young enough to give you one.’

  ‘You mean Mary Barclay? No, Stella. I thought you and I were going to share a roof?’ It was said as a joke, wouldn’t really do in his job even these days. Respectably married or nothing. Nothing too noticeable, anyway. Of course, he might be looking for a new job. There was still that Inquiry hanging over his head.

  Stella started to laugh. It was wonderful to laugh again, she was so glad she could do it.

  Ellice Eden wrote:

  It was quite easy to put into effect my little teases with the child. I went round to view where Nell was staying that first night after seeing her in the bar. I was overstimulated, I suppose. Imagination working overtime. I knew about the boy, although I pretended I did not. I always know the gossip. Didn’t know where the child came from, of course … I saw the dog in the garden that night and thought about the burial. I had the shoe-box that was used in my car, the bit of wood on which I wrote TOM was a plant marker from one of the rose-trees … I was still there when Nell came down. I saw her, watched … Didn’t see Stella, I was home by then. But I could not sleep. Still in overdrive, so I went back and moved the dog, and put the little hand (a small treasure from my collection, said to be the hand of one of Charles Dickens’s daughters), in position. The blood was my own.

  Even Ellice Eden himself wondered if he had been a little mad at that point. It was a good defence point, anyway. He would suggest it. He frowned. He had prowled up and down the stairs that evening even before seeing Nell in the bar, wondering if he should call. He did not like that memory. It was not worthy of him. Yes, that was the moment that the fire had started to burn. I should have strangled Nell then, not the dog.

  No, no, the killing was an accident. Cling to that thought.

  I had heard the story that the child-killer was in the
neighbourhood which gave substance to what I was doing and put fear into Nell Casey. But I want to make it quite clear that I never knew William Duerden and never met him or the so-called Papershop Group. My tastes are quite other, thank you.

  I don’t imagine I shall be incarcerated for very long. Self-defence, you see, Nell Casey came at me like a tiger. You can kill without noticing you have done it and for a little while I did not. Come round, Nell, I said, stop playing the fool.

  For a while I thought of killing myself, but even though HE whom I loved has gone, I want to go on living.

  I shall be back to the theatre.

  The Theatre needs such as me.

  ‘I see now,’ said John Coffin, ‘that the business of strangling the toy dog was a substitute, a rehearsal if you like, for strangling Nell. And the blood on the plaster hand was a unconscious confession of guilt. “My hand is bloody,” he was saying. I wonder if he realizes that now?’

  ‘I might make use of Ellice,’ said Stella. ‘Do a real drama based on the case. Very much in at the moment, that sort of thing. Might ask Letty what she thinks. Saw her this morning. New emerald earrings and a suit from Bill Blass. I think we can say the money troubles are over. She didn’t say, but I believe there might be a new husband on the way … And she wants to talk to you about your late mother.’

  ‘I shan’t listen,’ said Coffin. ‘I’ve got my own worries.’

  ‘Oh, you must go on acting, stay with the Play Reading Group. You have a real gift for butlers and they are thinking of doing The Admirable Crichton.’

  ‘You know, Stella,’ said Coffin, remembering something. ‘When I saw the dead face of William Duerden, I thought I had seen it before … There was a chap who came to the Reading Group once or twice and never came again. Couldn’t have been him, could it?’

  ‘Even murderers must have hobbies, I suppose,’ said Stella.

  But it was Ellice Eden who had the last laugh. He discovered after all that he could die: he hanged himself in the cell in the remand prison when he was left alone for half an hour. Usually there were three other prisoners with him.