A kind woman but too full of sympathy. What the pot of coffee and biscuits said was: You were stabbed by that maniac, he wanted attention and attacking you was his way of getting it. You nearly died.
It was the second knife wound he had suffered. This time it had got to his liver.
I must watch out for knives, he thought. I seem to attract them, and some in the back too.
He drank some coffee. His first secretary in the Second City had been one of his mistakes: efficient, but hostile, wanting him to know that he was a newcomer, an intruder, here.
There were other mistakes, but she was his first, and at the time, all subsumed in his feeling that his coming here at all was one big mistake.
He had been promoted beyond his powers. The feeling niggled away inside him, taking away all pleasure at his new position – well, nearly all, he had to admit, some pleasure remained, he couldn’t help that. It was marvellous to have power, to feel the lad from the London Docklands but south of the river was now part of the Establishment. Albeit one with more than a dash of the revolutionary in him. But he had already realized that you needed this in the Second City, which was never going to be docile. The population of the Second City had lived through wars and depressions, been bombed, and was now rebuilt, had seen old industries fade away and been replaced by bankers and journalists, had seen the great River Thames lose trade but become more beautiful; he was moving into a city of change and he was part of the change.
But in this changing city, where he had to make his mark, he had enemies. Within the police team were men well-entrenched who had worked their way up and resented the arrival of the newcomer.
Flashy, playing to the media, talks too much, thinks too much, not one of us. These were the comments flung about, some made a hit, as some always will, and hurt.
Not one of us, was the criticism shouted the loudest.
At the same time, he was coping with the mountain of reports, letters and memos that a new position inevitably entailed. He was learning faces, sorting out friends and enemies.
And Stella, ah, Stella, was not with him. She was working in New York. He had missed her. At first, settling into the new job it had not been too bad, but Stella had stayed away. What was more, she had proclaimed that she was not coming back to live in that terrible house in Barrow Street. It smelt wrong to her.
She had already bought the St Luke’s Church with plans to start the theatre there, and even then the tower was being converted into her home. She would come back when it was ready to live in. Oh yes, when work permitted, she would fly over to see him, but he would have to rent a flat or take a room in a hotel. Barrow Street did not suit her.
It was the difficult side of Stella which he knew existed, he had met it before, and never known how to handle it.
And then he wondered, could not help wondering, who Stella had in New York. Was she unfaithful?
Suspicion was an evil plant, he had admitted to himself, but it was growing inside him vigorously at that time. A fine flower with a bad scent.
He had been feeling particularly depressed and irritable when Anna arrived to interview him.
In those early days he was still doing interviews for the press and the television programmes to get the Second City Police known and respected.
Or that was the idea put to him by the PR people.
This was when Anna came on the scene. At first it felt like an invasion. A one-woman invasion.
Anna Michael was young, handsome rather than beautiful, and dressed in a casual way in jeans and a thick sweater. She couldn’t have been more different from Stella.
Anna was tactful and admiring in the way she questioned him, so that to his surprise, Coffin found himself responding.
This interview took place in an office in the old Second City Police HQ, since then rebuilt. She talked about where he was now living in Barrow Street.
‘When I was a kid we used to think that Jack the Ripper had lived there. We’d frighten ourselves talking about it.’
‘You come from round here?’ He was surprised, she seemed, somehow, international, conceived in an airport, born on a runway.
‘Oh yes, sure. My father was a docker . . . in the days when there were dockers.’ She laughed. ‘He’s still alive, screwed a lot of money out of his employers as redundancy and took himself off to Scotland.’
‘Is he a Scot?’
She nodded. ‘Remotely. Great-grandfather. I’m Carmichael, really, but I trimmed the name down, better for a journalist to have a short name . . . takes up too much space otherwise. Not Anna either, but Joanna. I didn’t care for the initials J.C., they were too holy.’ She went on: ‘There was a famous murder in Barrow Street in the sixties . . . the Triangle Murder, it was called.’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘Of course. They got two killers, didn’t they? But there was one they never got. Dead anyway by now, I suppose.’
‘Probably.’ And to his surprise he heard himself asking her for a drink at the house in Barrow Street.
She accepted at once.
He drank some coffee, which was good and hot, and considered lacing it with whisky or brandy, but rebuffed the idea without much trouble, although in his younger, wilder days, before becoming the Chief Commander of the Second City Force, he would certainly have done so.
He had probably topped up his coffee on the day Anna came to do her interview.
By the time that interview came out, he and Anna had become – he hesitated to use the word lovers because he didn’t think love came into it, because he knew he had remained in love with Stella, but love or lust while it lasted, whatever it was between them was powerful.
Love, lust, technical terms for a jumble of emotions. Behind his emotion was anger and disappointment with his new position and irritation with Stella. He wanted something to soothe away the frustration.
Anger can be a powerful impulse to sex. For men, anyway. Different for women, perhaps. Better not dwell on that thought.
He would like to think there was no anger on Anna’s side, ambition, yes, he now thought cynically. But I admired Anna, he thought. She had force and energy.
She had brought a copy of Notable British Trials, containing the Triangle Murder in Barrow Street. The Triangle was the name of the seedy nightclub-cum-gambling-parlour-cum-brothel that existed there in the mid nineteen fifties and sixties. (Certainly three angles to that place, Coffin had thought, as he read.) A couple of CID men were sitting there drinking when a masked man shouting abuse and waving a shotgun, with his two pals, burst in and aimed at the proprietor, Alby Hilter, who fell down with a bullet in his chest. He died later.
The masked man turned out to be an ex-copper with a grievance whom the CID men were obliged to identify and bear witness against.
It’s different now, he thought, things were like that in the outfit then, which was probably one of the reasons I was brought in to the area, and I have cleared it all out. Although there might be one or two rattling nests I haven’t got to yet.
He remembered that he had thought of those few weeks as a pleasant interlude, helping him through a bad time, and he had been grateful to Anna and those regular meetings in Barrow Street.
A nice easy relationship, not meaning too much to either party. No guilt involved, later he might tell Stella all about it and she would be humane and understanding. ‘My dear,’ she would say, ‘life is like a war, you are entitled to your comfort.’
Stella, in fact, would never talk like that, her dialogue, honed through years of the best playwrights, was sharper.
Or more likely, he thought, taking another drink of coffee, she would have given me a swift blow and stalked out of the room. Not forever, his behaviour would not have rated that high in the range of life’s misdemeanours, she would have been back.
Anyway, he hadn’t told her. Or not yet. He trusted that the initials J.C. and the terrible offering on the steps of the house in Barrow Street were not a preview of what was to come.
She had called at the house in Barrow Street, spontaneously, unasked, when he was working. He had gone down to open the door himself, there was no one else, he had no servants. The house was kept clean by a commercial firm with whom he had not much contact.
An image of that last time came sweeping back from beneath the careful stones he had buried it under. Not a memory to keep on display.
She swayed through the door; she had long legs, and skirts were minimal that year, and tight as well.
Tucked under her arm, she had something long and thin, wrapped in silk. A very pretty pink and blue printed silk, Italian silk for sure.
‘What have you got there?’
Without a word, Anna slowly unwrapped the silk. Inside was a whip.
‘I thought policemen liked a touch of violence.’
Coffin was silent. Then he said – he remembered the words so clearly – ‘That’s been your experience, has it?’
She just smiled.
Coldly, he said: ‘I don’t think it would be an aphrodisiac for me. I doubt if it would bring me to the desired consummation.’
Anna looked at him for a long minute, with no expression on her face. Then, in a soft, gentle voice, she said:
‘Pompous git.’
She swung round and made her exit, wrapping up the whip as she went.
‘You’re not worth a flick,’ she threw over her shoulder as she closed the door behind her.
They never met again. He made cautious enquiries about her and knew that she had left her post on the local paper . . . or been sacked, stories varied, and disappeared. She might be around still, if so he did not know where. Just as well.
She couldn’t come walking out of the past without her legs, he thought dryly.
He took another drink of coffee, which was still hot, so he could not have been far away in another world, another time, for long. Then he opened the file that Phoebe Astley had handed him and studied the medical report on the limbs found in Barrow Street.
You should go to your grave with all your limbs attached, he thought. But many didn’t.
Sex: Female
Colour: White
Age: Between 25 yrs and 45 yrs
A bit of guesswork there, he thought.
Height: 5′ 8″
Weight: Nine stone
Shoe size: 7
Hair on legs and arms: Light brown to ginger
Fingernails: bitten
A tall thin woman, probably a redhead, and large feet.
Anna had been tall but not thin; still, women changed, lost weight. A woman heading to the sort of death this woman had had, yes, she might well have lost weight.
She hadn’t bitten her nails, nor dyed her hair, but who could tell what time and trouble did for you.
Identifying marks:
1. Scars on left wrist, possibly the result of a suicide attempt
2. Damaged bone on left ankle
3. Scarring on the right leg
Blood Group: O
He hadn’t known what blood group Anna was, but O was about the most common.
Drugs in blood:
Desmethyl-Diazepam traces were found which is a drug breakdown product from several tranquillizers such as Cloraazepate (found in Tramene) or Chlordiazpaxide (found in Librium and Tropium) and Diazepam (found in Valium)
Anna might have been on drugs even then. These were all sedative-type drugs. Some of the details matched with Anna, but without the face, how could you be sure?
Neither of them had made any attempt to keep in touch. Coffin knew danger when he saw it and he had seen it then in Anna.
It was possible that the remains left on the steps in Barrow Street were those of Anna.
One of the three telephones on his desk rang, this was what he called his private line and was the only one which Stella used. She was careful, scrupulous even, about breaking into his working life.
Stella wasted no time. ‘Darling . . .’
That meant business, it was the theatrical darling, meaning nothing, except here I come and I have a request to make.
‘Yes?’ Coffin was cautious.
‘Robbie’s very worried about his daughter. His stepdaughter, really, but he loves her and she took his name.’
‘I gathered that last night.’ Was it last night? No, it was a bit longer ago than that. He had been so deep in the past, that the present was hard to hold on to.
‘Yes, but more worried . . . She’s missing, really missing, not just playing. She hasn’t got a very high IQ. Learning difficulties, they call it, don’t they? She’s lovely to look at, by the way, a beautiful girl, but a simple soul. I had her working in the theatre, in the wardrobe and so on, that side of things, she did well enough while they kept it simple. Then she went off without a word. She’s an innocent and he thinks she’s in real trouble.’
‘He can tell, can he?’
‘He thinks so. He’d like your advice.’
‘Well,’ began Coffin.
‘He’s important to me.’ She didn’t say darling again, but it was there in her voice. ‘And the limbs found on the house in Barrow Street . . . well, he’s wondering if they could be his stepdaughter, Alice. That’s her name . . . her mother married George Freedom next . . . not with him now.’
What a lot, Coffin thought. ‘Where does the girl live and how long has she been missing?’
‘She lives in a room her mother found for her in the Second City. She works three times a week. I gave her the job here. She is seventeen, and innocent.’ Stella hesitated. ‘That’s one reason for worry, she may not be able to protect herself.’
‘Stella, that unlucky woman was older and more battered than the young Gilchrist girl. It cannot be her.’ Not if she was young and lovely.
‘But, if there’s a killer out there –’
He interrupted her.
‘What is it you want?’
‘Could you meet us for a drink in Max’s, about six? We might eat there afterwards if you feel like it.’ Max and his restaurant was the favoured eating place for those working in St Luke’s Theatre Complex who could afford his prices, which had risen sharply in the last year. Max also ran the various bars and eating places in the three theatres.
Coffin, whose income had not risen as sharply as Max’s prices, was thinking about it, when Stella said: ‘My dinner.’
Stella, although out of work, was temporarily rich: the theatres were doing well, while a TV series she had done was endowing her with money for repeats from North America, Germany, Australia and from what Stella called the Monkey Islands. She used to complain that her TV series travelled much more than she did. A false complaint, since Stella hated to travel except in the greatest luxury.
‘If I am going to be an expense item, I accept.’
‘You are all right, are you, love?’ This time the affection was genuine. ‘You sound a bit strained.’
‘Just the first days back at work.’ And digging myself up. I may have a confession to make to you, Stella. ‘And a rather tricky murder.’
A set of limbs, anyway, we have to assume the body and the murder.
‘Don’t, love,’ said Stella solemnly. ‘You are too important to worry about the odd murder.’
He laughed. He never felt important.
‘You’re uneasy, though, I can tell, and that means you are involving yourself. Take my advice: work out what is bugging you, find it, and then leave it. You don’t need it.’
She put the telephone down gently.
‘I need the face,’ Coffin said aloud. ‘Where is the head?’
Phoebe Astley was thinking this too. ‘We had better find the head and quickly. If it’s not in a freezer or such, it will be deteriorating rapidly. Wasn’t there a killer who boiled the heads to keep them what he called “nice”.’
She was having a conference with Chief Superintendent Young, if you could call their conversation such: she was tacitly seeking support and advice from
this so much more senior figure. They were meeting in his office, which was tidy and very neat, with a potted plant, small and tidy too, on his desk. She thought his wife had provided the dark blue primula. Her own office was not tidy.
‘That was Dennis Nilsen,’ said Archie Young. ‘I believe he did cook bits of bodies, but I don’t know about heads. I should think the hair might make a difficulty there.’
Phoebe, who had dropped her observation in to see how Archie reacted (she knew that immensely experienced and tough as he was, he still had his squeamish side), had to admit that he had capped her.
‘How are we going to give her a name? Fingerprints?’
‘I don’t think so. Not unless she has a record and even then . . .’ He said no more. No need. The computer might go through all the fingerprints of all the females with criminal convictions, but even that would take time. Could be done, no doubt.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We need her doctor. With all those drugs inside her, she was on someone’s list. We just have to send out a letter to all GPs in the locality of Barrow Street and hope one of them holds up his hand.’
‘Yes,’ Phoebe sighed. ‘We’ve already started on that, of course. Tony Davley is in charge of that operation.’
Sergeant Antonia Davley was an up-and-coming young officer whom Phoebe liked. She had accepted the task of checking on all local doctors and hospital clinics without pleasure, but determined to do her best. She had sent a circular letter out. She was assisted by one detective constable who kept pointing out how hopeless it was.
‘And any of the women who have stayed in the Serena Seddon House who have the initials J.C. Or anything like it: J.G., I.C., or even just a J or just a C.’
‘You’re joking there, I suppose.’
‘Not a joke in me . . . and going back before it was the Serena Seddon Refuge House,’ Archie Young went on.
‘Agreed,’ said Phoebe sadly.
Coffin's Ghost Page 5
