Coffin's Ghost

by Gwendoline Butler

  She brightened a bit. ‘She was a great drinker, Lady Serena, did you know that? A real toper.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘My mother knew her, their paths crossed during the war. Both at Bletchley. Didn’t drink there, of course, but she did when she got out. Relief from tension, I suppose. It’s why she left her money to found a refuge. She saw she could go that way. Never married herself, but got beaten up once or twice.’

  ‘I never know when you are inventing things,’ said an exasperated Archie Young.

  Phoebe left his office laughing. On the way out she rubbed the leaves of the primula between her fingers and discovered that it was plastic. That settled the question: Adelaide Young was not the sort of woman to buy plastic flowers: Archie had bought it for himself.

  And that in itself raised an interesting question about the sort of man who would buy a plastic flower.

  She looked back at him almost with sympathy. Come on, Archie, life is real, not plastic.

  But as she ran up the stairs to her office (only the very top brass like Archie had their office lower down) she reflected that if anyone knew the world wasn’t plastic it was Archie Young. Think of the cases he had tackled: the Sacker murders, a whole troop of dead children; the arsonist of Perill Lane, and the woman who . . . No, bury the memory of that one, she killed herself in the end, God help her, if there was a God.

  The telephone was ringing in her room, she considered ignoring it, but decided against it. Experience had taught her that messages always get through if they bring bad news and only the good-news ones get lost on the way.

  Hard to be sure which the call was, she thought as she heard John Coffin’s voice.

  ‘Phoebe, I want you to come to dinner tonight.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ She liked him, always had done; she liked Stella, but it was a working relationship, an odd drink but no dinner invitations.

  ‘I have a missing-girl problem wished on me. Daughter of a friend of Stella. I can’t do anything myself, but you come and hear and see if you think there is anything in it. Then hand it on.’

  ‘Can you tell me any details now, sir.’

  ‘Daughter of a man called Robbie Gilchrist.’

  ‘Oh yes. I met him in connection with the Georgie Freedom case. I had to ask him a few questions.’ Didn’t like him but preferred him to Freedom who struck me as violent when he fancied to be. And he had made a snarling reference to the Chief Commander. ‘Did you ever get across Freedom? I don’t think he loves you, sir.’

  Coffin searched his memory. ‘Sure he doesn’t, now you mention it. I tried to get him for trading in drugs. Didn’t stick though. I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Right, sir.’ Watch your back, she felt like saying.

  ‘The girl’s name is Alice,’ went on Coffin. ‘He’s divorced from her mother but kept in touch. More or less. That’s about all I know at the moment.’

  ‘Age or anything?’

  ‘Only seventeen.’ But her stepfather had seemed vague, not the type of man to be sure about his daughter’s age.

  ‘Get me a report on Gilchrist and Freedom. Don’t leave him out. Check, as tactfully and quietly as you can, where they both were over the last forty-eight hours and the period before . . .’ For some of it, they had been at dinner with him, but never mind that.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I don’t like their attitude, jointly or singly, to a missing seventeen-year-old.’

  Not likely to have provided the legs and arms on the doorstep of the Serena Seddon Refuge, then.

  But certainly responsible for the edginess in the Chief Commander’s voice. He was worried about missing women and who could blame him?

  He knew that when he lived in the house in Barrow Street he had had a brief affair with a woman journalist.

  And knowing his fellow members of the Second City Force, he also knew that they knew about Anna Michael.

  Even as Phoebe was talking to him, a message was building itself up on the screen in front of her.

  The handbag found near to the package of limbs held a bloodstained photograph of John Coffin in an inner pocket. It had been cut from a newspaper, as yet unidentified, and was several years old. It was ragged and torn as if it had been about a bit, and only two-thirds of the Chief Commander’s face was there, but he was easily recognizable.

  He’s not going to like that, thought Phoebe.

  4

  Coffin did not like it, but he was not one to run away in the face of trouble. On the second day back at work and after some thought, word having got around to him about exactly what had rested on the doorstep of Serena Seddon House, he had insisted that Phoebe Astley and Archie Young give him the complete record of what they had. The word complete carried an emphasis. He suspected that there was more than the first file had shown him.

  And there was: a photograph of a smiling man with blood on his face. Not his own blood.

  Blood from who knew whom?

  The chief superintendent was occupied with checking the arrangements for a visit from the Russian Head of State. ‘Asked to see a Dickensian relic, some old workhouse or other that was knocked down when the motorway went through,’ he had muttered to Phoebe. ‘You go to see the Chief on your own and let me get on with this.’

  ‘You could take him to see the section house where I stayed for a night when I first came down from Birmingham, that was Victorian enough.’

  ‘I think they built that into the motorway . . . there’s something that looks very like it under exit two, only I think it’s a public lavatory now. No, you get off and handle the Chief carefully. I bet he’s twitchy about this. I would be.’

  Phoebe sighed. It was the morning shift and she was as well-groomed as usual. She wore very little make-up, but in the morning she applied a bright-red lipstick; as the day went on, it wore off. She was tall with a crop of dark hair which she kept well-cut. Amazed as she shot up to nearly six feet in her teens, she had then decided that the only career for her would be in the police. Or is this what she said?

  ‘Do you think he is fit enough to come back?’

  ‘Probably not. But that wouldn’t stop him. I’ve worked with him long enough to know that much.’ He added thoughtfully: ‘He knows how to make a good entrance, and, if he had to, he’d know how to make a good exit.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘Just go off, Inspector Astley.’

  So Phoebe had made the chief superintendent’s excuses and arrived with the folder of reports herself. She did so without comment. He could work out what they thought for himself.

  He raised his head from the file of papers to look Phoebe in the face. She had dined with them last night to meet Gilchrist and listen to his tale of woe.

  ‘Before we talk over the limbs on the step in Barrow Street, let’s clear the ground of extras.’

  Phoebe nodded.

  ‘There’s this missing girl, Alice Gilchrist. What do you make of it? You’ve heard what Gilchrist had to say, let him talk to you. As you saw, there is this worry that the limbs might be hers. We both had to spend some hours yesterday evening listening to him tell all about it. We both know that is rubbish: the dead woman, whosoever, is not a girl called Alice.’

  Phoebe shrugged. ‘Alice is in her late teens. Pretty, although a bit retarded, yet lively, if the picture her dad showed us is anything to go by. She’s gone off with a boyfriend, that is my guess.’

  ‘Seventeen,’ said Coffin thoughtfully. ‘About the right age, I suppose, to cut and run. Felt like doing it myself.’ In a way, he had actually done it, but he had not had much of a home to run from, and his mother had gone first.

  Phoebe nodded without speaking. In her experience, missing adolescents either came home or got in touch with their parents in the end. The days when they came home with a crying bundle in their arms were gone, but they might come back with a drug habit to be serviced. She had no illusions.

  ‘Yes, not one for you,’ said Coffin. Missin
g babies and children were looked for and usually found, but if all the adolescents who took themselves off were searched for, then the police forces of the whole kingdom would have time for little else. ‘But add her name to the register, and I will explain to Gilchrist.’

  The wine was good,’ said Phoebe. ‘Did you think that he cared one way or another? It sounded as though the pressure was coming from the mother.’

  ‘He’s a selfish bastard.’

  It had been a good meal which Phoebe had enjoyed, somewhat to her surprise. Stella was a skilful hostess, choosing food and wine which pleased her guests while bearing in mind that one guest was worried. Or claimed to be.

  To her surprise, considering he was a humped, complaining figure, seated across the table from her and swigging the wine like water, she had liked Robbie Gilchrist.

  Meeting Stella’s eyes, Phoebe recognized that she too felt the strong sexual charge emanating from Robbie Gilchrist. Without doubt, the Chief Commander picked up all these vibes too. His face was expressionless, a faint smile occasionally crossing his lips.

  He was running over in his mind the report on both Robbie and George Freedom.

  Because of the shortage of men and money, the report was short: on the night in question both men had been at a club in the Second City called Empire. It was on the site of a long bombed and gone (but fondly remembered) old cinema. It was respectable enough on the surface and doubtful underneath. Sex is its game, said the report.

  Both men could have come and gone, picking up chopped-off limbs, and depositing them. Could. It was hard to be sure.

  No one was in the position to say that they had done.

  Coffin eyed Gilchrist with some cynicism and possibly suspicion. ‘Like it to be you, chum, but is it?’

  ‘Glad you enjoyed the wine,’ he said.

  Was there a faint note of irony there? Phoebe had drunk deep and merrily last night, which Coffin had certainly noticed. I wasn’t drunk, though, she said fiercely to herself.

  He went on: ‘There may be a case to be investigated there, I don’t know yet, but in any case, it won’t be for you. I had a word last night with Gilchrist and he is going to use a private investigator.’

  ‘Which one?’

  In the Second City there were several outfits, some respectable and others not.

  ‘He had used Fraber and Shrewsbury for his divorce and will use them again.’

  Phoebe knew Geoff Fraber from her Birmingham days, he had been a good copper and a hard-working if not a clever detective.

  ‘He could do worse – Geoff Fraber will peg away at it and get somewhere if anyone can. Depends if the girl wants to be found, some do and some don’t. She may not be one of the easy ones.’ Phoebe ran over the details of what the father had said. ‘Did it strike you that there might be an element of self-hurt here? All those accidents, the slashed arm, the cut artery, that they might have been self-inflicted?’

  ‘It did cross my mind.’

  ‘In that case, she needs help because she might move on to suicide. Self-damage is often a substitute for suicide.’

  Coffin took a pace up and down the room. The dog, who was with him that morning, looked up in alarm. ‘I daresay Gilchrist has thought of this, he’s not a fool. But it is not our problem. We have plenty of others.’ He patted the file on his desk.

  ‘There is something I have to say, possibly contribute to this other bloody business.’

  Phoebe gave him a sympathetic smile and decided that silence was the best option.

  ‘You know that I lived in that house once . . . it was very different from what it is now. I had a few sticks of furniture in it, not much, because St Luke’s Tower was already being made ready for us, and Stella was busy with the first theatre . . . she’s done well since that beginning.’

  ‘Very well,’ agreed Phoebe. She fed him the next line in the script. ‘It must have been a difficult time for you, though, sir.’

  ‘Lonely. I’d come from the other side of the Thames, didn’t really know anyone here, and Stella was away a lot setting up the business side.’ He smiled. ‘I nearly went back home. Only I didn’t have a home. Living in that house in Barrow Street did not promote home-making.’

  ‘It does well now as the Serena Seddon Refuge. The warden, Mary, does a good job.’ Phoebe tried for the bland, neutral answer.

  ‘And now my name seems to be associated with the place once more.’

  ‘Only guesswork, sir.’

  ‘And my face,’ said Coffin grimly. ‘On a newspaper cutting in an empty handbag.’

  ‘I didn’t think it meant much, sir.’ A lie, she had wondered, debated, and thought, Yes, it must mean something.

  ‘Nevertheless, it was there in the file, you wanted me to see it. With blood on it.’

  Phoebe protested. ‘We thought you ought to see it.’

  ‘And who’s we?’ He knew the answer to that one: all the bloody Second City Force. Grinning all over their faces and avid for the next instalment of the soap.

  ‘No one’s laughing, sir,’ said Phoebe with dignity. And some truth: a lot of interest, some look in the eye that might be a laugh if it ever got out, but no more.

  ‘Who is in charge of the case?’

  ‘I am in overall charge. With Inspector Brownlow and Sergeant Davley. It’s all in there.’ She nodded towards the file.

  – I am going to have to tell her this before I tell Stella, Coffin told himself, and it’s the wrong way round. But here I can give her a strictly edited version, knowing she will read between the lines with that tact the police are noted for.

  But Stella will want the whole thing spelt out. She won’t need it done because she is very good at jumping to the right conclusions, but she will give herself the pleasure of watching me as I spell it all out.

  ‘When I was living there in Barrow Street, I was interviewed by a young journalist on the local paper. Anna Michael. I liked her. We became friends. She came to the house once or twice. I took her out to dinner. Max wasn’t open then. Before his day.’

  I hate apologizing, he told himself, especially to Stella. I hate admitting that I was in the wrong.

  Usually with Stella, I have managed to avoid it. Been grouchy, shifty and shuffled away.

  I am not proud of this.

  Perhaps he was overdoing the wallowing in guilt bit, but it seemed right to feel churlish.

  Phoebe Astley was still staring at him. ‘You said something but I didn’t hear, sir.’

  ‘I think I was talking to myself.’ A sudden pain on the site of the old injury made him draw in his breath.

  Phoebe saw it. ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  ‘Yes, just memory of where the knife went in. Pain’s like that. Gets you when you don’t expect it.’

  ‘You went a bit white . . .’ She stood up. ‘Can I get you something? A drink?’

  ‘Nothing. Sit down. I want to tell you something.’

  Phoebe sat down obediently.

  ‘The young journalist.’ The one who took my fancy, he said to himself. ‘Anna Michael was not her name, just her writing name. She was Joanna Carmichael. J.C.’

  Phoebe stood up again. Whereas just now the Chief Commander had gone white, now a blotchy red was creeping up his face. ‘I don’t think you are well, sir. You shouldn’t have come to work today.’

  Coffin ignored her. ‘Did you hear what I said? J.C., her initials. Her real initials. Joanna Carmichael. I think the limbs may be hers.’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible, sir.’ Privately, she thought the Chief Commander was having a kind of fantasy fit.

  ‘I want to see the limbs.’

  DCI Astley was not the only one who thought the Chief Commander had come back to his office too soon.

  Stella Pinero was even more anxious. She was worried about him, worried about their relationship. She had never seen him quite so troubled as he was now over what she called crossly, ‘Bloody Barrow Street.’

  She knew the Serena Seddon Refuge to which sh
e had donated money. When it was setting up, the St Luke’s Theatre Company had given a special performance of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (always a crowd-puller) to help raise money. Stella herself had performed in it.

  On this occasion she had met Mary Arden and thought her pretty and gentle, possibly too gentle for the disturbed and distressed women she would have to live with. Not to mention the husbands who would certainly be both disturbing and probably violent.

  I’d be better at it, she had thought. I mean, when you have coped with a cast of performers all rampantly enjoying one form of sex or another (she was thinking of the cast of Major Barbara which she had just produced . . . It was surprising how sexy Shaw was when you came up against him), then you can cope with almost everything.

  Mary Arden’s assistant she knew better because Evelyn’s husband worked in the theatre, a nice brawny lad with curly hair. A bit younger than his wife, Stella assessed.

  He had found an opportunity to talk to her about the limbs deposited on the Serena Seddon Refuge. His wife was upset, he said, and all the present residents were, as he put it ‘on the twitch’.

  ‘Must be a woman with some connection with the house, you see, Miss Pinero, and that makes them nervous. For themselves, each and every one having a close experience of violence. Her now, one of us next, that’s how they reason. And I’ve had the kid, Alice Gilchrist, she used that name, working for me. A nice girl, if simple, she’s off. It’s worrying. You can understand it.’

  Stella agreed that you could, but put in the proviso that the police would be watching the house and protecting the women in it.

  The warden thinks the limbs belong to a girl who used to live there . . . Helped run the place, I think, not a battered wife. French girl, Henriette. Etta, they called her. Supposed to have gone back home, but did she?’

  ‘Has she told the police?’

  Peter was vague, he didn’t know, might have mentioned it.

  ‘Why does Miss Arden think it’s this girl Etta?’

  ‘She hasn’t heard from her and she believes she would have done. Or ought to have done. But someone else was saying that she’d seen Etta around the town, and with a rough crowd.’