She wasn’t drunk, Coffin thought, but tired and letting words go to her head. Or rather her mouth.
‘It’s no joking matter.’
‘Who’s joking? I’m not joking. In fact, I am quite melancholy about it all. I knew the chap. Not for what he was, of course, simply just as a good-looking chap who came my way.’
So he was good-looking. Coffin noted. ‘How did you get to know him?’ Not a question to ask Phoebe, who followed where her wind of fancy took her.
‘He came round to talk about my bomb damage and we went out to have a drink. We planned to … well, never mind what we planned, that’s off.’
‘He might come back.’
Phoebe pursed her lips. ‘No good. If he comes back and works for T. Lodge and Co, why is he cosying up to me, I ask myself. To find out what we know that he or his masters might like to know? Then again, if he is really working for the other team, the prospect of what he wanted from me is even worse. No, a straight up-and-down builder was all I was looking for.’
A faint, very faint, set of ideas were beginning to take shape in Coffin’s mind. Let it settle, he told himself. See what happens. Sleep on it.
He realized with surprise that he might, after all, sleep. He paid Max, gave him a healthy tip, and saw Phoebe home. Or did she see him home? He could feel her resolute, sensible presence beside him as he drove home.
At the bottom of the stairs, he took a deep breath. The telephone was ringing; he moved fast up the stairs. It might be Stella.
But no. ‘Inspector Lodge here, sir. Could we talk?’
He was unsurprised. ‘Yes, I thought you might want to.’
‘I knew you would guess, sir. I put up the act of being willing to hand over the case to Archie Young, but, of course, I can’t do that. Not entirely. He knows it, too. Pete Corner is my man, I must be interested. Those were his clothes … I have to find out how and when and why he parted from them. Also where he is. We have a system for keeping in touch.’
‘I know.’
‘He hasn’t used it. He may have reasons – I hope he has – but if he doesn’t turn up soon, then he has to be found. It’s a bit of a problem. We have his clothes, but not his body … And that’s apart from other complications.’
Who but the Todger would refer to Stella as a complication?
‘Do you want to come round here and talk further?’
‘I suppose I have said it all, sir. I shall be digging, of course …’
Digging was the word, and whatever he dug up, even if about Stella Pinero, would be in his hands, and those who controlled him.
‘I understand,’ said Coffin.
‘Knew you would, sir. I can’t help myself.’
Of course not, the Todger was only part of a network. As he was himself, for that matter. ‘Better to have everything out … whatever.’
‘There is something else: I have been a little concerned about Corner myself lately.’
He put the telephone down.
No Stella. But Augustus was asleep on the bed. He raised his head, muttered something, then went back to sleep.
Coffin sat on the edge of the bed while he thought about life. There was a smell of Stella’s scent on the bed linen which even the furry smell of peke could not overlay. Coffin closed his eyes.
He was beginning to see Stella more and more as victim. He leaned back against the big square pillow, and closed his eyes.
The darkness stayed with him as he slept, but now writhed and twisted in strange shapes. Every man’s horror was upon him: he had lost his wife. Worse than losing a cat or a dog, a shade worse than losing a child? Nothing between them: he had lost a wife, had lost a child, he knew how it felt, but Stella was something more, she was part of his whole life, woven into the fabric.
When he woke into daylight, with the dog sprawled by his side, practically eyeball to eyeball, the presence of Stella had faded somewhat. She was still there, but more comfortably, as if she did not want to cause him too much misery.
It had turned warmer by the time he got to his office. He could see through the windows of this modem building where men in shirtsleeves were moving around, answering telephones, or watching flickering screens.
He hurried past, nodding a brief good morning to the outer office so he could get to work. Work would be his salvation, as it had been once before. It would not bring Stella back from wherever she was and for whatever reason, but it would make it easier to bear. A sense of her did not exist in this office.
There was plenty of work, not all of it connected with the bomb in the Second City. The day-to-day routine, which he had initially resented and performed badly, he had now come to enjoy. He was good at it too – or quick and neat, anyway, which counted as virtue. On a day like this, it was as good as aspirin and better than whisky.
The Second City was getting steadily more crime-ridden. In front of him he had a letter suggesting that something should be put in the water piped to families with a record. No recipe given. The front office ought to have filtered this letter out, not sent it in for his consideration. But perhaps they wanted to give him a laugh.
Then he read the signature: the writer was a distinguished member of the House of Lords. A tactful reply would have to go out to a man who was on one of Coffin’s important committees, a man he might meet socially tomorrow or the next day, and who clearly had become exceedingly eccentric.
The thought depressed him but, hell, what did it matter? Senility was nature’s way of easing you off the scene, maybe allowing you a little amusement on the way while giving plenty of annoyance to your friends and relations.
He worked away quietly, dictating letters, handling telephone calls as put through to him, ignoring the voices from the outer room. Paul Masters seemed to be in good tongue.
It was still mid morning.
Then Phoebe rang: ‘Archie Young and the Todger combined forces and made Dennis Garden begin work really early. He hated it, but did the job. He’s just about ready to announce what he has found, cause of death and so on. The Todger and Archie are there now and I think they would like you to be there too … In the circumstances.’
‘I’m busy.’
‘Won’t take ten minutes.’
‘Are you sure you don’t already know and can’t tell me?’
‘I am absolutely sure. I will come round and drive you.’
Dennis Garden received them all in his office in the University Hospital. It was a big new hospital and he had a big new office.
He looked pale, being up too early in the morning did not suit him, but he was freshly scrubbed and smelt of a mixture of disinfectant and verbena.
‘Nice to see you, Chief Commander.’
No one shook hands. ‘So what is it?’ asked Coffin.
In a few short sentences Garden told them what would be in his report. He said the man died from a stab wound, but he had had a weak heart, so nature had helped, then he was beaten about the face, fingers cut off, and laid out afterwards. Dead about four days.
‘Did he struggle?’
‘Possibly,’ said Dennis Garden. ‘But he was not a healthy man, and he had been out on a cold night.’
‘Are you suggesting exposure, then?’
Garden shook his head. ‘He might have suffered from chilling, but he had taken a mixture of drugs beforehand. It all weakened him, though I agree, the absence of a struggle is puzzling.’
Coffin began thinking it out. ‘So why was he got up like that? For a bet? For money? Someone picked him up? I wonder where that was.’
Archie Young cleared his throat. ‘Near the Armadillo in Power Street probably, that’s a likely spot.’
‘A good guess,’ agreed Dennis. He was subdued and quiet, not his usual manner of brisk confidence that God was in Dennis’s heaven and all was right in his world. ‘Not that I have any personal knowledge of the place,’ he added stiffly.
Coffin wondered about that; he could imagine Dennis at a table there, quietly leading the band. ‘But we
are no nearer establishing identity,’ he said.
‘Not quite. He was known to me. We met occasionally. He’d been on the stage; nothing great, period drama, panto, that sort of thing. He liked dressing up.’ As you live, so you die, Coffin thought.
‘He went up for parts even now every so often – didn’t get many. He had a tiny private income so he survived. As I say, I knew him socially. Di Rimini, he called himself. Not his real name; he liked play acting. If someone offered him money to dress up, he’d take it.’
Garden was offering an interesting suggestion: di Rimini had been paid to put on the clothes. Coffin could believe it.
Coffin looked at Archie Young. They knew Garden’s ways socially. It depended what society you moved in.
‘Would you call him a friend?’ he asked bluntly.
‘In passing. In passing only. A young friend.’
‘But you knew him. So there was really no point in cutting off the fingers and rubbishing the face.’
‘Of course, I can’t say about that,’ said Dennis stiffly. ‘That’s for your teams to decide. But whoever killed him could not have known that I had met him and that I would be doing the postmortem.’
Nor known that you could recognize his body even if his face was gone, thought Coffin cynically.
Dennis Garden met no one’s eyes but twisted his lips wryly. There was not much more to be said. Promising a speedy official report plus photographs, he opened the door for them. Relieved, Coffin thought, to see them go. ‘This is all off the cuff,’ he said, as Coffin passed.
Coffin nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Pity him being one of Dennis’s boys,’ said Phoebe, as they made their way out. ‘Muddies the waters a bit. You could see Dennis feeling it.’ She did not hide the satisfaction in her voice. ‘He shouldn’t mix it so much; one sex or the other, not both at once.’
‘Really?’ asked the Todger, something of a puritan. ‘Difficult operation, I should think.’
‘It can be done,’ said Phoebe, smiling. ‘No personal knowledge, of course.’ She reined in the smile as she spoke to the Chief Commander. ‘May I drive you back to the office, sir?’
‘I am sorry about Dennis Garden,’ said Coffin, once they were alone in the car.
‘I’m not, I enjoyed it.’
‘I could see you enjoying it.’
‘He was rude to a friend of mine once.’ The car was moving swiftly through the streets. ‘Pity about the dead man, but he was going to die anyway. This way someone picked him and found a use for him. First time in years, I should think. Except for Dennis, of course.’
‘You knew what Dennis was going to say, didn’t you?’
‘Let’s just say that with the help of a friend who works in the mortuary, and a little intelligent guessing, I knew something.’ She smiled. ‘Might as well come clean: Francesco di Rimini, under his real name of Edward Bates, did a little work as a snout, as did my friend. I gather Bates did it more for the pleasure of nosing round and picking up scraps of info – which might or might not have been true – than for the money.’
‘Might have been why he was killed.’
‘Doubt it, don’t you, sir? He wasn’t big time.’
‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘Oh, you would have been informed. I just got there first.’ They had arrived and Phoebe parked the car neatly where he had but a few paces to walk to the main door.
Coffin was still thinking it all over. The puzzle remained: ‘But why kill him at all? Why use the body, dress him up, make him look like my wife?’
‘Ah, why indeed. To get at Stella?’
‘Again, why?’
Phoebe transferred her car keys from one hand to the other then put them in her handbag. None so blind as those … she murmured to herself. ‘To get at her is to get at you.’
Coffin digested this, which he knew already, so Phoebe was not being as clever as she thought she was. ‘Well, it hasn’t hit the news desks yet.’
‘Not yet. But it will. The press and the TV will know soon, but Archie and the Todger will be sitting on them. Won’t last. Be in the Evening Standard lunch-time editions, I expect. Mimsie Marker will be selling in the hundreds.’
‘Especially if –’ he stopped.
‘There won’t be a mention of Stella. Not at first.’
‘No, I can’t make up my mind what to do.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Can’t send out a general search message, she’d kill me.’
Then he heard himself say loudly: ‘I think she’s dead. I think Stella is dead.’
‘If there had been an accident, you would have heard by now.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of an accident.’
‘Stella wouldn’t do anything silly,’ said Phoebe. ‘She wouldn’t kill herself.’ She had a sudden picture of the vibrant, lovely Stella, of whom she had nursed some jealousy but nevertheless liked for all that. Besides, Stella valued her own appearance and even in death she would not damage it. A woman knew the strength of that feeling, thought Phoebe.
‘Not suicide,’ said Coffin. ‘Murder.’
The loved ones of those who go missing fall into two groups: those who are convinced the dear one will come back even as the police are trying to get them to identify a dead body, and those who know from the beginning that the loved one is gone for ever. He could hear his own voice now, trying to bring reason to both parties, rational, quiet, useless words.
Coffin was surprised to find he belonged with the second group.
Chapter 4
On the river near to Petty Pier stood a large house which the proprietor, Emmeline Jessimon, ran as a set of small service flats. The only service she gave was to change the linen and towels and tidy up once a week. Linton House had been run as a small hotel, but Mrs Jessimon had decided that one-room flats – self-catering, of course (she provided a minute kitchen unit with a tiny cooker and refrigerator) – would bring in a greater profit with less work. Money in advance, naturally. Two of the flats were occupied by lease-holders. One, an elderly widow called Mrs Flowers, was no trouble; the other was a tenant who came and went, as well as sometimes lending the flat, or so it seemed, to friends. This flat worried Mrs Jessimon. But on the whole it was easy work, she said to herself.
Usually this was true, and she had the help of the caretaker from the school round the corner, who helped with the boiler and the rubbish. True, he was on holiday at the moment (Bermuda, of all places), but she had his stand-in, a young chap called Vince. What a name for a man who cleaned out the drains in an emergency – if that was his real name; on occasion he seemed to forget, which made her wonder. Still he was nice, if silent, and she liked his help. But tenants had their own ways of making a nuisance of themselves, from falling asleep while smoking and setting fire to the sheets, to breaking such china as she provided. There was a notice in each apartment proclaiming CATERING ON REQUEST, but as one tenant, a theatrical on tour, had said: It would be a brave soul who faced Ma Jessimon’s cooking. In fact, she just went round the corner to a Chinese takeaway.
On the same day that Coffin decided that Stella was dead, Mrs Jessimon (the Mrs was honorary) was checking up on the tenants in one of her apartments. First the quick let.
An interior monologue went on: Gone then. Luggage gone, clothes gone. Not that they had much. Fly-by-nighters, knew that the minute I set eyes on them. Can’t fool me. Still, they paid for the week. Money in it for me. I might let it again. Change the linen, tidy up, check the fridge – don’t want anything going bad in it. Remember the time that man left an uncooked rabbit in it? Thought it was a dead baby, I did. Perhaps it was, for all I know. Into the dustbin with it. Nothing there this time, not even a bottle of milk. Now milk, when not too stale, comes in handy.
Then she moved on to the next tenant, the permanent one, if you could call her that. She had been in. Paid for everything: milk, bread … She came with a man, but it was her that paid. You don’t see that so often, even these days. I think men should always pay, it’s what they are for
. Lovely looking, she is. So was he. In a way. Younger than her. I suppose that’s what she paid for.
No, I mustn’t be unkind. He must have fancied her – kept his arm round her all the time. Must have been hot. It was a warm day.
Never heard them go. Not that it matters.
Could that be blood? Drops of it, on the floor. I’ll never get that out of the carpet. Now I must be sensible, he probably cut himself shaving. Or she did … stupid to think otherwise. Don’t want the police prowling round. It’s her place. Not my responsibility. Tidy up, close the door behind you. Lock it. Quietly now. The tenant in number four likes to listen.
That’s it, quietly down the stairs. You could fall and break a leg, you’re so strung up. Never mind. A glass of sherry will do the trick. No, gin. It’s a gin day. A gin and tonic, and a nice cup of tea and a rest. Then you can tidy up the room. A pity she couldn’t do it before she left. It’s a woman’s job. All that blood. A man should pay and a woman leave things neat and tidy.
Nor should a woman notice things better left unnoticed. I didn’t notice the kitchen knife on the floor.
She came with a man, and she’s gone with a man.
Across the Second City in the casualty department of a big, anonymous hospital, Dr Allegra, junior registrar, was so tired that he was talking to himself. Most of it was aloud and listened to by his patient; some, however, was a silent conversation in his head.
Lost a fair bit of blood, muttered Dr Allegra to himself. Bit more and there would have been real trouble. Don’t think a transfusion is needed here. Just as well, since the hospital is short of blood. Funny thing to be short of: there it is pumping away inside everyone in the city, millions of pints, but you had to get it out, keep it sterile and spend money on it, then shove it into people. And money was short. Of course, if you were dying you would probably get blood. Better not to count on it, though. Three months as a junior reg had made a natural optimist into a cynic. He did not believe the patient’s version of what had caused this wound.
Aloud, he said: ‘This may hurt a bit, I shall give you a local, but you will probably still feel it … Yes, sorry about that … About a dozen stitches, I think.’
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