Coffin's Game

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘If Sir Fred turns up, give him a drink and keep him happy.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Masters, watching the Chief Commander’s retreating back.

  On the staircase, Coffin met Phoebe Astley. ‘Just coming to see you.’

  ‘Good. Come with me on this call, then you can tell me what you think.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think about,’ observed Phoebe mildly.

  ‘You’ll find out. Tell me, I suppose the usual teams went over the theatre after the body was found?’

  ‘Still doing it, I think. It’s a big job.’

  ‘Not found anything?’

  ‘Not yet, as far as I know.’ Phoebe did know, but loyally said nothing about the fact that the forensic and SOCO teams had enjoyed the theatrical company so much that work had gone slowly. She herself had delivered a sharp kick to them only that morning.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ She was moving fast to keep up with him.

  ‘We’re going to the Production Room.’

  Phoebe raised an eyebrow, but followed without a word. When the Chief Commander was in this mood, it was best to do as asked, without fuss.

  One lone figure, Sergeant Bailey, was in the Production Room. He looked up in surprise as the Chief Commander came in.

  ‘Morning, sir.’ He stood up.

  ‘I want to see the register.’

  Every artefact connected with any crime, great or small, was bundled up in a plastic bag, entered in the register, together with the name of the officer who brought it in, the date, and a few identifying details.

  Silently, the sergeant handed the book over. ‘It’s all on the computer as well, sir. We’ve never lost anything yet.’

  The joke was ignored as Coffin studied the register.

  ‘I want to see Number 33741.’

  He waited while Bailey checked the shelves, brought a step ladder, and climbed up to search the top shelf.

  ‘Here you are, sir. Brought in by Sergeant Miller.’ He pointed to the signature and the date. He was a man who liked everything authenticated, well suited to the job he did, which many considered dull. He found a certain romance in these objects once touched by a crime, so never to be let loose in the world again. Kind of sacred, in a way.

  Coffin took the bundle to the long trestle table in the middle of the room where, under the centre light, witnessed by Phoebe and the sergeant, he opened the parcel.

  A dark pair of trousers, and a very loose black jacket.

  ‘These were found in the house in Percy Street. Thought to have been left there before the bomb fell.’

  ‘So?’ said Phoebe.

  ‘I think they were worn by the killer over the killer’s own clothes.’

  ‘Is that just a guess, sir?’ Phoebe was careful to be formal.

  ‘No, if you study the video of the street scene you can see a figure dressed like this following di Rimini.’ A wolf after his prey. Coffin was spreading the clothes out on the table. ‘Did they ever come under forensic study?’

  ‘No, they were not thought to be connected.’

  ‘Sloppy thinking.’ He stretched out the jacket and then the trousers, examining both inside and out. He was slow, taking his time. There was a stain at the crotch, to which he pointed. ‘Now that is an interesting stain.’

  ‘It’s on the inside –’ protested Phoebe.

  ‘Yes, think about that. Get a proper forensic study done for me, and sooner than soon. I want to know about the blood.’

  ‘I’ll see to it, sir.’ She looked at Sergeant Bailey, who moved towards the telephone, muttering about a messenger. ‘But sir … no blood analysis is much good to us, without a suspect to match it to.’

  ‘Use your mind, Phoebe,’ said Coffin briskly. ‘You are a woman.’

  ‘So you’ve noticed,’ Phoebe muttered under her breath.

  He marched out of the room. ‘Come on, the sergeant can get on with that, I want you with me.’

  ‘Going where, sir?’

  ‘To the theatre. You had better drive, I want to think.’

  The entrance to St Luke’s was blocked by two police cars. Phoebe double-parked her car beside them.

  ‘Something’s up,’ she said. As she did so, her phone began ringing. She picked it up. ‘Sir,’ she called out, as she listened. ‘Sir–’

  But Coffin was out of the car before her, moving rapidly into the foyer. A uniformed constable greeted him with a surprised salute.

  ‘What is going on?’ demanded Coffin.

  The constable was about to answer that he didn’t know much but he knew that traces of a lot of blood had been found and that Miss Pinero –

  He was interrupted by the appearance of a detective sergeant who seemed surprised at the arrival of such a high-level visitor, but also relieved.

  ‘Sergeant Lomas, sir. We had a call about a lot of blood –’ He in his turn was interrupted by the sound of barking. ‘That’s the dog, sir,’ he began.

  Coffin was off, through the swing doors behind the box office, through the darkened theatre, following the sound of the dog. ‘Thought you had a team going over the theatre,’ he called over his shoulder.

  ‘Must have got called elsewhere,’ said Phoebe as she followed. Curse them, she thought, I’ll have their lights and livers, or Archie Young will. ‘There are about three cases on the go at the moment, sir.’ Excuses, excuses, she was muttering, I will kill them regardless.

  There was a WPC at the door of the property room. Inside, Stella, Alice, and Mr Gibb stood grouped together at one end of the room before the opened doors of a big cupboard. Nearer the door, and huddled together, were a frightened group. Coffin recognized Jane Gillam and Irene Bow, and there were a couple of young men whom he did not know, except by sight.

  Augustus was barking and whining, rushing between Stella and Alice. When he saw Coffin, his barking increased in fervour but he did not move away from the women.

  Coffin walked up the room, nodded to Stella and Alice without speaking, then went through the double doors.

  There were indeed traces of blood; stale, dried blood, and plenty of it, even though an effort to scrub it away had been made. A bucket with bloody water in stood at the end of the little room. There was more blood here. A trolley of the sort used to move props around stood, blood on it.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Coffin, coming out. ‘So this was where Pip Eton was killed.’ And how his body was moved. Cover it up with a sheet or blanket and you could move through the corridors with some impunity.

  Stella began to say something.

  ‘Be quiet,’ ordered Coffin, his voice stern. ‘And keep the dog quiet.’

  Stella picked up Augustus, who kept up a low grumble.

  In a low voice, he said: ‘So this is where you killed your fellow conspirator.’

  ‘No,’ Stella cried out. She tried to take his arm.

  ‘Not you.’ He moved away. ‘You, Alice, you.’

  He was aware of Phoebe Astley, together with the detective sergeant, moving quietly up the room towards Alice. She was shaking her head from side to side.

  ‘Keep away, you lot,’ she called, without turning to look. ‘Or I won’t answer for who gets killed.’

  ‘Oh, I daresay you have a knife up your sleeve,’ said Coffin. ‘But you won’t use it.’

  ‘I won’t need to, everyone knows it’s all her,’ she nodded at Stella. ‘Your lovely wife. All her doing.’

  ‘No, that won’t wash. Stella is in the clear. You are not. We can prove you were in the house with di Rimini.’

  ‘The old transvestite? Oh, big deal.’

  ‘The clothes you wore to kill him, you left them behind and went home in jeans and a sweater. We will probably track that down on the video.’

  ‘You’ll have a job proving they are my clothes,’ she laughed. ‘What rubbish!’

  ‘We will track you at every street corner till you got back to the theatre: picture of a killer. And we will examine the clothes; there is blood inside the trous
ers …’

  Alice shrugged. ‘So what?’

  ‘I’m making a guess it’s menstrual blood, Alice. You were bleeding yourself when you stabbed him. Are you always worse at those times?’

  ‘Stop it, stop it. I hate that talk. You’re all doing it, shouting. The walls are shouting at me. I can hear them all the time.’ She was still moving her head, then a steel blade had appeared in her hand. ‘I may not be able to kill your wife, but a slash or two down her face won’t improve her looks.’

  Stella made a small noise.

  ‘I don’t want to harm her, it’s self-defence. It was you we were after all the time. Orders, you know. Get close to you, compromise you, get you out. Pip was to do the job with help from Stella.’

  ‘And he didn’t get it right, so you killed him. Maisie knew it was you. She had sold you some of Stella’s clothes, and was about to say so. Pip, first, then her.’

  ‘It was me or him. I think he liked Stella, he was going to tell her everything.’

  ‘Thank you for putting it into speech. There are witnesses.’

  She did not bother to look round. ‘Stop shouting at me. I won’t be here. No one will touch me while I have this knife … And I have friends who will get me away. A pleasure to go … I hated you, you know. You would play the big benefactor, the kind man, but you are selfish and cold. A proper careerist. Because of you, my father died. I knew that and I knew it would be a pleasure to drag you down. You think Pip Eton recruited me and Charles Mackie? No, I was looking for someone like him. I couldn’t get in fast enough.’

  She put out a big strong hand which gripped Stella by the shoulder. The knife, long and bright, was in the other hand. ‘I’ll take her with me for safety. Touch me and I will drag this knife down her face.’

  Coffin drew back.

  Alice began to push Stella towards the door. ‘Let me pass, you lot.’

  But at the door, Augustus wrenched himself out of Stella’s arms. As she staggered backward, free, the dog went for Alice. She kicked him away as she pushed into the group at the door and through them, Augustus following.

  ‘Don’t bother touching her,’ called Coffin. ‘A woman running through the streets with a peke pursuing her will be picked out on every camera in every street. Let her go. I’ll warn them. She may lead us to the centre control she must have had, if not, a patrol will take them in whenever – Astley, take over.’

  He walked towards Stella. ‘Bloody you,’ she said angrily, rubbing her elbow where she had fallen.

  ‘I said I would have to apologize and I will … but later.’

  Followed by the cameras, Alice was picked up some forty minutes later entering a house to the south of Spinnergate Tube station. Augustus was still with her, footsore and weary.

  The house was later raided by a special police unit; three men were arrested in connection with the recent bomb. Bomb-making material was found in the garage.

  ‘They aren’t the whole unit,’ said Coffin to Tom Lodge later, ‘but a good part of it. Some others blew themselves up.’

  ‘Good work,’ said Sir Fred, even later. ‘I congratulate you, Chief Commander.’

  Later still, Coffin made his peace with Stella. Over a special dinner at Max’s restaurant.

  ‘You aren’t really as angry as you act, are you?’

  ‘Yes, I am. Furious.’

  He looked her in the face and smiled.

  ‘You can pour me some more champagne. We might need another bottle. I hope it costs.’

  With a sigh, he said: ‘I apologize, I repent, I confess – will that do?’

  Stella considered. ‘A bit more detail is required.’

  Coffin buttered one of Max’s special bread rolls. ‘Even now, I can’t tell you some things. I knew about you and Pip and the place in Fish Alley, I’ve told you that. I was to get you out of it all … I knew how dicey Alice was, her father had told me. I knew I was in the game, but I shouldn’t have asked you to give her a job. For that I apologize.’

  ‘Apology accepted.’

  ‘I didn’t know how much she hated me. I should have thought about it long before Edinburgh. But my game was to get Alice … unluckily, her game was to get me.’

  Stella considered. ‘Pip’s death … She can’t have done all that on her own. She must have had help.’

  ‘Yes, I think Maisie helped. Not in the killing – I don’t see Maisie as a killer – but afterwards – in the tidying up, in the transport of the body on that barrow, skip – whatever you call it. And keeping watch while the body was moved. Yes, she could have helped there, but I guess that was also the time when she took fright and thought about confessing. And so Alice killed her.’

  Stella shook her head. ‘And Maisie did all this for money?’

  ‘Alice had her hooks well and truly in by then, but Maisie liked her, strongly.’ Coffin studied his wife’s face. ‘Just guessing. You never noticed anything? I think one or two of the cast did.’

  ‘I knew about Maisie, we all did, but she kept that side of her life from me, she knew I wasn’t that way.’

  ‘Money and sex,’ said Coffin. ‘They come in everywhere.’

  Stella was considering what she had heard. ‘And is that all? Was anyone else involved?’

  Coffin decided that honesty was best. ‘I expert so, my dear. You have to face it. This is not the end, there is more to be found out. But my guess is that the theatre will be in the clear. I wonder about those builders, though.’

  Stella sipped her champagne. ‘Let’s take the rest of the bottle home. Max won’t mind. We mustn’t leave Augustus alone any longer. He is exhausted, poor boy.’

  ‘He deserves a medal. I hope you aren’t too tired?’

  Stella looked at him under her eyelashes. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’

  THE CASE OF ALICE YEOMAN

  When the case came to court, a plea of abnormal menstrual tension was put forward by the defence. This plea was rejected by the court, which accepted the Crown’s medical assessment of manic depression leading to a psychotic state.

  The prisoner was committed to a secure mental hospital for the duration of the Queen’s pleasure with the provision that if she responded to treatment she might be released into the community.

  Coffin visited her in hospital, he being her last friend, or unfriend, in the world. She seemed normal, but probably was not.

  She wanted to discuss the affair and her involvement with the bombers. ‘Blew themselves up, didn’t they, so I’ve heard.’

  ‘Yes,’ Coffin said. It had been in the papers. ‘By mistake, as they were packing up to disband. They had rented an empty garage down by the river.’

  ‘I know. I put them on to it.’

  ‘I’m surprised they let you into their group.’

  ‘I had a passport,’ she said gleefully. ‘You.’ Then she added: ‘And a lot of local knowledge – streets, houses, garages, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I wonder that they trusted you.’

  ‘Oh, they didn’t, not a lot. Kept me on the edge, but I enjoyed it, because I meant to drag you in through Stella and see you go down, down, down.’ She kept on repeating ‘down, down’. Then she said: ‘I expect they would have killed me, too, in the end.’

  So they might, thought Coffin. You were hardly the ideal terrorist. A one-woman terror campaign.

  ‘I was determined to soil you, degrade you.’

  Thanks, he thought. ‘Why did you leave di Rimini’s finger in a handkerchief belonging to Stella?’ Ask a silly question, get a silly answer; but no, what came out was rational enough.

  ‘It implicated Stella in his death, like dressing him up in her clothes and using the other chap’s underpants – well, I didn’t think of that; Corner left them behind, I suppose,’ she sounded shocked. ‘Di Rimini must have put them on. As for me, I paid him, I knew his ways from that place we both drank in. He thought we were making a film, so he dressed himself up, he did a bit of porno posing for dirty pictures. I knew the chap who did them, that’
s how I got the picture of Stella faked, do anything with a camera, that man could. Give you his name, if you like.’

  ‘We found it out,’ said Coffin grimly.

  ‘So?’ She was disinterested. ‘Di Rimini didn’t have to do any acting, just lay there as asked, and then I stabbed him and hit him. Stabbed him first. He squeaked a bit; I reckon he owed a fingernail – and he didn’t miss it, he was dead. Moribund, anyway,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘It does take time for some people to die. Then I went away. No one takes any notice of what you do in Spinnergate if you look as though you are working, as if you have a purpose.’

  ‘You certainly had that. What about the other deaths?’

  She shrugged. ‘Oh, you know how it is. I had to kill Pip Eton, he knew it was me. I even went to the hospital with him to jolly him along. I thought he might kill Stella for me, but all he could do was to try to threaten her, and through her get at you. I went to Linton House and suggested he might kill Stella, but he wasn’t up for it, and he was beginning to threaten me. So I did him. I fancied to by then. Maisie, of course, had to go, and she knew it. She knew I bought clothes off her and she soon knew why. Couldn’t trust her to keep quiet.’

  ‘A lot of killing in a short time.’

  ‘I am nimble – you can do it if you are nimble.’ She leaned forward. ‘Don’t tell them here, but I might be nimble enough again.’

  Alice fell silent, no more to say.

  All gone, Jerry, Andrew and Charles. And her victims.

  And her father whose death she blamed on Coffin – had she really loved him so much that only a string of deaths could exorcize his memory?

  At Christmas, Alice Yeoman sent a card from Bishoptown Hospital, Surrey, to John Coffin with the message:

  SEE YOU WHEN I GET OUT.

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