Cold Coffin

by Butler, Gwendoline

  ‘Anon would be easiest, but it’s too late.’

  There was a short thick-set figure, male he thought, it was just conjecture, sitting on the door step of no. 18, eating a stuffed bagel and making a messy job of it. He moved aside as they came past, giving them a bright, birdlike stare.

  ‘Almost human,’ observed Phoebe as she pushed past.

  Coffin raised an eyebrow. ‘Now, now.’

  ‘Joke,’ she said hastily. ‘He’s probably a mathematical genius busy working out the answer to quantum physics versus relativity.’

  Coffin looked up and down the street, which he knew to be one of those streets in his bailiwick where a car could be stripped down of all, including the tyres, in a matter of minutes. It was now full night, so even more dangerous.

  He went over to the seated figure, pushed two coins into his hand and said, ‘Same again if the car is still there and in one piece when we get back.’

  Sam nodded without a word and pocketed the money.

  Natty and her husband were not the only people waiting for them. There was a third person, sitting on a hard, wooden chair, looking white and tired. Coffin and Phoebe were offered similar chairs. It was one of the bleakest rooms that Coffin had seen: plain white paint, cream walls, and a scattering of rugs on a polished wooden floor. Mugs of coffee stood on a round table.

  ‘Dr Murray’s husband,’ said Phoebe. ‘He just got here.’

  He came forward, held out his hand. ‘Dave Upping . . . Margaret’s my wife.’ Then he corrected himself. ‘Was my wife. We were married all right, but she chose to keep her single name.’ He was talking nervously and too quickly, as if he wanted to get the words out before they escaped him. ‘I’ve been away. I work abroad a lot, I was in Paris, I’d taken the train . . . I can’t believe she’s gone. I want to see her.’

  Coffin introduced them both. ‘Chief Inspector Astley, and I am Chief Commander Coffin. I’m sorry if we’ve been slow.’ Upping, on the other hand, had been very fast.

  Dave nodded. ‘You didn’t have to introduce yourself. I’ve seen both of you around. I’ve even cut your hair once, sir, although you’ve forgotten.’

  No answer for Coffin there, so he did not try to give one.

  ‘I got the message on my mobile. I was already on the way home . . . I was near Waterloo, on the Eurostar. One of your chaps met me at the station and brought me back. Kind of him. Appreciate it. But I want to know, want to see her.’

  ‘Glad we could do so,’ said Coffin. And of course, it establishes that you were in Paris at the relevant time, and not over here killing your wife.

  ‘I believe I will have to identify Margaret,’ he said. ‘Someone has got to.’

  ‘Later,’ said Coffin. ‘Just a formality.’

  ‘How was she killed? I know she was attacked, and I know where, in that bloody museum, but how?’

  ‘She was shot. Probably by a handgun, but we don’t have the weapon.’

  Dave said in a dull voice. ‘I knew it was murder, of course, not an accident.’

  Coffin thought: It’s most often husbands who kill wives.

  You could buy an alibi, or hire a gunman. Check. Check the man, Phoebe. She caught his look.

  ‘How was that?’ Phoebe had been silent; now she spoke.

  ‘Margaret had been worried. I thought perhaps she was ill or wondered if she was. She said no.’

  ‘But she admitted to being worried?’

  ‘She didn’t deny it.’

  ‘No clues?’

  Dave shook his head.

  Phoebe looked at Nat, who shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I was worried myself about her, but there was nothing I could put a finger on.’

  ‘Right,’ said Phoebe. ‘Later on we will be taking statements from you.’ She looked at Natty and Jason. ‘From all of you. Just routine, something we have to do. To get places and people and times clear.’ She gave one of her radiant, kind smiles that meant nothing. ‘And, also, taking a look at Dr Murray’s house.’ Which we will search thoroughly and ruthlessly, just to see what we can find.

  ‘It’s my home too,’ he said dully.

  ‘Don’t worry, we shall not make a mess.’

  Thus laying out, whether he knew it or not, the pattern of the next twenty-four hours. You got these jobs done at once, or their validity drained away like water from a bowl with a hole in it.

  People, witnesses, could be such tellers of untruths. Rooms, objects even, did not like it, but had to be caught quickly before time altered them, corrupted their first honesty.

  Natasha stretched out a hand quickly. ‘Don’t worry, Dave. We’ll be with you, won’t we, Jason?’

  ‘Every step of the way,’ Jason said promptly.

  ‘Stay here tonight with us. Don’t go home until tomorrow.’

  Dave smiled. ‘Thanks. I’ll be better off at home. On my own.’

  Phoebe produced a small plastic bag in which rested the golden ring that had rolled from Margaret Murray’s pocket. She held it up so they could all see.

  ‘Do you recognize it?’

  ‘No.’ Dave stared at it. ‘Looks like a wedding ring. Not Margaret’s; she never wore one.’

  Natasha looked it and shook her head.

  ‘May not be important,’ said Phoebe easily. ‘We’ll find out.’

  The mobile phone rang in her pocket. ‘Excuse me.’ She disappeared into the hall.

  She was soon back and gave a nod to the Chief Commander. He tried to read her expression but failed.

  ‘Inspector Dover will be round with Sergeant Helen Ash to take your statements and to go over the house and so on. He will set up all the arrangements.’

  Coffin gave her a small nod, which let her know they would be off for now.

  When they were outside in the car, Coffin turned to her. ‘Well?’

  ‘You asked for the blood to be tested pronto, sir.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Good guess, sir. There was blood of two types: O and AB.’

  ‘Both pretty common.’

  ‘Margaret Murray was O.’

  ‘So we are looking for an AB killer.’

  Phoebe drove on in silence, there was a knot of traffic to get through. When she was clear, she said, ‘The AB blood was loaded with morphine . . .’

  ‘A user. I suppose that might make identification easier.’

  Phoebe drove the length of the street before adding a further bleak comment.

  ‘Yes, also HIV positive.’

  Coffin absorbed this in silence, then, ‘What about the trace of blood on the skull?’

  ‘It’s difficult to get a type from such a small trace, and one that has been in water, but he’s trying . . . One thing though he did say and I dare say you’ve thought so yourself: that particular skull cannot have been in the water long else all the blood would have washed away.’

  Phoebe thought she knew where the blood could have come from.

  ‘Hospitals are the place for blood,’ was what Stella said when he got home and told her.

  The police investigators of the two sets of killings, those of Dr Murray and the women in Minden Street, had as yet no intimation that the Walkers Club, an occasion rather than a formal gathering, numbers variable with some hangers-on, and meeting in the local library, in the park and at the local supermarket, was later found to be intimately involved with the deaths.

  The members had only one thing in common: childbirth. They had met at ante-natal and post-natal classes, agreeing that if there was a time when you needed friends it was when you had a baby. The children got older but the Walkers – they had all pushed prams, hadn’t they? – stayed together.

  4

  Later on Friday. On to Saturday.

  Stella repeated her observation as she handed him a drink. ‘Hospitals are the places for blood.’

  Coffin accepted the drink. ‘I don’t know about the hospital. It’s likely the blood came from the killer.’

  She could be very acute. ‘Was there a weapon on the mu
rder scene?’

  ‘No. And yes, we saw the importance. If Dr Murray carried a weapon that inflicted enough damage to make her attacker bleed so much, then where is that weapon? Not on her, or by her, or underneath her.’

  ‘Perhaps he . . . I say he, but of course . . .’

  ‘It could have been she . . . yes, perhaps the killer took that weapon with him, along with his own.’

  It was impossible, Coffin found, to avoid the masculine: he was convinced this killer was a man. But he had been wrong before.

  ‘Be interesting to see that weapon . . . gun . . . if it hasn’t been dropped in the river.’

  ‘Don’t keep reading my thoughts,’ growled Coffin, but he did it affectionately. He was used to Stella’s intuitive advances into his mind. ‘Yes, we must find the weapon. It may have been used before.’

  ‘In Minden Street?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘If it’s the same killer, then what is the motive?’

  Coffin shrugged. ‘You tell me. Perhaps the killer is a seriously deranged person.’

  ‘A loony.’

  ‘There are more elegant ways of putting it, but yes. It’s not an elegant world out there.’

  ‘Hate, revenge, those are motives too,’ said Stella.

  ‘It’s the tiny skulls that I don’t like. There’s a message to be read there, but I can’t read it.’

  ‘You’ve got a loony at work,’ repeated Stella, chewing an olive. She saw her husband’s expression. ‘All right. I take that back. Not worthy of me. But I have had half a dinner, a long wait in the car, and a drive through the past . . . although I don’t think we got there.’

  ‘I did,’ said Coffin in a low voice.

  ‘And I think I have had too much to drink,’ went on Stella.

  ‘Not you, you’re never drunk.’

  Stella laughed. ‘It’s because I’m a performer. I can cover it up. Still, it’s good sometimes to sit a bit loose to the world.’

  ‘Is that what you are doing now?’

  ‘Stops my thinking about all those sad babies. The primitive early ones, buried in the grave near your office, and all those lined up in the museum as teaching specimens . . . I think that’s worse, truly.’

  She was drunk, Coffin thought, and prepared to get weepy any moment. Not like his Stella. She never cried, except professionally.

  He stood up. ‘I’ll make some coffee . . . I could do with some myself.’

  Before brewing the coffee, he went up the winding staircase to the very top of the tower, where the workroom had been contrived for him. His study he would not call it, because what did he study there? But he did work there.

  At the door, he hesitated; he could see that the answerphone had no message for him, nor was the fax spewing out a ribbon of paper.

  Good. So far so good.

  But there was something about his room. His work table had not been moved, he could still sit there looking out of the window across to the old churchyard, but he felt as though someone was looking at him.

  He swung round. Someone was looking at him. Serious bronze eyes stared back. Bronze eyes in a bronze face.

  It was a stylized bronze portrait bust with all the features and neck slightly elongated. Not unpleasing, but not natural either. The arms were folded across the chest, with the hands extended. The hands were very long and thin.

  The bronze was on a black pedestal to the right of the door. All was normal in the rest of the room, his room, except for this bronze visitor. He gave a checking glance round the room. No other intruder.

  ‘I hope you are a visitor,’ he addressed it carefully. ‘And not here to stay.’

  As he walked past it, he saw that the creature possessed another arm; a third arm protruded from the right shoulder blade . . .

  He closed the door carefully behind him.

  He was tired, but he knew he would not sleep. Too many unpleasant images were floating around in his head.

  The kitchen was clean, neat and empty. They had no animal present, the last incumbent, Gus, was still in the animal clinic, determined to come home. Coffin missed the friendly presence. He would have liked to have had a cat comfortably asleep in his basket. The basket was still there, but empty.

  Coffin felt deeply depressed, especially when he discovered he was making tea instead of coffee and had to start again. He took particular care about arranging the china, the fine bone stuff that Stella liked (a long life in the police had accustomed Coffin to the thickest of china mugs), and getting out a few biscuits. Stella would not eat them; she was counting the calories again this season.

  ‘What about getting a cat?’ he asked Stella as he pushed into the sitting room with his tray.

  She turned to look. ‘Watch it, you’ve got a spot of coffee on your sleeve.’

  Better than blood, he thought, as he dabbed at it. Come to think of it, if the killer had spilt all that blood, wouldn’t he have it on his clothes too? And if so, why hadn’t someone noticed?

  Hospitals were places for blood, as Stella had observed. Perhaps he ought to be looking for a surgeon.

  A mad one, according to Stella.

  ‘It was water,’ he said, rubbing at his sleeve. But that other spot on his trouser leg was coffee right enough; he hoped Stella would not notice. She abhorred spots on clothes, whereas any copper would tell you that they went with the job.

  He knew he was at the stage in the case when, had he still been out in the field doing hard graft, he would have admitted to being in a muddle. From which, with hard work and co-operation from the rest of the team, a truth would emerge.

  As a rule.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, while you were making the coffee.’

  ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘That too.’ She drank some coffee. ‘I did dream a bit, one of those short little dreams . . . And I thought: Not killing the babies, but kind of collecting them.’

  She looked at him, wide-eyed. Just so might Mary Shelley have looked at Percy Bysshe as she read him passages from Frankenstein, with Byron listening.

  It was quite an idea, Coffin thought.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, Stella. All the other infants were long dead, thousands of years, but forensics have now told us that the modern one is probably nearer a hundred, an easy task they said.’ It looked as though it had been stolen from the museum and planted among the much older skulls.

  ‘There’s a rational element here, Stella. This killer is organized, I swear. He does it his way.’

  He had read that there were two sorts of serial killers: the organized and the disorganized. He thought he had an organized one here.

  ‘A two-headed monster,’ said Stella sleepily as she sipped her coffee. ‘I’m going to try to get Peter Storey to give me his new play.’

  ‘Is he writing one?’ Storey was a golden name in the theatre.

  ‘He’s always Writing one. All writers always have a play or a novel in the bottom drawer.’

  Her husband was not paying her much attention, still caught up with his own thoughts about the killer. ‘Maybe organized is not quite the right word,’ mused Coffin. ‘More just lucky.’

  ‘If you say he is organized,’ declared Stella with great loyalty, ‘then he is. You always get it right.’ She then took away some of the force of this statement, by saying, ‘Whatever being organized for murder means. Do you mean he is paid?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, but I might consider it.’

  ‘Any news of Joan Lumsden?’

  ‘None. Or if there is, then no one has told me.’

  ‘Oh, you would be told.’ Stella was incredulous at the idea that her husband could be kept in the dark.

  Coffin shrugged. ‘His mates would close ranks.’

  Slowly Stella said, ‘You can’t mean they think he killed her . . . they would never protect him then.’

  ‘No, but they might not help to drop him in it.’

  Silence, he thought, was a great weapon.

  ‘He’s o
n leave, I suppose?’

  Coffin nodded. ‘Seems best. Anyway, he’s not in any shape to work. Apparently.’ There was a little chill in his voice, suggesting that he did not quite believe in Detective Constable Lumsden’s ill health. He was under pressure, certainly.

  ‘What about the blood in her car?’ The story of the blood had figured a great deal in the press, so it was no secret. ‘Is it hers?’ Blood again, she thought, a lot of blood around at the moment.

  Coffin shrugged. ‘Not known. She isn’t around to check, and many people have blood of her type. It is certainly not his.’

  ‘And it is human blood?’

  ‘A good guess, Stella – that question was raised since their dog is missing too – but, yes, it is human.’

  He got up and started to move about the room. ‘Dead or alive, I wish she’d turn up.’

  One of the men who had worked with Lumsden had said that he thought Lumsden missed the dog as much as his wife. This joke (question mark here) had been passed on to Coffin. It showed how Lumsden was rated by his colleagues. You didn’t make. that sort of joke about someone you liked and respected.

  He’d known a copper like that himself in his youth; he could still remember his name, Len Daley. A man who had worked by the rule, doing his job but without imagination. He was probably a high-ranking officer by now, but he had never come Coffin’s way, so it was guesswork.

  ‘Could be dead,’ he said aloud.

  Stella waited to hear if he amplified this statement, then asked, ‘Who is dead?’

  Coffin stared at her but he did not speak; he was far away.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  He gave himself a shake. ‘To myself. A ghost walking.’ Then he laughed. Ridiculous to think of Daley as a ghost when he was probably alive, prosperous and master of a household. If he had a household, then he would certainly be master of it; that was his style.

  ‘Am I master in this household?’ he said aloud to Stella.

  She looked surprised. ‘Now what are you talking about? First ghosts, and now masters of households . . . Let me tell you, no one talks in those terms now.’

  ‘Some of them still think it,’ said Coffin humbly. ‘And I only asked.’

  ‘Well, the answer is that you are not.’