Coffin in Fashion

by Gwendoline Butler

  He stood there watching. ‘Wish I could lip-read.’

  But just watching was telling him something. They moved as in a dance.

  Now the boy Steve was doing the talking while Lily was listening, and that surprised him. The boy was going on at length with apparent fluency. From Lily’s back he could tell nothing.

  A shame not to be able to hear, but he knew if he took one more step towards them the scene would break up and he would lose them.

  In the end it was the woman who gave ground and the boy who stayed.

  No doubt he should report it, and probably he would.

  But, after all, what could he say? That he had seen the two talking?

  And it wasn’t his case.

  Not his case, but his feet thought otherwise. They followed Lily; sometimes, as detective, your feet do know best. He had to hope so, because his feet appeared to be following Lily, carrying him with them, willy-nilly.

  He went after Lily, not sure exactly what he would do. He followed her down one quiet suburban street after another till they approached the busy main road. Then she stopped and turned round.

  ‘You’re following me. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Go away or I’ll call the police.’ Her eyes flicked towards the main road where a uniformed constable stood. She had led him there neatly.

  ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you.’

  She thought about him. ‘You’re a policeman yourself.’

  ‘I thought you’d recognize it.’ The policeman at the corner was looking interested.

  ‘Don’t count on that, son. Or being liked the more because of it.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  The uniformed policeman had begun a slow, thoughtful walk in their direction. Explanations could be made, but might not be easy. Not his case.

  ‘So what do you want?’ Gabriel would have recognized that Lily was in one of her aggressive moods; they alternated with gentle or more co-operative states. ‘I suppose I ought to expect to be bullied. Spied on.’

  ‘No one’s doing that.’ Not strictly true, he thought; no wonder some people have mixed feelings about us. I did exactly what she said. Still, my motives were good. He added politely, ‘Mrs Bates?’

  ‘I’m in mourning, did you know that? My little nephew has been found. Dead. Murdered. More like a grandson than a nephew he was to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  By now she’d had a good look at him. ‘I’ve known you. I’ve seen you with Gaby.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Does she know about Ephraim?’

  ‘Not yet.’ But she’d have to be told.

  ‘I thought she didn’t. Or she’d have let me know. In a kinder way than you lot did.’

  ‘It had to be the police tell,’ he said deprecatingly. ‘Where do you live, Mrs Bates?’

  She nodded to one of the row of tidy brick houses.

  ‘Can we go in the house and talk? That’s all I wanted.’

  Also this young police constable was getting closer. Lily too had noticed the policeman by now and perhaps did not want to encounter him. ‘Yes,’ she said quickly, and led the way to the house without hesitation.

  Inside, Lily’s house was sunlit and quiet. She led him straight into an old-fashioned kitchen where a coal range gave out a dull red glow. He could smell cooking.

  ‘Always keep a casserole going in the oven ready for when I come in from work. Always been a working woman. Had to be, and keep my family comfortable.’

  ‘You a widow?’

  ‘No, I’ve still got Dad, but he doesn’t count for much now, poor love, he’s gone a little bit silly.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He can’t walk, though, his legs have gone, so you needn’t start having suspicious thoughts about him. He’s upstairs now, asleep. Or thinking. He does a lot of thinking even if he can’t say what. As harmless as a baby. More harmless than some babies I’ve known.’

  ‘I don’t know much about babies,’ said Coffin humbly.

  ‘Oh, it’s the ones that have a sharp look to them that you’ve got to watch out for. They’re the bad ones. Look like little old men, they do, sometimes. Then you’ve got to watch what they grow up like.’

  ‘Poor little things.’ He felt a serious sympathy for the little ones looking like their own grandfathers; he had probably been such a one himself. ‘And what about your nephew Ephraim? Was he one of the sharp ones?’

  Lily didn’t answer; she was bent down getting the casserole from the oven. The fragrant steam made his mouth water.

  After a bit she said, ‘I don’t know about Ephraim. I loved him, so it was harder to see.’

  ‘He lived with you?’

  ‘No. With his mother and stepfather and his grandmother. Nice old soul, but you have to think for her.’

  Lily looked as though she had been thinking for her whole family all her life; she was younger, by far, than she appeared.

  ‘Didn’t he have anyone closer?’

  ‘Not that were any good to him. He was born out of wedlock.’ She used the old phrase. ‘His real father’s in the Merchant Navy, and when we’ll see him next, I couldn’t say. Off the coast of West Africa when I last heard from him, and that wasn’t so very recent. As for his mother …’ She shrugged. ‘Here today and gone tomorrow, that one. Moved in with a boy that’s got a group. Then they got married. So there’s a kind of stepfather.’

  She made it sound like a disease. She had the casserole lid off and was stirring its contents. ‘Lot of them around at the moment.’

  He took the spoon out of her hand and laid it on the table. ‘And what about Steve Hilaire? Is he a sharp one growing up bad?’

  Lily put the lid on the casserole, and the casserole in the oven. She shrugged.

  ‘You spoke to him,’ Coffin reminded her.

  ‘Have you spoken to him?’ Coffin shook his head. ‘Perhaps you should. Try it for yourself, see where it gets you. Have a try. I had to speak to him, to find out what he knew about Ephraim; after all, he had Ephraim’s boots.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He makes me angry.’

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘He won’t answer questions. None of my Why questions. Nor How. Just didn’t answer. Or couldn’t.’

  ‘He seemed to be talking.’

  Lily gave him a look telling of her own sharpness. ‘Oh, you saw that, did you? Pity you can’t lip-read.’ Coffin had often thought the same himself. ‘He was talking. But there’s talking and saying. He wasn’t saying. He talked about nothing.’

  ‘Absolutely nothing?’

  ‘He talked about himself. That was nothing to me. I wanted to know when he’d last seen Ephraim. Where he’d last seen him. What they’d done together. The places they went to. Were they true friends? And why?’ She shook her head. ‘Nothing. He didn’t know. Or couldn’t remember. But about himself he practically told me what he had for breakfast. I’d like to be a policeman, he said. Or if not a policeman, then a doctor.’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘So he could make trouble for people,’ said Lily sourly.

  ‘Is that really you talking, Lily Bates? Saying these things?’

  There were angry tears in Lily’s eyes. ‘I used to like the little beggar. Time was when he was always around my house with Ephraim. I thought they were pals, real pals. I knew he kept it from his mother. I suppose I ought to have realized that if a boy could do that, then he wouldn’t be open with anyone else. I wish I hadn’t spoken to him now.’

  ‘You’d have done better to leave him alone.’

  ‘I wanted to know for myself, hard and clear, with my own ears what he knew about Ephraim.’

  Coffin said, ‘I think you took a risk, talking to him in the park.’

  He did not amplify nor did Lily ask the nature of that risk, but it was a comment he profoundly believed, an emotion rather than a rational thought. He was working on it. But what he seemed to be sensing was that the boy was dangerous.

  Somehow or the
other, he was not sure how, she had dished him out a plate of stew and he was sitting eating it.

  The kitchen was a homely, comfortable room. Everything that could be polished was polished, but nothing was new, all the furniture and equipment settled into their accustomed places as of long habit. It was cosy.

  I’m setting Lily in her context, Coffin thought. And Ephraim too. These are ordinary people. Steve and Rose are not ordinary people.

  ‘What did they do together? Any idea at all?’ He was trying to get a picture of the life that Steve and Ephraim had had together. From that life seemed to have come death.

  ‘Oh, they were always out. Away and off together. But I didn’t know where. You know lads. But they often came back here for their tea.’ Rose, her tone implied, was a poor cook and a worse mother.

  ‘And they’d talk? So you knew what they got up to?’

  ‘Not lately. Not the last year. Shut down, they both did.’

  ‘And that worried you?’

  ‘Yes. It did. But just lately – ’ she hesitated ‘ – just lately, I’ve wondered if Steve ever gave much away.’ Once again she hesitated. ‘He’s a manager. He can pull strings.’

  ‘Manipulative, you mean?’

  The word was alien to her and she looked doubtful. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me all this; it’s what I wanted to know.’

  ‘You’re a nice young man. I wouldn’t talk to everyone like I’ve talked to you.’

  ‘I know that, Mrs Bates.’

  ‘He saw too much of old Mosse. That house, it was a disgrace. Attracted the dregs.’

  ‘Yes. And I wanted to know about that too.’

  ‘A disgrace. He let himself and the house go. I hope you’ll be happy in it.’

  ‘I shall try to be,’ said Coffin soberly. If he got the chance.

  Lily saw him to the front door.

  ‘They were only kids,’ she said despairingly.

  ‘Only kids,’ said Coffin. ‘Steve still is.’ But a kid with Uncle Mosse and his house in his background, a house in which murder had been done.

  Uncle Mosse, retired eccentric, and a house in Mouncy Street; genetics and environment, the two strands in making a person.

  And you had to take Rose Hilaire into the equation.

  She came into it, mercilessly when he had heard what Gabriel had to say.

  Chapter Seven

  It was a warm evening. Suddenly and unseasonably warm. Coffin found it hard to tuck into Mrs Lorimer’s cold beef and salad after having eaten Lily Bates’s stew. Nor did he fancy it greatly; after some years away from Mrs Lorimer’s hotel and of looking after himself, eating exactly what he liked, it was hard to get used to her iron hand with a potato.

  All over Greenwich and down into Deptford and along in Woolwich, people were protesting at the sudden heat. It was unnatural, they said, hot days ought to start gradually, beginning with dawn, but this one had hit them suddenly between four and five in the afternoon. By six-thirty it was hot, with the temperature still rising. For some unexplained reason many housewives had cooked beef in one form or another that night and Coffin was probably lucky to find his second supper was cold, for all over South London people were pushing their plates back.

  ‘And what are you doing this evening?’ asked Mrs Lorimer. She was virtually retired these days, her hotel (where Coffin had once lived) turned into small flats over whose tenants she kept a stern eye. A favoured few like John Coffin could still be housed en pension, as it were. It was because of the overpowering force of this favouritism that he had chosen to move elsewhere, making the demands of his job the pretext.

  ‘I’m going to my evening class.’

  ‘Oh, which one? German, or the other one?’

  ‘The family history one.’ He could have lied, but he usually found himself speaking the truth to Mrs Lorimer; it was another reason for moving out.

  ‘Still intent on finding your lost brother?’ She shook her head. ‘A waste of time.’

  ‘I don’t think so. And I enjoy it.’ He did. If he hadn’t been a detective he might have been a historian. Indeed, there was a sense in which he was a historian: he loved investigating source material, going back to the originals, and patiently fitting one piece of evidence into the pattern with another.

  ‘It’s the girl that teaches the class: the one with red hair.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ Another thing she disapproved of was his passionate interest in the other sex. But he did like the young woman, a hoyden from Somerville who gambled on the horses and was always broke.

  ‘All right, what are you doing this week?’ It was a challenge; not for nothing had Mrs Lorimer been a formidable ARP warden in the war, and later a JP.

  ‘Parish registers. And I’ve done my homework.’

  She leaned forward. ‘Mark my words, no good will come of it.’ Then she relented: ‘Have some apple tart?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Her iron hand was even harder on the pastry, and affected its colour as well so that it looked dark and oppressed. ‘Too hot.’

  ‘I know what’s the matter with you: those dead boys.’

  ‘Not my case,’ he muttered.

  ‘No. But your house. And you can’t stop thinking about it.’ Well, that was true enough. ‘And you mind, reminds you of that other case.’

  At the beginning of his career, a friend of young John Coffin’s had been a multiple murderer, and he had learnt something of their nature. They were a strange breed, these killers who might or might not know their victims, but for whom the victim filled a need. Between victim and murderer there was a match, too; they slotted into position in each other’s lives like template and pattern.

  Other things he knew as well, and meant to look out for. Like the shadow such killers cast on others.

  ‘Do you ever hear from Stella Pinero?’

  He had fallen in love too at that time. He shook his head. ‘No.’ That was in character: Stella did not look back.

  ‘She’s certainly done well,’ said Mrs Lorimer grudgingly.

  ‘She’s a good actress.’ Perhaps even a great one; he always went to see her perform. Thus aiding his education because Stella was stretching her powers in the classics: Hedda Gabler, Lady Macbeth, St Joan.

  ‘You know Angel House is being turned into a Museum of the Theatre?’

  He nodded silently. Of course he knew. Rachel Esthart, a famous actress of her day, and a patron of Stella Pinero’s just as the then Chief Inspector Dander had been of the young Coffin, had left her Greenwich house to Stella.

  ‘Now there was an actress. Better than Stella, to my mind.’

  ‘Different.’

  ‘More heart. Shame she died so soon after that comeback.’ Mrs Lorimer was a keen student of the theatre and could swap phrases like ‘comeback’ and ‘a turkey’ and ‘papering the house’ with the best. ‘Seemed as if she had that one last flare of light before she went out.’

  Mrs Lorimer chewed her way through her own helping of apple tart.

  ‘Oh, that reminds me. That other young woman rang up.’

  ‘What other one?’

  ‘The new one: Gabriel.’

  ‘Yes, not my new one.’ But he knew she would be if he could work it. ‘What did she want?’

  ‘She wants to talk to you.’ Mrs Lorimer’s eyebrows rose. ‘We thought of better excuses in my day. You’re to telephone her.’

  They met, by arrangement, outside the entrance to the school where his evening class was held. With the inevitability of certain aspects of life, this was, of course, Hook Road School.

  ‘Coming in?’ he said. A few drops of rain were falling from the overheated sky.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Gabriel responded nervously. ‘I went to this school myself.’

  ‘So did I.’ Another thing they had in common. Hook Road graduates, both.

  ‘Let’s walk up and down while I tell you.’

  She was nervous as she handed out the story, but she told it vividly, her
body unconsciously acting out the story so that he could almost see and hear Rose and Dagmar.

  ‘Charley said I must tell you.’

  ‘Calm down, Gabriel.’ He put his arm round her thin shoulder. ‘Nice scent you’re wearing.’

  ‘It’s a new one.’ She relaxed a little. ‘American. They’re making good scent now. Quite different from a French scent, isn’t it? … So what do you think?’ Her voice rose. ‘I think she’s killed someone. Perhaps Ephraim. Or anyway, seen a killing.’

  ‘Seen a killing,’ repeated Coffin. ‘Well, she could have done. Thought of asking?’

  ‘No!’

  In the end, someone will, he thought. ‘Why have you told me?’

  ‘You’re a policeman.’

  ‘Not my case.’ That was going to be written on his heart.

  ‘Still – I saw her in Mouncy Street one night,’ said Gabriel suddenly. ‘I thought she was drunk. She was near your house, she sat on the wall.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘I can’t be sure. But it could have been about the time Ephraim disappeared.’

  ‘Who else have you told?’

  ‘Just Charley.’

  His grip on her arm tightened. ‘Gaby, let me explain something: this is a major case. A multiple murder case.’ A few heavy spots of rain were falling on the pavements like coins. ‘A lot of people will be involved. There is an Investigating Officer – he’s a kind of control figure; he has an Incident Room. But there is also a scene-of-the-crime officer, a photographer, a pathologist. Various forensic people, and probably a search team. That’s a lot of people, Gaby, and I am not one of them.’

  ‘Still …’ she said again.

  ‘I am busy on my own work: I am part of a team, legging it around London, working undercover.’ Gently he said, ‘So I’ve got other things on my mind, Gaby.’

  Triumphantly she said, ‘But I know.’ She corrected herself. ‘We know that you’ve seen Lily. And you were seen talking to your pal Jordan who is on the case. We watch you, you know.’ She nodded. ‘You are interested. We know.’

  Coffin stared at her; her little face was excited and interested. Intent, was another word.