It was at this moment, with a faint feeling that made the hair on his head prickle, that Coffin got the first intimation that even if it was not his case, he himself was in it.
Right in it.
We know, she’d said. Damn you, Gabriel, you’ve opened my eyes and no one enjoys that.
He was seeing it all so differently from Gabriel; he was seeing it from the other side of the mirror.
And he was looking at his own face.
Of course Jordan was taking time off to talk to him, and of course he was observed, probably on all sides.
It was his house.
That investigating team he’d talked about, they were probably passionately interested in him.
In the nicest possible way, of course. Young Coffin? Decent chap, this business can’t be anything to do with him. Still, we’d better look.
You bet.
He wiped his forehead.
Hot. Was it getting hotter?
As the heat of the evening mounted, Rose Hilaire opened all the windows in her sitting-room to let air in.
There was a lot of bad feeling floating around her house and by opening the windows she hoped to let it out. The smell that floated back from the river with its docks and factories was unpleasant, like her life at present.
One chink of light had appeared, however: Steve was talking to her. Not a lot, not saying much, but offering observations voluntarily, as if there was a relationship between them.
Not necessarily that of mother and son; Steve had detached himself from that hook and would never be hung on it again.
Just as well, perhaps, but for Rose, not so easy. One tiny little fragment of her would always be a mother.
But at last there was a kind of to and fro between them, more like a tennis match perhaps than a genuine conversation, with words being patted back and forth, but Rose at least was grateful for it.
She leaned out of the window, trying to enjoy the fresher air; a scent of burning rubber drifted in. To the west was a soap factory; she could smell that too. ‘Good old Deller’s,’ she murmured.
Steve was sitting in front of the television set watching a pop show.
‘What’s that you’re listening to?’
‘“Ready, Steady, Go.” Pretty Things.’
‘Noisy.’
‘I like them. Better than the Stones.’
‘I thought it was all the Beatles.’
‘Oh – ’ he was dismissive ‘ – wouldn’t miss them.’
‘Time for you to go to bed.’
He got up almost at once without argument. In that kind of way he was never any trouble. It was good behaviour. Or, looked at from another point of view, it was most abnormal.
‘Good night,’ she said to his back. From the back he looked just like anyone else.
What she longed to ask him was: ‘Have I ever been missing for any time, Steve? Been away and not come back when I should? Acted strange? Have I ever come back with blood on me?’
But these were questions you did not ask.
Because he might say: ‘Yes, Mum, once or twice you did. And I happen to know it was you that put Ephraim’s boots in my bag.’
She sat back in her chair by the window and let the hot air play over her face.
She relaxed and her mind ran free.
Soon she felt a different person. Or the same person in another skin.
The murderer came out and sniffed the air temporarily. Hot. There was something stimulating about the warmed air so heavy with the smells of living. For the murderer it summoned up memories of shared moments. These were valuable, photographs in an album. A black album.
One or two anxieties came with the memories.
A pity about the boy’s boots. That was a mistake. Looked a good idea. Wasn’t. The murderer thought about it, still finding it almost as amusing as it had seemed at the time; the murderer’s sense of humour was childlike, adolescent at the best, but secretive. All the best jokes are private.
A joke against authority that now didn’t look so good. The trouble with being what you were was that although your judgement was impeccable, the rest of the world just didn’t always know it. They would never know the utter thrill. It had been spicy, really rich, having the body ‘at home’, as it were, over the holiday, when Belmodes was empty. The body at rest in the cupboard in the women’s room. Then, before the holiday ended, removed, which involved a certain amount of dragging. It would be better to be stronger in the arms, help could be summoned, but some tasks one did on one’s own. Leaving the pants in the cupboard was possibly a nothing, and picking up the reel of red thread in the boots simply accident, done goodness knows how. The world, of course, would look for plan and purpose here, not knowing how much a creature of serendipity you were, not knowing, just doing.
They’d learn. You were what you were, and the world would just have to learn.
Rose woke up from her sleep (if it had been a true sleep) and stirred. She thought she could hear someone moving about. Or was it just noises in the skull? She had plenty of those too.
‘Is that you, Steve?’
Silence.
Chapter Eight
It was not too hot to sleep: in Coffin’s life it had never been too hot or too cold or too anything to find oblivion. Sleep always came to him easily and quickly, very often unexpectedly, burying him when he wasn’t looking. Death would be like that for him, he always supposed. But tonight his thoughts were stamping around his mind wearing heavy boots.
They were beating a clear path. The path towards Uncle Mosse of Mouncy Street. Turn which way you would, Edward Mosse, retired and dotty, and his house in Mouncy Street were always there, a kind of terrible citadel.
He knew without doubt it was a path he was going to walk: the path to old Mossycop.
The place was vital.
Victims sought out their killers. Yes, that was acknowledged. You had to look for a pairing between murderer and victim.
But places, too, sometimes cried out for their crime.
The house in Mouncy Street had been such a place. He could see that now.
Created so by Ted Mosse, lover of uniforms, not too honest, deceased.
It was, after all, no real mistake that his body had been falsely identified as being there. Uncle Mosse had wanted to be dead there, and since he couldn’t achieve it for himself, his clothes had done it for him.
There are no accidents in murder. It all comes about as deliberately, if unconsciously, contrived.
Then Coffin thought: No, that’s a bit fancy, boy. But he did have fancy thoughts sometimes, nor were they always wrong.
A fancy thought popped into his mind then, handed to him by the tutor of his evening class.
When you don’t know where to begin your investigation about your family, she had said, start talking to the last generation back, then the one before if there are any survivors. They were there, raid their memories, make your start with them.
Get in touch with the eldest living contacts, Marina Marsden had said, her big blue eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. No wonder her class loved her.
He started with himself.
I am the first living contact to consult, Coffin thought, lying back in his hard bed under Mrs Lorimer’s roof.
He began to assemble what he remembered about the house in Mouncy Street as he had first known it.
Old Mosse saved three people from a burning house in the Blitz but was a thieving rat otherwise. Was he a grand old man or a proper perisher?
Then, just for a moment, unpredictably, his unknown sibling was in the room with him. He had taken to doing this lately. His appearance varied. Sometimes he looked like John Coffin himself, sometimes he was more like what Coffin remembered of his mother, but he was always young. He was ageless. Sir James Barrie would have known him for a Lost Boy.
He did not always have a voice, but he always had a point of view. ‘You hardly knew old Mosse, remember,’ he now pointed out. ‘He hardly left the house by the time you got ro
und to him.’
They don’t wear knickers in Paradise Street, they had said in Mouncy Street. But life had caught up with them. No one wore knickers any more. They wore tights, and what they wore underneath that no one had told Coffin.
‘I’m going down Mouncy Street,’ he said to his sibling. ‘And down Decimus Street and then to Paradise Street. I’m going to ask all the old ’uns.’
If there were any left. But there were. When he had one of these fancy feelings he was never entirely wrong.
He had always liked Decimus Street, it was a decent little street without the glamour of being wicked like Paradise Street.
Mouncy Street and Decimus Street and Paradise Street formed three sides of a square with all the backyards running together. The fourth side of the square was occupied by a gas-works whose gasometer looked down on its neighbours. During the war it had been a dangerous neighbour, but no bomb had fallen on it, although fire-bombs had spattered all over Mouncy Street and Decimus Street. The inhabitants were used to the smell, which mixed in nicely with the odours from Deller’s soap factory and the mingled scents from the river. It was a homely smell, they hardly noticed it.
The smell was as familiar to Coffin as anyone else. One of those things you forget about when away, then meet with surprised pleasure on a return. Now he fancied himself a connoisseur of the smell, able to distinguish between its elements. Mouncy Street had more of the river in its atmosphere, Decimus Street more of the gasometer, while Paradise Street, as was to be expected, was altogether richer and racier on account of the cats’-meat man who boiled up his ware in an old stable in the road. He had survived two world wars and a slump. There was never any shortage of cats in the neighbourhood; they too added their smell to the back gardens.
No one took any notice of him when he arrived back in Mouncy Street. He was not yet known as a neighbour. His own house, at which he looked wistfully, was still in the control of his colleagues. Was it his fancy that he saw Phil Jordan staring at him morosely through an upper window? He knew he must still be an object of some interest. But his time was his own; he was off duty.
He knew that the investigation into the deaths of the young boys was proceeding slowly but methodically, building up a picture.
All the boys had died by strangling. Not manual strangulation: a lead had been drawn sharply round the neck in each case.
No. 30 Mouncy Street was his first stop because he knew already from his own observation that here lived a truly old inhabitant; Mary Adelaide Flock, who had been born twenty years before Queen Victoria died and did not count herself old yet. ‘A proper old duck’, she was known as locally, but she was a duck who had somehow acquired a set of sharp teeth with a bite.
Coffin had wondered how to introduce himself, but there was no need. She leaned out of her front bay-window and gave him a shout. ‘Let yourself in; the door’s on the latch.’
She was a large woman, wearing a blue cotton dress with two woollen cardigans, one white, and one red, on top of each other, although the weather was still hot. She sat squarely in a big armchair and looked at him. The room was crowded with furniture. At her elbow was a small round table bearing a tea-tray.
‘I thought you’d be along to see me.’
‘Did you?’ He was surprised.
‘Everyone always comes to see me. I’ve lost the use of my legs, you see, and can’t get out. You’ve heard of me, I expect.’
‘Well, I had,’ he admitted.
‘And I know who you are. And what you are. So that makes us equal. Crippled I may be, but I’ve got my eyes and ears.’
‘And your wits,’ he said admiringly. ‘So why have I come? Apart from wanting to meet a neighbour, Mrs Flock.’
‘You can call me Mary, most people do.’
‘Mary, then.’
‘So you plan to stay on, do you?’ she said with interest. ‘I thought you’d be moving away now.’
‘I shall stay if I can. Not sure about that yet. I may not be able to stomach it.’ He was surprised to hear his voice saying that, he hadn’t known until that moment. ‘But it’s about the house I want to talk.’
‘And who’s to blame you.’ She motioned towards the tea-table. ‘Pour me out a cup of tea, please.’ And as he started to do so, ‘Take one yourself, will you?’ There was a Hanoverian command to her voice, not particularly feminine, but full of authority.
‘Not for me, thank you.’
She stirred her tea. ‘You’ve been talking to Lily Bates.’
‘She told you?’
‘Not directly, but I heard. I do hear things. So who told you what a useful person that old gossip Mary Flock was? Was it Lily?’
‘The man in the chemist’s shop.’ He had provided a short list of his oldest customers. There was another in Decimus Street and yet another in Paradise Street.
‘Ah, him.’ She appeared to digest this fact. ‘Well, I haven’t known him as long as some. So what is it you want to know?’
‘For how long did Ted Mosse live in Mouncy Street?’
‘All his married life.’
‘So you knew him well?’
‘I knew Freda Mosse better. A nice little woman.’
‘And her husband was not nice?’
‘I’m not saying that.’ She sipped her tea with pleasure, nodding again towards the tea-tray. ‘Sure you won’t? No, well he was a bit of a public figure, see, and people like us don’t care for that.’
Coffin pressed her. ‘But then he retired. Stopped being a public face.’
‘He never retired from what he was,’ she said bluntly. ‘Called him a proper bastard in Paradise Street.’
It was true that Ted Mosse had turned out not to be too honest, even in his best uniformed days, had run various little corruptions and been found out, but it did not seem the sort of bad behaviour that would have worried most of working-class South London. Or not much.
‘He wasn’t so bad,’ Coffin protested. ‘And then he was a brave man. I heard he saved a whole family during the Blitz.’
Her tea was getting a vigorous stirring, so that it swirled around the cup. ‘I was away during the war. Evacuated. I was doing my war work making aeroplanes. Beating old Adolf.’
‘What about when you came back?’
‘All I know is that I left Freda a jolly-looking woman and when I came back she was altered. From then it was downhill all the way. Cancer. I blame him. I think Freda did too.’
She hadn’t told him much except that she did not like her neighbour Fireman Mosse and blamed him for the death of his wife.
‘So you can’t tell me much?’
‘I don’t know what you’re after,’ she said. ‘I don’t reckon you know yourself. There’s been death in that house, but old Ted Mosse is dead himself – I knew him and Freda when they was married, what he was before that I can’t say. He came from Paradise Street. I was Mouncy Street. We didn’t mix much. Ask his niece. Ask her.’
Doesn’t like Rose Hilaire, he thought.
‘Didn’t have any children, did they?’
Dead silence. She put her cup down. ‘See yourself out,’ she said. ‘You know the way.’
As he walked back into the hot street he wondered if some royal bastard did indeed lurk in her family tree. The sons of George III had been prodigal breeders, hadn’t they? You had to explain that profile and that manner somehow.
Although it was so hot the sky was grey and low, not an evening to raise the spirits. As he walked on down Mouncy Street and into Decimus Street he could almost feel the curious eyes of Phil Jordan on his back.
He swung round. No one there, all his imagination. Not another appearance of his unknown sibling, it felt quite different, in any case that creature was very, very private, only appearing when they were alone.
No. 5 Decimus Street was his next address. According to the sociable chemist, here dwelt an elderly man with many ailments and a prodigious memory. Don’t believe everything he says, mind, but he claims to have lived in the same house
all his life.
Arthur Ford was a tiny, wry little man who appeared silently behind his front door as Coffin banged on the knocker.
‘Hello, are you the man from the Social?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’re the man from the Sally Army about the soup plates?’
‘No.’ He had thought about what to say, not everyone was going to be as easy to approach as Mrs Flock. ‘I’m moving into Mouncy Street. I bought Ted Mosse’s house, and now I’m wondering what sort of man he was. Worries me, I’ve got to live in the house.’
‘Well, it would.’
‘You knew him. I’m told so.’
‘Oh yes, poor old fellow.’
Suddenly it was a new picture of Ted Mosse being presented. Now he was a ‘poor old fellow’.
‘Come on in, I never mind a chat.’ Arthur retreated inside the house, motioning Coffin to follow. He was a good deal younger than Mary Adelaide Flock, and probably a lot younger still than the late Ted Mosse, but a limp suggested rheumatism and the reason he was known to the chemist.
He led Coffin to a bright back kitchen, furnished in the most modern style, with new canary-yellow paint. A bird to match sang in a cage in the window, noisily saluting the room.
‘Shut up, Daisy girl.’ He banged on the cage. ‘We are both a bit deaf so you’ll have to talk up.’ He sat down on a hard kitchen chair and stared hopefully up at Coffin. ‘Ted Mosse, was it now? I used to take Meals on Wheels to him when he got past caring for himself.’
‘You didn’t know him earlier?’
‘No, I didn’t. I was night work, till I retired. But you could ask Mother. She’s only upstairs.’ Picking up his stick, he banged three times on the ceiling. ‘That’ll fetch her.’
A bumping and creaking down the stairs announced the arrival of Mrs Ford, who was younger and taller than her husband but just as friendly. She was wearing denim overalls and carrying a bucket and brush. ‘It’s turned out a beautiful blue, love. Not too bright at all, I put just that bit of white in like you said and it’s coming on lovely. I wonder if we could afford a blue bath?’ Then she saw Coffin. ‘Hello, dear. Have you come about the Darby and Joan party?’ The bird answered her with a burst of violent song. ‘Be quiet, Daisy. I don’t think I can play for the dancing this year. But they’ve got a lovely lot of dance records. Victor Silvester, the lot. Use them, dear, that’s what I say.’
Coffin in Fashion Page 9
