Some faint trace of strain there, he thought.
The second message was from Chief Superintendent Paul Lane asking for a meeting, tomorrow if possible. About the box in which the girl was buried.
CHAPTER 5
The next day. Day Eight
The box was an amateur production, roughly hammered together out of pale new planks of wood. By the look of it, it had not taken long to make.
‘Bit of a cheap job,’ said Paul Lane to the Chief Commander. It was the next day and they had met in the car park as Coffin arrived, both in a hurry, both glad to talk. ‘Just thrown together. I thought you’d want what we got as soon as maybe. Just whacked together.’
‘But interesting it should be made at all,’ said Coffin. He hadn’t slept well and had eaten no breakfast.
‘You think so? … I tell you it made my flesh creep a bit.’ He screwed his face up in a frown. ‘Nasty.’
‘It could have been made in love.’
Paul Lane looked alert and sceptical. Let’s keep our feet on the ground, his face said. ‘I’ll let you know if the lab boys pick up anything from the coffin.’ He had come to have a reluctant respect for his scientific colleagues and their technical expertise. Many a good case had been got into the courts with their help. And the odd one lost, of course, but don’t dwell on that. They had set up an Incident Room on the spot in a pod, a mobile van with appendages, and all the technicians were at work, overtime no worry, which pleased some and not others. ‘Going over the ground down there, inch by inch. There’ll be something.’
‘Keep looking for another coffin.’
‘You think he made himself a coffin and then dropped himself into it?’ Silly joke and no one laughed. Least of all Paul Lane when he realized the Chief was serious.
‘We’ll keep looking,’ he said.
‘I’m glad I caught you.’
‘Yes, I’ve left some papers at home.’
He watched his boss drive off to collect some papers he had left behind. Not like the Chief Commander, he thought, to be forgetful.
‘It was the girl in it, of course,’ said Stella. They were walking side by side, round and round the small courtyard that the architect had contrived between St Luke’s Mansions, where they lived, and St Luke’s Theatre now up and running in the old church itself. The architect called it a cloister and was proud of the small arcaded walk. Stella was walking round and round it, accompanied by Bob, as she thought about her next part. She had the script with her. She learnt her words better if she walked them into her brain. But she was also thinking about the future of the main theatre … the workshop theatre was safe, she thought, since its demands were modest. The big theatre was dark at the moment, it had a production they had brought in from Windsor coming in next week for a month, but after that … ‘So it was the girl,’ she said again. She said it sadly. Sometimes she felt that death came close to her too often through her relationship with John Coffin.
They had met in the cloister, Stella on her third circuit, Bob on his fourth or fifth because he moved faster, and John Coffin coming back home to grab some papers. Or so he had claimed, but it was really an excuse to get back into his own home for a bit. He had sat there, slumped in a chair and thought about Jim Dean and his own troubled past. Things were getting dug up and not only bodies.
They were all pleased to see each other, Bob most of all, because he felt he had a hope of a meal: Stella had overlooked his last feeding time, she grew forgetful when she was in rehearsal, and he was hungry. He associated John Coffin with food, so that was good. He sat down and looked up hopefully.
‘Poor kid,’ said Stella.
‘It was her.’
‘You knew it would be.’
‘Yes, I think I did,’ said Coffin, considering. ‘It seemed likely.’
‘And no signs of the boy?’
‘No, we still have no idea where he is.’
‘How did Jim Dean take it?’
Coffin considered again. How had Dean taken it? ‘He took it very well. He was expecting it, I think.’
He was not surprised that the news of the discovery in the woods had reached Stella before he told her, Spinnergate was a village in many ways. A brief mention in some of the London papers had not included the identity of the body.
‘He won’t leave it there, though. He’s very angry.’
‘With whom?’
Again Coffin considered. ‘Everyone, I think, including himself.’ Most of all himself, he had thought, as he had watched Jim Dean’s face. ‘But with the boy. He blames the boy. And certainly he is angry with the police.’
‘Why?’
‘For being too slow.’
‘You were as quick as you could have been.’
‘But not quick enough, apparently … And slow about finding Martin Blackhall. He talked about getting a private detective to look for the boy but I intend to talk him out of that.’
Stella was thoughtful. ‘I don’t think I remember Jim Dean.’
‘He was after your time. And before it.’ He gave her a loving smile. There had been a hiatus in their relationship during which they had not met, although he had always been aware of where she was. During this time they had lived different lives. He had buried his years in the wilderness; Stella had triumphantly risen above hers. She always had a quality of the phoenix.
But it was in this buried decade, right at the beginning of it, that Coffin had known James Dean. They had been paired for a while, then Dean had left. He suspected that Dean had links still in the Force, possibly among his own men. No harm in that, there were always networks, he used them himself.
‘How did the girl die?’
‘She was strangled. Manually.’
‘So it was murder?’
‘Oh yes, no doubt about that.’
‘But of course,’ said Stella thoughtfully, ‘it always looked as if it would be. I never thought anything else. Not that I knew the girl, but when a girl like that is missing, you always think: Ah yes, well, she’s dead, poor kid. Someone’s got her … I suppose the boy is likely to have done it?’
Coffin shrugged. ‘It’s hard to like the human race sometimes.’
‘But you go on trying … That’s what I love about you.’
‘I don’t keep trying all the time.’
‘Well, I don’t love you all the time.’
Coffin laughed. ‘I’d noticed that. Now I know why.’
‘There are other reasons … You can be maddening.’ She bent down to stroke Tiddles who appeared from behind a pillar. ‘I wish I’d been around when you knew Dean.’
‘It didn’t last long. It wasn’t the best time in my life. And I wasn’t a very nice person to know.’
Stella picked up Tiddles and looked into the distance. ‘You realize you make me feel sad when you talk like that.’
‘I wasn’t very nice to you, Stella.’ He saw himself: young, brash, self-centred.
‘That was earlier. And I wasn’t very nice to you.’ Far from it. She had treated him badly. Walked away, left him, with barely a goodbye. She couldn’t do it now. Life had softened her, made her more tender.
‘Ah well, I don’t dig it up very often.’ Keep things buried, he thought, but they get dug up like bodies, all the same.
‘Well, I suppose you wouldn’t.’ She put Tiddles down, but he hung around, he had something on his mind. Food, probably. Bob too acted hungry.
‘But I learnt something in those years and it’s stayed with me. Done good service. I learnt when to get worried.’
‘And now?’
‘Yes, I’m worried now. Something bad is going to happen.’ He didn’t use the word evil, it was not professional, but he smelt it.
‘What?’
‘I wish I knew.’ In his career, he had met most varieties of evil, but life had taught him that there was always scope for more.
‘I’ll tell you all about those years one day, Stella.’ Or as much as was suitable, she wasn’t as tough and cynical as she pr
etended. ‘There were some good patches and some bad patches, some mad weeks and some weeks I was too sane, and I think I’ve ended up sane streaked with madness and that seems the right mixture for a policeman.’
They parted in the cloister, Coffin going back to his office and several boring committees and his own thoughts on the death of Amy Dean.
Coming home late that evening, he met Tiddles at his front door. It was a night for hunting. Tiddles debated and then shot up the staircase ahead of John Coffin.
James Dean was waiting for him at the head of his stairs.
‘How did you get in?’
Dean did not answer directly. ‘I wanted to see you. Privately. On our own.’
He was holding a bottle of champagne. On the table was a tray with smoked salmon sandwiches. Tiddles advanced hopefully.
Dean waved a hand. ‘I went to Max’s Deli, ordered a light meal for us both and told him you wanted me to await you here. He gave me his key.’
‘I’d forgotten he had one.’ Dean had always known how to get in where he wanted; he remembered that and one or two other things as well. Money no doubt had passed hands; he must remember that too.
‘To do Max justice, it was not Max himself, a girl, one of his daughters.’
‘Oh yes.’ Dean knew how to handle women, always had, the younger the easier. Look how he had managed the girl, Angela. She had been soothed, quietened and sent back to Armitage Hall in Dean’s own car with a policewoman. Dean himself had taken a taxi.
‘Nice-looking kid.’
The Beauty daughter, then. Stupid that one, and not as pretty now as she had been three years ago. Some bloomed at fifteen and went off. She might end up a plain forty-year-old. Then he checked this bitchy thought: it was just redirected anger at James Dean.
‘You haven’t got your pretty lady with you.’
Coffin prickled at this description of Stella Pinero who was so much more than that.
‘So what is it?’ He observed with pleasure that the cat had already got his paw round a sandwich and was removing it to the floor. ‘Why champagne?’
‘Not a celebration of a death,’ Dean said savagely. ‘I want to talk. I’m going to give you a week to find the boy and then I am going to send in my own detective.’
‘I strongly advise you not to do that.’
‘But I don’t take your advice, do I?’ He was pouring the champagne. ‘Or I didn’t in the past. It was one of the reasons we parted company. Here, take your drink.’
Coffin accepted the drink reluctantly, he was still angry with this invasion of his privacy. ‘Not the only reason. And we didn’t part, as you put it. You left the Force.’
Dean said: ‘I don’t trust that bastard Tom Blackhall and that wife of his. She’s too clever. I don’t like clever women.’
‘Is that the real reason?’ Or did she turn you down once? He knew Dean’s reputation. ‘Do you trust any of us?’
‘You found my daughter. You got her dug up. I give you that.’
Coffin said thoughtfully: ‘The bus ticket led us there.’ Then he added: ‘You led us there.’
‘No, I was just driving around. I’d given up. I still don’t know what she was doing on the bus or who was with her. The boy, I suppose, but you were the one that persevered. You always were. Remember the time we were looking for the Hadden rapist? You stuck at it.’ He poured some more champagne.
‘But you don’t trust me to find the boy?’
‘You’re only human.’ He shook his head. ‘And I want to make very sure that he gets what’s coming to him.’
‘He may be dead.’
‘I don’t think so. His wallet was in the car. That says he was there.’
‘It also says he may not have left the car willingly. People don’t leave their money and bank cards behind if they can take them with them.’
‘He may not have noticed. Depends on his state, doesn’t it? You and I know that murderers don’t behave rationally.’
‘Yes, I do know that.’
‘And always leave something behind. Some trace. He’ll have left his spoor. Find him.’
‘CI Young will be checking passengers on the bus. Something might come from that.’
‘Well, see he gets on with it. People forget things. How many people were on that bus? He’ll never track them all down. What about the driver? Is he the sort to remember?’
‘Young’s a first-class officer with a good team.’
Dean gave a grunt and sank back into the chair. Coffin acknowledged the raw pain inside the man. Both of them knew too much about what was going on, what was happening to his daughter’s body, the people involved, the police surgeon, the pathologist, the technicians. He was not surprised at what Dean said next.
‘Remember viewing your first post-mortem, John? Not nice, eh? How did you feel? I was sick, you weren’t.’
‘Everyone felt the same.’
‘The inside organs don’t look too bad, once they’ve been cleaned up. In fact, they’re kind of interesting. I remember thinking that. But it’s not what you’d want for your nearest and dearest.’
Coffin saw he was shaking. He touched Dean’s arm gently. ‘I’m sorry, Jim,’ he said.
‘Yes, I wish I hadn’t remembered. He was an old man, that one … She was all I had left.’
‘I know.’
‘No, you don’t. For you it’s just business. D’you think I don’t remember how coppers look? I’ve seen that look before in other eyes, and was surprised to see it now.’
‘You’re doing me an injustice.’
Dean let a long pause go by. He can talk before I do, Coffin decided. Damn. And I’m not sure about this wash of emotion. I never have been sure about him.
Dean said suddenly: ‘I didn’t want her to go to the university, I didn’t want her to take that sociology course.’
‘What did you want?’
‘She had a place at a finishing school in Paris. I wanted her to go there. But no, she had to choose this place on your patch.’
‘Not my fault.’
‘I think she already knew the boy Martin. Seem to remember him around the place.’
‘At school together?’
‘No, he was at one of those schools for smart, difficult boys, the schools where clever academics send their sons when they can’t manage them. They met at a party somewhere … on the river.’
He knew a lot about it, Coffin reflected, he must have watched the girl. Perhaps he had used one of the detectives he spoke about.
‘And that place she worked at. Star Court. I was dead against that. Why did she have to go there?’
‘Part of her course, I believe.’
‘That’s what she said. Perhaps. I don’t like that place. Take it apart if you have to.’
Was that really why you came here, thought Coffin.
Dean went to the window, glass in hand. ‘Nice view you’ve got here. I like to see the river.’
Coffin joined him at the window. He drew it down a fraction so that the night smell, still damp and full of autumn, floated in. ‘Just a glimpse. You don’t hear much these days. Never the big ships talking to each other like you used to. I miss that sound.’
‘No, those days are over … Remember that night on Phoenix Wharf?’
There was a long pause while Coffin picked up noise and smell from the past: a foggy November night, fog sirens wailing sadly from the river, the peremptory hoot of a tug in the distance. The remoter sound of traffic. The smell of dampness and dustiness and oil, all mixed up. London as it was all those years ago.
‘Never forgotten.’ Buried the memory, of course, but he was digging it up now.
‘Dark night, wasn’t it?’ said Dean. ‘That was why we got lost.’
Coffin dragged another memory out. ‘Didn’t get lost, we were misled by that man who was supposed to be pointing out the way.’
‘Yes, you always said that, I was never so sure.’
Misled or just lost, Coffin could see it now: the d
arkness, the river on his left, the tall black buildings of Phoenix Wharf on his right. What had been stored in there, that it all smelt so oily? Dean had been behind him. In front … the figure that was meant to be leading them to the rendezvous suddenly disappeared.
He thought now, as he had thought then: We were fools to have believed him, we have been led into a trap. He could smell his own fear.
Ahead, a shape loomed up through the fog, another behind.
These days, he thought, we wouldn’t have gone in without proper back-up. Asking for trouble. Young fools.
He had hesitated, then shouted. Probably the worst thing he could have done. In the darkness came the flash of a gun, he had half turned, then Dean had pushed him down, and in the same second fallen on top of him. The bullet had gone into Dean’s chest.
He could remember the weight of Dean on top of him, the rush of blood, instantaneous it had seemed, spouting out. He could remember the smell. Him or me, he had thought, and it was Dean that had got hit.
Then he had dragged himself from under Dean’s body and got on with the job.
Well, the men had been caught, although not by him, and he had got Dean to hospital.
‘You saved my life,’ he said to Dean. ‘I knew that then, although I was too bloody-minded to say so.’ But that had not been the true reason, there was another, blacker reason, a feeling of treachery, that perhaps Dean had known more than he should about what was going to happen, and had not been the one meant to be shot.
I was always jealous of him, Coffin admitted silently, it distorted everything so that I never knew what was truth and what just suspicion. He pushed the idea down to the past where it belonged and turned back to the safety of the present.
‘Although I can’t remember much about it, I understand you got me to hospital in time and offered your blood.’
‘But it was the wrong sort. Our bloods don’t match.’ Just as well, he had thought at the time, my blood would have clotted in his veins. He had kept his bloodstained clothes bundled up in the back of a cupboard till they began to stink, then had put them in a small case. He had carried the case round with him for days before eventually dropping it in the river. Dean’s blood, shed for him, and he had very mixed feelings about it.
Cracking Open a Coffin Page 7
