Cracking Open a Coffin

by Gwendoline Butler

‘All I’ve got is a badly bruised leg.’ Stella lay back on her sofa and held out her hand for the brandy that Coffin was offering her. She would have preferred gin but brandy seemed more suitable for an injured lady.

  ‘You could have been killed.’

  ‘You look worse than I do.’ This was true, Coffin was white. ‘Where’s Bob?’

  ‘Eating,’ said Coffin. ‘You ought to go to hospital.’

  ‘What, and miss a performance. I go on, broken leg or not.’

  ‘Good joke,’ said Coffin sourly. ‘Just as well you haven’t really got a performance tonight.’ He was still shaken.

  ‘I would have gone on. Sarah Bernhardt went on with one leg, didn’t she? I could go on with two legs and a limp.’

  He knew she would have done. Any actress would. You faint with pain after the curtain goes down.

  Stella closed her eyes. ‘Wouldn’t it have been awful if I had died? Killed saving Bob.’

  ‘Yes, it would,’ said Coffin. He was realizing how terrible it would have been.

  ‘Was the car driver upset?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault.’

  ‘So you both said.’

  ‘And was Bob upset?’

  ‘He was when I dragged him home,’ said Coffin grimly.

  Stella leaned back on her cushions. The accident seemed to have cheered her up. ‘You know, I think I’ll get the better of Jack Tickell after all. I won’t lose that part. Want to bet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know, I think I’m hungry. Could you manage a sandwich for me?’

  In her kitchen, with its unused look, Coffin dug into the bag of groceries he had bought at Max’s. Parma ham, French bread, Brie cheese, tiny little tomatoes. They would do. Two tins of salmon meant for a cat.

  Somewhere out there Tiddles must be raging with hunger.

  He made some coffee, in the making of which he now had considerable skill, knowing not to boil the water and exactly how much powdered coffee to dump in a cup. His sister Letty was continually giving him expensive and gleaming glass and silver coffee-making machines, one of which even ground the beans; these he ignored. He found some plates and carried in the tray.

  They sat, eating and talking in a companionable way. It felt cosy, as near to domesticity as they had ever come. Stella had a child and had once run a household, but one would never know it, she had sloughed off anything of the housekeeper she had ever had. But her child was reported happy and successful and deep in her own career.

  ‘Are you worried about this case?’ asked Stella.

  ‘No,’ and to his surprise he was telling the truth. He felt a cold remoteness from Jim Dean and his daughter. Not nice, he thought, but true.

  ‘You usually are.’

  ‘Not this time.’ Must be a reason for it.

  ‘Of course, I know you’ve got the boy Martin. Do you think he is guilty?’

  ‘Probably. But it might be tough to prove. Gradually the forensic evidence will mount up. If there are traces of his clothes or skin on the girl, that would be a help. But sometimes all these magic tricks fail to come up with anything we can use.’ They could point the way and sometimes offer the sort of proof that judges and juries loved, but not always.

  Stella said: ‘Go on, this is interesting. You’ve never talked to me like this before.’

  ‘She was strangled, and buried in a coffin. How did the body get where it was buried? Did it go in the coffin? Or was she killed and the coffin made and brought to her? Or made on the spot … lots of possibilities.’

  ‘How could a boy like Martin do all that?’

  ‘There were wood splinters in his hands. He could have got them making the coffin.’

  ‘I suppose you could look at the wood.’

  ‘All flushed away down a hospital sink … there may be some still in his hands waiting to be dug out, but I doubt it.’ His mother would have checked on that, or even the boy himself.

  ‘And we would have to find out how he got the wood and where from and how it was transported to Essex.’ He added: ‘He might have been able to lay his hands on wood.’

  ‘I suppose I can imagine a sensitive boy who hadn’t meant to kill her but to whom it had somehow happened, a quarrel, a sexual frenzy, wanting to bury her.’

  ‘Could be,’ said Coffin, reflecting with sad irony that life with him had certainly opened Stella’s mind to the various ways of violent dying.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Timing matters,’ he said cautiously. ‘The boy turned up, having apparently been in the water somewhere and been caught trying to rob a shop. It’s a complicated situation with him. But it’s the way a guilty and frightened boy might behave. We don’t have to look for reason and balanced judgement here, just panic and disorder.’

  ‘It’s how I would be, if I’d killed a person,’ said Stella, her eyes dark. ‘Poor lad.’

  ‘The girl herself is a puzzle.’ Not Jim Dean’s daughter for nothing. ‘What was she up to? Victims sometimes seem to go looking for death.’

  ‘What a terrible thing to say.’

  ‘They were worried about her at Star Court House. Josephine must have told you that. Not the first death either. There was the other girl, Virginia … She was a helper at Star Court too.’

  ‘You can’t suspect them of anything.’

  Coffin did not answer directly. ‘Josephine came to me, remember. Whatever happens, she came to me … If Martin Blackhall did kill Amy Dean, then he may not have been in it alone.’

  Stella was troubled. ‘Tell me what you really think.’

  ‘I think she was killed elsewhere, possibly in her own car, and then transported to Essex. Or in the car in Pickerskill Wood. I don’t know at what point she was put in the coffin. Or why. And that’s about all I do think at the moment.’

  Or by whom, but he knew that Paul Lane and Archie Young thought they had the killer. No proof but the right man: Martin Blackhall.

  ‘Time matters,’ he said again. ‘Who had time to do all that was done?’

  Stella said: ‘I have never heard your voice so cold.’

  She got up. ‘I think I want to get to bed. Help me, please.’

  Hobbling and leaning on his arm, she reached her bedroom. ‘I’ll take a shower.’

  ‘Want help?’

  ‘No, I can manage. Wait for me, though. Don’t go away. Wait till I’m in bed, then say good night. And there’s something I want to say first.’

  While she was fidgeting around, creaming her face, combing her hair, seated with her back to him at her looking-glass, she said: ‘I wouldn’t tell you this if we hadn’t been talking freely, and you may know and it probably has nothing whatever to do with the case …’

  He sat waiting, wishing these were days when one could smoke, and conscious of the dark cold hole inside him that you might call hate.

  ‘Victoria Blackhall has been married twice. Her first husband was found head down in a small lake in Oxford. He’d been drinking, but there was a lot of talk. Everyone knew about Tom and Victoria, they’d been very public. I was playing at the New Theatre in Oxford at the time, and I knew them all.’

  ‘Accident or suicide?’

  Stella shrugged. ‘I suppose it was an accident. Who knows?’

  ‘The Oxford police must have investigated it as a mysterious death.’

  ‘Yes, and I think that was exactly where they left it: a verdict of accidental death. But a lot of people blamed Tom, there was gossip.’

  ‘I bet there was,’ said Coffin. ‘Doesn’t seem to have touched his career.’ Academics were broad-minded chaps these days, what was the odd divorce or suicide? What was it Tom Blackhall had said himself? One of my professors is up for dangerous driving and another has seduced three pupils.

  Did this story make any difference? What did it amount to? Two young people (Tom Blackhall had been very young) and behaved wildly. They had been the subject of gossip and had no doubt felt guilty. But it had no connection wi
th what was happening now. The two of them had survived and prospered. Victoria Blackhall was a powerful lady, and one not liked by James Dean. Might be something personal there …

  But James Dean just didn’t like successful women.

  When Stella was in bed, leaning against her pillows, she said: ‘I think the way you feel about this case has to do with James Dean himself. I don’t know what he did to you, but it must have been bad.’

  ‘He saved my life,’ said Coffin in a hard voice.

  ‘You are detaching yourself from this murder in a way you never do. It has been your strength and your virtue. Because he saved your life, however much you resent that, and you appear to do so, I think you owe it to him to find out who killed his child.’

  ‘You hit hard, Stella.’

  For answer, she took his hand. Her own hand was soft and cool, smelling of rose geranium.

  As he sat there, holding her hand and telling her how it had been, Bob came in and stretched out on his feet. He went on talking. Stella smiled and murmured back at him in a friendly way. Then she was quiet.

  Presently, he saw that Stella was asleep. He tucked her in, patted Bob’s head and let himself out of her apartment. Stella would bounce back. She always did. She might lose a part and break a leg, but she would be there again, at the top of the tree, waving.

  As he walked the few paces home, he recognized that Stella had got through to him. She had cracked something open.

  She was right. He had not been straight with himself about this murder. Too many old emotions had entered in. Now he must make it his honest business to find out how and why Amy Dean had died.

  CHAPTER 8

  The night of that long day and into the next week

  His thoughts kept time with his feet on the stairs of his tall abode. One thought a tread.

  You have to know these people.

  And their backgrounds.

  Do I know them?

  The answer was: Some, but not others.

  It was a long staircase and he was only half way up.

  Tom Blackhall he knew. Probably in more detail than Sir Thomas guessed. He had information. It was part of his job. He hadn’t really needed Stella to tell him what she did. It was on record.

  Victoria Blackhall? He knew her too slightly and not much about her career. But he could find out, her academic and medical career would be on record, and he could talk to people she worked with. He had heard she was held in high esteem.

  Josephine? He knew her not at all, but there was a feeling that he could know her if he chose. Dig into her corners, seek out the depths.

  Jim Dean, his old partner. Oh yes, he knew Jim.

  He was almost at the top of the stairs, he paused to look out of the window. That was London there below in the moonlight. Not the smartest or the richest or the most beautiful of Londons, but his, with its cruelties and its criminals and its poverty. Also what it had of richness and goodness and human companionship.

  Not to mention its busy, cheerful eccentrics like Philippa Darbyshire, so happily engaged with the choir and the Wagner production. She was a bit Wagnerian herself in size.

  Martin Blackhall, another one to know, and possibly a very important one, but he might be just a boy dragged into the picture by bad luck.

  And two whom he would never know now: Amy Dean and Virginia Scott.

  He would tour around, ask questions, go to this place and that. Watching, and listening.

  And all the time, a ghost would walk beside him.

  It was a question where to start, but the answer soon came. To the place where the girl was last seen alive. To the university.

  He drove round, not an occasion for walking, found a place to park his car, and asked the man in the porter’s lodge where he could find Mick Frost and Rebecca North.

  ‘Beenie and Mick, sir,’ said the man cheerfully. ‘Oh, they’ll be in a class now, but hang about and you might see them coming across the quad to the library.’

  ‘You seem to know them well.’

  ‘Oh, I know all the students, by sight anyway. Some better than others. It’s my job. I know that pair.’

  ‘So you knew Amy Dean?’

  ‘Yes, and I know you too, sir. That’s why I’m talking. Don’t do it to everyone.’ Across the room the telephone rang. ‘Oh, excuse me, sir, I’ll have to attend to that.’

  Coffin went out into the sunshine, and strolled around until he saw students pouring out of a door in a corner of the large white building. He collared one and asked to be shown Mick Frost.

  ‘Mick? Oh, he’s not been at this lecture. I’m a medical and he hates us.’ The lad, tall and carrot-haired, looked around. He pointed. ‘You could try his room in Armitage. If they let you in, a snooty lot there … Oh, wait a min … That’s him, though, coming out of that door.’

  Coffin made his way across the grass, students on all sides of him, some running, some walking head down in deep abstracted thought, others in friendly groups, but all apparently going somewhere important and at once, and none of them interested in him.

  ‘Are you Michael Frost?’

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’ Mick looked at him alertly. He knew Coffin, having attended a lecture the man had given the year before on Crime and Punishment. Mick was more or less in favour of punishment, of the right sort, and he had thought that the speaker had felt the same. A good bloke, he had judged.

  Coffin introduced himself, noting no surprise on Mick’s face. ‘Anywhere we can talk?’

  Mick nodded. ‘Over here.’ He led the way towards the library and Coffin followed. All the students seemed to have disappeared, the quadrangle was empty.

  Mick sat down on the steps outside the library portico, and Coffin lowered himself. He recognized it as the site where Amy Dean had been photographed. He was probably sitting on the very spot.

  ‘I hope I’m not keeping you from something?’

  ‘No, I had a class, that’s just finished. I’ve got a tutorial in an hour’s time. I was just on my way to the library.’

  The porter was an accurate observer of Mick’s ways, Coffin reflected.

  ‘Tutorial,’ he said absently. ‘That’s an interview with your tutor, is it?’

  ‘To read an essay, discuss it. Of course it’s not one to one, or even two; usually three or four of us. We take turns to read. We’re supposed to be imitating Oxford, only economy style.’

  ‘You and Rebecca North were Amy’s closest friends?’

  Mick was willing to concede this. ‘Yes, I think so. Except for Martin, of course. And Angie.’

  ‘Oh yes, Angela.’ The girl who had come rushing forward to look at Amy’s burial place, and been restrained by James Dean himself. ‘Where can I find her and Rebecca?’

  ‘Beenie’s in Bloomsbury for a lecture. Angie’s working in her room, as far as I know.’

  Was he nervous? Alert and a bit jumpy. ‘I want to talk to you about Amy and Martin.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much more I can tell you … I’ve answered a lot of questions already. People keep asking the same questions … I feel like a plucked chicken.’

  ‘You know that Martin has been found?’ Mick gave a short nod. He knew; they all knew. ‘What sort of a relationship did those two have?’

  Mick frowned. ‘Fairly close,’ he said in a neutral, giveaway-nothing tone.

  ‘Lovers?’

  Mick remained silent.

  ‘Come on, we already know Amy was not a virgin.’

  ‘Ask him.’

  ‘I will when I can. Now I’m asking you.’

  There was a long silence, during which Coffin watched a solitary girl student make her way from the gatehouse to a side door of the library.

  Mick relaxed, took a deep breath and managed a smile. ‘All right. Fine. But in spite of what you seemed to think I don’t know every detail of my friends’ lives. I don’t know if they went to bed with each other. They didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask.’

  ‘But you think?’


  ‘I think not … He was in love with her, but Amy wasn’t in love back.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Then Mick relented. ‘Amy might have told Angie what was what, and Angie might have told Beenie … but as it happened, no one told me.’

  ‘And Martin didn’t say anything?’

  Mick shook his head. ‘I don’t really know him that well.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Not sure if anyone does. It is difficult for him, being the Rector’s son. He ought to have gone to another university, not this one. Don’t know why he didn’t. He’s bright enough.’

  ‘You don’t think it was Amy … she was here?’

  ‘Could have been,’ conceded Mick. He was pretty sure it was, but didn’t want to say so. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Go on.’ But I may not answer.

  ‘You’re the boss figure, like our Rector only more so. Why are you going round doing the questioning?’

  Polite but bold and self-assured, Coffin thought. Wouldn’t mind having him work for me.

  ‘I know Mr Dean,’ he said formally. ‘What is it you are studying?’

  ‘History. But I’m going to be a lawyer. Or I might sing.’ But that was a fantasy and he knew it.

  ‘You’ll be a good lawyer,’ said Coffin. ‘What about considering the police force?’

  ‘Money,’ said Mick, still polite. ‘I don’t think there’s enough.’

  ‘You were one of the last people to see Amy alive.’ He didn’t make it a question.

  ‘On the campus, yes.’

  ‘Did you notice what she was wearing?’

  ‘The Sergeant and the Chief Inspector both asked me that. The answer is no, I can’t remember.’

  ‘Did she own a blue and white sweater with pockets?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Beenie or Angela about clothes.’

  ‘Did you ever ride with Amy in her car?’

  ‘Yes, several times, she was generous with lifts. She liked using the car.’

  ‘Do you know if she used the buses much?’

  Mick said: ‘I’ve been asked that before and the answer is no. As far as I know she never used a bus. She had the car, after all.’

  ‘Did you ever go to Star Court House with her?’

  ‘No, never. I didn’t encourage that business. Not that she took any notice.’