Cracking Open a Coffin

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘Not sure. What she could get locally … She sometimes is, when she’s not here,’ said Maisie, not very coherently but perfectly to be understood. She didn’t like Jo taking drugs but she did when the mood was on her and couldn’t be stopped. Her mood had been bad lately.

  ‘Does Rosa get it for her?’

  ‘Rosa? No, that’s not her style. All for clean living and tough muscles is Rosa. You don’t get those on drugs. No, Rosa gets whacky when Jo does drugs. She might take the odd cigarette, but that’s it.’

  ‘Is she likely to be with Josephine now?’

  ‘No, Rosa was in a mood after Betsy went off. We won’t see her for a bit … Rosa can look after herself but I wouldn’t like you to bother Jo.’

  He could tell by Maisie Rolt’s voice that she was not happy. ‘I won’t make a fuss. I only want to talk to her.’

  ‘I suppose I mustn’t ask? No.’

  I have a whiff of death in my nose, thought Coffin, as he put the telephone down and it won’t go away.

  The death of Amy Dean occupied more and more of his thoughts. His mind went back continually to the huge collection of material that had built up in the weeks since her death. Paul Lane and Archie Young were in control, but he felt they were at a dead end.

  By the time he got back to the kitchen, the potato and cheese casserole was burned black. He shovelled it into the waste bin, then put the dish to soak. He made himself a cheese sandwich instead. He wasn’t hungry now.

  He slumped in his big chair by the window, stroking Tiddles who lay across his chest, purring noisily. Tiddles was asleep first. It was a long while indeed since Tiddles, who had watched a murder in his youth, had worried about life.

  In his sleep, Coffin found himself dreaming about Rosa Maundy, silent and tough in her black leather gear. She wheeled her bike at him, with no smile on her face.

  Our General had called a meeting of her closest lieutenants; two of them, Commander A and Commander B. Under each was deployed a section of her supporters whose number varied with the strength of her gang. Numbers had been falling lately, not that this worried her greatly, although she liked a good turnout. Numbers did rise and fall.

  What Rosa liked best of all was the whole outfit lined up on their bikes in the yard of her father’s firm. Then she would walk down the lines inspecting the troops. She was generous with spares and petrol from her father’s supplies, and if he protested, then she hit him. He had hit her in her youth, now it was her turn.

  ‘It’s not Betsy Coleridge I’m worried about. Maisie thinks it is, but it isn’t, nothing to be done about her, she’s a lost cause, you can just tell, one day he’ll break her skull and that’ll be it.’ It might be that it would be given to Rosa to then break his skull, sometimes she had such dreams, but she would have to wait and see. It might also be that she, Rosa Maundy, would live out her life in peaceful respectability; that also had to be considered.

  ‘So?’ said Commander A whose turn it was to speak.

  ‘It’s Josie. We’ve got to save her.’

  ‘Is she in danger?’

  ‘No, it’s inside her.’

  ‘What do you want us to do, General?’ Commander B’s turn. ‘The A team are out there waiting to go on a run, and B are almost ready.’ She glanced out of the window to the yard where bikes were already throbbing away. It was the joy of their life to race around the streets in formation, alarming motorists and pedestrians alike, and annoying the police patrols.

  ‘I want you to come with me.’

  ‘Both of us?’ A glance passed between A, who was nicknamed Dutchy, and B, who was called Jill, because it was not usual for Our General to call upon them both at once. She believed in splitting the command, there was no unity except in her. Dutchy had known Our General all her life, Jill for about a year; neither of them felt they truly knew her.

  ‘Yes. A, dismiss your squad, no action tonight. We’ll tour the Burlington Estate tomorrow. B, tell your squad to finish cleaning up and then dismiss. Burlingham tomorrow. Rendezvous here.’ The Burlingham Estate, northwards of Spinnergate had been reported as having a gang in embryo. Our General meant to find and if possible crush any future rivals. But that could wait.

  ‘Right.’ They jumped to their feet and saluted. They enjoyed saluting.

  The friendship between Rosa and Josephine was not one that her cohorts understood, any more than they understood what drove Our General, but they accepted it and were swept along by her energies.

  What they appreciated without putting it into conscious thought was the order she imposed on their lives. They enjoyed the uniforms, the smartness, the glitter of their machines as they all lined up. The regimentation carried a thrill with it that was better than sex. Some of the girls had boyfriends, others had girlfriends, but sex was not important; being part of Our General’s team was.

  They were all of high manual skills but with no book-learning interests at all. Most were wage-earners in reasonably good jobs, because gang life was not cheap, and one and all kept quiet when at home about life with Our General. The majority lived in the family home and were neat and tidy about the house.

  The average age was under twenty, Our General herself was the eldest by a few years. Most of the girls knew in their depths that they could not go on with the gang as they grew older. But this was for now. The future was nothing, they might never get there.

  One irritated member of the Second City Force had complained that they were as alike as two pins and there was a lot of truth in this. Identity did not count.

  The three of them mounted their bikes and wheeled off, three abreast, then dropping into a file, one behind the other. Our General rode in the middle: the position of power.

  Outside George Eliot House they slowed to a stop. It was a large block, pale in colour and marked with dark runnels where the rain had dripped down. A hopeful artist had painted an abstract mural in dark blue. Graffiti workers had pencilled their lewd comments.

  Rosa looked up to the floor where Josephine lived and where there were lighted windows. But Josephine’s window was dark.

  ‘Doesn’t look as though she’s home,’ said Dutchy, a girl who made up her mind quickly.

  ‘I’m going up,’ said Rosa.

  The lift worked for once, although it smelt of vomit and urine as usual, but Rosa did not make her usual sharp comment about the muck. She hurried along the covered pathway.

  Josephine’s neighbour had the TV on loud behind curtained windows. Josephine’s windows were uncurtained yet there seemed to be a flickering light within the rooms.

  Rosa rang the bell. No response came, she tried again, then used her fist to bang. ‘Josie, are you in?’

  Still no answer. The nextdoor neighbour came to the door. She was a short, stout, curious-eyed woman. ‘Think she’s out. Haven’t seen her all day.’

  ‘Told you no one was there,’ said Dutchy.

  Jill had her face against the window. ‘There’s a light at the back,’ she said.

  Rosa looked for herself. Then she lifted the letter-box to stare through it.

  ‘I say, is that—’ began Phil, her voice excited.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Rosa. ‘I’m going in.’ She lifted her gauntleted hand, made a fist and drove it through the glass of the door.

  A half-circle of fire surrounded Josephine where she lay in her bath. Reflected in the looking-glass on the wall and the white tiles about the bath, the circle completed itself. Josephine had her eyes closed. Like Brunnhilde, she seemed to sleep, ready to wake.

  John Coffin and the cat were both roused by the doorbell ringing. Coffin woke up with a start and the impression that the bell had been ringing for some time. It gave one last despairing peal and then fell silent.

  He stumbled down the stairs behind the cat, and opened the door.

  It was Stella on the doorstep, with her arms full of roses.

  ‘Just found them. I was out,’ she said huskily. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Yes, please do.’
r />   They both knew there was no need to say anything more. He held the door open wider and Stella came in.

  CHAPTER 12

  On the same day

  Josephine lay in her bath which was still fragrant with verbena bath salts. Her head was resting on a rolled-up towel, her hair, freed from the turban of scarves which hid it, flowed over her shoulders and into the water. She was quite grey. But she had masked herself with a plastic bag so that her features were obscured. Now she was naked you could see that she had put on weight but was still shapely. Her toenails were trimmed and shaped but unpainted, as were the nails on her hands.

  She had arranged a crescent of rolled-up newspaper and bits of burnable rubbish about her bath and put a match to them. They had been slow to burn but were well away and the carpet had caught fire and there was a smell of smouldering wool and wood by the time Our General arrived. As the girls burst in, the draught caught the fire which sprang up with eager life. Suddenly it was everywhere, darting around the bathroom and then out towards the living-room.

  Inside her circle of fire, Josephine lay in the still warm water as if asleep, but the water was a thin red.

  She had cut her wrists in the classic style of suicide and let the blood drain out of her veins. From the bottles found beside her, she had also taken a sleeping tablet and some whisky.

  The fire had taken hold, and was already too much for the three young women to put out. Rosa telephoned the fire brigade and the police in that order.

  The fire engines arrived first, speedily and in number, because standing orders laid down that a fire in a block of flats like the George Eliot should always be a treated as a potential major conflagration. The police patrol car came hard after, followed very quickly by a CID sergeant and the police surgeon. ‘Suspicious circumstances’, was the word.

  Rosa did not cry, tears came painfully to that iron heart, but she sat slumped against the walkway wall, waiting. The other two, with the street wisdom of their kind, had melted away. Rosa too would have disappeared, but she knew the neighbour had seen her face. In any case, she felt an obligation to Josephine.

  Rosa was so used to being aggressive and positive that she hardly recognized misery when she felt it, but she was aware of a tight, cold feeling in her diaphragm, something physical and painful.

  ‘It was you sent the alarm out, young lady?’ asked the chief fireman. He did not know Our General, he was new to the district.

  Rosa stood up, and gave a brief assent.

  ‘Hello, Rosa,’ said the CID sergeant, who certainly did know her. ‘Didn’t expect to see you. Friend of the deceased, were you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rosa. Her expression said: And what’s that to you?

  ‘Looks as though she killed herself. Do you know of any reason?’

  ‘No reason,’ said Rosa.

  ‘Was she depressed? Spoke of suicide, of ending it all?’

  ‘Is there a note?’ asked Rosa.

  ‘There may be,’ said the sergeant. ‘Haven’t found it yet.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything to me,’ said Rosa.

  He gave her a long, sceptical look. ‘I don’t think you’re telling me all you know. What made you come here this evening?’

  ‘I wanted to see her.’

  ‘Hang around, Rosa, I shall want to talk to you.’ He turned away to where the police surgeon was preparing to leave.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just looking, gotta do that, you know it, Rosa.’

  ‘Mind her things,’ said Rosa sharply.

  He swung round. ‘What’s it to you, Miss Maundy?’

  ‘I’m her executor.’

  ‘Really? That’s interesting. Shouldn’t have thought she had much to leave.’

  A first quick survey had shown him that Josephine had only a few clothes, which hung in a sad row in the wall cupboard, their flutters and feathers looking limp without Josephine inside them. Certainly he had seen no jewellery, and the furniture wasn’t much, either. Not a well-stocked kitchen: some bread, a few tins of soup, coffee and tea, with a pot of organic peanut butter and vegetarian cheese in the refrigerator. He doubted if she ate at home much, probably always down at Star Court House, he had learnt that much about her. All the signs of someone who lived close to the bone.

  ‘I’m her literary executor,’ said Rosa again. ‘So watch it.’

  ‘Literary executor? Now what does that mean?’

  ‘It means I have control of all her papers,’ said Rosa.

  ‘Now that does interest me,’ said the sergeant. ‘It does indeed. As I said, stay put. We’ll talk about this later.’

  Me and my big mouth, muttered Rosa to herself. Why couldn’t I keep quiet?

  ‘I’m not promising,’ she called after him. But she knew she would stay and accompany Josephine’s body as far as she could, riding behind the ambulance on her bike if she had to, as if she was following a funeral bier. You deserve it, Jo, she thought.

  The sergeant took himself back, intending, when the SOCO and the photographers should have completed their business, to conduct an industrious search for Josephine’s papers. His reasoning was simple: if Rosa was after them, then they must be important. He wanted to be the first to know.

  But there were no papers: Josephine had kept not a scrap. She had pencils and pens but she had no letters, no diaries, no scribbled little messages to herself. Nothing.

  CHAPTER 13

  That same night

  The roses were sweet and reconciliation after a breach even sweeter. Neither of them spoke of what had passed, for the moment it was buried. Both of them knew that this was not the wisest way to go on, some issues should not be buried. Coffin was ashamed of the violence that he had felt welling up inside him, while Stella was ashamed of having noticed it and of finding a black hole in a man whom she admired and loved. Loved perhaps more than he loved her: that was another fact she did not wish to face. She had sat in on a rehearsal of the Wagner last night, caught up Brunnhilde’s passion of betrayal, and thought how well Wagner understood it.

  The murder motif. You heard it in music, you felt it in life.

  It’s bloody loving, she thought, hardly worth it but you can’t stop yourself.

  But tonight they were happy cowards.

  The roses revived in water, and Stella said she would take them home with her when she left. ‘I’ll stay to breakfast,’ she said, flicking an eyelash at him. ‘Because we ought to start taking ourselves seriously.’ Her hands were busy with the flowers in the sink.

  ‘I suppose I could start with apologizing.’

  She swung round and put a wet hand over his mouth. ‘Not now, no apologies now.’

  ‘Well, one apology I will give: Miss Pinero, I’ve been a surly beggar, bad-tempered, rough to you and not willing to admit it. Forgive me, Stella.’

  ‘Of course I’ve always known you hate to admit you’re in the wrong,’ said Stella. ‘It’s part of you. I’ve accepted that, ages ago.’

  ‘Women really are nicer than men.’

  ‘Of course.’ She took off her shoes, curled up on his sofa, and made herself comfortable. ‘And to prove it I am going to tell you what a much more attractive man you are now than when I first knew you. You’ve matured well, you know.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He didn’t know whether to kiss her or to hit her. Both impulses welled up inside him.

  ‘Oh, come on, don’t be cross. When I first knew you, well, you didn’t know how to dress, you could be awkward in company, you had no idea how to decorate a room.’ She looked around her. ‘But now … this room is lovely. And you did it by yourself.’

  ‘I was young, Stella, that’s what you’re saying. And so were you. Do you want me to tell you how you were?’

  ‘You might as well.’ She settled herself against a cushion. ‘Hit me with it.’

  ‘You were over-ambitious, occasionally strident, sometimes a liar, and not nearly as good an actress as you thought you were.’

  Stella nodded. ‘I gu
ess that’s about right.’

  ‘And you were lovely to look at, marvellous to make love to, a virgin longer than you ever admitted …’

  ‘Well, that’s true.’

  ‘And I adored you.’

  Stella gave a small secret smile. ‘I was pretty bowled over by you, but too cunning to admit it.’

  ‘Why did we quarrel all those times?’ Bitterly and as it had seemed at the time irretrievably.

  ‘I did the quarrelling,’ said Stella.

  ‘Not quite true, not always, but why?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to depend on you. I wanted to be myself. I knew that you could swallow me up.’

  ‘I didn’t know … It would have been unconscious.’

  ‘Of course. The worst way.’

  ‘Do you know, underneath, I think I felt the same. I feared you. Still do, I think. You’re very powerful, Stella, in all the ways you don’t know about.’ All the secret hidden ways she could control him, push him to anger, to love. The way she smelt, the way she moved, the deeper tones in her voice when she used them. Her jokes, her very bad jokes, and her good ones too. All part of it.

  They were being very aggressive with each other and it wasn’t hurting. No, not quite true, Coffin thought, it hurt, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  ‘Then there were the middle years when our paths crossed occasionally. We even stayed together for a bit … You were whiney then. Self-pity.’ Now she was telling him.

  ‘I was miserable.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘And you were too sharp, too overtly ambitious, shouting.’

  ‘I was going through a bad patch, the work wasn’t coming in.’

  It was a war, blows were being exchanged, but they were not bleeding. It was a just war.

  ‘You know, you are my hold on normality … It’s very destructive, the work I do. Tears you apart if you let it, makes you hard if you don’t.’

  ‘You’re not hard.’

  ‘In a way, Stella … I hide a lot from you. But you keep in touch with the gentle things.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘You know that old line: “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be”? It isn’t true, of course.’