Mrs Esthart in a pink satin quilted robe with fluffy sleeves. A bit grubby round the edges. She had Punchy Pooh with her; I think he’s a Peke but hard to be sure as he was buried in satin, except for two eyes and snout.
Stella’s quite right: Esthart’s coming out of her missing-son syndrome. I caught the gleam of hard, cold sanity in her eyes. Especially when she made sure all doors were locked behind me.
Anyone could get in that house, though. Wide open. Emotionally as well; those women were vulnerable.
Angel House and its precious occupant, darling Stella, off his mind for the moment, he hurried down the hill to take a look at Greenwich Pier. He had half an hour in which to give a quick survey to see if there were any signs that the girl’s body had gone into the river there. Then a tram to work; he enjoyed a tram ride, especially if he went on the top to sit on the prow as on a galleon. You could sit there to smoke and not envy the King himself.
He was out so early that a haze still hung over the city. He had time to walk across the heath, down Maze Hill towards the Wren buildings and the river. London lay stretched out majestically before him.
What a city to pillage, the old Prussian General had said.
A few workmen were standing waiting for a tram at the corner of King William Walk and Nelson Road. A milkcart pulled by an elderly horse trundled past him into Romney Street. England’s great sailors of the past are well represented in Greenwich street names in a manner which Dutch King William might not have appreciated had he lived to see them, any more than Charles de Gaulle did when recently given the chance.
He walked along the pier, which is short and broad, lined with a few benches. At the further end, with its back to the entrance, there was a wooden booth which had sold chocolate and ice-cream in peacetime. ‘Fry’s Chocolate Creams’ proclaimed a faded advertisement, ‘Twopence a bar’, and another offered ‘Eldorado ice-cream sticks.’.
He went inside, it smelt sour and it was grubby, but there were cigarette ends and scraps of newspaper on the floor, signs of human habitation. People used this place.
He went out, taking another quick look around the pier. Then soon a turn to the left to walk along a path which ran a hundred yards along the water’s edge and where iron railings bordered either side. At intervals sturdy flights of stone steps went down to the water. There were gates, but unlocked.
He did not know what he was looking for, just a feeling perhaps. Or just to see for himself.
He had no doubt that other policemen had walked this path already, looking and searching. He wanted to understand. Presumptuous of him, possibly; he guessed that this might be the worst sin a young detective could commit. But he intended to commit it.
He lingered at the flights of steps, three flights in all, all giving easy access to the water. You could get at these steps from two directions: from Trafalgar Road through Park Walk and from King William’s Walk.
A picture of a body being pushed there in some conveyance came into his mind. Pushed like a baby in a pram? Or possibly tugged along on some improvised sledge. There was a pram in the theatre.
Who would see late at night? In London someone probably would. Except that it was dark here at night, the street lamps still not working after the war, people might not linger.
On the other hand a couple could walk here, like lovers, close and warm, with only the murderer knowing what lay ahead.
Stand by the steps and embrace in the dark, then be killed and pushed into the water for the river to deal with.
Two pictures of a death. One with the girl being pushed already dead, and the other her walking to that fate.
The girl must have been wearing shoes, had probably been carrying a handbag, but neither had been found.
As he walked back along the river path he noticed that where the brick walls supporting the path and pier made an angle, and there were three such places, here rubbish collected. He saw bottles and tins, empty cigarette boxes and assorted rubbish swirling and bouncing in the tide.
He stared down looking for something interesting but finding nothing.
He walked back, then caught a tram. On the tram, sitting on the top, he had time to think. He did not want to believe he knew the killer, knew him as a person. He wished him to be anonymous, a figure plucked from the crowd by a single act of violence like the killer of the Shepherd woman. But more and more as the perspective lines in the picture he saw centred upon Angel House and the Theatre Royal, he felt that the murderer was going to be a man known to him.
He could think of two possibilities. Two men worked at the Theatre Royal and had links with Rachel Esthart.
One was Edward Kelly, and the other was Chris Mackenzie. Chris had already expressed a strong dislike of Rachel Esthart. Edward Kelly had loved her once and been rejected. He might have hatred burning inside him.
This was not going to be a case where a tight alibi would eliminate any man, because there was no exact time for the killing.
At some time, about two days before her body had been found, and probably shortly before her body had gone into the water, she had been strangled and then stabbed and deeply mutilated. She had not been raped.
There was a further complication.
A murderer who called himself Rachel Esthart’s son had despatched her on her way.
You could reject this idea of a living, murderous son or you could accept it.
If you accepted the son as still around and ready to kill, then you had to look for someone in a certain age-group.
Chris Mackenzie fitted, but Eddie Kelly did not. Names to throw around; there would be others.
At the back of his mind was what he called his ‘dark’ thought which bore directly upon his private and professional life, questioning all his deeply held beliefs about the relationship between men and their loyalties. That thought would not go away.
And if there was no son, and someone was playing games, then your choice was wide open again.
As the tram bounced along to its destination, John Coffin blinked in the sunshine. ‘It will all come together,’ he said aloud.
The passenger next to him looked at him in alarm, then moved away to another seat. There were a lot of lunatics loose in London just now. This passenger was not anxious to run across them. Just demobbed, this passenger was starting work in a new job that day; he was going to work for W. J. Clarke, butcher, of Melville Street, Lewisham, with whom there was a long-standing family connection. Not a job for life, but it would do for a start. So no lunatics, please.
Coffin’s emptying stomach rumbled as he got off the tram and hurried in to see his boss. He could still taste that breakfast egg, the ghost of it still about his mouth. It was an egg that seemed to have come a long way, and had a hard journey of it. No egg to forget.
But he felt strong enough to face Tom Banbury, and this made his step confident and happy.
Mrs Lorimer had heard her lodger depart, and noted that all policemen seemed to walk with that firm confident ring. Her two young detectives certainly did. Quite different from the way soldiers walked.
That was Mr Rowley on the stairs now. A nice young man, easier to know than Mr Coffin, who sometimes seemed to have an abstracted way with him as if he was looking right through you and out the other side, and seeing something quite different.
From her contacts in the police force she knew that Tom Banbury was quite troubled about them both. ‘My difficult youngsters,’ he called them. The first new intake since the war and they had their own ideas. It was the Labour Government’s fault. Young policemen had not been so before the war.
Not that Tom Banbury was an easy man himself, never had been, too buttoned up and reserved, the more so since his wife had been killed. Drink, it was called, and probably there was drink too, but much else besides. Unstable. His father had been badly wounded in the last war and kept a bayonet on the wall in his bedroom to prove it. Lilly Lorimer had seen the bayonet, still there on his deathbed. It was bad for a boy to grow up looking at
a bayonet.
As with the breakfast, that was the government’s fault too. Britain had won the war, hadn’t it?
And there was Lady Olivia. No mistaking her tread either. She’d fall from the top to bottom one day.
‘No, Lady Olivia,’ she said firmly. ‘There is nothing the matter with your egg. You’re lucky to have one. It’s not your turn for an egg this week at all. Next week you get your rationed egg. This one is off the ration. The butcher let me have a dozen Chinese eggs off the ration.’
Distantly she head Lady Olivia muttering something about her butcher, and bacon.
‘Two ounces, Lady Olivia. Two ounces, and you ate it all yesterday.’
Stella was sitting at her make-up box, extracting one by one the materials for her face as Candida; she had tried several faces, never getting the one she wanted. She was not an actress who liked to appear with her face as God made it. Every time she wanted to create something different.
In this she was at odds with Rachel Esthart, who had been content to project herself, naturally and powerfully. But then Rachel was a beauty, and always would be.
Not for the first time, Stella wondered what the Lost Boy had been like, what the father had been like, and also the lover who had precipitated the final explosion.
People did gossip about it. Albie and Joan did, so did Edward Kelly, but only to a point. They closed up just when it got interesting.
Her hand outlined her lips, still shaking. This might have been due to the strong draughts that blew all around her on that cold summer. The Theatre Royal was a charming theatre but it was ramshackle and cold. One day its bomb-damage grant would come through and then it would be refurbished, when pieces of its history would be tucked away. The dusty scenery from a forgotten production of Swan Lake (Albie and Joan had briefly dabbled in ballet brought down from London) which was propped against the wall in Stella’s dressing-room would go. As would the tea-chest full of decaying costumes left over from the two seasons of Great Classics of the Theatre dating from well before the war. As it was, people fell over the past, walked into it, cursed it, and generally ignored it. When it was gone it would be too late, then someone would write a book about it.
‘Stella?’
It was Bluebell Harrison, a junior member of the cast, a character actress in the making. After a short initial period of jealousy, Stella and the rest of the cast had established a friendly, cosy relationship, as is the way with theatricals. A company that is quarrelling is on the way to disaster. The rest of them knew that Stella had something going with Eddie Kelly, and probably with someone else as well, but they were not moralists and did not hold it against her. They warmed themselves against her vitality. In short, she was popular. Bluebell bore her no animosity for wresting away Edward on whom she had staked a mild claim, recognizing that Eddie was probably too much for her anyway.
‘I nipped down to Powis Street this morning and got myself an Arden lipstick. Six shillings and ninepence, and pillar-box red the only colour. Doesn’t suit me but I got it, anyway.’
‘Oh, good.’ Stella was still improving her Candida face. She squinted at it.
‘And if I can’t wear it then I can trade it for something. Chloe’s got some nail varnish that’s quite pretty.’ A good deal of bartering went on in the company. A box of face-powder for a pair of stockings, a lipstick against a bottle of scent. ‘Anyway, what I came for: here’s a letter.’
Stella received a letter from her best friend Kay and slipped it under her make-up box. When Bluebell had gone, Stella got it out to read. Then she started a reply.
Stella wrote:
You are quite right, Kay, love, I am nervous of my lover. Not that he is my lover. Not completely. I wouldn’t dare. I think it would blow the top of my head off. His too, probably.
Her hand shook. The episode last night had frightened her more than she had admitted even to John Coffin. Later, she was to see her violent lover as a killer. Already she had sensed the narrow margin between pleasure and pain. Then she wrote:
I will tell you the name of the person I am afraid of, then if anything happens to me you will know.
The Theatre Royal was disintegrating so rapidly that flakes of plaster, rust and paint were always depositing themselves all over everyone who came there, so that all who came to the theatre went away with a bit of it on them.
Now a flake of plaster fell on to Stella’s letter, but she was so used to such a deposit that she flicked it away with a finger and sealed the flap. A little shred of paint and a powdering of rust were secreted inside with the name of a man.
Stella did not send the letter to Kay, she wasn’t sure she meant to even, but by writing down the name she had taken away a little of the man’s force.
It was a primitive way of thinking, but actresses can be very primitive sometimes.
She put the letter in her make-up box, a little time-bomb (a word with which Hitler had made them familiar) waiting to explode.
John Coffin saw that Tom Banbury was already at his desk, sitting with his shoulders hunched in that way he had as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders.
His room had a strong character all of its own which Tom Banbury had not dispelled. In its earliest days this part of the old school had housed Mixed Infants. Tom had the Headmistress’s room and the ghost of this long-dead lady made itself felt.
Try as he would, he had never been able to efface a disposition in the furniture of the room to arrange itself like a schoolroom. His desk would assume the air of a desk and the chairs arrange themselves in rows.
He was an unhappy man and looked it. The sight of Detective-Constable Coffin did not cheer him. He had worries he was not prepared to share. And he was none too pleased to see John Coffin at that time. But he was a polite man; he let the young detective have his say: the girl’s fingernail, her possible identity, the ghost of the seagull.
For a moment Coffin thought Tom Banbury had not heard him: he started again. ‘Chris Mackenzie …’
‘Yes. I heard. The pathologists pointed out the fingernail. We have an identification. She has been positively identified.’ He went on: ‘You were right, as you said.’ He sounded absent, as if his deeper thoughts were elsewhere. ‘You should have reported the bird last night. Nasty. I’ll go up to see Mrs Esthart myself.’
‘She’d be glad.’
‘But we’re out of it now. Not altogether, naturally. There’ll be plenty to do. We’ve asked for help from the Yard. You’ll meet the man this morning. Andy Warwick, Chief Inspector Warwick. You’ll like him.’
‘I see, sir.’ And this was true, for not only had they this murder to deal with, but the preparations for the royal visit to cope with. In addition, there were all the usual items like the goods going mising from the docks that were turning up on stalls in Woolwich market. Someone (it was Alex) had to deal with that.
‘I’ve got plenty on my plate. Quite a dish.’
It was so unusual for him to make a joke of any sort, that John Coffin hardly took in what he meant, then he realized: the Shepherd child.
‘Have there …? I mean …’ He stopped. How could you say out aloud: What other bits – leg, arm or other members of that poor kid – have turned up? ‘Any more news, sir?’
‘Yes. You’ve got it. A hand this time. A very small hand.’
One way and another there were so many bones disturbed over London then. In 1917 a German Zeppelin had exploded, tossing one of the crew into the Abbey Woods beyond Woolwich (the Abbey long since gone) where he had been waiting to be found ever since. Some thousand years before an Anglo-Saxon girl had been lost and had been working her way to the surface of the land since then. She was just about ready to be found. In 1940 a land-mine blew all the occupants of an omnibus far and wide. Not all the bodies were found. Bits of them travelled too far. It had been a hard war, but the Lions had played on at Millwall, and Charlton at the Valley.
‘A tiny hand,’ repeated Tom Banbury. He looked down at his own hand. A minu
te tremble began near the knuckles, then spread down to the fingertip. A tiny movement, but observable.
He hates all this, thought Coffin. He absolutely bloody hates all this.
All police officers hate the murder of a child, but Coffin picked up something else as well, which at the moment he could not name, but it felt like shame.
It was at that moment that John Coffin knew that something was wrong.
He looked away. You don’t want to catch your superior out in a private emotion, it’s not the way to get on in the world. And, if you are like John Coffin, you don’t enjoy it anyway.
From outside came the sound of doors banging, a voice talking cheerful, and a lower voice answering.
Dander and Warwick, like a pair of cross-talk comedians, had arrived.
It was impossible not to like Dander, he had such style. John Coffin sat there drinking in the details of his appearance and behaviour. The jacket loose and unbuttoned as if the muscles and energy of the man had burst it apart. The crisply curling hair, cut short and greying at the temples but long at the back, was in character. He made his own style.
What a beast, he thought. Will I be like that when I’m forty?
Was Dander forty? About that, probably, must have been in the forces somewhere but it was hard to see as what. Impossible as a private, he would have been much worse as an officer. He was an army in himself.
Coffin admired him immensely.
Inspector Warwick was another case altogether: young, hard, tough, and nasty. But at the same time you could tell he was reliable. Trustworthy but bloody, the worst combination.
They were all crowded into the room that had been the art-room in the days of the school. Never a large room, it was now full of large men. Present were the men from Scotland Yard, Warwick and his sergeant. The pair were flanked by Dander and Banbury.
The rest of them, the whole team of men who would be working on the river case, sat where they could. Coffin sat next to Alex Rowley who had arrived late, breathless.
Coffin on the Water Page 8
