Tom Banbury had spoken, Dander had spoken, Warwick had spoken. The rest of them had listened. A bit like going into battle. But at least they knew their jobs. A roster of duties for the day, the week ahead.
Alex was to stay with Tom Banbury working on the Shepherd case. He pulled a sour face at Coffin and shrugged.
John Coffin would work with Inspector Warwick, as part of his team, but mostly based in the Greenwich office collating reports. ‘A filing job. I’m a bloody clerk,’ he muttered resentfully to Alex.
‘It’ll keep your feet dry.’
A heavy rain was now falling outside.
Warwick delivered a brief summary. ‘The victim’s name is Lorna Beezley. She was an unmarried girl of twenty-three, a schoolteacher, living at 23 Catherine Street, Greenwich. She had no family. She has been identified by her landlady who had reported her missing. Also, by the headmaster of the Hook Street School where she taught in the Infant Department.’
Dead silence in the room, but outside an earth-moving machine was groaning away in the bomb-site next to the school as it prepared the ground for the new estate.
‘She was murdered by strangulation, then mutilated, the genitalia attacked. She was then put in the river. She was dead when she went in.’
‘How strangled?’ someone asked.
‘Manually.’
The chap had strong hands, thought Coffin, who soon would start thinking about the murderer’s hands. He looked at his own, broad and thick. But Warwick was going on:
‘The river police think she went in the water just before the tide turned in the early morning of May 12th. Greenwich pier and Convoy Wharf were likely points of entry.’
Alex Rowley: ‘I could have told him that.’
‘You probably did, it was in your report, wasn’t it?’
Warwick had more to say.
‘We have no strong lead to her killer, but he is out there in the population somewhere and we will bloody well find him. That’s an order.’ He enumerated what they had to do, handing out tasks efficiently like a croupier dealing out the cards. ‘All contacts to be flushed out and talked to. All boyfriends, girlfriends, all the people she worked with, the people where she lodged. Her school and the theatre are vital. Do the Theatre Royal in Nelson Street. She’d played in the orchestra.’
So they’d got on to that, too? Edward Kelly and Chris Mackenzie were names to Warwick, as well. There was nothing Coffin had that was original.
Except his own dark thoughts.
Warwick said: ‘Any questions?’
Coffin put up a hand. ‘Sir, she’d have had a handbag and shoes. Perhaps gloves. We haven’t found them.’
‘Right. You’ve got yourself a job.’ Warwick gave him a quick, assessing stare; Dander smiled. No expression appeared on Tom Banbury’s face. ‘Check what she had at her school and lodgings. You know the address. Don’t think I’d overlooked it, though.’ Dander’s smile broadened.
Coffin was pleased. I’ve got myself an out, he thought. I was pushed on the edge, but I’m crawling back in. And I don’t mind if I get my feet wet.
‘Any more questions?’ Warwick was brisk.
There were none. Warwick’s face precluded it, somehow.
Warwick said: ‘In my view this is a straight sex crime. The girl may have known her killer. Or he may have been a stranger. You will all have heard of the so-called message found on her. My opinion is that you should ignore it. In my view it is a joke.’
As they went out Coffin thought he heard Dander saying something to Banbury about a pet-shop and private zoo in Greenwich Hythe Street that had been bombed silly. Any pets there must have had a rough time.
Hookey Street, he was going to Hookey Street. Back to Hookey Street.
You leave a school at fourteen, shake its chalk dust from your feet, and swear never to see the place again.
A war and nearly ten years later, you go back to investigate a murder.
Could Mr Poole still be Headmaster? No, that would make him about ninety. Wait a minute, though. He might have looked like a battered old lizard ten years ago, but he had probably been well under fifty. Old men were not appointed to be heads of schools like Hook Street. Such men had to be tough, physically and mentally. Poole had been tough, John Coffin’s bottom had borne witness to the power of old Poole’s right arm.
Hook Street School had not been changed for the better by the war. The asphalt playground still contained the great square water container put up in 1940 to hold water for another fire-bomb raid. It was empty of water now but full of litter. It smelt as though the cats of Hook Street used it too.
The ground-floor of Hook Street school had great ARP signs in white paint all over the walls. It had been both an Air-raid Wardens’ post and an Auxiliary Fire Service station.
In the school playground was the wooden hut which had housed the infant class taught by Lorna Beezley.
Coffin looked up to the floor where Senior Boys had once held sway. Two kids looked down at him from a window.
‘There’s a young man crossing the playground,’ said Miss Jeffries to Miss Arden. They were in the staff-room, the only occupants since the rest of the staff had responded to the end-of-break bell.
‘Ah.’ Miss Arden came to look. ‘Well, don’t be too hopeful, dear. He hasn’t come for us.’
Miss Jeffries took another look. ‘He’s a policeman. You know why he’s come, don’t you?’
Just before school closed yesterday afternoon two policemen in plain clothes had called. They had all been late home. ITMA night too. Oh, the pain of missing Tommy Handley.
‘But we’ve told all we know.’
‘Not quite all, have we?’
‘All I did was to keep quiet,’ said Helen Jeffries slowly. ‘I thought we agreed.’
‘I think we were wrong.’
‘She’s dead. Poor child.’
‘All the same.’
‘Couldn’t be any connection,’ muttered Helen Jeffries. ‘I don’t think I shall want to say.’
Alma Arden took another look out of the window through which she got a clear vision of John’s uplifted face. She drew in a quick breath.
‘Do you remember years ago in Junior Mixed School a lad with auburn hair, ginger almost, who stole all the wood from the Senior Boys’ woodwork class because he said he was building an ark to escape with?’
‘Do I not? He said he’d join the police when he got older and be like Sherlock Holmes.’
‘I think he’s made his ambition. A bit of it, anyway. I must say I always thought he’d go to prison.’
They stood there looking out of the window, ignoring the increasing noise of their neglected classes.
The familiar noise of school greeted John Coffin’s ears as he went into Hook Street School. He felt he knew his way around. Apart from any memories of the building, it was almost identical to the one in which he now worked.
The only difference from the old days was that Mr Poole had given place to Miss Swann, a tall, slender woman who was now interviewing him. To Coffin it felt that way around.
‘Mr Poole retired in 1939. He came back to work in 1940 as head of Basco Road School. We were very short of men teachers. The school got a direct hit from a flying-bomb in 1944.’ She answered his unspoken question. ‘Yes, killed at once.’
Just about the same time as Coffin himself was being exploded. Not a coincidence, exactly, but not a coupling of their situations that either party would have predicted all those years ago.
‘I’m sorry.’ But it wasn’t true; he was not sorry. Suddenly he was aware of a lightening of the spirit, a figure that had loomed in the background for years had leapt off his back and disappeared. Old Poole was gone, taking a bit of Coffin’s past with him, and glad to see it go.
‘Of course you have my permission to talk to the staff, but everything was told to the investigating officers yesterday. I’m really surprised to get another visit.’ Time to waste, her manner implied.
‘Special questions,�
� Coffin mumbled. ‘Something a bit different. About her clothes. I’d like to speak to the women on your staff.’
‘There are no men. We have no boys in the school. During the war when the ARP took over the ground floor, the Infants went up to the top floor and the Senior Boys went round to Basco Street.’
Evacuation had briefly thinned out the school population of Greenwich Wick and Greenwich Hythe in the autumn of 1939, but the sturdy inhabitants had soon come pouring back to sit out the Blitz and most of the flying-bombs and rockets, too. Anything was better than country living.
Coffin and Helen Jeffries knew each other at once: she, of course, pre-warned.
‘Miss Judge!’
‘Jeffries,’ she corrected automatically. She knew her nickname. She taught a modest amount of English history, and had expected what she got.
It would be idle to pretend the young detective had not enjoyed questioning the teaching staff. For the first time he was in the chair and asking questions.
And getting some answers. Starting with Miss Swann.
‘I can only repeat what I said before. A cotton dress and a cardigan. It was what she usually wore. We all wear the same clothes, more or less.’ She shrugged. ‘Coupons, utility clothes, we look alike, Mr Coffin. As to her shoes and bag, I expect they were more or less like mine.’ She extended a thin ankle with a solid brown brogue shoe. ‘And handbags –’ She pointed out her one brown leather handbag. ‘We can’t all find Joyce Wedgies and a matching shoulder-bag.’
When he left her he had been handed a great truth: most women had only one handbag. Whatever had been the fashion in the past, the average woman did not now change her handbag with her outfit.
He knew he’d got news when he saw Helen Jeffries: she was wearing red shoes. He wondered Miss Swann hadn’t noticed, but she probably only saw what she expected. Most of the population did that.
‘I’d better tell you. It didn’t seem important, not a matter of life and death, but now you’re asking about her shoes and handbag I must say. She was probably wearing them, after all. An evening out, she’d wear her best shoes.’
She looked down at her own feet, then silently produced a flat red shoulder-bag from a drawer.
‘I love pretty things, and we’ve been starved. Lorna got me this. I paid, but no coupons. She got them from her boyfriend. I suppose they were stolen, black-market. They are export stuff, you see, not meant for us at all. I’m ashamed, I suppose. Only not much,’ she ended defiantly. ‘I’ve been bombed and starved for five years, and the peace has come. I want my share of pretty things.’
You and Stella and Rachel Esthart, and most of the women of England. Only people like Miss Swann seemed exempt. ‘There won’t be any trouble about that,’ he said gently. But he had a question. ‘Who was the boyfriend?’
‘No idea. There wasn’t just one, you know. She was always out dancing. Or the theatre. That was her life. Not teaching. And I don’t blame her.’
No, nor did John Coffin, but she had twinkled away in her red shoes and never been seen alive again.
He went into the newspaper shop in Hook Street, bought a newspaper, and asked hopefully for some cigarettes.
Under the counter, but some for him because the newsagent liked his face. It fitted Hookey Street (everyone called it Hookey Street).
Coffin’s eye fell upon a pile of boys’ comic papers. There was a lively picture of a boy in a kilt carrying a magnifying glass. ‘Eagle Scott,’ ran the caption, ‘the laddie detective with the magic eye.’
I could do with some of that, thought our detective.
He read quickly: the laddie was on the track of an escaped Nazi war criminal. The German was fleeing across the highlands of Scotland. A little bit owed to J. Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps there, he thought.
But he had to know how it went on, and avoiding the newsagent’s eye, he bought his copy.
He lit a Woodbine, and went on the top of the tram to smoke, to read, to think.
The next interviews went fast.
‘Oh yes,’ Lorna’s landlady told him. ‘Yes, she was wearing red shoes. Loved them. New, you see, no one else had shoes like it. She went dancing in them.’
Another tram, again on the top, this time to Greenwich. Then a walk along the riverside walk.
He could hear the murderer’s feet now. Dancing feet. She had walked to her death, he thought, that murdered girl. Gone with her fate as with a lover. Perhaps they had gone dancing first.
Would Rachel Esthart accept a light-footed murderer as her son? Need she be required to? In Coffin’s mind this murderer had two possible heads but, as yet, no face.
The tide was well up, lapping against the walls of the pier.
In the right-angle formed between pier and river walk there was a full house of rubbish. Old tins, jam-jars, and beer bottles. Orange peel. Had oranges come back? A long time since he’d seen a free orange.
But beyond the orange, there was the glint of something red.
He leaned over to look. Not a handbag. Might be a shoe.
He took off his jacket, and inched his way in.
A voice from behind hailed him.
‘Mister, you mustn’t go in the river.’ A thin, defiant little boy. ‘My gran says it’ll kill you that water. Death, it is.’
The deadly river Thames. Not far wrong, thought Coffin, lowering himself into it. Still, he’d risk it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Following the Feet of the Murderer
The murderer soon heard about the finding of the shoe and was not pleased. Nothing should be found except as he desired. He realized he had been foolish to let the matching shoulder-bag go into the river, although there was no sign of it turning up. Probably it never would. With any luck it was caught somewhere below the water level, never to surface again. Or it had been towed out to sea by a passing ship. As for the shoes, he had not thought of them; they seemed part of the girl.
There was no reason to believe either bag or shoes could be pointed to him, nevertheless there was a loose connection. He should have removed the shoes and lost the bag.
Another time he would be more careful. Once more at least. Then perhaps once again. Then finish. He would have done.
He took the tram that ran towards Deptford, along Creek Road, then down Evelyn Street. A well-bombed area close to the Surrey Docks, not beautiful ever, now shabby and blasted, but containing what he wanted, the place he was looking for.
He got off the tram at the end of Evelyn Street and took a road that led obliquely off it to the docks. In a little sweet shop he used some of his sweet coupons to buy some toffees. Chewing them, he made his way towards Convoy Wharf.
Convoy Wharf was the old cattle delivery point where the cattle ships had come in bearing the living beasts on the hoof ready to be sold in the near-by market and slaughtered. The introduction of refrigerated ships and frozen carcases in the 1920s killed the cattle-market. It was cheaper and easier to carry frozen beef rather than the herds which had to be fed, and watered, across the Atlantic. As Cromwell had said, and the killer believed, stone-dead hath no fellow. Ships bearing paper came into Convoy Wharf now, but there weren’t so many these days since newsprint was rationed.
The murderer knew the history of Convoy Wharf, and its connection with slaughter, and had saved it up for special use.
Now he was coming down to take a look round, check it out, as a good soldier might, making notes. Nothing unusual in that, every fit adult male in the country had served in the army.
He took a table in a dock café where a dish of unlovely sausages tumbled and sizzled in a pan all the time. The place was two-thirds full of stevedores, dockers and lightermen. They took no notice of him, he did not stand out, he was in no way remarkable, although they knew he was not one of them.
The murderer did not wear a mask; he always looked exactly himself, knew no other way to do it, but by nature he had been given a face whose planes and angles made him appear calm and without much expression.
> As he walked towards Convoy Wharf he did not know that John Coffin was already listening to his tread.
Tom Banbury kicked off his shoes, removed his socks, then sat back in his armchair. End of day. End of rotten day, a day to make a fool of him. He had known that the bones of the hand found in Greenwich Hythe could not be that of the little Shepherd girl as soon as he looked at them. They didn’t look right even to the lay eyes. He had seen enough bones and dead flesh in his day to have an eye for it.
An eye, but not a stomach. He was not in the right job; he should not have been a policeman. What he should have become was not clear to him, possibly a teacher. He liked children. Hated to see them abused.
If the Shepherd child was dead and he found the killer he would be glad to attend his execution. Some people deserved hanging.
The young soldier who had murdered Mrs Shepherd herself would shortly come to trial and if found guilty would be condemned to hang.
Tom Banbury considered the act of execution: he knew what happened, had stood behind the hangman. In Madame Tussaud’s.
He stretched out a hand for the bottle of whisky on the floor and poured himself a drink. He would drink until he fell asleep. He was one of those who found comfort in the bottle.
Only Dander knew, because Banbury’s sister, Dander’s wife, showed this congenital disability. Banbury kept his secret because he only drank when he was sure of being alone. He was almost alone.
A picture of his wife’s body, torn and bleeding, as it must have been after the bomb, floated in front of his eyes. Not her face, he never saw her face, just her naked, blasted body. He had never seen this sight: he had been on a job and away from home when the bomb fell, but he knew how she must have looked. It was peace now, but never peace for him.
This picture always came to him about this time of day because he was at leisure. It was a time he feared and yet loved, the time when he was alone with Elizabeth. Elizabeth was the daughter they would have had, the child his wife had been carrying when she was killed. He had never seen this child, did not truly know its sex, but he was convinced he would have had a daughter. He had lost this child, lost it for ever. This was what fuelled his search for the Shepherd child. He had lost a daughter because of the war; Rachel Esthart had lost a son because she was a drunken slut.
Coffin on the Water Page 9
