‘Has she been so very sane this last fifteen years? I wonder sometimes.’
‘Anything else?”
Stella shook her head. ‘Except I think Florrie’s frightened. She’s very jumpy. And nicer to me than usual. She doesn’t like me, you know.’
Coffin turned them back towards Angel House. ‘No, Stella. It’s man crime. All the marks.’
Except there had been no sexual violation. Only mutilation. And hadn’t someone once thought that Jack the Ripper was Jill the Ripper?
They were outside Angel House, she had to go in. He hoped to God she was safe. He bent to kiss her.
‘I don’t suppose you could ever, well, care for me – seriously, I mean?’ He felt clumsy, stupid, but the feeling was real.
‘I don’t know.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘I’m the classic can’t-make-up-her-mind girl. I don’t know what I want.’
‘Is there someone else?’
‘Yes.’ She dropped her voice so that he could hardly hear the murmur. ‘Sort of.’
More than one, probably. Being Stella, it was probably more than one, and always would be. Yet she knew the part, the career, the way of life she wanted. That was Stella.
‘Forget I spoke, love. No harm done.’
She raised her head. Florrie from her window saw their kiss. Rachel Esthart saw them. As their lips met, Stella said: ‘I swear she’s planning something, Rachel is.’
‘You’ve trusted me with this.’
‘I wouldn’t have told anyone else. I might have done in front of Alex. No one else.’
‘Leave it there. With me. Don’t say anything to anyone.’
‘I won’t.’
Stella went inside.
It might well be she would be safer there than anywhere else.
Coffin had his own dark thoughts which that evening had reinforced.
Dark, dark, like a shadow of comradeship gone wrong.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Neck Feels the Rope
The tiny woman who crouched in the recess between two stone pillars on the wharfside at the Isle of Dogs did not know she was being talked about by her sister and her sister-in-law. She was on bad terms with them both. She was cleverer, prettier and better educated than either of them; they resented her. For her part she had never liked either of them, nor did she like water, the Isle of Dogs, or crouching. Life plays you some nasty tricks.
A little way up river from Greenwich, towards Deptford, two women were talking.
‘Coffee or tea?’
‘Tea, please. She’s left him, you know. That’s what she’s done.’
‘Never. She’s a wanderer. I see her going off, having an affair, but not leaving him.’
‘He says so.’
‘He would. It’s what he hopes.’
‘Oh, go on, Lou.’
They were talking in the small dark living-room of a small terrace house. It was a house which had been bombed, then roughly repaired, and was now undergoing re-painting and re-papering. The living-room was half done. Two walls had new paper in a bright colour while the other two retained the original grubby yellow.
In the kitchen outside a kettle was boiling.
The woman who had offered the choice of tea or coffee looked round nervously. ‘I don’t like making tea in her kitchen without her being here.’
‘Wait long enough if you waited for her. Never offered a cup, she didn’t, even if she’d got the kettle on herself.’ The speaker looked around appraisingly. ‘You’ve tidied up.’
‘Did it for him, didn’t I? He’s had enough to put up with.’
‘Any sugar, Lou?’
‘Oh, ought we to use their sugar? I never like touching another person’s rations.’
Lou occasionally annoyed everyone. At the moment she was annoying her friend Nora, who was sister to Jim who was married to Lou’s own sister Eileen, always called Tiny because of her size. The chain of relationships did not end there because Lou was married to Ted, who had once been engaged to Nora before she married Arthur on the rebound from a quarrel with Ted. Nor was that the end of it because Eileen and Jim had one child who was at present being passed back and forth between them like a parcel. He was unfortunate enough to resemble his pretty mother while bearing the sex of his father, thus endearing himself to neither aunt. Lou could not ‘abide’ boys, while Nora disliked Eileen’s looks. She liked boys, though, and was possibly the little chap’s best hope at the moment.
A wail from his pram outside alerted the aunts. Lou went outside and wheeled in the pram.
‘Fancy leaving your child.’ Even a boy deserved something better, but Eileen never thought twice about anyone else.
‘Fancy leaving your husband like that! And him just back from active service.’ Nora picked up the boy, a child of some eighteen months and gave him a biscuit. There you are, Lennie, you take the nice biccy. You’ll stop looking such a nancy boy when you get older. She ought to stop putting him in a dress, Lou. It’s not right.’
‘She didn’t take her clothes. Nor her suitcase,’ said Lou uneasily. ‘Jim said. He doesn’t like it.’
‘We don’t know that for sure. She’s been buying a lot new lately. Had more than Jim. Took all his coupons.’
‘Mine too,’ Lou said sadly. ‘Said she’d pay me back. Never has. But she’ll be back. She’d never leave Jim really. Just go off for a change. She said so in her note: “Look after baby while I’m out. Back soon, love, Tiny.” That doesn’t sound like leaving him. Not for ever.’
‘So what’s Jim done?’
Nora no longer lived close: she had been bombed out, and moved a bus ride away to New Cross. She’d been bombed there too, but less thoroughly.
‘Not much. What can you do?’
‘He’s had over two weeks. I’d have got track of her by now. Look for the man. She’s gone off with a man. She’s a loose woman.’
‘She’s not loose,’ defended her sister sadly. ‘But she does like a bit of fun.’
On the table between them was yesterday’s evening paper, which had the latest report on the case of the dead girl found at Greenwich.
Lou picked it up, studying idly while she drank her tea. It was a pity when girls got themselves murdered, but they had only themselves to blame.
The woman who crouched in the hiding-place stirred uneasily, waiting for the moment to make her re-entrance.
‘Stay there,’ her boyfriend had said, ‘and I’ll come and get you, Tiny. Promise.’
He spoke in the way people sometimes talk to children and animals. Toy-talk, paper thin. Such talkers are not usually very fond of either children or animals.
He put his hand to his neck as if it irritated him. There was a red mark where possibly his collar had rubbed, producing perhaps a touch of eczema. The line of red was about two inches long and half an inch wide. There was a wheal-like quality to it as in a rope-burn; the hangman’s mark.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Hands of the Murderer
It did not take long to find out something of what Rachel Esthart was planning because she announced it herself, sending out invitations.
Time had passed. Stella endured her role in Candida; felt she was improving without enjoying it much, went for an interview with the management in the West End (Lonsdale’s, it was, as it happens) where the impresario patted her hand and said: ‘You’re true gold, darling, but we must wait for the right thing to come along or we shall waste you.’ Then he asked her to lunch at the Dorchester and then to see his collection of theatrical relics, but Eddie had warned her about that, as indeed had Bluebell, Joan and Florrie, but not Rachel who had smiled enigmatically, so she said yes to the lunch and no to the playbills and Mrs Siddons’s slippers. The lunch was delicious and she could live on that for a week.
Preparations for the Masque gathered pace. The timetable for the Royal Visit progressed through the borough. Special police arrived to check on details. Two Doggett Coat and Badge-winners, both watermen resident in Greenwich, came to
blows over which should row the Royal Barge. Then it was announced there was not to be a Royal Barge, the royal party would arrive and depart in Daimlers. The watermen joined in drinks at the Admiral’s Head to deplore this sad dropping away from standards.
‘The old Queen would have ridden on the river,’ said the one.
‘She’s been gone since the turn of the century.’
‘I don’t mean Victoria: Elizabeth. You remember her from history.’
Elizabeth and Great Harry her father, Czar Peter and his reluctant host John Evelyn, were still figures that walked in Greenwich. There was one family of tall giant men that called themselves Peters and claimed descent from Peter the Great. One of them now was fighting to play a part in the Masque. A claim resisted strongly by Joan and Albie and promoted by the local newspaper: the Greenwich Herald. In the interests of publicity the current Peter was likely to win.
By now anxieties about the murder were rampant in Greenwich. The Wick and the Hythe were downright nervous. Women locked their doors, did not go out at night alone. It was worse than the blackout, more nerve-racking than the Blitz. Dark rumours floated in the air like droplets of the plague. Another girl had been murdered, only her body had not yet been discovered, or the police were keeping quiet about a series of sex attacks, that was another story.
At Lorimer’s both Alex and John Coffin were questioned and returned tactful answers.
No, no other body. No, no reports of sexual attacks on girls or women. Yes, they were quite sure the murderer of Connie Shepherd had been caught. They’d got the right man who would very soon be coming up for trial. Yes, her daughter was still missing, but they had no reason to believe she was dead.
No reason to believe anything one way or another about that child. She could be on the moon, for all they knew.
The clothes found had certainly been hers once, but a neighbour had given witness that she had long outgrown them and they had been passed on to her own child (coupons, you know) before being discarded as outworn.
Her own child was there, alive, and kicking its heels while it looked at Tom Banbury and Alex Rowley. Banbury need not have been there, Alex could have done this interview on his own, but Banbury was here, there and everywhere these days, and never seemed to leave him alone.
Some days after his supper with Stella, when a lull, a lassitude, had fallen on the investigation, John Coffin sat at an early breakfast at Mrs Lorimer’s. She had a kipper for him, cooked with bacon, a bonus for a good boy. She was getting to like him.
She had a packet of letters the postman had just delivered in one hand and a teapot in the other. ‘Tea?’
‘Thanks.’ The kipper was good, the bacon even better. The day was beginning well. He cast his eye on the letters. Probably none for him, there never were any for him. He had no one to write to him. Never had had. He wondered how it would be to have a wife to write to him.
One could not imagine Stella writing to him, somehow, but that undiscovered brother or sister might if ever located.
Mrs Lorimer poured herself a cup of tea. She never ate with her lodgers, but often attended their meals rather in the manner of a keeper at the zoo, sometimes allowing herself a drink, as now.
There was something in her determined manner of sipping the tea that suggested to him that she wanted to talk.
‘Of course, I tell them it is nonsense to suppose the Royal Visit will be put off on account of one murder,’ said Mrs Lorimer. ‘The King and Queen did not leave London during the bombs so one murder will not drive them away. As a magistrate I can say that with certainty. They may leave the princesses at home. One could understand that precaution. As a mother of a daughter I would sympathize.’
So the depressed-looking young woman who occasionally emerged from the kitchen was her daughter. Coffin had speculated.
‘Are you a magistrate, Mrs Lorimer?’
‘I have just become one,’ said Mrs Lorimer, with her hanging-judge look on her face.
Lady Olivia’s voice could be heard from behind her door. ‘Two seemly young men. One so dark and the other that ginger-gold which is so fascinating.’ Coffin blushed. ‘I choose him.’
One never seemed to see Lady Olivia, although her voice was heard, but she must get around because she was always up to date with the news.
Her door banged to and she began to sing: ‘My love is like a red, red rose.’
Of course, she’d seen him go past with the roses for Stella that night, the old devil.
‘Don’t mind her,’ said Mrs Lorimer. ‘With gin and whisky so short she’s not a lot of trouble. It’ll kill her in the end, of course.’
‘She’ll go down singing.’
Mrs Lorimer laughed for the first time in their aquaintance. ‘That she will. But she’s an old duck, really. I’ve known her all my life. My grandmother was cook to her ladyship’s mother.’
‘Did they live round here?’ It struck him that Mrs Lorimer might help him with his own private question. ‘I suppose you know a lot of the old families. And the shops?’ he continued hopefully.
‘No as to Lady Olivia, her family’s house overlooked Hyde Park,’ said Mrs Lorimer, reverting to the face without a smile, ‘but yes, I suppose I know a good many of the local people.’
‘I’m interested in Clarke’s, the butcher’s.’
‘There’s a whole string of Clarke’s all over Greenwich Wick and the Hythe and very good shops they are. Started with one little shop in Greenwich Strand in 1880. Old Mr Clarke’s long gone. Be over a hundred now if he were still alive. Always gave good weight. It paid, you know.’
‘Ah.’
‘We lost touch during the war so I don’t know what became of them all. They weren’t a large family. I heard the grandson died as a POW in a Jap camp and that his wife was dying. But I don’t know for sure. The war killed a lot off, one way and another.’
‘No family left, then?’ Not even one last old man? he thought sadly.
She didn’t answer. Instead she put one long, cold hand on his. ‘I expect there is a lot you know about this murder that you aren’t telling us.’
He realized what he’d done now. She thought he suspected the unlucky family of butchers. Shades of Jack the Ripper.
‘It’s a private inquiry,’ he said hastily. That’d be something; to flush up a long lost brother and then find he was a murderer. He swallowed. I’m laughing, he told himself, just laughing.
‘They wouldn’t really put off the Royal Visit?’
‘I haven’t heard a word about it.’
‘No.’ She considered. ‘It was you that got the shoe out of the river. No, don’t answer. I know you’re not supposed to talk. But I know it was you because Lady Olivia’s little friend Paul Shanks, who does her errands for her, was the one who spoke to you. We all wonder you’re still alive, taking in that water. Very dirty, you know.’
‘I’m all right. I didn’t swallow any. But I can’t talk about it.’
‘That’s what Tom Banbury always says. Poor Tom.’
‘Well, he’s not a talker,’ said Coffin with feeling.
‘Ah, you didn’t know him before his wife went.’
‘I thought she was killed.’
‘She was killed. By a bomb. With the baby. But she’d gone first. Left home. Moved in with another man. Couldn’t stand being married to a policeman. Some women can’t.’
‘I’ve heard.’
‘Tom feels she wouldn’t have been killed if she’d stayed with him. His house was never touched, you know. Not a scratch. And of course, the child that was to be. He minded that. Dug in the rubble with his own hands, he did.’
‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘Just thought you ought to know.’ She added gruffly, He’d never tell you himself. He went off to the war after the bomb and did very well, for a bit.’
‘I know.’ Coffin had done a little prudent questioning himself and knew that Tom Banbury had conducted investigations into refugees from the Low Countries and France who mi
ght be Fifth Columnists. If he decided they were spies, then more or less on his say-so they went off to be executed.
What that did to a man in his emotional state could not be guessed at.
‘He’d hate killing, poor Tom. But any policeman would, wouldn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ said John Coffin. ‘Policemen don’t like killing.’ But he wondered if that was true: the impulse to kill could come to any man, given the right circumstances. The war taught you that. All you could say was that some men suffered more.
‘It was bad about the bird. The seagull.’
‘How did you hear about that? Not Lady Olivia again?’
Mrs Lorimer smiled. ‘No, the lady who comes in by the day to clean my kitchen scrubs the kitchen floor at Angel House once a week. She told me. Her floorcloths were all wet and bloodstained. She nearly had a heart attack. It must be connected.’ She nodded her head sagely. ‘And you really have no idea about the killer?’
‘No. Not me. The boss may have.’
‘Could it be anyone local?’
He shrugged. ‘Could be. Likely in a way.’
A roster of names ran through his mind continually. Edward Kelly, Chris, even Rachel Esthart herself, together with other faces.
‘I’ll tell you: sometimes I think one thing and sometimes another.’
Not Rachel Esthart’s missing son?’
‘I shouldn’t think so, would you?’
No. I’m sure he’s dead long since, poor little boy.’
‘You knew him?’
‘He was only a baby. But he was gentle. Whatever happened, I don’t see him as a killer.’
But someone did not like Rachel Esthart, and did not like women. Possibly did not like actresses, but they did not have to be the same person. The killer and the bird man could be two different people.
‘There are two aspects,’ he said aloud. “There’s the hatred of ‘Rachel Esthart which seems displayed. Then there is the actual killing of the girl, her murder. It’s hard to see where the two themes join up. Or why.
‘I think that’s what worries Dander and Warwick. I know it’s what worries me. They play it down. But I think they do join. That I swear.’
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