‘My darling,’ he said. ‘How glad I am that I am married to you.’
Stella sat up. ‘So am I, my dearest. It is very nice for me.’ She sounded slightly surprised. But she was a generous woman who liked to return praise for praise. Even if it was not strictly true, since they had their ups and downs and she could not deny that she sometimes found her husband tiresome. It was part of the function of being a husband, perhaps a necessary one.
‘I love you, darling.’ She held out her arms for a kiss.
They had hitherto conducted their marital conversations rather in what she called the ‘Noel Coward style’. In other words, relaxed, amused and detached. Except when they were quarrelling, when there were no holds barred. Stella enjoyed the quarrels, she said they gave her scope. As a dramatic actress, she needed scope.
It occurred to her to say: Mind my nail varnish, but this would have been both unkind and bad manners, so she enjoyed the embrace, only turning her eyes for a quick glance as she emerged. All well, no smudging.
‘What’s up?’
‘Why should anything be up?’
How to put this tactfully? ‘That was kind of a desperate kiss.’
‘You certainly know how to cut a fellow down to size,’ said Coffin, rolling over on his elbows on the bed, but he was more amused than angry. ‘Not desperate, just bewildered.’
‘That isn’t like you.’ Stella rescued the bottle of nail varnish, and put it away tidily in a case. It was true, her husband was usually in control of himself and the scene: sometimes angry, sometimes depressed, but always sure he knew where he stood. Or that was how she saw him.
‘I have just listened to the most extraordinary tale and I don’t know whether I believe it or not.’ He stood up, and walked to the window. There just in view was the old churchyard. A woman was pushing a pram round it, and there were two dogs behaving the way dogs do. An old man was sitting on a bench, apparently asleep. It was not going to be an easy area to excavate. If he decided to do it.
‘I suppose it is one of those cases you can’t talk about,’ said the experienced Stella.
‘I am going to talk about it to you.’
‘Oh, thank you.’ Stella appreciated the compliment.
‘You’re sensible.’
Ah, the compliment shrank a little.
‘So I am,’ she said, getting up, wrapping the silk jacket – which the warm embrace had disarranged a little – more closely round. ‘What are you looking at out there?’
‘The old churchyard.’
Death again, she thought, there’s always death in our life. My husband’s career has been largely built on the deaths of men, women, and children.
‘It figures in what I am asked to do: I am asked to investigate a serial killer who did the deeds over eighty years ago (only they were not called that then but monsters), and find the grave of one of his victims.’
‘It’s a joke?’
Coffin shook his head. ‘No, it wouldn’t be funny if it was, but it isn’t.’
‘You can ignore it, say you are too busy to investigate deaths so long ago.’
‘I’m too busy all right,’ said Coffin gloomily.
‘Who is it who is asking you to do such a thing?’
Coffin took a deep breath. ‘Richard Lavender, former Prime Minister.’
‘I thought he was dead. No, that is not true, I didn’t think about him at all. Past history.’
‘Go on,’ said Coffin, still gloomily. ‘You aren’t cheering me up, but it’s what I thought myself. More or less. He is not dead, very old, but alive and articulate. Also, it seems, the possessor of a conscience that must be assuaged.’
‘He didn’t do the killings? Don’t tell me he was the mass murderer! What a play it would make.’
‘It would take a Shakespeare to do it justice … but no, he said it was his father who did the killing. He and his mother did the burying. At least, if we can believe him.’
She caught the note of doubt in his voice. ‘You don’t believe him?’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. Come on, what do you think, you’re outside it, what do you think?’
‘Be sensible, you mean.’ Stella sat down at her dressing table, and studied her face. She drew her mouth down in an ageing but sensible expression. ‘Well, why should he lie?’
‘That’s it. What is the motivation? I can’t make it out. He says he wants to die with a clear conscience.’
‘We all want that, I suppose, but it hasn’t worried him all these years.’ A thought struck her. ‘He must have been very young, you can’t blame a child.’
‘Not quite a child. A very clever one, too. And then all those years in power, controlling London. Why didn’t he do something then?’
‘He does believe it?’
‘Mm, mm. I think so … but I feel he might be under the influence of the people he lives with … A man called Jack Bradshaw.’
‘Oh, him,’ said Stella.
‘You know him?’
‘Comes to the theatre, belongs to the Theatre Club, even does the odd review for the local paper. Yes, I know him.’
‘What do you make of him?’
‘I like him, I think he’s got a sense of humour.’
‘Perhaps this is his joke,’ said Coffin, gloomily again.
‘He may not be kind,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think I would count on him to do the kind thing. It might not be a kind joke.’
‘It wouldn’t be, but unkind to whom to rig this up? Apart from me, of course. He’d have to hate the old man to manipulate him in that way. He could do it, I suppose, he’s writing his life. Perhaps old Lavender is senile.’
‘Does he look it?’
‘No, but it might need a trained observer.’
‘Aren’t you one?’
‘In a way, yes … This conversation isn’t getting anywhere. Give me a new start.’
‘Does he live alone? Is there anyone else?’
‘He may have more of a circle than I know. I could find out, and there is the niece. Great-niece, but she is just a domestic character.’
Stella shook her head. Women are never just domestic characters. Inside they are plotting another world like everyone else. Probably even animals did it in their own way. Cats certainly did, she thought, looking down at her own cat, former lost cat, ex-warrior of the streets, now an aged domestic retainer in a livery of tabby.
‘Do you think he is mad?’
‘He could be. With the sort of madness that can come sometimes with extreme old age … Not exactly madness, really, just too many memories, too many dreams remembered.’
‘It seems to be the memories that are the trouble.’
Coffin went to the window to look down on what he could see of the former church below, now part of the St Luke’s Theatre Complex, and then beyond to what had been the old churchyard, with the aged tombstones ranged around it like dead teeth.
The church was a solid Victorian building which had survived two world wars, much bombing, only to fall victim to the decline in churchgoing. The church had been deconsecrated, and converted into a dwelling in the tower, into which Coffin had moved, while the church itself had been turned into a theatre, and a theatre workshop and an experimental theatre.
‘It was a different world outside there then, when he was a boy. The London of his childhood was rougher and nastier and poorer in so many ways. Dark streets, and cramped, crowded living places.’
‘Oh come on. Dickens was dead, you know.’
But Coffin would not be stopped. ‘As a boy, he must have heard all about the murdered women, read about them in news sheets. Talked about it. Perhaps he buried it in his memory through the years as he became rich and successful. Now he has let the memory out, and he has taken on the guilt.’
Stella said: ‘I must think about that … perhaps there was something in those days that he had guilt about and he has transferred it … Make a good play.’
‘Jack the Ripper was not so far
off in the past. Still a terrible name to conjure with. Talked about at the time … People would have been reminded of him. It would have been in his mind.’
‘Perhaps his father was Jack the Ripper,’ said Stella lightly. ‘Come back for a second go.’
‘That would be something, to identify the Ripper after all this time,’ said Coffin, ‘and to have him father a Prime Minister.’
It was not quite a joke.
As he looked out of the window, he saw a tall figure going into the old churchyard; Coffin watched as the young man threw himself full length under a tree and buried his face in his hands.
An actor, of course. Only an actor walked with that air of ease and elegance, and then behaved with so much emotion. Unless he was a duke.
‘Who is that beautiful young man who crossed the road with such consummate grace and then fell on his face?’
Stella got up to look. ‘Oh, that’s Martin. Martin Marlowe. He’s just joined the company. He is lovely, isn’t he?’ There was frank appreciation in her voice: no one liked a beautiful young man more than Stella. Usually it went no further than detached admiration, but possibly not always.
Coffin looked at her and shook his head. ‘Not for you, darling.’
‘I wouldn’t think of it.’
‘You may think. Look but don’t touch.’
Stella laughed. ‘You are a pig. Or you can be. But bless you, I promise you that boy has enough emotion in his life without me joining in.’
‘I thought that from the way he fell upon the grass. Hamlet himself.’
‘Oh, do you think so?’ Stella was appraising. ‘I see him more as Romeo. Romeo after he’s lost Juliet.’
‘Has he lost his Juliet?’
‘Not yet, but he’s well on the way. He’s had a noisy row with his girlfriend, everyone heard, he was most articulate. So was she, come to that.’ She didn’t sound too miserable at the thought. ‘It will give depth to his acting, of course.’
Coffin was still looking out of the window. ‘That must be why he is beating the grass with his fist. Is that sorrow? I am bound to say it looks more like anger.’
Stella came to look. ‘I expect he is just rehearsing his part.’
‘What did you say his name was?’
‘Martin Marlowe.’
Coffin was thoughtful. ‘Real name or just for acting?’
Stella said slowly, ‘His real name.’
‘Ah.’
There was a pause, then she said: ‘You know who he is?’
Coffin said slowly but without emphasis: ‘I know.’
‘I suppose you usually get to know things like that.’
‘It’s part of the job. As you say, I get told that sort of thing.’
‘He doesn’t talk about it a lot, but he understands that people know and do. He doesn’t hide it, I call that brave.’
‘I didn’t know he was in a cast here.’
‘He’s only just joined. I went down to Bristol to see him act there, liked what I saw and offered him a part. He’s very young still …’
‘I could see that.’ It had been a very young man who had flung himself on the grass, and then to hammer it with his fists. An emotional young man. He did not accept Stella’s comment that he was rehearsing his part.
‘He did well at RADA, didn’t win any prizes, but we all know that prizewinners don’t necessarily have the most brilliant careers.’ Stella herself had never won a prize as a young actress, but her career afterwards had brought her several; she was up for a BAFTA award now. ‘But he has a way of getting straight at the audience that will stand him in good stead.’ She added: ‘Of course, he knows some people remember what took place and will talk about it. He accepts it. He told me that he doesn’t remember much …’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘He was only eight.’
‘You can remember a lot of what happened to you at eight,’ said Coffin. ‘And death … murder … your own father.’
‘But that is just what would block it.’
‘What about the sister?’ The sister had been much older, about sixteen.
‘She is a surgeon in a hospital in East Hythe.’
‘Isn’t it unwise to let a young woman so well acquainted with a knife become a surgeon?’
Stella was angry. ‘That is very unkind. And not like you.’
‘Yes, perhaps it is in bad taste.’
She is a different person from the girl who stabbed her father.’
But Coffin had read the official reports on the murder, had read the pathologist’s notes and seen the photographs of the victim. None of these had been seen by Stella.
Fourteen years earlier a family tragedy had been played out across the river in Chelsea. Henry Arthur Marlowe, a reasonably successful barrister, but a heavy drinker who became violent when drunk, was stabbed to death by his two children: a son, Martin, aged eight and a daughter, Clara, then sixteen. They stabbed him to protect their mother whom her husband treated savagely when drunk. Within a few weeks, the mother killed herself. In spite of everything, she had loved her husband. The girl Clara was in deep shock, inarticulate, not able to talk freely; not willing to, either.
The sitting room in the house in Vernon Gardens was full of blood, there was blood on the stairs, blood in the bathroom and blood in the bedroom where Averil Marlowe lay deeply asleep; she had taken a sedative.
The victim was lying, his body half across the doorway into the hall. He had been stabbed several times. Each wound penetrating deeply. This had been no quick killing.
The girl had let her mother have her sleep out before waking her with a cup of tea to tell what they had done. She herself telephoned the police, confessing to the killing.
When the police got there, the boy was found, asleep with the knife clasped to his chest. Both he and the girl were covered in blood which they had not washed off.
From prints on the knife the boy had certainly held the knife, and there was a bloody thumbprint on his father’s shirt.
But the girl did the main job. Detective Inspector Headerley had said. And he had added a scribbled note to the report that Coffin had seen: ‘And she wasn’t joking, every blow was meant.’
The boy, being so young, was not charged with any crime and could not be charged – he was sent to live with foster parents. The girl was put into a special establishment for disturbed and violent children, where she had a breakdown but responded to treatment, and after she was calm and cooperative, no trouble to anyone. Being highly intelligent, she had no trouble getting the exam levels demanded by the medical school of her choice. Her background was known, but after several interviews she was accepted. She was the best student of her year, but she had one little idiosyncrasy: she never spoke unless spoken to.
Still looking out of the window, Coffin said: ‘Do they still see each other, the brother and sister?’
‘I believe so,’ said Stella. ‘But I am only just beginning to know him, and I have only seen her once.’
‘Did she speak to you?’
‘No, that’s how it goes, I believe.’
‘Hard on her patients.’
‘Martin says she has a professional technique for work. I think they fill in a questionnaire and read it to her, that gets her going.’
Coffin still had his eyes on Martin, then he turned to Stella. ‘I have always had a feeling that we got something wrong about that case.’ He shook his head. ‘And yet I don’t know what.’ He looked out of the window again. ‘He’s getting up.’
‘Rehearsal over,’ said Stella cheerfully.
Coffin watched Martin’s progress; he certainly was handsome, and strode forward with a gentle, elegant air that was attractive. ‘He’s coming this way. I believe he is going to call on you.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Stella. ‘I asked him over for a drink.’
‘Stella,’ said Coffin warningly.
‘No, of course not.’ She sat up very straight and managed to look indignant. ‘Nothin
g like that. Why, he’s a baby.’ Then she said sweetly: ‘You’ll get a stiff neck if you look out of the window at that angle, and you know policemen are very prone to stiff necks … it’s an occupational disease.’
It was very hard to get the better of Stella, reflected Coffin as he went down the long staircase to let Martin in and take him to the sitting room, which, like the bedroom, overlooked the churchyard. It would be flooded with sunlight, and Stella had recently redecorated it in soft yellow. He was still laughing when he got to the door.
Martin stood outside on the low step, running a hand up and down the soft silk sleeve of his jacket. He looked expectant but smiled tentatively. ‘Stella asked me in for a drink before dinner.’
‘I expect she will ask you to dinner too. Come on in.’ Coffin held the door.
‘Oh, I never think of her as cooking.’
‘Oh, she won’t cook it.’
Martin looked at Coffin with surprise and query.
‘Not me either,’ said Coffin. ‘I expect we will go to Max’s or get him to send something over.’
The young man tripped on the stairs and apologized. ‘S-sorry.’ He had a little stammer.
‘This is a difficult staircase. Copied from a Norman trip stair in castles, I always say,’ joked Coffin. He put out a hand to steady the lad.
‘S-sorry … I’m not usually so clumsy.’ Martin had this slight but not unpleasing stammer. ‘I’m always nervous with a policeman.’ He looked at Coffin. ‘I’ve got a bit of a past, as you know.’
Coffin nodded silently.
‘I always tell people if they don’t know, just to get it out of the way.’
‘You had no need to tell me.’
‘I expect you knew anyway. You probably know more than I do. The thing is, I’ve forgotten. Silly, isn’t it?’
‘No, not silly at all. It’s probably a sensible way of dealing with it.’
Martin looked at Coffin as if he didn’t know exactly how to take this. Then the sitting room door was opened smartly and Augustus burst forth with a little bark. Stella followed, red satin catching the light. ‘He says he needs a run,’ she said, holding out her hand to Martin. ‘Come in, Martin.’
Martin bent down to pat the dog. ‘Good boy, nice fellow.’ He looked up. ‘I’ll take him, Stella. Just across the road to the park.’
A Double Coffin Page 3
