Fortunately, he liked it. But better not dwell on that thought.
‘And whose side am I taking here?’
Stella frowned. ‘I am not sure, but judging by the last conversation, it is Jack Bradshaw.’
Coffin said seriously: ‘Darcy’s a good man, a clever detective. I have to listen to what he says.’
‘Even if you don’t believe it; he knows that, of course. Couldn’t miss it, could he? I admire him for sticking to his idea that Bradshaw is the man, even though you don’t take that line.’ She was brushing her hair. ‘Mind you, I think you are wrong.’
‘Do you?’ He had some faith in Stella’s powers of observation and understanding; often she saw more than he did.
She swung round on the chair at the dressing table to face him. ‘Yes, I think Bradshaw could kill.’
‘And I think I know whom you are backing as innocent victim,’ said Coffin. ‘Martin.’
Stella said: ‘Well, I do need him in my cast, but you can have his sister. For my mind she could kill anyone.’
And hasn’t she already? thought Coffin, but did not say so aloud. It was there though, that thought, and both of them knew it.
As he made his way to meet George Darcy, Coffin knew that his investigation was made more difficult by the way in which the two cases ran together. A kind of twinning.
The join was Jaimie Layard.
Was she an innocent victim or had she brought her death on herself? All he had heard about her suggested she was a violent woman herself. He had only met her once but she had made an impact as a strong, even aggressive woman. Perhaps that was unfair, clearly at that time her relationship with Martin was under strain.
Was it physical passion that lay behind her death? She was certainly the sort of woman that could provoke a fierce, killing anger in a man.
But there was something else: it now seemed that she had cultivated Martin because she was going to put him in a book. She was also investigating the murky depths of Dick Lavender’s youth.
Dick Lavender had asked for help from Coffin to find his father’s last victim: the old man might not welcome publicity of the wrong sort, but he was anxious to make belated amends. An old man, with a distinguished past, who now wanted to die having cleared his conscience. Not likely to murder.
On the other hand, Martin and his sister had a stronger motive; Clara Henley had served her sentence, and was building a fine career, but she was very protective of her younger brother. Martin might easily have killed the woman he loved, Darcy liked the idea of a crime of passion, and Darcy had a good record for being right in murder cases.
If Martin had done the killing, then Clara might set up the charade of Jaimie dressed as a guy in the car park. She might even have enjoyed it.
Martin was a good actor, possibly she was one too.
He had a picture of Clara, dressed perhaps as an adolescent in jeans, pushing the pram through the street.
It was a foggy, cold morning; he had a chance as he drove past to stare into the old churchyard which was cordoned off and guarded. No one seemed to be taking much interest, even the young journalist must have packed up and gone home. Unless she was the sleeping figure in the little red Metro. He thought she was; she would get the whole story of the bodies in the churchyard, she was game. The spirit of Edgar Wallace stirred again. Rivalry between the police and investigative journalist could operate here; she might get the true facts before he, the Chief Commander, did, but he felt no jealousy, he was glad to say – he always liked pretty young women.
An empty coffin, the bones of a hastily buried man, and the skeleton of a woman with child.
They might never discover who either of the dead were. But if Dick Lavender was telling the truth there was a chance that the dead woman was Isobel Haved, who had been a missing woman in 1913 and believed to be a Spinnergate Ripper victim.
Or killed by Edward Lavender, if you believed his son.
The same Edward Lavender whose jacket had now been wrapped round the body of another murdered woman.
He liked the idea of a revenant coming back to wreak revenge on a biographer. Or possibly go in for one last murder.
He was laughing as he arrived; parked his car in his own marked parking space (which he knew was regularly monitored to check if WALKER – his code name – had arrived).
CI George Darcy was waiting for him: he was a punctual and reliable man who was always where he had said he would be and at the time appointed. ‘I have warned them we are coming, you have to with that lot, a law unto themselves.’ There was a war between the CID and the police scientists, the scenario made up of accusations from both sides of delays, loss of vital material, and obfuscation. Darcy found them particularly irritating.
‘Nature of their work, I suppose.’
‘So they say.’
Darcy led the way in through the swing door, checked their arrival as he would check them out (Darcy knew the rules), since no one, not even the Chief Commander, was allowed in without a pass. Too many confidential, and sometimes dangerous and even highly contagious, materials came into this building.
Coffin followed him politely (he also knew the rules and had long since known how to circumvent them, this being one of the reasons for his rise and on occasion fall); he knew there was a back door that was regularly left open.
‘Hello, Dr Miller.’ He knew Daisy Miller from an earlier visit; she had helped him catch a man who was threatening Stella, and writing obscene letters. Daisy specialized in writings, although probably not on aged jackets.
She had a charming smile and a polite way of talking, although the burden of what she said was often sharp. Coffin thought that her parents must have been reading Henry James when she was christened.
‘You’ve come about this fucking jacket,’ she said in her ladylike voice.
‘You don’t like the jacket?’
‘I don’t usually feel one way or the other about the artefacts I work on, but this gives me the creeps.’ She stared down at it. ‘Where did it come from? Whose tomb?’
She saw Darcy staring at her rubber-gloved hands. ‘I always wear gloves when I’m working and you ought to do the same. You could pick up anything in here … this jacket, straight from the Plague Year?’
‘Not quite that old,’ said Coffin. ‘Say eighty years.’
Dr Miller looked at the jacket with assessing eyes. ‘I’m not a fashion expert, but the fabric and the cotton lining could bear analysis. I bet they contain dyes and stiffening no longer in use. You might be able to date it that way … if that matters.’
‘It could matter. The name matters.’
He stared down at the jacket which was pegged open so that he could see the lining. It had been marked just below the collar.
Not much to be seen, just a blur, a shadow.
‘Comes up better in the photograph.’ Dr Miller handed over an enlarged print.
In a cursive hand, with flowing curves, at once ornate and yet unsophisticated, the typical copperplate handwriting of a London Board School in late-Victorian England. It was the handwriting of someone who followed the rules but did not write much.
Edward Lavender.
That was all that could be read easily. There was some writing underneath, but very blurred.
Daisy Miller appraised it. ‘I might be able to bring that up.’
‘Be useful if you could.’
She looked at Coffin. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Probably the address. And addresses are always useful.’
‘Get lucky and you might get a date and a confession as well.’
‘That would be even more useful.’ Had she heard about the hunt for a serial killer of long ago?
‘Of course, he would be long dead.’ She had heard. The whole Second City Police Force knew and was talking about it, seeing their Chief Commander as a lunatic pursuing the unfindable.
Coffin’s eyes traced some faint shadows on the photograph; he turned back to the jacket to look there. Yes, there was discolouration.
‘Stains? Is it blood?’
‘I don’t know why you lot are always so keen on blood … Stains are not my speciality but the word is not blood, but earth … clay probably, dear old London clay as laid down in the Ice Age or earlier.’
Coffin bent down to study the jacket. ‘Are you saying the jacket has been buried?’
Dr Miller shrugged. ‘I don’t know, more your job than mine … perhaps the chap was a gardener.’
Coffin traced his finger along a line across the breast of the jacket.
‘Is that the sign of a fold … where the jacket was folded up?’
‘Mind how you touch,’ said Daisy Miller. ‘Mustn’t pollute or contaminate the evidence. Yes, could be where it was folded.’ She pointed to the photograph. ‘See it better there. A set of lines where it was folded. Folded for a long time, too.’
As the Chief Commander and CI Darcy left together, she held the door open for them and then called after them: ‘Wish you luck.’ Her tone and manner suggested she hoped for the opposite.
‘I think we stepped on a mine with her,’ said Darcy as they walked away.
‘You always step on a mine with Daisy.’ Coffin accepted it as a fact of life. ‘I always do. It’s known as having a short fuse, I think.’
‘She doesn’t like men.’
‘So I have heard.’
No more was said, but a bridge had been built between them, gratifying to Darcy who was a career man and allowing Coffin to go back to his own thoughts.
A jacket that might have been worn by a murderer while at his killing, a jacket wrapped round another murdered woman some eighty years later.
How long can a man live? Surely he couldn’t be killing at the age of a hundred and twenty or so?
Or had he stepped out of the past, out of the fourth dimension … No, people didn’t talk like that now. Time was indivisible but we could not walk through time where and how we liked.
Or so Coffin had always piously supposed. He looked at George Darcy and saw he knew no such doubts, secular or religious, rational or the opposite.
‘I shall have to question Bradshaw again, inspect his rooms and have his car gone over.’ His voice was practical. ‘There was no trace of him in her rooms but we shall see. There is her workplace – it was looked at, of course, but we might have another go.’
‘I doubt if she was killed in either of those places. Still, I would like to see them too, I will come with you.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I will have to consult the diary, work out when.’ Darcy nodded, not pleased, he would have preferred to have been on his own. ‘And I shall talk to Dick Lavender myself.’
Suddenly he realized he was both desperately tired and very hungry. Darcy seemed to read his face.
‘What about some breakfast, sir? I have been on the go all night.’ And so have you from what I have heard, but he did not say this aloud. ‘The canteen does a good breakfast, and we have our own room.’
‘I’d put the rest off their food.’
‘I don’t think so, sir,’ said Darcy, who had seen his colleagues eating.
‘Right. Lead me in.’
The Senior Officers’ Mess was not crowded, as Coffin reckoned Darcy had counted on. Most officers took breakfast at home or didn’t eat it. It was a pleasant room, even on a foggy November morning, warm and cheerful with pale oak-panelled walls and a nut-brown carpet. At the beginning, the Chief Commander, feeling the push of political correctness, had experimented with one big, all-ranks eating hall, but it was soon clear that people liked to sit in groups with whom they felt at ease. Segregation was natural, it appeared, so the Chief Commander had bowed to wishes that were apparent but not expressed, and created a separate room for the most senior officers.
The two men sat at a table by the window. Darcy went across the room to pour them orange juice and bring cups of coffee. He also picked up the local newspaper and The Times. ‘Bacon and eggs on the way. Fried bread too, sir.’ He gave the Chief Commander The Times, as his due, and read the local himself.
Across the room. Coffin saw that his old friend Chief Superintendent Archie Young had arrived. Archie was one who often breakfasted because his wife was a high-performing career lady who did not eat breakfast.
There was one long table down the centre of the room with several smaller tables ranged along the wall by the door and by the window. Coffin had noticed that most people avoided the middle table to take one of the small ones. Whatever happened lower down the ranks, top brass liked to eat on their own. You didn’t have to be a solitary to succeed, but it didn’t hurt either.
Archie Young was not by nature one who liked to be on his own, but life had thrust it upon him, since his so successful wife and his own promotions had removed him from his own kind. But he still maintained a friendly relationship with John Coffin, their pasts ran together for such a long way.
All three men read the newspapers, eating without much talk. Coffin noticed that Darcy seemed more interested in his local newspaper than he himself was with The Times, even muttering with what sounded like pain at one point. Then he folded the Sentinel to get on with his breakfast.
When he had finished eating and reading the latest scandal about a member of the House of Commons, and there always seemed to be one. Coffin looked up, met Archie Young’s eye and smiled. ‘Come over, Archie.’
The chief superintendent gathered up the scattered pages of his paper and came over.
‘See you’ve got the Sentinel too.’
‘Not me. Darcy here.’ Darcy being named, nodded in a slow, reluctant way and without offering the paper.
‘You ought to read it.’
Coffin dragged the paper towards him. ‘Oh? Any special reason?’
‘You’ll see.’
George Darcy said, but sadly and as if he would rather not: ‘Page two, sir, and then again on the editorial page, that’s six.’
Coffin turned the page. The headline stared out at him. With it was a photograph: big-eyed, pretty, winsome even, there was Jaimie Layard.
Or, as the Sentinel had it: Marjorie Wardy.
MURDERED WRITER’S LAST STORY.
She told our interviewer how she is researching the story of a killer, in Spinnergate.
She names no names, but says there will be a sensation when her work is complete. Her book will link the past and the present.
This study she planned to follow up by the story of a contemporary murder that will stagger all who read it.
But Marjorie says that her flat was broken into and her work attacked: her word processor was broken; some of her research destroyed.
She herself was followed and attacked but she managed to escape. She felt under a threat.
She reported all this to the police in Spinnergate, one night, late in October, about a week before she died.
SOMEONE IS OUT TO GET ME, she said,
AND I THINK I KNOW WHO.
WAS THIS WHY SHE WAS KILLED?
The rest of the article was just padding, making hints but giving no details of any importance. Coffin turned to the editorial page.
WHAT WERE THE POLICE DOING?
He knew what to expect after that beginning.
‘Lovely,’ he said to Darcy and Young, looking from one to the other. ‘Is this true?’
George Darcy said: ‘It’s one of those Our Reporter Learnt jobs. Can’t tell how much of it is true and what she really did say, but I’ll look into it, sir.’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
Archie Young said: ‘I think it’s probably true, sir. I know the editor of the Sentinel, and though he is not a lover of the police, he is very professional and I don’t think he would run this story without having something solid.’
Darcy stood up. ‘I’ll get off, sir, and investigate. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not true, but I will find out. You can be sure of that.’
His back was expressive as he marched off.
He went off bearing his own burden of anger to spread around.
The other two men watched him go. Coffin was still wrathful. ‘It’s his job to know what’s going on and not to let stories like this get around.’ He looked at Archie Young. ‘You knew.’
‘I just happened to hear something going around.’ He could see the Chief Commander’s anger. ‘Information gaps do happen sometimes, I have had them myself.’ He did not add: And so have you, in the past. ‘I gather one officer was ill, away.’
Coffin got the message. ‘Well, yes, I’ve dug a few holes for myself in the past, and fallen into them.’
He stopped being angry and finished drinking his coffee. ‘The fact is, Archie, as you probably know, I am close to two cases at once … not a good thing at all in my position.’ Especially as one of them was an investigation eighty years too late.
The anger felt by the Chief Commander was carried down by George Darcy to the inspector beneath him and the CID unit dealing with the death of Jaimie Layard. By the time he had finished, about a dozen men and women had felt the lash of his tongue.
George Darcy made to feel a fool was nobody’s friend.
Eventually, in company with Detective Inspector Upton and Sergeant Foster, he was talking to a uniformed constable who had been on duty at Blake Street Police Station when Jaimie Layard had called about the break-in and about the attack on her. He was Constable Eric Casey. They were not being rough with him.
The reason they were handling Eric Casey gently was because the night that Jaimie came in to talk to him at his desk was the night that his wife was hit by a stolen car and plunged into a coma. She stayed on a life-support machine for ten hours, after which she died.
Eric Casey was not seen around Blake Street during that time and not for some days after it. When he did return to work, although he had, at the time, made all the necessary signs on paper to record Jaimie’s visit, he remembered nothing. He went on remembering nothing, and having been transferred to quiet duties in the Register and Library at Central, he may have been the one man in Spinnergate who was not taking much notice of Jaimie’s murder.
Professional opinion from the police psychologist treating Casey was that the memory was there all right and they would get it out if they handled him the right way.
A Double Coffin Page 13
