Heavy tread. A man’s. Probably friendly. Better not run any risks. He gave another long growl.
Whoever it was went away.
It was John Coffin the other side of the door, his tread that Bob had heard, Coffin he had growled at.
Stella’s got a watchdog now, Coffin thought as he turned away. I wasn’t really going to call, just look in and see how she was.
Perhaps he had had more in his mind than that simple quest; he had wanted to see Stella for himself. But in addition he had meant to ask her to come with him round the Zeman house in Feather Street where Val Humberstone had died. Lived and died.
He was puzzled about that death, they all were, there was considerable perturbation in the police team. Did it have any connection with the death of Anna Mary Kinver? If so, what, and how?
It was also causing more troubles in the neighbourhood. He could sense the tension rising. Nor was it imagination, he had solid reason. Feather Street was clogged with people trying to get a look at the Zeman house. A brick had been thrown through Leonard Zeman’s office window, and a wall at the bottom of Feather Street had been daubed with the word MURDERERS.
All this activity was unreasonable and illogical, but threatening.
Also, he had received advance information that the local newspaper would be launching a hostile editorial at him.
In addition, a BBC research team had arrived in the neighbourhood to interview and photograph the inhabitants. He did not know the exact nature of the programme being prepared, but he could guess. Somewhere in it there would be criticism of the police.
All in all, the death of Val Humberstone spelt trouble for the Chief Commander and his police force in the Second City of London.
He wanted desperately to know if Val Humberstone had died naturally or killed herself. Or been killed.
He wanted her to have died naturally but somehow he did not think she had.
The letter from the Paper Man seemed to suggest otherwise. If so, and Val’s death was not just a coincidence, how did the writer of the letter (whoever he or she was) know what was going to happen?
The odds against Val Humberstone having died naturally were shortening.
Well, the post-mortem might show how Val Humberstone had died. Not that they always did, he reflected gloomily, sometimes you didn’t get an answer. It wasn’t magic, a post-mortem, you were in the hands of the scientists and they were cautious people.
He had been told who was doing this post-mortem and he knew that Dr Angela Livingstone was one of the slow and careful ones.
But he wanted to go round the Zeman house and he wanted to go with Stella, because Stella had had a letter from the Paper Man and that must mean something. That particular letter had been handed over to Inspector Archie Young, who had his experts working on it. The first judgement seemed to be that it was alike in wording to that which had come to John Coffin, and similar in all respects in the way it was put together. The letters had probably been cut from the same source at the same time. The slightly shiny paper suggested a quality newspaper or magazine.
Sir Harry Beauchamp was coming through the narrow passage that led between St Luke’s Mansions and the Theatre Workshop. He was accompanied by his assistant who was carrying all the bags. Sir Harry himself was burdened with nothing more than a copy of Vogue under his arm, American edition.
‘Ructions going on in there,’ he said, giving a nod in the direction of the Workshop offices. ‘Nothing like actors for quarrelling. Artists are peace itself by comparison. Well, they don’t meet together so often, I suppose. A fat young man they called the Equity dep was tearing into Stella about something he called Clause Eighteen B. However, she was holding up nicely.’
‘Oh, she would do.’
‘Glad to see you, would have called anyway. Have you got anything out of those photographs yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I’ve got some blow-ups for you. Might not help. Don’t give more detail, but these are slightly different shots. There you are.’ He handed a packet over. ‘Worth a look. Hope you get something out of them.’
Coffin accepted them. ‘I’m grateful for them. I’ll pass them on to the investigating team.’ Having a look first himself, of course.
Then he went to the house in Feather Street where Val Humberstone had died. It had been left exactly as when Leonard and Felicity had walked in and found her. A quick survey had been made by a police detective, but they were waiting now for the post-mortem report. If it was natural death, then that was the end of it. If not, well …
The house was very still and quiet and stuffy. Smelt of the living, with just a faint whiff of death.
Coffin looked round the kitchen, then went up to the bedroom where the bedclothes were still in disarray.
On the bed table was the plate which Felicity had put there. The tea-tray was still there, but the teapot and the teacup had been taken away.
The plate except for a few crumbs had a well polished surface. An animal’s tongue could give it a clean look like that, Coffin decided. Bob and Val had shared some food in that room, and both had suffered.
He took one last look round the house before leaving.
He got to his parking place behind the new police building just in time to see Archie Young driving slowly past it, giving it a loving look, measuring himself for it. Dreaming: That’ll be mine one day.
Coffin knew the look, had had it himself in the past. Young would probably make it. He had that way with him, but his day was not yet.
‘Wait a minute,’ Coffin said, getting out the car. ‘Want a word. Got something for you.’ He handed over the packet of photographs that Sir Harry had given him. ‘Bit more material from Sir Harry. Get yourself copies, then let me have these back.’
‘Right, sir.’
Young looked bright and cheerful, although he had already done a hard day’s work and was still at it as evening came on, a twenty-hour day this was going to be, but he never tired. He was a stocky man for his size, with a thatch of fair hair which was always untidy.
He looked at Coffin, seeing him, just for a moment, not as the Boss, or the Old Man, or WALKER, but as a man you might meet in a pub like anyone else. Tall, going grey, but not losing his hair, bright blue eyes, quite formidable when he concentrated on you. Kind, possibly ruthless all the same. Decent, he thought. Someone you could work for.
‘Something to tell you, sir. Going to get the Paper Man letters in the press. Local and national papers. Superintendent Lane’s idea, sir. Thinks it might flush out something.’
‘Worth trying,’ nodded Coffin. And typical of Paul Lane, never averse to a bit of publicity.
‘You’re working late, sir.’ Young allowed himself the little friendliness, thinking that Coffin was not the sort to pull rank, and also not reluctant to draw attention to the fact that he himself was still at it.
‘I had to come back for something.’
In his office, Coffin went to the machine that recorded his messages, found the relevant tape and played over the original telephone call from Val Humberstone asking for a meeting.
Nothing there, he thought, but tension in her voice. But all the same there is something I want to think about, something that nags at me.
He sat down and let his mind run over what she had said when she put off that appointment. He had covered up his alarm when he turned back into the room with Stella and Sir Harry and the ever-present Dick, but it had worried him.
Not the message itself.
I was probably the last person to talk to her, he thought. And her voice was wrong.
Yes, that was what worried me. On that second call there was something different about her voice.
And there was something wrong with her breathing.
Get on with it, Dr Angela Livingstone, he thought. Let me know what you’ve found.
CHAPTER TEN
Wednesday to Friday, June 21–23, with a retrospective look at Tuesday again when Tim Zeman was interviewed
In the relatively
small, new CID unit that was still in the process of building itself up, knowledge about different cases was freely passed around, and would have been even if the names Kinver and Zeman were not irretrievably twined in and out of each other. One case, two cases, who knew?
Science was meant to help, but had so far not spoken.
Superintendent Paul Lane said that Dr Angela Livingstone, the pathologist engaged in the post-mortem on Val Humberstone, was a smart girl and a thoroughly reliable worker, but a bit reserved; Inspector Archie Young said she was absolutely brilliant, a friend of his wife and had been at Cambridge with her. From which the Chief Commander of the Force they worked in, John Coffin, deduced that Paul Lane, who was a bit of a womanizer (in a nice way, people said), had made an advance to Angela and been rejected and that Archie Young hadn’t thought of such a thing. So he said Good, he was glad to hear all that, but the trouble was she was very slow, and couldn’t she be hurried up a bit? He wondered if he ought to mention that Val Humberstone’s breathing had sounded abnormal, but in his experience scientists did not welcome lay help.
Paul Lane agreed to put pressure on. ‘But what I’m interested in is the genetic fingerprint of the Zeman boy to see if it matches with that of the killer.’ As found in the secretions on Anna Mary Kinver’s body. ‘If it does, then we’ve got him and no argument about it.’
They were not pleased, therefore, when on one and the same day the scientists checking the body secretions in question pointed out that they would have to be patient, these things took time, and Dr Angela Livingstone, instead of sending in her report, suggested she be allowed to examine the body of Mrs Kay Zeman, now some two weeks deceased.
It meant she had some clues to what had killed Val Humberstone, but she was not yet confident enough to say what. No one liked this, the news was kept quiet. Leathergate and Spinnergate were full of rumours.
There were too many bodies around. As well as the Zemans, an accident between a lorry and a bus crowded with schoolchildren had killed three seven-year-olds and a teacher. In addition, on that same morning a man had been found dead in the gutter outside the Spinnergate Tube Station. Mimsie Marker had found the body as she set up her newspaper stall just as the first trains of the day started to roll. She said he was a well-known gay character and to her mind he had died from a heart attack brought on by drink, and by what she tactfully called ‘overdoing it’. Mimsie was almost certainly right, but it was one more cadaver.
The body of Anna Mary Kinver was still in the police mortuary. A brief and formal inquest had been held and then adjourned at the request of the police. It was hard on her parents, everyone agreed, especially those who had seen Fred Kinver lately, but there was no doing anything about it.
Local feeling was toughening about Timmy Zeman. The story was that he had killed Anna Mary Kinver, and his grandmother and Val Humberstone had known something that had incriminated him, so he was rubbing them out too. One by one. No coincidence, these two deaths, was the judgement. No testimony about body secretions and genetic fingerprinting was necessary for them, they knew the answer: Tim Zeman.
Whether John Coffin, Archie Young and Paul Lane liked it or not (and they didn’t like it), the Zeman deaths were rapidly becoming part of the same problem with Anna Mary Kinver.
It was an added and unwelcome complication to Lane and Young that their boss was personally involved and taking what they felt to be an over-close and over-active interest in the case.
‘I just wish he’d get off our backs,’ said Superintendent Paul Lane, knowing full well from years of knowing Coffin that he wouldn’t. ‘Trouble is, he still thinks he’s a working copper, and he isn’t. Not any more. He’s an executive running a large business, and crime detection is only a part of it.’
Archie Young preserved a tactful silence. He was on the sharper end of John Coffin’s attention, getting the messages, questions, and demands and returning the answers, but he could do something for himself in the contact with WALKER.
John Coffin himself recognized the truth of the criticism which Paul Lane had not put into words yet had got across, but what Lane did not recognize was that emotions were involved which would not let him go.
It wasn’t Stella, although being close to her always stirred things up; it was because of that case at the beginning of his career when he had walked upon, literally stumbled upon, the hands of a young girl who had been raped and murdered. That girl had been killed by her young lover.
Coffin admitted this prejudiced him against Timmy Zeman, which was why he had to see that justice be done.
Officially he had not met Tim Zeman, but he knew what the boy looked like because he had seen him at the theatre with his parents. He was tall like his mother with her eyes and bone structure, but he had his father’s gentle manner. A boy with a sensitive expression, which might or might not mean a sensitive soul. You couldn’t tell. He had known a murderer with a face like a Botticelli angel, and a saint with a broken nose. Tim looked intelligent, and coming from the family he did, then he probably was. Heredity and genetics did count for something.
Coffin let a day pass while he got on with other business. There was plenty of it. Sometimes he felt he might close his eyes on a peaceful dockside London one day, then wake up the next morning to find it was ablaze like Beirut. Or he’d be out to dinner somewhere and someone would ring up and say: You’ve got a riot in your area. He had to hope he would have been told before it got to that, but he couldn’t count on it.
Public order, crowd psychology, were words he heard too often. The trouble was that the faces here were anonymous, and in the end crime was deeply personal. It was the death of your wife, your daughter, your son, even your neighbour, that gave you pain.
Thus he turned back to Timmy Zeman and Anna Mary Kinver.
He had taken the trouble to get the tapes of all the interviews the boy had had with Archie Young and Paul Lane, separately and together, they played it both ways. One of them went out, the other came back; one of them was good-humoured, the other threatening.
No doubt the boy had been confused, he was meant to be, to be thrown off his balance, ready to talk and make admissions.
However, he had made no admissions. At the first interview, his voice had sounded youthfully arrogant to begin with, then nervous, and finally frightened.
In successive interviews he had steadied, he had courage, but he had sounded cautious and tired.
Yes, he had admired Anna Mary very much. She was beautiful and nice to be with. Yes, very popular, everyone loved her.
Asked if he had loved her, he had said, ‘No.’ Very quiet on this, not saying much.
‘So what about the poems?’
Yes, he had written those, but they were not specifically to her. Just love poems. Things he was writing. She was a good judge, he valued what she thought of them.
‘So you are a poet?’ It was Archie Young’s voice.
Yes, he thought he might be, came the answer. It was what he wanted to be.
Silence for a bit then. Coffin could hear the shuffle of papers and the offer of a cup of tea which was accepted.
Sensible fellow, Coffin thought. Play for time, keep calm.
The boy seemed to be keeping calm, but you could hear the tension sharpening and making shrill his voice. Normally, he probably had a pleasant baritone. An educated boy, he spoke well.
After the tea, Paul Lane had put in his question:
‘You may not have loved Anna Mary but you probably fancied her. You admit she was an attractive girl. Did you make love to her?’
‘No.’ A short and quiet response.
‘Not ever?’
Again: ‘No.’
This time it was a mumble, as though the boy had his head down on his chest.
‘Perhaps you tried and were repulsed?’
‘No. It wasn’t like that.’
‘But she was sexually experienced, you knew that?’
She had had lovers, the physical signs were there.
> That would not please Fred Kinver. But the stories had already got about.
A bit of silence. Young, for it was he who now took it up after Lane, now pressed the question: ‘Did you know?’
‘I might have done.’
A juvenile answer, Coffin thought, not worthy of a boy who had shown himself intelligent.
But it highlighted the area, of sexuality, whether his own or hers, where he was sensitive and vulnerable. Or possibly guilty.
Archie Young then took up another tack: Where had he been on the night of the murder?
‘I was away.’
‘It wasn’t far away, though, was it?’
‘The other side of London, out towards Bromley.’
‘And you could have got back? You had transport?’
‘I had my motorbike. But my friends would have missed me.’
‘But would they? My information is that there was a bit of a family crisis there, and you disappeared while they sorted themselves out.’
The boy was on the defensive now. ‘There was a quarrel. My friend’s parents started on at each other. I went to sit in the park while they got it over. I knew they would, they often fight but they make it up. When I thought it was right, then I went back.’
‘Which park was that?’
‘I don’t know the name.’
‘Anyone talk to you there? Anyone who will remember seeing you?’
‘Shouldn’t think so. I sat on a bench and read a book.’
‘For hours? I believe you were gone some time?’
‘I might have gone and had a Chinese.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, somewhere local. I don’t remember.’
The thing was, Coffin thought, he might have done just that.
Or he might be guilty.
But there was an area of sensitivity here which needed to be explored.
The interrogation did not end at this point. Superintendent Lane, assisted by Archie Young, took Tim Zeman over all the ground again. Asking virtually the same questions, wording them a bit differently, placing them in another context as far as he could, using the usual tricks to try and trip him up.
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