Coffin's Ghost
Authors: Gwendoline Butler
COFFIN’S GHOST
Also by Gwendoline Butler
A GRAVE COFFIN
COFFIN’S GAME
A DOUBLE COFFIN
A DARK COFFIN
THE COFFIN TREE
A COFFIN FOR CHARLEY
CRACKING OPEN A COFFIN
COFFIN ON MURDER STREET
COFFIN AND THE PAPER MAN
COFFIN IN THE BLACK MUSEUM
COFFIN UNDERGROUND
COFFIN IN FASHION
COFFIN ON THE WATER
A COFFIN FOR THE CANARY
A COFFIN FOR PANDORA
A COFFIN FROM THE PAST
COFFIN’S DARK NUMBER
COFFIN’S FOLLOWING
COFFIN IN MALTA
A NAMELESS COFFIN
COFFIN WAITING
A COFFIN FOR BABY
DEATH LIVES NEXT DOOR
THE INTERLOPER
THE MURDERING KIND
THE DULL DEAD
COFFIN IN OXFORD
RECEIPT FOR MURDER
Gwendoline Butler
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press
COFFIN’S GHOST
. Copyright © 1999 by Gwendoline Butler. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in an manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
ISBN: 978-0-312-27997-4
ISBN: 0-312-27997-3
First published in the United States by Collins Crimes
An imprint of Harper Collins Publishers
First St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition: December 2001
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I wish to record my thanks to Dr Barker, Dr Fink,
and John Kennedy Melling for the help given
me with this book.
One evening in April 1988, I sat in Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, near to Docklands, listening to Doctor David Owen (now Lord Owen) give that year’s Barnett Memorial Lecture. In it, he suggested the creation of a Second City of London, to be spun off from the first, to aid the economic and social regeneration of the Docklands.
The idea fascinated me and I have made use of it to create a world for detective John Coffin, to whom I gave the tricky task of keeping there the Queen’s Peace.
A brief Calendar of the life and career of John Coffin, Chief
Commander of the Second City of London Police
.
John Coffin is a Londoner by birth, his father is unknown and his mother was a difficult lady of many careers and different lives who abandoned him in infancy to be looked after by a woman who may have been a relative of his father and who seems to have acted as his mother’s dresser when she was on the stage. He kept in touch with this lady, whom he called Mother, lodged with her in his early career and looked after her until she died.
After serving briefly in the army, he joined the Metropolitan Police, soon transferring to the plain-clothes branch as a detective.
He became a sergeant and was very quickly promoted to inspector a year later. Ten years later, he was a superintendent and then chief superintendent.
There was a bad patch in his career about which he is reluctant to talk. His difficult family background has complicated his life and possibly accounts for an unhappy period when, as he admits, his career went down a black hole. His first marriage split apart at this time and his only child died.
From this dark period he was resurrected by a spell in a secret, dangerous undercover operation about which even now not much is known. But the esteem he won then was recognized when the Second City of London was being formed and he became Chief Commander of its Police Force. He has married again, an old love, Stella Pinero, who is herself a very successful actress. He has also discovered two siblings, a much younger sister and brother.
May, 166-
On Wednesday last, I did go to Easter Hythe across the River Thames. I crossed the river in a waterman’s boat from Rotherhythe with a joking waterman who challenged me to swim across if he dropped me over the side because the weight of me and my friend Mr Williams was like to sink his boat. We let him laugh and staid where we were.
We were met by Mr Williams’s son. It was but a short walk – for walk we must – to the township of Easter Hythe which some say was first used by Viking sailors. Easter Hythe is a poor-looking place with low-built wooden houses and some stone-built hovels said to be of Viking origin.
In Easter Hythe we went to Drossers Market where were many stalls and great crowds. Young Mr Williams said here you might buy anything you wanted and most of it would be stolen and might be stolen back again before you got home with it.
From it leads Chopping Tree Lane and there I was shown the pit into which the bodies were dropped and which we had come to see.
For this was the Viking execution place, so it is told, where victims were sacrificed and criminals hanged.
Many skulls and other bones were found but young Mr Williams said that it was his belief it was nothing of the Vikings but more recent and more criminous. Mr Williams is a surgeon and sees many broken bones and it is his opinion that the bones in the pit are too new broken to be Viking.
The sense of evil in Chopping Tree Lane was mighty strong, creeping into Drossers Market, and Mr Williams said to me that the evil would be there for centuries.
We came back in poor spirits, although I bought a pretty bracelet for my wife and one, but not near so dear, for my maidservant Alice.
Editor’s note: It is thought that Pepys’s real motive for the visit to East Hythe with his friend Williams was that they had been told that it was home to some handsome and willing and pox-free young women whose embraces they could enjoy at a lower price than in the City of London
.
‘Who was it said that modern detective stories never have the murder of children in them?’ John Coffin asked from his hospital bed. Then he answered himself: ‘Graham Greene. And how wrong he was. Can’t have read many.’
‘Don’t be so grumpy.’ Stella Pinero had brought him in a selection of detective stories which lay scattered on the bed. She had also brought him in a local newspaper with her photograph and her description as ‘the love of his life’. This irritated him too, although Stella, ever the realist, said what good publicity for both of them it was. ‘Won’t do anything for me,’ he had grumbled, still grumpy.
‘You’d be grumpy with a hole in your liver.’
It was healing nicely though, and someone had once told him that you could spare as much as half your liver.
He wondered who had told him that.
Not Graham Greene.
He turned over the books. Policemen don’t read crime novels. They might write them but not read other people’s. Except in training, which doesn’t count.
‘The Handbag,’
he said aloud in a tone of deep scepticism. ‘Doesn’t sound like a crime novel. Simenon, perhaps. More like Oscar Wilde.’
He began to feel better. Nothing like a grumble. But he remembered
The Handbag
. It worried him for some reason. Stuck in his memory.
‘I am going to have a wonderfully happy domestic time,’ announced Stella Pinero, wife to John Coffin, with a wonderfully happy smile. She was a good actress.
In fact, she was more than a little depressed. She was well aware that she had almost lost her husband, and had gained the shocking knowledge that without him she would lose half herself.
Now this was something she had never believed possible. It was important now not to let him share this knowledge.
‘I am going to stay home, and enjoy my unusual leisure.’
What she meant was that she had no stage performance at the moment, no television play contracted, and nothing on the radio: in short, she had no work. To cheer herself up and as a homecoming present for Coffin, she had had a large window put in to the ground floor of the strong-minded tower in which they lived. It lit up a very dark area which must be a good thing, even if some might count it a security risk. You need light, she told herself, to be happy and it has to be natural light, not the electric sort.