Coffin's Ghost (10 page)

DC Rodders may have blushed behind his screens but he said nothing, and muttering that he had the photographs, he retreated. Walking backwards.

As if I was the Queen or the Pope, thought a still irritated Coffin.

He turned to the pathologist, patiently waiting for him.

The young pathologist – and he was very young, since Professor Garden always employed the youngest graduates as being on a low salary scale and also likely to move on, he liked a turnover of young men – this particular one being very left wing, did not approve of the police. He had nothing personal against DCI Astley and the Chief Commander, except that the latter had a very successful wife and was therefore too rich. (On which point Coffin, who had the usual quota of overdraft and mortgage debts since his church tower home, while charming to live in, had been expensive both to convert and run, could have enlightened him.)

A drawer was pulled out.

Inside, as if nesting, were two legs.

No one spoke as Coffin walked over to take a closer look. He bent over the drawer, not touching the limbs, but studying them intently.

He could see there was a damaged bone on the left ankle,
from which radiated a scar, deep and red, running up the calf.

The right leg was also scarred with what looked like the pucker remains of a burn.

He nodded.

Turn them, please.’

The backs of the legs were smooth and unscarred. ‘No one kicked her there, anyway.’

‘She didn’t shave her legs,’ said Phoebe.

‘Yes, I noticed that. Light brown to ginger, the hairs.’

The bones of the legs were fine and slender; whoever she was, she had good legs. He felt a sense of grief as he looked down on them.

‘May I see the arms, please?’

The arms were stretched out with the hands reaching for each other, a grasp they were destined never to make.

Hands can tell you more about a person than legs and feet. Hands are the tools which dragged men up the trees and out of them, making a world. Not a perfect world by any means but better than crawling in the mud round the dinosaurs’ feet.

The hands of this woman had worked hard, breaking the nails, and leaving many scars of cuts on the fingers.

What had she been, he asked himself, a cook, a butcher?

On the arms were signs of injections. So she had been on drugs.

‘On them for years,’ said the knowledgeable Phoebe.

‘Yes, sure.’

‘Signs in the blood too. We knew about that so no surprise.’

Coffin found himself wanting to reach out to the right hand to see if he remembered the touch.

But you didn’t do that sort of thing because, apart from anything else, it was frozen. Cold, heavy and hard.

He nodded to the pathologist. ‘Thank you. I’ve seen all I need.’

As they walked towards the car, he said: ‘No identification. I need to see the head.

‘Phoebe: I want you to find out what happened to Anna
Michael; try the local paper first. Do you know anyone there?’

‘I know the editor, but he hasn’t been there long.’

‘See what you can do.’

Phoebe said she would do her best.

– And perhaps I will come back with that head that is worrying you, and it will still be on its neck and shoulders, not dead at all, but a big success and editing a mag or paper somewhere, or else on TV.

It was so like a man, she thought, to believe that any rejected woman must end up dead.

Coffin wanted the head, as did several other people, including Phoebe Astley, the pathologist, and the funerian (no burial without the head) and he was soon to discover that, with a celebrated writer, heads do talk.

If you can hear the voice.

The word went round the investigating unit like a chant: He wants the head.

But, Coffin wonders, if they find the head, will it come complete with the trunk?

For obvious reasons, he flinched from a view of that trunk. He reassured himself with the conviction that those legs could not be those of the young Anna he had known so briefly. The initials J.C. were a joke, or a coincidence. Nothing to do with him or any past relationship.

But what about the bloodstained picture of himself – himself, and no other?

Curse it, he thought. Thank goodness, as far as he knew, Stella was not aware of all this.

But there was an alarming gentleness and sympathy in her manner to him lately which he had put down to wifely affection after the stabbing he had suffered. But now he wondered. And at the back of her eyes there was a hint of something he liked even less: amusement. And with Stella being such a good actress, if there was anything in her eyes to be read, then she meant you to see it.

He was not something to laugh at, was he?

He was not a proud man, he said to himself in the looking glass as he shaved that morning, but he had the natural sensitivity of any male to being laughed at by his wife.

By anyone really, but especially by her.

He gave a slight shiver – feeling the cold since the op, he told himself. But no, distantly, quietly, he could hear the ancient, archaic gods laughing at him from beyond the river and above the clouds.

Perhaps he ought to learn to laugh at himself.

Phoebe Astley was tired and tense, she had more than one case that she was nursing, and the affair of the legs and arms came to be like a film which she was watching and yet taking part.

She seemed outside it and yet of it.

Chief Inspector Phoebe Astley would like the trunk and the head to be found so that the case could be wound up, but she fears neither will be found. Ever.

Either would do, she says to herself.

Meanwhile, she had used her friendship with the editor of the
Second City Chronicle
to ask him if he could find a trace of Anna Michael, once a journalist on his paper. It’s thought she went to work on a London paper, possibly the
Independent
.

In spite of his protests that he was a new chap here and did she know what he had on his desk, Phoebe called in a few of the favours she had done him (most notably in where and how he parked his motorbike), and he agreed to try. First reminding her when, taken as her guest to the annual Second City Police Ball, he had held her back when she had wanted to rush to the Chief Commander to offer to go to bed with him. And shepherded her, drunk as a lady, back to her car and driven her ‘ome . . . He was a professional cockney.

Some hours later, he called back to say, Yes, Anna had gone to a London paper, thought to be the
Independent
, had worked there for over a year, and then left.

It was thought she had come back to the Second City. ‘Over to you, love,’ was his message to Phoebe, received with a grinding of teeth.

On the streets, as many officers as could be spared were searching open ground, empty buildings, old factories and
warehouses (not so many of these, most have suffered conversion into smart apartments), along the railway embankment.

Nothing had been found relating to the limbs deposited on the house in Barrow Street, although one or two items had surfaced which related to earlier crimes. Such as the old mailbag, a relic of a PO robbery, and a cache of silver, small stuff but pretty, in a tin box in a dustbin down by the docks, a theft from somewhere. An antique shop, maybe, was the suggestion and Henry Hemmings, their antiques expert, was being consulted.

We just need a tip-off, thinks DCI Astley. A hint, just a something, to get us going.

Better give Tony Davley a prod, time she came up with something.

Before doing so, however, she telephoned the Chief Commander to tell him what she had learnt of Anna Michael’s career.

‘I think she did come back,’ said Coffin. ‘Thanks for finding out.’

No result had come from the questioning of the residents of the Serena Seddon Refuge House. All had been asked but not one of them had any useful ideas other than those handed around already. Mary had come back to report that she did not, could not, believe the limbs to be those of Henriette, known as Etta. One by one the women relaxed and settled down to their usual occupations. In some cases, of course, this meant a quarrel over the cards as they played whist – a particularly cutthroat version of the game with their own rules. Not much money changed hands because no one had much, but the feeling was intense. Miriam Beetham and Ally Carver could be relied upon to row, but they had met their equal in a new arrival, Mrs Ellen Newbattle, who was not badly named.

‘She’s a cow, that woman,’ said Ally with admiration. ‘What a tongue on her.’

‘She’ll be gone soon, she’s not a stayer, you can tell.’

‘Not like us, eh? We know the ropes.’

‘Aye, and where to pull on them.’

It was a shifting population in which Miriam and Ally were the old residents. There was a housing association, part of the Serena Seddon establishment, which owned properties into which residents could move. If they so chose – some houses were less popular than others.

‘We’re a full house now,’ said Ally. She had turned down the offer of a flat in Bellhanger Road as ‘shimmy’, and was waiting for one to come in Cheeseborough Place which was more upmarket.

‘Joan Benson upstairs is going,’ said Miriam, who was always first with the news, because she listened to all telephone calls and read everyone’s letters. ‘She’s going to Bellhanger, the one you turned down.’

‘She’s welcome. They say they’ve got rats the size of rabbits there.’

One family was on the point of being rehoused and another was arranging to go to stay with Grandma.

‘And I hope Grandma will be pleased,’ was Evelyn’s comment to Mary, even as she set up the travel arrangements, ‘because they are a difficult bunch. D’you know, Mrs Addington asked me if they could travel first class because of the cat.’

‘I didn’t know they had a cat.’

‘It’s been living with the old neighbours . . . I bet it would prefer to stay there. I pity Grandma, if the cat’s as fertile as Mrs Addington.’

Mary agreed absently and said that it wouldn’t last long but was worth a try. She is busy catching up with business, checking the bank accounts, paying bills, and then working in the kitchen.

‘You know the police went over the house for drugs while they were here.’

A police call on the Serena Seddon House was not unusual. Things just happened; vandals breaking windows or pouring paint down the basement, the lost and drunk trying to break in, the man from Glasgow who thought it was a brothel and would not be turned away; the police took their chance and had a quick look round. After all, some of the residents were old acquaintances with interesting pasts.

‘They usually do.’

‘Pretended it was just a routine check-up, but I knew.’

‘As long as they didn’t find anything.’

‘We’ve been lucky,’ said Mary. ‘The worst trouble was when Serena herself was warden, she really fell for that girl who was on heroin.’

‘On anything that went,’ said Evelyn. Both women had worked in the hostel with Serena. In the end, Serena had been losing her grip. ‘She was dead attractive, that girl, Phyllis something, poor Serena couldn’t resist her. She was lucky when Phyllis moved on. She’s still around and not so lovely. Drossers Market is where she hangs out.’

Drossers Market was the real, dirty centre of drugs, prostitution and violence in the Second City. Coffin was trying to clear it up. But it was also lively, and attractive to many, which made the task harder. Nor was he quite sure of some of his own officers. One or two names were in the frame and being watched. DC Radley, from the Met, and PC Ryman-Lawson of the uniformed lot. Nothing proved, and there might be others.

Mary shrugged her acceptance; Serena’s sexual tastes were well known to her. But she wouldn’t dwell on the past, she knows that in her office, the answer machine is flashing its little red light. Mary hates attending to the answerphone since it always means more work.

Let it wait.

‘She was standing up and suddenly she dropped like a stone.’

‘Dead,’ said the gravelly voice.

‘Dead in the middle of the car park on Vestey Road and no one there.’

‘Who said?’ asked a sceptical Tony Davley. She was supposed to be following what leads she had on the limbs affair – precious few, as it happened, and she shouldn’t be dealing with this business, but she had been unlucky enough to be around in the office when the message about the killing came in so she got it.

She had come in early to clear up some notes left over from last night, she had been standing there drinking a mug of lukewarm coffee as breakfast and mulling over some of
her own writing which she could not read, when the phone went and her immediate boss, Sergeant Jimmy Silver, took the message, nodded at her and said, You might as well take this one as you are here.

That was how life went: you got the jobs by standing around and being there. It was taken for granted that you not only could but would work on two investigations at once and not get them muddled.

But she had to admit that this one was not without interest. In short, she did not realize that what she had got was a snip.

‘I said’ – the voice was firm, putting a firm underlining beneath the
I
– ‘I telephoned for the ambulance and the police.’