Coffin's Ghost (15 page)

They sat drinking coffee in the plain white mugs which the Stormy Weather café produced. The large woman who ran the place mopped at the sweat on her face – she was busy frying sausage and chips for a table of workmen across the way. She was over-fat, what had once been a handsome, if not pretty, face embedded in too much flesh. She wore her hair puffed up round her face. She worked politely and with efficiency but she did not meet your eye readily.

Arthur found her intimidating but Dave seemed fond of her. Of course, she was his landlady and he had already guessed from what he knew of Dave that he was usually behind with his rent.

‘Flo seems to be doing everything,’ said Arthur, finishing his coffee. ‘What’s happened to that greasy cook that was here?’ He had only caught a glimpse of the lady but had not
cared for what he saw: unhealthy somehow, not what you wanted close to food.

‘Around somewhere,’ said Dave. ‘But I don’t ask Flo.’

‘You keep on good terms with that one,’ Arthur said as he got up.

‘Sure I do.’

‘Thought she was called Jo.’

‘Only on Mondays,’ said Dave placidly. ‘Today’s Wednesday.’

‘Ha ha,’ said Arthur, going to the phone.

Dave waited, finishing his coffee while Arthur telephoned. Doesn’t know he’s born, that lad, he thought.

Arthur came back. ‘She says to drive round, she’ll give us the keys and we can get in and she will arrive as soon as she gets the present talking over. Dunno what she means by that, but off we go.’

‘You go. I’ll finish my coffee first and wait here.’

‘I don’t know why I let you get away with things.’

‘Because I’m a magician,’ said Dave, still placid.

Arthur went off and was soon back.

He threw the keys on the table so that Dave could pick them up.

‘She didn’t sound cross, although she’d had the right to be . . .’ Arthur frowned. ‘I don’t want to lose this job, it’s a good one, and apart from that, she hires actors.’

‘I knew she would hand over the keys,’ said Dave placidly. ‘Worth the gamble.’

Arthur led the way to the car. ‘Well then, let’s go and have this party.’

When they got there, Dave leapt out. ‘Get the cleaner out. I’ll make a start.’

Arthur took a look behind him into the back of the van. ‘The mess you’ve made in there, I’ll have to dig it out. What were you doing, burying it?’

‘Just looking for something.’

Dave was already getting the front door open.

Arthur yelled out. ‘Be careful, don’t set off the burglar alarm.’

He saw Dave hesitate at the door, take a step inside, then
draw back. He shouted: ‘Sounds like it’s already sounding . . .’

Arthur couldn’t hear anything, so with a shrug and a curse, he went to try to extricate the cleaner. If Dave had buried it on purpose he couldn’t have done a better job.

He was dragging it free when he heard a shot. ‘Dave? Dave, you all right?’

Silence.

He found himself running towards the tower. He was trying to run fast, but it seemed to him he was going slowly, slowly. As in a nightmare.

‘Dave, Dave?’ Breathless, he paused on the threshold of the tower. He heard a voice calling him from up the staircase. So the man was alive, anyway.

Straight ahead he could see the big window which Stella had created, from where he stood it looked as though a great pane of glass was broken.

Dave came running down the stairs. ‘I was looking for him but I think he got out through the window.’

‘Someone smashed it, did a good job.’ Arthur had come into the hall and was surveying the window with incredulous eyes. ‘How did he do it?’

Dave pushed him. ‘I don’t know, do I? Probably had a hammer on him. Or used the gun . . . Come on, I’m going after him.’

Muttering something about the police, Arthur was also saying to himself: Who’s he? Did you see him? ‘I’ll look inside.’

But suddenly there was the police presence. A young constable had stopped Dave. ‘What’s all this, sir?’

‘If you were protecting the tower you haven’t done a very good job,’ said an angry Dave. ‘A man broke in. Did you see him? Did he go past you?’ Dave was spluttering.

‘Calm down, sir.’

‘We’ve lost him now,’ said Dave, slapping his side with anger. ‘The tower broken into, me shot at, and the man away because you were slacking.’

PC Vallent was about to defend himself strongly on the grounds that he had been round the other side of the tower, patrolling as requested, nay ordered, by his sergeant, but he
decided that attack (except with a sergeant) was better than defence. ‘Are you sure you saw a man, sir?’

Dave opened his mouth in fury when Arthur shouted:

‘Come, come quick, there’s something wrong inside here.’

Nasty wrong.

On the first rising step of the staircase lay something small.

It was the head of a cat. A black and white cat. Underneath it was a sheet of paper with letters cut out of a newspaper.

SO YOU WANTED A HEAD?

Coffin, summoned from his office, swore under his breath.

‘Does anyone know whose cat it was?’

Phoebe Astley shook her head. ‘A stray, I expect. Plenty of them around in the Second City.’

She stepped back to let the photographer continue taking the picture of the poor little head.

She turned to Stella who had arrived to collect her keys in time for the drama. ‘Not your cat, anyway.’

‘We haven’t got one at the moment.’ Stella looked sick. ‘What a terrible, loathsome thing to do. Poor little creature.’

‘I hope it was dead when the head was cut off.’

Stella moved away. ‘I don’t suppose you do a postmortem on a poor old mongrel cat. No, of course not. Why did I ask?’ She was getting rid of her pain with a dose of anger.

‘I expect we could get a vet to take a look,’ said Phoebe doubtfully.

‘I’ll pay the bill.’

Coffin came up to Stella, put his arm round her. ‘It was a lousy thing to do. Thank goodness you had the dog with you.’

‘I can’t even get into my own home,’ wailed Stella.

‘No, the forensic and scene-of-the-crime people must go
over it all.’ He looked towards the van where Arthur and Dave were sitting, uncomfortable but forbidden to leave until they had made a first statement with the promise of another to come to be signed later. ‘They will clean up for you afterwards. You go off to Max’s, order lunch and I will join you when I can.’

‘You will come?’ He was famed for making a promise to arrive and then failing to turn up. Police business was tricky and unpredictable was his excuse.

‘Sure. Have you got the dog with you?’

Stella nodded. ‘Not actually with me. I left him behind in my office, but he will be safe.’

‘I am thinking of you, not him,’ said Coffin. ‘He’s not a bad protector.’

Of course, he had to see this second attack on his house as a clear threat.

‘He’s got teeth,’ agreed Stella dolefully. ‘I suppose he would defend me.’ He had in the past. She kissed her husband on the cheek in a neutral kind of way and went to her car, passing Dave and Arthur on the way.

‘You can come and clean up after this.’

‘Sure. We will be there,’ said Arthur.

‘I’m glad you didn’t get hurt, Dave.’

‘Oh, no question of it, Miss Pinero.’ Dave nodded his head sagely. ‘Not after me, I don’t think . . . he made off as soon as he saw me.’

After me or my husband, thought Stella. And all part of this horrible sequence of events starting in Barrow Street.

‘Are we stuck here, Miss Pinero?’ asked Arthur; he was the paymaster. ‘We have another job to go to.’

‘You’ll be told when you can go, when the forensics and the photography are done,’ said Stella. ‘Not too long, I shouldn’t think.’ She gave them a sympathetic wave as she drove off.

‘What’s all this forensic stuff they do?’ asked Arthur.

‘Oh, body traces and suchlike in the house. Fingerprints. They will want mine, I daresay, as I went in.’

‘Did you touch anything?’

‘Can’t remember. Must have done. It’s all a bit of a daze now. I told them that.’

‘Wonder how he got in?’

‘Oh, through that broken window,’ said Dave with confidence.

This was not the story that the Chief Commander was hearing.

‘He got out that way, yes, possibly,’ the forensic man was saying, supported by mutterings from the scene-of-the-crime officer. ‘But not in . . . you can see from the way the glass was shattered. Done from the inside.’

‘Thought so myself,’ agreed Coffin. ‘That glass was meant to be shatter-proof.’

‘Nothing is ever what it’s supposed to be,’ said the man from forensics. ‘And I ought to know . . .’

‘How was the window broken?’

Forensics put his head on one side and adjusted his spectacles. ‘At a guess, I’d say with that bronze bust of Miss Pinero which is on the shelf behind you.’

Coffin looked behind him. There was the beautiful portrait bust of his wife done about two years ago, by Henry Mister. She looked happy and young.

‘I’ve had a first look, but there are marks on it where it smashed into the glass . . . don’t worry, it isn’t damaged.’

Coffin thought about it. ‘So . . . he, if it was he and not a woman, got in with a key . . . He didn’t know how to deal with the alarm system, so that went off, but he got in.’

He left a head and used a head.

The head of Stella Pinero.

And he had a key.

In Max’s, Stella was sitting drinking a dry white wine and talking to Robbie Gilchrist. Max was hovering, trying to persuade them to choose what they wanted to eat.

Coffin walked in, not too pleased to see Gilchrist there. In his mind, Gilchrist, although less questionable than George Freedom, was not a man he cared to see near his wife.

Business, she would say, nothing personal. They are willing to invest and I want their money. But what did they want, he wondered? Too many pretty young girls, and lads (because
to his mind Freedom was up for anything) came into the St Luke’s Theatre Complex.

‘Freedom not here?’ Coffin asked as he sat down.

‘No.’ Gilchrist gave Coffin his charming smile, a smile which never reached his eyes. ‘He’s gone to London . . . We don’t call here London, you know.’

Max bustled up, eager to talk, to pour a drink, to help Coffin choose his lunch.

‘Bit later, Max. Not sure if I will be able to stay to eat.’

Max looked disappointed. ‘You should eat, sir, feed the brain.’ He shook his head. ‘Miss Pinero, can I suggest a light omelette as you are not hungry?’

Stella agreed and Gilchrist announced that he was hungry and would have a steak, pretty rare. ‘Ashamed to say I like blood,’ he confided to Stella.

Stella paled but was gallant. ‘We were talking about money.’

‘Oh?’ Coffin motioned to Max, after all, he would eat. He began to feel he was going to need food. ‘Whose money?’

‘Spoken like a husband.’

I’m going to be even more like one in a moment, a husband who is a copper, a husband who is a copper from whom a relevant fact has been kept.

He leaned forward.

‘Stella, tell me, have you recently lost your handbag?’

Stella gave him the look which he had learnt to recognize meant she was considering telling him a lie. Or at least wrapping up the truth.

After a pause long enough for Coffin to order steak and for Robbie to suggest with false tact that maybe he should leave them alone to sort it out, she settled for wrapping it up.

‘Mislaid it. I mislaid it.’

‘And where did you mislay it?’

Another pause.

‘In the public library in Cater Street . . . I was getting some books on the French Revolution. Might be doing a play . . . No, not
A Tale of Two Cities
. . . A woman, one of those who takes up the space of two, jogged my arm and I dropped the books. I think that’s how I came to forget my handbag.’

‘And?’ he probed.

‘I came out with an armful of books, went straight into my office in the theatre and did not notice I had left my bag behind.’

‘And how long before you noticed?’

‘It might have been a couple of hours. Or a bit longer.’

Say four hours, Coffin doubled it quietly. ‘And then?’

‘Then I went back, and retrieved it. A nice man had found it in the reading room there and handed it in to the librarian,’ said Stella triumphantly.

I always knew a handbag was going to come into it somewhere, he told himself.

‘Thank you. Forgive me while I make a call.’

He went into the lobby where it was quieter and called Phoebe Astley. ‘Phoebe, send someone, or go yourself, to the library in Cater Street and find someone who can tell you who it was handed in Stella’s handbag. Which,’ he said, with measured irritation, ‘she left there.’

‘Right,’ said Phoebe. ‘I know the librarian in Cater Street, I use the place myself. You want the name of the man who handed in Stella’s bag – it had the keys to your house in it.’

‘He may be our killer.

‘Any news on the head, the other head?’

‘No, sir. Still looking.’

‘It’s out there somewhere. That bugger wants us to go on looking, he’s taunting us.’

‘Does he want us to find it, though?’ asked Phoebe.

‘Yes.’ Coffin was decided. ‘He wants us to find it.’