Coffin's Ghost (6 page)

Mary paused on the stairs to look out of the window. She ran her finger down the glass. Outside it was beginning to rain, the rain would come through this window.

The Serena Seddon House needed money spent on it, money it did not have. It was as comfortable and welcoming as it could be made inside, and that was what counted. Outside in Barrow Street it aimed for anonymity with no blue plaque displaying the name and just a discreet Number 5 on the door. And you had to come up to the door to see that.

The partners of the battered women had been known to come looking for them so being unnoticed counted. Even so, the house was known in the area and not loved.

Number 5 had been built at the end of the last century, it had celebrated its centenary, but it was showing its age. And who could blame it, Mary thought, since it had been a private home, home to a doctor who had been a police surgeon, and afterwards a dentist’s surgery, afterwards rented as home to the new Chief Commander of the Second City, one John Coffin, and then left empty for a clutch of years.

Now it was a home for the fearful and the dispossessed. Interestingly, in the time of its first occupant, the doctor, it had got the reputation of being the home of Jack the Ripper: Dr Death.

Mary Arden walked down the stairs. There was a WPC sitting on an upright chair in the hall.

‘You all right? Would you like a more comfortable chair?’ If there is one, Mary thought, even as she asked the question.

‘No, thank you, Miss Arden. This one does me.’

‘Is it true that a handbag was found outside the house?’

‘I haven’t heard, Miss Arden.’

And wouldn’t say.

Mary opened the front door to breathe in the cold, damp
air. Phoebe Astley, who had been talking to the forensic team, swung round to look at her.

‘Hello, you advance guard, or doing the questioning yourself?’

‘Just checking.’ Phoebe came into the hall, sniffing the air. ‘I always wonder how you manage to keep this place smelling so fresh when . . .’

‘You mean when we don’t wash enough here.’

‘No, I didn’t mean that and you know it. I mean you have a very mixed and floating population here, and yet it never seems institutional.’

She does mean it doesn’t smell. Mary grinned.

‘I work on it, it’s meant to be pleasant. We all like a hot bath or shower and there’s always hot water. And I provide lavender bath soap . . . they don’t have to use it, they may prefer their own, but it’s there.’

Phoebe looked trim and brisk, her dress sense had tightened up; she carried a neat black notebook, the successful detective officer.

I admire you, Phoebe, Mary said to herself. But what would you say, if I said: I could read what was written on the two terrible bundles and I saw the initials J.C.?

What would you make of that, Phoebe?

Not the signature of the sender, you would say at once, but a suggestion of the recipient?

All she said was: ‘I suppose you want to talk to everyone here?’

‘Not me in person, but a couple of WDCs will be in.’

‘Don’t upset them, please. All the women have been through a lot. They need to be treated with care.’

‘That’s why I am sending women officers. They have been carefully chosen.’

‘Good.’

‘Just whether they heard or saw anything in the night or early morning. You too will be asked, Mary.’

‘I saw nothing,’ said Mary quickly. ‘Heard nothing. I don’t think anyone here will be able to help you. It can’t be anything to do with current residents.’

Phoebe nodded but did not commit herself.

‘And the bag?’

‘May have nothing to do with the remains of the body.’ Phoebe was still being cautious.

Suddenly, Mary said: ‘I know what was written across the bundle. I did go out to look when Evelyn came running in. I couldn’t make it out.’

Phoebe allowed herself a shrug. Who can, it said.

‘I send it back from me to you, although it was yours before . . . Sounds like a quotation.’

‘We’re working on it.’

‘And J.C.? What does that mean?’

Phoebe did not answer. Not even a shrug this time.

‘Some of the girls here think the body or what there is of it might be from Etta . . . she worked here for a bit. I thought she’d gone home, but it seems she’s been seen around the district . . . She had some risky friends, the sort that might use violence.’ Mary let the next words drop out slowly, as if she had just thought of them: ‘And she went about a bit with a few local coppers.’

Phoebe could have said that she had heard this, but she did not. Never divulge information unnecessarily was a dictum she had been taught. Especially in a case like this. ‘We’ll work it out,’ said Phoebe patiently. ‘Trust us.’

But trust, as she knew, was always in short supply in the Second City.

And she wasn’t too sure how much she had of it herself. She nodded to PC Ryman-Lawson as she left, acknowledging that he was wet and cold.

Because Coffin had once lived in the house in Barrow Street (which was attracting intense if discreet media attention), he was being kept informed of the investigation as it went on. Reports of all important crimes in the Second City always went to him as a matter of course, but this was different. Archie Young had decided he must see and hear of everything.

The message scrawled on the two bundles was being kept quiet although rumours went around the watchers.

Coffin knew of them, had seen a photograph of the bundles, although not the bundles themselves. He knew what was written there, and understood why Archie Young and Phoebe Astley were keeping an eye on the investigation.

Keeping an eye on him too, he thought with some irritation.

The initials J.C., taken in conjunction with the fact he had once lived in the house was giving them pause for thought.

And they were probably thinking also, quietly to themselves: And what about the woman?

The House in Barrow Street – he thought of it as The House that belonged in a sensitive part of his memory when he had lived there alone. Alone, new to the Second City, wondering if he was going to regret leaving the Met, a time when Stella was in New York and the marriage was rocky. Or seemed to be so.

I love you, Stella, he thought, but you can be difficult.

This is the point where you laugh, he said to himself, because probably she says the same about you. Bound to. It was always mutual, that sort of complaint, wasn’t it?

He went to the window to look out. He had returned to work, against his doctor’s advice, earlier than that luminary thought wise. He had a deputy and an assistant, but work was piling up and he wanted to get on with it himself. He did not find it easy to delegate.

Outside it was raining; the Second City did not look at its best when the sky was grey and heavy with rain.

He returned to his desk where a tray of coffee had been put ready for him by his secretary with a look of sympathy. The way he felt at the moment he did not want sympathy, it irritated him.

A kind woman but too full of sympathy. What the pot of coffee and biscuits said was: You were stabbed by that maniac, he wanted attention and attacking you was his way of getting it. You nearly died.

It was the second knife wound he had suffered. This time it had got to his liver.

I must watch out for knives, he thought. I seem to attract them, and some in the back too.

He drank some coffee. His first secretary in the Second City had been one of his mistakes: efficient, but hostile, wanting him to know that he was a newcomer, an intruder, here.

There were other mistakes, but she was his first, and at the time, all subsumed in his feeling that his coming here at all was one big mistake.

He had been promoted beyond his powers. The feeling niggled away inside him, taking away all pleasure at his new position – well, nearly all, he had to admit, some pleasure remained, he couldn’t help that. It was marvellous to have power, to feel the lad from the London Docklands but south of the river was now part of the Establishment. Albeit one with more than a dash of the revolutionary in him. But he had already realized that you needed this in the Second City, which was never going to be docile. The population of the Second City had lived through wars and depressions, been bombed, and was now rebuilt, had seen old industries fade away and been replaced by bankers and journalists, had seen the great River Thames lose trade but become more beautiful;
he was moving into a city of change and he was part of the change.

But in this changing city, where he had to make his mark, he had enemies. Within the police team were men well-entrenched who had worked their way up and resented the arrival of the newcomer.

Flashy, playing to the media, talks too much, thinks too much, not one of us. These were the comments flung about, some made a hit, as some always will, and hurt.

Not one of us, was the criticism shouted the loudest.

At the same time, he was coping with the mountain of reports, letters and memos that a new position inevitably entailed. He was learning faces, sorting out friends and enemies.

And Stella, ah, Stella, was not with him. She was working in New York. He had missed her. At first, settling into the new job it had not been too bad, but Stella had stayed away. What was more, she had proclaimed that she was not coming back to live in that terrible house in Barrow Street. It smelt wrong to her.

She had already bought the St Luke’s Church with plans to start the theatre there, and even then the tower was being converted into her home. She would come back when it was ready to live in. Oh yes, when work permitted, she would fly over to see him, but he would have to rent a flat or take a room in a hotel. Barrow Street did not suit her.

It was the difficult side of Stella which he knew existed, he had met it before, and never known how to handle it.

And then he wondered, could not help wondering, who Stella had in New York. Was she unfaithful?

Suspicion was an evil plant, he had admitted to himself, but it was growing inside him vigorously at that time. A fine flower with a bad scent.

He had been feeling particularly depressed and irritable when Anna arrived to interview him.

In those early days he was still doing interviews for the press and the television programmes to get the Second City Police known and respected.

Or that was the idea put to him by the PR people.

This was when Anna came on the scene. At first it felt like an invasion. A one-woman invasion.

Anna Michael was young, handsome rather than beautiful, and dressed in a casual way in jeans and a thick sweater. She couldn’t have been more different from Stella.

Anna was tactful and admiring in the way she questioned him, so that to his surprise, Coffin found himself responding.

This interview took place in an office in the old Second City Police HQ, since then rebuilt. She talked about where he was now living in Barrow Street.

‘When I was a kid we used to think that Jack the Ripper had lived there. We’d frighten ourselves talking about it.’

‘You come from round here?’ He was surprised, she seemed, somehow, international, conceived in an airport, born on a runway.

‘Oh yes, sure. My father was a docker . . . in the days when there were dockers.’ She laughed. ‘He’s still alive, screwed a lot of money out of his employers as redundancy and took himself off to Scotland.’

‘Is he a Scot?’

She nodded. ‘Remotely. Great-grandfather. I’m Carmichael, really, but I trimmed the name down, better for a journalist to have a short name . . . takes up too much space otherwise. Not Anna either, but Joanna. I didn’t care for the initials J.C., they were too holy.’ She went on: ‘There was a famous murder in Barrow Street in the sixties . . . the Triangle Murder, it was called.’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘Of course. They got two killers, didn’t they? But there was one they never got. Dead anyway by now, I suppose.’

‘Probably.’ And to his surprise he heard himself asking her for a drink at the house in Barrow Street.

She accepted at once.

He drank some coffee, which was good and hot, and considered lacing it with whisky or brandy, but rebuffed the idea without much trouble, although in his younger, wilder days, before becoming the Chief Commander of the Second City Force, he would certainly have done so.

He had probably topped up his coffee on the day Anna came to do her interview.

By the time that interview came out, he and Anna had become – he hesitated to use the word lovers because he didn’t think love came into it, because he knew he had remained in love with Stella, but love or lust while it lasted, whatever it was between them was powerful.

Love, lust, technical terms for a jumble of emotions. Behind his emotion was anger and disappointment with his new position and irritation with Stella. He wanted something to soothe away the frustration.

Anger can be a powerful impulse to sex. For men, anyway. Different for women, perhaps. Better not dwell on that thought.

He would like to think there was no anger on Anna’s side, ambition, yes, he now thought cynically. But I admired Anna, he thought. She had force and energy.