A Coffin for Charley (17 page)

‘Perhaps he wasn't quite her class,' admitted Annie with reluctance.

Coffin pushed on to another aspect. ‘He only left a few clothes here. Overcoat, raincoat, couple of hats.' Clothes that strongly reminded him of the figure that Stella had described: dressed in black, and wearing a hat.

‘He didn't live here. Only visited.'

‘You'd expect him to have left a dressing-gown, pyjamas.'

‘I suppose he didn't wear them,' said Annie without much interest.

‘I noticed he left a pair of boots, and inside was a pair of thick woollen socks. Any comment.'

‘I suppose he had tender feet. I think he did limp a bit.'

‘And no shaving materials.'

‘Took them with him. You'll have to ask him.'

‘Oh, we will. When we find him.' Which search you are not doing much to help. ‘Find out where he works, where he lives. Where does Miss Royal work?' Or where did she work? He was beginning to have a bad feeling about Caroline Royal.

‘One of the big Oxford Street stores.'

‘But which one, Annie?'

Annie dragged at her memory, and let something come up. ‘Ferguson and Dyer, I think.'

‘Yes, I saw one of their carrier bags in the cupboard. Miss Royal seems to have nothing but winter clothes in there.' And not many of those.

He waited, and eventually Annie said: ‘Well, if she was going to somewhere with a hot climate …'

‘She's been gone longer than you admit, hasn't she, Annie?'

Silently Annie nodded. Once started nodding, she kept it up like a doll. Coffin gazed at her in alarm.

‘I'll get you a glass of water.'

The doorbell rang and he could hear someone shouting through the letter-box.

‘Annie, are you there? Are you all right?'

Annie took a deep breath and stopped nodding her head. ‘It's Alex … Mr Edwards.'

Archie Young got up. ‘I'll let him in,' he said hastily. ‘Your social worker, wasn't he?'

‘He's a friend now … He'll let himself in, he's got a key.'

And sure enough, Alex was in the room with them. He crossed at once to Annie's side.

‘Saw your cars,' he said accusingly. ‘Can't you leave her alone? Can't you see she's in shock? Are you all right, Annie?' He put his arm round Annie, who flinched away as Coffin noticed. ‘Trust me, Annie.'

‘Why did you make that racket at the door if you have a key?' said Young.

‘I have a key for use in emergency: I don't regard it as my right to enter Annie's house at will,' he said with dignity.

Coffin spoke mildly. ‘We're not an emergency.'

‘I know you, you're the boss. What are you doing here?'

‘I'm a friend of Annie's too,' said Coffin, his voice even gentler. He could see that Alex could barely restrain himself. There was a lot of emotion flaring round Annie's head and it wasn't clear if she realized it. ‘We met a long while ago.'

He caught Young's gaze. The man's in love with her, it said.

He stood up. They wouldn't get any more out of Annie now, even if there was any more to get. She didn't know where Caroline Royal was or where she had gone.

‘We'll find out where Caroline Royal works. Ferguson and Dyer, you said?' Annie nodded. ‘And see what they can tell us.'

Annie's eyes flickered as if in alarm and Alex responded at once. ‘What's she got to do with anything?'

‘She doesn't seem to be around,' said Coffin. He turned to Annie. ‘I'd like to have another look at her place later.' He held out his hand. ‘May I have the key?'

Alex said at once: ‘I'll come with you.'

‘No need.' He kept his eyes on Annie. Silently she handed over the key.

‘That man's up in the sky and over the top,' said Young when they got outside. ‘Always has been and he's getting worse. I don't think he's in the right job, he's not solid enough.'

‘He cares,' said Coffin absently, fingering the key. He hoped Annie had given him the right one.

‘Want me with you when you go to the Royal flat?'

‘No.' He knew who he did want.

Young considered. He hated being left out when it was his job to be in, but there was nothing he could do. And the Chief had been a good detective in his day. The flair and the intuition were still there. He believed in hard slog and patient attention to detail himself, but there was no doubt a kind of telepathy helped.

He became aware that it was operating now and the Chief had read his mind.

‘I'll let you know at once if I pick up anything,' he was saying.

As they parted, each to his own car. Young said: ‘I don't think there's anything in the Royal absence. She's just taken off for time on her own.'

Taking most of her wardrobe, Coffin thought, and leaving a motley collection behind.

To Stella, over drinks in their sitting-room, he said: ‘Tell me, do girls, working women, just take off for time on their own, so-called, these days? Don't they just say Well, I'm
off to Paris or Saigon or New York with Tom or Dick or Harry and no business of yours?'

Stella considered. ‘Yes, that's about it.'

‘What would you have done?'

‘Just gone. If I wanted to. Leave the odd message to my agent, maybe.' She knew she would have done so, an offer, an audition (although she was too important to audition these days, or thought she was), it was hard to leave those behind.

‘And clothes?'

She thought about it. ‘That's more difficult. I might take nothing much at all. Depends how rich the chap was, or how generous.'

‘Thanks.' What an insight I'm getting into Stella's life, he thought.

‘And don't ask,' Stella said.

‘Ask what?'

‘If I ever did.'

Then he decided instantly that she certainly had, more than once perhaps, and he was suffused with retrospective jealousy.

Aloud he said: ‘Will you come with me to look at something?'

‘At what?'

‘A property.'

‘Don't bite your tongue out telling me details.' But she finished her drink and stood up. ‘What is it, are we moving house?'

‘Just viewing. I want your opinion.'

Stella raised her eyebrows in surprise as they drew up outside Annie's house. ‘So this is it?' But she let him lead her up the steep iron staircase and open the front door.

He stood back to let her in. ‘What do you make of it?'

‘It's just a place.'

‘Use your nose.'

Stella widened her eyes, registering surprise and comprehension at once. ‘So?'

‘Yes, go around, take your time.'

He watched as she walked slowly round the sitting-room, then the kitchen, finally the bedroom and bathroom. He could read her face. ‘There's something, isn't there?'

‘Maybe.' She frowned.

‘Try the cupboards. Both of them.' His and Hers, he thought.

Stella opened the cupboard which contained Caroline's clothes, or what there was. She shook her head slowly. ‘Not what you'd expect from a high flyer. If she was one.' She picked up the carrier bag of deep blue plastic with the name of Ferguson and Dyer spread across it and wrinkled her nose. Beneath it was a smaller paper carrier: Harrison's of New Bond Street. ‘That's more like it, that's money. Harrison's is up there with Valentino and Yves St Laurent for my money.'

‘Now try the other cupboard.'

This was the cupboard with the few oddments of male clothing and the boots with socks in them.

Stella stood there looking, then put her head closer to the clothes, then she shut the door with a little bang.

‘Yes, that could be Charley,' she said. ‘That definitely could be Charley … Do you know, I feel quite cold.'

She watched while he locked the front door behind him. ‘Is that it?'

‘Yes. Do you mind if we call in my office on the way home?'

‘No, of course not.' Even if it wasn't her favourite place.

In his office Coffin quickly typed a note to be delivered at once to Chief Inspector Young, wherever he was.

It was brief.

I am concerned about Caroline Royal. She may have gone off of her own free will but I think the man she had in the flat may have been Charley. I think we need to trace her.

As they drove back to St Luke's Mansions, Stella said: ‘You are worried about the girl who owns that flat, aren't you?'

‘Yes … I don't want to alarm you and I hope your chap never reappears, but if he does, stay well away from him.'

‘I always do,' said Stella.

He parked the car neatly in the slot allowed to him beside the Mansions. There was no integral garage.

‘Wait a bit,' she said. ‘I've got something to tell you. We have trouble of our own. Letty has withdrawn almost all the money in the St Luke's Theatre account. The money has gone and she's gone with it.' She looked her husband straight in the face. ‘I don't think she's coming back in a hurry, do you?'

Coffin tightened his hands on the wheel. Letty. Oh God, she's done a runner. Just like our mother.

Still the river runs backwards

Damn Letty, she was a complication he could have done without. She had come into his life suddenly, when he had not known she had existed, bringing with her news of his mother, and now she had gone and apparently taken a large sum of money with her.

That looked like panic, which was not something Letty suffered from as a rule.

He remembered how she had claimed that the man watching Stella might really be there for her. And hadn't her daughter come into it somewhere?

His skin prickled. Surely Letty could not be part of this case in any way?

What did he really know about Letty? Except that she was good with money. Too good, as it now seemed. He had liked her, admired her, trusted her. That looked like a mistake now.

And then the alarming, selfish, frightening thought: she could get me into trouble. Letty could get me into big
trouble. If there had been any financial misdealings in money or property, the dirt could rub off on him.

For that matter, what did he know about Stella, except he loved her passionately and physically and that did cloud the mind. Then he rejected doubts about Stella with fury. She's honest, is Stella, perhaps more honest than I am. There were gaps in her life he knew nothing about, but weren't there always? You had to trust.

If I don't trust Stella I am nothing.

Towards the end of the case, talking it over with Archie Young, Coffin said that he had realized there were three centres for this crime.

Not centres which created the murders, or where they were done, but which made sense of them. Centres which drew together strands, connected them.

The office of Alex C. Edwards in Britannia Buildings, the unloved block of local government offices, was one; the small office of the Tashworth Detective Agency, T
ASH,
T. Ashworth, Prop., was another.

And, as Stella had alerted him, the Karnival Club. This was the third.

He had been to Tash once, soon after coming into his command here, when it had been run by the elderly man whom he took to be the father or uncle of Tom Ashworth. The set of rooms beside a bookmaker's shop in Spinnergate had struck him as being like the sort of place where you waited for a taxi. There was even the same smell of long dead cigarette smoke.

He had never been to Alex's office but he had seen enough similar places in his career to know that it would be clean, cheaply furnished, and with a dead pot plant next to the coffee machine.

The Karnival changed its décor rarely and was best seen in artificial light, but oddly enough, of the three centres, he found it the most friendly.

These centres had, as he said, the scent of Charley in them: you could smell him there.

It was a rough thought.

Response to scent, the sense of smell, is a curious thing.
Exactly what happens inside the brain when you smell something? Seeing colour is the brain's response to the electrical waves set up when we view an object, they beat across the brain and we see colour, which otherwise does not exist, so everyone sees it differently. A bit differently, anyway. Your yellow may not be my yellow, my red different from yours. Is smelling something of the same process? He had to ask the question.

He was in the middle of the boring but crowded committee meeting which he was not chairing and his thoughts were wandering.

So what was it that had stirred up Stella's electrical brain waves and would it do the same for anyone else? It hadn't done the same for him, as he had noticed nothing.

Well, he'd smoked a lot once and that had knocked his sense of smell. Or some of it. Some smells got through … as now … thoroughly masculine smells.

If jealousy had a smell, then he must be reeking of it. Stella had provoked a wave of it.

He yawned, it was hot in the room and the air-conditioning seemed to have given up. But then they were all smoking. The cupboard had smelt just like any other cupboard, a bit more scented than he might have expected.

‘Chief Commander, can we ask your opinion?'

He roused himself and tried to think what he had last heard them talking about.

‘It's all a question of timing, isn't it?' This being a useful intelligent-sounding holding phrase while he took a deep breath and waited for a helpful response.

… And there was Eddie Creeley. What you could call the Creeley factor. The thing to do was to take Eddie in for questioning again, he decided, and Archie Young had probably done it already.

The room seemed to be waiting for him to say something else.

‘But of course, security must be the paramount precaution,' he said cautiously.

He had said the right thing. A murmur of approval rose around the table.

‘The President will be sending over his own security advisers,' said a small dark-haired man across the table.