Coffin's Ghost (7 page)

She had brought a copy of
Notable British Trials
, containing the Triangle Murder in Barrow Street. The Triangle was the name of the seedy nightclub-cum-gambling-parlour-cum-brothel that existed there in the mid nineteen fifties and sixties. (Certainly three angles to that place, Coffin had thought, as he read.) A couple of CID men were sitting there drinking when a masked man shouting abuse and waving a shotgun, with his two pals, burst in and aimed at the proprietor, Alby Hilter, who fell down with a bullet in his chest. He died later.

The masked man turned out to be an ex-copper with a grievance whom the CID men were obliged to identify and bear witness against.

It’s different now, he thought, things were like that in the outfit then, which was probably one of the reasons I was brought in to the area, and I have cleared it all out. Although there might be one or two rattling nests I haven’t got to yet.

He remembered that he had thought of those few weeks as a pleasant interlude, helping him through a bad time, and he had been grateful to Anna and those regular meetings in Barrow Street.

A nice easy relationship, not meaning too much to either party. No guilt involved, later he might tell Stella all about it and she would be humane and understanding. ‘My dear,’ she would say, ‘life is like a war, you are entitled to your comfort.’

Stella, in fact, would never talk like that, her dialogue, honed through years of the best playwrights, was sharper.

Or more likely, he thought, taking another drink of coffee, she would have given me a swift blow and stalked out of the room. Not forever, his behaviour would not have rated that high in the range of life’s misdemeanours, she would have been back.

Anyway, he hadn’t told her. Or not yet. He trusted that the initials J.C. and the terrible offering on the steps of the house in Barrow Street were not a preview of what was to come.

He remembered the last time he had seen Anna.

She had called at the house in Barrow Street, spontaneously, unasked, when he was working. He had gone down to open the door himself, there was no one else, he had no servants. The house was kept clean by a commercial firm with whom he had not much contact.

An image of that last time came sweeping back from beneath the careful stones he had buried it under. Not a memory to keep on display.

She swayed through the door; she had long legs, and skirts were minimal that year, and tight as well.

Tucked under her arm, she had something long and thin, wrapped in silk. A very pretty pink and blue printed silk, Italian silk for sure.

‘What have you got there?’

Without a word, Anna slowly unwrapped the silk. Inside was a whip.

‘I thought policemen liked a touch of violence.’

Coffin was silent. Then he said – he remembered the words so clearly – ‘That’s been your experience, has it?’

She just smiled.

Coldly, he said: ‘I don’t think it would be an aphrodisiac for me. I doubt if it would bring me to the desired consummation.’

Anna looked at him for a long minute, with no expression on her face. Then, in a soft, gentle voice, she said:

‘Pompous git.’

She swung round and made her exit, wrapping up the whip as she went.

‘You’re not worth a flick,’ she threw over her shoulder as she closed the door behind her.

They never met again. He made cautious enquiries about her and knew that she had left her post on the local paper . . . or been sacked, stories varied, and disappeared. She might be around still, if so he did not know where. Just as well.

She couldn’t come walking out of the past without her legs, he thought dryly.

He took another drink of coffee, which was still hot, so he could not have been far away in another world, another time, for long. Then he opened the file that Phoebe Astley had handed him and studied the medical report on the limbs found in Barrow Street.

You should go to your grave with all your limbs attached, he thought. But many didn’t.

Sex:
Female
Colour:
White
Age:
Between 25 yrs and 45 yrs

A bit of guesswork there, he thought.

Height:
5′ 8″
Weight:
Nine stone
Shoe size: 7
Hair on legs and arms:
Light brown to ginger
Fingernails:
bitten

A tall thin woman, probably a redhead, and large feet.

Anna had been tall but not thin; still, women changed, lost weight. A woman heading to the sort of death this woman had had, yes, she might well have lost weight.

She hadn’t bitten her nails, nor dyed her hair, but who could tell what time and trouble did for you.

He hadn’t known what blood group Anna was, but O was about the most common.

Anna might have been on drugs even then. These were all sedative-type drugs. Some of the details matched with Anna, but without the face, how could you be sure?

Neither of them had made any attempt to keep in touch. Coffin knew danger when he saw it and he had seen it then in Anna.

It was possible that the remains left on the steps in Barrow Street were those of Anna.

One of the three telephones on his desk rang, this was what he called his private line and was the only one which Stella used. She was careful, scrupulous even, about breaking into his working life.

Stella wasted no time. ‘Darling . . .’

That meant business, it was the theatrical darling, meaning nothing, except here I come and I have a request to make.

‘Yes?’ Coffin was cautious.

‘Robbie’s very worried about his daughter. His stepdaughter, really, but he loves her and she took his name.’

‘I gathered that last night.’ Was it last night? No, it was a bit longer ago than that. He had been so deep in the past, that the present was hard to hold on to.

‘Yes, but more worried . . . She’s missing, really missing, not just playing. She hasn’t got a very high IQ. Learning
difficulties, they call it, don’t they? She’s lovely to look at, by the way, a beautiful girl, but a simple soul. I had her working in the theatre, in the wardrobe and so on, that side of things, she did well enough while they kept it simple. Then she went off without a word. She’s an innocent and he thinks she’s in real trouble.’

‘He can tell, can he?’

‘He thinks so. He’d like your advice.’

‘Well,’ began Coffin.

‘He’s important to me.’ She didn’t say darling again, but it was there in her voice. ‘And the limbs found on the house in Barrow Street . . . well, he’s wondering if they could be his stepdaughter, Alice. That’s her name . . . her mother married George Freedom next . . . not with him now.’

What a lot, Coffin thought. ‘Where does the girl live and how long has she been missing?’

‘She lives in a room her mother found for her in the Second City. She works three times a week. I gave her the job here. She is seventeen, and innocent.’ Stella hesitated. ‘That’s one reason for worry, she may not be able to protect herself.’

‘Stella, that unlucky woman was older and more battered than the young Gilchrist girl. It cannot be her.’ Not if she was young and lovely.

‘But, if there’s a killer out there –’

He interrupted her.

‘What is it you want?’

‘Could you meet us for a drink in Max’s, about six? We might eat there afterwards if you feel like it.’ Max and his restaurant was the favoured eating place for those working in St Luke’s Theatre Complex who could afford his prices, which had risen sharply in the last year. Max also ran the various bars and eating places in the three theatres.

Coffin, whose income had not risen as sharply as Max’s prices, was thinking about it, when Stella said: ‘My dinner.’

Stella, although out of work, was temporarily rich: the theatres were doing well, while a TV series she had done was endowing her with money for repeats from North America, Germany, Australia and from what Stella called the Monkey Islands. She used to complain that her TV series travelled
much more than she did. A false complaint, since Stella hated to travel except in the greatest luxury.

‘If I am going to be an expense item, I accept.’

‘You are all right, are you, love?’ This time the affection was genuine. ‘You sound a bit strained.’

‘Just the first days back at work.’ And digging myself up. I may have a confession to make to you, Stella. ‘And a rather tricky murder.’

A set of limbs, anyway, we have to assume the body and the murder.

‘Don’t, love,’ said Stella solemnly. ‘You are too important to worry about the odd murder.’

He laughed. He never felt important.

‘You’re uneasy, though, I can tell, and that means you are involving yourself. Take my advice: work out what is bugging you, find it, and then leave it. You don’t need it.’

She put the telephone down gently.

‘I need the face,’ Coffin said aloud. ‘Where is the head?’

Phoebe Astley was thinking this too. ‘We had better find the head and quickly. If it’s not in a freezer or such, it will be deteriorating rapidly. Wasn’t there a killer who boiled the heads to keep them what he called “nice”.’

She was having a conference with Chief Superintendent Young, if you could call their conversation such: she was tacitly seeking support and advice from this so much more senior figure. They were meeting in his office, which was tidy and very neat, with a potted plant, small and tidy too, on his desk. She thought his wife had provided the dark blue primula. Her own office was not tidy.

‘That was Dennis Nilsen,’ said Archie Young. ‘I believe he did cook bits of bodies, but I don’t know about heads. I should think the hair might make a difficulty there.’

Phoebe, who had dropped her observation in to see how Archie reacted (she knew that immensely experienced and tough as he was, he still had his squeamish side), had to admit that he had capped her.

‘How are we going to give her a name? Fingerprints?’

‘I don’t think so. Not unless she has a record and even
then . . .’ He said no more. No need. The computer might go through all the fingerprints of all the females with criminal convictions, but even that would take time. Could be done, no doubt.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We need her doctor. With all those drugs inside her, she was on someone’s list. We just have to send out a letter to all GPs in the locality of Barrow Street and hope one of them holds up his hand.’

‘Yes,’ Phoebe sighed. ‘We’ve already started on that, of course. Tony Davley is in charge of that operation.’

Sergeant Antonia Davley was an up-and-coming young officer whom Phoebe liked. She had accepted the task of checking on all local doctors and hospital clinics without pleasure, but determined to do her best. She had sent a circular letter out. She was assisted by one detective constable who kept pointing out how hopeless it was.

‘And any of the women who have stayed in the Serena Seddon House who have the initials J.C. Or anything like it: J.G., I.C., or even just a J or just a C.’

‘You’re joking there, I suppose.’

‘Not a joke in me . . . and going back before it was the Serena Seddon Refuge House,’ Archie Young went on.

‘Agreed,’ said Phoebe sadly.

She brightened a bit. ‘She was a great drinker, Lady Serena, did you know that? A real toper.’

‘How do you know?’

‘My mother knew her, their paths crossed during the war. Both at Bletchley. Didn’t drink there, of course, but she did when she got out. Relief from tension, I suppose. It’s why she left her money to found a refuge. She saw she could go that way. Never married herself, but got beaten up once or twice.’

‘I never know when you are inventing things,’ said an exasperated Archie Young.

Phoebe left his office laughing. On the way out she rubbed the leaves of the primula between her fingers and discovered that it was plastic. That settled the question: Adelaide Young was not the sort of woman to buy plastic flowers: Archie had bought it for himself.

And that in itself raised an interesting question about the sort of man who would buy a plastic flower.

She looked back at him almost with sympathy. Come on, Archie, life is real, not plastic.

But as she ran up the stairs to her office (only the very top brass like Archie had their office lower down) she reflected that if anyone knew the world wasn’t plastic it was Archie Young. Think of the cases he had tackled: the Sacker murders, a whole troop of dead children; the arsonist of Perill Lane, and the woman who . . . No, bury the memory of that one, she killed herself in the end, God help her, if there was a God.

The telephone was ringing in her room, she considered ignoring it, but decided against it. Experience had taught her that messages always get through if they bring bad news and only the good-news ones get lost on the way.

Hard to be sure which the call was, she thought as she heard John Coffin’s voice.

‘Phoebe, I want you to come to dinner tonight.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ She liked him, always had done; she liked Stella, but it was a working relationship, an odd drink but no dinner invitations.

‘I have a missing-girl problem wished on me. Daughter of a friend of Stella. I can’t do anything myself, but you come and hear and see if you think there is anything in it. Then hand it on.’

‘Can you tell me any details now, sir.’

‘Daughter of a man called Robbie Gilchrist.’

‘Oh yes. I met him in connection with the Georgie Freedom case. I had to ask him a few questions.’ Didn’t like him but preferred him to Freedom who struck me as violent when he fancied to be. And he had made a snarling reference to the Chief Commander. ‘Did you ever get across Freedom? I don’t think he loves you, sir.’