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Authors: Gwendoline Butler

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BOOK: Cold Coffin
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‘Margaret Murray was O.'

‘So we are looking for an AB killer.'

Phoebe drove on in silence, there was a knot of traffic to get through. When she was clear, she said, ‘The AB blood was loaded with morphine . . .'

‘A user. I suppose that might make identification easier.'

Phoebe drove the length of the street before adding a further bleak comment.

‘Yes, also HIV positive.'

Coffin absorbed this in silence, then, ‘What about the trace of blood on the skull?'

‘It's difficult to get a type from such a small trace, and one that has been in water, but he's trying . . . One thing though he did say and I dare say you've thought so yourself: that particular skull cannot have been in the water long else all the blood would have washed away.'

Phoebe thought she knew where the blood could have come from.

‘Hospitals are the place for blood,' was what Stella said when he got home and told her.

The police investigators of the two sets of killings, those of Dr Murray and the women in Minden Street, had as yet no intimation that the Walkers Club, an occasion rather than a formal gathering, numbers variable with some hangers-on, and meeting in the local library, in the park and at the local supermarket, was later found to be intimately involved with the deaths.

The members had only one thing in common: childbirth. They had met at ante-natal and post-natal classes, agreeing that if there was a time when you needed friends it was when you had a baby. The children got older but the Walkers – they had all pushed prams, hadn't they? – stayed together.

4

Later on Friday. On to Saturday
.

Stella repeated her observation as she handed him a drink. ‘Hospitals are the places for blood.'

Coffin accepted the drink. ‘I don't know about the hospital. It's likely the blood came from the killer.'

She could be very acute. ‘Was there a weapon on the murder scene?'

‘No. And yes, we saw the importance. If Dr Murray carried a weapon that inflicted enough damage to make her attacker bleed so much, then where is that weapon? Not on her, or by her, or underneath her.'

‘Perhaps he . . . I say he, but of course . . .'

‘It could have been she . . . yes, perhaps the killer took that weapon with him, along with his own.'

It was impossible, Coffin found, to avoid the masculine: he was convinced this killer was a man. But he had been wrong before.

‘Be interesting to see that weapon . . . gun . . . if it hasn't been dropped in the river.'

‘Don't keep reading my thoughts,' growled Coffin, but he did it affectionately. He was used to Stella's intuitive advances into his mind. ‘Yes, we must find the weapon. It may have been used before.'

‘In Minden Street?'

‘Could be.'

‘If it's the same killer, then what is the motive?'

Coffin shrugged. ‘You tell me. Perhaps the killer is a seriously deranged person.'

‘A loony.'

‘There are more elegant ways of putting it, but yes. It's not an elegant world out there.'

‘Hate, revenge, those are motives too,' said Stella.

‘It's the tiny skulls that I don't like. There's a message to be read there, but I can't read it.'

‘You've got a loony at work,' repeated Stella, chewing an olive. She saw her husband's expression. ‘All right. I take that back. Not worthy of me. But I have had half a dinner, a long wait in the car, and a drive through the past . . . although I don't think we got there.'

‘I did,' said Coffin in a low voice.

‘And I think I have had too much to drink,' went on Stella.

‘Not you, you're never drunk.'

Stella laughed. ‘It's because I'm a performer. I can cover it up. Still, it's good sometimes to sit a bit loose to the world.'

‘Is that what you are doing now?'

‘Stops my thinking about all those sad babies. The primitive early ones, buried in the grave near your office, and all those lined up in the museum as teaching specimens . . . I think that's worse, truly.'

She was drunk, Coffin thought, and prepared to get weepy any moment. Not like his Stella. She never cried, except professionally.

He stood up. ‘I'll make some coffee . . . I could do with some myself.'

Before brewing the coffee, he went up the winding staircase to the very top of the tower, where the workroom had been contrived for him. His study he would not call it, because what did he study there? But he did work there.

At the door, he hesitated; he could see that the answerphone had no message for him, nor was the fax spewing out a ribbon of paper.

Good. So far so good.

But there was something about his room. His work table had not been moved, he could still sit there looking out of the window across to the old churchyard, but he felt as though someone was looking at him.

He swung round. Someone was looking at him. Serious bronze eyes stared back. Bronze eyes in a bronze face.

It was a stylized bronze portrait bust with all the features and neck slightly elongated. Not unpleasing, but not natural either. The arms were folded across the chest, with the hands extended. The hands were very long and thin.

The bronze was on a black pedestal to the right of the door. All was normal in the rest of the room, his room, except for this bronze visitor. He gave a checking glance round the room. No other intruder.

‘I hope you are a visitor,' he addressed it carefully. ‘And not here to stay.'

As he walked past it, he saw that the creature possessed another arm; a third arm protruded from the right shoulder blade . . .

He closed the door carefully behind him.

He was tired, but he knew he would not sleep. Too many unpleasant images were floating around in his head.

The kitchen was clean, neat and empty. They had no animal present, the last incumbent, Gus, was still in the animal clinic, determined to come home. Coffin missed the friendly presence. He would have liked to have had a cat comfortably asleep in his basket. The basket was still there, but empty.

Coffin felt deeply depressed, especially when he discovered he was making tea instead of coffee and had to start again. He took particular care about arranging the china, the fine bone stuff that Stella liked (a long life in the police had accustomed Coffin to the thickest of china mugs), and getting out a few biscuits. Stella would not eat them; she was counting the calories again this season.

‘What about getting a cat?' he asked Stella as he pushed into the sitting room with his tray.

She turned to look. ‘Watch it, you've got a spot of coffee on your sleeve.'

Better than blood, he thought, as he dabbed at it. Come to think of it, if the killer had spilt all that blood, wouldn't he have it on his clothes too? And if so, why hadn't someone noticed?

Hospitals were places for blood, as Stella had observed. Perhaps he ought to be looking for a surgeon.

A mad one, according to Stella.

‘It was water,' he said, rubbing at his sleeve. But that other spot on his trouser leg was coffee right enough; he hoped Stella would not notice. She abhorred spots on clothes, whereas any copper would tell you that they went with the job.

He knew he was at the stage in the case when, had he still been out in the field doing hard graft, he would have admitted to being in a muddle. From which, with hard work and co-operation from the rest of the team, a truth would emerge.

As a rule.

‘I've been thinking, while you were making the coffee.'

‘I thought you were asleep.'

‘That too.' She drank some coffee. ‘I did dream a bit, one of those short little dreams . . . And I thought: Not killing the babies, but kind of collecting them.'

She looked at him, wide-eyed. Just so might Mary Shelley have looked at Percy Bysshe as she read him passages from
Frankenstein
, with Byron listening.

It was quite an idea, Coffin thought.

‘No, I don't think so, Stella. All the other infants were long dead, thousands of years, but forensics have now told us that the modern one is probably nearer a hundred, an easy task they said.' It looked as though it had been stolen from the museum and planted among the much older skulls.

‘There's a rational element here, Stella. This killer is organized, I swear. He does it his way.'

He had read that there were two sorts of serial killers: the organized and the disorganized. He thought he had an organized one here.

‘A two-headed monster,' said Stella sleepily as she sipped her coffee. ‘I'm going to try to get Peter Storey to give me his new play.'

‘Is he writing one?' Storey was a golden name in the theatre.

‘He's always Writing one. All writers always have a play or a novel in the bottom drawer.'

Her husband was not paying her much attention, still caught up with his own thoughts about the killer. ‘Maybe organized is not quite the right word,' mused Coffin. ‘More just lucky.'

‘If you say he is organized,' declared Stella with great loyalty, ‘then he is. You always get it right.' She then took away some of the force of this statement, by saying, ‘Whatever being organized for murder means. Do you mean he is paid?'

‘I didn't mean that, but I might consider it.'

‘Any news of Joan Lumsden?'

‘None. Or if there is, then no one has told me.'

‘Oh, you would be told.' Stella was incredulous at the idea that her husband could be kept in the dark.

Coffin shrugged. ‘His mates would close ranks.'

Slowly Stella said, ‘You can't mean they think he killed her . . . they would never protect him then.'

‘No, but they might not help to drop him in it.'

Silence, he thought, was a great weapon.

‘He's on leave, I suppose?'

Coffin nodded. ‘Seems best. Anyway, he's not in any shape to work. Apparently.' There was a little chill in his voice, suggesting that he did not quite believe in Detective Constable Lumsden's ill health. He was under pressure, certainly.

‘What about the blood in her car?' The story of the blood had figured a great deal in the press, so it was no secret. ‘Is it hers?' Blood again, she thought, a lot of blood around at the moment.

Coffin shrugged. ‘Not known. She isn't around to check, and many people have blood of her type. It is certainly not his.'

‘And it is human blood?'

‘A good guess, Stella – that question was raised since their dog is missing too – but, yes, it is human.'

He got up and started to move about the room. ‘Dead or alive, I wish she'd turn up.'

One of the men who had worked with Lumsden had said that he thought Lumsden missed the dog as much as his wife. This joke (question mark here) had been passed on to Coffin. It showed how Lumsden was rated by his colleagues. You didn't make. that sort of joke about someone you liked and respected.

He'd known a copper like that himself in his youth; he could still remember his name, Len Daley. A man who had worked by the rule, doing his job but without imagination. He was probably a high-ranking officer by now, but he had never come Coffin's way, so it was guesswork.

‘Could be dead,' he said aloud.

Stella waited to hear if he amplified this statement, then asked, ‘Who is dead?'

Coffin stared at her but he did not speak; he was far away.

‘Who are you talking to?'

He gave himself a shake. ‘To myself. A ghost walking.' Then he laughed. Ridiculous to think of Daley as a ghost when he was probably alive, prosperous and master of a household. If he had a household, then he would certainly be master of it; that was his style.

‘Am I master in this household?' he said aloud to Stella.

She looked surprised. ‘Now what are you talking about? First ghosts, and now masters of households . . . Let me tell you, no one talks in those terms now.'

‘Some of them still think it,' said Coffin humbly. ‘And I only asked.'

‘Well, the answer is that you are not.'

‘I thought I wasn't. I knew you'd know.'

Stella gave him a suspicious look.

‘Just so I know: who is?'

‘Of course there isn't one. We don't live like that.'

‘Glad to know it. So who rearranged my workroom?'

Stella said that she supposed she had. And did it matter?

‘Not in itself, but there is the stranger in the corner. If it is a stranger; looks familiar to me.'

‘You know who it is?' Stella was relieved. This was going to be easier than she had feared . . . Letty, Letty, what have you done to me? ‘You recognized the face?'

‘I didn't think it was Julius Caesar.'

‘It's from your sister, Letty, it's a surprise.'

‘It was that all right.'

‘It's by Elijah Jones, he's a coming man, Letty thinks a lot of him. He's a bit quirky, of course.'

‘He's certainly that.'

‘You mean the third arm?' said Stella nervously. ‘You may not have had a chance to see, but there's another eye at the back of your head . . . It symbolizes what you are: someone who sees round corners and solves problems.'

Letty Bingham was Coffin's much younger half-sister; she had reappeared in his life just at the time when, finding his mother's diary, he had concluded that, although long vanished, Mother might still be alive. Letty had grown up in the States, and was now a lawyer and a banker and rich. At intervals she descended upon the Second City to see her half-brother, sometimes with a new husband, sometimes newly divorced. Recently she had given up what she called ‘the marrying game'. Needless to say, she and Stella liked each other.

‘He's getting famous and your bust will be very valuable in time,' said Stella.

‘So I'm an investment now, am I?' grumbled Coffin. ‘Well, the thing is in my way. Move it, please.'

BOOK: Cold Coffin
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