Read the book: «A Cold Coffin»

PROLOGUE

A brief Calendar of the life and career of John Coffin,Chief Commander of the Second City of London Police.

John Coffin is a Londoner by birth, his father is unknown and his mother was a difficult lady of many careers and different lives who abandoned him in infancy to be looked after by a woman who may have been a relative of his father and who seems to have acted as his mother’s dresser when she was on the stage. He kept in touch with this lady, whom he called Mother, lodged with her in his early career and looked after her until she died.

After serving briefly in the army, he joined the Metropolitan Police, soon transferring to the plain-clothes branch as a detective.

He became a sergeant and was very quickly promoted to inspector a year later. Ten years later, he was a superintendent and then chief superintendent.

There was a bad patch in his career about which he is reluctant to talk. His difficult family background has complicated his life and possibly accounts for an unhappy period when, as he admits, his career went down a black hole. His first marriage split apart at this time and his only child died.

From this dark period he was resurrected by a spell in a secret, dangerous undercover operation about which even now not much is known. But the esteem he won then was recognized when the Second City of London was being formed and he became Chief Commander of its Police Force. He has married again, an old love, Stella Pinero, who is herself a very successful actress. He has also discovered two siblings, a much younger sister and brother.

1

Tuesday. One day it will be Christmas, but not for many of those living now.

CI Phoebe Astley spoke in a sober voice to the Chief Commander. ‘I hate a headless baby,’ she said. ‘Terrible thought.’

Because the Chief Commander was an old friend, she felt free to drop in on Coffin with anything that worried her. So much so that Coffin had told his wife that his heart sank when Phoebe appeared in his room.

‘I hate a headless anyone,’ said Coffin gloomily. Not so long ago an ill-wisher had left the head of a cat on the staircase in his home in St Luke’s Tower. Not something you forgot.

He looked round his office without pleasure. Stella, his wife, had told him that his chosen decorative style was ugly and he had replied that it was workmanlike, but observing it now he could see what she meant. Everything that could be dark brown was dark brown, and the rest was cream. Or, in the case of the curtains, dark blue.

‘Bile,’ he murmured to himself. ‘That’s what this room is like. I must have been bilious when I chose the colours . . . I’d probably had a row with Stella.’ They used to quarrel a lot in those days, and they didn’t seem to now. Was this a good sign, as he hoped? Or a bad one?

He loved her, though, he knew that, and he knew now that she loved him too. Once he had doubted, but no longer.

Phoebe went to look out the window. It was still raining, as it had been for days. The rain, washing away the light top surface of soil of a recent excavation, had played its part in uncovering the head. Heads rather.

Phoebe was a tall, elegantly built woman, with a taste for dark trousers and bright sweaters. Today she was in red and black. ‘There is this pit, about ten infants’ skulls.’ She shook her head. ‘More maybe.’

‘Seems enough.’

‘A small population. Probably not more than five breeding pairs in the group.’ This was the way students of primitive man talked about populations they were investigating. She had picked this up from one of the archaeologists working on the site. ‘They couldn’t feed too many children.’

‘Makes me feel like King Herod.’

‘No need to take it personally,’ said Phoebe briskly, turning away from the window. ‘Dr Murray . . . she’s the archaeologist, said they are Neanderthal . . . been there for many thousands of years.’

‘Some sort of a cult?’ enquired Coffin.

‘More like a culling . . . Dr Murray said the Neanderthals, to which, from the skulls, these children may have belonged, practised infanticide to keep the population down.’ Dr Murray had not yet passed on her belief that one, and only one, of the skulls was not so old, modern-day in fact, and might have been deposited there by someone who had discovered the heads and thought this was a good place to hide another one. She always thought in terms of crimes. She would be telling John Coffin her suspicions, which might mean something or nothing; it was going to be hard to date this later skull.

The big teaching hospital that was attached to Second City University had a collection of skulls in a medical museum that was now hardly used. It was a macabre, dead place these days, but it had its uses.

‘I’m hating this more and more . . . to think I’ve been sitting on top of them all these years.’ Coffin was gloomy.

‘Not exactly sitting, sir.’

He went to the window to join her. ‘Well, walking, walking towards my car.’

The whole area to the north of his window, once bare, unpaved ground where a few bushes struggled for life, was being cleared. Headquarters of the Second City Police was being expanded: they had outgrown their accommodation and another new block was being put up.

Or would be put up once the ground was cleared. At the moment it was a hole. And one full of water since it was raining hard. This water-logged hole was now roped off and marked with signs saying that Entry was Forbidden.

The archaeologists had taken over, but even they had not been able to work for some days.

‘Dr Murray is very excited about it. No one knew there was a concentration of Neanderthals here.’

‘Still got some,’ said Coffin sourly. He had come from a short working trip up north to find he had yet another problem. Neanderthals! Sometimes he felt he worked with a bunch of them. ‘There’s Nean Street just round the corner. Probably built on a settlement of them.’ And it was true that the local kids called some of the families there – short, stocky but powerful, men and women both – Neanderthals.

‘Oh no,’ said Phoebe seriously. ‘They died out millennia ago.’

‘Think so?’ said the sceptic.

He felt that he could hear the millennia marching with heavy feet, but not taking all the Neanderthals with them.

Phoebe ignored her boss’s mood, partly because she always did and partly because she knew the reason for it. There was a possible murder case in the Second City that was troubling him. Troubling a lot of them, since it involved a police officer, a detective in Spinnergate. It was just possible that Arthur Lumsden had murdered his wife.

That was, if she was dead. At the moment she was just ‘missing’.

He had not reported her missing, even after seven days of absence and silence. Her mother had telephoned his sergeant in the Amen Street Divisional Office.

But there was blood of her type in the family car, and talk of a quarrel. The family dog, a small terrier, was missing too. There was a strong feeling that Lumsden might have killed his wife . . . husbands could do anything, but he would never have killed his dog.

DC Lumsden was on leave. He had given a statement, denying a quarrel but admitting they had been having a ‘difficult time’. They had breakfasted together, and he had then gone on duty. When he came home there was no wife and no dog. He didn’t know anything about the blood in the car. And yes, he had had a rest period of two hours in the middle of the day. No, he had not gone home, just gone for a walk.

As a statement, there were holes in it.

And there the matter rested for the time being. One of the Spinnergate CID team was looking into Mrs Lumsden’s disappearance as quietly as possible. Coffin looked at the file: Sergeant Drury was the man.

Coffin knew Lumsden slightly and was now repressing the feeling that he hadn’t liked the man. ‘Not a joke in him.’

And then there were the murders in Minden Street. Gunshot wounds to the head. Nasty. Yes, Coffin had plenty to worry about. Phoebe was worried about them herself.

Coffin looked thinner, a trifle haggard, which she admitted to finding attractive. She always had found him attractive, but now working with him made this forbidden territory. Anyway, he had a very lovely wife, Stella Pinero, a powerful lady in her own right.

‘The Neanderthal population was probably small, she says, and co-existed with modern man.’

I just said so.’

Phoebe ignored this. She sipped the coffee that Coffin had politely offered her. He was good in that kind of way.

‘Are they still underneath all that water?’

‘Yes, but they are due to be carefully removed tomorrow morning, and taken off to be examined in a lab somewhere.’

Coffin felt better. ‘Right, well, let’s get back to what we were discussing.’ He knew what it was. Phoebe had come in several times already to talk about the same issue. ‘The murders in Minden Street . . . you believe you know the murderer, but the lawyers won’t let you charge him.’ Interesting case, he mused. Someone ought to write it up one day, perhaps I’ll do it myself.

‘I thought you liked him yourself,’ said Coffin cautiously. He had heard rumours.

‘We knew each other for a bit. It was when I first came to the Second City and was finding my feet, thought he might make a good contact,’ said Phoebe defensively. ‘I hadn’t got him sussed out.’ She shrugged. ‘So I made a mistake.’

‘So what can I do?’

‘He’s dangerous,’ went on Phoebe, as if she wasn’t listening. ‘He’ll do it again. Bound to.’

Better wait till he ‘does it again’ before I embark on the book, thought Coffin.

‘He says he knew you.’

‘I believe we have met,’ said Coffin cautiously. ‘Black Jack? Yes, he is a villain . . . never thought of him as a killer, though.’

Black Jack Jackson, which was his nickname and nothing to do with any American band leader, was up for any fraud and money-making enterprise that came his way. Son and brother to the victims. Murder in the family, all right. But although a suspect – there had been a quarrel and some violence from him – any proof was hard to find.

Coffin was riffling through the papers in the file. ‘Hard man to convict.’

At the suggestion that the lawyers might be right, Phoebe drew in a deep breath, so deep that Coffin thought she might blow up like an aggrieved toad and become twice her size.

‘There are three dead women in that house, and if he didn’t kill them, then I don’t know who did.’ She amplified this statement. ‘It looks as though whoever did it was either let in, or had a key . . . Mrs Jackson had fitted the flat up with one of those special keys.’ She repeated, ‘If he didn’t do it, then who did?’

‘Maybe that’s the answer,’ suggested Coffin. ‘We don’t know who did it.’ He shook his head.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, you are standing aside from this case.’

Coffin knew he was. ‘The two young women . . . the sisters were . . . are’ – how do you talk about the so recently dead . . . he settled for what seemed easier – ‘they are friends of Stella.’

He waited a bit, then said, ‘Black Jack? As killer? Not how I see him.’

‘He’s a friend, is he?’ Phoebe pretended to be surprised, but she was never surprised who rated as a friend of the Chief Commander. He trawled in dark waters when it suited him.

‘My friend? Black Jack is interested in and collects rare pornography, books, videos and manuals, all aspects: sadism, masochism, pederasty, bestialism, and he may well practise any of these that he can manage. I would be pleased to put him away for any of them if I got the chance. So, no, not a friend, nor a companion in bondage.’

‘Sorry.’

‘But I don’t think he’s a killer.’

Black Jack, his full name John Jackson, had come by his nickname because of his crop of dark curls and deep brown eyes. Also because he was a known criminal, not particularly violent, preferring to rely on cunning, which he had in abundance. He had the good sense to commit most of his crimes outside the Second City, which meant that Coffin’s investigators had only been after him twice, getting him inside once. ‘No hard feelings,’ he had said to Coffin. ‘You do your job, I do mine.’ And he had offered Coffin the run of his pornographic library.

Offer refused.

Unmarried, he had lived for a while with his mother and twin sisters in Madras House in Minden Street, moving out not long before the murders.

It was these three women who had been murdered. Shot.

‘I never knew Mrs Jackson, although she claimed to have known my mother.’ He had found this hard to believe, his long disappeared mother being a mythical figure by now to the son she had left behind before embarking on other marriages, other lives. ‘But the twins, Amy and Alice, were friends of Stella. They had worked together once. They were completely different from their brother, straight as a die Stella always said. And yet they loved him. It was their house, you know.’

‘He gave it to them,’ said Phoebe. She had had to admit to his generosity with his no doubt ill-gotten gains. He had offered her diamond stud earrings, which, thank God, she had refused, although her ears had ached for them, delicious glittery little objects that they were.

Coffin was silent. What do you know of people, after all?

Because of his position, which carried its own burden of responsibilities and worries, he had kept his distance from the Jackson household, although he knew that Stella enjoyed the company of the twins. He had always been too tactful to ask her what she thought of Black Jack.

‘So where is he now?’

Phoebe shrugged. ‘He can’t go back to the house in Minden Street. It’s a scene of the crime and still has forensics crawling all over it.’

This case was being handled by one of the Headquarters CID teams of which Phoebe Astley was a very active part. She was also handling one other case, that of a suspected abduction and rape, although it was coming to a successful conclusion.

‘Inspector Lavender is working with me.’

Coffin nodded. ‘Know him, of course.’ Larry Lavender, about whose name no one dared make jokes about sexual ambivalence, was a tough operator and came from a famous political family.

‘He’s got ideas, not all of which I agree with.’

Larry Lavender, yes, Coffin knew him as a man of ideas. He had helped his rapid promotion.

‘He says someone just walked in off the street and did it.’

‘Motive?’

‘He says first find the killer, and then you’ll find the motive.’

‘He could be right. So he doesn’t think it’s Jack Jackson.’

Phoebe shrugged. ‘I think he’d accept that it could be Jack. Whom we can’t find by the way. Never home.’

‘Are you looking?’

‘Not hard.’

Coffin nodded. ‘Well, I won’t weep for him. A man like Jack will have always a bolt hole. So where does he live . . . when he’s there?’

‘He used to live in the house in Minden Street. Not large, but smart. We’re coming up in the world in Spinnergate, you know. Then he bought a place in Watermen’s Row, near the river.’

Coffin nodded again. He did know. ‘Mimsie Marker will make a meal of it.’

Mimsie kept a newspaper and flower stall by the station; she was reputed to know all the gossip of the Second City and to pass it on with expertise, adding a little gloss where she thought necessary. She was also known to be a shrewd lady with a penny, acquiring substantial investments. The story had it that she walked round the corner in her shabby working clothes and then stepped into a Roller to get home. Coffin knew this was not true: it was one of the smaller Bentleys.

When Phoebe, still muttering crossly, had gone, Coffin got back to work on the papers on his desk. He had recently initiated a study of all the clubs in his bailiwick, some of which he suspected of being involved in drug offences and allied crimes. He thumbed through the report: the Cat Lovers’ Club sounded harmless enough, as did Tortoise Friends, but the Ladies of Leisure might need looking into. Several walking and hiking clubs – surely not much trouble there? But he knew from experience you could never be sure. Some were more sinister than others.

Then he put on a raincoat to go down to look at the flooded excavations.

The rain had stopped, but it was a damp, dark evening.

He looked down into the murk and wondered about the babies’ heads, once buried there, now uncovered. Although dark, the water was not quite opaque; reflections shimmered and moved in the lights from the building behind. You could imagine you saw shapes.

‘You could almost imagine that was a skull.’ He must have spoken aloud.

‘It is a skull.’

He felt a presence behind him and looked up. There was a tall, sturdily built woman in a raincoat but no hat. Her hair was wet, but she didn’t seem to mind. She was attractive, he found. Coffin moved forward, as if he would try to get the skull out. In fact he wanted to; he disliked intensely the thought of an infant head resting in the mud. He crouched down, trying to get at it.

The woman put her hand on his shoulder. ‘No, leave it. Let the archaeologists do it. Everything has to be mapped in situ.’

He stood up; they were about as tall as each other. ‘Dr Murray, I presume?’

She nodded. ‘And I know who you are, too. I know your wife.’

‘You know Stella?’

‘She came to a lecture I gave. Introduced herself.’ Dr Murray smiled. ‘You don’t forget Stella once you’ve met her.’

‘No. You’re in charge here?’ It was more of a statement than a question.

‘I am head of the prehistory and archaeology department at the Second City University. When I got wind of the discovery here, I asked to be involved and they kindly allowed me.’

No one else wanted to do it was Coffin’s cynical interpretation of this statement.

‘But I’m not in charge. A whole team of archaeologists will be doing the real work.’

And then Coffin got round to what really worried him. ‘I thought you were going to get all the skulls out. Still here, though.’

‘That’ll happen. All this rain,’ she said briefly. ‘Water drained in. We thought we would do more damage by rushing. It’ll drain naturally quite soon.’ She smiled. ‘I would be chary of using the phrase “in charge” anyway. Controlling a gang of scholars and technicians is never easy: they argue.’

‘I believe you.’ He stared down. Was he imagining a pinkiness down there by one of the skulls? He pointed. ‘Looks different.’ Pinkiness. Just the light reflection. Not blood. Couldn’t be blood. He had had blood on his mind since the Minden Street murders.

‘This one is not Neanderthal.’

He was surprised at her certainty. ‘How can you tell?’

‘By the shape. It is much much later. Modern.’

He wondered what modern meant. ‘How much later?’

‘At the moment I cannot be sure.’

In a car at the kerb, at the wheel, was a young woman, bright blue eyes, a froth of curly fair hair and a broad smile. She was looking at them both with good-humoured amusement. ‘Had enough?’

Dr Murray ignored this and introduced them. ‘This is Natasha, she drives for me. Well, some of the time. Chief Commander John Coffin, Natasha Broad.’

Natasha held out a hand. ‘I’m her cousin, but she doesn’t like to admit it. She can’t keep away from this site, can you, Mags? Fascinated by the infant skulls.’

‘They are interesting,’ said Dr Murray soberly. She looked at Coffin. ‘You’re interested yourself.’

‘Of course, I am,’ observed Coffin mildly. ‘Were the children sacrificed, or did they die naturally?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ said Dr Murray. ‘Not at the moment, perhaps never. If I had to make a guess, then I’d say they were sacrificed.’

Coffin looked thoughtful.

‘They probably ate the flesh,’ observed Dr Murray. ‘Neanderthals appear to have been healthy stock, but hungry. Neanderthal man ate what flesh he could get. We have found teeth marks on human bones.’

‘The Neanderthals died out, though, didn’t they?’ said Coffin. ‘To be replaced by modern man. Perhaps there weren’t enough babies for them to eat. Or perhaps modern man ate the Neanderthals.’

‘Possibly.’

Natasha laughed. ‘Come on, let’s get home.’

So they lived together, Coffin thought. Wrongly as it happened. Wonder if it’s a happy household.

‘Let me know about the later skull. I’m interested.’

‘It’s been there some time. Not a police job.’

Well, you never know, thought Coffin. ‘I’m not looking for work,’ he said.

Although he disliked the thought of the dead Neanderthal babies, he found himself even more troubled by the later skull. How did it get there? And why? And who put it there?

He felt a gust of fury at the thought.

‘I don’t think he liked what you said about the date of that one skull,’ said Natasha to her cousin, who was recounting her interview with Coffin in detail as they drove to Spinnergate, where Dr Murray owned a charming late eighteenth-century house that she had restored and renovated.

Margaret Murray did not respond to this gambit. ‘Odd to think that this was once one of the first homes of the English textile industry,’ she said.

‘Eh?’

‘Spinnergate,’ obliged Dr Murray; ‘Weaver or webster, creating fabrics.’

‘Oh you’re always back in the past.’ She drove on deftly. ‘Now, the Chief Commander is not interested in the past.’ She added thoughtfully, ‘He likes a good murder.’

‘Only professionally.’

‘Well, he’s got quite a choice at the moment.’ The papers had been full of the Minden Street murders, the death of the Jackson family. Horrible, she had thought.

They drove on with Natasha humming under her breath. Sounded dirge-like. To her cousin, she looked too thin and badly dressed. Margaret didn’t mind that both Nat and her husband only ever wore jeans, but you ought to wear them with style.

‘Don’t know what’s the matter with you two. You both work all hours, but you never seem to have any money to spend.’

‘Saving,’ said Natasha. ‘You know Jason doesn’t earn much, teachers never do. And we are trying to make improvements to the house.’

‘I thought Sam was helping you there.’ Sam was a kind of universal slave labourer. Sam was thought by some to be simple, but closer observers like Coffin saw he had a darker side. Certainly he took a keen interest in his medical specimens. ‘I might have been a doctor with a bit more luck. I reckon I’d have made a surgeon.’

‘Even Sam has to be paid.’

‘I shall have to take you in hand.’ And she meant it.

‘Don’t even try.’ And Natty meant it too.

‘We’d better hurry to get home,’ said Margaret Murray. ‘Dave might be there by now.’

Dave was her husband, a stylist and cutter and Mayfair hairdresser, always on the wing to Los Angeles and New York, the winner of many prizes and medals. She was a little afraid of him, he was such a dab hand with the scissors. Like a surgeon, lovely manners, but you always remembered the knife.

‘Oh, don’t worry about him.’ Natasha accelerated away. ‘He’s harmless.’

Margaret bridled a little. No one likes to believe that the husband they have loved, bedded and married was harmless. Besides, she was not sure if it was true.

‘He’s not quite what he seems,’ she said carefully.

‘No one is quite what they seem,’ said Natasha. She believed this. She got out of the car to help Margaret with her boxes and books, and limped to the door. It was a bad limping day; some days were worse than others. It was tiresome when her leg was bad. She had been a dancer once. Almost everyone has several lives, and that had been one of hers. Her very own. Others she had shared.

Margaret looked at her with a frown.

‘I’ll put the car round the corner. I saw a space,’ said Natasha. There was no garage nor space for one; motor cars had not been envisaged when this house was built. You owned a horse, and possibly a carriage, or walked.