Coffin on the Water Read online

  GWENDOLINE BUTLER

  Coffin on the Water

  Dedication

  To

  J.K.M.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: The Delivery

  Chapter 2: The Shape of the Murderer

  Chapter 3: The Stance of the Murderer

  Chapter 4: The Feet of the Murderer

  Chapter 5: Following the Feet of the Murderer

  Chapter 6: The Neck of the Murderer

  Chapter 7: The Neck Feels the Rope

  Chapter 8: The Hands of the Murderer

  Chapter 9: The Work of the Murderer’s Hands

  Chapter 10: A Sight of the Murderer’s Hands

  Chapter 11: The Way the Murderer Walked

  Chapter 12: The Face of the Murderer

  Keep Reading

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publishers

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Delivery

  It was the biggest feast since the feeding of the five thousand, or so it was felt locally in Greenwich, and their outliers, the Hythe and the Wick. In the spring of 1946 the General Assembly of the United Nations was entertained to a banquet in the Painted Hall of the Royal Naval College. Premier Attlee welcomed them. The feast was austere, in tune with the rationed times: a soup, game, and a pudding, but the wines were good.

  Present, in a purely professional capacity and not eating, were Chief Superintendent Dander, and Inspectors Warwich and Banbury. Also there were a troupe of young detectives-in-training, and among them John Coffin and Alex Rowley.

  Also present was a murderer-to-be, like a bridegroom in waiting.

  The bodies came later.

  The bodies came drifting in, delivered by the river, bearing a greeting card as if they were a birthday present. The river is a part of this story; the river supported the bodies, carrying them on the tide to their appointed destination. A body dropped on a rising tide in the river somewhere as yet unknown, between Deptford and Greenwich, to be carried up river, then back by the ebbing water towards Fidder’s Reach where it will be deposited on the mud on schedule. Or so the killer thought.

  Looked at later, as through the eyes of John Coffin, young detective still on probation, it was a hell of a journey they made for the hell of a purpose.

  What a case to test the nerve. He was on the edge of things in that first big case and he knew it. Yet the fact that he was so, helped in the end. Indeed, led to its solution. If you can call a solution what was so terrible a resolution.

  At that time he had a world to discover and a life: his own. Once in June 1944, he thought he had lost it, and once nearly had, but the shell from the Ruhr didn’t quite do it. He came back from the dead, as we do occasionally. Now he had to find out what that life was worth and make something of it. The world was London, 1946. He joined the police.

  Why the police? He wasn’t widely known among his pals as an idealist or a law enforcer, but he must have had something there. One of his fellow police-cadets had wanted to be a ballet dancer. You could never tell where your feet will lead you. Give him ten years or so and he might know the answer. And when he did, would it be the diary of his years?

  Around the first body the dark, oily water moved sluggishly, heavy with all the filth it bore. The body was not its only burden. Nor the first body, nor to be the last. Ships, tugs, barges had passed through it for decades, each generation depositing its own share of muck, coal dust and oil. Here at Greenwich the river was lined with docks and wharves so that the water lapped upon stone, not grass. Factories and warehouses shoved themselves up to the banks with their own unpromising war-stained profiles, nose to nose. Here and there a bomb-broken nose showed itself but the essential face of the docks and the river was unchanged, which might have surprised the bombers. Across one wall someone had written: ‘Down with Adolf’, making his mark on one warehouse. The rain was washing it away: Hitler’s was a name from the past already, one you didn’t bother with, and a wag had written underneath: ‘Down with Stafford Cripps’.

  It was visible from the railway which passed near at this point, adding its own dust to the dirt already delivered by the centuries of passing trade.

  From the tops of trams and buses running down the main road between Greenwich and Woolwich on the one hand and Deptford on the other the river could not be seen, but you could always smell it.

  The smell of the river might have been the last thing the victims had in their nostrils before the breath went out of them.

  Looking down on the river from Greenwich Park was the small dome of the Royal Observatory. General Wolfe, victor over the French in Canada, stared down from his statue on the Royal Naval College housed in Wren’s great buildings, once destined to be a palace. If you walked along its riverside façade you could fancy yourself in Venice.

  The police station was away from the river, at the bottom of the hill not far from the Deptford Road, and was presently housed, due to the Blitz, in an old school. Nearby was a factory which exuded a pungent smell, at once oily yet sharp, not exactly pleasant but somehow homely. A smell you could recognize and live with. To the locals it was the concentrated essence of South London, that smell. Men in the army in Germany or in the Middle East had been heard to say: ’I wish I could smell Deller’s again. One whiff and I’d know I was home.’

  The smell was exceedingly strong in the police station, so strong that after a while you ceased to notice it, although it always hit you first thing in the morning when you experienced it with a crystalline sharpness.

  It was a soft summer’s day, the light luminous and golden, a haze over the city making every view gentle and romantic.

  And the first body was already on the way.

  Do you like bodies? Dead bodies? Naturally you do not. But in Greenwich, 1946, there was a man who did and he was waiting for this one; whenever life landed one near him he thought of it as a bonus. His actual contact with bodies was minimal although not negligible.

  When the murderer first saw Rachel Esthart it was before his interest in dead bodies had become so particular and intense. He had gone looking for her, no other way of putting it, because he wanted to see what she was like. When he set eyes on her he was both fascinated and repelled. A monstre sacré, he thought, quoting. Vénus toute entière a sa proie attachée. He himself was much more than a bystander, by nature, more of a precipitant.

  In the police station Sergeant Tew, born not in this district but further down the river at Rotherhithe, and only just come into Greenwich on his promotion, was very conscious of the smell of Deller’s as his breakfast digested: scrambled, reconstituted dried eggs which his wife had managed to make extraordinarily indigestible.

  He was standing at the wooden counter which protected him from the public, writing some notes in his careful, legible script, remembering at one and the same time the public events that would demand the attention of them all soon and a private message from his wife to call on the fishmonger on his way home for some whale steak. He hated whale steak.

  A white hand fell upon his arm. It looked soft and feminine with delicate if grubby fingers but its grip had force.

  He looked up. He was a tall, sedate man who was sometimes lucky, sometimes unlucky. It was what marked him. He could almost tell which it was the moment he woke up. Today he had felt unlucky.

  ‘Officer, I need your help.’

  He saw a tall, slender woman dressed in a plum-coloured velvet coat trimmed with dark fur. She wore a tiny saucer hat of copper-coloured feathers which no one in Greenwich would have recognized as the creation of Paulette of P
aris circa 1929, but which the Sergeant’s innate sense of style told him was not the sort of hat his wife wore to church. Beneath the delicately pleated hem of her dress peeped a pair of pointed grey suede shoes. Everything she had on from hat to shoe needed a good brush.

  ‘I request your assistance.’ The voice was deep, commanding, with every syllable beautifully enunciated. ‘In fact I demand it.’

  She had immense black eyes.

  He straightened himself from the paper, brought to order by the voice. All his life he had been brought to attention by such privileged voices.

  ‘Madam,’ he began. You didn’t say Missis or Mother as you might have done to a less educated voice. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘I want you to help me find my son.’ The hands were held together now, twisting, plaintive. Thus might Desdemona have held her hands out to Othello. Or Cordelia. They were pleading hands, eloquent hands, theatrical hands.

  ‘Can I have your name, madam?’

  She ignored this request.

  ‘It’s what the police do, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. If we can. Now let’s get this all clear. It’s your son? Missing, is he? How long has he been gone?’ He decided to leave names and addresses for the time being, he could sense this was a tricky one.

  ‘Seventeen years.’

  He didn’t answer: all comment was knocked out of him. Seventeen years. He had been about thirteen himself. It was pre-war, and that was already history.,

  This was how he described it later: So, I said. That’s a long time, madam, how old would he be? Twenty-two if he’s still alive, she said. Then she said that she’d had a card saying he was sending her a present. But it hadn’t come.

  ‘A card?’

  ‘Yes. A correspondence card postmarked Greenwich. Stamped, came through the post. It said: “A present will be delivered today from your son.” That was two days ago. It hasn’t come. So you see, he cannot be far away, I have to find him.’

  ‘Perhaps the present will come along later, ma’am. And him with it.’ He began to form a sentence in his mind about the Salvation Army finding people, when he remembered that this missing son had been gone seventeen years, since the age of five.

  She was having a strange effect on him: he had the feeling that if he asked his limbs to move they would not answer his command.

  ‘You’ve had a bad time,’ he said awkwardly, surprising himself with his sympathy.

  Three men appeared through the swing doors behind him: one older man in a dark suit with untidy hair, two young men, one very dark, one very fair, with golden to auburn hair.

  They came on stage moving like veterans, natural actors, and dead on cue.

  ‘So that’s it about the Royal visit,’ said the older man: Detective-Inspector Banbury. ‘Now you know what’s what. And you can stop thinking about the Shepherd business.’

  He was only half joking: they had recently been dealing with the murder of a prostitute in a caravan off the Woolwich Road, an unpleasant murder. And there had been complications with a child. He had been surprised at the effect on his two young men and would be adding his judgement to his report on them. They had reacted too strongly. Then he looked across to where the woman and Harry Tew still confronted each other. She was keeping up a soft babble of sound. He walked across. ‘Come on now, Mrs Esthart, sit down and we’ll see what we can do.’ Over his shoulder he said: ‘Ring up Engel House and ask someone to come up here and fetch Mrs Esthart. Number in the desk-book.’ He had written the number there himself. For good reason.

  ‘She’s had a drop, I think, Tom.’ Tew was dialling. Presently he said, ‘No answer.’

  John Coffin came forward: ‘I think I can help. I know who to get. A girl called Stella Pinero. She lodges with Mrs Esthart. It’s all right, sir, I’ve got to know her quite well. I’ve met Mrs Esthart once or twice. Alex and I both have. Good morning, Mrs Esthart. Stella will handle this.’

  ‘Stella? This is John. Could you come down and collect Mrs Esthart? I think she needs help.’ He hesitated. ‘She’s in some sort of trouble.’

  ‘What’s it all about,’ said Harry Tew. ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Rachel Esthart,’ said Inspector Banbury. ‘A famous lady and I’ll tell you why: she’s been under suspicion for murder for nearly twenty years.’

  Seventeen years ago, Rachel Esthart, an actress at the height of her power, famous, glamorous, wealthy, had suffered a terrible tragedy. Look at it how you will, calling her guilty or not, it was tragic.

  Banbury said: ‘Seventeen-odd years ago her son was drowned. She took him out for a picnic. Or so she says. But it turned out later she had left her husband after a quarrel over a love-affair. She was jealous. She’d been drinking, and she wasn’t used to drink. Ran away, taking the boy. They were both missing. She turned up later, wandering around. Lost her memory, she said.’

  ‘And the boy?’

  ‘He wasn’t with her. She said she didn’t know where he was. Seemed surprised to be asked. But his body was found in the river. Drowned.’

  ‘Nasty.’

  ‘A lot of suspicion fell on her. But the coroner brought in a verdict of accidental drowning. Didn’t stop the talk, though.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘And she would never accept that he was dead. Carried on as if he’d come back. Always said he’d be home again. And when he didn’t, and didn’t, she retired to Angel House and hid.’

  ‘I remember hearing,’ said Tew. ‘It’s coming back to me.’ He thought Rachel Esthart looked calmer and more rational now, as if Banbury had had a good effect.

  ‘Over the years she’s often been in asking, roughly speaking, if we’ve got him. And of course, we never have. So what’s new this time?’

  In a wondering way Harry Tew said: ‘She told me she’d had a card from her son saying he was sending her a present, only it hasn’t come.’

  He knew now what it was that was unlucky about the day: it was this visit of Rachel Esthart. It depressed him. Especially with whale steak for supper.

  ‘She hasn’t been in lately. To tell you the truth I thought she’d given up. Cruel of someone to start her up again like this as a joke.’ Banbury felt angry.

  If it was a joke.

  The day Stella Pinero arrived in Greenwich was also the day a murder started to grow. Think of murder as a plant that has to have time to grow. Think of this murder as a plant with deep roots. The times get the murders that suit them. These murders were as bang in period as a page-boy hairstyle or a square-shouldered suit.

  It is harsh to associate Stella with murder, pretty, charming, ambitious Stella, but the truth is Stella, and that little streak of ruthlessness in her, was integral to the plot. Yet, if it had not been her, one has to say, it might have been another girl. In which case the story would be different, and not the one laid out here. Yet even that may be doubtful. Probably it was all laid out, the way it would go, very early on.

  Perhaps, as some philosophers suggest, there are alternative universes in which these murders are not taking place.

  Stella Pinero, a young policeman called John Coffin, and another, Alex Rowley, arrived on Greenwich railway station on the same day. It was new boys’ day. Stella Pinero going to the theatre, the two young men to their lodging-house and then on to report to the police station. Never mind it being Sunday. Actresses and policemen travel on Sunday.

  One other person got off the train with them, but they were too busy noticing each other to notice him.

  It was a cold day in March with a light rain just beginning to fall.

  Stella walked up the platform by the side of a porter pushing a trolley with her bags on it; all she owned in the world was in those bags and she had to keep an eye on them. She was aware of the two young men following her, aware that they must be admiring her long, silken legs and hopeful that her stockings didn’t have a ladder in them.

  Without a word they hurried their pace so that they were just behind her when the porter deposited her bags.
Her name was written in large white letters across the cases so they knew who she was from the beginning. Where she was going also. Theatre Royal, Greenwich, said a large label.

  In the street outside an aged hansom cab with an elderly horse was drawn up, with the driver sitting slumped over the reins.

  ‘I thought there’d be a taxi-cab,’ Stella was saying in a puzzled voice.

  ‘No taxis, miss. Not since the war. But there’s old John and his horse.’

  ‘Oh, the poor old horse. I don’t think I could. I think I must be stronger than he is.’

  But she had started to shift her bags when a tall, slender man came out of the station and cut across her path, apparently without noticing her, and jumped into the cab. He was driven off.

  Stella stood there looking.

  ‘Well, I’m damned. What cheek.’ John Coffin came forward; this was his chance.

  Stella was staring after the cab. ‘It’s Edward Kelly. I saw his face. I don’t suppose he even noticed me.’

  Coffin knew the name. He liked the theatre himself. ‘He’s quite a plain chap, too.’

  Stella said nothing. She knew all about Edward Kelly’s plainness and what it did to you. Edward was supposed to exercise a kind of droit de seigneur over the junior members of the cast. Might not be true, of course, but she rather hoped it was.

  Or did she? She was still a virgin. Well, more or less, she told herself. That is, rather less than more.

  Alex picked up one bag, John Coffin the other, and together they walked with her to the theatre which could be seen from the station, lying riverwards.

  Stella was friendly to them as they walked, chattering away telling them who she was and what a marvellous chance it was for her to work at the Theatre Royal, Greenwich, at this stage of her career. The Delaneys were real old pros; she was looking forward to working in their company. But Coffin got the clear impression that her thoughts were elsewhere.

  Both young men were trained to notice things: John noticed that she was pale beneath her rouge: Alex Rowley noticed that she was stronger than she looked, she had picked up her case quite purposefully and it was exceedingly heavy. One of those frail toughs, he thought sardonically, half attracted, half put off.