A Grave Coffin Read online

  GWENDOLINE BUTLER

  A GRAVE COFFIN

  COPYRIGHT

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by

  HarperCollinsPublishers 1998

  Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1998

  Gwendoline Butler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

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  Source ISBN: 9780006510123

  Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007545452

  Version: 2014–07–08

  DEDICATION

  With my thanks to Dr Colin Fink for

  all his help on scientific and

  medical matters.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  The Key

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  The Door Opens

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Also by the Author

  About the Publisher

  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

  The room had a view of St Paul’s Cathedral if you looked hard over the rooftops. To get into this room, you were required to press the red button on the door before entering; inside there was the distinct impression you were photographed from every angle and possibly microwaved as well. To the nervous it felt that way.

  The air itself was not fresh but filtered through a silent air conditioner which somehow made its presence felt so that even air and breathing were controlled in this room.

  John Coffin liked the view but was not sure of the company. He had got back the night before from a visit to Los Angeles where he had left his wife on business of her own, collected the dog from the kennels and found an urgent message from a high authority.

  ‘Wait until you see the body,’ said Edward Saxon. ‘Then tell me you cannot help me.’ He looked into John Coffin’s eyes, so blue, cold and clear. ‘Or study this photograph just to give you an idea.’ He pushed the photograph across the table.

  Coffin bent his head to look. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yes. Look, I know we were never pals, but we got on well enough, we worked together for long enough. So did Harry Blyth, you worked with him.’ He tapped the photograph. ‘That’s Harry Seton now. Or was.’

  ‘You hit hard.’

  ‘So? What about it? Will you help?’

  Coffin still kept quiet.

  ‘It’s not just me, you know, I am not asking this as a favour … it’s important for all of us.’ He looked Coffin straight in the eye. ‘You might die because of what is going on, someone you love might die. It’s certain that many have died already. Or been impaired, mentally and physically.’ He went on: ‘These are frontline pharmaceuticals for life-threatening, serious illness. Some are coming in legally through parallel importing, where a manufacturer finds they can make a drug more cheaply in Taiwan than West Middlesex – these are all right, because the quality, strength and the release of the drug in the patient will be the same. Sometimes there is counterfeiting, this has been an increasing problem first noticed on a professional production level in the late eighties. The cardboard covers and packaging are printed exactly the same, but the drugs inside might have been made in a backyard in Taiwan so that the activity in the patient, purity and contamination, all vary from the kosher production runs by legitimate producers. They might be no more than coloured starch, but unscrupulous pharmacy importers buy them, accept the false serial numbers without checking and offer them to none-too-fussy pharmacists at reduced prices. Big money and big chances for corruption.’

  Coffin sat taking it all in. ‘What powers will I have?’

  ‘As much as I can give you …’ Quickly, he added, ‘All you want.’

  ‘Access to the production date and all papers and files?’

  ‘The lot.’

  ‘Freedom to interview all the characters that I want to?’

  Was there a pause, a hint of reservation? ‘Yes,’ agreed Ed Saxon.

  ‘Right, then. It’s on.’

  Edward Saxon drew a deep breath, whether of relief or pain was not clear to Coffin. It might be a mixture of the two. Rumours of Saxon’s ill health had reached him, but rumours, of course, often lied.

  ‘I will have to fit my investigations into my other duties.’

  ‘That’s understood.’

  Coffin let his thoughts go back to the years when he, as a detective sergeant, had worked with Saxon in that remote area of South London where Kentish men and Men of Kent had once vied with each before the Great Wen had swallowed them both up.

  He had worked with Edward Saxon, admired the man’s tenacity, but had sensed a reserve behind the good manners. That was all right, a man was entitled to his own secrets; Coffin had his own. Although he had noticed that the passing years peeled them away. Marriage, the passing of time, seemed to take
off the surface through which a few artefacts you had buried came to the surface, as in an archaeological dig. His own wife Stella knew most things about him now, life had disgorged them before her, one way and another. Probably she still had a few secrets. He smiled at the thought, which he almost found endearing.

  He wondered about Saxon’s wife.

  ‘How’s Laurie?’ he asked.

  ‘Not too well. No, she hasn’t been well … she’s away at present.’ He added, as an afterthought, ‘How’s Stella?’

  ‘She’s away too. In Los Angeles, looking at scripts.’ Among other things.

  ‘They still film in Los Angeles? I thought it was all over the place, never in Hollywood now.’ It was an idle comment, he did not really know or care.

  ‘They do film in Los Angeles in this film. And on location, later.’

  He smiled. Stella had complained that she would be filming in the winter in the wilder reaches of the Bronx. If the film got that far, always a question. Stella, anyway, had other plans for herself before filming started. She would be in Los Angeles, attending to scripts and other more personal matters.

  ‘It’s an English company, anyway,’ she had said, ‘filming a short story of Scott Fitzgerald.’

  It was, as he knew, an avant-garde company, more interested in winning prizes than money. Stella had accepted a part because, so she said, it would do her image good. But Coffin had an insight into one of Stella’s secrets and how her image would be improved: she planned to have cosmetic surgery in Los Angeles because American doctors were good at that sort of thing. ‘So much custom, you see, they are at it all the time. Makes the prices higher but the noses better. But I have arranged a prix fixe.’

  ‘Like in a cheap hotel,’ he had said.

  ‘You needn’t have said that, darling.’

  But I did need, he thought, and it slipped out.

  ‘Laurie’s with her mother.’

  Coffin looked down again at the hideous photograph of Harry Seton’s dead body. ‘He was married, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, I want you to talk to Mary.’

  Coffin looked up and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Not just a sympathy talk,’ said Saxon. ‘She may know something that helps. I think she does.’

  ‘I want to know all the details of what is facing me first.’

  Saxon hesitated. ‘I expect we seem a small and unimportant unit to you.’

  Coffin looked around the room, and he laughed. ‘Oh, I assure you, you do not. I have taken in where this unit works, and the security measures you run. On the contrary, you look important and influential to me.’

  ‘We have enemies.’ Saxon spoke quietly but with conviction. ‘Inevitably in this trade. Which is why we have the neutral name of TRANSPORT A . We do need and use transport, but that is not our purpose. We watch transport, for that matter.’

  ‘Drugs,’ said Coffin thoughtfully, ‘but not the usual sort: heroin, crack and so on, not them. They don’t come into it from what you have told me already. I’ve got that much.’

  ‘No, always possible, but not what we are at present investigating.’

  ‘Go over it again for me, please.’

  Saxon nodded. ‘Pharmaceuticals. Antibiotics, drugs that can cure, or not in some cases. Legitimate drugs, manufactured here or abroad … Hong Kong, Singapore, watered-down, weakened, adulterated one way and another, packed up with fake packing, to look genuine. Sold sometimes to honest outfits that don’t realize what they’ve got but, no, it is cheaper than their usual supplier; more often to firms that know exactly what they want and want them cheap. Big profits all round and never mind the deaths. We have been monitoring them for some time, of course.’

  Coffin nodded.

  ‘Nothing new, been going on for decades, and various units have been investigating it. We are the latest, it was hoped we would be more effective, we are national, cover all areas.’ He turned to look Coffin hard in the face. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know about this.’

  ‘Not in the way you are telling it. Go on.’

  ‘We are small in numbers, but regional: Mercia, Wessex, Deira, Anglia … all old-English groupings, and of course, the headquarters in London. In Mercia, my head man is Tim Kelso … you won’t know him, he’s young and new, but good. In Wessex, I have Peter Chard; in Deira – the ancient name, I chose it because I liked the sound but it is the Newcastle area, in fact – there is Joe Weir; in Anglia I chose Felicity Fox, who is very good. There is also Susy Miller, who shoots around as wanted. And I mustn’t forget Leonie Thrupp, also in Coventry, that’s Mercia territory.’

  ‘And where was Harry Seton based?’

  ‘London, with me. He was my back-up.’

  There was a pause.

  Coffin felt he had to prod, so he said: ‘But that was only a cover from what you say. He was that and more. His real job was quite other.’

  Another pause, then Saxon sighed. ‘Yes, three or four months ago, March it was, we began to notice that investigations initiated in all good faith were failing as if the word had got round. False drugs were going round the country and into the shops, sometimes through genuine if gullible traders, sometimes through outlets that knew exactly what they were doing and knew it before we did. As a unit, we were not only failing to do our job but failing radically. We looked around for a reason, and found only one: corruption from within.’

  ‘Was it a shock?’

  Saxon said, honestly, ‘Yes and no. It’s always something to look out for in this sort of operation. So I put Harry in to investigate … On the quiet, no one to know what he was doing.’

  ‘Do secrets like that hold?’ In Coffin’s experience they did not, perhaps should not.

  ‘No, probably not, or not for long. But I thought Harry would clear it up quickly.’

  ‘Was there any reason why you should think that?’

  ‘Money does show up as a rule, and I thought Harry would sniff out the man who was living above his income. I mean, if you are corruptible, you want to enjoy the fruits, it goes with the crime.’

  Saxon started to fiddle with the papers in front of him, moving his hands quickly away as if they were hot. Perhaps to him, they were.

  ‘So, he made progress?’

  ‘He said he was “getting into things”, whatever that meant.’

  ‘How did he report?’

  ‘Nothing in writing … we met in a pub for a drink. Not always the same one, but the sort of pub we might have gone to naturally in a friendly kind of way. He talked but never gave names. That was in character, partly why I gave him the job; I knew I could trust a discreet tongue.’

  ‘And he didn’t talk to you either?’

  ‘No, I didn’t want it particularly when it was still in the air. I had to meet these people, act normal, not show suspicion. I am not a good actor, I would have given signs, which could be dangerous.’

  Not too bad an actor, Coffin thought. I remember you in the past, Ed Saxon, you could act a bit then. Remember the Billy Trout murder in the late seventies … 1978, was it? You capered around then like magic. I used to think I would see you in panto, but I was never sure as What: Buttons, the Clown, the Wicked Stepmother, or even, Ed, one of the Ugly Sisters … I knew about that side of you, Ed. The one part I never gave you was the Good Fairy, and I am not giving it to you now.

  Ed’s eyes flicked away.

  Whatever you really want from me is going to be good for you and maybe not so good for me, thought Coffin, seeing the look.

  ‘So you have no idea what he was working up to? There was something? He wasn’t just null and void?’

  Sunlight was pouring into the room. Saxon got up to pull down the blinds, cutting out the sun, but making the room even more closed and private than before. Wasn’t there an animal that hid from the sun. Coffin asked himself, and was it a nice animal or a nasty one?

  ‘The sun doesn’t worry me,’ he said politely.

  Saxon said briefly: ‘Don’t like it on my face.’

  B
ut that’s life, almost what life is: shining a light in your face that you don’t want. Happens the minute you are born. Perhaps Saxon had preferred the womb. Not what you could say to him, though. ‘So what had Seton got to say?’

  ‘On our last meeting, in the Rose Revived in Harters Lane … do you know it?’

  ‘Remember it.’ A big pub with dark corners. Like my mind, Coffin passed judgement on himself. I am afraid that I have got one or two dark corners where you are concerned, Ed, my lad. As you will have for me.

  ‘So what did he say then?’

  ‘That he had found three people who seemed to have a higher standard of living than he had expected.’

  Coffin considered this: ‘He said people? Did you think that an odd word to use? Did he mean that a woman might be included in his list.’

  ‘I do have some women officers in the unit, as I said before.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Several. And a few whom you might call helpers.’

  ‘I’ll bear them in mind, pay special attention just in case.’

  ‘You shall have their names. I will take care you have all the records. Where they are based and all that.’

  ‘And Harry kept to your quiet agreement not to name names to you?’

  ‘He did.’

  Coffin sat silent, then said, ‘And you believe him? Believed he was making progress?’

  ‘He could tell lies,’ said Saxon, ‘I knew that, but they were always what you might call political lies – they pushed a job forward. So, yes, I believed him: three people, sex ambiguous.’

  ‘Did he seem nervous? As if he thought he might be attacked?’

  ‘No, not Harry. He never showed nerves. I’m not saying he didn’t know when to be cautious, of course he did, or he wouldn’t have survived …’ He stopped.

  ‘As long as he did,’ Coffin said for him. ‘Because he didn’t survive, did he? He is dead.’ He stared again at the photograph. ‘Terribly dead.’

  ‘I didn’t see him again. No one heard from him, not even his wife, but he was working underground in a way, so there was no worry.’