Cracking Open a Coffin Read online

  GWENDOLINE BUTLER

  Cracking Open a Coffin

  COPYRIGHT

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992

  Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1992

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

  Source ISBN: 9780006472919

  Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007545490

  Version: 2014–07–07

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Letter to John Coffin from Professor Lessingham, The Institute of Mental Health, Bury Hill.

  ‘I am coming to the opinion that there are certain types of killers who might be called periodic serial killers in as much as they will only kill when the victim offers exactly what is required. So there may be long gaps in the cycle.

  ‘In these cases there is a symbiotic relationship between killer and victim: they move towards each other.

  ‘The rules as to the victim, manner of killing, disposal of the body have to be kept … But even the most dedicated of serial killers will be frustrated by circumstances, something the killer did not take into account, or could not control. There will always be cases out of pattern, that do not conform.’

  CHAPTER 1

  A day in early autumn

  One day in early autumn the neighbourhood newspaper, Second City News, carried a special supplement on the university, then celebrating its fifth birthday and welcoming that year’s intake of students. As well as a large photograph of the head of the university, Sir Thomas Blackhall, there was a page of photographs in colour of some of the students.

  Students at tutorials, seen in a booklined room, are neatly posed around their tutor. One of them is reading an essay, the others listen.

  Students at lectures, observing the lecturer write an equation on a large board spread across the wall behind him. He does it with some electronic device that he does not understand because he would prefer old-fashioned chalk. Once he failed, unknowingly, to use it correctly, so that nothing appeared on the board, and then, absent-mindedly back in the days of chalk, he turned round and wiped what wasn’t there clean away with the back of his sleeve. This brought down the house.

  Students in the library, heads bent over their books. Because this is not Oxford (where the habit was abandoned years ago) and because the university is so young, it is the fancy here for all the students to wear shortish academic gowns.

  Students at parties, at their summer ball. A crowded scene with many outsiders, among whom John Coffin might have recognized one of his own officers if he had looked more closely. Later, he was to regret this. The girls wear long dresses and the lads wear black ties and dinner jackets. There is even a couple where the girl wears what looks like a Christian LaCroix crinoline and the boy wears tails.

  A golden pair, thinks John Coffin, head of the Second City Police, and he remembers his own youth was so far from golden. A line underneath says: Amy and Martin. Well, good luck Amy and Martin, he thinks.

  Tutorials, academic gowns, formal evening clothes, the new university is building its traditions. Unfortunately, it looks as if murder might be one of them.

  John Coffin took the Second City News regularly and it happened that he had seen this photograph while sitting in the sun by the river. Not far from where he lived in his home in an old church was a small park which overlooked the Thames. It was an ancient, rundown little park, all that remained of the grounds of a mediæval bishop’s palace. A stretch of old stone walling, probably all that was left of the old place, ran along the river for a few yards and this was where Coffin sat.

  In the first place he liked the wall, in the crevices of which yellow and white weeds flowered in the autumn, and secondly there was a smell to it that reminded him of his childhood.

  It was communicating something to him, that smell. Opening up a window through which he could peer at the past.

  He had grown up by the river. This river, just as dirty and travelworn by the centuries, but winding through a different part of London. South, where the river takes a deep curve and looks up to the hills of Kent.

  It had not been a happy childhood. More or less orphaned (although mother, as it turned out, was still alive but missing), brought up first by a grandmother and an aunt, and then by the aunt alone, and finally fostered out to one family after another.

  There were a lot of memories of that childhood that were thrashing around in his mind, some he was busily engaged in repressing but others were getting through.

  He remembered sitting by the river, aged ten. He was fishing with a bit of string, a hook, and a tin can for the fish. But inside he was dreaming of himself in an open motorcar with a princess beside him. She was faceless but definitely royal.

  The beginning of sex, he supposed. Late, by current standards.

  Well, he eventually got the motorcar, although not the bright red open speedster of his dream, but never the princess. Although he had had several shots at it.

  And that brought him back to Stella. Darling, beloved, infuriating Stella to whom he had never been totally faithful nor totally unfaithful either.

  Which was where you had to think about it, because Stella was angry with him. She had opened her eyes wide and said: ‘To hell with you.’

  They hadn’t met for a few days now. They would meet again and things would be patched up, neither was prepared for a decisive break.

  There was another aspect to the problem of Stella, and he had a letter in his pocket, highly personal and very unwelcome, and one which caused him fury but which would have to be addressed.

  And all the time he was thinking about Stella and the golden pair of students, he was conscious of dry bones moving at the back of his mind. So that of all the people presently concerned with the murders, he was the least surprised.

  CHAPTER 2

  October. The first two days

 
A girl’s sweater, striped blue and white, lay on the edge of the River Thames near where Herring Creek and Leadworks Wharf looked across the water to each other. It was stained and muddy. On the front was an initial which might have been a D or a C but some small river creature had nibbled away at. No one had noticed the sweater yet, but it ought to be found soon.

  ‘The trouble with opera is the singers,’ said Philippa Darbyshire gloomily. She shook her head so that the slightly greying fair curls bobbed around her face; she was large but pretty and enjoying her middle years more than she would admit to her women friends. She had banned the word menopause, women didn’t have it now, you had hormone replacement. A smile lightened her face. ‘It would really be better without them.’

  ‘But not nearly so much like opera,’ suggested John Coffin. The two of them were seated in the bar of St Luke’s Theatre late on the chill October morning. This theatre was the creation of his talented sister, Lætitia Bingham, who had taken a derelict church in the old docklands beyond the Tower of London and turned it into a theatre with a theatre workshop attached. The main theatre was due to be opened officially this summer by the Queen, but of course it had long since been opened and running unofficially, operating at a handsome profit. Recession, it seemed, was not hurting the theatre.

  John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Second City of London police force, lived in one of the three apartments which had also been formed from the old St Luke’s Church. He had come through a difficult three years since his appointment to this new command and the lines around his eyes had deepened and the once dark hair was neatly silvered at the temples. He had fought his way up the career ladder to the top and now wondered whether and when he would fall off.

  But he liked heights. He had a flat in the tower of the old church with a fine view across his troublesome bailiwick. Hard by, in another apartment, lived the actress Stella Pinero, the love of his life or the bane of it, depending how their relationship was going.

  He was waiting for her now. Stella had been playing in a West End revival of Mourning Becomes Electra. It had not gone very well, although she personally had had delightful reviews, and she was now back at St Luke’s Theatre of which she was Director and guardian spirit. It had been created around her.

  Philippa had seized on him with the joy of one who needed to talk, beginning with a brisk: ‘I suppose you’re waiting for Stella? She came in, said you were late and went out again.’

  I wasn’t late, Coffin thought sadly. I’m never late. Or if I am, it isn’t my fault. What he was, was not there much. As a serving police officer of high rank, he had a crowded life. But Stella herself was often absent and her excuses were nebulous and vague.

  ‘But she left you Bob,’ Philippa had added.

  ‘I know.’ Bob, a mongrel of loving disposition, had already pressed his head on Coffin’s foot. You are my friend and half-owner, the pressure said, and now I can look after you and you can look after me. ‘Move over, Bob.’ Coffin tried to lift his left foot which was going numb. Bob growled. He believed fiercely in physical contact. Coffin patted his head which was rough and wiry, he knew that there would now be gingery hairs all over shoe and trouser leg. ‘Good dog,’ he said.

  He sipped his coffee and looked at Philippa, whom he liked and admired and somewhat feared: she seemed capable of everything, and had once persuaded him to take part in a play production. But he would have nothing to do with singing. Not even as a goblin.

  His mind moved back to his own purely personal and private problem. Several weeks ago he had had a telephone call. A man who did not announce himself.

  The call came through in the early morning, at home, in his sitting-room, which outraged him even more. This place was his sanctuary, his refuge.

  ‘Copper, watch your back. They’re gunning for you. Better get your answers ready.’

  It was repeated several times.

  ‘Copper, watch your back. Watch your back. Watch your back.’

  He had slammed the telephone down without answering it, shrugged and gone back to drinking his coffee. Not exactly forgotten it, but taking not much notice of it, either. He was used to the odd mad call.

  A week later to the very day, to the hour almost, came another call. Someone who knows when I drink my morning coffee, he had thought wryly. Same message, not exactly word for word but close enough.

  Some days later he came to find a message on his answering machine. More of the same. He thought he recognized the slight cough that prefaced the advice.

  But it was different this time.

  ‘This is a message from a friend: tidy up your private life or you will be in trouble. Serious trouble. No joking.’

  He turned the machine back, slowly and carefully.

  The letter came several days later, as he had always supposed it would, and it was now festering inside him like a bad boil.

  His unknown caller had had good information. All this was at the back of his mind while he listened to Philippa.

  Philippa was still going on about singers: ‘Oh, we have to have them, but off stage, that’s the place for them. Where we can’t see them. Just their voices. On stage we would have actors, dancers, who would look right. Singers have the wrong shape. They can’t help it, they need it to produce the voice, but we shouldn’t have to look at them trying to be Tosca or Mimi. Not to mention Siegfried and Brunnhilde.’ Mrs Darbyshire gave a feeling shudder. ‘And the Valkyries … Overweight, all of them. How can you dress them as warriors, I ask you?’

  Coffin looked his sympathy and tried again to shift Bob from his foot. Bob sank deeper down.

  ‘And I’m having such trouble with the students from the university. Such sharp little critics. Must think things through, they say. Just sing, I say.’

  Coffin offered sympathy again. ‘You’ll manage.’ In his experience of the ladies of Feather Street, of whom Philippa was one, they managed all they wanted. Even this production of extracts from The Ring would work out.

  ‘I think it’s university life. They’re spoilt, those kids.’

  ‘They have their troubles,’ he said softly.

  He knew something she didn’t.

  He knew that two students were missing. A boy and a girl. Whether together or otherwise was not yet clear. They had last been seen standing by her car.

  Gone two days. Not long, but in the circumstances, long enough.

  In the new university there were three residential blocks in which the students had rooms. The rooms were tiny, but each had its own bathroom and tiny slip of a kitchen. This was not so much for ease of student living as because in the long vacation there was much lucrative letting for conferences.

  The three blocks were named after benefactors, they were Armitage, Barclay and Gladstone. Each block had its own character, or was thought to have, and which was perhaps self-perpetuating: Barclay was rowdy and thus attracted the drinkers and the rugger players; Gladstone was near the library and the science buildings, so the industrious and the scientists settled there; Armitage was the fashionable and social block, the smartest place to live, and it attracted as well as the party-goers, the drama and music students.

  The missing students had lived in Armitage. Their group of friends there were among the first to be worried by their disappearance.

  In Angela Kirk’s room a small meeting was taking place.

  ‘It’s horrible.’ This was Mick Frost, tall and thin.

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, Mick, we don’t know that anything’s happened.’ Beenie was a year older than Mick and inclined to slow him down.

  ‘We know what’s been happening,’ said Mick. ‘We’ve seen, we’ve known the state she was in even if we haven’t talked about it.’

  ‘It wasn’t easy to talk about it. That sort of thing isn’t easy to talk about, and anyway part of it was us guessing.’

  ‘Pretty clear,’ said Mick. ‘Pretty clear. Sex and violence.’

  Angela said: ‘Don’t talk like that.’

  ‘Mick’s righ
t,’ said Beenie from the floor where she was stretched out. ‘We should have done something … After all, there was Virginia last year.’

  ‘We don’t know about Virginia.’ Angela again.

  ‘I think we do,’ said Mick.

  Beenie shifted uneasily. ‘OK, OK, so let’s do something.’

  ‘I’m frightened,’ said Angela. ‘I don’t want to go that way.’ She was scared and yet excited.

  ‘Oh, come on,’

  ‘No, I tell you, it’s evil, talking like this.’ The word dropped into the room, cold and hard.

  Angela bent her head to let a long fall of shining blonde hair cover her face. She stretched her thin white arms and imagined them with blue bruises and saw herself as victim.

  It can’t happen to me, she thought. If I keep quiet perhaps it will all go away … Beenie’s all right, she’s brown and tall and strong. She crossed her arms across her chest, protecting herself.

  Aloud, against her will, she heard herself say: ‘We owe Amy something. I could go down to Star Court, offer to help.’ It was as if she wanted to be a victim, that was what she had chosen and it would do.

  ‘Don’t let her, Beenie,’ said Mick. ‘Stop her.’

  Beenie shrugged.

  There was silence in the room.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ said Mick, standing up. ‘I’ve got to audition for some creepy amateur performance of Wagner.’

  ‘Why do you go, then?’ asked Beenie.

  ‘Sucking up to our dear Professor,’ said Mick with a ravishing smile. ‘Also, we get paid, not much but something and if you are aiming at a professional singer’s career (and I might be) you have to learn to take the money where you can find it.’

  At the door, he turned and said: ‘While I am singing Wagner, look after yourself, Angie. Wagner, here I come.’

  The Friends of St Luke’s Theatre, a group of local ladies important in Coffin’s life for all sorts of reasons, who put on an amateur performance once a year, were attempting an opera. Not the whole opera, just a scene or two. The choice bits, as they said. They had considered Rosenkavalier, The Marriage of Figaro, and La Bohème (a strong lobby for this last opera), but they were long-time supporters of the rights of women and the Ride of the Valkyries seemed just to fill the bill.