Coffin's Ghost Read online

  COFFIN’S GHOST

  Also by Gwendoline Butler

  A GRAVE COFFIN

  COFFIN’S GAME

  A DOUBLE COFFIN

  A DARK COFFIN

  THE COFFIN TREE

  A COFFIN FOR CHARLEY

  CRACKING OPEN A COFFIN

  COFFIN ON MURDER STREET

  COFFIN AND THE PAPER MAN

  COFFIN IN THE BLACK MUSEUM

  COFFIN UNDERGROUND

  COFFIN IN FASHION

  COFFIN ON THE WATER

  A COFFIN FOR THE CANARY

  A COFFIN FOR PANDORA

  A COFFIN FROM THE PAST

  COFFIN’S DARK NUMBER

  COFFIN’S FOLLOWING

  COFFIN IN MALTA

  A NAMELESS COFFIN

  COFFIN WAITING

  A COFFIN FOR BABY

  DEATH LIVES NEXT DOOR

  THE INTERLOPER

  THE MURDERING KIND

  THE DULL DEAD

  COFFIN IN OXFORD

  RECEIPT FOR MURDER

  COFFIN’S GHOST

  Gwendoline Butler

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press

  COFFIN’S GHOST. Copyright © 1999 by Gwendoline Butler. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in an manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-0-312-27997-4

  ISBN: 0-312-27997-3

  First published in the United States by Collins Crimes

  An imprint of Harper Collins Publishers

  First St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition: December 2001

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  I wish to record my thanks to Dr Barker, Dr Fink,

  and John Kennedy Melling for the help given

  me with this book.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  One evening in April 1988, I sat in Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, near to Docklands, listening to Doctor David Owen (now Lord Owen) give that year’s Barnett Memorial Lecture. In it, he suggested the creation of a Second City of London, to be spun off from the first, to aid the economic and social regeneration of the Docklands.

  The idea fascinated me and I have made use of it to create a world for detective John Coffin, to whom I gave the tricky task of keeping there the Queen’s Peace.

  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.

  FROM THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS

  May, 166-

  On Wednesday last, I did go to Easter Hythe across the River Thames. I crossed the river in a waterman’s boat from Rotherhythe with a joking waterman who challenged me to swim across if he dropped me over the side because the weight of me and my friend Mr Williams was like to sink his boat. We let him laugh and staid where we were.

  We were met by Mr Williams’s son. It was but a short walk – for walk we must – to the township of Easter Hythe which some say was first used by Viking sailors. Easter Hythe is a poor-looking place with low-built wooden houses and some stone-built hovels said to be of Viking origin.

  In Easter Hythe we went to Drossers Market where were many stalls and great crowds. Young Mr Williams said here you might buy anything you wanted and most of it would be stolen and might be stolen back again before you got home with it.

  From it leads Chopping Tree Lane and there I was shown the pit into which the bodies were dropped and which we had come to see.

  For this was the Viking execution place, so it is told, where victims were sacrificed and criminals hanged.

  Many skulls and other bones were found but young Mr Williams said that it was his belief it was nothing of the Vikings but more recent and more criminous. Mr Williams is a surgeon and sees many broken bones and it is his opinion that the bones in the pit are too new broken to be Viking.

  The sense of evil in Chopping Tree Lane was mighty strong, creeping into Drossers Market, and Mr Williams said to me that the evil would be there for centuries.

  We came back in poor spirits, although I bought a pretty bracelet for my wife and one, but not near so dear, for my maidservant Alice.

  Editor’s note: It is thought that Pepys’s real motive for the visit to East Hythe with his friend Williams was that they had been told that it was home to some handsome and willing and pox-free young women whose embraces they could enjoy at a lower price than in the City of London.

  1

  ‘Who was it said that modern detective stories never have the murder of children in them?’ John Coffin asked from his hospital bed. Then he answered himself: ‘Graham Greene. And how wrong he was. Can’t have read many.’

  ‘Don’t be so grumpy.’ Stella Pinero had brought him in a selection of detective stories which lay scattered on the bed. She had also brought him in a local newspaper with her photograph and her description as ‘the love of his life’. This irritated him too, although Stella, ever the realist, said what good publicity for both of them it was. ‘Won’t do anything for me,’ he had grumbled, still grumpy.

  ‘You’d be grumpy with a hole in your liver.’

  It was healing nicely though, and someone had once told him that you could spare as much as half your liver.

  He wondered who had told him that.

  Not Graham Greene.

  He turned over the books. Policemen don’t read crime novels. They might write them but not read other people’s. Except in training, which doesn’t count.

  ‘The Handbag,’ he said aloud in a tone of deep scepticism. ‘Doesn’t sound like a crime novel. Simenon, perhaps. More like Oscar Wilde.’

  He began to feel better. Nothing like a grumble. But he remembered The Handbag. It worried him for some reason. Stuck in his memory.

  ‘I am going to have a wonderfully happy domestic time,’ announced Stella Pinero, wife to John Coffin, with a wonderfully happy smile. She was a good actress.

  In fact, she was more than a little depressed. She was well aware that she had almost lost her husband, and had gained the shocking knowledge that without him she would lose half herself.

  Now this was something she had never believed possible. It was important no
w not to let him share this knowledge.

  ‘I am going to stay home, and enjoy my unusual leisure.’

  What she meant was that she had no stage performance at the moment, no television play contracted, and nothing on the radio: in short, she had no work. To cheer herself up and as a homecoming present for Coffin, she had had a large window put in to the ground floor of the strong-minded tower in which they lived. It lit up a very dark area which must be a good thing, even if some might count it a security risk. You need light, she told herself, to be happy and it has to be natural light, not the electric sort.

  She was reluctant to count no work as a holiday. Anyway, with an expensive daughter whose career she was, to a certain extent, subsidizing, money was always useful. The daughter was the child of an earlier marriage, not Coffin’s. The two were on friendly terms, and liked each other in a wary kind of way. They needed to get to know each other better, Stella understood this very well, but opportunity did not often come their way, since her child was a hopeful producer of films, having graduated from acting, and had little time to spare in her ambitious life. And Coffin always had MURDER. Stella put it in capital letters since it was spelt that way in her mind. Bright red, too, and occasionally flashing with lights.

  It was early evening, on the very day Coffin, although forbidden to do so by the doctors, had gone back to work. A pile of letters, a pile of reports, nothing on the answerphone because his efficient secretary had dealt with those. E-mail was loaded but could be ignored.

  One telephone call got through while Sheila was dealing with the printer which had stuck. He could hear her in the other room, swearing gently.

  ‘Hello, Albie Touchey here.’

  But he had recognized the voice.

  ‘Glad you got out.’

  It made it sound as if out of prison. Not remarkable since he was the governor of the Sisley Green Prison in the Second City.

  ‘Always meant to, Albie.’

  Touchey was a small, well-muscled figure, a tough terrier of a man. The unlikely friends had one thing in common: criminals.

  Coffin and Co. sent them to prison and Touchey eventually shovelled them out.

  But they had something else in common: they were both South Londoners and had, for a time, lived in the same street. They had not known each other in those days; Touchey had attended the local grammar school and Coffin had been a pupil at what he called Dotheboys Hall.

  But the two had met at a civic dinner and become friends over the whisky and the port.

  ‘That’s what my lodgers always say. As if I fancied to keep them. I don’t make favourites, you know. Move ‘em on as soon as I can.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Albie was ready for a grumble. ‘You have the easy side, all you have to do is catch ‘em. I have to live with them.

  ‘The average age of my lot is getting younger and younger. They’ll be bringing their nappies with them soon.’

  ‘They know you keep a well-run establishment,’ said Coffin. Indeed, Touchey managed to run a humane and orderly prison at Sisley Green.

  ‘Touch and go, touch and go.’

  They chatted for a while.

  ‘A friend of yours looked in on us while you were in hospital,’ Albie said conversationally. ‘Georgie Freedom.’

  ‘No friend of mine.’ Stella’s, perhaps. ‘Surprised you let him in. Or out.’

  ‘Felt like keeping him there but he said, No, he was taking a tour because of a TV series he was planning.’ In fact, Freedom had been inside for a bit while being questioned and was now out pending an appeal.

  ‘Think of him as a toad,’ said Coffin. ‘We’ll step on him and squeeze him in the end.’

  They both knew secrets about each other, small things, nothing much, the sort of thing men say to each other as they drink. Women don’t do this sort of confessing, they only pass on what they want known.

  And the governor knew one big secret.

  ‘Love to Stella,’ said Albie, signing off. ‘I’m going to ask her to put on a Christmas show for the lads.’

  ‘I’m sure she will.’

  ‘A great girl, you’re lucky there.’

  ‘I know it,’ said Coffin.

  He was sitting opposite her now in their tower sitting room, where the windows were wide open to catch what there was of moving air. There were windows on both sides, since this had once been a church tower in a church where symmetry was all, thus a smart breeze swept through the room.

  There must be a window open on the staircase somewhere. That reminded him of a question.

  ‘Who was the man just exiting with a vacuum cleaner when I came in? Was it our vacuum cleaner, by the way?’

  ‘Oh, that was Arthur. No, his machine. He cleans for me now.’

  ‘What happened to that nice girl? Gill, wasn’t it? She took over after good old Mrs James retired.’

  ‘Oh, she is having a baby. She only took the job because she wants to be an actress and she thought she would get nearer to me, and when that didn’t happen she decided to have a baby instead.’

  ‘Oh.’ Coffin hoped the baby would be pleased to be the stand-in for a broom.

  ‘Arthur and Dave, they have a house-cleaning firm.’

  ‘Ah.’ Coffin nodded. ‘So Dave was the middle-aged chap in the van outside. I wondered who he was. Why is his face all dirty and dusty?’

  ‘Hiding behind it,’ said Stella lightly.

  ‘A handsome chap when you get a look, with those grooves down the side of his nose. Compelling.’

  Arthur and Dave had said much the same about their employer as they packed themselves and the brooms into the van marked ‘House Men’.

  ‘So that’s the Chief Commander,’ Dave had said. ‘Not a bad-looking chap.’

  ‘Yes, I could fancy him myself.’ Arthur made no secret of his broad band of tastes. ‘But no go – I know others who have tried.’ He’d started the van and they had driven off.

  ‘Where do they come from?’ demanded Coffin.

  ‘All checked with your security outfit,’ said Stella. ‘Genuine firm, no bombs. That pair are out-of-work actors, resting anyway, and probably hope I might put a part their way. Arthur has had one or two small parts and Dave’s done some walk-ons.’

  ‘Where do they live?’ Security was tight round the Chief Commander’s household.

  ‘Arthur lives in a converted factory across the river in Greenwich with a gang of mates and Dave lives over a café called Stormy Weather.’

  Coffin grunted: he knew of the Stormy Weather eating place, which was in a bad part of the town and had a reputation to equal it. It had started out as a simple eating place, then become a hamburger bar and now proclaimed it did the best steaks in town. What Coffin knew was that it smelt of frying fat, cigarette smoke with a hint of something darker but no one had ever caught Jim Billson, the proprietor (he probably didn’t own it, he was reputed to have someone behind him) with any illegal substances. The woman who ran it was, according to Mimsie Marker, the fattest woman in the Second City, and the cook the most drunken. Coffin knew that every so often the Public Health crew, with a drugs man secretly with them, swept in and went over the place, but so far, it had been clean. Cleaner than expected.

  ‘He hasn’t been with Arthur too long . . . Arthur started it up with a mate who died.’ She frowned. ‘Cancer . . . it may have been AIDS-related,’ she added reluctantly. ‘Dave came in after that. They met in the theatre.’

  Coffin grunted again.

  ‘Anyway, it was too much for Gilly. This is a difficult house to clean. All staircase. Like a lighthouse.’

  Coffin was hurt. He liked his house. ‘You ought to have been brought up in a basement like I was.’

  He was not showing it, since that would not have been tactful, but he was sympathizing with Stella in her workless state. The Stella Pinero Theatre Complex, in the body of the old St Luke’s Church, which she had founded – and which now included a much smaller experimental theatre and a theatre workshop
– was leased out to three companies. The main theatre housed a commercial production of Guys and Dolls which was proving very successful and would be occupying the theatre for another two months, through the summer, while the Theatre Workshop was being used by the University of Spinnergate for its Drama Department.

  I told her that she ought to keep at least one of the theatres in her own hands, thought Coffin, studying his loved one’s face, but she was pushed on by Letty who always had her eye on the money bags. And I think Letty was having a money crisis herself at the time, although that is not the sort of information Letty tells you. Laetitia Bingham was his own half-sister, banker and investment panjandrum. But panjandrums have their ups and downs and Letty had suffered with the collapse of the eastern Tiger economies. She was over it now, thank goodness, since an impoverished Letty did not bear thinking about. It was time the iron hand of Letty let one of the theatres go free so that Stella could work. It was her world, after all.

  He looked with even more sympathy at his wife, before going back to his mother’s papers. What a woman she had been, not one to stay in a scene, held down by children or husbands, always moving on. It was going to be a good book.

  He ran his hand through his hair, mentally assessing (although he would never have admitted to this) whether his recent illness had made for a loss of hair. Felt as thick as ever, thank goodness. Nor was he going grey, or not what you could call grey, or not what he called grey; as a child he seemed to recall it had been what people called auburn, now it was dark with a hint of red in certain lights. Secretly he was pleased with his hair, colour and weight. Stella’s hair changed with her mood and the part she was playing: at the moment it was fair, long and loose. Coffin, who knew her age, thought how well she carried it off.

  Naturally, he allowed no hint of this to pass over to Stella.

  The Second City Force, of which he was Head and Commander, was not in his mind for the moment, that too had had its ups and downs, but for the moment all was tranquil there.