A Coffin for Charley (19 page)

There was silence for a few moments.

‘Our victims are recent,' said Archie Young.

The Chief Superintendent said nothing; he was watching John Coffin.

The young woman's hands had been crossed in front of her. Although the flesh had darkened and shrunk the fingers were delicate and well shaped. Each nail was painted bright red, the colour had withstood its burial better than the skin around it.

Archie Young said: ‘Our girls both bit their fingernails. We thought that turned our Jimmy on. He looked for it and then, whammy, she was it.'

Coffin reached down and touched one nail. The red colour lifted and came away.

‘I was waiting for you to get that,' said Walter Watson with satisfaction. ‘Told you there was a something.'

‘False fingernails,' said Coffin. ‘Underneath, the natural nails are badly chewed.'

He stood back. ‘Get Annie in for a look … Is she prepared?'

‘As much as she could be.' Archie Young shrugged. ‘She's got one of my best WDCs with her, Winnie Baker, they know each other.'

Coffin went outside to where Annie sat in the car. She was looking out with an anxious expression on her face.

‘Good of you to come, Annie.'

‘Didn't have much choice.'

‘It's important or we would not have put this job on you. I know it's not an easy one.'

He got in the seat next to the driver and turned round to look at her. The driver stared straight ahead, carefully not looking.

‘I want to talk with you. It seems necessary. Just a few questions.'

Annie gave a nod. All right, she was saying. Go ahead, but don't expect too much from me. Annie, except once, all those years ago, had never trusted the police. Perhaps she trusted this one, John Coffin, as much as anyone.

‘Do you know where Caroline Royal is?'

‘No.' She said it again, ‘No.'

‘But you know something?'

‘No, I don't. Told you all I know Must have.'

‘She's been gone some time, hasn't she?'

‘Looks like it,' said Annie who was finding difficulty in speaking.

‘You must have been concerned?'

‘I suppose I was … but she travelled a lot.'

‘Still … as time passed.' He studied her face, she was white.

‘Did you kill her, Annie? You can tell me.'

Annie shook her head violently.

‘I don't believe that you did.'

‘Thank you for nothing.'

‘I don't believe women commit serial murders of this sort. If that's what we're seeing … But you're an unusual sort of woman, aren't you, Annie?'

Annie bit her lip. A small bead of blood, red and shiny, appeared on her lip. Through her bloody lips she muttered something about Lizzie and Eddie Creeley.

‘Oh, they aren't out of the picture,' agreed Coffin mildly, ‘although I think Lizzie must be, as she was in prison at the time of the first murder.' Or the second, if this new body now counted as the first.

He sat back. There was a moment of silence. Annie, Annie, Coffin thought. I wish I could understand you better.

Annie licked at the blood on her lip. ‘I'd like a drink of water.'

‘We'll get you one. You know what you have to do? You know what you're in for?'

Annie nodded towards the woman detective. ‘She explained.'

‘And you're willing? Can't make you do it, Annie.'

There was a lot unsaid between them. He was remembering the frightened child who had seen two dead people being buried, who had faced a murderer.

Annie did not dwell on the dead old couple, whom she hardly remembered now except as two rolled-up envelopes being deposited in the earth, but she thought of Lizzie Creeley who was still alive and Eddie whom she hated. She found it easy to hate Eddie. He had killed Didi.

‘Have you told anyone that you were coming here today?'

‘I didn't have time.' Annie wished she had spoken to Ashworth and Alex Edwards, both of whom she regarded as her protectors. Alex occasionally sent in emotional bills, Ashworth had so far presented no account. But it was money on results with him, he said, and so far he had done nothing. ‘I wish I had now. You've been rough with me.'

He didn't apologize, he knew he might have to be rough again. He also knew that there was a sturdiness inside Annie that could take it.

‘I want you to promise to keep it to yourself until I say,' said Coffin.

Annie nodded. ‘All right.' But she would tell Ashworth, that was a professional matter. A woman shouldn't come as close to murder as she seemed to do without telling someone.

Coffin stood back to let her out of the car. ‘I respect you, Annie.'

Respects me but doesn't like me, Annie thought. And he was right, she was not likeable; what had happened to her when aged eight had made her unlikeable. Perhaps she always had been unlikeable and perhaps that was why life had elected her to see those bodies all those years ago. Annie had a profound superstition that life had a plan for you and her plan included death.

From that all else flowed.

He took her arm. At the door, Annie paused, she turned to him as if suddenly confused. ‘Why are you here, why am I here?'

I'm here because I thought the dead woman might be my sister Letty; you are here because she might be Caroline Royal.

He shook his head but did not answer.

Annie was led in, white of face but resolute.

Coffin let her look. Then:

‘Is this Caroline Royal?'

Annie fainted.

Fishing as the river is running backwards

The procession of cars turned back to the Second City. Coffin drove with Chief Inspector Archie Young, whose subordinates followed in another car. Annie, somewhat recovered but very pale, was driven home by the woman detective, with whom she had now established a friendly
relationship on the basis that any woman was better than almost any man.

She was grateful that the body was not Caroline, but knew she had not seen the end of any questions.

I didn't know the girl at all, she told herself and all who would listen. It was her face that made me faint. So human and so dead. It might almost have been myself.

‘Now calm down, dear,' the woman detective said. So Annie knew she must have spoken aloud. ‘You didn't know who it was and that's all for the moment.'

They'll be after me again about Caroline.
But this time, Annie was careful not to say it aloud.
That's not over with.
She knew it with a sad conviction.

‘So she's Miss Nobody,' said Archie Young in an unusually poetic vein. He had been moved by the body, so young, so very dead.

‘Oh, she's somebody all right,' said Coffin. ‘Miss No Name, though.' Certainly not Caroline Royal, if Annie was to be believed. Nor was she Letty Bingham, his own sister, thank God, but of course it never could have been Letty. He was just being over-anxious. A woman like Letty did not turn up dead in Dulwich, South London.

‘Very young, she's younger than the others.'

Younger even than Didi. Not a child but not far away.

‘Yes, that in itself ought to have told us she wasn't Caroline Royal … Who remains missing.'

Young was not so interested in Caroline Royal as his superior was. ‘She'll turn up. They do in the end.' Dead women, he meant, murdered women.

‘This one is one for us, though. No rape, no signs of attack from the murderer or resistance from the victim. She put up her hand and said yes, just like the other two. Strangled. Same method of killing.'

‘And of course, the chewed fingernails.'

‘That's what turns him on.'

The traffic was dense in the tunnel as they went through to the other side. Like the entrance to Hell, Coffin thought, as they drove in. Dante would have been able to describe
it, although he might have been disconcerted by the strong smell of diesel oil and by the noise of pop music from the car radios, and the faint, very faint, smell of death and corruption.

Or was he bringing that with him from the mortuary? Some smells do stay in your nose.

‘Does it strike you that there is a difference, with this unidentified body?'

The Chief Inspector tried to concentrate. The Old Man's got something on his mind. Had had for some time. Might be Stella, his own Alison had hinted that certain stresses were taking place. And what wonder, he thought, neither character being of the easiest.

‘Bound to be some, aren't there?' Abstracted but polite, he avoided a small car that was weaving in and out of the traffic lanes.

‘But I think these might be important … Don't you get the impression that the other two bodies were meant to be found? Found soon and found …' He paused. ‘As arranged.' This time it was not a question he was asking but a thoughtful statement.

Archie did not answer for a moment. ‘Hard to say.'

Coffin could hear Wally Watson's voice, repeating an earlier statement: Only found by chance, boys playing in the wood near the hospital, their dog dug her up. Bit of her anyway. An arm sticking out … We'd have found her in the end, though, because that bit is going to be developed as part of the hospital. And then, as I said, it was due for an archæological dig. Roman and possibly early Saxon.

All this would be well known.

And again: Some poor kid that's run away from home and got caught. No one will claim her. Or not for some time. Maybe never.

Coffin wondered if that would prove to be true. Somehow he thought this girl was one who would be claimed.

‘It's one of the series, though,' said Archie confidently.

‘Think so?'

‘The nails prove it to my mind. It's little things like that that give it away. It's what he's looking for. It's the mark.'
He added, ‘This death brings in the Met and that's a help.' Not that he liked sharing, of course, he was like an alley cat in that; what was his, was his.

And a nuisance, thought Coffin, reading his mind accurately; rivalry between the two Forces was not unknown.

‘And we've got to accept that there may be other bodies.'

‘Could be.'

Outside it was beginning to rain and even inside the tunnel the temperature was dropping. Coffin felt cold. ‘You've known Wally Watson for some time?' asked Archie Young as he drove out of the tunnel and felt the fresh air.

‘For years.'

‘He's a good sort. In his way.'

‘He's a good copper. Could have risen higher if he'd wanted but he likes it where he is.'

‘Nice place, Dulwich. Thought of living there myself once. Alison's got an aunt who says she's going to leave us her house, but it would have been difficult for work. Long drive.'

‘What will you do about the house?' inquired Coffin absently, his thoughts still running on the series of murders.

‘Sell it, I expect.'

‘Property is always useful.' Letty had taught him that much.

‘About the chewed nails,' he said. ‘Doesn't it strike you that the killer must have known about her nails?'

Covered, the nails had been with bright red falsies, but the killer had known what was underneath.

Was he straining the logic there, or was it so?

‘Might have done,' said Archie Young, as if he didn't think it important.

They drove on in silence. Presently Young said: ‘There's your good lady …' He had this tiresome way of talking sometimes, Coffin thought it was the result of some awkwardness when he had to mention personal relationships. ‘Heading for the Spinnergate Tube Station.'

There was Stella, wearing dark spectacles, a striped
woolly cap on her head and jeans with a tweed jacket. My camouflage clothes, she called them.

Also, her working gear. ‘She's off to a rehearsal,' he said.

She had her head down and was moving away fast.

The Chief Inspector slowed down, watching Stella who had stopped to buy a newspaper from the stall hard by the Underground station. She looked up, saw her husband and waved.

‘Let me out, Archie, thanks. I think she wants something.' And Coffin shot across the road.

‘Bless you, and good luck to you, Buster,' murmured Archie Young to himself, with sympathy and irony. He knew a husband whose marriage was under stress when he saw one. He'd been there himself.

Coffin caught up with Stella.

‘Got a minute?' she said. ‘Something to tell.' She looked at her watch. ‘I'm in a hurry, though.'

‘I'll walk beside you … It's important?'

Coffin got his wife a ticket from the machine, then went down the escalator beside her.

‘It's Letty, I've had a message from her. It was on my answering machine. I don't know when she left it … I've been upstairs with you and didn't check the machine all day yesterday.'

This was unusual for an actress, ever hopeful for that big new offer, that angel in the wings.

‘Well?'

‘So that's it, really.' A train was already approaching, moving the air in front of it down the tunnel. ‘She didn't say anything much, just that she was well and would be in touch … The message is there for you to hear.'

‘Where is she?'

‘Didn't say.'

‘Damn.'

‘Sorry, I know you've got a lot on at the moment … And there's something else, isn't there?'

‘Yes, another body. Stella …' A train was already approaching. ‘Stella, the smell thing. Think about it and let me know if you have anything to add.'

‘I think I have already.'

He could see she didn't want to talk about it. ‘Have a try. Think people, Stella.'

Stella stepped through the open door of the train, turned and waved. ‘I will. Promise.'

Before the doors could close, Coffin said: ‘Stella, what was the name of the shop on the other carrier bag in Caroline's cupboard?'

‘Harrison's of Bond Street,' she called out as the doors came together. Then she was gone, the train speeding on into the tunnel towards central London.