Coffin in Fashion. Gwendoline Butler
waste. This was bright red silk like blood. One of Gabriel’s designs had called for such silk. Rose knew it came from Belmodes, without another look.
It brought her factory right into the affair. Something would have to be done about it, although she wasn’t sure what exactly.
Steve had been quicker than she; his foot had shot out and covered the spool. Their eyes met. He was almost going to say something to her.
‘Raise your foot, Steve,’ said the woman detective.
Rose took a deep breath. ‘We’ll come down to the station with you,’ not removing her eyes from Steve’s foot. ‘I’ll drive. I’ve got my car. We’ll go together.’
It had got past denials and silence. She could see that even if Steve couldn’t.
After all, Coffin had had a happy couple of days; he had telephoned his house at midday and one of the workmen had answered. So he knew they were there, and might even be at work. It was even probable they were, since he had taken the precaution of asking his former landlady, now retired, Mrs Lorimer, to look in. She had a way with the idle.
Work, a dull but tricky investigation of an armed robbery, together with fraud and murder, had taken him out of his base all the afternoon, so that he almost missed an urgent personal telephone call. His work was undercover and it was best done discreetly. He was out of touch a good deal, that was policy. The whole area was experiencing a sharp uprise in crime, some small and petty, some violent, and Coffin was concerned about this. Another problem was drugs. A lot of hemp, a little heroin, and the new one to watch for, LSD 25, lysergic acid diethylamide, the hallucinatory drug, the so-called ‘Vision of Hell’ mixture.
He might have missed the call altogether if he hadn’t dashed back to collect something; he had forgotten a lot of things lately and although it worried him he knew why: it was because he had one big thing he was remembering.
‘Listen, you’ve got to know this.’ It was Mary Lorimer speaking; she didn’t announce herself which was unusual for her. ‘They’ve found a dead body in your house.’ The line went dead, again unlike Mrs Lorimer, who could usually be relied on for a good spell. It was a mark of her disturbance. Afterwards he discovered it was because she felt sick, having seen the remains.
It seemed the workmen had had a good day, Coffin’s house warm and sunny. They inspected the roof first, then decided that the first task should be the floor in the kitchen. Coffin was having most of the floorboards replaced with good new wood. They started taking them up …
As Coffin walked down Mouncy Street, he saw a police car parked down the road. Outside his house. He started to hurry.
A body? In his house. His first house with a big mortgage still on it. Well, he would have to stay, he could not afford to move out. It was the first time he had had such a thoroughly unprofessional reaction to a corpse.
‘I’m a first-time buyer,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m bound to feel bad.’ It was not what he had expected in home-owning. He followed into the house a small, dark young woman, carrying a medical bag: he knew her to be the new Home Office forensic pathologist seconded to this Division.
He walked into the house. The front door opened into a small hall from which a small living-room opened to the right-hand side. Straight ahead was the old kitchen and behind the scullery. All these houses in Mouncy Street were the same.
The floor was up in the kitchen, but it was possible to tread across it by means of the underpinnings to the scullery, which was where everyone seemed to be.
The floor was up here too, but having been so rotten this was no surprise, nor was the stale smell in the air. He had smelt it every day since he had moved in and been told it was damp rot.
He went up to the door and looked down. They hadn’t left it prone there for him to look at, they were waiting for the forensic team plus the photographers as he very well knew, but he felt a sense of possession about this poor sad object.
The two uniformed policemen both knew him, and nodded. ‘Glad you got here. Been trying to get in touch.’
‘I was out on a job.’
‘Haven’t seen you since that Wimpy Bar murder. Not round here, anyway.’
‘Only just moved in. Well, not long anyway.’
‘How long, John?’
‘A few weeks.’
‘Well, you’re in luck there.’
They both moved over side by side and looked down the hole from a better point. The sunlight through the window showed how dark and stained the bundle was, bursting through its paper wrapping. It was unmistakably human, and yet … ‘Been there some time,’ said Coffin.
‘I think so. Now, if you’d been living here for the last year …’
‘You’d be asking me questions.’ There was a grim humour in their interchange.
They still stared. Coffin spoke first.
‘Small.’ It was small.
‘Might not all be there.’
‘Cut up, you mean?’
‘Well, in bits.’
Joints in wrapping? No, it was a complete thing in itself.
Coffin shook his head. ‘That’s not the way it looks to me.’ He turned away. ‘It’s a whole thing, whatever it is.’ He knew without realizing why that it was somehow worse than that.
As he walked away he understood why: he had seen a tiny, tiny little finger protruding from one end of the bundle.
It was a kid down there, a little shrivelled-up kid.
Once before in his professional life, early on when he was just starting out, Coffin had been involved with a child case. Well, there had been others, but that first one had been the marker. That first child had turned up safe, as it happened.
With a sigh, he could foretell all that was going to happen to him and his house now. They were going to be invaded. Uniformed policemen, plainclothes detectives, all together with forensic scientists and other laboratory workers would be made free of his house. The whole scene of the crime outfit would have a passport. As would the photographers, and possibly their partners if they could manage it. The only person who was likely to be kept out was John Coffin.
‘The place has been empty for nearly two years,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That’s why I got it cheap.’
Now he knew what part of the price might be it did not seem so cheap. But he still wanted to live in it. Everyone had to have a home and this was going to be his.
‘Well, I’ll just go outside and have a smoke.’ There was a minute front garden with a red brick wall. He could sit on the wall in the sun and make a public spectacle of himself. ‘Who’s coming down, do you know?’ He meant: which officer is going to head the investigation team? He knew most of the local men and had worked with some. With none was he specially friendly, they were a clannish lot round here.
‘Jim Pedler, I think.’
He certainly knew Jim Pedler and had some respect for the Inspector. Or at any rate for his power of rising through the ranks. Whether he could see further into the wood than anyone else was another matter.
‘He knows how to use a team,’ he assessed.
‘He’s the boss,’ said the young policeman. His tone said: and one I have to live with.
There was the sound of a car door banging and a brisk voice announced the arrival of Inspector Pedler and his associates. Coffin quietly withdrew.
As he had planned, he sat on the wall in the sun and smoked a cigarette. He was experimenting with Turkish cigarettes, on the grounds that they represented a kind of luxury and he ought to know about luxury. He could not afford any other kind.
‘I’ll