Coffin on Murder Street

GWENDOLINE BUTLER

Coffin on Murder Street

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers,

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1991

Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1990

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

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

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780006471851

Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN 9780007544684

Version: 2014–07–02

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

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

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

‘In the real world, Proust would have killed Albertine.’

Gus Hamilton, speaking of the new play written about Marcel Proust.

CHAPTER 1

March 5

John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Police Force in the newly created Second City of London, made up of the old boroughs of Spinnergate, Leathergate, Swinehouse and East Hythe, sat in the window-seat of his living-room in St Luke’s Mansions; he was preparing the text of his mad mother’s diary for publication. The arrival of this diary had been one of the greatest shocks of his adult life. He had been brought up, fatherless and motherless, by an aunt and a grandmother who had fostered the notion that his parents were dead. It was later in his life that he discovered that his mother had not died when he was a child but had gone on to have numerous other relationships and at least one other marriage. Other discoveries had followed. Mother had been quite a character.

He was a tall man, going grey neatly at the temples with sharp clear blue eyes from which the innocent confidence he had had as a young man had long since faded. They were still kind eyes, yet wary. It was a good face, but held no promise of being easy. Life had toughened him. Presently he stood up, stretched himself and looked down upon the territory where he was responsible for maintaining the Queen’s Peace as Chief Commander of the New City Force.

There was a killing taking place down there in Murder Street at that very time, but he did not know that yet. No one did, except the victim and the killer.

Coffin could look down on this world because he lived in the tower of a converted church. The tower of St Luke’s and part of the church had been converted into three separate dwelling places, of which his apartment in the tower was the biggest and the most romantic. He could see the River Thames, he could get a glimpse of Tower Bridge and, if he was lucky and the weather was right, the top of St Paul’s Cathedral. His authority stretched eastward and southward down the river towards Rotherhithe or Greenwich south of the river, but not including them.

He loved looking down on this London, his London, the new Second City of London, even though he knew better than most that the streets housed a great variety of thieves, housebreakers, pickpockets, sneak thieves, prostitutes, rapists and murderers.

But this was the new Docklands where many of the old warehouses and dock buildings, firmly built by their Victorian creators, had been turned into desirable and expensive places to live in. So the new rich had poured in, provoking some hostility from the old natives. A halt in prosperity had slowed the process down, and, while not making the poor richer, had made some of the rich much poorer. Not such a bad thing, he thought. All in all, the two communities were shaking down nicely together.

A bit of violence now and again, he would be the first to admit it, an occasional flash of social tension. But the murder statistics in his area were no worse than in the rest of the metropolis, which, considering, it housed one ancient thieves kitchen, still surviving in the original network of streets, was not bad.

His mother’s diary made an interesting study, especially to the family circle which had been its first readers. Mrs Coffin had not been a woman of much education, but she had an easy, racy style of writing which led you on. Her life had lived up to her style, being also easy and racy, and leading you on. She had left three children by different fathers, dumped around the globe. One in London, John Coffin, the eldest by far; another in Scotland; and a third, the only daughter, in New York. It was possible there were others, but the trio who had discovered one another’s existence by degrees, lived in some apprehension of more siblings. An extended family was one thing, but far-flung was ridiculous.

Laetitia Bingham, his half-sister, was the owner of the St Luke’s Mansions complex where she had bought this old Victorian church and developed the three apartments, of which she had sold one to John Coffin. She was turning the main church into an in-the-round theatre, and had established a Theatre Workshop on the rest of the land she owned. The Workshop was up and running, under the vigorous management of the actress, Stella Pinero.

Letty Bingham had just jettisoned her second husband (although her half-brother did not yet know this), and was planning to establish herself and her daughter in London. Letty was a successful international lawyer but her passion was the theatre. She pretended she was doing it all for her daughter who had just started drama school, but it was really for herself.

William was the third sibling, who had taken to law; he was a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh. One way and another the law was in the blood.

The law, and a bit of drama, because you had to account for mother somehow. Perhaps her mother had been a Gaiety girl? And her father? Well, at one point in her diaries, she claimed he was King Edward VII.

Surprising this pull of the law, John Coffin thought, pouring himself a drink and taking a rest from his mother’s diary, because that lady herself had shown no respect for any law judging from the way she had gone on. He did wonder how much of her diary was fiction. That episode in the Hamburg hotel, for instance, with the man who had claimed to be a member of the Romanov family and who had given her a diamond tiara. Where was that tiara, he asked himself; had Mother pawned it?

And what about that story of travelling by car from Glasgow to Edinburgh with a man who told her when they arrived in Morningside that he had his dead wife in the boot, and had left her mother in the cellar back home. He could believe that one, reflected Coffin. People could behave that way.

Drama, fantasy, and lies, mixed with a modicum of truth, that was the cocktail his mother had mixed.

Publication of Ma’s memoirs was a joke, of course. Letty’s idea: she had arranged the typing of the diaries. Private publication, she said, and then we will try for TV and film rights. Make a mini-series, the material is there, but we must first establish our copyright. Surely Letty could not be serious? What did her husband think of the idea? Did she still have a husband? Coffin had his doubts, Letty had not said anything, but he could read her lovely face.

He put aside the typescript, removed his spectacles (a recent and regretted addition to his life), and went on to his next task. Stella Pinero had persuaded him to a little amateur acting.

The Friends of the Theatre Workshop, an association of energetic local ladies, had started a playreading group. Once a year a public performance was put on. As always, they were short of men. Coffin had no illusions about why Stella had enlisted him. He had been drafted, he was a conscript. Lately another man had joined, a quiet character who seemed willing to stay in the background and indeed had not attended the group lately, but Coffin was hopeful that the shortage of men was on the way out, although perhaps not with that one.

To his chagrin, he discovered in himself a faint sense of rivalry. He should be ashamed of himself. ‘I don’t care for the fellow, that’s what it is, not jealousy as such.’

With surprise, he had discovered he was enjoying the acting experience. Drama obviously was in the blood. Ran in the family.

No great part had been allotted to him, Stella was not going to push him too hard.

They were doing The Circle. Somerset Maugham was having a comeback. He was the butler.

‘Luncheon is served, sir,’ he said. He tried it another way. ‘Luncheon—’ deep breath—‘is served, sir.’

That was his best line. He had another: ‘Lady Catherine Champion-Cheney—Lord Porteous.’

You couldn’t do much with that, the important thing was not to get tied up in the names and fall over your feet. But he had a bit of business with a tea-tray later on that he thought he could work up nicely.

It could have been worse, he could have been the footman. All the footman said was, ‘Yes, sir.’

They had eliminated the footman. It didn’t seem to matter to the plot, speeded it up a bit. Coffin reflected that only in the low wage, pre-Equity days of the 1920s when The Circle had first been produced could a writer have allowed himself both a butler and a footman on stage.

He went to the door of his sitting-room, opened it, and gave a bow: Luncheon is served, sir.

Letty Bingham and Stella Pinero, the famous actress, now installed as Director Elect of the new theatre (as yet only half built) and Acting Director of the Theatre Workshop were running a Festival Month. It would raise money; money was always tight. It would bring publicity; publicity was always valuable. Things were rolling forward, with four plays now in preparation, the casts engaged. Life was hotting up.

The four plays were The Cherry Orchard. The early Rattigan: French Without Tears. Arthur Miller would be represented by Death of a Salesman, because Miller, like Maugham, was having a renaissance, and Ben Travers came forward with Rookery Nook. She was also doing short runs of plays with small casts. Stella had cast the plays with cunning and some shrewdness, hoping to cater for all tastes and entrap the favour of the critics. The favour of critics was like a wary beast that you had to lure to you and then entice to your bosom.

If only half the famous names signed up by Stella arrived in due course to play their parts, and attracted all the tourists that were hoped for, then all the sneak thieves, dips, confidence men and petty criminals from outside the Second City and as far as Hong Kong and Australia would swarm in to join the native criminal population.

A few miles up river, over Waterloo Bridge, up the Strand and turn left, you were into Virginia Square. This square of tall dusty houses now converted into offices was small, blocked off at one end by the back of a large chain store, and lined on one side with coaches setting off on various tours round London. Tickets could be bought from itinerant sellers carrying small boards which displayed the names and prices of the various tours, and covered with advertisements themselves on caps, shirts and jackets. One or two of them had been mugged for the money they carried, it was a job not without hazard.

A Tour of Westminster Abbey and the City Churches; See Harrods and Visit The Tower; A Mystery Ride round London; A Total Terror Tour. See the Most Evil Places in London. Guaranteed Trembles. The Ultimate in Fear.

The coach firm which ran the Terror Tour was called Trembles Ltd, and you might joke that the coaches were owner-occupied because the two brothers Tremble who owned the firm were also the drivers. One brother did the Mystery Tour and the other the Horror. The classy tour of Westminster and Harrods was advertised but did not actually exist. Anyone who asked for it was persuaded to take one of the others. Horror or Mystery, it didn’t matter which, the itinerary was more or less the same, the Horror being the more popular.

The Trembles had thought of this particular tour because of their name being what it was. Before this they had run tours to Spain, but you could have enough of Spain and sun and they had, and also of passengers who got drunk and run in by the local police and they were fed up with this too. A change was as good as a rest. The Horror Tour was never likely, they thought, to bring in the police. Also, the coaches were getting old and no longer up to the long runs. It was a modest business, always teetering between profit and disaster.

In fact, this tour was very popular with foreign visitors. It did most business in the evenings when customers were young, noisy and happy. Sometimes a little drunk and amorous, but always very willing to be frightened. But not too disappointed, in fact, if they were not, and the tour was, to tell the truth, not very terrifying. There was a coffee-bar at the back of the bus with a big Thermos and people helped themselves, but the tour usually ended up at a pub renamed not long before as the Ripper and Victim, known locally as the Rip and Vic, before a swift ride back.

The Terror Tour bus was small, because it is easier to arouse terror in a small group than in a large one. It was painted a sombre dull black and the windows were shaded green. So were the lights inside.

Not crowded tonight, thought the driver as he collected the tickets, and rather an elderly group. So much the better, he might get home early. On the other hand, more bodies, more money, and he was hard up. He sighed. The horses had not been running well lately. Those that could fall down had fallen down, those that should have finished first had finished last. It was Friday, a spring evening in early March.

He had much on his mind. He was, he felt bound to admit, a man who liked to oblige his pals. Perhaps it was a weakness, but there you were. He had an old friend, known to him all his life, they had been at school together and their fathers had worked side by side in the Docks. He liked him, but what a talker!

Tremble thought back to the young Tremble who had been led into all sorts of trouble by this same persuasive friend. Like the time they’d caught a Russian spy. Except he hadn’t been. Poor chap, a survivor of Hitler’s camps and then caught by two kids and locked up in a broom cupboard. Dad had tanned his backside for that exploit.

People didn’t change. Russian spies, Libyan terrorists, IRA bombers, and a murderer, a great circus of them, all walking out of his pal’s mind down Regina Street. Murder Street. And what were you to believe?

He mused: after all, it would only be an extra bit on his trip. Might amuse the punters.

Still, even among friends, nothing was for nothing, and cash was always useful.

The ghost of the young Tremble stirred inside him, issuing a warning. What was he getting into? As always with his friend, he had the uneasy feeling that he was taking part in a play, the plot of which had not been fully revealed to him.

He closed the door of the coach, and at the appointed hour set forth.

At 9.20 p.m., he was over the water in Coffin’s territory, had passed St Luke’s Mansions (where Coffin was learning his part) and the Theatre Workshop without comment, although both were brightly lit. But they were not in pursuit of brightness, but of darkness. The coach turned down a narrow road, badly lit.

‘Here we are in Murder Street,’ he announced. The coach passed slowly down the road.

Here on the left, at No. 6, the murderer Dr Brittany did away with his wife, his mother-in-law, and the cook, with arsenic. That was in 1914, just before war broke out; he escaped but he was caught in the end and hanged on Armistice Day. Three doors down, and again on the even side of the road at No. 12, the axe murderer, Joseph Cadrin, did in his victims and buried them in the garden.

‘How many, sir? It was never rightly established, the bodies being cut up so. Nineteen twenty-seven, that was. A lot of the victims would have been tramps and dossers.’

He slowed the coach to a crawl so that they could all get a good look and flash away with their cameras, taking photographs if they wanted. Sometimes he stopped and let them out, but not tonight. He didn’t think they felt like it somehow. He didn’t himself.

‘That’s all on this side, except just towards the end there was a young woman found dead in the basement, though that could have been suicide.’ He sounded regretful. ‘But on the other side of the road, odd numbers, four people and a dog died in a fire in No. 7, arson, that was. Yes, they have rebuilt that house, sir, but you can see which house it was, looks newer. And here and here …’ He went through the catalogue: at No. 15 (no, there was no No. 13 but 15 would have been it if there had been) rape and suicide; at 23 a double murder; and at 29 a single death by stabbing. Yes, it was a longer road on that side, the old match factory cut into the other side.

He changed gears and put on some speed. Time to get on. He felt quite tired himself. Goodness knows, they’d all swigged enough coffee en route, ought to be as bright as crickets. But no, sodden was the feeling.

9.30 and they drove off into the darkness. There are some darknesses which seem to swallow people up. This one did.

The bar of the Theatre Workshop was a great meeting-place. That evening a small but animated group had gathered after the curtain had gone down. It was the custom for the cast of the play then in repertory to appear in the bar for a drink after they had taken off their make-up, where they could meet and talk to some of their faithful audience.

Most of the audience and almost all the cast of the current play had melted away home, but a small hard core of Friends of the Theatre Workshop remained talking to Stella Pinero who was sitting in one corner. A few people were hanging on because they had heard that Nell Casey, star of a transatlantic famous soap, and booked to play in the Festival, might appear.

Here too was Gus Hamilton, current star at the Old Vic, who would be joining the Festival in French Without Tears and The Cherry Orchard. He was also teaching a group of local students in a Drama Workshop. Getting to Know the Bard, he called it. He was doing it for peanuts, just one peanut, as he said himself. Gus was never greedy about money but he was shrewd about how to advance his career. He was standing on his own, drinking a glass of white wine, a posse of his admirers having just left.

There’s something I ought to tell him, thought Stella. Then it happened before she had a chance. Oh dear, she thought, Gus is going to be furious.

Casey came in through the swing door and met his gaze across the room. She stood still. ‘My heart stopped,’ she told herself afterwards. ‘Just for one second, I stopped breathing.’

They moved towards each other, reluctantly, but irresistibly impelled.

Casey began to breathe again, but her breath was hard inside her like a knife.

‘I thought you were dead.’

‘Not funny. You knew I wasn’t dead. I’m still on the Equity list. You could have looked.’

‘I’ve been in the States.’

‘I was on Broadway.’ Off Broadway, but that was smarter.

‘Not that kind of dead,’ she said. ‘Not dead dead.’

‘Is there another kind?’

‘Dead to me.’ Her voice dropped.

‘You always had a duff hand with dialogue, Casey. I’ve told you that before. It’s why you haven’t been more successful. You can’t give a line the right weight.’

‘I am successful. And you played off Broadway.’

‘Aha,’ he said triumphantly. ‘So I’ve come back to life, have I? Not dead at all.’

‘And you got lousy reviews.’

‘Better than you did, dear, for your extremely lousy Amanda.’

‘Dead spiritually and emotionally,’ said Casey.

It looked as though they were about to embark on one of the stand-up fights that had broken their relationship in the first place. They had a fascinated audience all round them, drinking it in. Casey and Gus at it again.

Then Gus held out a hand. ‘Come on, Nelly. Kiss and make up.’

Casey swung on her heel. ‘You ought to have stayed dead.’

John Coffin, walking into the room, thought: Who are these people who are behaving badly? Years and years of knowing Stella Pinero and having a stage-struck sister had not accustomed him to the idea that a scene was words but not deeds and a quarrel was not for ever. Probably not even for the next ten minutes.

Still, this one had looked real.

The girl, tall, beautiful, reddish hair (he liked red hair on a woman but not on a man), a thin and delicately boned face—did he know her face?—was talking to a group of three, then moving on, being hailed, kissed and exclaimed at. Someone asked her if she had ‘brought it with her’. He made his way across to where Stella sat. ‘What was all that about?’

‘Oh, you’ve turned up?’

‘I said I’d be late. So what was it?’

‘They knew each other well once, and were going to be married. May still be,’ she added thoughtfully. Only indefinitely postponed. Owing to injury.

‘What got in the way?’ From the manner in which they assaulted each other he would have said they were a perfect match.

‘Something rather nasty. A death.’

‘Oh?’

‘Don’t prick up your detectival ears.’

‘Bad word.’

Nell Casey finished her tour of the room and ended up by Stella. ‘That was painful.’

‘I should have warned you he was here.’

‘Are we both going to be working in the Festival?’

Stella prudently held back the information that they were cast in the same play, the Rattigan. Wonderful publicity to be got from their pairing, she had to put the show first. ‘Apart from work, you need never meet.’

‘We have met,’ said Casey.

‘Isn’t it about time to call it a draw?’

‘No,’ said Nell. ‘Niet, non, nein. Is that clear? No, no, no. I’ll never forgive that shit. And you heard him just now.’