Coffin on Murder Street

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

To Stella’s relief, she turned to John Coffin, and held out her hand. ‘I’m Nell Casey. I know who you are, I’ve seen your photograph in the papers.’

‘Surely not.’

‘Yes, and I saw you on TV. You were over in Los Angeles on some policemen’s conference. You said …’ She stopped there, perhaps she couldn’t remember what he had said. ‘Well, it was about women as victims.’

‘I ought to have had my mouth shot off.’

A tall figure, bespectacled, with greying hair and a small white beard, who had just come into the room, tapped Casey on the shoulder. ‘So you got here.’

She spun round. ‘Ellice! I didn’t expect you.’

Neither did I, thought Stella, a little disconcerted. Ellice Eden was a famous and caustic theatre critic, who had not so far been too kind to her productions although professing undying admiration for Stella herself. ‘Lovely actress,’ he always said. ‘Lovely.’ Unmarried himself, he was famous for a special sensitivity towards actresses, while asking the question if women could ever reach the height of the greatest of men. Garrick, Kean, Olivier, did they stand on their own?

Duse, Bernhardt, goddesses, he said. Among moderns he praised Ashcroft, Redgrave, and Bloom. Nor did he despise the screen. Hepburn, marvellous. Monroe, now there was a talent of a very special kind. Streep? He was still watching and assessing. But the reservation about the supreme greatness of women remained, so actresses were careful with him.

He had shown a special liking for Nell Casey, and true admiration for her professional skills. She was so young, she had a long way to go.

‘Came to see you. It’s been quite a gap.’ He held her at arm’s length. ‘You look more Pre-Raphaelite than ever.’

‘“By the margins willow-veiled, slide the heavy barges trailed.” You always did like the river,’ she laughed.

He pulled her towards the bar. ‘Come and have a drink.’

Stella and Coffin were left alone.

‘What’s the story about the death?’

‘Surprised you don’t know. Casey and Gus were part of a company, avant garde little group called Boxers, they were touring Australia. They were in Sydney for a month. Gus ran a little class within the company, he likes teaching. One of the kids fell for him. A lad, of course, they were pretty bisexual, that company, some tours are. I’ve looked round on occasion and thought: Not a proper man here. Anyway, this lad hung around Gus, that sort of thing.’

‘So?’

‘Gus said he didn’t encourage him. Well, perhaps he didn’t. Two schools of thought about that. And then Nell moved in and kind of mopped him up. So they say. Anyway, it got pretty messy,’ Stella said. ‘He was found dead.’

‘Where?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘It might.’

‘In a car park adjoining the theatre. In a car, from the exhaust. It could have been suicide. But there were bruises, enough for doubts. Was he attacked, or was he not? Brilliant chap. Got all the medals and loads of praise. Gus came in for a lot of criticism, and some suspicion. Was he jealous, people asked, and if so, what sort of jealousy: sexual or professional or both?’ Stella thought a bit more. ‘He and Nell broke up amid tears and blows.’

‘When was this?’

Stella made a guess. ‘Not so long ago, but before Casey went out to Los Angeles and the part in the soap we all know about, and Gus struck it big in Shakespeare. Say a couple of years.’ She shrugged. ‘So one’s sort of forgotten about it, and thinks those two ought to have done. That long.’ She looked across the room to where Gus was ordering himself a drink. She frowned. Back on that again? She would have to keep an eye on Gus.

‘Was the truth about the death ever established?’

‘I don’t think so, I don’t really know.’ Stella sounded faintly surprised she should be expected to know. ‘It was in Australia.’

Far away and long ago.

‘Nothing to do with you.’

‘No, of course not.’

Across the room, John Coffin could see Gus inserting himself into what he clearly hoped was a neutral group, neither on his side nor Casey’s, or who perhaps had never heard the gossip, anyway. Coffin felt sorry for the man. He knew what it was to feel a pariah: all policemen did. Sometimes you felt an alien in a hostile world.

‘I believe you set this up on purpose. Arranged the whole thing,’ he accused Stella.

Stella pursed her lips together. ‘It’s time they made it up. But I wanted Gus. I tried to get him to do a new play about Proust and then Othello. It was going to be a double on jealousy, but he said no.’

‘You’re a dangerous woman, Stella, and you could have created more of a situation than you realize,’ he said, observing Nell Casey’s rigid stance.

The party in the bar was increasing in size rather than diminishing as word got round that not only Nell Casey was there but Ellice Eden also. Max from the Deli round the corner, who ran the bar as a private venture, never minded staying on late. He was a man of business who nursed his profits carefully.

Nell and Gus stood at different ends of the room but were without doubt the two most courted members of the party, twin suns with their own powers of attraction. People drifted back and forth between them. Ellice Eden sat by Stella and held his own court.

In Murder Street, the real name of which was Regina Street, the small body of this particular victim had already been neatly packaged and any mess tidied away, ready for burial. It had been efficiently done. The murderer was a tidy, efficient person.

Regina Street, which knew its name but did not rejoice in it, harboured a floating population in its crowded houses, most of which had been subdivided into what the landlords called ‘studio flats’. This meant one room with a midget kitchen and a shower room tucked into a cupboard. Most of them were let furnished, this bringing in the most profit for the smallest outlay. Very few people stayed long, especially when they got to know the local name for the street, and observed the tourist coaches studying them. There were one or two old inhabitants.

One was called Jim Lollard and as he was an old dock-worker who had lived there since before the war, he was generally regarded by those of the inhabitants who noticed him at all as having been unloaded from the Ark. He was the only one who had a whole house to himself, and the interest to devote to it. His house was the one freshly painted and with a single bell with but his name underneath it. Since he had retired with a nice lump sum and a steady pension from the Dock Labour Board, he had spent most of his time decorating his house, inside and out, and tending his garden. He took evening classes in carpentry and upholstery and was willing to do odd jobs for anyone. At a price.

‘His house is his hobby,’ said Mimsie Marker tolerantly. Mimsie sold newspapers outside the Tube station at Spinnergate and knew all the old inhabitants of the district, being one herself.

But she was wrong. His house was not his hobby but his life’s work. His hobby was murder.

He was well known to the police. As a murder addict, he frequently reported crimes that had happened, or were about to happen, as well as some that had never happened and were never going to happen.

He never bothered with a substation, but always directed his attention to the headquarters of the new Force in the big building a stone’s throw from Spinnergate Tube station. Thus his name and his face were known even to John Coffin, from whom, because of his rank, all but the most august criminals were sheltered.

‘You’ll cry wolf once too often, said the sergeant on the desk one day, leaning across to Jim Lollard.

‘What do you mean?’ Defensively.

‘You’ll call murder and we won’t believe you and it’ll be you. You’ll be the victim.’

Lollard drew back. Aggrieved. ‘I’m doing a citizen’s duty. I could report you for saying that.’

‘You do,’ said the sergeant. ‘Now hop it.’

Lollard was stung into further speech. Truth to say, he had had it prepared and meant to get it out. ‘You don’t take account of what you’ve got in this district. Polyglot, that’s what it is. Muslims, Hindus, the Irish. You want to watch them. I do.’

‘We’ve got special units dealing with that,’ said the sergeant.

Lollard was not to be stopped. ‘I’ve got it all on paper, don’t you worry. I keep a record. And I’ll see it gets noticed.’

‘Oh, pop off, dad.’

‘You lot wouldn’t know a crime coming if it got up and waved its hand at you,’ Lollard flung angrily over his shoulder as he departed, nearly knocking over in his anger the only other regular caller at the station, a young freelance-journalist always hopeful of a story. So to make up to the young man, Jim Lollard took him for a drink at the Rip and Vic, which although expensive had good beer and an atmosphere that jelled with his own.

That had been some months ago, but the comment from the sergeant had rankled. He had seen several suspicious circumstances since then and was convinced that he had his eye on at least one killer and that a mass murder was on the cards. But he had plans. Ideas catapulted out of his mind, one after the other. Get attention, he told himself, publicity is what you want. Set up a scene they can’t ignore. His imagination accelerated.

He saw the newspaper interviews. He would produce his records, show his diary of events. Let them see the kind of scoreboard he kept on the kitchen wall. Sell it, there would be money in it. He’d get on the Wogan Show. He saw himself sitting there, telling the tale.

Two of the items on his scoreboard related to the last two weeks. He always dated them, sometimes putting what the tide was on the river. In his old days as a waterman this had been important to him.

Mr Lilly, what does he do with his cats? Eat them?

And then: A strange fellow in No. 16. Will bear watching, ran one scrawl. What’s he doing here, not our sort, and what has happened to him? He had the darkest suspicions and had told a neighbour who let rooms what he thought. She laughed, but he’d show her. Show her something, anyway, to surprise her; he had his plans made.

Later that night a tentative telephone call came through to the Thameswater headquarters asking if they had any information about a tourist coach that had entered their area earlier that evening but had failed to return to base. Had there been a road accident? Had the coach broken down anywhere?

Sergeant Bond phoned around, but had to return the answer that nothing was known. He had zero to report.

When was the bus last seen? That was not clear, no one seemed to know. They had been sighted in Murder Street.

‘Regina Street,’ corrected the sergeant who lived not far away and did not like the nickname.

And the coach had not called in at the Ripper and Victim pub. But then I wouldn’t myself, reflected the Sergeant. Tourist trap, the landlord overcharges you.

The party in the bar of the Theatre Workshop was showing signs of breaking up at last.

Stella Pinero was speeding it on its way. ‘Come on now, you lot. I shall want you all in for a workout tomorrow early, then rehearsal—’ for she was producing the next play in repertory herself—‘and then there will be a meeting of all of you to hear details of the Festival productions. I will be handing out castings and you will be meeting Stan Odway and Jean Allen who are co-producing.’

The names struck awe in some of those present who started to melt away. Odway and Allen were hot stuff, names to conjure with, and Stella had been lucky to get them, all present acknowledged that, but they were tartars and you needed all your strength to cope.

Coffin, who was tired but had been hoping for a quiet half-hour with Stella, decided to depart himself.

The door opened and a dark-haired girl came into the room. She was carrying a bright-eyed little boy.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Casey, but I couldn’t get him to settle without saying good night to you.’

The child held out his arms and Casey gathered him up.

‘You should be tougher with him, Sylvie.’

Sylvie, who had a charming French accent, started a confused explanation, muttering about something or someone being missing. A favourite toy, perhaps? Coffin raised an eyebrow at Stella.

Nell had rented a flat in The Albion, which was hard by St Luke’s Mansions. The Albion had once been a public house, exceedingly seedy in appearance and not at all respectable, but it was of great antiquity, with cellars that looked as though they could have been there since the Domesday Book was compiled. Geoffrey Chaucer was said to have stayed there and Charles Dickens to have taken his friend Trollope for a drinking session there. Since then it had fallen on hard times, until converted recently into costly new apartments. Owing to the recent drop in property values most of them were as yet unsold, and the owner was turning them into furnished rented properties on short lets. Stella was suggesting them as homes for a number of her visiting stars in the approaching Festival. All expenses tax deductible, as she was pointing out.

‘Her child?’

Of course.’

Across the room, Coffin saw Gus staring hard at Casey and the boy. Casey was picking up her coat and hustling Sylvie out of the room. Stella followed. He moved forward and got the door open for them. The child gave him a smile as he passed in his mother’s arms.

Nice kid, he thought.

And then: So that’s what she brought with her.

And that wasn’t all she’d brought. Long years of experience had made his nose sensitive.

He could smell it, it was all around her: Trouble.

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