Read A Coffin for Charley Online
Authors: Gwendoline Butler
A Coffin for Charley
GWENDOLINE BUTLER
Published by HarperCollins
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Ltd
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins
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Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1993
Cover layout design © HarperCollins
Publishers
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.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780006478904
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 9780007545421
Version: 2014-07-02
âSo I said to Charley â¦'
Traditional theatrical cover-up when the
speech drops dead.
PROLOGUE
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 in 1958, and was very quickly promoted to Inspector a year later.
By 1969 he was a superintendent and nine years later became 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 longish period in a secret, dangerous undercover operation about which even now not much is known. But the esteem he won then was recognized when, in the late 1980s as the Second City of London was being formed, he became the Chief Commander of its Police Force. He has married again, very happily, to an old love, Stella Pinero. He has also rediscovered two siblings, a sister and a brother.
Monday. Towards the river
Darkness.
The two people stood facing each other. The girl with her back to the wall, the man looking at her, legs apart. He held out his hands.
âI never like being killed,' said the girl. She moved her hands forward as if to protect herself. She had long beautiful nails, painted bright red; on her left hand was a deep, diamond-shaped scar. Almost as if she had been branded.
âIt's happened to you before?'
âSeveral times. I'm the type, I suppose, and I never enjoy it. It's so awkward. They never get it right.'
âThey?'
âThe killers.'
âOh, I will get it right. Think of all the things I've been doing ⦠Watching you, admiring you, loving you, hating you. I'll get it right.'
âYou will?'
âI'll get it so right you'll never know you are dead.'
Quite a promise.
Darkness absolute.
âShall we move in for the kill?'
But he wouldn't be killing her just yet. For that, she would have to wait. Wait in hunger, wait in darkness.
Light.
One light, a spot above the dressing-table, focused on the lovely face of Stella Pinero, actress, now for a single rocky year Mrs John Coffin. An up and down year. But she forgave her husband. As always, she had contributed her share.
I must put a bit more lipstick on; I'm looking pale. I blame last night. Possibly blame was the wrong word, not
one to be associated with the evening before. Sex was good for you and improved the complexion, but sometimes fatigue made you pale.
The dressing-table had its full equipment of make-up, sticks of colours, pots of creams, tubs of powder, sprays of scent, Stella took a professional interest in her looks.
She smiled reminiscently as she considered the night. That was a bit of the up and down. A quarrel and a reconciliation.
It had been her fault. Probably her fault.
A rocky year. Right to marry, of course, but they had difficulties.
All the same, she'd enjoyed the twelve months and she rather thought he had too. Not a man to want a quiet life was John Coffin. He thought he did, thought of himself as the reserved scholarly type more interested in editing his rakish mother's rakish memoirs than anything else, but in truth he liked a battle. Or anyway, a bit of a skirmish. Wouldn't have become a policeman else, would he?
Well, he had had one big battle but not with her, and won it. His management of his Police Force in the Second City of London had come in for criticism on various groundsânot of inefficiency, it was agreed that he was very competent, but because with some people he was too friendly and with others too remote.
And then there was his relationship with her (well, that had sorted itself out) and his connection with his highly successful sibling Letty Bingham, property tycoon and owner of St Luke's Theatre Complex which contributed handsomely to Stella Pinero's income.
Or had done. This recession was biting sharply into Letty and so into Stella. It had taken a year or two for the slump to hit the theatre but it had done so now.
Property developers were not popular in the Docklands of the Second City where they had erected great office blocks and compounds of luxury flats which the local population resented. This had counted in the whispering campaign against John Coffin, but he had faced up to it, and
also to the overt criticism of his Police Committee, and he had won.
But it had not made for an easy first year of marriage.
I was sensible to keep on my own flat, Stella decided. If the Queen can have a separate bedroom, then I can have a separate flat. Somewhere to hide when things got too hot. Also, she was performing this season in St Luke's herself as well as producing two plays and she liked to have her friends in after a performance or after a particularly gruesome rehearsal and her friends did not always fit in well with the murder and mayhem that was part of her husband's life.
They loved it, of course, but she found their questions difficult.
She lived in St Luke's Mansions which had been converted from the tower of an old Victorian church which had fallen into disuse. The St Luke's Theatre Complex was adjacent. The main theatre in the round was in the old church itself while a theatre workshop had been built across a small courtyard.
I am attractive, she told herself, and I am a well known, if not exactly a famous, actress. Which is why that man watches me.
Hangs around, follows me, watches me.
Like all actresses, she had had followers, men who called with flowers, met her at the stage door, wrote little notes. It was part of theatrical tradition, the Stage Door Johnny. She had liked it, even found some of the men attractive; she was no prude.
But this was different.
She went to her window to look out. The dark-coated figure was not to be seen but he was probably there. She never got a good look at his face because he wore a hat which he pulled low, and dark spectacles.
Not a pleasing sight.
So that's it, she said to her reflection. I'm a
femme fatale.
The
fatale
bit did not please her.
She could tell her husband who would certainly act.
What was the point of being married to a policeman if you could not call upon him when you were alarmed.
She was alarmed.
John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Second City Police Force, looked out of his window in his office. He got a better view from the sitting-room of the tower in St Luke's Mansions, where he lived, sometimes with Stella and sometimes without her, but his view had improved since one tower block of council flats had been knocked down before it fell down so that he got a distant view of the river. He enjoyed looking out â¦
It was something he did quite often. Partly because it gave him pleasure to look down on this London which he loved (although he would not have admitted to the feeling) and partly because (and again would he have admitted it?) he liked to keep an eye on it.
It was a rough world down there and famously criminous. New wealth had not changed old ways. There were groups of streets where Victorian Peelers had refused to go except in pairs; there were still streets in which constables on the beat liked to feel they had good back-up. But he did not allow NO GO areas. Everywhere was policed.
It was the Queen's Peace he was responsible for keeping and he trusted she was grateful. Whispers had come to him about the next Honours List, so he supposed she was. He already had the Queen's Police Medal, awarded when he took up his present position.
If he did get an honour it would be a surprise since he had had several close brushes with his local MP and the Police Committee. The fact that they then passed what amounted to a vote of confidence in him did not mean they loved him the better.
Within his authority he had the old boroughs of Spinnergate, Leathergate, Swinehouse, and East Hythe, whose very place names testified to their antiquity. The Vikings had got as far as these four Anglo-Saxon settlements in their ravages up the Thames, the Norman warlords had swept in replacing the old English landowners, but the
indigenous population had survived and their descendants, spiced with immigrants from every land within the old Empire, were there now, tough, wily and ready to cause trouble. They had never been particularly law-abiding and recent events had done nothing to change their mind. New money had poured into the district in the last decade turning old warehouses and dockside buildings into offices and luxury apartments, and the old poor still in their terrace houses or council housing were resentful. Ill-feeling had turned to wicked mirth as the new rich became victims of the recession.