Coffin Knows the Answer

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Authors: Gwendoline Butler

BOOK: Coffin Knows the Answer
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‘What would you call the worst crime in the world?'
Coffin looked towards DCI Phoebe Astley who was studying some notes from a file on his desk. They dealt with a fraud case she had just completed.
They were old friends, Phoebe enjoyed working with him. Coffin was the most stable element in her life which sometimes felt more like a two-way escalator, down and up shifting with speed.
‘Oh, I don't know,' said Phoebe absently. ‘Kicking your old grandmother down the stairs. Torching her cat. Gassing a million …' She stopped because the Chief Commander had pushed a photograph in front of her.
‘Oh my God.'
‘Yes. Six months old.' Under his breath, he muttered something she did not catch. He pushed another photograph towards her. ‘He was three years and a bit.'
Phoebe looked sick. In her time as a police officer she had seen plenty of horrors, but children, babies, still hit her hardest. Yes, this was the worst of crimes. One for which she would be willing to kill the perp or perps. That was the other horror, it was a group thing. They needed an audience for their crime.
Coffin flipped another set of pictures towards her. She looked at the photographs on the Chief Commander's desk. The perps needed a record as well, pictures to look at in the bedroom or bathroom at home.
Phoebe looked across to Coffin, now Sir John Coffin, Chief Commander of Police in the Second City of London. He looked tired. She felt tired herself, engaged as she had been in a long investigation now ended with a satisfactory result. Three people committed for trial for fraud and murder. Women too. Women were getting more violent, no doubt about it.
She felt violent herself as she studied the photographs of abused and violated infants.
Then Coffin looked at her and smiled. At once she felt less weary.
‘It's good work you've done on the Wantage fraud case, Phoebe,' he said. ‘But I may be asking you to take on this paedophile business … '
‘Who else is working on it?'
‘Joe Jones and Mercy Adams, but Joe has just been diagnosed with leukaemia and I think that is going to take all his energies for a bit. And apparently Mercy is worried she might be pregnant.'
‘Oh.' Phoebe was disconcerted. Joe was a good worker, sometimes tricky to handle, but clever. She had heard that he had come close to a breakdown. She didn't know exactly what that meant but he had sounded pretty rocky. As for Mercy, well she was a widow or divorced so who was the father? (If she
was
pregnant … she had had worries before). Was it that young doctor she was so keen on?
‘The word is he is going to be all right,' Coffin continued, ‘but he needs help.'
What sort of help, Phoebe wondered. ‘How will it be if I go to see him? Has anyone else been?'
‘Mercy went, of course, she says that his wife has set up a strong protective shield.'
A strong lady, tall and muscular, as Phoebe remembered her, and not much liked by Mercy who was small-boned and pretty. Josephine Jones was handsome but not pretty. She worked in the local hospital, so was well placed to watch over her husband.
Would Mercy mind Phoebe taking over? The answer was certainly yes, but she would have to put up with it. You did not argue with John Coffin in certain moods. Not unless you were his wife, Stella.
‘It's all right,' said Coffin, as if he had guessed what she was thinking ‘Mercy will co-operate, I've had a word with
her, she wants this business cleared up as much as I do.' He put his hands together, staring at them, assessing the fact that two fingernails were broken. ‘She's known for some time that Joe was not working at speed.'
‘If you think I can do it.' So now she knew why she had been called into his office, given a cup of coffee and left to think about life while he studied the file of papers and photographs. She could see envelopes and handwritten letters inside.
‘Of course you can. You will, you must.'
Thanks for the vote of confidence, she thought. If that was what it was. Am I about to be pushed into something I cannot control?
Coffin read her expression. ‘No, nothing like that. I wouldn't drop you into anything.'
John Coffin and Phoebe Astley had known each other for a long time, way back to the days when Phoebe worked in Birmingham before being recruited to the Second City with advanced promotion. She had come because she wanted the promotion and liked the Chief Commander. Their relationship went back to the time which Phoebe called The Days Before Stella. Not quite true because Stella went back a long way in the Chief Commander's life, even if they had been apart for a considerable time. He loved her, though. No doubt about it. Phoebe, not without her own experiences of the tender passions, did not begrudge the Chief Commander what he had found in Stella.
A few of the team that Coffin had carefully gathered around him in the beginning to police the Second City had won promotion and moved. Archie Young was one, and now commanded his own Police Force. Paul Masters, a much younger man, remained still close to the Chief Commander, and then there was Phoebe herself.
‘Those first photographs I showed you were not taken by the police team. Not part of this investigation.'
Phoebe nodded.
‘No, they came in the post in a plain envelope to the CID office. You could say they started the inquiry. Others followed.'
‘Someone must have wanted you to start looking.'
Coffin was silent.
‘The second set of photographs I showed you did not come to CID. They came straight to my home.'
‘To you there?' Phoebe was questioning. ‘I guess they wanted to be sure you got them.'
‘Oh no … they were addressed to Stella. And before you say that was a compliment, it was not.' He tossed more of the photographs towards Phoebe. ‘They were not well meant, Stella was meant to feel pain …This is a Stalker, with a paedophile slant.'
His voice set the word Stalker in capital letters.
‘Do you think that this stalker is the paedophile?' Phoebe pressed.
‘There is a difference in style between these letters and the Stalker,' admitted Coffin.‘I sense this but I am not sure if Mercy does'. He added gloomily, ‘Two criminals then and not just one'
Phoebe Astley took up the photographs. ‘But Stella …' she said incredulously. ‘Why Stella, everyone loves Stella?'
Coffin shook his head. ‘I'd like to think so but apparently not. May be nothing personal, may be a way of getting at me.'
‘Who else is on it besides Joe and Mercy?'
‘All there in the file …Ellen Gower is one. You know her.'
Phoebe nodded. Yes, and she liked Ellen, they had worked together before.
Phoebe had been going to take a few days' leave, get her hair done and visit her mother, but she was not going to refuse to take on the job, you did not say No to the Chief Commander who, for all his politeness and quite genuine kindness of heart, was tough.
Another factor: she had been Chief Inspector for a few years and she was looking for promotion.
Not much time to consider, it had to be Yes or No, and it wasn't going to be No. She was conscious of the inquisitive presence of Paul Masters in the other office. She had sometimes had the wry suspicion that he had some sort of listening device because he always seemed to know everything. But probably it was just that he had the Chief Commander's diary and put two and two together.
‘Right,' she said.
‘Take a few days off to make yourself familiar with the stuff Joe and Mercy have got.'
So she could get her hair done after all. Perhaps he'd looked at it too and thought it needed help. Having a wife like Stella Pinero would certainly give you skill in assessing a woman's grooming. Without thinking, she ran her hand over her hair.
‘I might just have a word with Mercy first.' Tactful thing to do, it was possible that Mercy did not mind Phoebe's entrance into the case, but more than likely she would. ‘Ask about Joe.'
‘She knows you're coming,' said the Chief Commander.
‘Yes, sure.' She knew, and he knew, that there would certainly be bits of information, speculation and informed guesses that had not got through to the written record in the files and that she would have to tease out of Mercy like a knot in the hair (there it was, hair again!) just as Mercy allowed. Some interesting thoughts were now in hospital with Joe. That was the worst of coming into a team late.
‘Does Mercy know about these photographs sent to your wife?'
‘No,' said Coffin sharply. ‘You're the first. Stella doesn't know herself, and I'm trusting that I will not have to tell her. Not until she gets back. She's away for the next week filming a TV play in Scotland.'
He stood up to look out of the window. Distantly, he could see the belt of tall trees which hid the bit of unused land where Stella was about to build a tiny new theatre for students. (She would also rent it out, thus raising money). From his office he could see the roof of the theatre where Stella worked. She had created that theatre in the old church of St Luke's - he thought of it as Stella's theatre. They had made their home in the old tower of the church. An eccentric and expensive home but now very attractive and much loved by both Stella and Coffin. Their own too, not a police house, where they lived with the cat and the dog. The dog was with him now, lying on his feet, while the cat was probably out hunting. There was a tiny, disused old cemetery, long since transformed, across the road from St Luke's Tower where mice, squirrels and other wild animals were the cat's prey. A new building was going up next to the theatre complex, it was going to be rehearsal rooms because Stella was developing activities. So far only the foundations were being opened up, he could see the mud and the stones. He guessed the cat would enjoy excavating down there too.
As he thought about the cat, so mild and gentle at home, hunter and killer outside, he remembered his other worry.
It looked as though they had a serial killer in the Second City. Once again he considered the possibility that there was more than one nasty criminal on his territory.
He turned to Phoebe and said ‘She's already miserable about the two dead girls. She knew one of them: Amy Buckly, she was the one found by the canal …The other girl, Mary Rice was found near the railway station.'
Raped and strangled.
‘I've heard that a third girl has been found dead.' Superintendent Miller and Inspector Winnie Ardet were running the case. Winnie was a friend, Jack Miller was not. But that did not matter, it was sometimes better not to be a friend in this job. Coffin was remembering uneasily a promise he
had once made Jack Miller, for reasons he could not now remember, something to the effect that if Jack was ever in any trouble, he could count on Coffin.
Winnie Ardet had been working with a colleague on another nasty crime. Same method and killing, the same sexual assault.
Coffin nodded. ‘No doubt about it. We've got a serial killer in the Second City.'
‘Not the first.'
‘No, there was a local who went berserk and did a run of killings not long after I took over, but I don't think he was a true serial killer, he killed friends and relations. He was soon caught. He'd almost run out of likely victims.'
Phoebe was never quite sure whether to laugh or not at one of Coffin's wry jokes. This time she decided not to.
‘Winnie was talking to me about it earlier. She thinks this one is coming on strong.'
‘Winnie may be right,' he said dourly.
No jokes today, Phoebe said to herself. The paedophile and the serial killer are really getting to him and who can blame him?
And he is missing Stella. Phoebe had known the Chief Commander long enough to notice undertones in his voice when they were there. He could probably do the same for her. Almost certainly he knew that she didn't fancy the paedophile ring investigation, and he also knew that for this very reason she would put her back into it.
‘I'll get along to talk to Mercy and go through the files and whatever she's got on the computer.'
And since the Chief Commander had suggested she take a little time off, she would get her hair cut and washed. However, she knew from experience that his idea of time off was a cup of coffee in the canteen and then back to the job. So she would have to go canny.
The dog, old Gus, shifted position under the Chief Commander's desk, then came out looking sleepy. Gus was
an elderly pekinese, not in very good health (heart pills after a heart transplant, something for his kidneys and the odd painkiller for his rheumatism), but still enjoying life. He had survived the much-loved cat, enjoying a period of autonomy and peace before the arrival of a new cat. Because the new creature had large, appealing eyes, Stella had decided it was a female, to be named something soft and gentle like Angel or Honey. When taken to the vet for her immunisation, worming and anti-flea injections, however, the vet had gently pointed out that Angel was in fact a well-endowed male. An emasculating snip or two had been performed so that Angel had returned home as a tom. He was now a large cat who may have lost some of his sexual drive but none of his aggression or sharpness.

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