Coffin’s Ghost. Gwendoline Butler

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      But the two had met at a civic dinner and become friends over the whisky and the port.

      ‘That’s what my lodgers always say. As if I fancied to keep them. I don’t make favourites, you know. Move ‘em on as soon as I can.’

      ‘I know that.’

      Albie was ready for a grumble. ‘You have the easy side, all you have to do is catch ‘em. I have to live with them.

      ‘The average age of my lot is getting younger and younger. They’ll be bringing their nappies with them soon.’

      “They know you keep a well-run establishment,’ said Coffin. Indeed, Touchey managed to run a humane and orderly prison at Sisley Green.

      ‘Touch and go, touch and go.’

      They chatted for a while.

      ‘A friend of yours looked in on us while you were in hospital,’ Albie said conversationally. ‘Georgie Freedom.’

      ‘No friend of mine.’ Stella’s, perhaps. ‘Surprised you let him in. Or out.’

      ‘Felt like keeping him there but he said. No, he was taking a tour because of a TV series he was planning.’ In fact. Freedom had been inside for a bit while being questioned and was now out pending an appeal.

      ‘Think of him as a toad,’ said Coffin. ‘We’ll step on him and squeeze him in the end.’

      They both knew secrets about each other, small things, nothing much, the sort of thing men say to each other as they drink. Women don’t do this sort of confessing, they only pass on what they want known.

      And the governor knew one big secret.

      ‘Love to Stella,’ said Albie, signing off. ‘I’m going to ask her to put on a Christmas show for the lads.’

      I’m sure she will.’

      ‘A great girl, you’re lucky there.’

      ‘I know it,’ said Coffin.

      He was sitting opposite her now in their tower sitting room, where the windows were wide open to catch what there was of moving air. There were windows on both sides, since this had once been a church tower in a church where symmetry was all, thus a smart breeze swept through the room.

      There must be a window open on the staircase somewhere. That reminded him of a question.

      ‘Who was the man just exiting with a vacuum cleaner when I came in? Was it our vacuum cleaner, by the way?’

      ‘Oh, that was Arthur. No, his machine. He cleans for me now.’

      ‘What happened to that nice girl? Gill, wasn’t it? She took over after good old Mrs James retired.’

      ‘Oh, she is having a baby. She only took the job because she wants to be an actress and she thought she would get nearer to me, and when that didn’t happen she decided to have a baby instead.’

      ‘Oh.’ Coffin hoped the baby would be pleased to be the stand-in for a broom.

      ‘Arthur and Dave, they have a house-cleaning firm.’

      ‘Ah.’ Coffin nodded. ‘So Dave was the middle-aged chap in the van outside. I wondered who he was. Why is his face all dirty and dusty?’

      ‘Hiding behind it,’ said Stella lightly.

      ‘A handsome chap when you get a look, with those grooves down the side of his nose. Compelling.’

      Arthur and Dave had said much the same about their employer as they packed themselves and the brooms into the van marked ‘House Men’.

      ‘So that’s the Chief Commander,’ Dave had said. ‘Not a bad-looking chap.’

      ‘Yes, I could fancy him myself.’ Arthur made no secret of his broad band of tastes. ‘But no go – I know others who have tried.’ He’d started the van and they had driven off.

      ‘Where do they come from?’ demanded Coffin.

      ‘All checked with your security outfit,’ said Stella. ‘Genuine firm, no bombs. That pair are out-of-work actors, resting anyway, and probably hope I might put a part their way. Arthur has had one or two small parts and Dave’s done some walk-ons.’

      ‘Where do they live?’ Security was tight round the Chief Commander’s household.

      ‘Arthur lives in a converted factory across the river in Greenwich with a gang of mates and Dave lives over a café called Stormy Weather.’

      Coffin grunted: he knew of the Stormy Weather eating place, which was in a bad part of the town and had a reputation to equal it. It had started out as a simple eating place, then become a hamburger bar and now proclaimed it did the best steaks in town. What Coffin knew was that it smelt of frying fat, cigarette smoke with a hint of something darker but no one had ever caught Jim Billson, the proprietor (he probably didn’t own it, he was reputed to have someone behind him) with any illegal substances. The woman who ran it was, according to Mimsie Marker, the fattest woman in the Second City, and the cook the most drunken. Coffin knew that every so often the Public Health crew, with a drugs man secretly with them, swept in and went over the place, but so far, it had been clean. Cleaner than expected.

      ‘He hasn’t been with Arthur too long … Arthur started it up with a mate who died.’ She frowned. ‘Cancer … it may have been AIDS-related,’ she added reluctantly. ‘Dave came in after that. They met in the theatre.’

      Coffin grunted again.

      ‘Anyway, it was too much for Gilly. This is a difficult house to clean. All staircase. Like a lighthouse.’

      Coffin was hurt. He liked his house. ‘You ought to have been brought up in a basement like I was.’

      He was not showing it, since that would not have been tactful, but he was sympathizing with Stella in her workless state. The Stella Pinero Theatre Complex, in the body of the old St Luke’s Church, which she had founded – and which now included a much smaller experimental theatre and a theatre workshop – was leased out to three companies. The main theatre housed a commercial production of Guys and Dolls which was proving very successful and would be occupying the theatre for another two months, through the summer, while the Theatre Workshop was being used by the University of Spinnergate for its Drama Department.

      I told her that she ought to keep at least one of the theatres in her own hands, thought Coffin, studying his loved one’s face, but she was pushed on by Letty who always had her eye on the money bags. And I think Letty was having a money crisis herself at the time, although that is not the sort of information Letty tells you. Laetitia Bingham was his own half-sister, banker and investment panjandrum. But panjandrums have their ups and downs and Letty had suffered with the collapse of the eastern Tiger economies. She was over it now, thank goodness, since an impoverished Letty did not bear thinking about. It was time the iron hand of Letty let one of the theatres go free so that Stella could work. It was her world, after all.

      He looked with even СКАЧАТЬ