Coffin’s Ghost. Gwendoline Butler

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      Phoebe shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t care to be shut up in a dark room with him.’ But there were plenty of men you could say that of, although with some it might be a treat. She looked speculatively at the chief superintendent. No, probably not.

      And Freedom had a history of violence behind him. Used to shoot, just for a hobby. But more of that later, Phoebe thought. She never liked men who used guns as a hobby, even though they only shot at paper targets. They had faces and bodies, those targets, and the thought was there, wasn’t it? This reminded her of something else the Chief Commander was not going to like. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard yet about the trouble at the Abbey Road Gun Club?’

      He nodded. ‘I have the report. No more.’

      ‘Two of our men belong. Uniform. A PC and a sergeant, both from Cutts Street.’ Cutts Street was a substation not far from Abbey Road which was near to the tube station. She would like to have said that both the constable, who was known as Loverboy, and the sergeant – Sergeant Will Grimm, known naturally as Death – were on her worry list, but she kept quiet. With Grimm she always wondered if she ought to wear a necklace of garlic. Attractive but horrible. Unluckily, it was something she went for.

      ‘Got a puzzling side to it.’

      ‘Certainly has. Bill Eager, who is the club sec, runs it, really, blames it on the flood they had. I’ve read his statement. Does seem to have done in all the security they should have had.’

      ‘You’d better talk to him yourself. And the two men from Cutts Street. I want those guns back.’

      ‘I’ll see him again. I did go there at once, he was cleaning up the place, he had an outsider cleaning team in there.’ She frowned. ‘Perhaps that wasn’t wise, but he’s a careful chap, is Bill Eager.’ She went on to another of her problems, keen to talk to him because she did not get many chances of easy talk with Archie Young. ‘The Health people are going on about the sale of illegal beef … stuff from beasts slaughtered as suspect of BSE. They think it’s coming from the Second City.’

      Archie Young nodded. ‘We would get the blame.’ He knew it was the sort of investigation that went on and on with everyone lying.

      Phoebe came back to the packages containing severed limbs on the doorstep of the refuge. Not the kind of crime you would ever pin on George Freedom, she thought. If he packaged up a woman’s limbs then they would probably be packed in Hermés bags.

      There was a handbag, as it happened, round the corner, propped up against the wall of the house. Not Hermés, though. And the legs, otherwise bare, had painted toenails. A touching bit of vanity for such battered, bruised legs.

      ‘It’s sex, isn’t it?’ she said to Archie Young. ‘A sexual crime. You don’t chop a woman up like that without there being a sexual involvement.’

      Archie Young nodded, and Phoebe came back to what worried her.

      ‘Surely the fact he lived there for a bit will have been forgotten.’

      ‘It got a bit of publicity at the time; the local news rag, the Docklands Daily, was still running and it had an article about the Chief Commander and the house.

      Pictures. Coffin had obliged with reluctance but knowing that his new force in the new Second City needed all the help it could get. As he had done so lately: Coffin and his actress wife. ‘The love of his life,’ he had allegedly said not so long ago. All in the paper.

      Wrapped in layers of brown paper, the limbs came in two parcels, legs in one, arms in another.

      In blood, a message straggled: J.C. TO REMIND YOU, SIR.

      And underneath, in pencil, not blood: I send it back from me to you, although it was yours before.

      Archie Young was serious. ‘We haven’t spoken of it yet to the woman who runs the refuge. I don’t know what she will make of it. I think she read what seemed to be the message but she is playing it cool. Her name is Mary Arden. And we may be getting it wrong. But I think we have to tell the Chief.’

      ‘Oh sure,’ said Phoebe. ‘And won’t he be pleased.’

      She wondered a little bit what Stella Pinero would make of it. Still, no one really knew what went on in a marriage.

      You are not suggesting, she said to herself, that the Chief Commander knew those limbs intimately in life?

      She caught the chief super’s eye and knew that he was suggesting exactly that to himself.

      Two high-ranking police officers thinking the same thing.

      The governor of Sisley Green Prison was thinking something even worse.

Chapter 2

      There was a police van outside the house in Barrow Street and several police cars parked along the road. Outside the big Victorian house there was an area taped off around the steps and the front door. A police constable stood on duty.

      He looked bored and cold. A colleague who had been examining the ground around the house joined him.

      ‘You knew one of the women here, didn’t you, Ron?’ he asked PC Ryman-Lawson, whose double-barrelled name, itself the subject of jokes, got reduced to Ron.

      ‘Yeah. She worked here.’ Henriette Duval. Long-legged, and very pretty. She had come over to learn and she had certainly learnt it. ‘We went around for a bit. Then she dropped me. Said I was too young and she liked older men better.’

      ‘Not usually that way.’

      ‘I think she meant I didn’t have enough money to spend on her.’

      ‘Ah, that figures. A bit of a goer?’

      Ryman-Lawson did not commit himself. ‘Bloody cold here.’

      ‘What’s become of her?’

      Ryman-Lawson shrugged; the rain was running down his collar. ‘Gone back home, I expect.’

      Barrow Street not being a place to ignore anything exciting was providing an audience even though it was raining and not warm. Barrow Street knew a good thing when it saw one and was making the press welcome also. There was lively expectation of a TV van. You might see your own face on the screen in your own living room.

      ‘Always trouble there,’ pointed out a sturdy woman as she pushed her bike past on the way to work. ‘Trouble House or my name’s not Mona Jackson. Shouldn’t be here in a respectable street. Police, we don’t want them.’

      She achieved a small triumph by running her bike over the toes of an approaching police constable, who leapt back. ‘Watch it, missus.’ He added something under his breath.

      ‘Mrs Jackson to you, sonny,’ and she passed on in splendour. ‘And don’t think I don’t know you, Tad Blenkinsop, and I could report you for that language.’

      Not everyone thought Barrow Street so respectable, and by his expression, he was one of them.

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ