Coffin and the Paper Man. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ attracted to the law in one way and another, so there had to be something in ancestry after all.

      Their elusive mother who had bred them all, choosing her mates eclectically, was dead, but her presence lingered on in the shape of some amazing diaries that Letty Bingham declared should be published.

      Over my dead body, Coffin thought. A certain theatrical-ism hung over Mother’s memoirs and this quality had rubbed off on Letty (possibly all lawyers had it), who was now engaged in turning a piece of property, an old church owned by her husband in the New City, into a theatre and a theatre workshop.

      The workshop was in operation, the theatre was still on the planning board, but the luxury flats which were meant to help pay the way of the theatre were complete and occupied.

      John Coffin lived in one, and although he had flinched at the cost of his apartment in the tower of old St Luke’s Church, he now enjoyed living there very much. He liked looking down from his high window on the world below where he must keep the Queen’s Peace.

      There were two other tenants, one of whom, the actress Stella Pinero, he knew very well, and the other, recently moved in, he had not yet met. A man, so he was told. An art dealer, rumour had it, who had bought the Lead Works Art Gallery. Or was it his friend who had bought the flat, Sir Harry Beauchamp? Rumour and invention were still working on the story.

      Letty had made money on all that enterprise, but she was now much preoccupied with creating her theatre, which was why she had telephoned.

      ‘I want to call it the Ellen Terry. What do you think of that? We must get the name settled soon because of the publicity.’ Letty always thought about the publicity, good or bad. Any was better than none, she believed.

      ‘Have you asked Stella? She usually has good ideas.’

      ‘I think Stella is more worried about the lavatories at the moment,’ said Letty tartly. ‘She’s always so practical.’

      Stella Pinero, that distinguished actress, had accepted the appointment as resident director of the Theatre Workshop, with the implied assumption that she would continue with the main theatre when built. Times away for other work in TV and films and the other companies had been carefully negotiated, and she had just finished a six months’ stint on the West End stage in a long-running comedy and was back to appear in the Workshop Theatre, richer and ready for a change.

      ‘I’ve got to live,’ she had pointed out to Letty, ‘and what you pay wouldn’t keep a cat alive.’ She had a cat, as it happened, or a half share, as Tiddles lived part-time with John Coffin.

      ‘I thought it was security that worried her.’ Letty Bingham’s enterprise in converting the disused St Luke’s Church into several luxury apartments, together with a Theatre Workshop and the planned main theatre, was popular in the district as bringing lustre on the neighbourhood, but lately a certain Them and Us attitude had marred the good will.

      Stella had not liked having GO HOME YUPPIE painted all over her posters for her last production, The Birthday Party, and a load of rubbish deposited outside the stage door. Nor having one of her cast beaten up on his way home.

      ‘That too, but she feels happier now she’s got Bovvy End on her team as assistant director; he’s so huge she feels he ought to be able to protect them against most things.’

      Though you can’t be protected against everything, thought Coffin, his mind going back to the latest murder in Leathergate.

      ‘Anyway, I am flying back tonight,’ said Letty. ‘That’s why I am telephoning. How are you getting on with Mother?’

      ‘I’ve read most of her production. Her handwriting is terrible, though. Slows me down.’

      ‘I suppose she did mean it as truth? Has it occurred to you it might be a work of fiction?’

      ‘I think she was a bit of a liar, our mother, if that’s what you mean.’

      A liar and an escape artist as well: she had produced three children by three separate fathers and managed to abandon them all.

      ‘There’s a very interesting murder going on here,’ ended Letty conversationally. ‘A girl’s head in a bathtub, and bits of her turning up everywhere. They’re looking for her feet now. I declare I’ll be glad to be back in London.’

      We have our murders too, thought Coffin, as Letty’s presence (he could nearly always see Letty when they spoke, she seemed able to project herself visually) in his room melted back across the Atlantic. And I’m looking for a shoe.

      Since he had to speak to DI Young on other business (they were both on a committee setting up an under-fifteen football club in the old Brush Lane ground down by Beowulf Dock), he was able to ask: ‘And have you found the other silver shoe?’

      ‘Not as yet. But we will.’ DI Young sounded confident. As he always did. He had decided early on in his career that this was the right way to appear and so far had seen no reason to change his attitude. At home was different: his wife was smarter than he was, better educated and was climbing up the career ladder (she too was a police officer) faster than he was. At home he was more cautious.

      Coffin nodded. ‘Let me know. I’ll be interested.’

      ‘Right, sir.’ Cheerful as ever, Archie Young had added: ‘We’ll soon have the whole thing wound up. Several interesting leads. A witness who saw a man near her. A woman who heard her call out. Didn’t do anything, of course, but heard her. That gives us time. And then there’s what she said herself.’

      Get the man who killed me.

      Yes, that was interesting. But how did it help?

      ‘We know it was a man, anyway,’ he said to Young.

      ‘It means she didn’t know him.’

      He was pleased with himself. Got the old man there, he thought.

      But John Coffin, as he put the receiver down, picked up his briefcase, and patted the cat, thought: I wonder. I wouldn’t count on anything. Long experience had taught him, what was it, canniness?

      Archie Young was sharp enough to pick up the implications of his boss’s voice. ‘I have the names of her friends from A to Z,’ he said to the well-filtered air of his office.

      Behind the big new police station which was the Force Headquarters and which had been designed by a neo-modernist architect so that it looked like a Venetian Gothic castle in red brick (but was bullet-proof and fireproofed and so air-conditioned that not one natural breath could be drawn in it) was what had once been the choicest area of Leathergate in which to live. The street where the few professionals like the doctor and the solicitor and the undertaker had made their homes. It was still a nice district and a few of the old families clung on.

      Feather Street curved down a gentle slope and up the other side until it looked down on the railway embankment, solid Victorian houses with large gardens which backed on to each other so that cats, dogs and even humans could pass freely between them. At the bottom of the hill were a few shops such as a dairy, and a baker’s and a shop renting videos out.

      Here still lived Dr Leonard Zeman, his wife Felicity, who was a pediatrician, and his son Tim, who was an architectural student at the Poly. Across the way was the house of his widowed mother and her unmarried niece. The Zeman СКАЧАТЬ