Coffin in the Black Museum. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ army swept in and ravaged the town? Slighting a castle, wasn’t it called? St Luke’s had come near to slighting itself.

      St Luke’s, an old City church, in an area not far from the Tower of London, nor far from the maze of streets where Jack the Ripper had operated, had been in a bad way, the congregation long since diminished and the roof never quite patched up from bomb damage.

      Where he lived was going to be called St Luke’s Mansions (although it still looked unmistakably like a church with a bell tower and a tiny paved yard), a set of luxury apartments, but until the Post Office got round to making this clear to everyone, if you wanted your letters and visitors it was best to say you lived in St Luke’s. The locals knew what you meant and it was good for outsiders to get a surprise.

      When his sister Letty had told him that she had bought a church, Coffin had been surprised himself.

      ‘I’ve bought you a church,’ she had said.

      ‘Oh, thanks.’

      ‘And you’re going to live in it.’

      ‘Thanks again.’

      ‘But it’s going to be a theatre.’

      This time no thanks sprang to his lips. He was silenced. His sister Lætitia Bingham never failed to surprise him, she was a lady of such enterprise and style. All he could do was listen. If Letty said he was about to live in a church which would also be a theatre, then it was what would happen. She had a way of making the impossible possible.

      ‘Specializing in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. It’ll be a very small theatre. The smallest ever, I should think.’ An uncharacteristic piece of exaggeration on her part. Lætitia was a lawyer and not a girl to overstate things, but it showed how moved she was by what she had done. ‘It’s a listed building, so the façade will be preserved, but inside will be three apartments and, of course, the theatre and a small theatre workshop.’

      ‘Also the smallest ever?’

      Lætitia was his much younger half-sister (same mother, different father), and she had been educated partly in England and partly in America where she had married. Twice so far, but Coffin always feared thrice. Her present husband was a rich business man with ‘interests’, as people say, in the City of London. Letty’s own earned income (she was a lawyer, specializing in international law), was not negligible.

      ‘I feel I am investing in my inheritance.’ Letty had a young daughter and this was how it was taking her. ‘I am protecting a bit of England.’ She had come back to England to live after a long spell living in New York. The accident of birth which had separated her from her half-brother had given her dual nationality. She had made it work for her.

      ‘I hope England will be grateful.’ England so often wasn’t. And I am to be built into it like a brick. Or damn it, perhaps she’s protecting me too.

      ‘And besides, Lizzie thinks she might like to be an actress.’ Lizzie was her daughter, all of six years old, but a determined character as young girls so often are.

      ‘So you are protecting her too?’

      ‘A theatre in the family is a start.’

      ‘And who is going to manage this theatre until Lizzie is old enough to take it on?’ For a moment he had a serious worry that Letty might have cast him for this part also.

      ‘I shall get a professional, of course,’ she said loftily. ‘There are plenty.’

      The district had once been slummy, a fine place for murder, but was becoming smarter and more fashionable by the day, as the old houses were restored by prudent City gentlemen with an eye on property values. It was so close to the financial heartlands. You could walk to the Bank of England and the Mansion House if your Porsche was in trouble, and you had the energy. Or jog or cycle, that was even smarter.

      Coffin moved in as soon as his apartment was ready, even before the plaster was dry, he was desperate for somewhere to live close to his new department. As Letty had known. Cunning creature, he thought, used to being manipulated by her and by his niece.

      There were to be three apartments. One in the church tower, one in the old vestry, and a third in a side chapel dedicated to St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. The rest of the church would be turned into the theatre. All the apartments were small but luxurious and on one floor, with the exception of Coffin’s which was on three. He had the tower to himself. Of the other two flats one was complete but empty, and the third still finishing.

      The theatre was as yet still a plan on the architect’s drawing-board, but the Theatre Workshop, which was an easier project since it was in the former Church Hall, donated by parishioners in the year of the Great Exhibition of 1851, was about to light up. John Coffin was beginning to know the faces of the actors. The woman producer he already knew, had known her for years, but at the moment the game she was playing was not to know him. Stella Pinero, a talented and ambitious actress. This was her first effort at producing.

      He was a tall, slender man with broad shoulders and more muscle than appeared. Bright blue eyes, a lightly tanned skin and a neatly greying head of hair, made him better-looking now than he had been in youth. Attractive he had always been.

      He was aware that he was thinner than he had been, thinner than he should be perhaps. He had been slow to recover from a stab wound accompanied by great loss of blood, the culmination of an earlier case. He was finding too that promotion, success, could be as gruelling as failure and as time-consuming.

      He had changed home several times in the last decade; he hoped this was the last move. He liked where he was now, about the best place he had ever had, greatly to his taste. Letty had done him a good turn. From his top window he could see the Tower of London, the glint of sun on the dome of St Paul’s, and smell the River Thames when the wind was right. He liked to be near the river, it seemed his natural companion.

      He had recently received great promotion. The Development Board had created a new force to police the newly revived area of Docklands, Thameswater, known as the Second City. His Force was independent of the Met and the City of London police. He was its Head. A reward for good work in a difficult South London district.

      He took another look out of the window. What was going on down there in the street? The window was narrow, so he had to incline his head at an angle to see. The group had swelled by one member who looked like a street cleaner. He was waving his arms. Nothing to do with me, he seemed to be saying.

      John Coffin turned back into his sitting-room. He chose to have his main living-room up here on the third floor where the light was better and he could look across the London roofs and tree-tops. He always liked to be high. Something psychological, no doubt, which he could not account for at the moment but going back into his past. Underneath him on the floor below was his kitchen and bathroom. He slept on what might be called the ground floor but it had a subterranean feel to it because of the thickness of the walls and the narrow windows through which not much sunlight filtered through. The local preservation society had not allowed any tinkering with the windows in the tower, but a great curve of glass by which his sitting-room was lit had been allowed on the roof behind the crenellations. Both the architect and the builder who had worked on it were local men who had known the church all their lives and respected it. Letty had chosen them with skill, knowing what she wanted and trusting them to get it for her.

      When Ted Lupus, who was the builder (Edward Lupus, Builder, Pavlov Street, Leathergate, London), found his estimates had been accepted and he had a chance to meet Lætitia СКАЧАТЬ