Coffin on Murder Street. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ his window as he stood sipping his chocolate, hand on the telephone, he could see the police station. He knew some of the faces over there and a very decent set they were.

      ‘Gus dear, there you are. Did I wake you up?’ He didn’t name himself. If Gus Hamilton did not recognize his voice, so much the worse for him. ‘How are you? What about lunch one day? We haven’t talked for a long while. Admired your work.’ Not perhaps you yourself, my dear boy, not your character and your ways, but you are a peerless actor. In the making, anyway, not perhaps Olivier yet. ‘But it’s about Nell. Yes, our Nell. Your Nell, my Nell.’

      Gus could be heard muttering something.

      ‘All right, as you wish, not your Nell. But the child? The picture I have just seen in the paper of Nell, clutching a largish infant. How did that come about?’

      Gus muttered that it was nothing to do with him. Very likely not, thought Ellice, won’t disagree with you on that, but babies are not produced by a kind of spontaneous conception whatever your views on virgin birth. Two parties are required, even if one is represented in a test tube. Not that he thought that was how it had been with Nell Casey. No, indeed.

      ‘She has said nothing about it. Kept very quiet. A mistake.’ Every woman was entitled to one mistake, but Nell had made more than her share in his opinion.

      The explosion of anger that Gus delivered over the telephone surprised him.

      He had meant to get some information from Gus, not to call up a storm.

      Ellice began to put the telephone down, not having, as he had intended, asked Gus to lunch. He would invent some other treat for that young man.

      He had not, of course, been quite truthful in what he said to Gus. With his excellent intelligence system he had picked up news about the child. She had not exactly kept quiet about it, but not spread the word either. Her own business, she had implied.

      But what he had not expected was to see such a large, handsome and healthy child. Somehow a frail, delicate little creature would have been more suitable for Nell.

      Nor had he expected to see Nell looking down at the boy with such evident love.

      Sad, he thought. Very sad. Oh Gus, oh Nell, what a pair of star-crossed lovers you have been. It’s a tragedy. Shakespeare, Euripides, Racine. On that scale.

      A new voice took over on the telephone. ‘What have you done to Gus? He’s in a terrible state.’ The girl Gus currently shared his flat with, a singer. Ellice knew all the gossip.

      ‘You ought to watch over that young man,’ he said seriously. ‘He’s dangerous.’

      The voice went on at him again.

      ‘I know, dear,’ said Ellice, ‘I know you say Gus is a very private person.’ Whatever that meant, not a bright girl, this one, just lovely long legs and a way of picking up clichés. ‘But we don’t want any of this Here we go and Vengeance is mine says the Lord and I am his instrument, do we?’

      Like John Coffin, he too smelt trouble. He was tired now, but he was glad he had looked in at Stella Pinero’s outfit that night, always nice to see Stella. Not a great talent but a real pro.

CHAPTER 3

       Still on March 5

      There was a special scent for trouble, Coffin thought. Somewhere between sour smoke and vinegar. The exact smell varied according to the quality of the trouble. The very worst of trouble took your breath away, it was so sharp, so acrid. He had smelt it once or twice in his life and hoped never to smell it again.

      It wasn’t the sort of thing you mentioned, especially if you were a senior police officer, because other people might not smell it. Possibly did not. But everyone had something, he guessed, some little forerunner of trouble about. To some it might be a pain in their big toe. Or indigestion. Or even just a strong desire to quarrel with their wife. He had no wife himself. He had one once, but that was long since, and she lived now in another country and he bore her no grudge. Hell it had been at the time.

      He walked home to his flat, Stella having eluded him, and considered what trouble Nell Casey could be bringing with her. Gus, certainly, was high on the list. In fact, he might be the trouble.

      Certainly connected with it, he thought, as he put his key in the lock.

      He did this with a certain pleasure. He liked his handsome oak front door, old as the church itself, with a great lock whose brass key weighed down his pocket. He liked his home, of which he was quietly proud, and of himself for owning it. He had paid his sister, who had converted the church, a pretty price for the place, but it was worth it. Up in his tower he felt at peace, and peace was not a thing that came easily in his life. In the course of his career, he had had many homes in different places, some decidedly scruffy. Now he lived in his church tower with a sweeping view of his bit of London.

      He walked up the winding inner staircase, past his kitchen up to his sitting-room on the top. Above him he had the turret and a tiny roof garden where his cat sunned himself among the geraniums and daisies which were all the flowers that Coffin managed to grow. They were, he found, indestructible plants, which even he and the London climate could not destroy.

      Tiddles, the cat who had chosen to live with him and who answered to no name or any according to mood, sidled up to him, suggesting a little snack would be acceptable.

      Coffin liked to say he lived alone, but while he had Tiddles he was never alone. Tiddles, although a quiet animal, had a strong presence. He was not to be ignored, as witness the feeding bowl in the kitchen, the sleeping basket complete with plaid blanket by the window (he rarely inhabited this but a cat liked to have a bit of property), and the supply of his favourite food, minced beef, in the refrigerator.

      ‘Later, boy,’ Coffin said to Tiddles, throwing his coat on a chair. He had decorated this room with his few good bits of furniture, several large bookcases, and his treasured large oriental rug. Letty had ordered him to buy a Chinese rug because she said it matched the ceiling, but he had resisted her advice and bought a Bokhara. On the walls he had three biggish oil paintings which he had bought himself, backing his own taste. You had to be strong with his sister Letty or she bullied you. He loved her, though, and was delighted to have her in his life.

      For so long, he had not known he had a sister, although he had suspected he had a sibling. Then this beautiful, clever, enigmatic sister, Laetitia Bingham, had identified herself. Life had then delivered a bonus in the form of brother William. He did not love William, but he was prepared to like him and he certainly respected him. He suspected that his half-brother was, as they say in Edinburgh, a ‘warm man’, and Coffin who had never made more than his salary had to respect a man who could make money. Willy might be warm but his money was never burnt. William was both canny and cautious and that inheritance must have come from his father’s side of the family, from his mother’s it was impossible. Only in his marriage did William show a streak of that lady, for his wife was flaxen, buxom and extravagant. It was William who had come across his mother’s diary in some old property left for safe keeping with the family that had brought him up, read what she had written with a mixture of shock and amazement at her racy ease, and Letty who had suggested the diary should be published. ‘Not exactly the memoirs of an Edwardian lady but the frank, honest account of a real woman’s life before, during and after the war. That is how we must sell it,’ she had said.

      Frank, СКАЧАТЬ