Cracking Open a Coffin. Gwendoline Butler

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      He sipped his coffee and looked at Philippa, whom he liked and admired and somewhat feared: she seemed capable of everything, and had once persuaded him to take part in a play production. But he would have nothing to do with singing. Not even as a goblin.

      His mind moved back to his own purely personal and private problem. Several weeks ago he had had a telephone call. A man who did not announce himself.

      The call came through in the early morning, at home, in his sitting-room, which outraged him even more. This place was his sanctuary, his refuge.

      ‘Copper, watch your back. They’re gunning for you. Better get your answers ready.’

      It was repeated several times.

      ‘Copper, watch your back. Watch your back. Watch your back.’

      He had slammed the telephone down without answering it, shrugged and gone back to drinking his coffee. Not exactly forgotten it, but taking not much notice of it, either. He was used to the odd mad call.

      A week later to the very day, to the hour almost, came another call. Someone who knows when I drink my morning coffee, he had thought wryly. Same message, not exactly word for word but close enough.

      Some days later he came to find a message on his answering machine. More of the same. He thought he recognized the slight cough that prefaced the advice.

      But it was different this time.

      ‘This is a message from a friend: tidy up your private life or you will be in trouble. Serious trouble. No joking.’

      He turned the machine back, slowly and carefully.

      The letter came several days later, as he had always supposed it would, and it was now festering inside him like a bad boil.

      His unknown caller had had good information. All this was at the back of his mind while he listened to Philippa.

      Philippa was still going on about singers: ‘Oh, we have to have them, but off stage, that’s the place for them. Where we can’t see them. Just their voices. On stage we would have actors, dancers, who would look right. Singers have the wrong shape. They can’t help it, they need it to produce the voice, but we shouldn’t have to look at them trying to be Tosca or Mimi. Not to mention Siegfried and Brunnhilde.’ Mrs Darbyshire gave a feeling shudder. ‘And the Valkyries … Overweight, all of them. How can you dress them as warriors, I ask you?’

      Coffin looked his sympathy and tried again to shift Bob from his foot. Bob sank deeper down.

      ‘And I’m having such trouble with the students from the university. Such sharp little critics. Must think things through, they say. Just sing, I say.’

      Coffin offered sympathy again. ‘You’ll manage.’ In his experience of the ladies of Feather Street, of whom Philippa was one, they managed all they wanted. Even this production of extracts from The Ring would work out.

      ‘I think it’s university life. They’re spoilt, those kids.’

      ‘They have their troubles,’ he said softly.

      He knew something she didn’t.

      He knew that two students were missing. A boy and a girl. Whether together or otherwise was not yet clear. They had last been seen standing by her car.

      Gone two days. Not long, but in the circumstances, long enough.

      In the new university there were three residential blocks in which the students had rooms. The rooms were tiny, but each had its own bathroom and tiny slip of a kitchen. This was not so much for ease of student living as because in the long vacation there was much lucrative letting for conferences.

      The three blocks were named after benefactors, they were Armitage, Barclay and Gladstone. Each block had its own character, or was thought to have, and which was perhaps self-perpetuating: Barclay was rowdy and thus attracted the drinkers and the rugger players; Gladstone was near the library and the science buildings, so the industrious and the scientists settled there; Armitage was the fashionable and social block, the smartest place to live, and it attracted as well as the party-goers, the drama and music students.

      The missing students had lived in Armitage. Their group of friends there were among the first to be worried by their disappearance.

      In Angela Kirk’s room a small meeting was taking place.

      ‘It’s horrible.’ This was Mick Frost, tall and thin.

      ‘Don’t exaggerate, Mick, we don’t know that anything’s happened.’ Beenie was a year older than Mick and inclined to slow him down.

      ‘We know what’s been happening,’ said Mick. ‘We’ve seen, we’ve known the state she was in even if we haven’t talked about it.’

      ‘It wasn’t easy to talk about it. That sort of thing isn’t easy to talk about, and anyway part of it was us guessing.’

      ‘Pretty clear,’ said Mick. ‘Pretty clear. Sex and violence.’

      Angela said: ‘Don’t talk like that.’

      ‘Mick’s right,’ said Beenie from the floor where she was stretched out. ‘We should have done something … After all, there was Virginia last year.’

      ‘We don’t know about Virginia.’ Angela again.

      ‘I think we do,’ said Mick.

      Beenie shifted uneasily. ‘OK, OK, so let’s do something.’

      ‘I’m frightened,’ said Angela. ‘I don’t want to go that way.’ She was scared and yet excited.

      ‘Oh, come on,’

      ‘No, I tell you, it’s evil, talking like this.’ The word dropped into the room, cold and hard.

      Angela bent her head to let a long fall of shining blonde hair cover her face. She stretched her thin white arms and imagined them with blue bruises and saw herself as victim.

      It can’t happen to me, she thought. If I keep quiet perhaps it will all go away … Beenie’s all right, she’s brown and tall and strong. She crossed her arms across her chest, protecting herself.

      Aloud, against her will, she heard herself say: ‘We owe Amy something. I could go down to Star Court, offer to help.’ It was as if she wanted to be a victim, that was what she had chosen and it would do.

      ‘Don’t let her, Beenie,’ said Mick. ‘Stop her.’

      Beenie shrugged.

      There was silence in the room.

      ‘I’ve got to go,’ said Mick, standing up. ‘I’ve got to audition for some creepy amateur performance of Wagner.’

      ‘Why do you go, then?’ asked Beenie.

      ‘Sucking up to our dear Professor,’ said Mick with a ravishing smile. ‘Also, we get paid, not much but something and if you are aiming at a professional singer’s career СКАЧАТЬ