Cracking Open a Coffin. Gwendoline Butler

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      Stella’s eyes grew round with surprise. ‘She’s Josephine. You don’t know Josephine? You mean you didn’t recognize her? She was the great model of the ’fifties and ’sixties, everyone knew her, her face was on everything.’

      He thought he did recall the name and now he considered it, he could see it explained the way Josephine held herself and moved. ‘So what’s she doing at the Star Court?’

      ‘Oh well, she’s been down, you know, right down, touched the bottom … she had a bad time, drugs, drink, she went through it all, got beaten up herself once or twice.’ Perhaps more often than that, from all Stella had heard. ‘And I think she’s paying back all the help she got herself.’

      ‘So she doesn’t work any more?’

      ‘I don’t know what she lives on,’ said Stella, answering the unasked question. Not much, she feared.

      ‘She’s right, though, we ought to look into the case of the other girl.’

      ‘She’s got a conscience, has Josephine.’

      ‘You’re not suggesting that she had anything to do with it?’

      ‘Of course not. I mean she cares about people.’

      ‘It’s more complicated than she realizes.’ He drew a pattern on the cloth with his spoon. ‘Do they have lads, male students, working at Star Court?’

      ‘Shouldn’t think so, they avoid the male down there and you can understand it. Even the security staff is female.’ Ah yes, Our General, Coffin thought, no doubt supplied by her, wonder how they’d perform as Valkyries. Stella went on: ‘Why? Is a male student missing too?’

      ‘Could be,’ said Coffin. ‘It’s complicated.’ He could tell her that Martin Blackhall was missing, but he decided not to. Stella could be discreet, but not always.

      He meditated the problem: a university and a refuge for battered women, two institutions at opposite ends of the social picture, yet reaching out touching hands to each other. Bloody hands.

      He sat silently for a moment, his own problem sitting on his shoulders. Who knows how long he’d be able to help anyone? Stella looked at him with big, soft eyes. For once she seemed in a sympathetic mood.

      He was badly in need of someone to go to for advice, but unluckily she was the very last person he could ask.

      ‘What’s up?’ said Stella. ‘Feel like more coffee? Or a glass of wine?’

      Yes, definitely in a sympathetic mood, but it was no good.

      ‘Sorry,’ he said to Stella. ‘I’ve got to get back to work.’

      ‘Me too, I have a board meeting: your sister’s trying to cut our money.’ Letty Bingham kept the theatre on a rolling budget. Funds were tight at the moment, the theatre was doing well, but this was a recession, and Letty had other interests, other responsibilities. Stella liked and admired Letty Bingham, a beautiful, well-groomed woman whose clothes and way of life she admired and even envied, but Letty was sharp about money. They had battles; sometimes Letty won and sometimes Stella. No bones broken, but you had to struggle. ‘I have to fight it.’

      ‘You’ll fight.’

      They both stood up. Stella reached down for the dog’s collar. ‘I’ll take Bob.’

      ‘He’s yours.’

      Philippa, hurrying home, after what had been a very satisfactory and heart-warming meeting with Marcus (she called him Marcus and she was Philippa), went into Max’s the Deli on Old Church Street, hard by the theatre and St Luke’s, where she walked into her Brunnhilde.

      Lydia Tullock was buying smoked salmon roulade and a half-bottle of champagne.

      ‘Just bucking myself up. I felt I needed it after what I’d been through.’

      Philippa knew what was required of her, there had been a raid on a shop in Spinnergate Tube station and Lydia had been there. ‘Is that the Spinnergate thing? I heard you saw something.’

      ‘Saw something! I was there, my dear. I was just walking up to buy some tights in that little boutiquey place as you come up the escalator when I heard the noises and saw the assistant trying to fight off a youth, with another boy just coming up to attack.’

      ‘How awful for you. What did you do?’

      ‘Just stood still. One youth pushed past me, that one got away and the other would have done, but he was absolutely fallen upon by the most splendid girl in a kind of leather tracksuit, she hit the second boy and knocked him right down. Skull-cracking,’ said Lydia with some pleasure. ‘Ambulances and bodies all round.’

      ‘It must have been exciting.’ Lydia had all the luck.

      ‘Of course, I was worried for my voice.’ She touched her throat, draped in a silk scarf. A Dufy print in pink and blue, Philippa noted, and therefore probably from Hermès. Lydia always had the best. ‘That’s where the strain always shows. Otherwise, I should have run after our defender and offered her a lift home. But she cleared off … motorbike. Lovely young creature … not beautiful, plain of face, but a marvellous flow of muscles.’ Lydia gave the beaming smile that suited her plump face. ‘I shan’t say I saw her hit him, though, she might get into trouble if he dies, and she was such a creature.’

      Philippa listened: her friends’ sexual inclinations were always a subject of interest to her, but she decided now, possibly with a shade of regret as she herself admitted with shame, that Lydia’s emotion was purely æsthetic.

      ‘I wonder if she can sing?’ she asked, her chorus line of Valkyries being always on her mind.

      ‘Shouldn’t think so, dear,’ said Lydia, ‘but I saw some marvellous soft leather jeans in Bond Street that would just do for Siegfried.’ Except that he was about six feet round the waist. ‘I must take my little snack home. What are you getting, dear, something nice?’

      ‘Pretty nice,’ said Philippa, not willing to admit to an economical choice.

      From the back of the shop, Max called, ‘Here is your vegetarian terrine, Mrs Darbyshire.’

      ‘I thought you’d given that up, Phil,’ said Lydia, clutching her luxuries to her ample bosom. ‘Mustn’t stint on food, you need building up.’

      Philippa ground her teeth and watched her Brunnhilde depart. Tired, she walked home. On the way she nodded and smiled at a passing young constable on the beat. You never knew, and with searching eyes like that he would make a very visual Hagen, and with such a chest, he must have a voice. She gave herself a shake, she was getting obsessed with Wagner.

      That evening, that same young, sharp-eyed constable saw the blue and white sweater as he walked on the river path by the old foundry works. It was a well-known spot for the river to deliver its burdens.

      The young man picked the garment up, saw the label and recognized it for an expensive article. Missoni, said the label, and a discerning girlfriend (she was a barrister and they had met in court) had educated him about the value of that name.

      He knew at once it was СКАЧАТЬ