Coffin on the Water. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      ‘I love you, poppet, know that?’

      ‘Not you, Eddie.’ The light turn-away was always best with Eddie.

      He called after her. ‘What’s that face you were putting on? What face?’

      ‘Candida,’ she called back. ‘For Candida.’ It was to be her next big part, she had just had the ingénue part in An Inspector Calls.

      ‘Too hearty by half. Candida is pale,’ he shouted – Edward was to play her clergyman husband. Albie, surprisingly, would be the poet: he could act thirty years younger than he was.

      In the office, Joan and Albie were in consultation with Chris Mackenzie.

      It was Chris who had said that the finding of the body reminded him of ‘l’inconnue de la Seine’, the famous nineteenth-century girl found floating and immortalized in sculpture. He said things like that quite often and they were never a joke. He was a disconcerting young man.

      Now they wanted to discuss with her a technicality about Candida’s entrance; there were difficulties.

      Stella was cooperative. Anything they said. But all the time she was thinking of what Chris had said about the dead girl: it had sounded both calm and cruel. She did not like it that Chris could be like that.

      She wondered what it would feel like living in Angel House with such news under her belt.

      Well, at least, she knew some policemen. And the policemen knew her.

      John Coffin and Alex Rowley went with Inspector Banbury to the scene of the discovery. The body had been removed from the water by then and placed on the riverside. For the moment it was covered with a blanket.

      Inspector Banbury was in charge, the young men were present in a strictly subordinate capacity. They were there to assist and assist only, their sphere of action limited. In a way this was a help, or so John Coffin found. It freed the mind. He was able to look around and take it all in as a detached observer. Some of the things he saw he might not necessarily mention. Others he might review in his mind, then hand over to Tom Banbury. When the shell blew him up, then buried him, it took something away, an outer carapace, and gave him a clarity of vision. Life would replace the shell but meanwhile he saw all things new.

      At the moment he was testing out Tom Banbury to find out how much of his individual vision he could hand over without seeming odd. Because the things he saw were sometimes ludicrously simple, yet might be important.

      Such as the fact that although the girl had all her fingernails neatly trimmed, one nail and that of a little finger was long.

      Then again, he saw that where the water had drained away from the body it had run into a pool that was half moon-shaped. That couldn’t possibly be important or relevant, but it was certainly very striking. Stretched out like that, she reminded him of a picture seen in a history book of a sacrificial victim of the Aztecs with a shaped indentation at the feet where the blood drained, or libations were poured.

      He looked up and thought that Alex had caught the reflection of his thoughts because he too looked up, shook his head and frowned. Coffin wondered if he would say something memorable or profound to round off the moment, but he didn’t do so. All he said was:

      ‘Cold down here. It’s the wind off the river. Stinks a bit, too.’

      There was a smell, sour and succulent, floating off the water now stirred by the sharp breeze. The same smell, with some addition of its own, came up from the dead body. He wondered if dead women smelt the same as dead men, there must be a sex difference, you’d think.

      One thing was very clear as John Coffin looked down at the dead girl and that was that she had not died easily. In his life had had seen plenty of deaths, but they had mostly come very quickly so that it was over and done with before the mind took note. This girl looked as though she had had time to think about it and to know what was coming. Pain, too. Sharp, tearing pain and terror. A blow had fixed a mark down the side of her cheek and split her lip: she had felt that. There was another bruise on her chin. Her hands were swollen and water-sodden, washerwoman’s hands, but they had scratches and it looked as though she might have fought back. Her neck was bruised. A strangling?

      Her killer might be marked. He registered that fact.

      But the main area of wounds was on the trunk. There were tears in the pretty summer dress where a knife had gone through, and large bloodstains about each hole. He could see five holes. He counted. There might be more elsewhere that he couldn’t see. A white woolly cardigan, equally stained, had been buttoned across her dress.

      Put on after the killing, he thought.

      Banbury came across from the foreman’s office like a controlled whirlwind, the gentle, concise way of speaking belying the activity he generated, and Coffin told him what he thought.

      ‘Been buttoned back on afterwards.’

      ‘Don’t jump to conclusions. I’ve known the lab boys upset a few ideas of mine. Let them have a look and tell us what’s what and then we start thinking.’

      In the month in which he had worked with Tom Banbury he had learnt that his boss was good-tempered and hard-working, but very little else besides. He didn’t even know what football team he supported or what beer he drank. If he had a secret life even that was a secret. It was a mistake to be so closed up, and for a policeman it was a downright disadvantage. You ought to appear to be open, even if you were not.

      John Coffin assessed Tom’s comment as being in line with what he already made of his chief. A good man but limited.

      So he got on with his own thoughts in the way he wanted.

      He could see where a stain was partly covered by the white jersey and had absorbed some blood from it. Put on afterwards, he decided. And not just for fun. Getting her into that, a dead weight, would not come easy. But he did it.

      That was all they knew then. Later they were to discover the reason, but Banbury was never to say anything.

      ‘There is something about the clothes that I will comment on,’ said Tom Banbury. ‘They look to me the clothes of a quiet, respectable girl. She wasn’t one of Connie Shepherd’s sort.’

      The bare legs stretching before them had been pretty, sun-tanned legs, the feet well groomed with neat toenails. ‘She wasn’t flashy.’

      ‘Wonder who she is?’

      Tom Banbury shook his head and shrugged. ‘There might be a name on her clothes. But I doubt it.’

      Alex came back from where he had been talking to a uniformed constable. ‘Surgeon’s just arriving, sir.’

      ‘Know who she is, Alex?’ said Banbury. ‘Any idea? Ever seen her before?’

      ‘No. Unidentified.’

      An unknown girl dragged out of the Thames: that would be the newspaper headlines. It would make the evening paper. There was a stringer from the Star there already, with a young woman from the Kentish Mercury.

      ‘Somebody knows her.’

      ‘Sure.’

      ‘And СКАЧАТЬ