A Cold Coffin. Gwendoline Butler

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      Because the Chief Commander was an old friend, she felt free to drop in on Coffin with anything that worried her. So much so that Coffin had told his wife that his heart sank when Phoebe appeared in his room.

      ‘I hate a headless anyone,’ said Coffin gloomily. Not so long ago an ill-wisher had left the head of a cat on the staircase in his home in St Luke’s Tower. Not something you forgot.

      He looked round his office without pleasure. Stella, his wife, had told him that his chosen decorative style was ugly and he had replied that it was workmanlike, but observing it now he could see what she meant. Everything that could be dark brown was dark brown, and the rest was cream. Or, in the case of the curtains, dark blue.

      ‘Bile,’ he murmured to himself. ‘That’s what this room is like. I must have been bilious when I chose the colours . . . I’d probably had a row with Stella.’ They used to quarrel a lot in those days, and they didn’t seem to now. Was this a good sign, as he hoped? Or a bad one?

      He loved her, though, he knew that, and he knew now that she loved him too. Once he had doubted, but no longer.

      Phoebe went to look out the window. It was still raining, as it had been for days. The rain, washing away the light top surface of soil of a recent excavation, had played its part in uncovering the head. Heads rather.

      Phoebe was a tall, elegantly built woman, with a taste for dark trousers and bright sweaters. Today she was in red and black. ‘There is this pit, about ten infants’ skulls.’ She shook her head. ‘More maybe.’

      ‘Seems enough.’

      ‘A small population. Probably not more than five breeding pairs in the group.’ This was the way students of primitive man talked about populations they were investigating. She had picked this up from one of the archaeologists working on the site. ‘They couldn’t feed too many children.’

      ‘Makes me feel like King Herod.’

      ‘No need to take it personally,’ said Phoebe briskly, turning away from the window. ‘Dr Murray . . . she’s the archaeologist, said they are Neanderthal . . . been there for many thousands of years.’

      ‘Some sort of a cult?’ enquired Coffin.

      ‘More like a culling . . . Dr Murray said the Neanderthals, to which, from the skulls, these children may have belonged, practised infanticide to keep the population down.’ Dr Murray had not yet passed on her belief that one, and only one, of the skulls was not so old, modern-day in fact, and might have been deposited there by someone who had discovered the heads and thought this was a good place to hide another one. She always thought in terms of crimes. She would be telling John Coffin her suspicions, which might mean something or nothing; it was going to be hard to date this later skull.

      The big teaching hospital that was attached to Second City University had a collection of skulls in a medical museum that was now hardly used. It was a macabre, dead place these days, but it had its uses.

      ‘I’m hating this more and more . . . to think I’ve been sitting on top of them all these years.’ Coffin was gloomy.

      ‘Not exactly sitting, sir.’

      He went to the window to join her. ‘Well, walking, walking towards my car.’

      The whole area to the north of his window, once bare, unpaved ground where a few bushes struggled for life, was being cleared. Headquarters of the Second City Police was being expanded: they had outgrown their accommodation and another new block was being put up.

      Or would be put up once the ground was cleared. At the moment it was a hole. And one full of water since it was raining hard. This water-logged hole was now roped off and marked with signs saying that Entry was Forbidden.

      The archaeologists had taken over, but even they had not been able to work for some days.

      ‘Dr Murray is very excited about it. No one knew there was a concentration of Neanderthals here.’

      ‘Still got some,’ said Coffin sourly. He had come from a short working trip up north to find he had yet another problem. Neanderthals! Sometimes he felt he worked with a bunch of them. ‘There’s Nean Street just round the corner. Probably built on a settlement of them.’ And it was true that the local kids called some of the families there – short, stocky but powerful, men and women both – Neanderthals.

      ‘Oh no,’ said Phoebe seriously. ‘They died out millennia ago.’

      ‘Think so?’ said the sceptic.

      He felt that he could hear the millennia marching with heavy feet, but not taking all the Neanderthals with them.

      Phoebe ignored her boss’s mood, partly because she always did and partly because she knew the reason for it. There was a possible murder case in the Second City that was troubling him. Troubling a lot of them, since it involved a police officer, a detective in Spinnergate. It was just possible that Arthur Lumsden had murdered his wife.

      That was, if she was dead. At the moment she was just ‘missing’.

      He had not reported her missing, even after seven days of absence and silence. Her mother had telephoned his sergeant in the Amen Street Divisional Office.

      But there was blood of her type in the family car, and talk of a quarrel. The family dog, a small terrier, was missing too. There was a strong feeling that Lumsden might have killed his wife . . . husbands could do anything, but he would never have killed his dog.

      DC Lumsden was on leave. He had given a statement, denying a quarrel but admitting they had been having a ‘difficult time’. They had breakfasted together, and he had then gone on duty. When he came home there was no wife and no dog. He didn’t know anything about the blood in the car. And yes, he had had a rest period of two hours in the middle of the day. No, he had not gone home, just gone for a walk.

      As a statement, there were holes in it.

      And there the matter rested for the time being. One of the Spinnergate CID team was looking into Mrs Lumsden’s disappearance as quietly as possible. Coffin looked at the file: Sergeant Drury was the man.

      Coffin knew Lumsden slightly and was now repressing the feeling that he hadn’t liked the man. ‘Not a joke in him.’

      And then there were the murders in Minden Street. Gunshot wounds to the head. Nasty. Yes, Coffin had plenty to worry about. Phoebe was worried about them herself.

      Coffin looked thinner, a trifle haggard, which she admitted to finding attractive. She always had found him attractive, but now working with him made this forbidden territory. Anyway, he had a very lovely wife, Stella Pinero, a powerful lady in her own right.

      ‘The Neanderthal population was probably small, she says, and co-existed with modern man.’

      I just said so.’

      Phoebe ignored this. She sipped the coffee that Coffin had politely offered her. He was good in that kind of way.

      ‘Are they still underneath all that water?’

      ‘Yes, but they are due to be carefully removed tomorrow morning, and taken off to be examined in a lab somewhere.’

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