A Double Coffin. Gwendoline Butler

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Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      77–85 Fulham Palace Road

       Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

      Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1996

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

      Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

      Gwendoline Butler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780006497745

       Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007545445

       Version: 2014–07–07

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Author’s Note

       Also by the Author

       About the Publisher

Prologue

       A brief Calendar of the life and career of John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Second City of London Police

      John Coffin is a Londoner by birth, his father is unknown and his mother was a difficult lady of many careers and different lives who abandoned him in infancy to be looked after by a woman who may have been a relative of his father and who seems to have acted as his mother’s dresser when she was on the stage. He kept in touch with this lady, whom he called Mother, lodged with her in his early career and looked after her until she died.

      After serving briefly in the army, he joined the Metropolitan Police, soon transferring to the plain-clothes branch as a detective.

      He became a sergeant and was very quickly promoted to inspector a year later. Ten years later, he was a superintendent and then chief superintendent.

      There was a bad patch in his career about which he is reluctant to talk. His difficult family background has complicated his life and possibly accounts for an unhappy period when, as he admits, his career went down a black hole. His first marriage split apart at this time and his only child died.

      From this dark period he was resurrected by a spell in a secret, dangerous undercover operation about which even now not much is known. But the esteem he won then was recognized when the Second City of London was being formed and he became Chief Commander of its Police Force. He has married again, an old love, Stella Pinero, who is herself a very successful actress. СКАЧАТЬ