A Double Coffin. Gwendoline Butler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ thank you.’ Stella appreciated the compliment.

      ‘You’re sensible.’

      Ah, the compliment shrank a little.

      ‘So I am,’ she said, getting up, wrapping the silk jacket – which the warm embrace had disarranged a little – more closely round. ‘What are you looking at out there?’

      ‘The old churchyard.’

      Death again, she thought, there’s always death in our life. My husband’s career has been largely built on the deaths of men, women, and children.

      ‘It figures in what I am asked to do: I am asked to investigate a serial killer who did the deeds over eighty years ago (only they were not called that then but monsters), and find the grave of one of his victims.’

      ‘It’s a joke?’

      Coffin shook his head. ‘No, it wouldn’t be funny if it was, but it isn’t.’

      ‘You can ignore it, say you are too busy to investigate deaths so long ago.’

      ‘I’m too busy all right,’ said Coffin gloomily.

      ‘Who is it who is asking you to do such a thing?’

      Coffin took a deep breath. ‘Richard Lavender, former Prime Minister.’

      ‘I thought he was dead. No, that is not true, I didn’t think about him at all. Past history.’

      ‘Go on,’ said Coffin, still gloomily. ‘You aren’t cheering me up, but it’s what I thought myself. More or less. He is not dead, very old, but alive and articulate. Also, it seems, the possessor of a conscience that must be assuaged.’

      ‘He didn’t do the killings? Don’t tell me he was the mass murderer! What a play it would make.’

      ‘It would take a Shakespeare to do it justice … but no, he said it was his father who did the killing. He and his mother did the burying. At least, if we can believe him.’

      She caught the note of doubt in his voice. ‘You don’t believe him?’

      ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. Come on, what do you think, you’re outside it, what do you think?’

      ‘Be sensible, you mean.’ Stella sat down at her dressing table, and studied her face. She drew her mouth down in an ageing but sensible expression. ‘Well, why should he lie?’

      ‘That’s it. What is the motivation? I can’t make it out. He says he wants to die with a clear conscience.’

      ‘We all want that, I suppose, but it hasn’t worried him all these years.’ A thought struck her. ‘He must have been very young, you can’t blame a child.’

      ‘Not quite a child. A very clever one, too. And then all those years in power, controlling London. Why didn’t he do something then?’

      ‘He does believe it?’

      ‘Mm, mm. I think so … but I feel he might be under the influence of the people he lives with … A man called Jack Bradshaw.’

      ‘Oh, him,’ said Stella.

      ‘You know him?’

      ‘Comes to the theatre, belongs to the Theatre Club, even does the odd review for the local paper. Yes, I know him.’

      ‘What do you make of him?’

      ‘I like him, I think he’s got a sense of humour.’

      ‘Perhaps this is his joke,’ said Coffin, gloomily again.

      ‘He may not be kind,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think I would count on him to do the kind thing. It might not be a kind joke.’

      ‘It wouldn’t be, but unkind to whom to rig this up? Apart from me, of course. He’d have to hate the old man to manipulate him in that way. He could do it, I suppose, he’s writing his life. Perhaps old Lavender is senile.’

      ‘Does he look it?’

      ‘No, but it might need a trained observer.’

      ‘Aren’t you one?’

      ‘In a way, yes … This conversation isn’t getting anywhere. Give me a new start.’

      ‘Does he live alone? Is there anyone else?’

      ‘He may have more of a circle than I know. I could find out, and there is the niece. Great-niece, but she is just a domestic character.’

      Stella shook her head. Women are never just domestic characters. Inside they are plotting another world like everyone else. Probably even animals did it in their own way. Cats certainly did, she thought, looking down at her own cat, former lost cat, ex-warrior of the streets, now an aged domestic retainer in a livery of tabby.

      ‘Do you think he is mad?’

      ‘He could be. With the sort of madness that can come sometimes with extreme old age … Not exactly madness, really, just too many memories, too many dreams remembered.’

      ‘It seems to be the memories that are the trouble.’

      Coffin went to the window to look down on what he could see of the former church below, now part of the St Luke’s Theatre Complex, and then beyond to what had been the old churchyard, with the aged tombstones ranged around it like dead teeth.

      The church was a solid Victorian building which had survived two world wars, much bombing, only to fall victim to the decline in churchgoing. The church had been deconsecrated, and converted into a dwelling in the tower, into which Coffin had moved, while the church itself had been turned into a theatre, and a theatre workshop and an experimental theatre.

      ‘It was a different world outside there then, when he was a boy. The London of his childhood was rougher and nastier and poorer in so many ways. Dark streets, and cramped, crowded living places.’

      ‘Oh come on. Dickens was dead, you know.’

      But Coffin would not be stopped. ‘As a boy, he must have heard all about the murdered women, read about them in news sheets. Talked about it. Perhaps he buried it in his memory through the years as he became rich and successful. Now he has let the memory out, and he has taken on the guilt.’

      Stella said: ‘I must think about that … perhaps there was something in those days that he had guilt about and he has transferred it … Make a good play.’

      ‘Jack the Ripper was not so far off in the past. Still a terrible name to conjure with. Talked about at the time … People would have been reminded of him. It would have been in his mind.’

      ‘Perhaps his father was Jack the Ripper,’ said Stella lightly. ‘Come back for a second go.’

      ‘That would be something, to identify the Ripper after all this time,’ said Coffin, ‘and to have him father a Prime Minister.’

      It СКАЧАТЬ