Читать книгу Coffin in Fashion - Gwendoline Butler - Страница 4

One day in the middle of the 1960s, John Coffin, then a detective-sergeant but hopeful of promotion, made what his solicitor assured him was the best investment of his life: he bought a house. He was proud of himself as he signed the cheque, which represented a lot of borrowed money.

‘The best thing you’ve ever done,’ said the young solicitor, just married and a new householder himself. ‘A good investment. Property there will go up and up.’

‘Think so? All I could afford.’ Not even that, really.

‘Mouncy Street might be a bit run down now, took a pasting during the war, but it will go up and up. I’ve bought round there myself, as a matter of fact. Rowley Road. Worth every penny you’ve paid.’

He’d have to believe that, thought Coffin cynically, if he’s in Rowley Road. If anything, Rowley Road was a bit seedier than dear old Mouncy Street. ‘A lot to do to the place.’ He would do most of it himself, though, and only get help with what he couldn’t manage. He could wield a paintbrush but he was no carpenter.

‘A sound investment,’ said young Mr Davenport.

Later, Coffin felt like telling the lawyer what he had actually got for his money.

Death. Murder. A love-affair. A family inheritance. How did that rate in the profit and loss account?

The district around Mouncy Street and Decimus Street, together with Paradise Street and the Rowley Road, was known to Coffin of old. He had gone to Hook Road Senior Boys’ School, which wasn’t so far away, and had chalked slogans on the wall of the factory which was now Belmodes and made clothes, and had bought ice-cream in the little café now called The Coffee Shop and under the new management of an ambiguous character called Cat.

He slipped the house keys in his pocket and went to have a look at his new home.

He stood in the hall and looked around. From the front door you could see through the living-room to the kitchen and then up the stairs to the lavatory.

It smelt damp. Well, it smelt. A lot of living had been done in this house, and it showed.

There was a shabby raincoat and a cap hanging on a peg on the scullery door, left behind by the last occupant. A breeze through a broken windowpane lifted the sleeve so that an arm seemed to wave at him.

Suddenly he felt so depressed that he had to go round to the Red Anchor and have a drink. There he found his patron and mentor, Commander Dander, CID, drinking a double whisky.

‘I’ve had a psychic experience,’ Coffin said. ‘That bloody house is haunted.’

‘Who by?’

‘By an old man with a hat on.’

‘You need a whisky,’ said Dander, who always took this cure himself. ‘Or a woman.’ That was his other remedy.

Gabriel Glass knew John Coffin by sight because every morning for the last few weeks they had met at the same bus stop. Gabriel had been so christened by her mother, who said that was the name she desired for her daughter and that Archangels were sexless anyway. Her mother had invented Unisex long before anyone else. So all her life Gabriel had been in contest with her name. She was definitely a girl herself. But looking back, she wondered if her name had not contributed its own small share to the murders in Mouncy Street. Another sexual ambiguity, anyway, to add to that already murky soup. Gabriel got off the No. 36 bus while Coffin got on, and she noticed him because she always noticed attractive men. But she thought he looked worried.

He was worried.

Today workmen were coming to replace the rafters in the attic and replace rotten floorboards in the kitchen. He hoped they would get on with the work fast without too many tea-breaks, and then go. He had owned his house for nearly two months now and he was still camping out in it. Progress must be made soon. It was tiring and the police work he was engaged on, undercover and complex, needed all the energy he could give it.

Gabriel pondered what job he did; he looked efficient but anxious. She concluded his work was important to him and exacting, something very nearly, but not quite, beyond his powers. Since this was her own state exactly, she knew how he felt. Sometimes she felt as stretched as an elastic band.

Now he went one way and she went another. Wherever he was going (and one day she’d find out), she was going to Belmodes Factory where she worked. Later she would take a taxi to Beauchamp Place. The day would come when she would go in a Rolls. Her own.

Her mind reverted to her own troubles, most of which centred around Rose Hilaire, owner of Belmodes and of the shop in Beauchamp Place. Also of other desirable properties like a Porsche car (not what Gabriel would have gone for), and some good jewellery. She had a shop in Knightsbridge, another in Bond Street, a fourth in Sloane Street and yet another in Baker Street. This small chain of exclusive shops was all fed from Belmodes in Greenwich.

At the moment she was tired. For the last few months she had been working hard for her boss, and even harder at a project of her own. She had this little private scheme going with her good friend Charley Moon, the young photographer, whose South London studio was in an old stable belonging to Belmodes.

She turned into Mouncy Street. It was a quiet, working-class street of small houses, some in a better state of repair than others. It was the sort of street that seemed respectable by day, but which you didn’t fancy too much at night.

Behind Hook Road School, in an area bounded by the main road and Paradise Street to the south and a large park to the north and Mouncy Street to the west, was a club for dancing and drinking called Tiger’s. There had never been a tiger present, but in the 1930s a travelling circus had rested in the park for a week. Tiger’s was partly owned by a man called Joe Landau, who had also put money into Belmodes, which Rose was sweating to pay off. His partner was a local businessman who kept a shop, liked to live a quiet life and not worry his mother who was an invalid.

A lot of troublesome people poured out of Tiger’s after dark, as Gabriel knew. She had been there with Charley and summed up the customers as ready for anything. ‘Living on the edge, that lot.’

Perhaps she was imaginative, but some weeks ago, after one of her long sessions with Charley, she’d treated herself to a taxi home (not a frequent indulgence in her hard-working life); she had looked out of her window and seen a woman walking down the gutters.

Walking. Stopping. Then walking again. Finally the woman had sat on a wall outside a house.

With a shock she had recognized her employer, Rose Hilaire. She could hardly believe her eyes. What was Rose up to? Was she drunk or ill?

Gabriel had leaned forward to ask the taxi-driver what he made of it, but he said he’d seen nothing and no one. She was pretty sure he had, which made it seem worse.

Next day Rose had seemed normal, although pale, but she had said nothing, and Gabriel had certainly not mentioned it.

After all, she had her own secret to keep. Moreover, she was resentful of Rose Hilaire.

‘I could kill that woman easily. Be a pleasure.’

Charley Moon disliked this. ‘Don’t talk so much about death and killing,’ he had said. ‘I don’t like to hear it. Worries me.’ At this time in their relationship they often quarrelled. Partly because they had known each other for a long time and could afford to be cross with each other, and partly because they were both restless and unhappy.

‘She’s holding me back.’

‘She’s run that shop of hers and this factory for years. She must know what she’s about.’

‘I’m in a straitjacket … I design the clothes. She takes all the credit, and she pays me peanuts.’

‘She knows the market. Her market.’

A market of comfortably off ladies who could afford to pay high prices but did not move in circles which demanded couture clothes. ‘Pretend’ couture, echoes of Paris and Milan, were more their line. These Rose Hilaire provided.

But the market was changing. Fashion was becoming bright, crisp and street-orientated. For the moment high fashion was casual-chic and even Rose Hilaire’s ladies were noticing.

Gabriel got off the bus at the corner of Mouncy Street, looked hungrily at the ham rolls in the delicatessen, remembered her diet and swung off towards the factory. Her skirt was mid-thigh and met her boots on the way up. Both skirt and boots were soft white leather, cuffed with suede. She passed the chemist’s shop and then turned back to buy some aspirin. It looked as though it was going to be that sort of day. Harry Lindsay handed her what she wanted across the counter without a word. One of his silent days. He was into silence. [He’d been blown up during the war as a small boy, and people said it had made him sad. But Gabriel attributed it to the perpetual presence of his invalid mother.] He was also into late-nineteenth-century interiors of genuine old-fashioned chemists’ shops, and high stiff collars on his shirt to go with it. The sunlight filtered through the great red, green and yellow jars standing in his window, not many of them about now, and coloured his face and cheeks with bands of colour.

By the end of the day she had been grateful for the aspirin but her head still banged. She popped another aspirin in her mouth and followed it with coffee. Was the man at the bus stop ending the day with a headache? He looked as though he knew what pain was. But pain came in different parcels for everyone.

‘If I tried to kill old Rose, that cow, what method would you suggest, Charley?’

‘Shift your head.’ Charley did not want to pursue the theme. ‘To the left.’ He was setting up the lights above her head, checking what he saw in the lens, getting ready to photograph her.

Occasionally she acted as a model for Charley if he was hard up, but this time it was for her.

This was her very own collection of clothes, a deep secret from Rose Hilaire who owned Gabriel body and soul, or thought she did, and which Gaby meant to use as a launching-pad for herself. Strictly under the rose, of course, since according to her contract all work done by Gabriel belonged to Rose.

Charley was photographing the clothes for a portfolio she was going to send out, and in the interests of economy she was modelling them herself.

‘Don’t talk for a moment, and don’t even breathe.’ Charley adjusted a screen behind her. ‘I don’t know why you bother with all this. You’re a beautiful girl. Why not settle for a rich husband?’

Gabriel ignored this sally, she and Charley had known each other since art school and his remarks could be passed over. Or bitterly contested, according to how she felt. He did the same in return. ‘Do you know what she said to me today?’ It had been the final insult. ‘She said: “My customers aren’t dolly birds but ladies so please remember that, even if you can’t be one yourself.” That was because she heard Dolly ask me if I was on the pill. And then I heard her on the phone telling Lady Olney that the new blue tunic dress would take ten years off her.’

Charley squinted through his lens. ‘All right, so she exploits you. For my money you fight on equal weights. Look at what you’re doing now.’

‘Blur my face out, won’t you, so she won’t know it’s me if she sees the album,’ said Gabriel apprehensively.

‘She’ll find out in the end.’

‘But it’ll slow her down. All I need is time.’ These designs were as good as she thought they were. She crossed her fingers for luck.

‘She’ll kill you.’

‘No. Just snitch the designs. Let her try.’

‘I bet she could sue you.’

‘And I bet she won’t. She’d have to admit in open court that the designs for the last two years were mine and nothing but mine.’

For a while they worked, Gabriel rapidly changing clothes; she had made every dress with her own hands, cutting and stitching, and she knew exactly how to wear them.

The photograph session was taking place in Charley’s South London studio which was in the loft of an old stable attached to Belmodes. Rose Hilaire was, in fact, his landlady. She also owned, although he did not know it, the terrace house in Mouncy Street which he was considering renting, and another she had already sold. Meanwhile, Charley was camping out in his studio which he was renovating himself. At present he was working on the splendid oak floors, sanding and polishing them. When life got too uncomfortable he stayed with a friend he had living in the district. Or, at odd times, he slept in the van he kept in the access road between Mouncy Street and Decimus Street.

Finally Charley said: ‘That’s it. Let’s dismantle the show.’ He started to take down his lights. ‘I think she’ll beat you: she’s got armour plate all round her.’

Slowly Gabriel said: ‘She’s got one big hole in that armour.’

They looked at each other.

‘You mean the boy?’ said Charley in a low voice.

Gabriel nodded. ‘That sad boy.’

Sadness might be infectious, perhaps it had spread from Rose Hilaire to her son, emptying his eyes and his mind, a kind of family infection that might spread outwards to Gabriel herself.

Another reason for getting away. Bad luck did brush off so, everyone knew that.

‘Do you think he might kill her?’ He’s only a kid, Gabriel thought, for heaven’s sake what are you saying? But she had said it. And not such a kid. Fourteen, wasn’t he?

‘Oh no. It wouldn’t be like that.’ Charley sounded as if he knew.

‘Do you think she might kill him?’

Charley shook his head. ‘Oh no. Not because I think neither are capable of it. Anyone could be – but because there has to be love to kill.’

‘She’s up to something.’ The speaker was a tall sturdy woman with a crest of bright golden hair just turning grey. She was wearing her coat ready to go home. ‘Rose, I’m telling you. Am I your friend or am I not?’ A waft of garlic sped across her employer’s desk.

Rose Hilaire, born Rose Lee, once married, and mother of Steve, whose whole life was hidden, unspoken and out of sight, an underground boy. She firmly believed that he was in no way different, that tucked inside him was a mental giant, but he just WOULD NOT SPEAK. Not to her. Sometimes he wouldn’t even look, only turned his head away to stare at the wall. She knew he understood, though; she could see. Oddly enough he performed well at school even though in an average kind of way. Whatever Steve was he was not average, she told his teacher so. And of course she mentioned that he would not talk to her.

Sometimes, at bad moments, she thought he liked her new motorcar, the Porsche, more than her, and that if anything happened to her, he would find it a good mother substitute. She had caught him sitting at the wheel, playing with the gears. He’d even tried to drive it away.

In anger, she’d hit him, and then was ashamed because you should never hit your child. So she’d promised to give him driving lessons, on the quiet, when no one could see. But the anger was still there between them, this time it had transferred itself to him. It came out in the way he held the wheel, as if the car was his anger and his weapon. This frightened her. So she’d dropped the driving instruction. It was illegal, anyway.

At that moment, the end of her working day, the day after Gabriel’s photo session, her mind was about equally divided between Gabriel, whom she knew to be a problem but did not yet know how big a one, and Steve. Here again, was he a real problem or just a tiny little one that she had let get out of hand?

One day, she thought, he will walk out of this house and I will never see him again. Fourteen years old and already she felt she was writing his obituary. Only underground boys like Steve did not have obituaries, they just wandered off and one day there was a tiny paragraph in the daily paper about a boy being found. Or perhaps not even that. Just silence for evermore. But silence was what she had now.

One day she might find out why he hated her, if that was what it was, and not some family sickness to which she might one day succumb herself. But no, the bad blood was on his father’s side of the family.

At this moment she had a letter in her desk from Steve’s teacher praising his dramatic ability and suggesting he ought to go to theatre school. Rose thought she knew all about his dramatic powers, having been only too often a reluctant witness.

Although he would not talk to her, Steve had no intention of going short of his needs and he could mime. He could get across what he wanted all right and Rose never had any difficulty in being convinced he meant it. She wondered if he really wanted to go to drama school? So far he had made no such signal to her, which probably indicated he had no such intention. On the other hand, sometimes he liked to keep her in the dark until the last possible moment.

Small wonder that with such a training in body language she had no difficulty in reading Gabriel’s mind: she knew that Gabriel was keeping something from her, could make a pretty good guess what it was and did not, in spite of what Gabriel might think, even mind very much. She had a simple philosophy of all being fair … and the rag trade was a kind of war. She even liked Gabriel, but that didn’t mean she would let her get away with anything. Far, far from it.

‘I’ll kill that girl if she really screws me up.’

She was older than Gabriel, but not as much older as Gabriel thought. Nevertheless, in her career she had seen a good many Gabriels come and go. Some had more talent than others and stayed the course better. Character came into it too, you needed toughness in this trade. Gabriel was one of the smartest and the most talented. Perhaps the most talented. Rose respected that talent even while she knew very well that Gabriel would not stay with her for ever, or even for much longer. But while she was under contract, Rose meant her to abide by it.

Unluckily, she herself had no creative talent worth talking of. She had a good head for business combined with an intuitive grasp of what the market wanted. In other words, she understood fashion as interpreter. She needed someone like Gabriel and meant to hang on to her if she could. Usually she was content to let her young designers drift away; few of them were heard of again. Perhaps contact with Rose Hilaire had sucked them dry. But in the case of Gabriel she could foresee a long and profitable relationship, if not a particularly happy one. If Gabriel examined the small print of her contract she could see that Rose had allowed herself a ten-year option on her services.

Now she said: ‘I don’t trust her, Dagmar, but thanks all the same.’

Dagmar Blond buttoned her coat. ‘How long have we known each other?’

Rose did not answer because she knew from experience that Dagmar was about to tell her.

‘I worked for your aunt when she was running the business, and I was with your grandfather before that, God rest his soul.’

Grandfather Hilaire’s soul received frequent benedictions from Dagmar Blond who found him a useful seal of approval, although in life she had been no more than an errand girl in his workshop whose face he barely knew. Still, it proved she went a long way back with Rose.

‘So we inherited each other.’ Rose remained good-humoured. ‘And if I remember right, Gabriel came with an introduction from you.’

‘All right, all right. She came from Paradise Street. That ought to have told you something.’

Paradise Street was a short, crowded street running between Mouncy Street and Rowley Road, near the railway station and hard by the factory. It was famous for the close-knit family groups which lived there. Famous also for living by their own rules, and being well known to the police.

‘So did we once,’ said Rose Hilaire, ‘and we’ve moved away. That girl will be going a long way from Paradise Street.’

But they both knew you never got Paradise Street out of your system, it was there for always, something you were born to, like a crown or an inherited disease.

It said something about you when you said you came from Paradise Street. It had a past and a history, had Paradise Street, and they both projected themselves into the future. Strange violent things had happened there and were suppressed by the inhabitants: it was their business, other people could only guess.

‘I can manage her,’ Rose repeated.

‘And what about Joe?’

‘Joe?’

‘Yes. Joseph Benedict Landau,’ said Dagmar. ‘Can you manage him?’

‘Leave Joe out of it.’ Rose did not like to hear Dagmar talk about Joe; he was private.

She and Gabriel represented opposing poles in fashion but Rose was old enough to know that in the end they might complement each other. Even in looks they were different: Gabriel, beside being still very young, was slight, small-boned like a bird, and with dark eyes and a flow of dark hair, which at the moment, she ironed straight every morning. To those who said she might be bald at forty as a consequence she said either that she did not expect to live that long or else that she would buy a wig. Already she owned two falls of hair which she wore on an Alice band. Rose was tall, full of bust and narrow of waist, with a round face and strong curly blonde hair. Like Gabriel, she had a wardrobe of wigs. On her they never looked quite natural.

She looked at the clock on her desk, a round black face set in a crystal block, one of her first presents to herself when she began to make money. The factory was closing down, emptying for the night, but she often worked late, telephoning round her branches or to various contacts in the fashion trade. It was her time for keeping in touch with movements in her world.

But she also liked to be home to greet Steve when he came in from school. He came as near as he ever did to talking to her then. Anyway, it was the time that messages passed back and forth between them.

Because she wanted to stay in the neighbourhood from which she sprang, a desire reinforced by her wish to give a strong background to Steve, she had moved to a flat in a new block overlooking the river not far from Mouncy Street. She could walk there in ten minutes, but she drove in her Porsche. She was a slow and cautious driver, causing both alarm and irritation to other drivers by her handling of her fast car.

She wanted to get home but she also had several business matters she needed to check up on, not least of which was the possible destination of the portfolio of designs she imagined that Gabriel was creating. You couldn’t keep that sort of thing secret in the relatively tight world they lived in. Only as youthful an operator as Gabriel would have expected to.

On looking the field over, it seemed to Rose that there were two candidates: on the one hand there was the old-established firm of Senlis Styles which was seeking (and rightly so in Rose’s opinion) to change its image. On the other hand there was the small and thrusting new firm of Lizzie Dreamer whose super-active boss, a stout young man called Touch, was busy scooping up all the new talent available.

Rose herself had had a brush or two with Teddy Touch and almost wished Gabriel joy of him, but this was a weakness she could not allow herself. You hung on to what you had and you never let go, that was her style.

Then the telephone rang on her desk, not the red one that was entirely office and work, but the blue one which was her private number. Only family and friends used it.

‘Hello. Is that you?’

A young, gruff voice, she knew it at once, even though it was so rarely used for her.

‘Steve, what is it? Why are you calling?’

‘Well …’ A hesitation, a fumbling for words. Was it that he could not speak, or would not? ‘Just to say – that something bad has happened.’

‘Steve … Please … What is it?’ She was almost shouting.

The telephone was removed from his hand, and another voice spoke. A woman’s voice, educated, gentle but with a hint of command and a slight Scottish accent. ‘Miss Fraser speaking …’ Steve’s headmistress at Hook Road School.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Can you come round, Mrs Hilaire? At once? I think it would be best. There is something you have to be told.’

It seemed to Rose Hilaire that she could hear other voices in the background. Another woman and perhaps a man.

Yes, certainly a man, and why not, in a school? But all the same she didn’t like the sound of it at all.

Before she left, she picked up her blue phone. ‘Joe? I’m sorry, darling. Tonight’s not on. Trouble here.’ Hook Road School had lately undergone a face-lift. As cosmetic surgery, it was minor and superficial, designed as is usually the case with such surgery to raise the spirits rather than change the character. Old woodwork had been replaced with newer structures, strip lighting had taken the place of glass globes hanging from the ceiling. Pale turquoise paint had replaced the steady old green paint of the old days. A new heating system boosted the temperature so that some rooms were uncomfortably warm, though the lavatories and washrooms for both staff and children were as chilly and damp as ever. Within the next decade the buildings were due to be demolished to give place to a glittering new place of stone and glass. The staff had seen pictures of it and were profoundly uneasy.

But for the moment Hook Road School was much as it had been when the Victorian School Board of Governors devised its architecture and meant it to last. As indeed it had done, through two world wars, Zeppelin raids and the Blitz. The ghosts of the old pupils (who still seemed to hang about in the smells and noises) would have felt quite at home.

There was a piano being played somewhere in the building; there had always been a piano being played.

Miss Fraser shut the door against the noise. She was young for a headmistress, and as tough as her job demanded, which was tough enough. She gave the impression of having an active and vital life outside school. Otherwise she was fond of children and good-humoured. But today she looked tense and preoccupied, as if underneath she was frightened.

In the room with her was a bearded man, sitting down, a uniformed policewoman, standing up, and Steve Hilaire who was half sitting, half crouched on a hard chair, beside him his sports bag.

‘Come in, Mrs Hilaire.’ Miss Fraser took her hand away from the door, and momentarily leaned against it as if she could do with its support. ‘Let me get you a chair. Steve, get one for your mother.’

Silently Steve got off his chair for his mother to sit down. Their eyes met and passed each other without comment. Rose’s gaze slid on and settled on the policewoman.

‘What’s this? Why is she here?’ Rose, when frightened, was always aggressive.

The policewoman looked at Miss Fraser, who gave a slight nod. They settled it between them that Miss Fraser would do the talking. At first.

Rose’s eyes flicked nervously to Steve. ‘What’s it about, then? Why am I here? What’s it to do with Steve?’

She couldn’t stop her eyes going back to that bag of his.

‘This afternoon,’ began Lovella Fraser, ‘the school had its uniform inspection, there’s always one once a term. Just a check-up to see that everyone has the right shoes, and blazer and so on. Sports equipment, that sort of thing. Every child lays out his stuff, and we do it form by form.’ She nodded towards the bearded man. ‘Mr Gordon is Steve’s form-master.’

‘So what’s the mystery?’ Rose was getting her nerve back. ‘Steve – you haven’t taken anything that doesn’t belong to you?’ At times of pressure the old Paradise Street slipped out; petty theft had been an occupation there, and accusations of it a commonplace of life.

‘No, we don’t think he’s taken anything.’

‘Come on then. Why am I here?’

Miss Fraser cleared her throat, she was still to do the talking. ‘I don’t know if you have heard about Ephraim Humphreys?’

Rose stared at her, she appeared to be searching her memory. ‘I don’t know.’ She frowned, temporarily off balance. ‘Ephraim Humphreys … ? He’s a boy, a little boy?’

The policewoman made an involuntary move. Young, yes, still a boy, aged twelve. But not so little. Tall for his age. Above average. Steve was tall also, although his choirboy-like innocent face sometimes made you forget this.

‘I don’t read the papers much,’ Rose stumbled on.

Miss Fraser accepted the tacit admission that Rose knew more than she seemed capable of getting out. ‘Yes. It has been in the newspapers.’

‘He’s gone away?’ Her gaze fell upon Steve’s sports bag, her Christmas present to him and now on the headmistress’s desk. Open.

The woman detective thought: Gone away was one way of putting it. Two weeks ago a twelve-year-old boy called Ephraim Humphreys, a pupil at Hook Road School, left his family home after a sparse breakfast in good time to do his paper round and then get to school … The woman detective shifted her stance from one foot to another.

‘No one knows if he ever got here, his papers were delivered but no one noticed if he arrived at school or not.’

‘I’m remembering,’ said Rose. It had all happened at a time when she was busier than usual getting together the winter collection of clothes. They made four collections a year, as did most wholesalers (and in spite of her chain of shops, that was how she regarded herself; she wasn’t a couture house, that was sure). The winter collection, the third for which Gabriel had been responsible, had been a difficult one. Skirts were going up, getting shorter and shorter, but there were hints that daytime overcoats might suddenly lengthen, sweeping the ground. At least one Paris house had shown some such, and one New York. In New York they had, as they say, bombed. But who could say what London would do? London took its own line, it was on its own. Rose had wanted to stay with a safe, half-way line and Gabriel had said that was disaster, you had to be brave and plunge. Literally, let the hemline of heavyweight winter coats drop, go right down to the ground. Team them with short, short skirts and wet-look shiny boots, and you would have a total look. It had been their first big quarrel. Not the last, by any means, but the biggest and the loudest. Gabriel had won.

Into their quarrel the story about the local boy who had gone missing had hardly penetrated, but she found now she could dig out more details than she would have guessed. It was all there, a story waiting to tell itself to her.

The boy had gone out from his home in Decimus Street after eating a bowl of ready-cook porridge and drinking a cup of tea. He had been wearing his usual school clothes, but on his feet his favourite but eccentric red boots. These had been a present from his grandmother in America. He loved them and always wore them when he could. They had a soft canvas top and leather bindings, a kind of house slipper really, and not for outdoors. He would have to change them when he got to school because they were not allowed with the school uniform.

He had not been missed until the late afternoon when his mother came in from work; she thought he might be playing with friends and waited. When her husband arrived they both took alarm. They tried asking friends and neighbours but no one had seen Ephraim. The husband (who was not the boy’s father) went round the streets looking for the boy, the wife stayed at home, waiting in case her son came back. Next day they discovered he had never been at school. But by that time the police already knew and were on the job.

‘Yes, it’s all coming back,’ said Rose. In fact it came back with a quick fast flood that she found painful. She remembered how the mother had looked when she appeared on television appealing about her son, and how untidy her hair had been; she remembered how the owner of the newspaper shop had managed to look both defensive and guilty when he was probably neither. She remembered the woman on the bus who was crying. Where she came in Rose had no idea but she clearly remembered the woman’s tears. ‘You didn’t know him, did you, Steve?’ Not specially know, not as a friend, surely she would have remembered.

‘Yes, Steve did know him. They were in the same form.’ Miss Fraser provided the answer. She looked at Mr Gordon, who spoke for the first time.

‘I don’t believe they were special friends. But I could be wrong.’

‘Well, he didn’t say anything to me.’ But when did he ever say anything to her? Everyone, or almost everyone, had a secret life, but Steve’s sometimes looked like a secret even from him.

‘Inside the bag we found these …’

Jim Gordon unzipped the bag slowly, or it felt slowly to Rose, and took out, first a white sweater, then a light cotton shirt with matching trousers, the boys’ sports outfit, and a crumpled tracksuit. She recognized them all as Steve’s, they had his look somehow, smelt like him.

Then he held the bag out wide and let Rose look in. At the bottom of the bag, dented and crushed, looking as if they had been there undisturbed for some time were a pair of red boots. The red boots.

Rose raised her head from the survey. ‘Ephraim’s?’

She did not look at Steve, but she knew he was staring out of the window with the air of one who had nothing to do with what was going on here.

Now the policewoman came forward. ‘I’m Joan Gilmour, Mrs Hilaire, Sergeant Joan Gilmour. These are the boots the boy was wearing when he disappeared. Or we think they are. We can’t be quite sure without a positive identification from Mrs Humphreys. Or forensic proof. Or perhaps both … But Steve says he doesn’t know anything about them.’

Rose shook her head. ‘Then he doesn’t.’

Gently the other woman said: ‘From the look of it, they have been in his bag some time … He must have seen them every time he went to the bag. But he won’t say … We thought you might talk to him.’

Rose smiled, it was a game smile in the circumstances, but it stretched across her face like a grimace of pain. ‘I don’t believe Steve will talk to me. He doesn’t usually. He might talk to me on the telephone, or he might write me a message, if he had something specific to say. Such as affected his own comfort, you understand …’

‘Mrs Hilaire …’ began Miss Fraser, her voice shocked, but Rose went on:

‘He won’t talk to me. If you want to get someone to talk to Steve then I suggest you try Miss Andrews who teaches English and drama. She likes him.’

‘We all like Steve.’

Rose nodded. Good. So did she, she supposed, and a fat lot of good it did her. No, that wasn’t true: she loved him, but she sometimes found it hard to like him.

‘And Miss Andrews has spoken to Steve: she was there when the boots were found, as it happens.’

‘This is serious, Mrs Hilaire,’ said Sergeant Joan Gilmour. ‘Can you make Steve see how serious and that we can’t accept his story as it stands?’

‘He knows it’s serious, I expect.’ She looked at her son. ‘Well?’

Steve opened his mouth as if to speak.

‘Be careful what you way, Steve,’ said Jim Gordon.

Steve stopped talking even before he had started. Rose knew that phenomenon. It had started out in life with her and she still saw it daily, as if Steve had words ready to pour out to her and bit them back. She had stopped wondering why he did it. In her heart she knew that one day he would tell her and the truth would be hard to bear, better put it off.

A heavy silence settled on the room. Everyone in the room, except Rose, was wondering how to deal with it. The policewoman thought a good hard smack might be the answer, but couldn’t be the one to deliver it. Jim Gordon knew he shouldn’t have spoken and was regretting that he had opened his mouth; he was sunk in his own problem. So too for that matter was Lovella Fraser, who knew she had to control the situation and come out of it well; she knew, all the teachers at Hook Road School knew, that when the great amalgamation of three schools into one big comprehensive took place then the headship of that school would go to the best. She had to be that best. The rivalry among her peers was intense and so was the gossip about who was coping well with what.

They sat on for a while in silence. Steve obviously did not feel impelled to speak. Rose could have told them that at no time did he feel that obligation.

Lovella Fraser stood up. ‘We can’t leave the matter here, Steve, Mrs Hilaire, I’m sure you see that. The police will want to go on questioning you, Steve, and Sergeant Gilmour will probably have to take you down to the police station.’

—And you will be out of my hands and not under my direction to make you speak or not to speak. What she was doing was a failure of her responsibility to the boy, but a holding operation as regards her own career.

Sergeant Joan Gilmour got up too. ‘Mrs Hilaire will have to come too. She must be there when we talk to her son.’ Her voice was not friendly. Rose, an old inhabitant of Paradise Street, who had heard that tone from the police before, at once felt three feet tall and aged five, and someone who had stolen a bar of chocolate. Stolen it, as she now recalled, not because she had no money but because chocolate was rationed.

Rose stood up too, and as she did so brushed against the desk where the sports bag and its contents were laid out. The red boots slid to the floor.

Not one of them wanted to touch the boots, that was suddenly obvious.

And out of the boot rolled a small red object which moved a few feet across the floor with a funny little sideways motion like a crab.

Rose recognized it at once as a little spool such as was sometimes used in her factory to wind off surplus silk from the machines. A lot of pure silk thread was used, too expensive to waste. This was bright red silk like blood. One of Gabriel’s designs had called for such silk. Rose knew it came from Belmodes, without another look.

It brought her factory right into the affair. Something would have to be done about it, although she wasn’t sure what exactly.

Steve had been quicker than she; his foot had shot out and covered the spool. Their eyes met. He was almost going to say something to her.

‘Raise your foot, Steve,’ said the woman detective.

Rose took a deep breath. ‘We’ll come down to the station with you,’ not removing her eyes from Steve’s foot. ‘I’ll drive. I’ve got my car. We’ll go together.’

It had got past denials and silence. She could see that even if Steve couldn’t.

After all, Coffin had had a happy couple of days; he had telephoned his house at midday and one of the workmen had answered. So he knew they were there, and might even be at work. It was even probable they were, since he had taken the precaution of asking his former landlady, now retired, Mrs Lorimer, to look in. She had a way with the idle.

Work, a dull but tricky investigation of an armed robbery, together with fraud and murder, had taken him out of his base all the afternoon, so that he almost missed an urgent personal telephone call. His work was undercover and it was best done discreetly. He was out of touch a good deal, that was policy. The whole area was experiencing a sharp uprise in crime, some small and petty, some violent, and Coffin was concerned about this. Another problem was drugs. A lot of hemp, a little heroin, and the new one to watch for, LSD 25, lysergic acid diethylamide, the hallucinatory drug, the so-called ‘Vision of Hell’ mixture.

He might have missed the call altogether if he hadn’t dashed back to collect something; he had forgotten a lot of things lately and although it worried him he knew why: it was because he had one big thing he was remembering.

‘Listen, you’ve got to know this.’ It was Mary Lorimer speaking; she didn’t announce herself which was unusual for her. ‘They’ve found a dead body in your house.’ The line went dead, again unlike Mrs Lorimer, who could usually be relied on for a good spell. It was a mark of her disturbance. Afterwards he discovered it was because she felt sick, having seen the remains.

It seemed the workmen had had a good day, Coffin’s house warm and sunny. They inspected the roof first, then decided that the first task should be the floor in the kitchen. Coffin was having most of the floorboards replaced with good new wood. They started taking them up …

As Coffin walked down Mouncy Street, he saw a police car parked down the road. Outside his house. He started to hurry.

A body? In his house. His first house with a big mortgage still on it. Well, he would have to stay, he could not afford to move out. It was the first time he had had such a thoroughly unprofessional reaction to a corpse.

‘I’m a first-time buyer,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m bound to feel bad.’ It was not what he had expected in home-owning. He followed into the house a small, dark young woman, carrying a medical bag: he knew her to be the new Home Office forensic pathologist seconded to this Division.

He walked into the house. The front door opened into a small hall from which a small living-room opened to the right-hand side. Straight ahead was the old kitchen and behind the scullery. All these houses in Mouncy Street were the same.

The floor was up in the kitchen, but it was possible to tread across it by means of the underpinnings to the scullery, which was where everyone seemed to be.

The floor was up here too, but having been so rotten this was no surprise, nor was the stale smell in the air. He had smelt it every day since he had moved in and been told it was damp rot.

He went up to the door and looked down. They hadn’t left it prone there for him to look at, they were waiting for the forensic team plus the photographers as he very well knew, but he felt a sense of possession about this poor sad object.

The two uniformed policemen both knew him, and nodded. ‘Glad you got here. Been trying to get in touch.’

‘I was out on a job.’

‘Haven’t seen you since that Wimpy Bar murder. Not round here, anyway.’

‘Only just moved in. Well, not long anyway.’

‘How long, John?’

‘A few weeks.’

‘Well, you’re in luck there.’

They both moved over side by side and looked down the hole from a better point. The sunlight through the window showed how dark and stained the bundle was, bursting through its paper wrapping. It was unmistakably human, and yet … ‘Been there some time,’ said Coffin.

‘I think so. Now, if you’d been living here for the last year …’

‘You’d be asking me questions.’ There was a grim humour in their interchange.

They still stared. Coffin spoke first.

‘Small.’ It was small.

‘Might not all be there.’

‘Cut up, you mean?’

‘Well, in bits.’

Joints in wrapping? No, it was a complete thing in itself.

Coffin shook his head. ‘That’s not the way it looks to me.’ He turned away. ‘It’s a whole thing, whatever it is.’ He knew without realizing why that it was somehow worse than that.

As he walked away he understood why: he had seen a tiny, tiny little finger protruding from one end of the bundle.

It was a kid down there, a little shrivelled-up kid.

Once before in his professional life, early on when he was just starting out, Coffin had been involved with a child case. Well, there had been others, but that first one had been the marker. That first child had turned up safe, as it happened.

With a sigh, he could foretell all that was going to happen to him and his house now. They were going to be invaded. Uniformed policemen, plainclothes detectives, all together with forensic scientists and other laboratory workers would be made free of his house. The whole scene of the crime outfit would have a passport. As would the photographers, and possibly their partners if they could manage it. The only person who was likely to be kept out was John Coffin.

‘The place has been empty for nearly two years,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That’s why I got it cheap.’

Now he knew what part of the price might be it did not seem so cheap. But he still wanted to live in it. Everyone had to have a home and this was going to be his.

‘Well, I’ll just go outside and have a smoke.’ There was a minute front garden with a red brick wall. He could sit on the wall in the sun and make a public spectacle of himself. ‘Who’s coming down, do you know?’ He meant: which officer is going to head the investigation team? He knew most of the local men and had worked with some. With none was he specially friendly, they were a clannish lot round here.

‘Jim Pedler, I think.’

He certainly knew Jim Pedler and had some respect for the Inspector. Or at any rate for his power of rising through the ranks. Whether he could see further into the wood than anyone else was another matter.

‘He knows how to use a team,’ he assessed.

‘He’s the boss,’ said the young policeman. His tone said: and one I have to live with.

There was the sound of a car door banging and a brisk voice announced the arrival of Inspector Pedler and his associates. Coffin quietly withdrew.

As he had planned, he sat on the wall in the sun and smoked a cigarette. He was experimenting with Turkish cigarettes, on the grounds that they represented a kind of luxury and he ought to know about luxury. He could not afford any other kind.

‘I’ll be around for a bit if you want me,’ he said as he left the house. ‘It’s my evening class tonight.’

He got the baffled look of incomprehension he expected. This would have been intensified if he had said, not: Yes, it’s woodwork; but: Actually, it’s genealogy.

To take his mind off the small body in the house behind him, he thought about his genealogy class and his reason for taking it.

He had a good sound practical reason, or so he told himself, but it might have been self-deception, he might just have been indulging a private fantasy.

Several years ago he had been searching for a long-lost sibling. About whom he had been told by an elderly relative. Another and younger child of his mother who had been put out to adoption. Or lost. Sometimes he thought deliberately lost. He had been on the hunt for this lost brother or sister. At one time he thought he had a good lead through a friendly butcher’s, one of whom might have adopted this child. But that had come to nothing. He had gone on with the search to no purpose.

Now he had a new approach: he would dig back into the family history and see if something emerged that way. To teach him how to do this basic research he was attending classes on the subject at the local Adult Education Centre on Charlton Hill. Mrs Lorimer believed his real reason was that he fancied the class teacher.

He did like the girl, it must be admitted, but his heart was still locked in a love-affair of long ago. Long to him, that is, a matter of six years, although when he worked on his genealogy it counted as but yesterday.

As he sat there smoking, he looked down the road to where the Belmodes factory was just visible. Old inhabitants, of whom he was beginning to know a few, had told him that before it was Belmodes making clothes, it was a furniture factory that did not survive the war.

One cigarette and then another. He took a stroll up the road and then back again, vaguely seeking entertainment. He could have thought about the case he was working on, but there had been three fruitless days on that and he wanted a change. He could have thought about his evening class, but even that did not attract at the moment.

The working day was over at Belmodes, but there were still women about, popping in and out of the shops. He was bound to say that they looked cheerful and not toilworn. Whatever it was Belmodes was clearly not a sweatshop. A small crowd of onlookers was standing to stare curiously at his house with the sinister activity within. Somehow, they knew there was a body found.

Walking on her own was a girl he recognized. He had seen her only that morning at the bus stop where he changed buses. As a matter of fact he saw her every morning. She was an exceedingly pretty girl and she wore the short skirts he liked. So this was where she came.

He stood up, not without the hope of attracting her attention. As she drew level their eyes met. She looked first surprised, then pleased.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

Gabriel blushed. ‘I’ve seen you at the bus stop.’

‘I know. I remember.’

‘Did you notice? I didn’t know … Do you live here?’

‘More or less,’ said Coffin grimly.

Gabriel’s gaze flickered to the police car. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘I’m not sure.’

She accepted the cautious reply for the dubious currency it was. A childhood in Paradise Street had accustomed her to both police cars and evasive replies.

‘The police is the police.’ She had her portfolio of photographed designs under her arm; she was already experiencing the first feelings of guilt about what she was doing to Rose. She gave Coffin a wave, then walked on. ‘One of them behind you wants you,’ she said over her shoulder.

The uniformed man walked down the path to John Coffin and sat down on the wall.

‘You’re in luck.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘The body is only half yours. You share it with next door. The whole parcel is part under your floor, and part under next door. Looks as though it may have gone in that way.’

‘That house is lived in.’

‘A year ago it wasn’t.’

‘A year, eh? As long as that?’

‘The lady doc says so. And it’s upset her. A boy it is, young kid. And so she thought it might be the Humphreys boy. His red boots have turned up locally, so it all fitted in. But no: this one’s been in too long.’

And yet Coffin had thought it might be even longer. The dried-up-looking parcel he had seen had looked as if more years than one had browned it. Done it to a turn.

‘Apparently there’s something in the soil round here that dries out tissue but also darkens. Too much of something or the other, the doc says.’ His tone was respectful.

Dr Mary MacMiller was a newcomer, but one to be handled carefully; she had a sharp way with those who presumed on her sex and good looks.

‘Clue to identity?’

The other policeman shook his head.

‘So now it’s Who, When, How?’

‘The usual three.’

‘Well, it’s your case,’ said Coffin cheerfully. ‘And not mine. I only live here.’