Читать книгу Coffin and the Paper Man - Gwendoline Butler - Страница 7

The days of Friday to Wednesday, June 2 to 7

Fred Kinver was building his own paper palace at home in Elder Street. He had collected all the newspaper reports of the killing of his daughter which he had stuck on a board in the kitchen. They lived for most of the time in the kitchen, so they were under his eyes as he ate and worked. The distress they caused his wife was ignored by him. Two sturdy piles of newspapers with their coloured supplements stood on a table by the door. On them was a handwritten sign: NOT TO TOUCH.

She did not touch. Wouldn’t have dreamt of it. She turned her eyes aside every time she went past.

Nearly two weeks after the killing, with the police investigation stuck, these reports were naturally less frequent, but Fred Kinver was pursuing his research in other channels.

‘Just off,’ he called to his wife who was making the bed upstairs. ‘I’ve washed the breakfast things.’ Not quite true, he had held them under the tap and left them on the side to drain, tea stains and marmalade marked them still, his wife would have to do them again. But she was prepared for this, and did so every day. The thing is to keep him occupied, she told herself, and not to let him know he does not do things well.

‘Where are you going?’ She didn’t really like him out of her sight just now. He had to protect her. She had to protect him.

‘The library.’ Not quite true on this point either, as he had another call to make in addition. ‘Don’t forget to take your tablets the doctor gave you.’ He usually said this as he left.

‘The library’s not open yet,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Won’t be for another hour.’ Did he think she was a fool? The answer was that he did, and didn’t like questions, either.

She heard the front door go and then a click.

‘He’s locked me in.’ She sighed. The back door would be locked as well, and all the keys gone. He was doing it a lot lately. And not by accident, either. She would have to get herself another set of keys cut or life would be even more difficult for her than it was at present. She grieved deeply for her daughter, but she had hung on to rationality. It didn’t look as though Fred had.

Fred Kinver walked briskly to his small allotment hard by the former Brazen Head Dock, now changing into a hotel and leisure centre. His allotment might be swallowed up by their tennis courts but at the moment Fred and about a dozen others were still in possession.

Here Fred had the wooden hut that he called his ‘office’. He did keep a few papers, old bills and diaries here. Otherwise he used it for a smoke, a quiet drink, and talk with a few old friends. It was locked, or appeared to be so, but the padlock had long since been broken and hung there for show. All Fred’s friends knew you could get in if you wanted.

When Fred went there, as he did often, no one noticed him because he was a familiar figure. He had looked the same for years, grey-haired, spectacled, of medium height, and on the thin side. Winter or summer he wore the same old tweed jacket and raincoat. By the same token, he did not notice much about others. Jim Marsh, riding past on his father’s milk-float, saw Fred going across to his allotment. His father had told him to keep away from Fred because of family reasons, which prohibition he obeyed without meaning to keep for ever. He didn’t like Fred.

Now Fred went into his ‘office’ and sat down for work. He was keeping a kind of diary. Perhaps not a diary, more an account of a life.

After he had filled in a few paragraphs, he rose and hid it in a corner of the hut, under a box of lettuce seedlings that he would probably now never plant out. They were already yellow and sorry-looking. Casualties of the war he was fighting.

Then he went on to what he called his next appointment. At the Library.

The new Spinnergate District Library in Puddle Lane was a long, low building put together from the dark red brick so popular locally. It replaced an Edwardian building of stern construction which had resisted bombs in two world wars and very nearly defeated the 1980’s demolition team.

The old building had been a comfortable home for books, mice and men. The new one, although light and warm, seemed less welcoming somehow, and mysteriously appeared to have fewer books. The librarians explained this by saying that there were just as many books, but they just looked fewer on the new shelving. Hardly anyone believed them and Fred, a regular attender and borrower since his unemployment set in like a long illness from which he would never recover, was able to name several of his favourite books that had definitely disappeared. The Giant Book of Mysteries, for one. Also The Boy’s Book of Sea Stories, an old favourite which had gone from the ‘Books for Younger Readers’ shelves.

He made for the reference library, which was quiet and well stocked with files of newspapers going back over the last decade. The Spinnergate Library was a library of reference for South Docklands. It was much used by the Sixth Form College down the road and occasionally by students from the University. The room was never empty, but there was a live and let live feeling about the place: you kept quiet and did not interfere with the other readers.

This was just as well since they had been seen doing rather odd things. Eating was not allowed in the library, but there was no doubt that old Mr Rough had been noticed chewing a piece of cold toast. A late breakfast, he had maintained. Mrs Armitage knitted a dark blue sock which never seemed to get finished; she must unravel it in the night like one of those strange Nordic goddesses, and would ask to measure it against your foot if you would be so kind, which was harmless enough but not what the Library was meant for. Two female students had been seen holding hands in one corner and one of them, weeping, had run out before anything could be said to them.

Fred Kinver went into the stacks behind the main library where the files of newspapers, both local and national, were kept in great bound volumes.

He was systematically going through them collecting material on John Coffin. Personal details of the man’s life (not many of those, he had not been free with information about himself to the Press), photographs, and anything that came to hand about the cases he had worked on. Over the years Coffin had had a fair amount of publicity, so Fred had a harvest. When the new Force was created and John Coffin appointed he had figured in several major articles in The Times and the Independent.

As soon as he came across anything that interested him, Fred took out a tiny knife and quietly cut it out. No one saw. He did a bit every day, never too much, but taking his mite of paper daily, like a rodent.

He smiled as he did so.

When he got home the day’s haul would be pasted neatly in a big scrapbook, which he planned to take round to his ‘office’ as soon as it was up to date. He was reluctant to do this, as he would rather have had it to hand, but in the end, if left in the house, his wife would find it. She found everything.

‘Valuable archive information,’ he muttered as he stowed away today’s bag, and then went off to choose a new book to take out.

‘You’re doing a lot of reading lately, Mr Kinver,’ said the cheeky girl at the desk as she fed his tickets into her machine.

He did not answer.

Stiff-necked old thing, thought the girl. ‘No manners,’ she complained to her colleague.

‘Don’t think he heard you.’

‘What’s more, I think he always takes the same book out.’

‘Oh, he’s one of those, is he?’

They had several like that.

On his way home Fred loaded up with all the daily papers that Mimsie Marker had left on her stall by the Tube station. She let him have them cheaply in a bundle. She was sorry for him.

‘It’s not good for you to keep reading everything about Anna, but I can see why you feel you must,’ she said.

‘Do you?’ In a way she probably did, but not entirely. ‘I’m collecting information.’ He didn’t mind talking to her: she was old Spinnergate village, not like the red-faced little girl in the Library, an alien if ever he saw one.

‘The police are better at that, Fred.’

‘Are they?’ He leaned forward and looked her in the eye. The one eye that really looked at you, the other wandered. ‘But do they draw the right conclusions?’

He was angry, but it seemed more than that, Mimsie thought. ‘So what are all the newspapers for?’ She didn’t know about what he did in the Library, but from the way she spoke she might almost have guessed it.

‘Background material.’

There wasn’t much of that, she thought, but he was obsessed.

‘Fourteen days, that’s three hundred and thirty-six hours, and I don’t know how many minutes since Anna was killed, and they still haven’t got the man.’

‘It’s early days.’

‘And it’s staring them in the face,’ said Fred Kinver. ‘I’ll set things right.’

Mimsie said: ‘Fred, we’ve been chums a long time, haven’t we? You can trust me. You’re not up to something, are you?’

But he didn’t trust anyone then, not Mimsie, not his wife, not John Coffin, no one except himself could set things right. For it was not just information he was collecting, he was somehow fuelling himself up for what he meant to do.

A naturally timid and peaceful man, more fitted for making biscuits than taking action, he needed strength.

‘It’s quite clear who killed her,’ he said. ‘Why don’t they listen to what Anna said. I listen all the time.’

He strode off.

‘You’ve left your change,’ Mimsie called after him, but he did not hear.

She could see he was not taking the road home to Elder Street. He was turning left. Wherever he was going, that way was not home.

Now what was that way, she asked herself?

Nearly everything that counted in Spinnergate. The University, the two big scholars, St Peter’s Hospital, St Luke’s Mansion and theatre complex, the new police headquarters and the river.

Not the river, she hoped.

Oh, not the river, thought Elsie Kinver, still in her prison. She would have to break a window if she wanted to get out, yet she would do that if she got desperate enough. The shepherd’s pie was in the oven and he hadn’t come home to eat it, so that it was pale brown and dry now. Neither of them had much appetite at the moment, but you had to try. ‘He wouldn’t do that to me. He knows I couldn’t stand to lose both of them.’

She knew a little more about her daughter than Fred did, because she made the beds and did the housework and she had found the sexy poems long before the police.

Not mentioned them to Anna Mary, though. The girl had a right to her own life.

She hadn’t been shocked. ‘Wouldn’t have minded some poems like that myself when I was her age. Fat chance from Fred.’

Naturally she hadn’t mentioned them to Fred, hoped he didn’t know. Goodness knows what he would have done if he’d found them. It didn’t bear thinking about.

The police had them in their possession now, of course, but as far as she knew, they had not told Fred.

Where was he now, and what was he up to?

What was he up to?

John Coffin looked down on the river from his office window. He couldn’t see it from where he lived in St Luke’s Mansions, so this was a bonus. He was fond of the Thames which had been part of his life. He could just remember when it had been filled with merchant shipping, now it was empty except for a few small vessels which moored at the Brazen Head Dock from time to time. All the big carriers had moved down to the estuary where the water was deeper. The romantic upper Thames, north of Oxford, so beloved of poets and scholars, had little appeal for him whose river was the London river, the tidal river of docks and working craft.

An uproar in his outer office drew him back from the window. Such noise did not usually disturb the Head of the Force. He was a sacred object to be treated with respect. A boring fact, but true.

What were they having, a riot?

But no, it was just one man’s voice, shouting, and his secretary shouting back. He was surprised she could shout, she never raised her voice with him.

Someone banged against his door, collided with it, and then opened it. He saw a dishevelled middle-aged man with grey hair and frantic eyes. But he looked determined.

No gun that Coffin could see, so he probably was not dangerous. He could hear bells sounding in the distance and knew that help would be rushing in. Still, the man should not have got through every barrier.

He recognized Fred Kinver at once, but he did not say so. Instead, he stood there waiting. Always let the other fellow plunge in.

‘Got you,’ said Fred Kinver. ‘It’s you I want.’

Coffin still waited.

‘It’s about the murder of my girl, my Anna. I’m Fred Kinver. I know who killed her.’

Coffin looked across to his secretary. ‘It’s all right, Edith. Calm everything down, will you? Come in, Mr Kinver.’

Fred was already in, sitting himself confidentially down upon the chair facing Coffin’s at the big desk. The sunlight fell on his face. It wasn’t that he was a bold or pushing man, Coffin understood, but that he was out of himself at the moment. He had worked himself up to do what he must do.

‘I come to you because you are the top man and my wife knows you.’

Coffin nodded. He had met Mrs Kinver in Stella’s dressing-room.

‘She say’s you’re a good man. I tried the others—’ your underlings, he implied’—and got no good from them. Wouldn’t listen. Well, they did listen, but wouldn’t hear.’

A fair enough judgement, Coffin thought, on Archie Young when feeling sure of himself.

Coffin made a sudden decision. He rose and went to the door. ‘Let’s have some coffee, please, Edith.’ This chap was living in a world of his own, perhaps coffee would drag him out of it.

‘Ten minutes,’ he said. ‘That what’s you can have. Say what you have to say and then get out.’

As things were, it was a generous ration of his day.

‘It’s what she said, what Anna said. She didn’t say ‘Get the man who killed me.’ She couldn’t talk like that when she was dying. What she said was ‘Get Zeman. He killed me.’

Tim Zeman. Dr and Felicity Zeman’s beloved son.

Timmy Zeman.

‘Did you write me a letter?’ asked Coffin. ‘Anonymously?’

‘No, certainly not. Of course not, anything I have to say I’d say to your face. I have said it: the Zeman boy killed my girl.’

He was not entirely in his right mind, thought Coffin, and who could blame him?

In the next few days the police poured in and out of the Zeman house.

‘We’d thought of it for ourselves,’ said Archie Young. ‘Of course we had. Be fools not to. And we were planning to concentrate on the boy Zeman. He wrote the poems. Admits it.’

They interviewed Leonard Zeman, Felicity, his wife, and of course, Tim himself. Then they moved down the road to Mrs Kay Zeman and Val Humberstone. Mrs Zeman took to her bed with a mild heart attack, where Val waited upon her. No good was got from either of them.

They questioned the ambulance man again, and spoke to Jim Marsh. Jim said, Yes, he had heard Anna speak, but he hadn’t been close, keeping the dog away, you see, and couldn’t be sure what he’d heard. He did not like being questioned, wasn’t a bit happy with the attention he was getting.

Then they took Tim in for questioning.

Yes, admitted the frightened boy, he had written the poems. But he hadn’t killed Anna. He had been away at the time. He could prove it. He had been staying with friends in Kent, a young married couple called Eden. They would bear him out, only at the moment they were abroad.

He was kept overnight in the clean new cell in the police station that had only been opened last year, but where the cell had already acquired a smell of its own. Next morning he was collected by his mother.

She drove him away in her large Mercedes car of which Tim was simultaneously proud of her owning and ashamed at the same time. It was flashy, expensive, all the things his mother wasn’t really.

They were alike, these two. Tim had his father’s height and his short sight but her delicate bones and pretty features. They even looked pretty on him although he was masculine enough. Birdlike, both of them.

‘I didn’t do it, Mother.’

‘Of course, not. You don’t have to tell me.’

I’d believe you even if you had done it, she thought. Mothers always do. My son is innocent, that’s what they always said, didn’t they? He is a nice boy. That was the other thing they said.

‘About the poems—they didn’t mean anything. You understand, Mum, don’t you? It was just a kind of experiment, the sort of thing you have to do.’

‘Of course.’ She’d said it again, she really must find a different way of expressing herself. And she was driving much too fast, she’d nearly shaved that cyclist off his wheels.

‘And we never did anything much, Anna and I, if you get me. And if we had, would it have mattered?’

No, it wouldn’t have mattered. Anna had not been a virgin anyway at the time of her death. Some sexual experience, the medical grapevine said, and why not? Who expected otherwise? …

‘Why didn’t you get me out before? Why did I have to stay in there all night? It was foul.’

‘The police had a right to question you, Tim. You aren’t a minor any more.’

In fact, she had wanted to try to get him home last night, to go round there and make a fuss. But Leonard wouldn’t do it.

‘Let him stay. After all, he has something to answer. He knew the girl. Wrote her poetry.’ That’s what he had said.

Sometimes, I feel like killing you, Dr Zeman, she thought. Quite possibly you feel the same about me, and being doctors we both have the means to do it efficiently.

Now she negotiated the turn into Feather Street, drove past the dairy, hit the kerb but then parked the car with some neatness.

‘I’ve made some coffee,’ she said, ‘and I’ll cook you breakfast. I’ve taken the day off from my clinic.’

The home which Felicity Zeman had created in Feather Street was warm and buoyant and full of light. It rested on the hill like a ship, quite unlike the solid household of Kay Zeman with its heavy antiques and dark curtains.

The family lived on the first floor, leaving the lower rooms for Dr Zeman’s consulting rooms.

The small white peke Arthur emerged to greet them with a fury of enthusiastic barks.

‘You’re home now, love,’ Felicity said, putting her arm round her son’s shoulders. ‘It’s over.’

Or that bit was.

Leonard Zeman heard their voices and came up from his consulting room below. ‘Glad you’re back, Tim. You got him all right then, Fe?’ He poured himself some coffee and took a piece of the toast she had made. ‘Any press around? Any photographers?’ He was holding on to his son’s arm as if he didn’t want to let go.

‘Some. But I drove past them fast.’

They had got a picture through the car window, though, of her furious, intent face and Tim staring straight ahead. Tomorrow it would be in some newspaper.

‘Any here?’

‘No. All clear.’

He hung around, wanting to stay with them to offer love and reassurance but not finding the words, as alas, he so often did with his patients whom he treated and sometimes cured, but could not love. Of course, you weren’t obliged to love your patients, only work for them. Better not to love, in fact, but family you were obliged to love. Damn it, he did love them. He took another piece of toast and shared it with Tim.

Felicity became irritated, tried to hold it back and failed. ‘Haven’t you got any patients?’

‘A queue of them.’ Some of them ill, others there to view the father of the Zeman boy, so that they could say, ‘I was in there yesterday and he looked all right, you wouldn’t know there was anything wrong.’

Funny thing, family, he reflected. Tim whom I love, Felicity whom I also love, and Val whom I actually want. Want quite a lot.

‘I think I’ll have a bath,’ said Tim. ‘Wash the smell a way. Then I suppose I’d better get down to some work. Catch up with things. I’ve got an exam coming up.’

‘Use my bathroom,’ said his mother. ‘It’s looking rather good at the moment. There’s a bowl of lily of the valley that just matches the curtains.’ Things mattered to her, helped her if necessary. Her spirits could be raised by a nicely arranged breakfast table with the right china.

‘Lily of the valley bath oil, too?’ asked Tim, trying to get up a smile.

‘Of course,’ said Felicity, hoping not to show that she thought him pathetic and brave.

The telephone rang, the private line, as Tim went upstairs.

‘Wonder who that is?’ said Leonard Zeman.

Felicity made no move to answer the bell. ‘At a guess, Val.’

The Zeman family were all getting back to normal. Or trying to, well aware that it was not going to be easy, but trying to pretend otherwise.

Soon the news spread around that Tim was back home. When Val heard she told her aunt. Soon Harold and Phil Darbyshire knew, and the Annecks, all of them even the dog, and the dog-walker, Jim Marsh.

They were all trying to hang on to normality in very difficult circumstances. Working, watching television, going to bed. Cooking meals, even eating them. Hanging on.

Harder for some than others.

Fred Kinver had retired to his home after his interview with John Coffin, where his wife watched him nervously, and waited for results. He was confident. There would be an arrest.

None came. Presently, he realized that it was never going to come. The police were not going to arrest Tim Zeman.

They had no evidence.

Fred Kinver sat crying, watched anxiously by his wife, who cried inside herself only.

In the neighbourhood feelings began to run high. It was known that a man was still in detention. He now had a name: Solomon Wild, and a medical history but no police record. Word about this seeped out. Why was he not being charged? With something, with anything?

The questioning of Tim Zeman and then his release had provoked angry comment in certain quarters. Too middle-class to get charged, was the feeling.

This police inaction speedily produced another outburst from the Paper Man. He was soon to give himself this name.

Two identically phrased letters went off this time, one to John Coffin’s office and another to his home in St Luke’s Mansions. The Paper Man was making doubly sure his message got through.