Читать книгу Coffin on Murder Street - Gwendoline Butler - Страница 10

‘Stella, take Nell and the child upstairs.’ Coffin’s voice was rough with tension, ‘take her up there and keep her up there. I don’t want her to come down again.’

‘Right, come on, Nelly.’

‘I heard what you said, but I don’t think I want to go up and be hidden. I want to see. There’s been a child murdered.’ Her voice was rising.

‘We don’t know that,’ said Coffin absently. ‘Take them up, Stella. I’m going to do some telephoning.’

There was a call-box on the corner of the road outside The Albion, he shut himself in, ignoring the interested gaze of a lad who ought to have been delivering the newspapers.

He gave his instructions briskly. ‘Get plastic sheeting over the whole area. Keep an eye on it. No, nothing else. I don’t know yet if any crime has been committed. Oh yes, send a policewoman over. NOT uniform.’ He could give the orders, cut corners, arrange things as he wanted them, and he did. Not always, but when it suited him. ‘To Miss Casey, Flat Three, The Albion.’

‘Classy joint,’ said the CID sergeant who was taking the call. ‘And the Old Man is there himself.’ John Coffin’s code name was WALKER, but you only used that in certain circumstances. ‘A WDC, he says. Would you like to go, Mary Anne?’

Mary Barclay, the Anne was extra, a joke which she privately resented, was keen to go.

‘What is it, though?’ She was a girl who always liked to get things established and as clear as possible. Anything to do with the missing coachload of tourists? Still unaccounted for as far as she knew, and that really was weird.

‘Don’t know, might be a nasty, might not, but if the Boss calls we answer.’

Mary Barclay prepared to depart. ‘There’s a bit more than that, though, isn’t there?’ she said, knowing him.

‘A child is involved,’ said the sergeant towards her back without looking at her. ‘He said that much. He’s waiting for you there, he’ll tell you the details.’

‘Ah.’ Reluctantly he met her eyes. Brown, sympathetic eyes. Both of them had read the item about the suspected child murderer thought to have moved into the area. And the Sergeant had lost a child last year. His son had gone out to play and never come back. He had been found afterwards, in the canal. Drowned. Not foul play, exactly, they said. Murder by his peers. Three six-year-olds, having a game.

Mary Barclay drove off, glad to get away from Sergeant Jeremy Kay, she was so sorry for him that it felt painful.

On the other hand, she thought, if I’ve got to face an anxious mother that’s not so good, either. But it’s the job. She had only been a CID officer for six months after a tough apprenticeship in the uniformed branch. But she liked her work and liked the district where she had grown up. To know so many people and have them know you was both a help and a hindrance; it made them tell you some things and hold back on others.

Nell Casey? She knew that name, she had seen one or two of the episodes in the soap Destiny in which Nell had appeared, although it was tripe. Ripe tripe. But the clothes had been lovely; she had read that Nell was out of it now, and had come back to England to be made legitimate on the stage.

A uniformed constable was already covering an area of earth and grass under a big tree when she got to The Albion.

Coffin met her in the hall.

‘We’ll talk here.’

Upstairs, Nell Casey and Stella were looking out of the window, down to the garden.

‘What’s happening?’

‘A policeman in uniform is pegging down a sheet of plastic.’

Nell shivered; she still looked white. ‘It was horrible.’

‘Are you feeling better now?’

‘Oh yes.’ She looked across the room to where Tom was playing with a train, but he had Bonzo by him and was keeping a protective eye on the animal. An attempt to remove Bonzo from his custody was likely to produce a storm. ‘As long as he is.’

‘No one touched him. You nearly fainted down there, you know.’

‘You knew it wasn’t a real hand, didn’t you?’

‘Not straight away. But at a second look.’

‘I didn’t take a second look,’ said Nell with a shudder. ‘It looked like real blood, though.’

‘I think that was real,’ said Stella thoughtfully.

But the hand was of plaster, the very perfect model of a child’s hand. Not exactly a museum piece, but a good piece of work. The Victorians had liked that sort of thing. Some loving mother had had that piece made. Perhaps of a dead child.

Better not think on those lines.

‘Queen Victoria had models of all her children’s hands. Of their feet too, for all I know.’ Not much of a joke, but it might lighten Nell’s mood of doom. Not unjustified, she must admit. And a small smile did touch Nell’s lips. ‘We had one as a prop when we did Housman’s Victoria Regina.’

‘Is that where it came from, do you think?’

‘We borrowed ours from a local antique shop, as I remember. He got a credit in the programme and a couple of free seats.’ A wide boy name Les Llywellyn who knew as much about antiques as you could read on the back of a postcard but knew how to make money. ‘I suppose it went back.’

The young policewoman detective, who said her name was Mary Barclay, came up into the apartment and asked gentle questions, taking statements from both women, Nell Casey first because she was the mother of Tom, and then Stella, making notes as unobtrusively as possible. Downstairs, John Coffin had told her to handle the whole thing with tact. She had meant to do that in any case, but she was also observing Nell Casey and Stella Pinero with passionate interest. They both looked a bit pale and beaten up, not that you could blame them, and smart clothes were not in evidence, but, yes, a definite glamour hung around them.

Sylvie, who was in charge of Tom, had also been spoken to but seemed to know nothing. But you couldn’t be quite sure of that, thought Mary, who was better able to judge a girl so near her own age. Sylvie might know something. She saved that thought up for future use.

Stella Pinero took herself off to her own apartment, protesting she wouldn’t go if she didn’t have a meeting.

WDC Mary Barclay saw her to the door.

Time for Tom also had to have his minute with her, sitting on his mother’s knee, clutching Bonzo.

‘I think he’ll have to give Bonzo up for a while,’ Mary whispered to Nell Casey. ‘Tests, you know.’ Coffin had instructed her to get possession of the stuffed animal. Peaceably if you can, he had said, but by brute force if you have to. Not the easiest of her jobs.

Nell shook her head. ‘Not a chance.’

‘He’ll have to, Miss Casey.’ Was she Ms, Miss or Mrs? Mary Barclay did not know but took the safest route, actresses were always Miss, the days of Mrs Siddons were long over. ‘Either I shall have to take it off him or you will. Better you, really.’

But getting the dog away from the boy went better than Mary expected, surprisingly easy, in fact. The boy didn’t have much of a vocabulary but what he had he was efficient with.

His mother had sat down on the floor and asked straight out for the dog. And straight out, she had set a price.

‘A pound if you let me have him.’

No response.

‘All right, two pounds. And you’ll get him back. He will, won’t he, Mary?’

‘You will get him back,’ Mary had promised, not knowing if he would or not.

‘More,’ Tom had said with a winning smile. ‘More dollars.’

‘The deal is in pounds,’ his mother reminded him.

‘Is that more?’

‘It is.’

‘Yes, Tom will.’ But he still held on to the animal. ‘Each day.’

‘What, each day Bonzo is away? Come on, Tom.’

‘He won’t be away long,’ said Mary hastily. He might never come back, who could tell what Forensics would get up to, but it was a lie in a good cause.

‘All right,’ said Nell, ‘you’ve got me over a barrel.’

As she took the toy away from the boy and put it in a plastic bag, Mary thought: Wonder if he could have done it himself?

But no, that was a wicked thought, although in her experience kids could be wicked. But still, he certainly couldn’t have buried the plaster hand and he didn’t look old enough to have written his name.

‘Can you write your name, Tom?’ she asked.

His mother answered for him. ‘He can’t,’ she said coldly. ‘No more of that, please.’

‘I had to ask.’

She put a few questions about the plaster hand, but Nell Casey knew nothing more.

Mary Barclay did not pass on the information about the arrival in the district of the child murderer.

‘Keep a watch on him, Miss Casey. Probably nothing to worry about. But if anything does alarm you, you can always call me.’

Why did she have the distressing notion that she and Nell Casey would be seeing a lot of each other?

As well as the alleged child murderer who had just moved in, they had their own authenticated, fully certificated bunch of child molesters all on the register.

They had names, addresses and records. These were the lads who had been caught, sentenced and served their term.

In addition, there were all those undesirables they did not know about, who still moved murkily about the undergrowth. Life was full of joy, Coffin thought.

What the local mob were calling The Missing Bandwagon had still not turned up. By now the Press had heard about it and were besieging the Headquarters by Spinnergate with requests for information. There were two good pubs there, one a free house and the other with an excellent cuisine (best bangers and mash in London), so it was not a hard beat to walk.

The coach had been missing for almost twenty-four hours, and the coach-driver’s wife, normally the most permissive and relaxed of women, was anxious. She was used to her husband being away a great deal, it was the job, but he was good about telephoning if he was going to be delayed. This time nothing. Silence.

She had spoken twice on the telephone herself to her brother-in-law, the other partner in the firm.

‘Gert, I know no more than you do: nothing. At first, I didn’t think much of it, I’ve had tours go missing before, temporarily. But never in London, and never for so long. I’m real worried about the coach.’

‘I’m worried about my husband.’

‘Of course you are, Gert, of course you are,’ he said hastily. ‘So am I.’

Somehow, he felt this was not quite enough, and the silence at the other end of the telephone reinforced this impression.

So he added, by way of explanation: ‘But it’s the insurance, you see, if anything’s gone, well—’ he sought for a word—‘what you might call wrong, I have to put in a claim within twenty-four hours. The policy says so … Is Alf insured? Personally, I mean.’

‘My God, what a terrible thing to say to me just now. And no, he isn’t. You know him better than that.’

Unfortunately they both did.

‘The police are out looking.’

‘He won’t like that, you know he won’t,’ said his wife with conviction.

They both did.

All over London, police units were keeping an eye out for any sign of the missing group. Naturally, the search was sharpest in the Second City of London where the tour had last been sighted. The Force commanded by John Coffin had the keenest responsibility.

Comments among the police ranged from the bawdy, making frank suggestions about where the coachload had gone and with what activity in mind, to the idea that a spaceship had come for them and they had gone off in it, a bunch of elderly ETs.

But underneath there was worry: it was beginning to look less good with every hour that went by with no sighting. The Force was stretched because of the fire in the Tube, but the blaze was out and so that particular crisis was now over, but it’d taken a lot of men off other duties. But they had the usual patrol cars out.

One patrol car had paid particular attention to a group of deserted Dockyard buildings, an empty office block and an old warehouse down by the Bingley canal. The canal itself was due to be turned into a marina with a hotel complex beside it, but planning permission was being disputed so that no work had been done.