id="u315536c8-6095-50b8-a8d7-509cdcdf3764">
GWENDOLINE BUTLER
A GRAVE COFFIN
HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1998
Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1998
Gwendoline Butler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, 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 e-books.
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: 9780006510123
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007545452
Version: 2014–07–08
With my thanks to Dr Colin Fink for
all his help on scientific and medical matters.
CONTENTS
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
