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
