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GWENDOLINE BUTLER
Coffin in Fashion
Contents
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.
