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GWENDOLINE BUTLER
COFFIN’S GAME
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997
Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1997
Gwendoline Butler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780006510116
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007545483
Version: 2014–07–08
My thanks to Professor Geoffrey Lee Williams for help about terrorism and terrorists, and to Inspector Euan Forbes and John Kennedy Melling for details of technical procedures.
CONTENTS
PROFILE OF THE AVERAGE TERRORIST
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,
