diary had been one of the greatest shocks of his adult life. He had been brought up, fatherless and motherless, by an aunt and a grandmother who had fostered the notion that his parents were dead. It was later in his life that he discovered that his mother had not died when he was a child but had gone on to have numerous other relationships and at least one other marriage. Other discoveries had followed. Mother had been quite a character.
He was a tall man, going grey neatly at the temples with sharp clear blue eyes from which the innocent confidence he had had as a young man had long since faded. They were still kind eyes, yet wary. It was a good face, but held no promise of being easy. Life had toughened him. Presently he stood up, stretched himself and looked down upon the territory where he was responsible for maintaining the Queen’s Peace as Chief Commander of the New City Force.
There was a killing taking place down there in Murder Street at that very time, but he did not know that yet. No one did, except the victim and the killer.
Coffin could look down on this world because he lived in the tower of a converted church. The tower of St Luke’s and part of the church had been converted into three separate dwelling places, of which his apartment in the tower was the biggest and the most romantic. He could see the River Thames, he could get a glimpse of Tower Bridge and, if he was lucky and the weather was right, the top of St Paul’s Cathedral. His authority stretched eastward and southward down the river towards Rotherhithe or Greenwich south of the river, but not including them.
He loved looking down on this London, his London, the new Second City of London, even though he knew better than most that the streets housed a great variety of thieves, housebreakers, pickpockets, sneak thieves, prostitutes, rapists and murderers.
But this was the new Docklands where many of the old warehouses and dock buildings, firmly built by their Victorian creators, had been turned into desirable and expensive places to live in. So the new rich had poured in, provoking some hostility from the old natives. A halt in prosperity had slowed the process down, and, while not making the poor richer, had made some of the rich much poorer. Not such a bad thing, he thought. All in all, the two communities were shaking down nicely together.
A bit of violence now and again, he would be the first to admit it, an occasional flash of social tension. But the murder statistics in his area were no worse than in the rest of the metropolis, which, considering, it housed one ancient thieves kitchen, still surviving in the original network of streets, was not bad.
His mother’s diary made an interesting study, especially to the family circle which had been its first readers. Mrs Coffin had not been a woman of much education, but she had an easy, racy style of writing which led you on. Her life had lived up to her style, being also easy and racy, and leading you on. She had left three children by different fathers, dumped around the globe. One in London, John Coffin, the eldest by far; another in Scotland; and a third, the only daughter, in New York. It was possible there were others, but the trio who had discovered one another’s existence by degrees, lived in some apprehension of more siblings. An extended family was one thing, but far-flung was ridiculous.
Laetitia Bingham, his half-sister, was the owner of the St Luke’s Mansions complex where she had bought this old Victorian church and developed the three apartments, of which she had sold one to John Coffin. She was turning the main church into an in-the-round theatre, and had established a Theatre Workshop on the rest of the land she owned. The Workshop was up and running, under the vigorous management of the actress, Stella Pinero.
Letty Bingham had just jettisoned her second husband (although her half-brother did not yet know this), and was planning to establish herself and her daughter in London. Letty was a successful international lawyer but her passion was the theatre. She pretended she was doing it all for her daughter who had just started drama school, but it was really for herself.
William was the third sibling, who had taken to law; he was a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh. One way and another the law was in the blood.
The law, and a bit of drama, because you had to account for mother somehow. Perhaps her mother had been a Gaiety girl? And her father? Well, at one point in her diaries, she claimed he was King Edward VII.
Surprising this pull of the law, John Coffin thought, pouring himself a drink and taking a rest from his mother’s diary, because that lady herself had shown no respect for any law judging from the way she had gone on. He did wonder how much of her diary was fiction. That episode in the Hamburg hotel, for instance, with the man who had claimed to be a member of the Romanov family and who had given her a diamond tiara. Where was that tiara, he asked himself; had Mother pawned it?
And what about that story of travelling by car from Glasgow to Edinburgh with a man who told her when they arrived in Morningside that he had his dead wife in the boot, and had left her mother in the cellar back home. He could believe that one, reflected Coffin. People could behave that way.
Drama, fantasy, and lies, mixed with a modicum of truth, that was the cocktail his mother had mixed.
Publication of Ma’s memoirs was a joke, of course. Letty’s idea: she had arranged the typing of the diaries. Private publication, she said, and then we will try for TV and film rights. Make a mini-series, the material is there, but we must first establish our copyright. Surely Letty could not be serious? What did her husband think of the idea? Did she still have a husband? Coffin had his doubts, Letty had not said anything, but he could read her lovely face.
He put aside the typescript, removed his spectacles (a recent and regretted addition to his life), and went on to his next task. Stella Pinero had persuaded him to a little amateur acting.
The Friends of the Theatre Workshop, an association of energetic local ladies, had started a playreading group. Once a year a public performance was put on. As always, they were short of men. Coffin had no illusions about why Stella had enlisted him. He had been drafted, he was a conscript. Lately another man had joined, a quiet character who seemed willing to stay in the background and indeed had not attended the group lately, but Coffin was hopeful that the shortage of men was on the way out, although perhaps not with that one.
To his chagrin, he discovered in himself a faint sense of rivalry. He should be ashamed of himself. ‘I don’t care for the fellow, that’s what it is, not jealousy as such.’
With surprise, he had discovered he was enjoying the acting experience. Drama obviously was in the blood. Ran in the family.
No great part had been allotted to him, Stella was not going to push him too hard.
They were doing The Circle. Somerset Maugham was having a comeback. He was the butler.
‘Luncheon is served, sir,’ he said. He tried it another way. ‘Luncheon—’ deep breath—‘is served, sir.’
That was his best line. He had another: ‘Lady Catherine Champion-Cheney—Lord Porteous.’
You couldn’t do much with that, the important thing was not to get tied up in the names and fall over your feet. But he had a bit of business with a tea-tray later on that he thought he could work up nicely.
It could have been worse, he could have been the footman. All the footman said was, ‘Yes, sir.’
They had eliminated the footman. It didn’t seem to matter to the plot, speeded it up a bit. Coffin reflected that only in the low wage, pre-Equity days of the 1920s when The Circle had first been produced could a writer have allowed himself both a butler and a footman on stage.
He went to the door of his sitting-room, opened it, and gave a bow: Luncheon is served, sir.
Letty
