Still on that same Sunday
Sunday was a day for burning.
But not down by the docks, Archie Young found out as he drove towards his office, much nearer home.
Some sod, as his sergeant delicately put it, had driven an old banger into the car park of the new police station, where security was not what it should be, and then set light to it. Blazing merrily, it had then exploded and looked as though it might set light to several other cars, including the sergeant’s own. The fire brigade had then arrived in force and blanketed every vehicle in sight in foam. One of those covered was Superintendent Paul Lane’s own special Rover, and another belonged to the Chief Commander. There were many others, and since everyone feared that the foam could be damaging to paintwork, chrome and internal upholstery, their owners were not happy men.
Since the whole building had been evacuated on the fire chief’s orders in case there was an explosion, all concerned had a full view of the spectacle.
That was the best and biggest fire, but there were also smaller fires in two empty houses just finished and awaiting occupation, and another fire in the site manager’s office on a new flat and marina complex just started. A guard dog had been drugged.
A fire that never took place was in the courtyard of St Luke’s Mansions between the Theatre Workshop and the old church itself, now awaiting its new life as the main theatre. In this courtyard a small bonfire had been built, but no attempt had been to light it. Stella Pinero interpreted it as a threat.
She surveyed it late that afternoon in company with Lily Goldstone.
‘It’s a warning.’
‘Nothing personal,’ said Lily easily. She had a riverside flat, she had been born locally, some of her family still lived here, she felt she spoke for the whole neighbourhood.
‘I think it is. Someone doesn’t like me.’
‘The fire never happened.’
‘I’m to wait for it. Next it will happen. Or something worse.’
‘Don’t think bad thoughts.’ Lily was very nearly on the point of giving up Marx and taking up the Master of the Karma, a local seer, who had beautiful eyes and lovely hands. At the moment, she was riding both horses at once, a feat only Lily Goldstone could achieve. ‘You bring on yourself the fate you fear.’
‘Thanks, Lily.’
Together, they cleared away the bonfire materials, old boxes, newspapers and rubbish. It looked as though several dustbins had been emptied in their courtyard. It was all rather smelly and Stella wrinkled her nose distastefully. She had a nasty feeling she recognized some of her own rubbish.
Stella had returned from her filming the day before to hear the news about Tim Zeman. By the time she got back, it was known that Dr Zeman would survive. John Coffin had come down to tell her himself, they had a quiet drink in her flat and he told her not to worry.
As is so often the case with reassurance, she felt more worried afterwards, although she tried to hide it. Bob knew this fact, and leaned heavily on her feet, staring at her with loving eyes. She was his now, and he was hers.
The Sunday of the fires worried them both. They crept out together to look at some of the conflagrations, Stella telling Bob that they ought to know what was going on even if it frightened them.
A crowd had gathered to watch the scene at the police station, at the heart of it a silent, watchful group of youths. After a bit, they melted away and reassembled outside the Zeman house. By now other onlookers had gone and only a uniformed constable remained outside the front door. He eyed the youths warily but did nothing, except radio in a report. Then a tall, scrawny lad kicked the side of Felicity Zeman’s car, and another threw a stone through the rear window. Then they ran.
Another small gang was touring the area near the fire on the new estate. Hanging about, doing nothing much, but very clearly in evidence.
For a short while they coalesced with the first group, then they split up into several small parties, and roamed the district. Prowl cars kept up a quiet watch, and an All Points Bulletin sent out the message that there might be trouble on the way, and to watch for gatherings of youths.
By evening on that Sunday, they had all disappeared. Plotting something worse, was the police judgement.
At some point, a joker was able to paint on the garage wall behind the Zeman’s Feather Street house, the message: GLAD THERE GONE.
Silently a group of Feather Street ladies, headed by Phil Darbyshire and Mary Anneck, scrubbed it out. They did not comment on the spelling but it added to the fury with which they worked. They were assisted by their children, unwilling conscripts.
Phil said to her son and daughter: ‘If I ever catch either of you two doing anything like that or mixing with those who do, I will kill you personally. That’s a promise.’
‘We wouldn’t,’ they said, speaking as one.
‘And the form that killing will take will be the cutting off of all financial support, other than plain food and a bed for the night. It will be death by monetary starvation and you will find that very painful. And you can take that seriously.’
They had been taking things seriously for some time.
The emptying of the streets was noted by the police.
‘Retiring and regrouping to think up something else, the louts,’ said Paul Lane sourly.
He and Archie Young were having a private conference with the Chief Commander in his office. Coffin had made it clear that he had a personal interest in all this business.
Lane had had no lunch and was very hungry. Archie had sped home to a meal cooked by his wife, and had since eaten some scrambled eggs in the canteen. He felt he could go on all night.
‘I know one or two of the faces that I’ve seen hanging around. Could have been involved in the car window smash, their style.’ Archie Young had been offered and was now drinking a cup of tea; he would have preferred beer or whisky, but this had not been on show and from the ironic look in the Old Man’s eyes was not going to be. Tales said that he had been a bit of a lad himself in his day, but he was so respectable now it was painful. ‘All this disturbance, fires, bricks, the lot, is linked up with the Kinver case and the Zeman deaths somehow. They’re exploiting the situation, but there’s real feeling there. You agree, don’t you, sir? I don’t suppose one of them killed the Zeman boy?’ He sounded wistful. ‘I wouldn’t mind getting Terry Graham for it, if I could. I hate his guts. Or Ron Slater, he’s worse. All that Planter Estate gang are bad.’
‘I don’t think they could lay hands on the Digoxin, or knew what it was if they did,’ said Coffin absently. Or find the means of getting it into the food.’
‘I might take one or two of them in and see what I can get out of them. They might have robbed a chemist’s shop. Boots in Paradise Street was broken into last week.’
‘Still got to find the means of administration.’
‘If I thought they had the drug, I wouldn’t worry about anything else.’ He thought about what he had just said, and decided it wasn’t such a clever thing to have voiced. He was glad to be in the company of two senior officers, drinking with them, even if only tea, but it was a burden to him too. ‘What I mean is, if they had the drug, we would be more than half way there. We know the motive: one, they’re wiping out the family they think responsible for the Kinver kid; two, it’s a class thing. Never mind that the Zemans have lived here forever, it’s a Them and Us thing.’
‘There’s something in that,’ admitted Paul Lane. ‘Get Graham and Slater in. Question them. It’s a start.’
‘You don’t know yet in which food the poison was hidden,’ said Coffin, still pursuing his own silent train of thought.
‘Dr Livingstone thinks the soup is the most likely. It would hide the flavour and the rough texture of the soup would hide the slight grittiness. She also thinks a higher concentration of poison per mouthful could be achieved in the soup as opposed to the chocolate pudding. If the pudding had been in individual helpings that would have been different, but apparently it wasn’t.’
‘And there is none left?’
‘No, it was all eaten but the dishes were left unwashed. A forensic team is going over the kitchen to see what it can find.’
‘The pudding came from the freezer?’
Young consulted his notes. ‘Yes, Mrs Zeman took it out. But she says she did not make it, the pudding was made by Val Humberstone. It seems chocolate cakes, puddings and biscuits were her speciality.’
Coffin realized he was about to make himself unpopular with his colleagues. Interference, would they call it?
‘I had a look round the Feather Street house where Val Humberstone died. Of course, you will have done so too.’ Silence from both men. Inspector Young had had a look, Paul Lane had not, he had other things to do that day but he was not going to say so. Young was well aware that Coffin was going to claim to have seen something that no one else had done. He sighed.
Lane said, half defensively: ‘It was before we had really tied Miss Humberstone’s death in with anything.’ He himself had been convinced it was a natural death, and had not welcomed any other suggestion. Life was difficult enough as it was. But he had had to agree that an autopsy was a good idea, he had protected himself. In a longish police career, he had learnt how to do that with some success.
He had also learned how to listen to a superior; he listened now.
‘We agree that the dog, Bob, was poisoned too? When I had a look round the bedroom in the Zeman house that day, I saw a plate with a few crumbs but a licked look. I think it had had cakes or biscuits on it that the dog finished up. Miss Humberstone had eaten most, probably, so she got most of the drug. She died, Bob recovered.’
‘I remember the plate,’ admitted Young. ‘I think the biscuits must have been chocolate biscuits.’
‘So do we think that chocolate pudding held the poison in the second poisoning?’ asked Lane.
‘Possibly.’
‘I’ll get the forensic team on to it. They may get traces out of the freezer or the dishwasher.’
‘Two deaths from poisoned chocolate. Well, it has a strong flavour and I understand biscuit crumbs and brandy were part of the recipe,’ said Lane. ‘Homemade, too. I’m not sure I will want to eat home-baked chocolate cake again.’
‘Oh, if your wife cooks it …’ Young spoke happily. He trusted his wife.
‘Yes, my wife,’ agreed Lane uneasily, resolving to pay her more attention in future. Not that she seemed to do much cooking these days. What did she do with her time when he wasn’t there?
‘More than two deaths, perhaps,’ said Coffin. ‘Could be three. I wonder if Mrs Kay Zeman ate chocolate cake?’
‘I am asking for an exhumation order there,’ said Lane defensively.
There was a moment of uneasy silence. Both Superintendent Lane and Inspector Young thought: The Old Man knows something we don’t.
‘Just thinking aloud,’ Coffin said. He went on: ‘But don’t overlook the soup. The drug could have been in the biscuits or cake in one case and in the soup in another.’
‘Poisoners usually stick to one MO,’ said Lane.
‘This one is different.’
Coffin played with a pencil on his desk. ‘It says something about the character of the murderer. Makes him someone who was free to walk in and out of the kitchens of both houses and take an opportunity when it offered.’
‘He or she,’ said Lane heavily.
‘Doesn’t sound like the Planter Estate lot. Not exactly handed the key of the house anywhere,’ said Archie Young. ‘But I’ll take a look at them anyway. They’re great at getting into places where they shouldn’t.’
‘Yes, I should do that,’ advised the Chief Commander. ‘Don’t give up on anyone, because as I see it there are pointers this way and that.’
‘You say so,’ said Lane, half questioningly. He had the feeling that he was picking up vibrations that could shake his picture of the crime, already forming. He seemed to see Felicity Zeman as the poisoner. A kind of female vengeance figure, wiping out her husband’s lover and her son like a Greek fate, dealing out her own justice.
‘Think about it.’ Coffin put down the pencil and stood up. The meeting was over.
As they went out, both Young and Lane had a similar thought, but it was Archie Young who got it out: ‘He knows something we don’t. Felt that, didn’t you?’ He rubbed his ankle, still sore. That bloody dog.
‘He gets around far too much,’ said Lane. ‘Talks to people. Sees round corners.’ He sounded disapproving. ‘Thinks too much.’ But this he did not say aloud, it would reflect on himself. Also, he owed a lot to John Coffin, and there was loyalty. He hoped the Old Man wasn’t going over the top. He blamed Stella Pinero.
John Coffin had his own informant. He had established a friendship with an elderly local inhabitant, Mimsie Marker, the proprietor of the stand selling newspapers and magazines by the Spinnergate Tube Station, every morning, every day including Sundays. But Sunday she packed up at midday and went home. Wherever home was, as Mimsie kept quiet about this. She had a basement flat in Parmiloe Street, had had for years, ever since being bombed out of Woodstock Street as a young war bride. But it was generally believed she owned a large suburban house in Wimbledon where she kept either a lover or one invalid daughter, according to how your fancy took you.
She was locally famous for her hats, flowery in summer and velvety and feathery in winter. It was summer, so her hat was adorned with violets, layers of them, violets upon violets. No one ever saw her without her hat, nor knew where she found them. No ordinary hatmaker had piled those violets upon violets. Stella Pinero had said that a rose confection that only came out on high days like a royal wedding had been made by Simone Mirman in Paris, and that there was one that Rose Bertin might have created.
‘But Rose Bertin made hats for Marie Antoinette,’ Coffin had protested.
‘And after the revolution, for Josephine too. And these are very old hats.’
A walking hat museum or not, Mimsie was always very well informed, as someone will be who spends all the day on the pavements.
She always had John Coffin’s papers ready for him, although in her opinion he wasted his time reading those that had no real news in them. The only one to read was the Thameside Times, in which, if you read between the lines, you got all important local news. International or national stuff did not count, you watched the TV news for that, or didn’t bother. Still, she was always there to inform him.
It was a pleasure as well as a duty, like Arthur and his bites, with whom, indeed, she had a lot in common: both wary Londoners, ever ready to defend themselves and their friends.
‘Nasty business,’ she said, as she handed over his papers. ‘How’s Dr Zeman?’
‘Early days yet.’
‘If he’s not dead by now, he’ll live. I knew his old dad, Dr Victor. Tough, that lot. That’ll be two-fifty.’
Coffin handed the money over. ‘Think so?’
‘Wasn’t meant for him, anyway.’
‘Are you sure of that, Mimsie?’
She ignored the question. Who was sure of anything? ‘You know who did it, don’t you?’
‘No, I don’t. Surprised if you do.’
She ignored this also, nor did she answer it directly. That would be too straightforward for Mimsie. ‘Know who they’re saying did it?’
‘Who is they?’ Of course, he knew, but one had to play it Mimsie’s way.
‘Us, us locals. People like me who have always lived here, not the new lot.’
‘So who have they picked on? I suppose there is a name?’
‘Yes. They think Fred Kinver is wiping out the Zemans to avenge his daughter. And they say Good Luck to him.’
‘But the Zemans have lived around here a long time too, Mimsie.’
‘Makes no difference. Well off, you see.’
‘And do you think Fred Kinver killed them, Mimsie?’
Mimsie just smiled, showing sparkling white false teeth.
Coffin remembered all this as he went home, late on that violent Sunday. He was hearing too much about Fred Kinver.
Bob always demanded an evening walk, pointing out in an anxious way that without this walk his bladder could not manage to last. Once or twice he had got Stella up in the middle of the night to prove his point.
On the Sunday, when the fires were out and the streets quiet, she took him as far as Max’s Delicatessen: Max never closed until midnight, even on a Sunday. She could have a drink of coffee, give Bob a biscuit, although not chocolate. The rumour about the use of chocolate to mask the presence of poison had spread through the district with great speed.
It was about nine o’clock, and a fine evening. Usually at this time, Max’s was busy with people drinking coffee and eating cake, buying ice-cream or just gossiping. The Theatre Workshop crowd used it as a kind of club. Max encouraged his customers just to drop in even if they didn’t buy. ‘They are my friends,’ he said. ‘I like to see them, pass the time of day. It makes my work happy.’
It also made his till ring, because few emerged without buying something, even if it was only a packet of coffee. He sold good coffee, the best in London, he claimed.
But tonight the place was almost deserted. Just one couple sitting in a corner over glasses of iced coffee. Sir Harry Beauchamp and Dick, heads together, talking quietly. They had the reputation of being the worst old gossips in London, but without malice.
Max was on his own. ‘My wife has a migraine, I have one myself. I think. It is that sort of day.’
Sir Harry looked up and waved her over. ‘Come and join us. We need cheering up. I’ve just signed on the dotted line for the new apartment in St Luke’s Mansions. We wanted to be near Dicky’s gallery.’ He patted Dick’s hand, they made no bones about their relationship; they lived independently but each apartment had a double bed. ‘And now I’m wondering if I’ve done the right thing.’
Stella walked across to them followed by Bob. Bob was allowed in on sufferance because he was known to be a dog of sorrows, a bereaved boy, but otherwise Max did not encourage animals.
‘A double espresso, Max, please.’ Stella sat down by Sir Harry. ‘And a custard cream wafer for Bob.’ It was better if Bob was a paying customer. ‘Oh, you’ll like it round here,’ she said loyally. ‘It’s very agreeable. Usually, anyway. Perhaps it’s a bit rough at the moment.’ She decided not to tell him about the fire that never was in the courtyard, since he obviously did not know.
‘I don’t want to be savaged on my way home,’ said Sir Harry. ‘I keep late hours, and there’s poor Dick’s place. Some cad painted on his wall. Quite a nice drawing but a bit graphic.’ Delicately, he said no more.
‘Has he wiped it out?’
‘No, it was quite decoratively done, and I’m going to photograph it for my book on graffiti.’
That book ought to be quite a sizzler, Stella thought, if all she had heard about Sir Harry’s haunts were true. There was said to be a bit of rough trade down by the Dock in the Plymouth Bar, and she had heard stories about one of the local discos too. You heard every sort of gossip in the theatre world without taking it to heart. Live and let live. However, she did not usually pass on such tidbits to John Coffin, although he probably knew of them professionally. He must know of every sink and stew and den in the district.
‘For private publication only, of course,’ said Sir Harry, with a wicked look in his pale blue eyes.
‘Of course.’
‘I had to pay a pretty price for my apartment. She drives a hard bargain, your landlady. She says she needs every penny for the new theatre.’
‘I expect she does.’
‘And she’s sister to our eminent detective.’
‘I suppose he affords us some protection.’
‘You could say that.’
‘On the other hand, he might attract violence,’ said Dick, making a rare contribution to the conversation.
‘Naughty,’ said Sir Harry, slapping his hand.
Stella sipped her coffee while Bob swallowed his biscuit and looked round for more.
‘I was sorry about that poor boy Zeman. He had such a lovely face.’
‘You knew him?’ Stella was surprised.
‘Seen him around,’ said Sir Harry easily. ‘I notice faces. It’s my job. I liked what I saw. I might have photographed him. A lot inside him.’
‘Perhaps we ought to get off,’ said Dick; he was said to be the jealous one.
‘Give you a lift home, Stella?’
‘No, I must walk. It’s for Bob.’
Bob looked up at hearing his name, stood and gave a shake. Stella picked up his leash and they departed. Bob was like an old horse and only ever wanted to take the walk he knew. Now he showed a strong determination to head off in the direction of Feather Street.
Stella let him take her that way, it was a fine night, the coffee had refreshed her, and she had Bob with her, after all. What was there to be afraid of?
To her surprise, Bob went through Feather Street without more than a sniff at the odd lamp-post, then carried on briskly to the bottom of the road. Here, outside the Marsh house, he stopped and looked up hopefully.
Stella laughed. ‘Obvious where Jim takes you on your walks. Home. Well, not tonight, Bob.’
She moved him on, letting him lead her round the corner and up Brazen Hill. She knew this led back to St Luke’s.
But outside a house, Bob showed a desire to linger again. This time it had a big brass plate: John Dibben. Veterinary Surgeon. Obviously another of his haunts.
‘Come on, Bob, nearly home now. Just a pull up the hill.
Brazen Hill soon flattened out, turned into a busy main road and then led to St Luke’s Mansions.
Stella walked in through the main doorway where all the entrances to the flats were situated. Once it had been the door of the church, but Letty Bingham’s architect had opened it up in a charming way to form a small cloister.
John Coffin was just arriving in his car which seemed to have a curious dulled look as if someone had dipped it in soapy water and not polished it. Stella waved at him, pulled on by Bob, now anxious for water, and sleep.
‘I’ll catch you up, Stella,’ called Coffin. ‘Want to talk.’
Then he heard her scream.
He got out of the car and ran into the building after her. Someone had turned out the light that always shone at night, but the moon was up so he could see her.
She was staring down at a figure lying propped against the wall. She had stopped screaming but shudders were running through her.
The figure wore a man’s dark old trousers, a tweed jacket and a striped cotton shirt with scarf at the neck, on the bulbous head was an old tweed cap. Black boots stuck out from the legs.
Stella still shuddered. ‘He hasn’t got a face,’ she said.
Coffin bent down and touched. Paper stuck out from where the arms would have ended, the legs in the old boots gave under his fingers. The body was stuffed with paper, rolls and rolls of newspaper.
‘It’s the Paper Man,’ he said. He put his arm round Stella, holding her close.