Coffin’s Ghost. Gwendoline Butler

if he was going to regret leaving the Met, a time when Stella was in New York and the marriage was rocky. Or seemed to be so.

      I love you, Stella, he thought, but you can be difficult.

      This is the point where you laugh, he said to himself, because probably she says the same about you. Bound to. It was always mutual, that sort of complaint, wasn’t it?

      He went to the window to look out. He had returned to work, against his doctor’s advice, earlier than that luminary thought wise. He had a deputy and an assistant, but work was piling up and he wanted to get on with it himself. He did not find it easy to delegate.

      Outside it was raining; the Second City did not look at its best when the sky was grey and heavy with rain.

      He returned to his desk where a tray of coffee had been put ready for him by his secretary with a look of sympathy. The way he felt at the moment he did not want sympathy, it irritated him.

      A kind woman but too full of sympathy. What the pot of coffee and biscuits said was: You were stabbed by that maniac, he wanted attention and attacking you was his way of getting it. You nearly died.

      It was the second knife wound he had suffered. This time it had got to his liver.

      I must watch out for knives, he thought. I seem to attract them, and some in the back too.

      He drank some coffee. His first secretary in the Second City had been one of his mistakes: efficient, but hostile, wanting him to know that he was a newcomer, an intruder, here.

      There were other mistakes, but she was his first, and at the time, all subsumed in his feeling that his coming here at all was one big mistake.

      He had been promoted beyond his powers. The feeling niggled away inside him, taking away all pleasure at his new position – well, nearly all, he had to admit, some pleasure remained, he couldn’t help that. It was marvellous to have power, to feel the lad from the London Docklands but south of the river was now part of the Establishment. Albeit one with more than a dash of the revolutionary in him. But he had already realized that you needed this in the Second City, which was never going to be docile. The population of the Second City had lived through wars and depressions, been bombed, and was now rebuilt, had seen old industries fade away and been replaced by bankers and journalists, had seen the great River Thames lose trade but become more beautiful; he was moving into a city of change and he was part of the change.

      But in this changing city, where he had to make his mark, he had enemies. Within the police team were men well-entrenched who had worked their way up and resented the arrival of the newcomer.

      Flashy, playing to the media, talks too much, thinks too much, not one of us. These were the comments flung about, some made a hit, as some always will, and hurt.

      Not one of us, was the criticism shouted the loudest.

      At the same time, he was coping with the mountain of reports, letters and memos that a new position inevitably entailed. He was learning faces, sorting out friends and enemies.

      And Stella, ah, Stella, was not with him. She was working in New York. He had missed her. At first, settling into the new job it had not been too bad, but Stella had stayed away. What was more, she had proclaimed that she was not coming back to live in that terrible house in Barrow Street. It smelt wrong to her.

      She had already bought the St Luke’s Church with plans to start the theatre there, and even then the tower was being converted into her home. She would come back when it was ready to live in. Oh yes, when work permitted, she would fly over to see him, but he would have to rent a flat or take a room in a hotel. Barrow Street did not suit her.

      It was the difficult side of Stella which he knew existed, he had met it before, and never known how to handle it.

      And then he wondered, could not help wondering, who Stella had in New York. Was she unfaithful?

      Suspicion was an evil plant, he had admitted to himself, but it was growing inside him vigorously at that time. A fine flower with a bad scent.

      He had been feeling particularly depressed and irritable when Anna arrived to interview him.

      In those early days he was still doing interviews for the press and the television programmes to get the Second City Police known and respected.

      Or that was the idea put to him by the PR people.

      This was when Anna came on the scene. At first it felt like an invasion. A one-woman invasion.

      Anna Michael was young, handsome rather than beautiful, and dressed in a casual way in jeans and a thick sweater. She couldn’t have been more different from Stella.

      Anna was tactful and admiring in the way she questioned him, so that to his surprise, Coffin found himself responding.

      This interview took place in an office in the old Second City Police HQ, since then rebuilt. She talked about where he was now living in Barrow Street.

      ‘When I was a kid we used to think that Jack the Ripper had lived there. We’d frighten ourselves talking about it.’

      ‘You come from round here?’ He was surprised, she seemed, somehow, international, conceived in an airport, born on a runway.

      ‘Oh yes, sure. My father was a docker … in the days when there were dockers.’ She laughed. ‘He’s still alive, screwed a lot of money out of his employers as redundancy and took himself off to Scotland.’

      ‘Is he a Scot?’

      She nodded. ‘Remotely. Great-grandfather. I’m Carmichael, really, but I trimmed the name down, better for a journalist to have a short name … takes up too much space otherwise. Not Anna either, but Joanna. I didn’t care for the initials J.C., they were too holy.’ She went on: ‘There was a famous murder in Barrow Street in the sixties … the Triangle Murder, it was called.’

      ‘I’ve heard of it.’

      ‘Of course. They got two killers, didn’t they? But there was one they never got. Dead anyway by now, I suppose.’

      ‘Probably.’ And to his surprise he heard himself asking her for a drink at the house in Barrow Street.

      She accepted at once.

      He drank some coffee, which was good and hot, and considered lacing it with whisky or brandy, but rebuffed the idea without much trouble, although in his younger, wilder days, before becoming the Chief Commander of the Second City Force, he would certainly have done so.

      He had probably topped up his coffee on the day Anna came to do her interview.

      By the time that interview came out, he and Anna had become – he hesitated to use the word lovers because he didn’t think love came into it, because he knew he had remained in love with Stella, but love or lust while it lasted, whatever it was between them was powerful.

      Love, lust, technical terms for a jumble of emotions. Behind his emotion was anger and disappointment with his new position and irritation with Stella. He wanted something to soothe away the frustration.

      Anger can be a powerful impulse to sex. For men, anyway. Different for women, perhaps. Better not dwell on that thought.

      He would like to think there was no anger on Anna’s side, ambition, yes, he now thought cynically. But I admired Anna, he thought. She had force and energy.

      She had brought a copy of Notable British Trials, containing the Triangle Murder in Barrow Street. The Triangle was the name of the seedy nightclub-cum-gambling-parlour-cum-brothel that existed there in the mid nineteen fifties and sixties. (Certainly three angles to that place, Coffin had thought, as he read.) A couple of CID men were sitting there drinking when a masked man shouting abuse and waving a shotgun, with his two pals, burst in and aimed at the proprietor, Alby Hilter, who fell down with a bullet in his chest. He died later.

      The masked man turned out to be an ex-copper with a grievance whom the CID men were obliged to identify and bear witness against.

      It’s