Coffin’s Ghost. Gwendoline Butler

OF SAMUEL PEPYS

       May, 166–

      On Wednesday last, I did go to Easter Hythe across the River Thames. I crossed the river in a waterman’s boat from Rotherhythe with a joking waterman who challenged me to swim across if he dropped me over the side because the weight of me and my friend Mr Williams was like to sink his boat. We let him laugh and staid where we were.

      We were met by Mr Williams’s son. It was but a short walk – for walk we must – to the township of Easter Hythe which some say was first used by Viking sailors. Easter Hythe is a poor-looking place with low-built wooden houses and some stone-built hovels said to be of Viking origin.

      In Easter Hythe we went to Drossers Market where were many stalls and great crowds. Young Mr Williams said here you might buy anything you wanted and most of it would be stolen and might be stolen back again before you got home with it.

      From it leads Chopping Tree Lane and there I was shown the pit into which the bodies were dropped and which we had come to see.

      For this was the Viking execution place, so it is told, where victims were sacrificed and criminals hanged.

      Many skulls and other bones were found but young Mr Williams said that it was his belief it was nothing of the Vikings but more recent and more criminous. Mr Williams is a surgeon and sees many broken bones and it is his opinion that the bones in the pit are too new broken to be Viking.

      The sense of evil in Chopping Tree Lane was mighty strong, creeping into Drossers Market, and Mr Williams said to me that the evil would be there for centuries.

      We came back in poor spirits, although I bought a pretty bracelet for my wife and one, but not near so dear, for my maidservant Alice.

      Editor’s note: It is thought that Pepys’s real motive for the visit to East Hythe with his friend Williams was that they had been told that it was home to some handsome and willing and pox-free young women whose embraces they could enjoy at a lower price than in the City of London.

Chapter 1

      ‘Who was it said that modern detective stories never have the murder of children in them?’ John Coffin asked from his hospital bed. Then he answered himself: ‘Graham Greene. And how wrong he was. Can’t have read many.’

      ‘Don’t be so grumpy.’ Stella Pinero had brought him in a selection of detective stories which lay scattered on the bed. She had also brought him in a local newspaper with her photograph and her description as ‘the love of his life’. This irritated him too, although Stella, ever the realist, said what good publicity for both of them it was. ‘Won’t do anything for me,’ he had grumbled, still grumpy.

      ‘You’d be grumpy with a hole in your liver.’

      It was healing nicely though, and someone had once told him that you could spare as much as half your liver.

      He wondered who had told him that.

      Not Graham Greene.

      He turned over the books. Policemen don’t read crime novels. They might write them but not read other people’s. Except in training, which doesn’t count.

      ‘The Handbag,’ he said aloud in a tone of deep scepticism. ‘Doesn’t sound like a crime novel. Simenon, perhaps. More like Oscar Wilde.’

      He began to feel better. Nothing like a grumble. But he remembered The Handbag. It worried him for some reason. Stuck in his memory.

      ‘I am going to have a wonderfully happy domestic time,’ announced Stella Pinero, wife to John Coffin, with a wonderfully happy smile. She was a good actress.

      In fact, she was more than a little depressed. She was well aware that she had almost lost her husband, and had gained the shocking knowledge that without him she would lose half herself.

      Now this was something she had never believed possible. It was important now not to let him share this knowledge.

      ‘I am going to stay home, and enjoy my unusual leisure.’

      What she meant was that she had no stage performance at the moment, no television play contracted, and nothing on the radio: in short, she had no work. To cheer herself up and as a homecoming present for Coffin, she had had a large window put in to the ground floor of the strong-minded tower in which they lived. It lit up a very dark area which must be a good thing, even if some might count it a security risk. You need light, she told herself, to be happy and it has to be natural light, not the electric sort.

      She was reluctant to count no work as a holiday. Anyway, with an expensive daughter whose career she was, to a certain extent, subsidizing, money was always useful. The daughter was the child of an earlier marriage, not Coffin’s. The two were on friendly terms, and liked each other in a wary kind of way. They needed to get to know each other better, Stella understood this very well, but opportunity did not often come their way, since her child was a hopeful producer of films, having graduated from acting, and had little time to spare in her ambitious life. And Coffin always had MURDER. Stella put it in capital letters since it was spelt that way in her mind. Bright red, too, and occasionally flashing with lights.

      It was early evening, on the very day Coffin, although forbidden to do so by the doctors, had gone back to work. A pile of letters, a pile of reports, nothing on the answerphone because his efficient secretary had dealt with those. E-mail was loaded but could be ignored.

      One telephone call got through while Sheila was dealing with the printer which had stuck. He could hear her in the other room, swearing gently.

      ‘Hello, Albie Touchey here.’

      But he had recognized the voice.

      ‘Glad you got out.’

      It made it sound as if out of prison. Not remarkable since he was the governor of the Sisley Green Prison in the Second City.

      ‘Always meant to, Albie.’

      Touchey was a small, well-muscled figure, a tough terrier of a man. The unlikely friends had one thing in common: criminals.

      Coffin and Co. sent them to prison and Touchey eventually shovelled them out.

      But they had something else in common: they were both South Londoners and had, for a time, lived in the same street. They had not known each other in those days; Touchey had attended the local grammar school and Coffin had been a pupil at what he called Dotheboys Hall.

      But the two had met at a civic dinner and become friends over the whisky and the port.

      ‘That’s what my lodgers always say. As if I fancied to keep them. I don’t make favourites, you know. Move ‘em on as soon as I can.’

      ‘I know that.’

      Albie was ready for a grumble. ‘You have the easy side, all you have to do is catch ‘em. I have to live with them.

      ‘The average age of my lot is getting younger and younger. They’ll be bringing their nappies with them soon.’

      “They know you keep a well-run establishment,’ said Coffin. Indeed, Touchey managed to run a humane and orderly prison at Sisley Green.

      ‘Touch and go, touch and go.’

      They chatted for a while.

      ‘A friend of yours looked in on us while you were in hospital,’ Albie said conversationally. ‘Georgie Freedom.’

      ‘No friend of mine.’ Stella’s, perhaps. ‘Surprised you let him in. Or out.’

      ‘Felt like keeping him there but he said. No, he was taking a tour because of a TV series he was planning.’ In fact. Freedom had been inside for a bit while being questioned and was now out pending an appeal.

      ‘Think of him as a toad,’