Coffin’s Ghost. Gwendoline Butler

      ‘I thought he was gone.’ Then she laughed. ‘Well, only for about a minute. But remember I was walking to the car with him when the chap dug the knife in. It was the Chief Commander or me, and the Chief saw to it that it wasn’t me.’

      ‘You got the man though.’

      Phoebe nodded. ‘Ten years inside. Wish I could have got the knife into him.’

      Then she said: ‘We haven’t told the Chief about the legs and arms?’

      ‘He’s got to know. I am preparing a report which he will see in the ordinary way of things. Since he reads everything.’ And remembers it, he had a phenomenal memory. ‘He will know.’

      ‘On his doorstep too.’

      ‘Not his present doorstep,’ corrected Chief Superintendent Archie Young. ‘He didn’t live there at first, when he came to the Second City. St Luke’s was just being converted and he was on his own. Her ladyship was working in the States.’ He frowned. In fact, he was not sure what exactly had been the state of the marriage at that time. He had heard rumours. On and off. Happy enough now, though, it appeared.

      Lovely woman, and talented, no doubt about that, but he personally always handled her with care.

      ‘Miss Pinero wasn’t there?’

      ‘Not at the time, she always seemed to be on the move. She came and had a look round, of course, so I suppose she spent the odd night there but practically speaking, he lived alone in Moorbank House. It had been a doctor’s house. Or was it a dentist’s? Been both, I think. Called something else now.’

      ‘So when he moved out, it became a women’s refuge?’

      ‘I think it was something in between.’ Archie frowned. ‘Yes. We used it for CID offices. We were all busy creating the Second City Police Force. Some of us came from the Met and others were local to the old Docklands.’

      ‘And some were completely new to it like me.’ Phoebe had come later from Birmingham. By the time she had arrived, the theatre complex was almost complete with only the smallest theatre waiting completion. The Coffins’ home in the converted tower of the old church was lived in. Must have been expensive, she remembered thinking.

      ‘You’ve been in touch with Stella, haven’t you?’ Archie Young put a question to which he knew the answer.

      ‘Yes, sure, she was what you might call a character witness for George Freedom. I had to come at it sideways, as it were, not to make too clear what I was after. That I thought Freedom was a killer.’ She was cagey, careful with what she said. Anyway, she thought he was the sort that got off. There were types like it.

      Justice or not? She didn’t know.

      ‘Hit a girl on the head, didn’t he?’

      ‘Yes, his secretary, hit her with a log. He claimed it was an accident. But they had been quarrelling. He’s out now.’

      ‘What did you make of him?’

      Phoebe shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t care to be shut up in a dark room with him.’ But there were plenty of men you could say that of, although with some it might be a treat. She looked speculatively at the chief superintendent. No, probably not.

      And Freedom had a history of violence behind him. Used to shoot, just for a hobby. But more of that later, Phoebe thought. She never liked men who used guns as a hobby, even though they only shot at paper targets. They had faces and bodies, those targets, and the thought was there, wasn’t it? This reminded her of something else the Chief Commander was not going to like. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard yet about the trouble at the Abbey Road Gun Club?’

      He nodded. ‘I have the report. No more.’

      ‘Two of our men belong. Uniform. A PC and a sergeant, both from Cutts Street.’ Cutts Street was a substation not far from Abbey Road which was near to the tube station. She would like to have said that both the constable, who was known as Loverboy, and the sergeant – Sergeant Will Grimm, known naturally as Death – were on her worry list, but she kept quiet. With Grimm she always wondered if she ought to wear a necklace of garlic. Attractive but horrible. Unluckily, it was something she went for.

      ‘Got a puzzling side to it.’

      ‘Certainly has. Bill Eager, who is the club sec, runs it, really, blames it on the flood they had. I’ve read his statement. Does seem to have done in all the security they should have had.’

      ‘You’d better talk to him yourself. And the two men from Cutts Street. I want those guns back.’

      ‘I’ll see him again. I did go there at once, he was cleaning up the place, he had an outsider cleaning team in there.’ She frowned. ‘Perhaps that wasn’t wise, but he’s a careful chap, is Bill Eager.’ She went on to another of her problems, keen to talk to him because she did not get many chances of easy talk with Archie Young. ‘The Health people are going on about the sale of illegal beef … stuff from beasts slaughtered as suspect of BSE. They think it’s coming from the Second City.’

      Archie Young nodded. ‘We would get the blame.’ He knew it was the sort of investigation that went on and on with everyone lying.

      Phoebe came back to the packages containing severed limbs on the doorstep of the refuge. Not the kind of crime you would ever pin on George Freedom, she thought. If he packaged up a woman’s limbs then they would probably be packed in Hermés bags.

      There was a handbag, as it happened, round the corner, propped up against the wall of the house. Not Hermés, though. And the legs, otherwise bare, had painted toenails. A touching bit of vanity for such battered, bruised legs.

      ‘It’s sex, isn’t it?’ she said to Archie Young. ‘A sexual crime. You don’t chop a woman up like that without there being a sexual involvement.’

      Archie Young nodded, and Phoebe came back to what worried her.

      ‘Surely the fact he lived there for a bit will have been forgotten.’

      ‘It got a bit of publicity at the time; the local news rag, the Docklands Daily, was still running and it had an article about the Chief Commander and the house.

      Pictures. Coffin had obliged with reluctance but knowing that his new force in the new Second City needed all the help it could get. As he had done so lately: Coffin and his actress wife. ‘The love of his life,’ he had allegedly said not so long ago. All in the paper.

      Wrapped in layers of brown paper, the limbs came in two parcels, legs in one, arms in another.

      In blood, a message straggled: J.C. TO REMIND YOU, SIR.

      And underneath, in pencil, not blood: I send it back from me to you, although it was yours before.

      Archie Young was serious. ‘We haven’t spoken of it yet to the woman who runs the refuge. I don’t know what she will make of it. I think she read what seemed to be the message but she is playing it cool. Her name is Mary Arden. And we may be getting it wrong. But I think we have to tell the Chief.’

      ‘Oh sure,’ said Phoebe. ‘And won’t he be pleased.’

      She wondered a little bit what Stella Pinero would make of it. Still, no one really knew what went on in a marriage.

      You are not suggesting, she said to herself, that the Chief Commander knew those limbs intimately in life?

      She caught the chief super’s eye and knew that he was suggesting exactly that to himself.

      Two high-ranking police officers thinking the same thing.

      The governor of Sisley Green Prison was thinking something even worse.

Chapter 2

      There was a police van outside the house in Barrow