Coffin and the Paper Man

Not mentioned them to Anna Mary, though. The girl had a right to her own life.

She hadn’t been shocked. ‘Wouldn’t have minded some poems like that myself when I was her age. Fat chance from Fred.’

Naturally she hadn’t mentioned them to Fred, hoped he didn’t know. Goodness knows what he would have done if he’d found them. It didn’t bear thinking about.

The police had them in their possession now, of course, but as far as she knew, they had not told Fred.

Where was he now, and what was he up to?

What was he up to?

John Coffin looked down on the river from his office window. He couldn’t see it from where he lived in St Luke’s Mansions, so this was a bonus. He was fond of the Thames which had been part of his life. He could just remember when it had been filled with merchant shipping, now it was empty except for a few small vessels which moored at the Brazen Head Dock from time to time. All the big carriers had moved down to the estuary where the water was deeper. The romantic upper Thames, north of Oxford, so beloved of poets and scholars, had little appeal for him whose river was the London river, the tidal river of docks and working craft.

An uproar in his outer office drew him back from the window. Such noise did not usually disturb the Head of the Force. He was a sacred object to be treated with respect. A boring fact, but true.

What were they having, a riot?

But no, it was just one man’s voice, shouting, and his secretary shouting back. He was surprised she could shout, she never raised her voice with him.

Someone banged against his door, collided with it, and then opened it. He saw a dishevelled middle-aged man with grey hair and frantic eyes. But he looked determined.

No gun that Coffin could see, so he probably was not dangerous. He could hear bells sounding in the distance and knew that help would be rushing in. Still, the man should not have got through every barrier.

He recognized Fred Kinver at once, but he did not say so. Instead, he stood there waiting. Always let the other fellow plunge in.

‘Got you,’ said Fred Kinver. ‘It’s you I want.’

Coffin still waited.

‘It’s about the murder of my girl, my Anna. I’m Fred Kinver. I know who killed her.’

Coffin looked across to his secretary. ‘It’s all right, Edith. Calm everything down, will you? Come in, Mr Kinver.’

Fred was already in, sitting himself confidentially down upon the chair facing Coffin’s at the big desk. The sunlight fell on his face. It wasn’t that he was a bold or pushing man, Coffin understood, but that he was out of himself at the moment. He had worked himself up to do what he must do.

‘I come to you because you are the top man and my wife knows you.’

Coffin nodded. He had met Mrs Kinver in Stella’s dressing-room.

‘She say’s you’re a good man. I tried the others—’ your underlings, he implied’—and got no good from them. Wouldn’t listen. Well, they did listen, but wouldn’t hear.’

A fair enough judgement, Coffin thought, on Archie Young when feeling sure of himself.

Coffin made a sudden decision. He rose and went to the door. ‘Let’s have some coffee, please, Edith.’ This chap was living in a world of his own, perhaps coffee would drag him out of it.

‘Ten minutes,’ he said. ‘That what’s you can have. Say what you have to say and then get out.’

As things were, it was a generous ration of his day.

‘It’s what she said, what Anna said. She didn’t say ‘Get the man who killed me.’ She couldn’t talk like that when she was dying. What she said was ‘Get Zeman. He killed me.’

Tim Zeman. Dr and Felicity Zeman’s beloved son.

Timmy Zeman.

‘Did you write me a letter?’ asked Coffin. ‘Anonymously?’

‘No, certainly not. Of course not, anything I have to say I’d say to your face. I have said it: the Zeman boy killed my girl.’

He was not entirely in his right mind, thought Coffin, and who could blame him?

In the next few days the police poured in and out of the Zeman house.

‘We’d thought of it for ourselves,’ said Archie Young. ‘Of course we had. Be fools not to. And we were planning to concentrate on the boy Zeman. He wrote the poems. Admits it.’

They interviewed Leonard Zeman, Felicity, his wife, and of course, Tim himself. Then they moved down the road to Mrs Kay Zeman and Val Humberstone. Mrs Zeman took to her bed with a mild heart attack, where Val waited upon her. No good was got from either of them.

They questioned the ambulance man again, and spoke to Jim Marsh. Jim said, Yes, he had heard Anna speak, but he hadn’t been close, keeping the dog away, you see, and couldn’t be sure what he’d heard. He did not like being questioned, wasn’t a bit happy with the attention he was getting.

Then they took Tim in for questioning.

Yes, admitted the frightened boy, he had written the poems. But he hadn’t killed Anna. He had been away at the time. He could prove it. He had been staying with friends in Kent, a young married couple called Eden. They would bear him out, only at the moment they were abroad.

He was kept overnight in the clean new cell in the police station that had only been opened last year, but where the cell had already acquired a smell of its own. Next morning he was collected by his mother.

She drove him away in her large Mercedes car of which Tim was simultaneously proud of her owning and ashamed at the same time. It was flashy, expensive, all the things his mother wasn’t really.

They were alike, these two. Tim had his father’s height and his short sight but her delicate bones and pretty features. They even looked pretty on him although he was masculine enough. Birdlike, both of them.

‘I didn’t do it, Mother.’

‘Of course, not. You don’t have to tell me.’

I’d believe you even if you had done it, she thought. Mothers always do. My son is innocent, that’s what they always said, didn’t they? He is a nice boy. That was the other thing they said.

‘About the poems—they didn’t mean anything. You understand, Mum, don’t you? It was just a kind of experiment, the sort of thing you have to do.’

‘Of course.’ She’d said it again, she really must find a different way of expressing herself. And she was driving much too fast, she’d nearly shaved that cyclist off his wheels.

‘And we never did anything much, Anna and I, if you get me. And if we had, would it have mattered?’

No, it wouldn’t have mattered. Anna had not been a virgin anyway at the time of her death. Some sexual experience, the medical grapevine said, and why not? Who expected otherwise? …

‘Why didn’t you get me out before? Why did I have to stay in there all night? It was foul.’

‘The police had a right to question you, Tim. You aren’t a minor any more.’

In fact, she had wanted to try to get him home last night, to go round there and make a fuss. But Leonard wouldn’t do it.