A Coffin for Charley

So she looked about her as she went out and kept an eye on the street. She spent hours at a rehearsal of a TV series in which she was involved, she visited her agent’s office and signed a contract, she kept an appointment with her hairdresser in Beaumont Place.

‘You’re fidgety, love,’ said her hairdresser. He had known her for years, and had placed a signed photograph of her on the wall above the washbasin. He had other stage ladies there too. ‘Keep your head still or I can’t get the cut right.’

‘Sorry, Kenny.’ Stella took a deep breath. ‘Bit on edge.’

‘I can tell … Why not go downstairs and get some massage? Saw you on TV last night. You were lovely.’

‘Oh, good.’ He was cheering her up deliberately and she knew it, but it was his pastoral skills as well as his brilliance as a cutter that kept his shop in Knightsbridge in the top league of hairdressers.

Kenny watched her walk away (without having gone downstairs to his new and expensive health and fitness salon for a soothing massage of the neck and back). He watched her passage past the hatter’s window display and the jeweller’s boutique and the little couture house where royalty shopped, all with their flowered window-boxes and bright front doors, and shook his head. He had known her for years. That woman’s worried.

Stella turned round to see him looking, she gave a wave, and stepped into a taxi.

‘Spinnergate,’ she said. ‘And don’t tell me it’s too far.’

One of the disadvantages of living in the Second City was that taxi-drivers complained about taking you there. Not safe, they said, or no fares back.

But this one gave her a grin. ‘Lady, for you, anything.’ He leaned out of the window. ‘Saw you in Candida. Great acting.’

She had recently done a back to back couple of productions of Candida and A Doll’s House, first on TV and then taking them to St Luke’s Theatre on a wave of public interest to boost audiences. It had worked.

‘My wife liked it too,’ he shouted as he drove away.

Well, that’s two of them that like me, thought Stella. Then she went home for a meeting with Letty Bingham and the rest of the committee which was setting up the Drama School, they would be discussing the constitution and the difficult matter of charitable status.

And on the mat outside her door was the cat and the cat was sitting in a wreath of white roses.

So he admires me this observer? And sends me white roses? Stella said to herself. By God, I’ll get him. I don’t have to be passive, I’ll go after him myself.

Inevitably by this time the story that Marianna Manners had thought she was being watched had gone the rounds and Stella was told about it by Mimsie Marker as she bought a paper from the stall by the Tube station and by the chemist when she bought some aspirin. (And if ever a woman needed it, I do.)

She had not heard about Annie Briggs’s similar fears. She had hardly any knowledge of the Creeley family.

Murder is always noticed locally. People come to stare at the home of the victim, some take photographs. The media is always there, although they melt away as a new story breaks. The police take their time in measuring, photographing, and taking samples for forensic investigation.

The body of the victim seems forgotten.

Not in this case, however, since she had a beautiful and much photographed body and that body had been loved by a well-known MP.

Used, said the local feminist organization, used and abused and finally sacrificed. This group of women who had a club room in Spinnergate admired Stella Pinero, deplored her marriage to John Coffin (A policeman, just think! She was better free!) and disliked Job Titus, MP. They were pretty libertarian, this group of Feather Street ladies, and did not advocate sexual austerity for men, women or beasts; they liked sex themselves, they just hated Titus’s way of going about it. They thought he was a coarse fellow.

Coffin was soon made aware that the murder of Marianna Manners was not going to be an easy one to handle. The appearance of Job Titus on various TV news flashes, of Job Titus as he left his flat to go to the House of Commons or walked his dog in the park, reminded him of this even if he had felt like forgetting. Apart from anything else, Titus was demanding police protection from the harassment of the media while issuing threats of legal action if his name was mentioned as a suspect.

Because of the sensitivity of the case, Coffin kept himself informed of all that went on in the Murder Room which had been set up in a church hall in Swinehouse on the border of Spinnergate, close to where she had lived and been murdered in the block of flats in Alexandra Wharf, near to Napier Street where Annie Briggs lived.

There had been a good many changes in the Serious Crime Section in the last year or so as Coffin had worked through his senior police officers and weeded out the weaker members of the team by means of early retirement, sideways promotion, and in one case by death. The unit was now smaller but more efficient.

Archie Young headed all important cases, and had taken personal charge of this one. It was important for Young as well as John Coffin, he was a very ambitious man. His wife, Alison, knew this trait and used her influence on him to moderate an open show of it. She was cleverer than he was and knew that ambition had to be masked. She valued her friendship with Stella Pinero which both of them used to communicate worries about their husbands and to put a brake on the men when it seemed wise. Both of them were convinced that without their efforts their spouses would be dead of overwork.

‘She was strangled and stifled but there was no rape, no semen traces, nothing like that … All the same, the pathologist thinks there might have been some sexual satisfaction involved.’

‘Why?’

‘He thinks the killer took his time about it, that’s all. Getting some kicks.’

‘How does he know? About the going slow?’ It was not a picture he was going to cherish.

‘I don’t know. Something to do with the bruising, the flow of blood. Or perhaps he’s just guessing. Percy’s good at guessing.’ Professor Percy Peters had worked with them, on and off, for some years now. They knew him well enough to value his intuitions. He had been at it so long that he seemed to have developed a sympathetic link with both killer and victim.

It was that or black magic, Young said, and he was a rationalist by long habit. Inside himself, he admitted that Percy could make his flesh creep.

‘Been turning up some things about her lifestyle. She was a good dancer and an actress as well, apparently they all have to do everything now, even a bit of singing. She was unemployed a lot.’

‘Aren’t they all?’ Coffin had been well schooled in the politics of The Profession by his wife.

‘She took what work she could get.’ He paused. ‘Did a stint at Karnival in Ladd’s Alley.’

Coffin raised an eyebrow.

‘Yes, the transvestite club. No evidence that she was into that, for her it was work. Or probably.’

He said probably because, unlike Percy Peters, he was no mind-reader and how could you know what went on inside people? Maybe Marianna had found it agreeable to dress up as a man. She was a tall, muscular girl and would have looked the part.

Karnival was a club for those who wanted to dress up and dance. It also offered a cabaret.

Fun, Fizz, Frou-Frou and Frolic, it advertised.

It was well run and although probably seedy-looking in the hard light of day, in the evening managed to be most of the things it promised.

‘Ever been there, sir?’

‘Yes, once. I was watching a female impersonator. He was good, the whole act was good, even I thought he was good and I knew who and what he was.’ He had had to arrest him, though, but for theft not for dressing up. ‘Of course, I think some of them get the most kick out of a man who doesn’t manage to look quite like a woman. Or a woman who doesn’t quite fit together as a man, however butch she is. The other sex still hanging out seems to give more of a thrill.’

‘And that’s where Titus seems to have met her.’

‘Good lord!’ Coffin breathed in sharply. ‘Now you have surprised me. What was he doing there?’

‘He’s straight as far as we know.’ And the Special Branch usually did know that sort of thing and had been approached by Young. ‘He may be a bit of a voyeur. I think he visited for the hell of it. Just to look and pry.’ He didn’t like Job Titus. ‘Anyway, he picked up Marianna there. So maybe they both had something in common.’

‘A lovely man.’ Coffin considered. ‘How did you get this?’

‘Judy Kinnear, Special Branch. She keeps an eye on him, just in case. I knew she’d be on to whatever there is to know, it’s her job. And I’ve known her for years. Worked together once. Before she moved over to Special. Do you know her, sir?’

Coffin shook his head. ‘Know the name.’

‘She looks like a hard-faced bitch, but when you get to know her she’s one of the best.’

‘I don’t suppose Titus is a security risk?’