Coffin’s Ghost

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 different now, he thought, things were like that in the outfit then, which was probably one of the reasons I was brought in to the area, and I have cleared it all out. Although there might be one or two rattling nests I haven’t got to yet.

He remembered that he had thought of those few weeks as a pleasant interlude, helping him through a bad time, and he had been grateful to Anna and those regular meetings in Barrow Street.

A nice easy relationship, not meaning too much to either party. No guilt involved, later he might tell Stella all about it and she would be humane and understanding. ‘My dear,’ she would say, ‘life is like a war, you are entitled to your comfort.’

Stella, in fact, would never talk like that, her dialogue, honed through years of the best playwrights, was sharper.

Or more likely, he thought, taking another drink of coffee, she would have given me a swift blow and stalked out of the room. Not forever, his behaviour would not have rated that high in the range of life’s misdemeanours, she would have been back.

Anyway, he hadn’t told her. Or not yet. He trusted that the initials J.C. and the terrible offering on the steps of the house in Barrow Street were not a preview of what was to come.

He remembered the last time he had seen Anna.

She had called at the house in Barrow Street, spontaneously, unasked, when he was working. He had gone down to open the door himself, there was no one else, he had no servants. The house was kept clean by a commercial firm with whom he had not much contact.

An image of that last time came sweeping back from beneath the careful stones he had buried it under. Not a memory to keep on display.

She swayed through the door; she had long legs, and skirts were minimal that year, and tight as well.

Tucked under her arm, she had something long and thin, wrapped in silk. A very pretty pink and blue printed silk, Italian silk for sure.

‘What have you got there?’

Without a word, Anna slowly unwrapped the silk. Inside was a whip.

‘I thought policemen liked a touch of violence.’

Coffin was silent. Then he said – he remembered the words so clearly – ‘That’s been your experience, has it?’

She just smiled.

Coldly, he said: ‘I don’t think it would be an aphrodisiac for me. I doubt if it would bring me to the desired consummation.’

Anna looked at him for a long minute, with no expression on her face. Then, in a soft, gentle voice, she said:

‘Pompous git.’