A Cold Coffin

‘Statement?’ No pleasure there, instead surprise and hurt dignity.

‘Just routine,’ Phoebe assured him. ‘Anyone who has access to the museum.’ She murmured something about fingerprints with some satisfaction.

He must have either spumed her or raped her, thought Coffin. He did not usually form such wicked witticisms about a colleague and friend, but even he sometimes had a thought better not expressed that he pressed firmly down, and this one had escaped.

He realized he was in shock.

Stella meanwhile had performed the well-known theatrical trick of disappearing while still being there. (She could do the opposite too: not being there but seeming to be present, while really being at the hairdresser’s having a tint.)

‘I’ll clear off,’ said Dr Merchant. ‘Leave you to it. I’ll be in my room working, if you want me. I am preparing a lecture for tomorrow. Room 3A in the Bedford teaching block.’

Thank you,’ said Coffin, his eyes on the group round the body. However often you saw it and however tough you were, there was something final about the journey to the pathologist’s table.

‘Ready to move her now,’ said Phoebe Astley.

Something rolled from the body, out of a pocket in her jacket.

Golden, round and shining. It was a wedding ring.

‘Were the clothes searched?’ Coffin found himself unable to say ‘her’ clothes . . . too personal, better keep it neutral.

‘Not really, sir,’ said Dover. ‘A quick search to establish identity . . . The rest will be done by forensics when the clothes come off.’ Subdued hint of reproof here: You know the ropes, sir.

Coffin knew them. To Phoebe Astley, he said, ‘Keep me up to date.’

‘I will, of course.’

Underneath, they were conducting a different dialogue. Coffin was saying that this was a particularly bloody murder in which he had been named and called in, and he wanted to know why.

From Phoebe, proving that great minds do not necessarily think alike, came the thought that she was irritated by this and wished he would keep out. She would call him when it was necessary.

Coffin picked up the irritation as he watched the body removed.

‘What about the MO?’ he asked Phoebe. ‘Does it remind you of the Minden Street murders?’

Phoebe shrugged. ‘We don’t know if she even knew where Minden Street was.’

‘Minden Street may have known where she was.’ He was pacing the area where the body had rested.

Plenty of blood. Too much. Amazing the way the heart keeps pumping it out when it would be better to stop. Even if help had got there earlier, she would probably still have died.

And she had asked for him, allegedly. By name.

Coffin. Get Coffin. Sounded like a Hitchcock film.

To Phoebe he said, ‘Get the blood tested.’

Surprised, Phoebe nodded. ‘We always do, sir.’

Coffin walked round the room. The police technicians, still at work, moved aside as he came past.

It was a small museum, showing not only heads. Whole skeletons, exposed in the old-fashioned cabinets, had not been disturbed.

‘It’s the heads that are important,’ he said, coming back to Phoebe.

Looking at the ring of tiny skulls, Phoebe thought she had worked that out for herself.

‘Question the man Joe thoroughly. I get the feeling he may know something.’

‘That will be done, sir.’

‘I’ll go to the post-mortem with you,’ said Coffin. He felt he should; the dead woman had asked for him as she died. It was the least he could do for her.

‘Thanks. I hate that place.’

‘So do I.’ Who didn’t? As a young policeman he had attended post-mortems as duty demanded. He hated the ice cabinets, with their freight of bodies, the trays on which they emerged to lie on metal tables with drip trays underneath.

Coffin looked round for Stella, only to find that she had done a disappearing act, and not a theatrical one; she was nowhere to be seen.

She was outside in the car, reading.

‘I shall always bring a book with me when you take me out to dinner, then I can read it when you go off.’

‘You seem to have got one.’

‘I found it in the car.’ She held it up: David Copperfield