A Grave Coffin

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PROLOGUE (#ulink_d241cad4-f349-59a6-a54d-5bf9c30486fc)

A brief Calendar of the life and career of John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Second City of London Police.

John Coffin is a Londoner by birth, his father is unknown and his mother was a difficult lady of many careers and different lives who abandoned him in infancy to be looked after by a woman who may have been a relative of his father and who seems to have acted as his mother’s dresser when she was on the stage. He kept in touch with this lady, whom he called Mother, lodged with her in his early career and looked after her until she died.

After serving briefly in the army, he joined the Metropolitan Police, soon transferring to the plain-clothes branch as a detective.

He became a sergeant and was very quickly promoted to inspector a year later. Ten years later, he was a superintendent and then chief superintendent.

There was a bad patch in his career about which he is reluctant to talk. His difficult family background has complicated his life and possibly accounts for an unhappy period when, as he admits, his career went down a black hole. His first marriage split apart at this time and his only child died.

From this dark period he was resurrected by a spell in a secret, dangerous undercover operation about which even now not much is known. But the esteem he won then was recognized when the Second City of London was being formed and he became Chief Commander of its Police Force. He has married again, an old love, Stella Pinero, who is herself a very successful actress. He has also discovered two siblings, a much younger sister and brother.

1 (#ulink_b950f9d4-0c1b-5b97-9fb2-abb78dd7c493)

The room had a view of St Paul’s Cathedral if you looked hard over the rooftops. To get into this room, you were required to press the red button on the door before entering; inside there was the distinct impression you were photographed from every angle and possibly microwaved as well. To the nervous it felt that way.

The air itself was not fresh but filtered through a silent air conditioner which somehow made its presence felt so that even air and breathing were controlled in this room.

John Coffin liked the view but was not sure of the company. He had got back the night before from a visit to Los Angeles where he had left his wife on business of her own, collected the dog from the kennels and found an urgent message from a high authority.

‘Wait until you see the body,’ said Edward Saxon. ‘Then tell me you cannot help me.’ He looked into John Coffin’s eyes, so blue, cold and clear. ‘Or study this photograph just to give you an idea.’ He pushed the photograph across the table.

Coffin bent his head to look. ‘Jesus.’

‘Yes. Look, I know we were never pals, but we got on well enough, we worked together for long enough. So did Harry Blyth, you worked with him.’ He tapped the photograph. ‘That’s Harry Seton now. Or was.’

‘You hit hard.’

‘So? What about it? Will you help?’

Coffin still kept quiet.

‘It’s not just me, you know, I am not asking this as a favour … it’s important for all of us.’ He looked Coffin straight in the eye. ‘You might die because of what is going on, someone you love might die. It’s certain that many have died already. Or been impaired, mentally and physically.’ He went on: ‘These are frontline pharmaceuticals for life-threatening, serious illness. Some are coming in legally through parallel importing, where a manufacturer finds they can make a drug more cheaply in Taiwan than West Middlesex – these are all right, because the quality, strength and the release of the drug in the patient will be the same. Sometimes there is counterfeiting, this has been an increasing problem first noticed on a professional production level in the late eighties. The cardboard covers and packaging are printed exactly the same, but the drugs inside might have been made in a backyard in Taiwan so that the activity in the patient, purity and contamination, all vary from the kosher production runs by legitimate producers. They might be no more than coloured starch, but unscrupulous pharmacy importers buy them, accept the false serial numbers without checking and offer them to none-too-fussy pharmacists at reduced prices. Big money and big chances for corruption.’

Coffin sat taking it all in. ‘What powers will I have?’

‘As much as I can give you …’ Quickly, he added, ‘All you want.’

‘Access to the production date and all papers and files?’

‘The lot.’

‘Freedom to interview all the characters that I want to?’

Was there a pause, a hint of reservation? ‘Yes,’ agreed Ed Saxon.

‘Right, then. It’s on.’

Edward Saxon drew a deep breath, whether of relief or pain was not clear to Coffin. It might be a mixture of the two. Rumours of Saxon’s ill health had reached him, but rumours, of course, often lied.

‘I will have to fit my investigations into my other duties.’

‘That’s understood.’

Coffin let his thoughts go back to the years when he, as a detective sergeant, had worked with Saxon in that remote area of South London where Kentish men and Men of Kent had once vied with each before the Great Wen had swallowed them both up.

He had worked with Edward Saxon, admired the man’s tenacity, but had sensed a reserve behind the good manners. That was all right, a man was entitled to his own secrets; Coffin had his own. Although he had noticed that the passing years peeled them away. Marriage, the passing of time, seemed to take off the surface through which a few artefacts you had buried came to the surface, as in an archaeological dig. His own wife Stella knew most things about him now, life had disgorged them before her, one way and another. Probably she still had a few secrets. He smiled at the thought, which he almost found endearing.

He wondered about Saxon’s wife.

‘How’s Laurie?’ he asked.

‘Not too well. No, she hasn’t been well … she’s away at present.’ He added, as an afterthought, ‘How’s Stella?’

‘She’s away too. In Los Angeles, looking at scripts.’ Among other things.

‘They still film in Los Angeles? I thought it was all over the place, never in Hollywood now.’ It was an idle comment, he did not really know or care.

‘They do film in Los Angeles in this film. And on location, later.’

He smiled. Stella had complained that she would be filming in the winter in the wilder reaches of the Bronx. If the film got that far, always a question. Stella, anyway, had other plans for herself before filming started. She would be in Los Angeles, attending to scripts and other more personal matters.

‘It’s an English company, anyway,’ she had said, ‘filming a short story of Scott Fitzgerald.’

It was, as he knew, an avant-garde company, more interested in winning prizes than money. Stella had accepted a part because, so she said, it would do her image good. But Coffin had an insight into one of Stella’s secrets and how her image would be improved: she planned to have cosmetic surgery in Los Angeles because American doctors were good at that sort of thing. ‘So much custom, you see, they are at it all the time. Makes the prices higher but the noses better. But I have arranged a prix fixe.’

‘Like in a cheap hotel,’ he had said.

‘You needn’t have said that, darling.’

But I did need, he thought, and it slipped out.

‘Laurie’s with her mother.’

Coffin looked down again at the hideous photograph of Harry Seton’s dead body. ‘He was married, I suppose.’

‘Yes, I want you to talk to Mary.’

Coffin looked up and raised an eyebrow.

‘Not just a sympathy talk,’ said Saxon. ‘She may know something that helps. I think she does.’

‘I want to know all the details of what is facing me first.’