Coffin on the Water

What a case to test the nerve. He was on the edge of things in that first big case and he knew it. Yet the fact that he was so, helped in the end. Indeed, led to its solution. If you can call a solution what was so terrible a resolution.

At that time he had a world to discover and a life: his own. Once in June 1944, he thought he had lost it, and once nearly had, but the shell from the Ruhr didn’t quite do it. He came back from the dead, as we do occasionally. Now he had to find out what that life was worth and make something of it. The world was London, 1946. He joined the police.

Why the police? He wasn’t widely known among his pals as an idealist or a law enforcer, but he must have had something there. One of his fellow police-cadets had wanted to be a ballet dancer. You could never tell where your feet will lead you. Give him ten years or so and he might know the answer. And when he did, would it be the diary of his years?

Around the first body the dark, oily water moved sluggishly, heavy with all the filth it bore. The body was not its only burden. Nor the first body, nor to be the last. Ships, tugs, barges had passed through it for decades, each generation depositing its own share of muck, coal dust and oil. Here at Greenwich the river was lined with docks and wharves so that the water lapped upon stone, not grass. Factories and warehouses shoved themselves up to the banks with their own unpromising war-stained profiles, nose to nose. Here and there a bomb-broken nose showed itself but the essential face of the docks and the river was unchanged, which might have surprised the bombers. Across one wall someone had written: ‘Down with Adolf’, making his mark on one warehouse. The rain was washing it away: Hitler’s was a name from the past already, one you didn’t bother with, and a wag had written underneath: ‘Down with Stafford Cripps’.

It was visible from the railway which passed near at this point, adding its own dust to the dirt already delivered by the centuries of passing trade.

From the tops of trams and buses running down the main road between Greenwich and Woolwich on the one hand and Deptford on the other the river could not be seen, but you could always smell it.

The smell of the river might have been the last thing the victims had in their nostrils before the breath went out of them.

Looking down on the river from Greenwich Park was the small dome of the Royal Observatory. General Wolfe, victor over the French in Canada, stared down from his statue on the Royal Naval College housed in Wren’s great buildings, once destined to be a palace. If you walked along its riverside façade you could fancy yourself in Venice.

The police station was away from the river, at the bottom of the hill not far from the Deptford Road, and was presently housed, due to the Blitz, in an old school. Nearby was a factory which exuded a pungent smell, at once oily yet sharp, not exactly pleasant but somehow homely. A smell you could recognize and live with. To the locals it was the concentrated essence of South London, that smell. Men in the army in Germany or in the Middle East had been heard to say: ’I wish I could smell Deller’s again. One whiff and I’d know I was home.’

The smell was exceedingly strong in the police station, so strong that after a while you ceased to notice it, although it always hit you first thing in the morning when you experienced it with a crystalline sharpness.

It was a soft summer’s day, the light luminous and golden, a haze over the city making every view gentle and romantic.

And the first body was already on the way.

Do you like bodies? Dead bodies? Naturally you do not. But in Greenwich, 1946, there was a man who did and he was waiting for this one; whenever life landed one near him he thought of it as a bonus. His actual contact with bodies was minimal although not negligible.

When the murderer first saw Rachel Esthart it was before his interest in dead bodies had become so particular and intense. He had gone looking for her, no other way of putting it, because he wanted to see what she was like. When he set eyes on her he was both fascinated and repelled. A monstre sacré, he thought, quoting. Vénus toute entière a sa proie attachée. He himself was much more than a bystander, by nature, more of a precipitant.

In the police station Sergeant Tew, born not in this district but further down the river at Rotherhithe, and only just come into Greenwich on his promotion, was very conscious of the smell of Deller’s as his breakfast digested: scrambled, reconstituted dried eggs which his wife had managed to make extraordinarily indigestible.

He was standing at the wooden counter which protected him from the public, writing some notes in his careful, legible script, remembering at one and the same time the public events that would demand the attention of them all soon and a private message from his wife to call on the fishmonger on his way home for some whale steak. He hated whale steak.

A white hand fell upon his arm. It looked soft and feminine with delicate if grubby fingers but its grip had force.

He looked up. He was a tall, sedate man who was sometimes lucky, sometimes unlucky. It was what marked him. He could almost tell which it was the moment he woke up. Today he had felt unlucky.

‘Officer, I need your help.’

He saw a tall, slender woman dressed in a plum-coloured velvet coat trimmed with dark fur. She wore a tiny saucer hat of copper-coloured feathers which no one in Greenwich would have recognized as the creation of Paulette of Paris circa 1929, but which the Sergeant’s innate sense of style told him was not the sort of hat his wife wore to church. Beneath the delicately pleated hem of her dress peeped a pair of pointed grey suede shoes. Everything she had on from hat to shoe needed a good brush.

‘I request your assistance.’ The voice was deep, commanding, with every syllable beautifully enunciated. ‘In fact I demand it.’

She had immense black eyes.

He straightened himself from the paper, brought to order by the voice. All his life he had been brought to attention by such privileged voices.

‘Madam,’ he began. You didn’t say Missis or Mother as you might have done to a less educated voice. ‘What can I do?’

‘I want you to help me find my son.’ The hands were held together now, twisting, plaintive. Thus might Desdemona have held her hands out to Othello. Or Cordelia. They were pleading hands, eloquent hands, theatrical hands.

‘Can I have your name, madam?’

She ignored this request.

‘It’s what the police do, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, ma’am. If we can. Now let’s get this all clear. It’s your son? Missing, is he? How long has he been gone?’ He decided to leave names and addresses for the time being, he could sense this was a tricky one.

‘Seventeen years.’

He didn’t answer: all comment was knocked out of him. Seventeen years. He had been about thirteen himself. It was pre-war, and that was already history.,

This was how he described it later: So, I said. That’s a long time, madam, how old would he be? Twenty-two if he’s still alive, she said. Then she said that she’d had a card saying he was sending her a present. But it hadn’t come.

‘A card?’

‘Yes. A correspondence card postmarked Greenwich. Stamped, came through the post. It said: “A present will be delivered today from your son.” That was two days ago. It hasn’t come. So you see, he cannot be far away, I have to find him.’

‘Perhaps the present will come along later, ma’am. And him with it.’ He began to form a sentence in his mind about the Salvation Army finding people, when he remembered that this missing son had been gone seventeen years, since the age of five.

She was having a strange effect on him: he had the feeling that if he asked his limbs to move they would not answer his command.

‘You’ve had a bad time,’ he said awkwardly, surprising himself with his sympathy.

Three men appeared through the swing doors behind him: one older man in a dark suit with untidy hair, two young men, one very dark, one very fair, with golden to auburn hair.

They came on stage moving like veterans, natural actors, and dead on cue.

‘So that’s it about the Royal visit,’ said the older man: Detective-Inspector Banbury. ‘Now you know what’s what. And you can stop thinking about the Shepherd business.’

He was only half joking: they had recently been dealing with the murder of a prostitute in a caravan off the Woolwich Road, an unpleasant murder. And there had been complications with a child. He had been surprised at the effect on his two young men and would be adding his judgement to his report on them. They had reacted too strongly. Then he looked across to where the woman and Harry Tew still confronted each other. She was keeping up a soft babble of sound. He walked across. ‘Come on now, Mrs Esthart, sit down and we’ll see what we can do.’ Over his shoulder he said: ‘Ring up Engel House and ask someone to come up here and fetch Mrs Esthart. Number in the desk-book.’ He had written the number there himself. For good reason.

‘She’s had a drop, I think, Tom.’ Tew was dialling. Presently he said, ‘No answer.’

John Coffin came forward: ‘I think I can help. I know who to get. A girl called Stella Pinero. She lodges with Mrs Esthart. It’s all right, sir, I’ve got to know her quite well. I’ve met Mrs Esthart once or twice. Alex and I both have. Good morning, Mrs Esthart. Stella will handle this.’

‘Stella? This is John. Could you come down and collect Mrs Esthart? I think she needs help.’ He hesitated. ‘She’s in some sort of trouble.’

‘What’s it all about,’ said Harry Tew. ‘Who is that?’

‘Rachel Esthart,’ said Inspector Banbury. ‘A famous lady and I’ll tell you why: she’s been under suspicion for murder for nearly twenty years.’

Seventeen years ago, Rachel Esthart, an actress at the height of her power, famous, glamorous, wealthy, had suffered a terrible tragedy. Look at it how you will, calling her guilty or not, it was tragic.

Banbury said: ‘Seventeen-odd years ago her son was drowned. She took him out for a picnic. Or so she says. But it turned out later she had left her husband after a quarrel over a love-affair. She was jealous. She’d been drinking, and she wasn’t used to drink. Ran away, taking the boy. They were both missing. She turned up later, wandering around. Lost her memory, she said.’

‘And the boy?’

‘He wasn’t with her. She said she didn’t know where he was. Seemed surprised to be asked. But his body was found in the river. Drowned.’