Coffin Underground

Prologue (#ulink_cae06514-5835-5ad1-95dd-49dc2c16c509)

One hot day in the summer of 1974, in New York, a young girl was out shopping. She was looking for a present for her boyfriend back in England. It would soon be his birthday, he was three years older than she was, and when they had parted she had made a promise that she would send him a present. In many ways she felt very far away from him now and getting farther with every minute, but she meant to keep that promise. She had not written many letters to him, although he had sent her constant messages of a brief if loving kind. The fact that her world and his were now so very different. Her parents were working in New York, her father in the United Nations and her mother for a private consultancy, and they were living in a smart secure part of the city. She was a diplomat’s child and used to that way of life; her London boyfriend was in different circumstances altogether.

She had some errands to do for her mother in a big and famous store in Fifth Avenue (her mother shopped expensively), so that her first search for a present was in this store. This kind of shop was her natural habitat since her family had both taste and money. But today nothing took her fancy as a suitable present.

There was a reason for this, one of which she might not have been fully aware herself. She was in an odd mood, had been for some weeks now. Puberty was hitting her hard. Sex was both interesting her and perturbing her. She did not quite know how to handle it or herself. She was changing so fast that every day she felt different. It puzzled her as much as anyone.

Her parents sensed something of her emotional disturbance, but put it down to her arrival at an awkward age, in a new and exciting city. She was a clever girl, doing well at her private school. In this way New York suited her. Ambition was stirring inside her.

She strolled around the store, studying ties, shirts, small leather goods and pieces of jewellery, like gold chains such as men wear. He would like such a chain, but although well provided with money for her age, she was still a child who could not afford gold.

She wandered into the book department. No, nothing he would like there. He was not a reader. More an adventurer in life, or that was how he saw himself. But looking at the books had given her an idea. She remembered something that one of her mother’s friends in London, a distinguished man, had told her about. And hadn’t her friends at school here joked about some similar game? She poked about for what she fancied.

She could feel her heart beginning to bang. It was exciting, her idea. But no, she soon realized that this was not the sort of store in which to find what she wanted. Too staid, too conventional.

In fact, she fancied the sales assistant gave her an odd look when she asked by name for what she wanted, but this might have been her imagination. It was saleable, after all. No, they did not stock it. Well, she was not surprised.

She was a robust girl who had been through all the upheavals attendant upon the life of a diplomat’s family with vivacity and pleasure. She liked the excitement. They had a house in London, England, to which they returned at intervals. It was not a house she enjoyed living in, although she liked London. The house had a feeling about it which she noticed on her first entrance every time the family returned. After that first impact, she got used to it. Or it faded away. She would call it a house with a strong character and not all of it nice. It was a house with a history.

She might write about it in a story for her class magazine. She wanted to get one in this term if she could. It would be good for her standing amongst her peers. But there was another episode in her London life she might write about. Get it out on paper and stop thinking about it, she decided.

In the next shop, she bought a fresh pad of paper to use for her writing. Then she made her inquiry.

Oh yes, they had the game. Yes, certainly, it could be packed up ready to send overseas. The assistant was surprised. This was not the type of kid that usually bought these games. Typically, they were white, well educated and pushy. This girl was well spoken but fulfilled no other condition.

The girl adopted a sophisticated air and made all the arrangements for postage and the US customs. The assistant had given her a look of surprise, as if she wasn’t the sort of person who usually bought that kind of game, but so what?

The palms of her hands were sweating as she completed the transaction. Her imagination was excited. Various tales were going the rounds about this game in her circle. The phrase ‘Playing with Fire’ came into her mind.

Chapter One (#ulink_2b9bbcf1-5cca-510f-ba37-d4c2e25efecc)

The house stood by the church and by the church was the churchyard which the house had done its share to fill. More than its share, in truth.

There was already another body about to take up residence but no one knew about that yet.

The past, of course, was different.

In the last century, when the house in Greenwich was only a few years old, a visitor from abroad had brought cholera with him from India, which had spread through the district after killing him. A lot of new graves appeared in St Luke’s churchyard at this time.

Nor had the house, No. 22, Church Row, ceased in its work of filling graves. In addition to what you might call the average statistical supply of family bodies, inhabitants of the house, dying in the usual way from old age, childbirth or the poor medicine of the period, the house picked up other victims. It attracted the blast from a bomb dropped by a Zeppelin in World War One and from a landmine in the second great war. Neither was a direct hit, but each time there were many casualties in the house, which seemed to fill up for the occasion of a calamity as if it knew one was coming and wanted to do its best. Or worst. In 1917 when the Zeppelin hung over Greenwich the house was crowded with a party of young soldiers, home from the trenches and celebrating the twenty-first birthday of the son of the house. As it turned out he would have been safer in the trenches. (His twin sister survived the blast but the house got her in the end, because she died, with her parents and younger sister, in the great influenza epidemic of 1918.) In 1941 the house was used as a hostel for nurses working in the nearby Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital, the owner being abroad on war service and his wife and family evacuated. Most of the nurses were killed, and of those that died, some, being local girls, were interred in one great grave in St Luke’s.

A quiet time set in for No. 22, Church Row after the war. It had had enough. Or it was resting.

In 1972 the then owner of the house, a career diplomat, was abroad with his family (he came back the next year, and then in 1975 left for New York), and the house was let to three students in the University of London, who were enrolled in Goldsmiths’ College at New Cross. They were quiet, unobtrusive lads, not much seen and no trouble to anyone.

Since the other inhabitants of the street did not see them regularly, they were not at first much missed. No one saw them come in, no one saw them go.

But they did go somewhere because they were never seen alive again, leaving a lot of blood behind in the house. Blood on the stairs and in the kitchen on the ground floor. So it was told.

In 1978 a policeman called John Coffin, now a Chief Superintendent, moved into Church Row, and heard all the stories about the house and treated the superstition with the contempt it deserved.

He was able to do so, of course, since he was not living at No. 22 (although he knew the present owners) but at No. 5, well away from any dangerous emanations.

It was Mrs Brocklebank, who cleaned his house and also did for No. 22, who told him the saga. She could even add to the story, and did, the moment she saw her chance.

‘Oh, come on now, Mrs B. It’s all rubbish. Houses can’t do that sort of thing. You mustn’t be superstitious. And as for the students, was there really any blood? I heard they just moonlighted, left without paying their rent.’

‘Never been seen again, though, have they?’

‘Well, I don’t know about that.’ He did not know the details of the case, if indeed there had been one. He seemed to remember there was some puzzle about the three students. Or was it just one of them?

But for Mrs Brocklebank the blood was an indelible part of the story. Literally so.

‘Every time I clean that house on the anniversary of the disappearance there is blood on the front step. I have to scrub it away.’

‘Oh, Mrs B.’

‘Never really get it off. It’s always there. Faintly. But worse on that day.’

‘Did you see the blood in the house yourself, then?’

‘Well, no. Wasn’t working for Mrs Pitt then, was I? In the soap factory, Deller’s, I was, before I decided to better myself. But we all heard. Everyone knew about it.’

She admired her new employer. You’d never know he was a policeman, she told herself.

He was a tall man, thinner than he had been, thinner perhaps than nature intended, a long face with fair hair just beginning to show traces of grey. He had never been good-looking but experience, life itself, had drawn on his face the lines which gave him distinction. His eyes still had the hopeful look which had been his as a boy. If you did not have hope in the world of London streets in which he had grown up, you had nothing, and never would have. It was this look which had drawn Mrs Brocklebank to tell him about the blood. Tell him, she’d advised herself. Get if off your chest.

Coffin deliberately went to take a look at the step of No. 22 one day, and it was true there was a string of faint stains that could have been blood on the two shallow stone steps to the front door. But they could have been a lot of other things as well.

No. 22 was a quiet dark house of three storeys, possibly a shade gloomy but otherwise unremarkable, and identical to the house where he had recently moved into the top flat.

Nothing in it, all rubbish, he thought. Just a house that has got a bad name. And he thought of all the other such houses there were. Blythswood Square; Rillington Place; The Priory, Balham.

But he was interested enough to make some inquiries about the case of the missing students.

His opportunity came when he had to deal with a local sergeant about another case. A violent criminal, William Howard Egan, had just come out of prison after serving his term and was known to be looking for revenge on the informer who had helped to put him there. The fact that this informer was his son-in-law, Terence Place, was not going to stop him. Both hunter and hunted were believed to be hiding in South London, and they might be in Greenwich. John Coffin had been the detective on the case. Threats had been made against him too by Egan. He was taking a personal interest.

‘I don’t think Billy Egan’s here, but that isn’t to say he won’t be, or isn’t, he was always a cunning bastard. He has a taste for this part of the world, so he might be back. I’ll keep my eyes open. You can count on me.’

‘Thanks, Bernard.’ Coffin took his chance. ‘What’s this tale I hear about three students going missing from a house in Church Row? Anything in it?’ He remembered a bit himself, but not the details.

The sergeant was an older man, passed over for promotion, but content to be what he was, and a great well of information about the district, which he transmitted only when it suited him, it was his property. He had lived in this part of South London all his life. Bernard Jones had known John Coffin when he was a humble detective, well before he had shot up the ladder so successfully. He was far too tactful to dwell on this, or even to mention it. It coloured their relationship, though, loading it with memories of old cases, old criminals and older colleagues.

The two men were having a sandwich and a cup of tea in the police canteen in Royal Hill police station where Jones was based. He didn’t want to talk about students, missing or not, he wanted a gossip.

About crime in his patch.

‘Been fairly quiet here lately. Two bodies found roped together in the river. Black man, white woman. The forensics say it could be suicide. Old man found dead in the street. Been dead over a week when found on a main road. Can you beat it? I suppose they thought he was put out for the dustmen. Two dead babies in a suitcase. No, nothing special.’