Coffin on Murder Street

Still, even among friends, nothing was for nothing, and cash was always useful.

The ghost of the young Tremble stirred inside him, issuing a warning. What was he getting into? As always with his friend, he had the uneasy feeling that he was taking part in a play, the plot of which had not been fully revealed to him.

He closed the door of the coach, and at the appointed hour set forth.

At 9.20 p.m., he was over the water in Coffin’s territory, had passed St Luke’s Mansions (where Coffin was learning his part) and the Theatre Workshop without comment, although both were brightly lit. But they were not in pursuit of brightness, but of darkness. The coach turned down a narrow road, badly lit.

‘Here we are in Murder Street,’ he announced. The coach passed slowly down the road.

Here on the left, at No. 6, the murderer Dr Brittany did away with his wife, his mother-in-law, and the cook, with arsenic. That was in 1914, just before war broke out; he escaped but he was caught in the end and hanged on Armistice Day. Three doors down, and again on the even side of the road at No. 12, the axe murderer, Joseph Cadrin, did in his victims and buried them in the garden.

‘How many, sir? It was never rightly established, the bodies being cut up so. Nineteen twenty-seven, that was. A lot of the victims would have been tramps and dossers.’

He slowed the coach to a crawl so that they could all get a good look and flash away with their cameras, taking photographs if they wanted. Sometimes he stopped and let them out, but not tonight. He didn’t think they felt like it somehow. He didn’t himself.

‘That’s all on this side, except just towards the end there was a young woman found dead in the basement, though that could have been suicide.’ He sounded regretful. ‘But on the other side of the road, odd numbers, four people and a dog died in a fire in No. 7, arson, that was. Yes, they have rebuilt that house, sir, but you can see which house it was, looks newer. And here and here …’ He went through the catalogue: at No. 15 (no, there was no No. 13 but 15 would have been it if there had been) rape and suicide; at 23 a double murder; and at 29 a single death by stabbing. Yes, it was a longer road on that side, the old match factory cut into the other side.

He changed gears and put on some speed. Time to get on. He felt quite tired himself. Goodness knows, they’d all swigged enough coffee en route, ought to be as bright as crickets. But no, sodden was the feeling.

9.30 and they drove off into the darkness. There are some darknesses which seem to swallow people up. This one did.

The bar of the Theatre Workshop was a great meeting-place. That evening a small but animated group had gathered after the curtain had gone down. It was the custom for the cast of the play then in repertory to appear in the bar for a drink after they had taken off their make-up, where they could meet and talk to some of their faithful audience.

Most of the audience and almost all the cast of the current play had melted away home, but a small hard core of Friends of the Theatre Workshop remained talking to Stella Pinero who was sitting in one corner. A few people were hanging on because they had heard that Nell Casey, star of a transatlantic famous soap, and booked to play in the Festival, might appear.

Here too was Gus Hamilton, current star at the Old Vic, who would be joining the Festival in French Without Tears and The Cherry Orchard. He was also teaching a group of local students in a Drama Workshop. Getting to Know the Bard, he called it. He was doing it for peanuts, just one peanut, as he said himself. Gus was never greedy about money but he was shrewd about how to advance his career. He was standing on his own, drinking a glass of white wine, a posse of his admirers having just left.

There’s something I ought to tell him, thought Stella. Then it happened before she had a chance. Oh dear, she thought, Gus is going to be furious.

Casey came in through the swing door and met his gaze across the room. She stood still. ‘My heart stopped,’ she told herself afterwards. ‘Just for one second, I stopped breathing.’

They moved towards each other, reluctantly, but irresistibly impelled.

Casey began to breathe again, but her breath was hard inside her like a knife.

‘I thought you were dead.’

‘Not funny. You knew I wasn’t dead. I’m still on the Equity list. You could have looked.’

‘I’ve been in the States.’

‘I was on Broadway.’ Off Broadway, but that was smarter.

‘Not that kind of dead,’ she said. ‘Not dead dead.’

‘Is there another kind?’

‘Dead to me.’ Her voice dropped.

‘You always had a duff hand with dialogue, Casey. I’ve told you that before. It’s why you haven’t been more successful. You can’t give a line the right weight.’

‘I am successful. And you played off Broadway.’

‘Aha,’ he said triumphantly. ‘So I’ve come back to life, have I? Not dead at all.’

‘And you got lousy reviews.’

‘Better than you did, dear, for your extremely lousy Amanda.’

‘Dead spiritually and emotionally,’ said Casey.

It looked as though they were about to embark on one of the stand-up fights that had broken their relationship in the first place. They had a fascinated audience all round them, drinking it in. Casey and Gus at it again.

Then Gus held out a hand. ‘Come on, Nelly. Kiss and make up.’

Casey swung on her heel. ‘You ought to have stayed dead.’

John Coffin, walking into the room, thought: Who are these people who are behaving badly? Years and years of knowing Stella Pinero and having a stage-struck sister had not accustomed him to the idea that a scene was words but not deeds and a quarrel was not for ever. Probably not even for the next ten minutes.

Still, this one had looked real.

The girl, tall, beautiful, reddish hair (he liked red hair on a woman but not on a man), a thin and delicately boned face—did he know her face?—was talking to a group of three, then moving on, being hailed, kissed and exclaimed at. Someone asked her if she had ‘brought it with her’. He made his way across to where Stella sat. ‘What was all that about?’

‘Oh, you’ve turned up?’

‘I said I’d be late. So what was it?’

‘They knew each other well once, and were going to be married. May still be,’ she added thoughtfully. Only indefinitely postponed. Owing to injury.

‘What got in the way?’ From the manner in which they assaulted each other he would have said they were a perfect match.

‘Something rather nasty. A death.’

‘Oh?’

‘Don’t prick up your detectival ears.’

‘Bad word.’

Nell Casey finished her tour of the room and ended up by Stella. ‘That was painful.’

‘I should have warned you he was here.’

‘Are we both going to be working in the Festival?’

Stella prudently held back the information that they were cast in the same play, the Rattigan. Wonderful publicity to be got from their pairing, she had to put the show first. ‘Apart from work, you need never meet.’

‘We have met,’ said Casey.