A Grave Coffin

‘He could tell lies,’ said Saxon, ‘I knew that, but they were always what you might call political lies – they pushed a job forward. So, yes, I believed him: three people, sex ambiguous.’

‘Did he seem nervous? As if he thought he might be attacked?’

‘No, not Harry. He never showed nerves. I’m not saying he didn’t know when to be cautious, of course he did, or he wouldn’t have survived …’ He stopped.

‘As long as he did,’ Coffin said for him. ‘Because he didn’t survive, did he? He is dead.’ He stared again at the photograph. ‘Terribly dead.’

‘I didn’t see him again. No one heard from him, not even his wife, but he was working underground in a way, so there was no worry.’

‘Not even from his wife?’

‘No, she said she was used to silence when he was on a case. He might make the odd phone call, this time he didn’t.’

‘Pity she didn’t scream for action.’

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference, Harry was long dead. He could have been killed soon after we met at the Rose Revived. So the medics think.’

Coffin got out the photographs of Harry’s dead body, all five of them, and shuffled them in order round the table. There were five photographs because Harry had been cut into five bits.

Coffin arranged them in the order he thought right: head first, the torso second, the arms next, and one leg … the other leg had disappeared. You had to remember that where this body was found in Deptford Park there were urban foxes.

‘How was he killed?’

Painfully, Ed Saxon said: ‘By degrees.’

‘I don’t think so, even if it looks like it, I don’t think death gropes for you; one bite and you’re gone, that’s how I see it.’

Saxon shrugged, as if he did not care for this way of talking, it might even be meant to be a joke. ‘If you say so.’

‘Where was the body found?’

‘In the bandstand in the park – it is partly boarded in. He may have been killed there, there was enough blood.’ Saxon gave the files another push towards Coffin. ‘It’s all here, medical reports and the forensic stuff, you can read it all up.’

‘I might want to ask the pathologist and the forensic chaps questions.’

‘Sure. You will find names and places in the files, you may know some of the team from when you were in the Met.’

‘Probably younger than I am.’

‘Oh, they stay with us a long time in this business.’

Coffin considered: ‘So you decided that he must have been getting close to the corrupt officer and therefore killed, in this particularly revolting way?’

Saxon stirred in his seat. ‘I had one reason which I have not yet mentioned … We had established a hotline so that he could talk to me. He never did use it except to set up meets. I had hoped it would be more use to us, he wasn’t much of a talker, Harry. It had its good and bad sides. But two days before he probably died he rang, asking me to turn up at the Fisher’s Arms off the Strand. I did and he did not.’

‘Did it worry you?’

‘From then on, I worried.’

‘You didn’t do anything even then?’

‘No. I sat and waited. About the worst thing I could have done. I just left it.’ He added: ‘I had a lot on my mind at the time; there’s never just one worry, is there?’

‘No.’ Probably not, we both have a lot of experience on those lines.

Ed Saxon suddenly clenched his hands and banged on the table. ‘Bloody, bloody business.’

Coffin studied Saxon’s face, tight and drawn: you are full of anger.

Saxon pushed a small bunch of keys across the table. ‘Harry had a room here, but he hired a special place, just off Fleet Street; three, Humper Place. Top floor. These are the keys.’

‘Thanks. Right.’

‘The forensic boys have been there, of course, couldn’t keep them out, but they were required to leave everything as they found it … They got nothing out of it, by the way. You may do better.’

Coffin drew the files on the table towards him. ‘What have I got here?’

‘Apart from the forensic and medical stuff, which I mentioned, you have a complete list of all the people in the unit, whether based in the Wessex, Mercian, Newcastle and Anglian teams. With it comes the evidence of corruption and why I thought it came from the unit. Read it for yourself and make up your mind.’

‘I will do, of course.’

‘You may find Harry had left records in his office in Humper Place, nothing in his room here, and he did his own typing.’

Bet it was a word processor, thought Coffin, the days of penpushing and typing are gone. Harry might have been vulnerable if his machine could be read.

In Saxon’s face, he read the same thought. ‘I’ll check the computer.’

‘I miss the old days when I wrote a report, typed it out and then someone lost it in the files forever. Suited me. Now you know the words are there forever, even if you had deleted them.’

Ed Saxon was still uneasy. ‘And what will you say you are doing here today? You will be noticed.’

Coffin smiled. ‘Never apologize and never explain.’

‘Good.’ Saxon was still uneasy.

‘Now, in my turn, a question: why did you pick on me for this job?’ This tiresome, probably dangerous, bloody job?

‘I knew you were safe, which is more than I can say for all my colleagues … We always did call you the pea-green incorruptible.’

‘Sea-green, I think. And it was from Thomas Stearns Carlisle, and he was writing about Robespierre.’

‘Oh.’ Saxon nodded. He never had read much, Coffin remembered. But someone in his circle must have done … Jason Hull, Coffin suddenly remembered the man, he’d been a reader. Where was he now? Retired, dead?

‘How’s Jason Hull?’ he asked. ‘Do you ever see him?’

‘Dead. Lung cancer, he always did smoke too much. Good man, though.’

‘So, what other reason did you have? There was one, wasn’t there?’