A Grave Coffin

‘No.’ A blunt refusal.

Coffin nodded. ‘Right,’ he said peaceably. ‘So when?’ Tomorrow, next week, he would have to accept it, and hope that the firemen had not destroyed too much.

‘Can’t say.’

‘I need to get into flat twelve.’ He held up the keys, swinging them a little.

‘You the tenant? You rent the place?’

Smooth, taking manners, thought Coffin, charming fellow. ‘I am part of a police forensic team that has been examining the place.’ It seemed safe enough to say this much. It might easily be common knowledge, passed around the other tenants.

He needn’t have worried. It cut no ice.

‘You can get in with the others when it is safe. Can’t say when yet.’

Reluctantly, Coffin faced the fact that he had got used to being speeded through any obstacles back home in the Second City and that life was tougher outside.

He walked down the road to the pub into which he had seen the rest of the tenants disappear. He noticed that the car was now empty and a figure was walking into the pub. To his surprise, it was a woman.

The Queen’s Arms was old and small and dark, it could have been there since the Great Fire of London in 1666, or even have survived it. Certainly it had survived the Blitz and all the rest of the bombs that particular war had thrown at it. Now it had a large notice advising customers to watch untended bags because of IRA bombs.

Inside it was crowded. Coffin stood at the door, wondering if he could work out who were the tenants who had fled from their offices.

He ordered a drink, which he stood by the bar drinking while he let his eyes study the crowd.

Well, he knew the woman: the back disappearing down the road had been wearing a black coat. So there she was with a drink in her hand at a table in the window.

And oddly enough, she was looking at him. Looking at him looking at her.

He stared down at his drink to break the link, but he could still see her in his mind’s eye: she looked lean, intellectual and sophisticated. She was dressed in black, but not dead black, there was a gleam of leather and the hint of silk at the throat. In other words, she looked expensive. Life with Stella had at least taught Coffin what good clothes cost.

Around him, the crowd of the dispossessed were drinking and shouting at each other.

‘I blame the chap on the top floor.’ This was a stout man in a check suit. ‘We never had anything till he moved in, and then we had the police, and now the fire brigade. And where is he now? It’s him.’

‘It did start there, damn it. I ought to know as I was near it. But I don’t think he’s there any more. I never see him now.’ A pretty, slight girl in the shortest skirt and with the longest hair that Coffin had lately seen walking around London. (‘On the way out, that Loopy Lu look,’ Stella had told him. ‘And it’s time the wearers knew it, but it’s got to be a uniform for them and they really don’t see themselves. They will be dinosaurs before they notice it.’) ‘I think he’s gone. They weren’t police you saw, they were debt collectors.’

‘Didn’t look like debt collectors to me,’ said Check Suit, ‘more official. And they locked the door.’

‘Trust you to notice that.’

‘They didn’t set fire to anything, though.’

‘Wonder who did? I hope my notes on the report I am writing for Lord Herrington on fiscal controls and the EU aren’t too kippered. I couldn’t bear to do it again, he’s so stupid you have to make it easy.’

This was Miss Miniskirt, so she was the intellectual heavyweight of the two? She was a lawyer, he guessed, so what was Check Suit? Another lawyer? No, a businessman of some sort. Probably he imported or exported something, handbags or lacy knickers.

‘Lord H. is always kippered himself, isn’t he, the way he drinks and smokes? I will say this for the fire people, they got there fast and put the fire out damn quickly. I don’t think I will have lost anything.’

‘The smell of smoke on everything is bad enough,’ grumbled the young woman. ‘And that foam stuff they use as well as water …’ But she didn’t sound too worried. Lord Herrington would have to put up with his smoked report.

The two of them turned away to talk to the rest of the homeless.

While listening to all this, and trying to assess what it told him about Harry Seton’s activities, Coffin had been watching the woman in the window.

The second sense that all long-time coppers develop told him that she was watching him while listening to the man and woman, just as he was.

That told him something.

He met her eyes and this time, she smiled and nodded at him. The moment was flooded over by a burst of laughter from the dispossessed to his right.

Coffin got up, walked across and stood looking at her; he said nothing.

She held out her hand. ‘I know who you are: John Coffin. My husband had a photograph of you. He was in it too.’ Still she kept her hand extended. ‘Mary Seton.’

Coffin took her hand, noting the softness and the shining tinted nails, not what you expected somehow from a copper’s wife, although heaven knew, his own wife Stella was typical of nothing, not even the stage.

‘Mary Beaton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael and I …’

The line from the old Scots ballad ran through his mind; he could not remember who ‘I’ was, but he did know that she came to a bad end. On the scaffold, having killed … whom? Her lover or her bastard child?

‘I think we are expected to meet to talk about my husband. Ed Saxon told me you would be around.’

‘I was going to call. But today I wanted to have a look round his office.’

‘The one that someone tried to burn? Yes, I wanted to see it too. We picked the wrong day, didn’t we? Sit down, do. You make me nervous standing there.’

Coffin put his glass on the table, then sat down opposite her. He doubted if he could make Mary Seton nervous.

‘You know, I had no idea the office existed until Harry died … I only learnt then by accident. Wives are supposed to be kept from too much knowledge, painful knowledge, that is. Or that’s Ed Saxon’s philosophy.’

Are you sure, thought Coffin cynically, wondering if he could believe her ignorant. I think he doles out the painful bits as it suits him, and if he let you know about this office then it suited him.

He was, he feared, a natural cynic where Ed Saxon was concerned.

He nodded his head. ‘I know Ed has his ways.’

‘I came today to look round. I didn’t have a key but I thought I could get in. I would have done too.’

Coffin believed her.

She made a gesture with her hands. ‘Well, you saw … when I got here there was the fire brigade and the police.’ She nodded towards the talkers and drinkers near the bar. ‘So I followed this lot in here.’

She had sat in the car watching, Coffin commented to himself, a careful, cautious woman. He liked the way she used her hands. Stella would have approved of that: what you do with your hands on the stage is so important, they give you character or take it away. Never walk on the stage without knowing what to do with your hands and never let them droop.

He could see that Mary Seton would never walk on to her stage with drooping hands.

She must have picked up his thoughts. ‘I know you are married, I have seen your wife act. I admired her.’