Coffin on the Water

‘You haven’t seen this one …’ His hand was trembling so much that the telephone shook. ‘I can’t get this bloody number.’

Ted took the telephone from him. ‘Here, let me.’ He put his mouth to the instrument and shouted. ‘Police.’

After he had got his message across he went outside to take a look for himself. Soon he came back and went across to a cupboard on the wall which he unlocked, taking out a bottle of colourless liquid to pour good helpings into two mugs. ‘Here’s yours, Will. Drink up.’ It was rum, transparent before the burnt sugar was put in to colour it, and immensely strong. Never ask where it came from. ‘It’s my silver wedding anniversary today. Nice way to bring it in … Not that it’s not better in some respects than the day itself. I was out of a job and on casuals. No way to start a married life. At least this war’s put us to rights there, Will. Never be out of a job now.’

‘No.’ Will drank up. Both men had seen the river in the Depression when men crowded at the dock gates to be picked out one by one for casual work, favoured men first. The war, in a way, had been a godsend. ‘Not in the docks, any road.’

‘Not anywhere. It’s different now. Got a welfare state now, you know. This lot know what they’re doing.’

‘They better.’ He took a deep drink. ‘You always were an optimist.’

The two men finished their drinks. ‘So what about the one outside?’ asked Ted.

‘Murder. She’s been murdered, that one.’

The news about the body was spread about the area with speed, reaching several centres where gossip was received and disseminated almost before the police knew themselves what had turned up there on the riverside. They were slow to react at first, thinking it just another suicide. There had been two already that year. The ending of the war had not brought peace to everyone. The last floater had been a young girl who had gone in with her lover, a coloured serviceman. He had survived, she had not. They were all the same, but all different, with the little eccentricities of dying that make each death unique. The hand grasping a piece of wood that it had clutched at as it went down, the body making its own bid for life, defying the mind; the body unclothed because death comes easier that way; the body in the top coat because the water is cold; they got them all. The murdered do not have so much choice, they are thrust willy-nilly into their departure with all the apparatus of their living about them. They cannot choose whether they die with their return train ticket to Waterloo in their pocket or a ham sandwich still stuck in their teeth. This too the police team had met recently. Connie Shepherd had been eating ham and the threads were still in her molars.

All those dead by drowning show the same set of postmortem signs, this is where they are the same. But this is only true when the bodies are recovered from the water soon after death, for when putrefaction comes on then these signs are obliterated. Most bodies from the Thames were recovered soon. Such bodies most often displayed a froth of fine bubbles at the nostrils. If wiped away these bubbles reappear, pushed out from the sodden lungs.

The body newly arrived showed no such signs and Will Summers knew it as well as anyone. It was probably from him that the first stories came. He had an Irish mother and could tell a tale and usually did. Ginger McCaffey was a mate of his and distributed the news as well as the milk. He was certainly the agent by which the Delaneys and Stella Pinero and the rest heard the news at the Theatre Royal. Joan told the cast as she handed round mugs of coffee. They were doing J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls and it seemed appropriate. Up at Angel House they were slower to hear the news because they were not on Ginger’s round, but Florrie heard when she called on her cousins the Padovanis for her meat. They supplied her with meat, butter, bacon and all interesting information. In their business you got to know a lot, and although taciturn Northern Italians, they were willing to talk to Florrie who was kin. Her mother had been English but they were willing to overlook that since Florrie was so totally in looks and spirit one of them. Only in her taste did she display her English mother; she rarely drank coffee but consumed quantities of sweet dark tea. The Padovanis called her their ‘English cousin’ and laughed at her when she was not there. But they respected her for living at Angel House, for her loyalty to Rachel Esthart, and for lending out money at interest, a good business woman.

They told her about the body and Florrie told Rachel Esthart. She considered suppressing the news but decided, after thought, that she’d better say. She had a presentiment that it would be wise. Or so she claimed afterwards.

The other great centre for the spread of news was the local library where Florrie went almost daily to change books for Rachel (she was at the moment reading Miss Heyer’s Faro’s Child and wondering if she should buy the film rights) and where the cast of the Theatre Royal went daily to read the newspapers which they could not afford to buy, so they said, and to steal the one copy of Vogue, which was rationed, if they could manage it. Someone usually could. At the end of the month they put it back, much battered, to the very great fury of the librarian. But in the library everything was told, and all items of news retailed like a good serial. As quite a lot of people changed their library books every day, including Will’s wife and Ginger’s mother, items of interest could be exchanged, added to and occasionally denied.

Through these channels the news about the dead body spread rapidly with comment added. Very soon the murderer knew what his audience thought of him. He began to see his face reflected in the public mirror. This greatly interested him.

The news was received by different people in different ways. The Padovanis had taken a frank and cheerful interest in the news, while at the library the elderly librarian had said girls should look after themselves better. She returned to her Elizabeth Goudge.

Rachel Esthart took the news calmly. She was in one of her downbeat moods after the excitement of the last few days. If she still believed her son was close at hand, she seemed to care much less. Perhaps she no longer believed he was alive.

She had, of course, been the victim of a filthy joke, and she had the card propped up on her desk to prove it, but she no longer seemed very interested, and if she was not, who else was left to mind?

Deep inside her own personal castle, Rachel Esthart heard about the dead girl with distant politeness. Florrie was relieved; her premonitions of trouble were wrong. She was very glad not to have precognition or telepathy or whatever. Her grandmother had been a witch; or so her mother (who had not liked her mother-in-law) had always alleged.

There was always the chance these powers had descended to her. In an Anglo-Saxon environment they would not be a comfortable attribute. But it would certainly show Ma Padovani.

So she told Rachel, who listened carefully. ‘Poor girl,’ she said sadly. ‘I hate to hear of young creatures dying. There’s been too much of that already in the war.’

Rachel had never closed her mind to the war, she had listened to all Churchill’s broadcasts. The progress of the war in North Africa and Italy, and then in France and Germany had been followed closely on war maps. She identified herself with the army as if she was a young soldier.

‘Florrie,’ she said suddenly, ‘I’m a bit scared. I feel death’s getting too close. Will it be my turn next? Do you think I’m going to die?’

‘No, love, no,’ said Florrie reassuringly. ‘When you are going to die, you don’t know. It’s unexpected.’ She wasn’t sure if this was true, but it was something to say.

‘Do you think it’s the war that produces a particular kind of murder – all those young men, seeing death, such violent and terrible deaths? No knowing what it might do to the mind. Not if they’re normal. But who is normal? And could you ever be normal again if you’d been blown up? Or blown a man up with a grenade?’ Her eyes wandered to the card promising her a present from her son. She still had it on her desk.

‘You ought to throw that away.’ Florrie was cross. ‘It’s rubbish.’

‘Is there any gin left?’

‘Right out.’ Florrie was regretful on her own account. ‘You finished it yesterday.’

Rachel sat for a moment in silence, then she said: ‘I won’t drink any more. That’s it. Over.’

One brick in the wall she had built around herself was gone.

Stella heard the news as she sat doing her face in her dressing-room. There was a brick out of her wall too, but in her case it was a real one. A bomb blast had weakened an area of brick on the back wall of the dressing-room, and one brick had become dislodged so that a cold breeze played around her ankles. Someone had stuffed the hole full of newspaper but it did not suffice to keep out the air of that chill summer. She kicked at the paper with her foot; her hand decorating an eye with mascara slipped and marred her perfect cheek – the make-up there was just right, a delicate apricot. She swore softly. At such times she resembled a little cat.

She was considering what she had heard. Joan and Albie had come straight out with the news and told everyone. It might affect audiences; it might affect everyone. One of the company had remarked that the dead girl reminded him of ‘l’inconnue de la Seine’.

Stella had experienced a little shiver of alarm. She had had a brush with violence herself recently and knew how easily it could come about. It might even be one’s own fault. And now this poor girl.

Edward poked his head round the door. ‘Hello, poppet, a call for you. Albie wants you in the office.’

The war had cast a shadow over Stella’s youth and growing up. This separated her from someone like Edward Kelly who had been adult in a world where the lights had blazed all night with no blackout and no bombs. His young world had had no rationing and no clothes coupons. A leading lady in a smart West End production expected to have her clothes ordered from Molyneux and her hats from Reboux. It was a glittering stage which Stella had not known. On Edward Kelly’s nineteenth birthday, he had been appearing with Noel Coward and Noel had sent him round a small bottle of champagne, then invited him back to Gerald Road. On Stella’s nineteenth birthday she had been crouching in a cellar in the Theatre Royal, Bath, while German bombs fell around them, one of the so-called Baedeker raids.

Edward was a creature from a different world, hence the glamour he had for her, but she was really closer in age and spirit to the two young policemen and Chris Mackenzie, the stage manager and musician.

‘What?’ She got up hurriedly. ‘Coming.’ Joan and Albie had no glamour (this was not their style) but they were management and paid the wages.

She was on her way, dressing-gown flying. As she went past, he brushed a kiss on her cheek.

‘I love you, poppet, know that?’

‘Not you, Eddie.’ The light turn-away was always best with Eddie.

He called after her. ‘What’s that face you were putting on? What face?’

‘Candida,’ she called back. ‘For Candida.’ It was to be her next big part, she had just had the ingénue part in An Inspector Calls.

‘Too hearty by half. Candida is pale,’ he shouted – Edward was to play her clergyman husband. Albie, surprisingly, would be the poet: he could act thirty years younger than he was.

In the office, Joan and Albie were in consultation with Chris Mackenzie.

It was Chris who had said that the finding of the body reminded him of ‘l’inconnue de la Seine’, the famous nineteenth-century girl found floating and immortalized in sculpture. He said things like that quite often and they were never a joke. He was a disconcerting young man.

Now they wanted to discuss with her a technicality about Candida’s entrance; there were difficulties.

Stella was cooperative. Anything they said. But all the time she was thinking of what Chris had said about the dead girl: it had sounded both calm and cruel. She did not like it that Chris could be like that.

She wondered what it would feel like living in Angel House with such news under her belt.

Well, at least, she knew some policemen. And the policemen knew her.

John Coffin and Alex Rowley went with Inspector Banbury to the scene of the discovery. The body had been removed from the water by then and placed on the riverside. For the moment it was covered with a blanket.

Inspector Banbury was in charge, the young men were present in a strictly subordinate capacity. They were there to assist and assist only, their sphere of action limited. In a way this was a help, or so John Coffin found. It freed the mind. He was able to look around and take it all in as a detached observer. Some of the things he saw he might not necessarily mention. Others he might review in his mind, then hand over to Tom Banbury. When the shell blew him up, then buried him, it took something away, an outer carapace, and gave him a clarity of vision. Life would replace the shell but meanwhile he saw all things new.