Coffin on Murder Street

Her own feet in their light slippers felt damp and cold on the grass. She was muttering under her breath to keep her courage up. ‘Wish I’d brought some gloves, I’m getting earth all over my hands.’

A worm moved sluggishly away from the trowel, a brown and pink creature not wanting to be disturbed.

Stella took scoops out of the earth, it was soft, and easy to move. The trowel struck something, not hard like wood or stone, but softer. She stopped digging for a moment and sat back on her heels. ‘Oh dear, I don’t believe I’m going to like this.’

Dropping the trowel, she brushed the earth aside with her hands. There was a cardboard box about twelve inches long and six wide; the sort of box shoes come packed in. In fact she could see the lid said Armstrong Shoes.

She lifted the box out of the earth, laid it on the grass beside her and lifted the lid.

Bonzo was there but he had been strangled. His head had been twisted round so it rested on his back. Something odd had happened to his feet, they had been extended and twisted too.

As far as you could murder a stuffed dog, Bonzo had been murdered.

Stella stood up. Only lightly buried, she thought. Buried but meant to be found.

How on earth could she show this to Nell Casey? On the other hand, Nell was up there waiting for her, she would expect to hear what Stella had found. How could she not tell her?

After some thought, Stella knelt down on the grass again, put Bonzo back in his box, and reburied him. She pressed the earth down with a firm hand, making all as tidy as she could. If you looked hard, you could see signs of disturbance, but probably no one would look.

Then she rang the bell for Flat No. 3 and when the answerphone spoke, announced herself.

‘It’s Stella.’

‘Come on up.’ The door opened for her and she made her way up to Nell Casey’s temporary abode. Nell had the door open and was waiting for her.

She drew Stella in. ‘So? What did you find?’

‘It’s Bonzo, all right. He’s in a box and just under the soil. Not deep.’ She had left the trowel behind. Damn, must remember to collect it on the way home. ‘Before you ask: I left him there. He didn’t look too good, poor Bonzo. I don’t think you’d like him.’

‘No.’ Nell put her hand to her head. ‘What am I going to say to Tom? I promised him I’d find Bonzo.’

‘Well, you have done. But you can’t give him that particular Bonzo. Can’t you get another one?’

‘Tom wouldn’t stand for it,’ said Nell, all mother figure. ‘He’d know. Probably throw it at me.’

‘You’ll have to tough it out, Nell.’ No child would want to play with the Bonzo down below.

‘Couldn’t we tidy him up?’

‘You can make up your own mind in the morning when you’ve had a look. But there’s something else. Think about it, Nell. It’s not good what’s happened. It looks like a threat to me, one directed at Tom.’

‘I know,’ said Nell unhappily. ‘Not Tom now, Tom next time. So what do I do?’

‘You know that or you wouldn’t ask. You tell the police, see what they can do.’

‘Yes.’ Nell accepted it. ‘Tomorrow. But Tom? What about Tom? Shall I send him away? Hide him? And Bonzo, how on earth will I handle that?’ Nell Casey sounded distracted.

‘Hell, I don’t know what you’re going to do about that. But my advice on the dog is a straight cash offer.’ She had formed her own opinion of Tom, and she thought money would speak.

‘Yes,’ said Nell thoughtfully. ‘I believe that would work with Tom.’

‘Never known it fail,’ said Stella briskly. Her own daughter always took a rake-off in either disaster money or triumph money, it sweetened the world remarkably. It was known either as incentive or bribery, according to how you looked at the world. She called it comfort money, herself.

She kissed Nell and gave her a consoling hug. ‘Go to bed, get some sleep. I won’t say it’ll seem better in the morning but at least you will have the strength to face it. I’m off.’ Must pick up the trowel, she told herself.

As she held the door open for her, Nell said: ‘Do you think the police will take it seriously.’

‘I know one who will,’ Stella promised. Or she would know the reason why, she told herself.

Cars were parked at intervals along the quiet street, but she had no sense of being watched or followed as she turned in to St Luke’s Mansions. She looked up at the window in the tower. Still alight.

Should she call now? But even as she looked the light went out.

Before she drifted off to sleep, one question worried her. How had the person or persons who grabbed Bonzo known he belonged to Tom? For that matter, who had known about Tom, his name and who he was? Nell Casey and her son had only been in the country for a few days.

The same question was worrying Nell herself, as she lay in bed. It must be someone who knows us, she thought.

Some person, somewhere, in this country she had come back to, hated her and Tom enough to torment them. She had an enemy, but who was it?

A secret enemy was a frightening thought, but an enemy who moved in one’s own world, whom you know, perhaps had liked and trusted, that was even more frightening.

‘But there’s another way of looking at it,’ Nell said to the silent interlocutor who was conducting the inquiry inside her, ‘someone whom you know to have a grievance.’

Someone like Gus.

Sleep was not going to come easily tonight. It was haunted by thoughts of Gus, whom she had once loved, and still admired, and whose character she knew to be striped about equally with generosity and anger. He was capable of anything, probably.

John Coffin slept soundly, his dreams not disturbed by fantasies of the missing coach with its pilgrims to horror, nor even by the child murderer who might now be one of his own flock. He had learnt long since to dismiss the worries of the day as far as his work was concerned. He had built up an efficient CID force, ably backed by the uniformed men. Let them get on with it. They had radio telephones, fax machines, and a computer network to help them. He could let them get on with it.

That said, he had enjoyed being a detective, puzzling out the truth of a crime, looking for the evidence and then putting one patient piece after another into the jigsaw until he had the truth. After that came the job of getting a case together and conviction in the courts, and there, he had to admit, he had not always been successful. There were one or two men and several women walking around who had escaped the law. They probably hated him just as much as if they had gone down. He got several hate letters a week. More sometimes. This too did not disturb his sleep.

Stella Pinero, however, could always disturb him, and she did so now. The telephone rang by his bed, waking him up.

‘Stella?’

‘Yes, of course, it’s me.’

‘What is it?’

‘Come down and have breakfast with me and I’ll tell you.’

‘I don’t eat breakfast.’

‘Not true. I’ve seen you having a croissant and coffee at Max’s.’

‘Well, I wasn’t going to do that today. I’m in a hurry.’ Not quite true, but if Stella detained him too long, then he would be. Holding the phone away from his ear while he removed the cat from his chest where Tiddles seemed to have spent the night, he could hear her voice still talking. ‘Peace, Stella, I will come down. Put the coffee on.’

When he rang her bell, she opened the door at once, looking businesslike in spectacles with her long hair tied back.