Coffin on the Water

At the moment he was testing out Tom Banbury to find out how much of his individual vision he could hand over without seeming odd. Because the things he saw were sometimes ludicrously simple, yet might be important.

Such as the fact that although the girl had all her fingernails neatly trimmed, one nail and that of a little finger was long.

Then again, he saw that where the water had drained away from the body it had run into a pool that was half moon-shaped. That couldn’t possibly be important or relevant, but it was certainly very striking. Stretched out like that, she reminded him of a picture seen in a history book of a sacrificial victim of the Aztecs with a shaped indentation at the feet where the blood drained, or libations were poured.

He looked up and thought that Alex had caught the reflection of his thoughts because he too looked up, shook his head and frowned. Coffin wondered if he would say something memorable or profound to round off the moment, but he didn’t do so. All he said was:

‘Cold down here. It’s the wind off the river. Stinks a bit, too.’

There was a smell, sour and succulent, floating off the water now stirred by the sharp breeze. The same smell, with some addition of its own, came up from the dead body. He wondered if dead women smelt the same as dead men, there must be a sex difference, you’d think.

One thing was very clear as John Coffin looked down at the dead girl and that was that she had not died easily. In his life had had seen plenty of deaths, but they had mostly come very quickly so that it was over and done with before the mind took note. This girl looked as though she had had time to think about it and to know what was coming. Pain, too. Sharp, tearing pain and terror. A blow had fixed a mark down the side of her cheek and split her lip: she had felt that. There was another bruise on her chin. Her hands were swollen and water-sodden, washerwoman’s hands, but they had scratches and it looked as though she might have fought back. Her neck was bruised. A strangling?

Her killer might be marked. He registered that fact.

But the main area of wounds was on the trunk. There were tears in the pretty summer dress where a knife had gone through, and large bloodstains about each hole. He could see five holes. He counted. There might be more elsewhere that he couldn’t see. A white woolly cardigan, equally stained, had been buttoned across her dress.

Put on after the killing, he thought.

Banbury came across from the foreman’s office like a controlled whirlwind, the gentle, concise way of speaking belying the activity he generated, and Coffin told him what he thought.

‘Been buttoned back on afterwards.’

‘Don’t jump to conclusions. I’ve known the lab boys upset a few ideas of mine. Let them have a look and tell us what’s what and then we start thinking.’

In the month in which he had worked with Tom Banbury he had learnt that his boss was good-tempered and hard-working, but very little else besides. He didn’t even know what football team he supported or what beer he drank. If he had a secret life even that was a secret. It was a mistake to be so closed up, and for a policeman it was a downright disadvantage. You ought to appear to be open, even if you were not.

John Coffin assessed Tom’s comment as being in line with what he already made of his chief. A good man but limited.

So he got on with his own thoughts in the way he wanted.

He could see where a stain was partly covered by the white jersey and had absorbed some blood from it. Put on afterwards, he decided. And not just for fun. Getting her into that, a dead weight, would not come easy. But he did it.

That was all they knew then. Later they were to discover the reason, but Banbury was never to say anything.

‘There is something about the clothes that I will comment on,’ said Tom Banbury. ‘They look to me the clothes of a quiet, respectable girl. She wasn’t one of Connie Shepherd’s sort.’

The bare legs stretching before them had been pretty, sun-tanned legs, the feet well groomed with neat toenails. ‘She wasn’t flashy.’

‘Wonder who she is?’

Tom Banbury shook his head and shrugged. ‘There might be a name on her clothes. But I doubt it.’

Alex came back from where he had been talking to a uniformed constable. ‘Surgeon’s just arriving, sir.’

‘Know who she is, Alex?’ said Banbury. ‘Any idea? Ever seen her before?’

‘No. Unidentified.’

An unknown girl dragged out of the Thames: that would be the newspaper headlines. It would make the evening paper. There was a stringer from the Star there already, with a young woman from the Kentish Mercury.

‘Somebody knows her.’

‘Sure.’

‘And we’ve got to find that somebody.’ Banbury turned away to meet the police surgeon. ‘That’s how you do it, lad.’ He nodded across to where the press stood, the first two had now been joined by another man. ‘You can tell that lot there if they hang about there will be a description for them to print. They can help us get a name for her with any luck. As I said: somebody knows her, and somebody will be missing her.’

As John Coffin obeyed orders and walked across to the press, taking in that the girl from the Mercury had red hair and pretty ankles, he noticed an arrival.

A smart black car drew up to the kerb from which stepped, accompanied by what ought to have been a flourish of trumpets and felt as if it had been, a burly well-dressed man. The man gave him a quick, perceptive look and passed on, coat flying. Coffin had the same feeling he’d had when he’d encountered a General on the field of batttle. It was a sparkling entrance.

Coffin knew his name but not his face. Chief Superintendent Dander, the Supremo of the CID in this South London police district, the nearest thing to God in Coffin’s professional life, had arrived.