The Coffin Tree

A quiet buzz sounded in Coffin’s pocket. ‘Damn! I’ve been summoned.’

‘Still attached to your bleeper?’ said Phoebe.

‘As ever.’ He also had a portable telephone but he preferred a call such as this and then to go to his car phone. More protected.

Phoebe raised an eyebrow, a sceptical gesture she should have denied herself when she knew how much she was going to depend on him. ‘I thought with your new eminence you would have given that up.’ He wasn’t a man who minded being laughed at, not as much as most men, but you couldn’t go too far. In the past she often had.

He stood up. ‘I must go to the car. How did you get here?’

‘I walked.’ I was on the verge of going too far, she thought, I must remember, I must remember.

‘I’ll give you a lift back.’ To where you are staying, he meant, wherever that was.

She would have known his car from any other man’s as soon as she looked at it. Nothing flamboyant: a good dark-coloured Rover, you could tell he had some money; he hadn’t had once, but always bought the best he could afford whether it was a car or a coat. No litter in the car, but a neatly folded raincoat on the back seat with a pile of road maps. He liked to know where he was going. She had used to wonder why he didn’t carry a compass as well. Not a joke to make now. He was quieter and more controlled than he had been once, gentler perhaps, but in a grim mood. He was angry.

In the car he listened to Archie’s voice. ‘I don’t know if you want to come, but you need to know. A body on a bonfire, looks deliberate.’

Phoebe watched and listened as Archie poured out his words. There was a faint scent on the air: Stella, she thought, her scent, and was horrified to feel a stab of jealousy. She was wearing Giorgio herself: strong, assertive and sexy and she had better give it up because if you want to be anonymous, and professionally this might be wise at the moment, then this was not the scent to wear. People remembered it. What Stella’s scent was, she could not recognize.

‘Is it still burning? Under control? But the body? Yes, I get it.’

Whatever Superintendent Young had to say did not please the chief commander because Phoebe saw him frown.

‘Right, I’m coming. I want to take a look for myself.’ He turned to Phoebe. ‘You’d better come along too. There is a fire and a body and it doesn’t look like an accident. And an old man I know seems to have something to do with it.’

He looked at Phoebe’s smart dress. ‘Will you risk that? You can never tell when you go to an incident.’

‘I’ll risk it … Did you notice – no, I don’t suppose you did – that the large woman on the committee was wearing another version of this dress in red?’

‘That was Geraldine, she always wears red when she’s on the warpath.’

Phoebe blinked. ‘And was she?’

‘She must have been. Powerful lady, Geraldine. Keep on her right side if she comes your way.’

‘And will she?’

‘Can’t tell. She knows the district pretty well. I think she may even know old Waters, the man who seems to have something to do with this new body.’

‘It doesn’t connect with that other business?’ She would always refer to the problem in this elliptical way from now on. ‘Only connect,’ E. M. Forster had said; he ought to have been a detective, she thought.

‘I hope not, or the whole thing will be even crazier than it is now, but who knows, he’s a strange man, but no, I don’t see a connection … Superintendent Young is there and he is one of the people you’ve got to know.’

And to get on with, Phoebe interpreted this as meaning. ‘I know something about him already. I know he worked with you before you came here, that he’s got a good record, that he’s done two courses at Saxon Police College, and always come out among the first half dozen, but that he always says his wife is the clever one.’

Coffin started the car. ‘You have done your homework.’ But he had expected no more of her and would have done the same himself in her place. She had perhaps demonstrated to him the range of her contacts, which interested him, and made him wonder who was using whom in this new appointment.

‘I’ve met his wife, by the way.’

‘How was that?’

‘Oh, just by chance, at a meeting in Birmingham University: she was the guest speaker.’

‘Interesting, was it?’ He was guiding the car through the traffic which was unexpectedly heavy on this hot evening where the going down of the sun had not lowered the temperature much. He glanced at Phoebe’s dress, there wasn’t much of it, so she was luckier in the heat than he was.

He didn’t believe for one minute that she had met Alison Young by chance; she had gone to the meeting on purpose, part of her pre-planning.

‘Yes, it was interesting.’

Archie Young was not himself an interesting speaker although it was well worth listening to what he had to say. He got his facts right.

He turned left at the traffic lights, leaving the busy main road through the Docklands behind him and driving into a side street lined with small houses with neat front gardens: Palgrave Drive. Beyond Palgrave Drive was Frances Street which was less neat, and from Frances Street he drove down the poetically named Golden Alley. Golden Alley was not neat at all since several old cars and various abandoned shopping trolleys had been left there to rust, next to a gas cooker of antique appearance.

‘We are in Swinehouse now and you’d better get to know it.’ He was driving slowly. ‘When can you start?’

‘I’ve already asked for a transfer. I have some leave. Straight away, if you want.’

‘It’ll have to be unofficial, but that suits me; I want you here, working for me, quietly.’

‘OK. Suits me too.’

‘Where will you live?’ The car was bumping over cobbles. The only good thing about Golden Alley was that it was short, it led into Brides Street. Every time Coffin came this way, he thought that if a modern Ripper got going (and praise be, it would not be in his time and his bailiwick) it would be in Brides Street. Brides Street was narrow, lined with houses in which people lurked rather than lived.

‘I’ll look around. Rent something till I sell my place in Edgbaston.’ She looked out of the window with interest. There seemed to be property for sale and to let around here. And she had not forgotten Eden Brown’s invitation: she liked Eden and it would be interesting to start off with her. She did not anticipate staying, she’d need her own place in the long run. But Eden was clearly quite a girl.

You could smell the fire now.

Brides Street wound its way into Fashion Street where, by contrast, the houses were pretty and well painted. Coffin came this way at irregular intervals to visit an interesting old inhabitant called Waters who had built Stonehenge in his garden. The neighbours had complained, so he removed his Henge, stone by stone, and built a pyramid in the back instead with an attempt at the Tower of Babel. His pyramid had a little door and Mr Waters lived in it himself when he felt like it, as did several itinerant cats and an old urban fox.

Behind Fashion Street was a stretch of rough ground in which Albert Waters sometimes operated and where he had once built a mini earthwork that he called Waters’s Way. Beyond the now weed-overgrown earthwork, lay the Swinehouse football ground.

In the rough ground, was the fire.

A fire engine, an ambulance and several police cars blocked their way. A small crowd was penned behind a police barrier.

‘I smelt a fire burning when I was shopping,’ said Phoebe.

‘Yes, Calcutta Street, where you were, is parallel with Fashion Street but nearer the river. The wind must have been blowing your way. It’s a funny district, I’ve smelt some weird smells there myself, almost as if the past had caught alight and was burning.’

He was recognized as he walked towards Archie Young and a shout came through the air. He had no difficulty in recognizing Albert’s voice. ‘Come over this way, sir, and I’ll tell you all about it. I am an innocent man.’

‘Be quiet, Bert, I’ll speak to you later.’

‘What’s he on about?’ he said to Archie Young as the superintendent came up.

‘Oh, some of the neighbours thought the fire was his fault; he’s always up to something, and he’s been talking about the Great Fire of London for weeks now.’

Albert was still calling out and Phoebe heard him shouting about ‘Your lady wife,’ and to her horror realized he meant her.