Gwendoline Butler - The Coffin Tree

Phoebe dug into her shoulder bag. ‘I’ll give you a cheque, all right?’

‘Sure.’ Eden added cautiously. ‘Make it a third; please.’

‘No, I’ll pay for the two. How’s the shop doing?’ Phoebe was writing her cheque; she was calculating, a substantial sum by her standards.

‘Fine,’ said Eden. She was of the opinion that this was entirely too personal a remark. ‘We’re opening a branch in East Hythe next month.’

‘Is that so?’ Phoebe handed the cheque over and waited for her receipt. ‘How many does that make?’

‘Three. One other in Swinehouse. Horrible name, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t live locally?’ You couldn’t if you hate the name that much; full of history that name is, even Phoebe knew that. Pre-Norman, pre-Saxon and probably pre-Roman.

‘No, I drive through the tunnel. Still Docklands, though.’

The new Thames tunnel joining London north of the river and the Second City was a great link; Phoebe had driven through it herself this morning, fighting traffic all the way and had thought it a great death trap with poor lane discipline, but that was Londoners for you. A lawless lot. Still, no one dead by the roadside that she had seen.

‘I’ll be looking for a place if I get the post. What’s it like round here?’

‘Can be expensive. Depends. Spinnergate’s your best bet. I’ll be looking there myself soon. I’ll be looking for a lodger too; we might suit.’

‘I’ll remember what you say.’ I’ll remember everything. I usually do, it’s my job.

She rubbed her cheek. The pain in her cheek was not really bad but it contained just the hint that if could get to be nasty and that worried her. She knew she had cause for worry. There was pain and pain, and this could be a bad one.

Outside, a church clock sounded the hour. Forty minutes to her appointment. Just time to drive and park the car and take three deep breaths. She had reconnoitred the route earlier and knew where to go.

She smiled at Eden as she pushed the heavy glass door. ‘See you again.’

‘The dresses suit you. You’ll enjoy wearing them, I promise.’

Phoebe paused at the door. ‘Can you smell burning?’

Eden sniffed. ‘It’s some way off. Sort of strong, though. There’s an old chap round here has a lot of bonfires. And he’s not the only one.’

Albert Waters had had one fire already today, possibly that was what they could smell?

‘If I didn’t know better,’ began Phoebe, then stopped. ‘What does he burn?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ If I didn’t know better, then I would say it was flesh burning.

Phoebe walked to her car, parked just around the corner, this spot too had been prospected earlier; she sat still for a few minutes recalling the scene behind her, remembering Eden, the shop with its contents, and the outside in that busy street. On one side there was a grocery store and on the other a chemist’s shop: both old stores but with a certain prosperity. Further down the street was a bank, and a pet shop where a small white puppy slept in the window. He had a basket, a cushion, a bowl of water and a few hard biscuits. Phoebe had hoped that someone would buy him soon; it was no life for a dog in a hot window.

She fixed Eden in her memory: the pretty blonde with the small hands and feet, and the big ego. She felt sure about the ego. Once inside Phoebe, all these details would be there for ever, and would pop out whenever required without effort on her part. Press the button, the right button, and out it came. It was the way her memory worked.

Having fixed it all, Phoebe started the car and drove away. The car window was open so that the smell of burning came into the car and drove away with her. The smell bothered her.

Mortuaries burnt odds and ends of human remains, so did hospitals, but she had studied her map and there was no hospital near here.

It had been a quiet, ordinary shopping day; both women if questioned would have so described it, but there is always a subtext.

Eden took the opportunity of an empty shop to make a local telephone call. She dialled the number and hung on for some time waiting for an answer.

‘Oh, come on, Agnes. Where are you? Two days I’ve been ringing you and you know we need to talk.’ She went away to make herself a cup of coffee. ‘You do flutter around, Agnes, just when you ought to stay put.’ The two women were business acquaintances rather than close friends; they worked for the same organization, but Eden liked Agnes Page. ‘Probably popped over to Paris without telling me to look for clothes.’ Or New York or Milan or Hong Kong. This was fantasy as all the clothes were purchased by the buyer, a hirsute woman with blue hair and long red nails who had been in the rag trade for decades and Agnes was on the accounts side, but it was a game they played between them, that one day, they would open a shop and buy from all the best houses. You needed a fair bit of capital for such a venture. ‘Money, money, money,’ hummed Eden as she drank her coffee.

On her way to her crucial interview, Phoebe wound up the car window to keep out the smoke.

The fire was burning and the smoke was blowing John Coffin’s way.

He felt the fire too. There had been a fire in his life for a few weeks now, and on the day of Phoebe Astley’s interview for a job in his force, he began talking about it openly to a group meeting in his room.

They were the interviewing board being entertained for drinks and coffee, all carefully selected men and women.

They would be interviewing the shortlist of three candidates.

He poured out drinks, letting his eyes wander out the window, wide open because it was so hot.

The Second City of London shimmered in the heat. In the distance was the river, but all he could see was the roofs of Spinnergate with – far away – the tower blocks of Swinehouse, and beyond, the factory tops of East Hythe.

For some years now, John Coffin had been chief commander of the Second City’s police force, responsible for maintaining law and order in this most difficult and rowdy of cities with a millennium-long tradition of being obstructive to authority. The Romans had suffered from its citizens as her legions had landed at the dock now being excavated by the archaeologists from the New Docklands University, digging up camp sites where the soldiers had been gulled and robbed by the locals. The English folk who settled when the Romans went picked up the same tricks and became as bad, worse really, because, being English, they kept a straight face and made a virtue of it. Norman, Plantagenet, Tudor: this part of London was not controllable, it kept its own laws. They withdrew behind the walls of London and its tower and left the villages and hamlets along the river to get on with it. And, with the river for their thoroughfare, so they did.

With every generation, the population grew, so that by the time Victorian notions of morality arrived, there was a dense population obstinately reluctant to be evangelized.

The hot air came heavy with the smells of the living and the long dead that came floating in through the window and hit Coffin in the face. He hoped he wasn’t going down with one of the odd viruses which were on the move in the Second City this summer. He couldn’t afford to be ill with Stella in the state she was in over her theatre (or was it his sister Letty’s theatre? It had been Letty who had helped put together the St Luke’s Theatre complex, now renamed the Stella Pinero Theatre).

He handed round the drinks: whisky with ginger – he ought to shudder and his Edinburgh half-brother – lawyer William – would certainly do so, but it seemed to be what Alfred Rome wanted.

‘Sir Alfred.’

‘Ferdie, please.’

Sir Alfred, Ferdie to his friends, he must remember that, was the warden – he preferred the title to vice chancellor or president – to the very new university tucked away in the east of the Second City, in the Bad Lands, not hitherto considered educable, but no doubt Ferdie Rome would change that. He was of the new breed, educated at Ruskin College, Oxford, then at Birkbeck College in the University of London, then a short period in the Cabinet office. The unusually rapid promotion suggested to Coffin that this was a political appointment, which made Sir Alfred all the more formidable. Tough, square-shouldered and completely bald in his late thirties, he looked fit for anything. Coffin now had two universities in his area and had to protect both from the rebels and the lawless.