Gwendoline Butler - The Coffin Tree

‘Don’t you trust your own men?’

Coffin was silent. ‘I have built a good structure up here. I took over a rambling set of CID and uniformed units and I’ve built up a force with its own identity. But I’ve had to do it on the quick. Of course I trust them but this is murder in my own backyard. I want you to investigate it for me.’

‘I see.’

‘You will have yourself and you will have me.

‘My own feeling is that someone is protecting the machine that is feeding the illegal money into this area. We have a Minder, and I want him or her caught. I want you to identify the Minder.’

Phoebe considered, she knew now what she was taking on. ‘I shall want back up. Leg work, help with interviews …’

‘You’ll get it.’

‘Forensics …

‘You’ll get it. Once we identify the Minder, then we will get the proof.’

Phoebe’s mouth went dry. ‘I never thought I’d hear you put it that way round.’ For the first time, she saw the metal in John Coffin. ‘I think you’d better get me another drink because I see what I am; a kind of stalking horse. If I succeed at all you want, I stand a good chance of getting killed myself.’

When he came back with her drink, she noticed he had got one for himself too and it looked strong. Good, at least he cared something for her. ‘I almost wish I hadn’t put in for the job.’ She looked down at her new black dress, the colour of which now seemed uncomfortably appropriate.

‘Phoebe, why did you apply? The truth now. I want you for this job, confirmation has to go through channels, but I’d like you here now. Only I need to know why you wanted to come.’

The drink lessened the dryness in her mouth. ‘Oh well, you might as well know: I put away a rough type with a long record who threatened to get me personally, if you know what I mean … He comes out about now. Could be out already. I thought I’d be better off down here in the Smoke where he wouldn’t have the contacts.’

Coffin considered. ‘Doesn’t sound like you, Phoebe.’

She looked out of the window. ‘Well, there was a sort of an affair.’

‘Ah, yes, that would complicate matters. So it got personal … He still wants you?’

There was a long pause. ‘It wasn’t quite like that. You see the affair, such as it was, was not with him but his wife.’

‘Now I am surprised.’

‘It was something that just seemed to happen … I wasn’t too happy, neither was she, poor girl, but for me, it was a mistake.’

‘Only not for her?’

Phoebe nodded. She was thinking about Rose with sadness and liking, but not love, not physical love. ‘No. I’m afraid I treated her badly. You might be surprised to learn that treating their lovers badly is not the prerogative of men.’

Stella herself could not have delivered a shrewder blow. ‘So you’ve run away?’

‘I’ve run away. Don’t we all?’

As they talked, the fire had been quenched and the blackened shrivelled body found; from one hand an unburnt finger stuck up as if in accusation.

The inhabitants of this particular area were few – a small terrace backed on to the open ground – moreover, they had among them the eccentric figure of Albert Waters who had built a small replica of Stonehenge in his back garden and who was now erecting the Tower of Babel in the front. They took it for granted that this fire was something to do with him.

He was into suttee now.

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?’