GWENDOLINE BUTLER

Coffin in the Black Museum

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in 1989 by Collins

This edition first issued in 1991 by Fontana

Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1989

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Gwendoline Butler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006179108

Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007545476

Version: 2014–07–07

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Keep Reading

About the Author

Author’s Note

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

‘What is that crowd?’ said John Coffin, looking down from his tower at the street below. A grey London street. ‘Who’s dead now?’

It was a joke, but he thought a lot about death. In a way it was his job.

Death was a long-stay visitor in the district he was observing with a proprietary interest. Poverty, disease, and several wars over the centuries had seen to it. But death comes in different packets, sometimes mercifully, sometimes stealthily, sometimes brutally and murderously. The district had known plenty of that sort of death too.

In the Middle Ages an instrument of violent death, whether cudgel, knife or even a simple horse that had thrown its rider, was deemed too dangerous to be let loose on the world, was declared ‘deodand’, given to God.

In twentieth-century England, such an object is apt to be put by the police in a Black Museum. But perhaps the power is not thus exorcized.

‘I suppose it’s going a bit far to call it a crowd.’ On closer inspection it appeared to be a child and two women staring at something in the gutter. But over the years John Coffin had developed a certain sensitivity to a group of people staring at a something. Professional sensitivity. It usually meant trouble on the way, and that was where he came in.

He took another look down on the street at the interestingly foreshortened view of heads, one curly and golden, and two hatted in the style favoured in the district by older ladies in summer, flowered and frothy.

Yes, from up here they looked as if they were getting excited. But it was a long way down. He could ignore it.

When John Coffin, policeman, said he lived in a church, it was understandable that people looked surprised.

‘St Luke’s Old Church,’ he would explain patiently. It was now a secular building. The bishop or someone like that had come in and deconsecrated it. Once you used to have to take the roof off, but that didn’t seem to be necessary now. Or was that just for castles, when an invading army swept in and ravaged the town? Slighting a castle, wasn’t it called? St Luke’s had come near to slighting itself.

St Luke’s, an old City church, in an area not far from the Tower of London, nor far from the maze of streets where Jack the Ripper had operated, had been in a bad way, the congregation long since diminished and the roof never quite patched up from bomb damage.

Where he lived was going to be called St Luke’s Mansions (although it still looked unmistakably like a church with a bell tower and a tiny paved yard), a set of luxury apartments, but until the Post Office got round to making this clear to everyone, if you wanted your letters and visitors it was best to say you lived in St Luke’s. The locals knew what you meant and it was good for outsiders to get a surprise.

When his sister Letty had told him that she had bought a church, Coffin had been surprised himself.

‘I’ve bought you a church,’ she had said.

‘Oh, thanks.’

‘And you’re going to live in it.’

‘Thanks again.’

‘But it’s going to be a theatre.’

This time no thanks sprang to his lips. He was silenced. His sister Lætitia Bingham never failed to surprise him, she was a lady of such enterprise and style. All he could do was listen. If Letty said he was about to live in a church which would also be a theatre, then it was what would happen. She had a way of making the impossible possible.

‘Specializing in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. It’ll be a very small theatre. The smallest ever, I should think.’ An uncharacteristic piece of exaggeration on her part. Lætitia was a lawyer and not a girl to overstate things, but it showed how moved she was by what she had done. ‘It’s a listed building, so the façade will be preserved, but inside will be three apartments and, of course, the theatre and a small theatre workshop.’

‘Also the smallest ever?’

Lætitia was his much younger half-sister (same mother, different father), and she had been educated partly in England and partly in America where she had married. Twice so far, but Coffin always feared thrice. Her present husband was a rich business man with ‘interests’, as people say, in the City of London. Letty’s own earned income (she was a lawyer, specializing in international law), was not negligible.

‘I feel I am investing in my inheritance.’ Letty had a young daughter and this was how it was taking her. ‘I am protecting a bit of England.’ She had come back to England to live after a long spell living in New York. The accident of birth which had separated her from her half-brother had given her dual nationality. She had made it work for her.

‘I hope England will be grateful.’ England so often wasn’t. And I am to be built into it like a brick. Or damn it, perhaps she’s protecting me too.

‘And besides, Lizzie thinks she might like to be an actress.’ Lizzie was her daughter, all of six years old, but a determined character as young girls so often are.

‘So you are protecting her too?’

‘A theatre in the family is a start.’

‘And who is going to manage this theatre until Lizzie is old enough to take it on?’ For a moment he had a serious worry that Letty might have cast him for this part also.

‘I shall get a professional, of course,’ she said loftily. ‘There are plenty.’

The district had once been slummy, a fine place for murder, but was becoming smarter and more fashionable by the day, as the old houses were restored by prudent City gentlemen with an eye on property values. It was so close to the financial heartlands. You could walk to the Bank of England and the Mansion House if your Porsche was in trouble, and you had the energy. Or jog or cycle, that was even smarter.

Coffin moved in as soon as his apartment was ready, even before the plaster was dry, he was desperate for somewhere to live close to his new department. As Letty had known. Cunning creature, he thought, used to being manipulated by her and by his niece.

There were to be three apartments. One in the church tower, one in the old vestry, and a third in a side chapel dedicated to St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. The rest of the church would be turned into the theatre. All the apartments were small but luxurious and on one floor, with the exception of Coffin’s which was on three. He had the tower to himself. Of the other two flats one was complete but empty, and the third still finishing.

The theatre was as yet still a plan on the architect’s drawing-board, but the Theatre Workshop, which was an easier project since it was in the former Church Hall, donated by parishioners in the year of the Great Exhibition of 1851, was about to light up. John Coffin was beginning to know the faces of the actors. The woman producer he already knew, had known her for years, but at the moment the game she was playing was not to know him. Stella Pinero, a talented and ambitious actress. This was her first effort at producing.

He was a tall, slender man with broad shoulders and more muscle than appeared. Bright blue eyes, a lightly tanned skin and a neatly greying head of hair, made him better-looking now than he had been in youth. Attractive he had always been.

He was aware that he was thinner than he had been, thinner than he should be perhaps. He had been slow to recover from a stab wound accompanied by great loss of blood, the culmination of an earlier case. He was finding too that promotion, success, could be as gruelling as failure and as time-consuming.

He had changed home several times in the last decade; he hoped this was the last move. He liked where he was now, about the best place he had ever had, greatly to his taste. Letty had done him a good turn. From his top window he could see the Tower of London, the glint of sun on the dome of St Paul’s, and smell the River Thames when the wind was right. He liked to be near the river, it seemed his natural companion.

He had recently received great promotion. The Development Board had created a new force to police the newly revived area of Docklands, Thameswater, known as the Second City. His Force was independent of the Met and the City of London police. He was its Head. A reward for good work in a difficult South London district.

He took another look out of the window. What was going on down there in the street? The window was narrow, so he had to incline his head at an angle to see. The group had swelled by one member who looked like a street cleaner. He was waving his arms. Nothing to do with me, he seemed to be saying.

John Coffin turned back into his sitting-room. He chose to have his main living-room up here on the third floor where the light was better and he could look across the London roofs and tree-tops. He always liked to be high. Something psychological, no doubt, which he could not account for at the moment but going back into his past. Underneath him on the floor below was his kitchen and bathroom. He slept on what might be called the ground floor but it had a subterranean feel to it because of the thickness of the walls and the narrow windows through which not much sunlight filtered through. The local preservation society had not allowed any tinkering with the windows in the tower, but a great curve of glass by which his sitting-room was lit had been allowed on the roof behind the crenellations. Both the architect and the builder who had worked on it were local men who had known the church all their lives and respected it. Letty had chosen them with skill, knowing what she wanted and trusting them to get it for her.

When Ted Lupus, who was the builder (Edward Lupus, Builder, Pavlov Street, Leathergate, London), found his estimates had been accepted and he had a chance to meet Lætitia Bingham, he said to his wife: ‘It’s the chance of a lifetime, but she might be the death of me.’ He had accurately assessed a certain ruthlessness in Mrs Bingham.

Inside all had been fitted out with ease and elegance by Lætitia, who demanded the highest quality in everything.

‘You’ve got to start living up to your position,’ she had said to her brother. ‘No more slumming around. You are important, successful, due for a knighthood, accept it.’

He had never quite believed in his own success. It had crept up on him unannounced, unexpected. Was it enjoyable? Was it totally believable? Would it last?

But would it matter? He had kept his old friends, had built something into his life that was indestructible.

Anyway, here he was and Letty had had her way. She had employed a top interior decorator who had allowed him to keep his pictures, his books and the few handmade oriental carpets he had bought for another home in what now felt like another life. But even for these household treasures he had had to fight.

‘I paid a lot of money for that one.’ He had pointed to a Persian rug of delicate blues and golds.

The decorator had replied that nothing made in recent decades had real value. Only antique rugs counted.

Coffin fell back on his last defence. ‘I like it.’ It would be an antique one day, wouldn’t it? He kept his rugs.

One of the disadvantages of climbing up the professional ladder was that he was now an organization man, running what was, in effect, a medium-sized business employing thousands of people. He was an executive and an administrator and no longer a detective.

True, his business was still crime.

In the area for which he was now Head Officer, with the provisional title of Chief Commander (a borrowing from the Met, as he was uneasily aware), the old boroughs of Spinnergate, Leathergate, Swinehouse and Easthythe joined together to form a new unit, the crimes were what they had always been through the centuries: mugging, breaking and entering, armed robbery and murder.

They did a good line in murder, showing sometimes an imaginative turn that might not have been expected of them. A Black Museum, which had resisted all attempts in the past from Met to take it over, was full of relics of their crimes in the past. Alarming relics sometimes, life had never been gentle around here.

Because it had never been a law-abiding area and nothing was going to change that, his own apartment had full electronic anti-burglar devices, but would certainly be entered one day. He had no illusions: everything could be beaten, he might be better off with a dog. But on the other hand, the church had never been vandalized and the theatre workshop seemed to be attracting local affection. His hard-bitten flock seemed proud of it.

They were even proud of having their own separate law force, rating it, so it seemed, as a mark of their achievement. They were proud of him, John Coffin. He was marked as he passed in the street on his way home, had a drink in a pub, or stopped for a newspaper.

‘Can I touch you, guv, for luck?’ Mimsie Marker. Mimsie had been selling newspapers on the corner by the Spinnergate Tube station for as long as anyone could remember. She wore a man’s thick tweed jacket over layers of different skirts at all seasons of the year, only in summer did she vary her outfit with a flowered boater. In winter it was a man’s cap. She was a well-known figure who had been photographed by a celebrated Royal photographer and appeared in Vogue as ‘Deprived Old Age’, and been on the cover of Time as ‘a bit of Old London’. People who knew her said that so far from being deprived she kept a sock of gold in her bed with her. Krugerrands and Edward VII gold sovereigns were said to be her favoured investment.

‘I love you, sir.’ She peered up at him, her tanned, wrinkled but roguish face enjoying every minute of his embarrassment. He did not reply, did not believe it. ‘I could really fancy you, sir.’

Her face, pressed against his arm, was younger than he had thought. Passion might still run there. He did not answer. Dignity forbade it.

‘A lovely picture of you, sir, in last night’s Standard. You in the Black Museum. You’ve got a boot of my grandad’s in there. He was topped for killing a police constable and he left his boot behind in a sewer.’

Was she lying or telling a tale? The maddening thing was that he remembered seeing a man’s boot in the glass case.

There was a problem about the Black Museum, which was why he had paid a visit. Not the sort of problem that the head of a force was usually bothered with, but there was a special reason in this case: he was an old friend of the curator. The problem was his old friend. Tom Cowley was as protective of the museum as a wild cat of her kittens and the museum as such was due to be closed down and merged with the much bigger one in the City Force. The Met and the City Force had always eyed it jealously.

Did Mimsie know all this and was this why she had mentioned the Black Museum? She was reputed to know all the gossip of the place better than anyone else. No story that passed through Mimsie’s hands lost in the telling, either.

He was almost sure Mimsie was one of the women down there in the gutter. He recognized the hat. Another reason for not going down.

The telephone rang on the bracket by the fireplace. He admired his sister’s architect for the skill with which a fireplace had been inserted and the interior decorator for the cunning with which she had frustrated him. It was not a real fire laid there, never would be a real fire, so in a way the architect had wasted his time, but it looked like a real fire with logs, coal and even ash which you could sprinkle down yourself as you so desired. Such luxury.

The telephone continued to ring. Since he was unlisted, only a few people had his number, none of whom he wished to speak to at the moment.

It was still early evening, he wanted a quiet night, reading, and then perhaps going out to the little Indian restaurant round the corner to eat curry. He did not really like Indian food, it gave him indigestion, but he had not yet mastered the smart microwave double oven that Letty had installed in the wall of his kitchen.

‘I am easily defeated by machines,’ he said to himself, with some complacency.

The telephone was still ringing. He would answer it, of course. He always did, he was constitutionally incapable of ignoring it. A mixture of curiosity and anxiety always got him to the ’phone. It was a character mix which had probably turned him into a detective in the first place. That, and the fact that at the time he simply hadn’t known what else to do.

He reached out for the telephone.

‘Hello, John dear.’ It was his sister Letty and she only called him dear when she wanted something. For a long time he had thought himself alone in the world, give or take a wife or two, then he had discovered his half-sister Lætitia, and together they had located yet another sibling, a brother younger than both of them who lived in Scotland.

‘Letty?’

‘It’s about William.’ William was the half-brother from Scotland, he was a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, with an office in George Street and house in Morningside. It was remarkable how all three of them, although otherwise dissimilar, were drawn to the law. Must be something in the blood. And since the parent they had in common was their mother, it had to be her blood. Not quite what one would have expected from that fertile, elusive lady who had disappeared from all three lives, leaving them behind like unwanted luggage.

‘He wants to come and visit you.’

‘Ah.’ Don’t agree or disagree, just hang in the air, always safer with Letty.

‘Needs to, he says.’

‘He’s not in trouble, is he?’ demanded Coffin suspiciously.

‘If he was he could deal with it himself, he is a lawyer, remember. Anyway, the legal system in Scotland is different from the legal system in England. He would not come to you.’

Letty paused. ‘I think it is a family matter.’

‘Don’t tell me that there is yet another of us. That we are four!’

‘No.’ Letty dismissed this idea. ‘I get the impression,’ she went on cautiously, ‘that it is about our mother.’

‘He must know as much as I do, more probably. Anyway, she’s been dead for years.’

‘Has she?’

‘I’m not young,’ parried Coffin. ‘I was her eldest child. If she was alive now she’d be very old indeed.’

‘Have you ever seen her grave?’

‘No, she died abroad.’ His aunt who had brought him up had told him so. She had told him a lot of other things too, not all of which had been true.

‘Or her death certificate?’

‘No.’

‘Then we have to assume our mother may still be alive.’

Strange how, while energetically if spasmodically pursuing a search for his lost sister and brother, he had accepted without question his mother’s death. Didn’t want to think about it, probably. He still thought she must be dead, though.

‘I suppose I’ll have to see him then, if that’s what he wants.’ He hadn’t taken to William on their one meeting in Scotland a few years since. Letty he loved, but not William. A prim, prissy fellow. ‘He’s taken his time raising the question, though.’

‘We don’t know what has come to light.’

Letty could be difficult too, elusive, hard to pin down in argument, of which they had plenty. She probably had the best brain of all three of them.

‘I don’t think William likes me very much.’ For that matter, he wasn’t much drawn to brother William himself.

‘Oh I don’t believe that’s true.’

‘I don’t think he likes anyone very much. I think he’s ashamed of having a policeman for a brother.’

‘That’s just his Edinburgh manner.’

‘Maybe. I hope he knows what he’s getting into.’ He himself had been so enthusiastic about seeking out his sister once he had known she existed. He had gone to evening classes on genealogy and read books called How to Trace Your Family Tree. In the end, Lætitia and he had found each other almost by accident.

And then gone on to flush out William. These affairs snowballed. Once you’d started, you couldn’t stop it.

‘The one thing you can be sure of about an Edinburgh lawyer,’ said Lætitia, ‘is that they know what they are getting into.’

‘I’ll do what I can. When is he coming?’

‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Lætitia.

‘Letty, where is your husband?’

‘In New York. He has a conference there. I might be joining him for a month or two. But of course, I don’t want Lizzie to drop out of school.’

‘She’s only six.’ He wondered, as he had often lately, if she was in the process of offloading her current husband.

‘It’s a bad habit to get into.’ Lætitia was firm. ‘Especially if the child is clever. Lizzie is outstanding.’

Naturally, thought Lizzie’s uncle. Poor little beast, she hasn’t got a chance. She’s got to be outstanding. On the other hand, he had to admit that Lizzie did have the appearance of a child who could handle her mother.

‘Oh, John, the second flat, the one beneath you, is let.’

He was instantly on the alert. This could be important news. A neighbour was an important factor in this kind of set-up.

‘Yes, Stella Pinero is taking it. Lovely person, isn’t she?’ There was a pause. ‘You like her, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes.’ Loved her once. Forgot her. Loved her again. Forgot her. No, never forgotten.

They needn’t meet much. Probably would not. And after all, it made sense for her to live on the job. He had seen her coming and going, but she had apparently not noticed him. Not that she would stay with the Theatre Workshop for long, Stella always moved on, as who should know better than he did.

While he was thinking, Lætitia had finished talking and rung off. He had the feeling he was left alone in the room with Stella. Darling Stella.

She had put on a bit of weight lately, that was why she was pretending not to see him.

The telephone rang again. This time it was Tom Cowley, the gruff voice was unmistakable. Coffin had heard it frequently as the battle to preserve the Black Museum hotted up. For some time now, Tom, canny about publicity, had been running Open Days for local groups. School parties (if they wished to come and a surprising number did), women’s associations, and other bodies like the Rotarians and the Freemasons. Not to mention the press, whom Tom provided with a good strong drink paid for by funds he seemed able to tap at will. Like a lot of old policemen, Tom usually knew where to go for money.

There was a strong, if unofficial, linking between all these groups, a kind of seepage of information. Thus the Chairwoman of the Townswomen’s Guild was married to one of the local journalists, Ron Peters, a keen supporter of Tom and the Black Museum. Mrs Peters was a friend of Mrs Lupus, the deputy head of St Luke’s Comprehensive, who on the advice of her friend (‘It’s educational in the best way, Katherine, take the kids, that’s my advice’), had brought two parties to view the museum and who was married to a Rotarian who was also the builder who had constructed the flats where Coffin now lived. This couple in turn were friends of the Lord Mayor of the new Dockland City, Albert Fraser, and his young, appealingly silly wife, Agnes. And all three couples knew, although they had never spoken to, Amelia Marr who ran the small but discreet bawdy house in Petty Poland Street. Amelia had come in on her own, speaking to no one but taking it all in. Mimsie Marker, of course, knew everyone and spoke to and of them with freedom and as it suited her. She liked Tom Cowley. He was a ‘real man’.

‘Hello, you there?’ He never stood on ceremony with his old friend, not in private, anyway. ‘About tomorrow. Now I’ve been thinking: two Frenchmen, a Swede and a German, that’s a bit international for me. Do you think they speak English?’

A group of high-ranking foreign policemen were on a visit to London and the new area of Thameswater was on their visiting list. The Black Museum in Thameswater was to be inspected and a buffet lunch would be served. Not the place one might choose for a luncheon, but the truth was that Coffin’s new area was short of buildings. Architecturally speaking, he was living from hand to mouth. Some splendid new buildings were going up on a cleared area of dockland but would not be complete until next year.

‘Sure to,’ said Coffin. He did not think that Tom was as unsophisticated as he pretended to be, but he had never been quite sure. It was a good act.

‘Of course, I won’t talk to them unless I have to.’ And possibly not even then.

‘So what is it, Tom?’

‘We’re putting on a good spread. Drinks. They won’t go short on them.’

‘I knew I could trust you there, Tom.’

‘These Krauts like a drink.’ He liked one himself. ‘Not convenient to me as it happens. I had been going to watch the West Indians at the Oval.’

‘You can go later, Tom.’

‘It’s a one-day match.’

‘I thought you called those an abomination and a spoiler of good cricket.’

‘I did, but I should still have enjoyed it,’ said Tom with perverse self-satisfaction.

‘Are you all right, Tom?’

‘Have felt better. But I’m getting a few days’ leave when this bash is over. Taking the wife to Turkey for a week.’ But he had something else to say. ‘If we go, that is.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t like leaving this place.’

‘It won’t run away.’ Nor get closed down while you are away. Sometimes Tom reduced you to infantile rejoinders.

‘Don’t like leaving it unguarded. Supposing we lost something.’

Old man Marker’s boot, perhaps?

‘Not likely. Besides, you’ve got an assistant.’

‘Worse than useless, she is. Not got her mind on the job.’ Tom was not an admirer of career women, especially in an outfit he regarded as peculiarly meant for men. It was like mining, wasn’t it? Women just didn’t have the muscle, and when there was any trouble you’d want to push them behind you, wouldn’t you? ‘I’m not saying we’ve had stuff lost so far, because we haven’t, but things have got moved around, out of place. If I heard someone had been in here illegally I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘Don’t tell me it’s haunted, Tom.’

Tom ignored this pleasantry. ‘Be a crime to let this place go.’ It was said without joking.

‘It’s not going,’ said John Coffin patiently. ‘Not exactly. It’s going to join up with the Met museum. All the contents will be preserved and displayed in a fine set of rooms. You ought to be pleased.’

But a cosy little niche that Tom Cowley enjoyed filling would be gone. Not an ambitious man, he had finally slotted himself into just the position he enjoyed in the Black Museum, where he had ruled as undisputed king. Affable and informative to all the visitors, helpful to the young constables who came in as his assistants as part of their job experience before moving on, and a careful custodian of his exhibits. The ropes, the knives, the cudgels, the assortment of guns, the very bloodstained rags of some victims were displayed by him with the reverence accorded to the remains of a Tutankhamen or a holy shroud. He had developed a manner somewhere between that of a postmaster and a librarian, with the policeman only showing when his authority was threatened. It was showing now.

‘Well,’ he said. No more, but Coffin knew what he meant.

Some time ago he had saved John Coffin’s life by providing pints of the special type of blood Coffin had needed. Just like John Coffin, his friends said, to need blood only another copper could provide. Cowley was not a man to call in a debt but the fact was there in the background. He was owed something.

‘I think the matter is settled, Tom.’ The truth was that the whole building, once the main station house for one of the largest boroughs in his new unit, the old Leathergate, was due to be demolished to make way for a new structure. The museum could have been moved to new premises, but there was a strong plea for centralization and economy.

‘It’s territory, John, you shouldn’t give away territory. Thameswater ought to have its own museum.’

He had a point there and Coffin acknowledged it, but he had other things to fight for; his new authority had to establish its identity in face of rivalry, envy, and indifference. Perhaps they should keep their own museum. Thameswater stood for the future, but it couldn’t ignore its past. A past gave you another dimension, a kind of legitimacy. And this area had always had a strong character, brawling, lively and independent.

Perhaps Tom Cowley had instinctively hit upon a truth.

‘I’ll see you at the reception, Tom.’

He put the telephone down, conscious that he had not handled the conversation well, and that one more old friend would go about saying John Coffin’s changed, promotion’s done him no good. There were a lot of other Toms in his life, men he’d started out with, served with and now left far behind.

Promotion always did change you, there was no way round it. You were changed, those around you changed towards you.

His doorbell sounded. One long commanding peal. The front door was two winding flights down; even if you hurried it took time. The bell sounded again.

‘All right, I’m coming.’

Outside was a small, sturdy boy, carrying in his arms what looked like a bronzed urn. Behind him was Mimsie, he had been right about the hat, another woman, by appearance a blood relation to Mimsie Marker, and the street sweeper, always called Alf, surname unknown. The three adults were leaving the talking to the boy.

‘We brought this to you, sir.’

‘You did? Why?’ Coffin was on his guard, it was wiser so with lads, some of whom you could trust and some of whom you couldn’t. Mimsie in the background was a kind of credential, she was far too streetwise to come near anything that might mean trouble. He thought the boy was about ten, with an alert, lively face, which might have been called cheeky once, but that expression was not so much used now. ‘What is it?’

‘Can I put it down, sir? It’s heavy.’

‘Not till you’ve told me what it is?’

‘It’s a burial urn, sir.’ The boy’s voice was serious. ‘It’s got the ashes of a dead man in it.’ He did put it down, thus demonstrating an independence of spirit which Coffin was to get to know.

‘Or woman,’ said Mimsie from the background.

‘Or woman. And we found it in the gutter. But it says St Luke’s Church, so we brought it to you.’

The urn which was of a fair size, bigger than such urns usually are, was certainly made of metal even if not of bronze. It looked more like a garden urn that had been adapted for this purpose.

But on it was a printed label: Black and Binder, Funeral Parlour. On the label was a typed address: St Luke’s Church.

‘What was it doing in the gutter?’

‘I don’t know, sir, I just found it. I found it first, and then these ladies and gentlemen came along and we discussed what to do. Then we thought we’d better bring it to you.’

A corporate decision, eh? ‘It feels too heavy to be just ashes.’ Too big, he thought.

The urn was closed by a lid with a small knob on top. Watched by the three, he tried to raise it. The lid gave easily. He lifted it up, casting aside prudence which suggested that it could be a bomb.

Then he dropped the top back quickly.

‘No, not ashes,’ he said.

Inside was a head. He saw the matted hair, the dull open eyes, the stained, blotched skin, and felt the whiff of decay. He could not tell if he was looking at the head of a man or a woman.

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