Coffin on the Water by Gwendoline Butler

Author:Gwendoline Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The Neck of the Murderer

What difference did the shoe make? After all his hunting, all his triumph of discovery, nothing much seemed to follow the discovery of the shoe.

John Coffin handed it over and saw no more of it.

Things were going on as a result, no doubt, efforts were being made to trace the provenance of the shoe, but no one told him with what result.

Inside himself he nourished the conviction that he, of all the people interesting themselves in the case, was the most aware of the truth. Hard to know why, since in many ways he was pushed to the side by the men from the Yard, was young and junior in any case. Perhaps it was that as he trudged around Greenwich Wick and Greenwich Hythe he felt intuitively closer to the girl and how she had lived, hence to her killing.

Because in her living was death, no doubt of that.

But his intuition was no logic, it was more like a woody outgrowth to his own character.

Several days passed without much action in them, or not much anyone told him about. He did hear, through the usual channels, that the tiny hand found had been identified as that of an adult chimpanzee, probably from the bombed-out pet shop and private zoo in Greenwich Hythe. The search for the Shepherd child ground to a halt. Tom Banbury had a day off sick, then returned to work.

On the third evening, not having seen Chris or Alex or even Mrs Lorimer (‘Mr Coffin, your ration-book, please?’), and with the unfair sense of having been abandoned by all, he washed and changed.

He was going to see Stella Pinero. It was his turn. He had stayed away to give Alex and Chris their turn, which was vanity on his part since he had no reason to believe that Stella perferred him to them. So deep inside himself there had to be another reason, which was probably cowardice. You could fear Stella for what she could do to you.

He bought her some roses at the florist’s in the arcade near the theatre. He was the last customer, surprised to find it still open.

Unusual, the florist told him, he was lucky, but there had been a large order to work on.

‘A wedding?’ Coffin asked.

‘No. A funeral. Local butcher’s widow. Lovely lady.’

‘Large family, I suppose?’ Coffin could see the huge pile of wreaths grouped at the back of the shop. One spelt her name in carnations, Alice, it said in red on white.

‘Lots of friends. Don’t think they had any children. Believe they adopted one.’

One wreath was in the form of two initials side by side.

A. C, it said.

Clarke? Clarke, family butcher?

‘Stella?’ He knocked on her dressing-room door, the bunch of flowers in his hand, and a buttonhole. ‘I’m a stage door Johnnie come to call.’

Stella Pinero had cleaned her face of make-up and brushed her hair, but she still wore her wrapper, with her street dress swinging on the hanger by her side. It was a new dress, underneath were a pair of new white shoes.

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