Coffin for Charley by Butler Gwendoline

Author:Butler, Gwendoline
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Still the river runs backwards

Damn Letty, she was a complication he could have done without. She had come into his life suddenly, when he had not known she had existed, bringing with her news of his mother, and now she had gone and apparently taken a large sum of money with her.

That looked like panic, which was not something Letty suffered from as a rule.

He remembered how she had claimed that the man watching Stella might really be there for her. And hadn’t her daughter come into it somewhere?

His skin prickled. Surely Letty could not be part of this case in any way?

What did he really know about Letty? Except that she was good with money. Too good, as it now seemed. He had liked her, admired her, trusted her. That looked like a mistake now.

And then the alarming, selfish, frightening thought: she could get me into trouble. Letty could get me into big trouble. If there had been any financial misdealings in money or property, the dirt could rub off on him.

For that matter, what did he know about Stella, except he loved her passionately and physically and that did cloud the mind. Then he rejected doubts about Stella with fury. She’s honest, is Stella, perhaps more honest than I am. There were gaps in her life he knew nothing about, but weren’t there always? You had to trust.

If I don’t trust Stella I am nothing.

Towards the end of the case, talking it over with Archie Young, Coffin said that he had realized there were three centres for this crime.

Not centres which created the murders, or where they were done, but which made sense of them. Centres which drew together strands, connected them.

The office of Alex C. Edwards in Britannia Buildings, the unloved block of local government offices, was one; the small office of the Tashworth Detective Agency, TASH, T. Ashworth, Prop., was another.

And, as Stella had alerted him, the Karnival Club. This was the third.

He had been to Tash once, soon after coming into his command here, when it had been run by the elderly man whom he took to be the father or uncle of Tom Ashworth. The set of rooms beside a bookmaker’s shop in Spinnergate had struck him as being like the sort of place where you waited for a taxi. There was even the same smell of long dead cigarette smoke.

He had never been to Alex’s office but he had seen enough similar places in his career to know that it would be clean, cheaply furnished, and with a dead pot plant next to the coffee machine.

The Karnival changed its décor rarely and was best seen in artificial light, but oddly enough, of the three centres, he found it the most friendly.

These centres had, as he said, the scent of Charley in them: you could smell him there.

It was a rough thought.

Response to scent, the sense of smell, is a curious thing. Exactly what happens inside the brain when you smell something? Seeing

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