Cracking Open a Coffin

GWENDOLINE BUTLER

Cracking Open a Coffin

COPYRIGHT

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

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992

Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1992

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006472919

Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007545490

Version: 2014–07–07

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

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

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Letter to John Coffin from Professor Lessingham, The Institute of Mental Health, Bury Hill.

‘I am coming to the opinion that there are certain types of killers who might be called periodic serial killers in as much as they will only kill when the victim offers exactly what is required. So there may be long gaps in the cycle.

‘In these cases there is a symbiotic relationship between killer and victim: they move towards each other.

‘The rules as to the victim, manner of killing, disposal of the body have to be kept … But even the most dedicated of serial killers will be frustrated by circumstances, something the killer did not take into account, or could not control. There will always be cases out of pattern, that do not conform.’

CHAPTER 1

A day in early autumn

One day in early autumn the neighbourhood newspaper, Second City News, carried a special supplement on the university, then celebrating its fifth birthday and welcoming that year’s intake of students. As well as a large photograph of the head of the university, Sir Thomas Blackhall, there was a page of photographs in colour of some of the students.

Students at tutorials, seen in a booklined room, are neatly posed around their tutor. One of them is reading an essay, the others listen.

Students at lectures, observing the lecturer write an equation on a large board spread across the wall behind him. He does it with some electronic device that he does not understand because he would prefer old-fashioned chalk. Once he failed, unknowingly, to use it correctly, so that nothing appeared on the board, and then, absent-mindedly back in the days of chalk, he turned round and wiped what wasn’t there clean away with the back of his sleeve. This brought down the house.

Students in the library, heads bent over their books. Because this is not Oxford (where the habit was abandoned years ago) and because the university is so young, it is the fancy here for all the students to wear shortish academic gowns.

Students at parties, at their summer ball. A crowded scene with many outsiders, among whom John Coffin might have recognized one of his own officers if he had looked more closely. Later, he was to regret this. The girls wear long dresses and the lads wear black ties and dinner jackets. There is even a couple where the girl wears what looks like a Christian LaCroix crinoline and the boy wears tails.

A golden pair, thinks John Coffin, head of the Second City Police, and he remembers his own youth was so far from golden. A line underneath says: Amy and Martin. Well, good luck Amy and Martin, he thinks.

Tutorials, academic gowns, formal evening clothes, the new university is building its traditions. Unfortunately, it looks as if murder might be one of them.

John Coffin took the Second City News regularly and it happened that he had seen this photograph while sitting in the sun by the river. Not far from where he lived in his home in an old church was a small park which overlooked the Thames. It was an ancient, rundown little park, all that remained of the grounds of a mediæval bishop’s palace. A stretch of old stone walling, probably all that was left of the old place, ran along the river for a few yards and this was where Coffin sat.

In the first place he liked the wall, in the crevices of which yellow and white weeds flowered in the autumn, and secondly there was a smell to it that reminded him of his childhood.

It was communicating something to him, that smell. Opening up a window through which he could peer at the past.

He had grown up by the river. This river, just as dirty and travelworn by the centuries, but winding through a different part of London. South, where the river takes a deep curve and looks up to the hills of Kent.

It had not been a happy childhood. More or less orphaned (although mother, as it turned out, was still alive but missing), brought up first by a grandmother and an aunt, and then by the aunt alone, and finally fostered out to one family after another.

There were a lot of memories of that childhood that were thrashing around in his mind, some he was busily engaged in repressing but others were getting through.

He remembered sitting by the river, aged ten. He was fishing with a bit of string, a hook, and a tin can for the fish. But inside he was dreaming of himself in an open motorcar with a princess beside him. She was faceless but definitely royal.

The beginning of sex, he supposed. Late, by current standards.

Well, he eventually got the motorcar, although not the bright red open speedster of his dream, but never the princess. Although he had had several shots at it.

And that brought him back to Stella. Darling, beloved, infuriating Stella to whom he had never been totally faithful nor totally unfaithful either.

Which was where you had to think about it, because Stella was angry with him. She had opened her eyes wide and said: ‘To hell with you.’

They hadn’t met for a few days now. They would meet again and things would be patched up, neither was prepared for a decisive break.

There was another aspect to the problem of Stella, and he had a letter in his pocket, highly personal and very unwelcome, and one which caused him fury but which would have to be addressed.

And all the time he was thinking about Stella and the golden pair of students, he was conscious of dry bones moving at the back of his mind. So that of all the people presently concerned with the murders, he was the least surprised.

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