Gwendoline Butler

Coffin’s Ghost


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      GWENDOLINE BUTLER

      

      Coffin’s Ghost

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      Harper

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1999

      Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1999

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

      Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

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

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780006513612

      Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 9780007553914 Version: 2016–12–19

      I wish to record my thanks to Dr Barker, Dr Fink, and John Kennedy Melling for the help given me with this book.

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Prologue

       Prelude

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Author’s Note

       Also by the Author

       About the Publisher

       Prologue

      A brief Calendar of the life and career of John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Second City of London Police.

      John Coffin is a Londoner by birth, his father is unknown and his mother was a difficult lady of many careers and different lives who abandoned him in infancy to be looked after by a woman who may have been a relative of his father and who seems to have acted as his mother’s dresser when she was on the stage. He kept in touch with this lady, whom he called Mother, lodged with her in his early career and looked after her until she died.

      After serving briefly in the army, he joined the Metropolitan Police, soon transferring to the plain-clothes branch as a detective.

      He became a sergeant and was very quickly promoted to inspector a year later. Ten years later, he was a superintendent and then chief superintendent.

      There was a bad patch in his career about which he is reluctant to talk. His difficult family background has complicated his life and possibly accounts for an unhappy period when, as he admits, his career went down a black hole. His first marriage split apart at this time and his only child died.

      From this dark period he was resurrected by a spell in a secret, dangerous undercover operation about which even now not much is known. But the esteem he won then was recognized when the Second City of London was being formed and he became Chief Commander of its Police Force. He has married again, an old love, Stella Pinero, who is herself a very successful actress. He has also discovered two siblings, a much younger sister and brother.