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