A Coffin for Charley by Gwendoline Butler Read Free Book Online Page A

Coffin, but they had their ways of showing scepticism. She wasn’t sure, indeed, how much even her husband had believed her.
    He must be a secret man, but someone somewhere knew him and was protecting him. That was what they always said, wasn’t it? But perhaps no one knew this man’s face?
    I am having a hard time. I am frightened, she told herself. And that is a fact. My fear is a fact.
    So she looked about her as she went out and kept an eye on the street. She spent hours at a rehearsal of a TV series in which she was involved, she visited her agent’s office and signed a contract, she kept an appointment with her hairdresser in Beaumont Place.
    â€˜You’re fidgety, love,’ said her hairdresser. He had known her for years, and had placed a signed photograph of her on the wall above the washbasin. He had other stage ladies there too. ‘Keep your head still or I can’t get the cut right.’
    â€˜Sorry, Kenny.’ Stella took a deep breath. ‘Bit on edge.’
    â€˜I can tell … Why not go downstairs and get some massage? Saw you on TV last night. You were lovely.’
    â€˜Oh, good.’ He was cheering her up deliberately and she knew it, but it was his pastoral skills as well as his brilliance as a cutter that kept his shop in Knightsbridge in the top league of hairdressers.
    Kenny watched her walk away (without having gone downstairs to his new and expensive health and fitness salon for a soothing massage of the neck and back). He watched her passage past the hatter’s window display and the jeweller’s boutique and the little couture house where royalty shopped, all with their flowered window-boxes and bright front doors, and shook his head. He had known her for years. That woman’s worried.
    Stella turned round to see him looking, she gave a wave, and stepped into a taxi.
    â€˜Spinnergate,’ she said. ‘And don’t tell me it’s too far.’
    One of the disadvantages of living in the Second City was that taxi-drivers complained about taking you there. Not safe, they said, or no fares back.
    But this one gave her a grin. ‘Lady, for you, anything.’ He leaned out of the window. ‘Saw you in Candida. Great acting.’
    She had recently done a back to back couple of productions of Candida and A Doll’s House, first on TV and then taking them to St Luke’s Theatre on a wave of public interest to boost audiences. It had worked.
    â€˜My wife liked it too,’ he shouted as he drove away.
    Well, that’s two of them that like me, thought Stella. Then she went home for a meeting with Letty Bingham and the rest of the committee which was setting up the Drama School, they would be discussing the constitution and the difficult matter of charitable status.
    And on the mat outside her door was the cat and the cat was sitting in a wreath of white roses.
    So he admires me this observer? And sends me white roses? Stella said to herself. By God, I’ll get him. I don’t have to be passive, I’ll go after him myself.
    Inevitably by this time the story that Marianna Mannershad thought she was being watched had gone the rounds and Stella was told about it by Mimsie Marker as she bought a paper from the stall by the Tube station and by the chemist when she bought some aspirin. (And if ever a woman needed it, I do.)
    She had not heard about Annie Briggs’s similar fears. She had hardly any knowledge of the Creeley family.
    Murder is always noticed locally. People come to stare at the home of the victim, some take photographs. The media is always there, although they melt away as a new story breaks. The police take their time in measuring, photographing, and taking samples for forensic investigation.
    The body of the victim seems forgotten.
    Not in this case, however, since she had a beautiful and much photographed body and that body had been loved by a well-known MP.
    Used, said the local feminist organization,