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

used and abused and finally sacrificed. This group of women who had a club room in Spinnergate admired Stella Pinero, deplored her marriage to John Coffin (A policeman, just think! She was better free!) and disliked Job Titus, MP. They were pretty libertarian, this group of Feather Street ladies, and did not advocate sexual austerity for men, women or beasts; they liked sex themselves, they just hated Titus’s way of going about it. They thought he was a coarse fellow.
    Coffin was soon made aware that the murder of Marianna Manners was not going to be an easy one to handle. The appearance of Job Titus on various TV news flashes, of Job Titus as he left his flat to go to the House of Commons or walked his dog in the park, reminded him of this even if he had felt like forgetting. Apart from anything else, Titus was demanding police protection from the harassment of the media while issuing threats of legal action if his name was mentioned as a suspect.
    Because of the sensitivity of the case, Coffin kept himself informed of all that went on in the Murder Room which had been set up in a church hall in Swinehouse on theborder of Spinnergate, close to where she had lived and been murdered in the block of flats in Alexandra Wharf, near to Napier Street where Annie Briggs lived.
    There had been a good many changes in the Serious Crime Section in the last year or so as Coffin had worked through his senior police officers and weeded out the weaker members of the team by means of early retirement, sideways promotion, and in one case by death. The unit was now smaller but more efficient.
    Archie Young headed all important cases, and had taken personal charge of this one. It was important for Young as well as John Coffin, he was a very ambitious man. His wife, Alison, knew this trait and used her influence on him to moderate an open show of it. She was cleverer than he was and knew that ambition had to be masked. She valued her friendship with Stella Pinero which both of them used to communicate worries about their husbands and to put a brake on the men when it seemed wise. Both of them were convinced that without their efforts their spouses would be dead of overwork.
    â€˜She was strangled and stifled but there was no rape, no semen traces, nothing like that … All the same, the pathologist thinks there might have been some sexual satisfaction involved.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜He thinks the killer took his time about it, that’s all. Getting some kicks.’
    â€˜How does he know? About the going slow?’ It was not a picture he was going to cherish.
    â€˜I don’t know. Something to do with the bruising, the flow of blood. Or perhaps he’s just guessing. Percy’s good at guessing.’ Professor Percy Peters had worked with them, on and off, for some years now. They knew him well enough to value his intuitions. He had been at it so long that he seemed to have developed a sympathetic link with both killer and victim.
    It was that or black magic, Young said, and he was a rationalist by long habit. Inside himself, he admitted that Percy could make his flesh creep.
    â€˜Been turning up some things about her lifestyle. She was a good dancer and an actress as well, apparently they all have to do everything now, even a bit of singing. She was unemployed a lot.’
    â€˜Aren’t they all?’ Coffin had been well schooled in the politics of The Profession by his wife.
    â€˜She took what work she could get.’ He paused. ‘Did a stint at Karnival in Ladd’s Alley.’
    Coffin raised an eyebrow.
    â€˜Yes, the transvestite club. No evidence that she was into that, for her it was work. Or probably.’
    He said probably because, unlike Percy Peters, he was no mind-reader and how could you know what went on inside people? Maybe Marianna had found it agreeable to dress up as a man. She was a tall, muscular girl and would have looked the part.
    Karnival was a club for those who