Coffin on Murder Street
When a small boy disappears from the notorious Regina Street in the Second City of London, Chief Commander John Coffin takes on the case. From one of the most universally praised English mystery authors.Regina Street, nicknamed Murder Street, has known more than its fair share of murders and violent deaths – and one inhabitant predicts that worse is yet to come. The local police dismiss him as an eccentric, but then a small boy disappears.Chief Commander John Coffin takes on the case, and discovers that the boy’s mother, a young actress, is something of an enigma herself. And soon the story behind the boy's disappearance unfolds into a history of jealousy and love.
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GWENDOLINE BUTLER
Coffin on Murder Street
HarperCollinsPublishers,
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1991
Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1990
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.
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Source ISBN: 9780006471851
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN 9780007544684
Version: 2014–07–02
Contents
‘In the real world, Proust would have killed Albertine.’
Gus Hamilton, speaking of the new play written about Marcel Proust.
March 5
John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Police Force in the newly created Second City of London, made up of the old boroughs of Spinnergate, Leathergate, Swinehouse and East Hythe, sat in the window-seat of his living-room in St Luke’s Mansions; he was preparing the text of his mad mother’s diary for publication. The arrival of this diary had been one of the greatest shocks of his adult life. He had been brought up, fatherless and motherless, by an aunt and a grandmother who had fostered the notion that his parents were dead. It was later in his life that he discovered that his mother had not died when he was a child but had gone on to have numerous other relationships and at least one other marriage. Other discoveries had followed. Mother had been quite a character.
He was a tall man, going grey neatly at the temples with sharp clear blue eyes from which the innocent confidence he had had as a young man had long since faded. They were still kind eyes, yet wary. It was a good face, but held no promise of being easy. Life had toughened him. Presently he stood up, stretched himself and looked down upon the territory where he was responsible for maintaining the Queen’s Peace as Chief Commander of the New City Force.
There was a killing taking place down there in Murder Street at that very time, but he did not know that yet. No one did, except the victim and the killer.
Coffin could look down on this world because he lived in the tower of a converted church. The tower of St Luke’s and part of the church had been converted into three separate dwelling places, of which his apartment in the tower was the biggest and the most romantic. He could see the River Thames, he could get a glimpse of Tower Bridge and, if he was lucky and the weather was right, the top of St Paul’s Cathedral. His authority stretched eastward and southward down the river towards Rotherhithe or Greenwich south of the river, but not including them.
He loved looking down on this London, his London, the new Second City of London, even though he knew better than most that the streets housed a great variety of thieves, housebreakers, pickpockets, sneak thieves, prostitutes, rapists and murderers.
But this was the new Docklands where many of the old warehouses and dock buildings, firmly built by their Victorian creators, had been turned into desirable and expensive places to live in. So the new rich had poured in, provoking some hostility from the old natives. A halt in prosperity had slowed the process down, and, while not making the poor richer, had made some of the rich much poorer. Not such a bad thing, he thought. All in all, the two communities were shaking down nicely together.
A bit of violence now and again, he would be the first to admit it, an occasional flash of social tension. But the murder statistics in his area were no worse than in the rest of the metropolis, which, considering, it housed one ancient thieves kitchen, still surviving in the original network of streets, was not bad.
His mother’s diary made an interesting study, especially to the family circle which had been its first readers. Mrs Coffin had not been a woman of much education, but she had an easy, racy style of writing which led you on. Her life had lived up to her style, being also easy and racy, and leading you on. She had left three children by different fathers, dumped around the globe. One in London, John Coffin, the eldest by far; another in Scotland; and a third, the only daughter, in New York. It was possible there were others, but the trio who had discovered one another’s existence by degrees, lived in some apprehension of more siblings. An extended family was one thing, but far-flung was ridiculous.
