COFFIN FOR BABY

by

GWENDOLINE BUTLER

GEOFFREY BLES

52 DOUGHTY STREET, LONDON

COFFIN FOR BABY

The Bird-in-the-Cage Baby Clinic lay in the heart of John Coffin’s division in down-at-heel, vigorous south-east London. It was where Mary Ellen worked - a sturdy girl with deceptively efficient-looking hands - where stupid, intimidated Alma Bishop brought her grubby, ill-fed little baby. From it ran lines of gossip and communication. One of these ran to Mrs. Cox, the Bishops’ landlady, who was soon to be found battered to death in the same room as a mummified baby in a suitcase.

This is the London that Gwendoline Butler has made peculiarly her own, full of colourful and murky characters, clans with their own special taboos, solid against the outsider. The complicated plot is built up like a well-edited film, it is a fascinating and complex story.

Also by Gwendoline Butler:

COFFIN IN OXFORD

MAKE ME A MURDERER 

DEATH LIVES NEXT 

DOOR THE DULL DEAD

THE MURDERING KIND and others

© GWENDOLINE BUTLER, 1963

This book is fiction.All characters and incidents are entirely imaginary.

First published in 1963

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY COX AND WYMAN LTD., PAKENHAM

SOME IMPORTANT CHARACTERS 

AT THE POLICE STATION

Inspector John Coffin Sergeant Fred Stone

Dr. Jason

AT THE CLINIC

Sister Olive Goode Mary Ellen Sarson Juliet Duveen

IN LEOPOLD GARDENS

Mrs. Cox

Mrs. Alma Bishop Charley Undershot John Tessimond Mrs. Gater

Mrs. Prink

Miss Prink

ONE

Friday

Monday was post-natal day at the Bird-in-the-Cage Clinic. Friday was Baby Day (naturally every day was baby day at the Bird-in-the-Cage Clinic, but this meant babies under six weeks) and Wednesday was antenatal day. Mary Ellen hated Wednesdays. You could say: feared them. This was not on account of the mothers who, wholly and deeply preoccupied with themselves, hardly noticed her except perhaps to say: “Nurse, mind my shopping basket”; or, “Nurse, here’s my specimen bottle, you won’t drop it this week, will you?”

It was because Wednesday was the day she was required to perform certain technical feats associated with her craft, such as taking blood samples, helping test blood pressures and handing out vitamin pills. She was a large boned, red-cheeked girl of seventeen with bright eyes and big, deceptively efficient-looking hands. Real nurse’s hands, people thought when they looked at them. Mary Ellen had thought so herself until she started training, then she got to know better, to know they were hands with a life of their own, hands that broke test tubes, stuck needles sharply into expectant arms, and tightened the bandage of the blood-pressure instrument till mothers squealed. Moreover these hands, manipulated by a helpless, if watchful, Mary Ellen were required to assist Dr. May, and Dr. May, although gentle and quiet, was himself of such skill and expertise that Mary Ellen could feel his scorn and irritation rising round her in clouds. He usually took most of the jobs off her, performing them neatly and deftly himself.

Not unnaturally Mary Ellen both adored and hated Dr. May. “Got no right to treat me like that. Got no right to take that bandage off Mrs. Froud,” she was muttering to herself. “I put it on, didn’t I? She wasn’t complaining.” Mrs. Froud wasn’t likely to complain, of course. Her I.Q. was so low (although her fertility was high) that even complaints surfaced in her mind with difficulty.

Mary Ellen was standing over the steriliser in the sluices. She had put in the day’s quota of nappies and towels and was standing waiting: it was probably going to blow up any minute. She kept half an ear on the machine and half an ear on the noise in the clinic itself. You could always tell how things were going by the quality of the noise. On bad days, when things had gone wrong, there was a distant hissing of sibilants, feet moved quickly and doors banged. The things that had gone wrong were not by any means always Mary Ellen’s fault, but like a wary jungle animal she had learnt to assess the temper of her world and take precautions accordingly. On good days there was simply a long, low, rumbling murmur from all over the clinic, with the distant roar of London traffic occasionally breaking through. She listened carefully, but today except for one baby crying it seemed a good day.

She switched off the steriliser. Her spirits rose. It hadn’t blown up and today was Friday not Wednesday. She liked the babies.

When the National Health Service started in 1948, two old houses in Bird-in-the-Cage Street, which runs between Tooley Street and Leopold Gardens, were acquired and converted into a Baby Clinic. At this time the trams ran along the top of the street, clanging and bouncing. Since then the trams had given way to buses, and the two houses had been twice repainted (the last time in a chic fondant pink and turquoise blue), but the clinic remained essentially the same, two battered old houses set back in the heart of John Coffin’s Police Division, the Borough, London, south of the river.

The use of two houses was never meant to be more than a temporary measure. It had been expected that the population of the district would drop as slum clearances took place but although the slums disappeared the population level remained roughly the same, and as much, if not more, in need of the clinic than ever. In fact, there was now an extension built on at the back to house the physiotherapist and her pre-natal exercise class. But because the houses were old and badly converted the clinic was excessively inconvenient, and the staff and patients spent a good deal of time walking up and down stairs. The steriliser room was in the basement.

Sister Goode poked her head round the door and said: “You get upstairs and go on with the weighing now, if you’ve finished there.” She disappeared again. Sister was so busy that she was rather like the Cheshire Cat, she was always coming or going and it was quite usual to see only her head with the rest of her body already departing for elsewhere. Her voice floated after her. “There’s about twenty mothers waiting already, so look sharp.”

Mary Ellen departed cheerfully up the stairs. Behind her there was a tremendous clang, as though some essential part of the steriliser had come adrift, but Mary Ellen did not hear.

Sister Goode was just passing through the room when Mary Ellen got there, a stream of comments and cries following her wake. “Sister, will you sign this form for me?”

“Sister, will you tell me…?” “Sister…”

Although there were only about eight mothers in the room the general effect was indeed of about twenty; this was because of all the equipment and attachments, bottles, carry-cots, shawls, spare nappies, wet nappies and extra children. In theory Fridays were reserved for the weighing and measuring, vaccinations and immunising of the newly born, but in practice there were also present any number of young children; most of the Bird-in-the-Cage Clinic mothers were what is known in the trade as multiparous - usually pretty high-ranking ones at that.

Mary Ellen saw with pleasure that one of her favourite mothers was at the head of the queue.

“Hello, Mrs. James,” she said happily. “Rex put on some weight this week?”

“About eight ounces, I reckon,” said Mrs. James proudly.

“Go on,” said Mary Ellen, getting the scales ready. “What have you been feeding him on; elephant’s milk?”

“Gin was mother’s milk to him,” said Mrs. James. This joke pleased them. They had both seen My Fair Lady three times and Rex was indeed named after the actor who had so won Mrs. James’s heart. Before that it had been going to be Adam (but not after the father of all), and before that Tommy. Mrs. James was about eighteen.

“Eight ounces it is,” said Mary Ellen. “You’ve got a good eye.”

“My old man’s a greengrocer,” said Mrs. James with quiet pride. She was busily wrapping up her child. “I’m just popping in to talk to Sister. See you next week.”

“I may not be here.”

Mrs. James looked surprised.

“I’m having my medical for the Royal Free next week,” said Mary Ellen. “I hope I pass,” she added fervently.

“Of course you will, a great strong girl like you.”

“Oh yes, I’m as strong as a horse,” agreed Mary Ellen. “Goodbye Rex,” and she patted the baby’s cheek. It gave a little call. “Oh, he knows me,” she said, gratified.

Thus cheered she was able to face her next mother, Mrs. Moody, a large, pale, plump woman who was, if anything, even more ham-handed than she was herself. Mrs. Moody had one hand gripping Baby Moody and the other clutching a large black bag.

“I’ve forgotten my weight card, nurse,” she said anxiously. Mrs. Moody had always forgotten her weight card.

“Never mind, I’ve got a record,” said Mary Ellen. “You ought to keep one too, though.”

Together they shoved the child on to the weighing machine. He was large and pale like his mother; he did not cry, but watched them anxiously, as he had cause to do. This time they did not drop him, and the scales sank heavily beneath him.

“Sixteen pounds,” said Mary Ellen. “And only six weeks. I don’t know how you do it, Mrs. Moody,” and she gave the baby a gentle prod to see if it was good, firm, solid flesh. “Well, let’s get him off. You going in to see Sister?”

“Not this week.”

They heaved him back into his carry-cot and Mrs. Moody staggered out with him. She left behind the black bag.

“Mrs. Moody, you’ve left your bag.”

“She didn’t hear you, dear,” said the next mother in the queue. “You’ll have to keep it until next week.”

“We’ve already got her blue bag and her red bag,” said Mary Ellen. “I keep telling her.”

She put the bag under the table, accidentally tearing a large strip from the handle as she did so.

“Here’s your cup of tea coming, nurse,” said the helpful mother.

“Oh, so it is,” said Mary Ellen, stepping backwards and almost knocking it into the pocket of the girl who was carrying it.

“Whoa, there!” said Juliet; she was tall and slight and pretty with big, sharp, blue eyes. “I’m back there with Sister. Yell, if you want me.”

Mary Ellen-worked on. The afternoon passed, mothers came and went, by five o’clock there was only one mother and child left in the room. Dreamily Mary Ellen reached out and popped the child on the scales. Her eyelashes fluttered; for a moment she was a mile away. “Don’t know you, do I, baby boy?” she said, coming back. “Oh yes, I do, though, you’re Baby Bishop.”

Mary Ellen did not approve of Mrs. Bishop; she thought she was a bad mother; Baby Bishop often bore unmistakable signs of neglect. Probably the reason Mary Ellen had been slow to recognise him was that this week he was rather cleaner. Through the folds of a greying shawl was poked a pretty face with bright, intelligent, violet-coloured eyes that were rapidly changing from baby blue to brown.

Mrs. Bishop looked apprehensive, for Mary Ellen was quite capable of making her mood felt. Had she but known it a sudden pallor was the most ominous sign. But there was nothing of that this week, no censure. All she said was: “You’ve washed him.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bishop, eagerly, glad to enjoy praise. She sneezed twice, possibly with excitement.

“But not his shawl,” said Mary Ellen. She was deftly unpinning the child, unwinding him from his wrappings. She always kept an eye open for bruises when examining Baby Bishop but so far she had never seen any. She had an idea that Mrs. Bishop knew she looked too. Underneath her long eyelashes she watched Mrs. Bishop. Mary Ellen was a girl of strong feelings. She felt strongly about Baby Bishop. She didn’t trust or like Mrs. Bishop.

Mrs. Bishop stirred uneasily. “I’ll have him weighed with his clothes on, Sister,” she said. She always called Mary Ellen ‘Sister.’

“He takes cold so easily, Sister,” She sneezed again to herself.

Mary Ellen frowned and reluctantly stopped unwinding the parcel that was Baby Bishop.

The small babies were weighed on a large covered set of scales which stood on a blanket-swathed table. It was easier and safer to lay the babies out on the table and lift them out of their clothes. Older children were weighed on a small chair-scale that stood in the corner.

Mary Ellen stood there at the table, one hand resting lightly on the baby’s middle and the other on her hip. Mrs. Bishop was by her side.

“In fact I don’t think I’ll get him weighed this week,” said Mrs. Bishop, “it only upsets him. And I’ve lost his card.” She put out a grubby hand.

“What did you bring him for then?” demanded Mary Ellen. She was already making out a fresh card to record the baby’s weight. Mrs. Bishop lost her card regularly. She was a shade worse than Mrs. Moody.

“I’ve lost my milk coupons,” admitted his mother, “and I’ll need to get Sister to sign a form for me.”

There was no one else in the room. Sounds floated through, indicating that the clinic was packing up - doors were being shut, cupboards banged, taps running.

Through the window Mary Ellen saw Dr. May get into his car and drive away into Tooley Street. By the gate stood only one pram, sole survivor of the fifty or so that had stood there during the day. It was a high, battered old black pram, redolent of dirty gutters, un-emptied ash-bins and unwashed milk bottles. It was undoubtedly a Bishop pram.

“You poor little scrap,” she thought looking down at the baby. “You certainly need your milk.” Aloud she said: “Wait here and I’ll get Sister. You may miss her.” Mary Ellen was polite even to Mrs. Bishop. Under her breath, Mrs. Bishop muttered something which Mary Ellen, who had sharp ears, heard. For the moment, she ignored it. But she did not forget it.

She had a job hunting down Sister Goode, who wasn’t in her office (she never was), who wasn’t in Dr. May’s room, who wasn’t in the basement, but who had been seen passing along the corridor (by Juliet, who was busy packing up spare sets of baby clothes), and who was found on the top floor, on her knees, counting bottles of cod-liver oil.

“I’ll follow you down,” she said. “Give me two seconds.”

But when Mary Ellen got back to the room where she had left the baby lying on the middle of the table with his mother by his side, the room was quiet and peaceful.

She went to the window and looked out. There was a figure standing by the Bishop pram.

“I don’t understand,” she said to Sister, when she arrived. “The two of them were waiting for you.”

Sister Goode shrugged. She was used to the eccentricities of both mothers and babies.

But Mary Ellen was worried. “I don’t feel sure that it was Mrs. Bishop took the baby. I saw the pram from the window and it didn’t look like Mrs. Bishop with it. Did you see? Was it Mrs. Bishop?”

Sister was unmoved. “If Mrs. Bishop has lost her baby she’ll be round here soon enough telling us.”

She looked in Mary Ellen’s concerned face. “I shouldn’t think any more about it…and for goodness sake don’t make a story out of it. It’s always better to keep a quiet tongue, my dear.”

But Mary Ellen couldn’t keep quiet. She was a worried girl (she had lost things before) and she wasn’t a girl who could ever keep things to herself anyway. She always told everything. She told her mother and she told Juliet.

Juliet Duveen, daughter of Robert Duveen, Q.C., and grand-daughter of Lady Passey, was her best friend. It was a companionable relationship. Both of them had learnt to take their friendships where they could find them, Mary Ellen because of a delicate childhood, and Juliet because she was the daughter of a difficult, if lovely mother, and an abstracted, but highly successful father.

Mary Ellen told Juliet and also added something which she had not told Sister Goode.

“I don’t like the way Mrs. Bishop spoke to me this morning, Juliet. She said something nasty. ‘You want to see yourself’ she said to me.” Mary Ellen repeated this uneasily to Juliet. “You want to see yourself What did she mean?”

“Dunno.” Juliet was not really listening.

Mary Ellen weighed up the remark.

Well, what did people usually mean by it? See yourself as others see you. But supposing Mrs. Bishop meant it literally?

Mary Ellen shivered.

“I shouldn’t worry about it,” Juliet said comfortably. “You take things too hard.”

“And you take them too easily,” retorted Mary Ellen, irritated. “I don’t know why you are doing this job when you have a rich father.”

“Don’t run away with the idea that because my father is a successful lawyer we have plenty of money. We have plenty of credit, but that’s not the same thing at all. It costs more to begin with and goes quickly. And then Robert” (she always called her father Robert) “has his expenses. He’s got to support my mother. She left us, you know.”

“Oh yes,” said Mary Ellen sympathetically. “It must be terrible to have parents who quarrel.”

“They didn’t quarrel,” said Juliet. “They didn’t really speak much. Isobel went because she said she couldn’t stand living with a man who looked like a perpetually reserved judgement.”

Mary Ellen laughed. She had never heard of a reserved judgement, but she admired Juliet. Then suddenly she was grave. “I don’t trust Mrs. Bishop. I don’t think she’s good to that baby. I don’t believe she likes it. Probably doesn’t like anything.”

“She likes cats,” said Juliet lightly. “I saw her stroking one once.”

“I get a bad feeling when I think about Mrs. Bishop,” persisted Mary Ellen.

“I expect she gets a bad feeling when she thinks about you,” said Juliet.

They stared at each other.

Her mother watched and listened over her ironing. Mrs. Sarson always listened to Mary Ellen because there was no denying the girl came home with some interesting tales from that clinic. If it had been anyone else but Mary Ellen she’d swear she made them up.

But no, call her what you will, Mary Ellen was not inventive.

“I think you’re making a lot up out of nothing,” she suggested cautiously; more to see how Mary Ellen reacted than because she believed it. “How can you be sure it wasn’t Mrs. Bishop pushing the pram? You couldn’t really see.”

Mary Ellen tried to put it into order. “It was partly the way she stood there. I didn’t take her in at first and then gradually I got to worry more and more. I feel sure it wasn’t Mrs. Bishop. She didn’t look like Mrs. Bishop.” Really, she wanted her mother to come right on and say roundly, and reassuringly, “Of course it was Mrs. Bishop. I happen to know it was Mrs. Bishop.” Mary Ellen looked at her mother pleadingly.

“You seem to have taken a lot of notice of Mrs. Bishop one way and another,” said her mother in a dry voice. A little irony was one of the luxuries she allowed herself in a life that had had rather more than its share of trials.

Mary Ellen stared at her. “I don’t like her,” she said shortly.

Her mother went on with her ironing. “And do you think she likes you?” she was asking herself.

So Mary Ellen told Sister Goode and Juliet, at midday, and she told her mother. The little story spread about that day. By evening, it even reached the ears of Inspector John Coffin, Divisional Detective Inspector.

But Mary Ellen did not pass on that there had been a suggestion about the figure that she had not quite cared for, something in fact that she couldn’t quite bring herself to think about clearly.

There was a group of four or five people who were going to be brought into contact with what was about to happen. Each of them had a contribution to make. A fact, an appreciation of a piece of behaviour, or just themselves.

Sister Goode’s sister (if she had been a woman with a sense of humour she might have made a joke of it, but she never did joke) did not know Mary Ellen or Mrs. Bishop and she never got to know them. Nevertheless she contributed. She was mainly responsible for the flat in which she and her sister lived. She tried hard, in a way, but for various reasons she was inefficient. One way and another she gave Sister Goode plenty of trouble and was responsible for taking her mind off her work. This strain was what she contributed. Miss Goode divided her life about equally between sleeping and shopping. While she was shopping she ran across Mrs. Cox of Leopold Gardens. They had a good deal in common but Mrs. Cox, who was the keeper of a lodging-house, had the greater experience of life and perhaps the nicer nature. Between them they formed a direct route, a tunnel, for information between Leopold Gardens and the Clinic.

Mrs. Cox was a sturdy figure; in cold weather she wore a double layer of almost every thing: two woolly coats, two petticoats (one flannel), two vests, and two pairs of dark blue garments that she still called ‘bloomers’. (She bought them at a local shop called Boxer’s). Underneath, if it could ever have been seen, was a plump, curving frame, and underneath all that were small tough bones. She was slightly sentimental, she loved babies, dogs and kittens, but she was moved wholly by her own interests.

The pattern of her days, later to be so treacherously revealed, was a consistent one: housework, shopping, and talking to her friends. The housework was simply and easily dispatched before mid-morning and she spent the rest of the day shopping and gossiping. The shopping provided the opportunity for the conversation, consequently she preferred to move among as many different shops as possible, a half a pound of butter here, a packet of cheese there, two onions and a carrot in this shop, and a tin of coffee in that one. She was well known. Naturally. She made her circuit at least once and sometimes twice a day. The scraps of gossip she picked up were small, feathers in the mind, no more, but she fingered them and passed them on.

Thus a day in her life touched many circles, and the circles themselves touched. Of all of them in the case Mrs. Cox knew the most people. She knew Mrs. Bishop, and the other Miss Goode, she knew John Coffin by sight, and admired his theatrical fiancée, and she knew about Dr. May by a devious route through his landlady and the laundry and knew that he was a good tenant and had photographs of morbid cell formations round his room instead of a girl friend.

Mrs. Cox knew a lot. In the end her knowledge of the crime was to be unrivalled.

Dr. May contributed his books to the problem. Not his own private reading matter, which consisted of Faulkner and Scott FitzGerald and Ian Fleming and which rested in his riverside flat, but his medical books which he kept in two book-cases at the Clinic. They looked a dull, solid sort of book.

But someone found them. Someone read them, someone hated them. In an extraordinarily personal way, almost as if they were alive, these books were hated.

Patsy Partridge, with whom the policeman Coffin was in love, had little to contribute directly. But she was very nearly the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Coffin’s back.

That very evening Mary Ellen was due to work late.

She had some work to clear up for Sister Goode, menial jobs, including some new medical stock to sort.

Mary Ellen walked into the stock-room with her pile of bottles to sort, planted them on the table and started work. She was busy. But out of the corner of her eye she became aware of another figure in the room, also working. Thinking it over, she was surprised.

She turned towards it, blinking. Then she took a step in its direction.

It came towards her with hand outstretched. A girl, wearing nurse’s uniform, clumsy, red-cheeked.

It was her double.

It was herself.

“I must have fancied it.” She was propped up against the wall. Mary Ellen was aware of a sense of loss. “Perhaps I fainted?” Rummaging in a pocket for a forbidden cigarette, she stood puffing it and trying to be calm. She shuddered at what she had seen. Surely it wasn’t real? Looked like a real person. Breathed. Phantoms didn’t breathe.

She tried to believe she had imagined it, but as the smoke blew round her head, she knew that to her there had been a dreadful reality about the figure.

This time Mary Ellen told no one of the episode. People in Mary Ellen’s position do not talk about what they have seen.

She was frightened she would be called mad.

Later that Friday evening Mary Ellen undertook the duty that fell on all the nursing staff alternately. This was chasing up the defaulters, the laggards, the absentees who had not put in an appearance at the clinic for some time. The list was made up of a dozen names, some due to removals or illness, and not likely to appear again, but the rest, recurring, were hardy old regulars whom Mary Ellen well recognised. She looked at her watch and decided to do the good girls first, they were usually the quickest to explain themselves. She had no idea why remissness should produce a flow of speech but it seemed to. No doubt a sense of guilt had something to do with it.

The sinners presented the usual variety but not much more originality. They were ill, they were tired, they had broken a leg, an arm, a pram. Only one of them came right out and said that her baby seemed to get on just as well whether she knew what its weight was or not.

Mary Ellen had almost finished her list. Just one more address with a query. The list was drawn up by Sister Goode and sure enough this pencilled addition to the type-written sheet looked like her hand. Mary Ellen hoisted her bag farther on to her arm and trudged on. All the checkers-up took a capacious bag (often called in joke the Murder Bag), stocked up with essentials like soap, clean towel, disinfectant, notebook, pen and pencil.

Sister Goode maintained that on such a trip she had once delivered a baby, taken particulars of two more to come, and brought back a defaulting husband.

The address, she was glad to observe, was not an address in the Mosley Street area. You usually got more trouble in the Mosley Street area. This was because the wives there were all educated and had all read Dr. Spock. Mosley Street was a row of nice little houses, early-Victorian cottages really, with flat faces and small front gardens with iron gates. They had lately become smart and fashionable and the incoming population was quite different from the rest of the Borough. The mothers of Mosley Street were amateurs compared with the other mothers who were professionals. Nothing gave a Mosley Street mother more anguish than to discover that tending her child was not all sweet maternal joy, that an element of misery entered into it, and that she could sometimes find its little red face very irritating indeed. It wasn’t what you read in the best books or the Sunday newspapers. It was hell to discover you didn’t always love your child. Mary Ellen treated more mothers than babies in Mosley Street.

A slight drizzle was falling. Mary Ellen put her head down and trudged on. This one last address and then home. She felt hungry and tired. She yawned frequently.

She turned the corner away from Mosley Street into a terrace of houses called Leopold Gardens, walked up a short flight of steps and looked round for a bell to ring. There was no bell, only a battered black knocker.

She was about to bang when the door slowly opened. There was someone standing in the black depths of the hall. She peered forward trying to see. Was there a second figure behind in the darkness of the hall. A girl carrying a bag?

“Oh Sister, is it you? Oh Sister, have you come to see the baby?”

Mary Ellen took a step backwards. But a hand came out and took her wrist. It was not a girl’s hand, not a young hand at all but an old hand. It was a woman’s hand, plump and slightly grubby.

Mary Ellen hesitated, but after all this was where she had a call to make. She allowed herself to be drawn forward.

That night, her mother, on one of her nocturnal prowls round the house, for she was a poor sleeper and had been since her neuritis got bad, looked in on Mary Ellen. She often felt like giving her soundly sleeping husband and daughter a good kick…Insomnia is lowering to the temper, but tonight she surveyed them lovingly. Nothing touched her husband’s sleep, and Mary Ellen was the same. Yet tonight as her mother tucked her in, she thought Mary Ellen looked tense and tired even in her sleep. She straightened the girl’s hair. She thought back to the day that had gone. She very much hoped there was going to be no trouble over Mrs. Bishop.

She went downstairs, put on the kettle and made a cup of tea. She drank it thoughtfully, sitting in her old rocking chair with a knitted shawl over her knees. Then, her pain somewhat soothed, she returned to bed.

But the next day she noticed that her daughter made no more reference to Mrs. Bishop. It was almost as if she was frightened of her.

TWO

Mrs, Cox—Monday

In his time John Coffin had paced most of his district on his beat; he knew it with his eyes and his ears, and his nose (important this - smells were often very significant) and with his feet. He had been in turn constable, detective-constable, sergeant and inspector, and itinerant as all of them. So when the address 13 Leopold Gardens came before him he could close his eyes and say, “Turning off Tooley Street, links with Bird-in-the-Cage Street and in the end runs out into the Lower Cut. No. 13, that’ll be half-way down on the left. Used to belong to a Mrs Cavey. Maybe still does.” He remembered that they’d been in the house once because of a drunken brawl and it had taken all his strength and that of two other men to bring in her and her antagonist. “No, come to think of it she couldn’t be still alive, the old girl’d be going on for ninety-five if she was.”

“No, it’s a Mrs. Cox. Keeps the place as a lodging house.”

But so had Mrs. Cavey, and the lady before that and the one before that and the one before that. Ever since it had been built in 1860 as part of a speculative builder’s attempt to keep up with the new railways swinging their way across South London, bringing a fine new passenger station just across the road, No. 13 Leopold Gardens had been a lodging-house.

Coffin got into a car and drove round to Leopold Gardens, he could easily have walked, but there would be too many people watching and asking questions. And already he knew this was a serious crime.

A small group of people were standing staring at the house. Across the road three women watched from their front door. It was midday on Monday, a fine cold sunny winter morning. They watched with the expression of those in whom is vested a past, a tradition. Leopold Gardens had its history. A murder had been committed there in 1889 when a Polish refugee killed himself and his wife and one other person. It was supposed to be a political crime but no one ever discovered if it was. Nor was much notice taken. 1889 was a vintage year for murder, with Mrs. Maybrick murdering her husband and Percy Fellowes murdering his wife. In 1910 there had been a case of arson and in 1943 an American soldier shot it out with the military policeman sent to collect him, having first drunk a great deal of whisky.

No one died that time. Leopold Gardens did not remember. Memories were soon effaced, washed out by the turbulence of London, leaving only the ghost of violence, the feeling that Leopold Gardens was not a nice street. Rents were fractionally lower there than round the corner. Beyond that no one remembered. Except the three old ladies, who were not, as they appeared to be, all of one generation (and a pretty aged one at that) but were mother, grandmother and daughter, and had lived there all their lives. They remembered down to the last bloodstain. Whatever was remembered by Leopold Gardens was remembered by them. Like the three Fates, whom they so much resembled, their ultimate business was birth and death, to both of which they had materially contributed. ‘Midwife’, said a small brass plate by the door.

Layer-out, it might have added. Coffin respected and rather liked them. In her generation each had done her two difficult jobs honestly and well. If it had ended with this preoccupation with their neighbours’ affairs, was it to be wondered at?

They watched him go into the house. All the houses in Leopold Gardens were exactly the same so that they could follow his movements in their mind. They knew he would go into the narrow hall, perhaps pause for a moment, then walk down the stairs to the basement. He would walk into the front basement room which looked out on to the street and where the curtains had been drawn for forty-eight hours.

Number 13 had been let out room by room. This made six possible tenancies. Four rooms were empty. Two only were inhabited. The tenants, a man and wife named Bishop, had moved out of the front basement without telling anyone.

But they had left behind their landlady, locked in their basement bed-sitting-room, battered to death.

“I’ve got two stories for you,” said the sergeant in charge, a man named Stone. ‘I’ve got the people lined up outside.”

Coffin nodded. His sergeant was one of the Stone tribe. Coffin often thought an anthropological survey of the tribes, call them clans if you like, of the Borough would make interesting reading. To begin with each was a matriarchy, a fact not immediately apparent to the observer who saw the women working hard, pushing the prams and carrying laden baskets. But like all climbs to power it was a slow-moving, conservative business, you had to have strength, stamina and above all longevity to get to the top seat. The younger women had to bide their time. The men might seem careless and indulged, but somewhere along the line you would find a woman, an elder sister, a mother, or a grandmother dominating the whole group. You had to fight your way to the top but when you were up there you stayed until death picked you off. Even senile and gaga you still had the force of an oracle. Coffin remembered old Mrs. Dinebon who had reached the age of ninety-six and whose sole solution to any problem for the last thirty years of her life had been: “Soak it and see.” There were various texts, some less proper than others; in some ways she was not at all a nice-minded old lady. But all her descendants took her advice and read into it, as with all oracles, just what suited them best. Marriage, however, was essential. No unmarried women ever attained the seat of power. You could be a man-hater but not a virgin. (There were anyway very few among the tribes.)

The Stones, the Doves, the Dinebons, and the Whitechairs were names which cropped up on every school register, every Labour Exchange list, every cemetery in the district. In spite of death and emigration there still seemed plenty of replacements. They were on both sides of the law, policemen and criminals, some were richer than others. The tribes were large and not every member necessarily knew all the others but there were certain common physical characteristics. The Stones were solid boned, not over tall but with neat hands; the Doves had poorer physiques, bad eyesight and a tendency to deafness (even a hint of petit mal); the Dinebons ran to large, quiet people, who were good with their hands; and the Whitechairs were completely undistinguished except by a sharp sense of grievances, private and public. They felt strongly that wrong should be righted and the oppressed relieved, and punishment handed out all round. They produced a fair number of shop stewards, barrack-room lawyers, and even one Labour M.P. Theirs was the nearest to a public spirit the tribes possessed.

Coffin himself had a streak of Whitechair blood in him which perhaps accounted for his joining the police force.

“You’ve had a word with them?” said Coffin.

Sergeant Stone nodded. A curious expression crossed his face. He was not a man capable of subtle facial play but there was a sort of distorted anger and admiration in his look. “Yes, I’ve had a word,” he said.

“I’ll see them now. I suppose you’ve got a place for me, Fred?” Coffin looked expectantly at the sergeant. He knew his Fred and he knew that already, somewhere in this house, there would be a little corner modestly but firmly appropriated and stamped Fred Stone his mark, with notebooks, pencils, paraphernalia and such comfort as the place could offer.

“Front parlour,” nodded the sergeant. “Old lady’s room. Only fit place.”

He led the way into a small room crowded with furniture but clearly hardly used. It was the landlady’s showpiece where she entertained on Christmas Day and on holidays. The room behind was where she had lived but this room was the one she kept dusted. Fred had established himself on a table in the window. He had thoughtfully drawn the curtains to keep out the stare of people from the street. Coffin drew them back at once.

“Let’s have some light,” he said.

“Didn’t think you’d want people looking in.”

“There’s nothing they can see here that’s going to tell them anything they don’t know.”

“No,” agreed Stone reluctantly, “but it’s a free show.” He hated giving anything away free. He was all Stone. He went to the door and beckoned. “You can come now. Inspector Coffin’s ready for you.”

“Mr. Undershot from upstairs,” said Sergeant Stone.

“Top back,” said Mr. Undershot. “I’ve been waiting two hours to see you, Inspector. It was two hours ago that I told the sergeant about what I heard and saw last Friday night.”

“Heard,” said Stone. “You didn’t see anything.”

“Well, I did see something,” said Mr. Undershot. “I didn’t tell you everything.”

Mr. Undershot was lean and tall and bright-eyed. He wore a dark suit but no shirt. His jacket was pinned at the neck. Coffin recognised an eager talker when he saw one. They’d get a story, possibly two or three stories out of this man and goodness knows which would be the true one. He thought he knew now what had caused the expression on his sergeant’s face.

“Suppose you tell me everything,” said Coffin.

They sat down facing each other. Mr. Undershot had his face turned towards the light in the traditional witness’s position. It tightened the lines on his face and revealed the bones beneath the wrinkles. It also gave him a view out of the window. He stared for a moment and gave a slight wave. Then he stood up and waved again.

“Just waving to a friend,” he said.

A slight noise came from Sergeant Stone and Mr. Undershot turned on him sharply. “What’s pleasure for some is boredom for others,” he said. “Likewise, what’s boredom for some is pleasure for others. That’s to be admitted.”

“Sit down, Mr. Undershot,” said Coffin, “and get on with telling us about what you heard. It was Friday night, you say?”

“Quiet as the grave last night and the night before,” he said promptly. “Which it was in a sense, wasn’t it?

But Friday night, oh my, that’s a different matter. Quarrelling like cats they were.”

“Who were?”

“Mrs. Cox and Mrs. Bishop, and I’d no doubt whatever that Bishop was there too, but he never said much. Mrs. Bishop was the one there, all right; but there’s no doubt Bishop supported her, no doubt at all. He supported her. She’d say and he’d do.”

“What was this quarrel?”

“Did I say it was a quarrel? I may be wrong there. I heard voices all right but now I come to think of it, Mrs. Cox only gave one shout.”

“And Mrs. Bishop?”

“Oh, she was quiet for ever such a long time after that and then I heard bumping noises. Fighting, I thought to myself. There’ll be murder done. And I was right, you see.”

“Can you put a time to this shout you heard?”

Mr. Undershot hesitated. “Oh. Late,” he said vaguely.

“Can’t you get closer? How late? Were you in bed? Asleep?”

He still hesitated. “It was Friday night, you see. I’d been down to the Public Library. I go there every Friday.”

“Whatever for?”

“I go through all the papers,” he said as if this explained everything. “In case I’ve missed anything. I wouldn’t like anyone to get away with anything.”

‘A streak of Whitechair there,’ thought Coffin.

“They close at ten on Friday. I was quite worn out when I got back, in fact I fell sound asleep in my clothes. Well, it was after closing time anyway.”

“Try a bit harder,” said Coffin. “How much after closing time?”

Mr. Undershot looked thoughtfully at Coffin as if assessing how much detail he would take. “It woke me up, but I hadn’t been asleep long. I heard the man next door start up his motor bike and go off to the night shift…I hear that every night. Wait a minute though, he goes off about nine, so I can’t have heard that then.”

Coffin watched him intently.

“But I did though…I remember now, I left the Library early because I wasn’t feeling quite myself. I’ve had a terrible cold, caught it from Alma Bishop. I was seedy all day Friday.” (‘He’s got some Dove in him,’ thought Coffin. ’Unhealthy beggar, I bet.’) “But it was just after nine Mrs. Cox gave that great big shout,” he finished triumphantly.

He looked up waiting for praise.

“I was muddled before, but I’ve got it straight now.”

“You didn’t do anything about it?”

Mr. Undershot was silent. In Leopold Gardens you lived and let live.

“Had they quarrelled before?”

Mr. Undershot shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m at work all day. I work in the biscuit factory. I’m out all day. And when I come home I need my sleep. They seemed quite reasonable together. Mrs. Cox liked the baby.”

“What baby?”

“Mrs. Bishop’s baby. Didn’t you know that? You haven’t discovered much.”

“Mrs. Bishop has a son aged four months,” said the sergeant briefly.

“Do you know why Mrs. Bishop and Mrs. Cox should quarrel?”

“Be money, most likely,” said Mr. Undershot. “I dare say they hadn’t paid their rent. Mrs. Cox liked her money, you know. Old miser. Used to keep all her savings down in that basement kitchen of hers. ‘Be done in for that one day, you will,’ I said to her.” He stopped short and looked at Coffin.

“And what was it you saw?” said Coffin. “You said you saw something.”

Mr. Undershot looked uneasy. “I did and I didn’t,” he said.

“So you did go down and look,” said Coffin.

Mr. Undershot said nothing; he began to look frightened.

“Come on. I can tell you did. What are you frightened of? Not us? Not yet anyway.”

“I’m scared,” muttered Mr. Undershot. “Not of him. Her.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Coffin asked: “What did you see?”

“Crept down and peered through keyhole. Couldn’t see much. Could hear breathing though. Near the door.

“Saw the baby,” whispered Mr. Undershot. “Lying there all wrapped up on the floor. ‘Poor shrivelled little beggar,’ I thought, ‘more dead than alive you look.’ Saw its poor little hand sticking up all blue with cold. I was cold down there.”

“I believe you,” said Coffin. “And this was how long after the scream?”

Mr. Undershot looked puzzled, more than that, he looked disconcerted.

“I thought it was just after,” he said, “but now I think about it I feel as though somehow it was a long time after. Do you think I dropped off to sleep in between?”

“Charley boy,” said Coffin. “I think you might have done anything.”

“Get my next customer, will you?” asked Coffin, and while he waited he summed up what Mr. Undershot had contributed as evidence. First, there had been a quarrel between Mrs. Cox and Mrs. Bishop; this quarrel Mr. Undershot placed at somewhere around nine in the evening. It was then he had heard a scream followed by silence. He had seen the Bishop baby and therefore presumably Mrs. Bishop was not far away, even although as a mother she seemed a doubtful quantity. (Mary Ellen could have given him some views on this.) He turned over in his mind the story that had come round to him from Mary Ellen about Mrs. Bishop and her baby leaving the clinic. There was something very odd about Mrs. Bishop. Something abnormal. People were frightened of her temper, she was unpredictable, erratic and probably stupid. Something tugged at his mind, then subsided.

He could hear voices outside the door. Stone was having a rough time with Leopold Gardens. Presently the sergeant appeared pushing one person into the room before him and apparently warding off a press of bodies behind him. He looked flustered. His captive, a young man with a beard and a black sweater, was sleepy.

“Sorry,” he said. “Not really awake.” He yawned. “I’m afraid that’s my landlady, well my landladies really, outside. They’re worried in case you’re going to arrest me.

“I’m not arresting anybody. Your landladies called Gater?” he asked.

“Gran is,” said the young man. “The other two are called Mrs. and Miss Prink.”

“Thought I recognised their voices,” said Coffin. “Didn’t know they had lodgers.”

“Only since they retired, and only me. Since I’m a medical student it keeps their hand and eye in, not that they need it. Sharp as needles.”

Coffin smiled, the three midwives of Leopold Street were famous for their acuteness.

“What’s your hospital?” said Coffin.

“St Thomas’s.”

“And you lodge round here? Inconvenient, isn’t it?”

“But cheap. Besides, imagine the help it is living with three women like that. It’s like having a resident College of Obstetricians. I’m well ahead there. It isn’t as if they keep their interest just for that, either. They’ve been no end of help in my general clinical work. The young one’s red hot on diagnosis. No, they’re worth their weight in gold to me.” He was waking up now.

“You’ve already had a talk with Sergeant Stone?” said Coffin looking down at the notes the sergeant had given him. “Your name is John Tessimond, you are twenty-three” (‘Looks more than that,’ he thought) “and you lodge at No. 5 Leopold Gardens?” They nodded at each other. They had already decided that they liked each other. Stone was looking faintly disapproving. He never liked anyone he met professionally. And not very many people anyway - that was the Stone blood coming out. “You’ve got something to tell me?”

“Only what I’ve already told him. Nothing fresh, you understand.”

“I want to hear it, though.”

‘It’s going to be important,’ thought Coffin, considering what Mr. Undershot had told them.

“I was sitting working late on Friday. I have an evening job at a café and I don’t get in until almost eight. I was a little later on Friday because we were extra busy and I stayed on to help. It was about eight-thirty when I got in, perhaps a little more.”

“Did you see anyone then?”

“I saw Charley Undershot coming home.” In a detached sort of way, he added, “He’s quite a case himself.”

Coffin had observed before with young doctors that people were always ‘cases’. It took about fifty years, if the doctor lasted that long, for humanity to get back its own face.

“Did you notice anything about No. 13? See anything? Hear anything?”

“No. It was all quiet and peaceful. I settled down to work. I get my supper at the café and I made a pot of coffee and sat down by the window to make up some notes. If I looked sideways a little I could easily see No. 13. I saw Charley’s light on. I expect he could see me. I didn’t have the curtains drawn. But No. 13 was absolutely dead quiet.”

“I can see you know what Charley Undershot’s told us?”

“Yes, I do.” He looked worried. “The whole street knows. But what I saw contradicts it. There wasn’t a sound. Everything was absolutely peaceful. I could see in. The light was on and I could see in.” He was repeating it, as if to convince himself too. “There was no one there at all.”

After a pause Coffin asked. “How can you be sure?”

“I could see. You come across to my room and check. I could see. Maybe they were lying on the floor. Otherwise I could see. It’s only a little room.”

Coffin took a deep breath. “Well, go on. What happened next?”

John Tessimond looked even more perplexed. “I went on working. I was working late that night to catch up.”

“During this working time you didn’t keep a fixed eye on No. 13?”

“No, of course not. I didn’t take any more notice. Then.”

“And later?”

“Later on, I stopped to have some more coffee.”

“When was this?”

“About two-thirty, I suppose. Yes, it was. Then I gradually became aware that there was still this one square of light burning across the road. Even then I didn’t take much notice, until…”

“Until what?”

“That was when I heard the cry. One strong loud cry.” He shook his head and added, half to himself. “Odd. Like the cry of a woman at the terminal stage of labour.”

Coffin stared at him.

“By that, I mean, it was wrung out of her. Involuntary. Almost a muscular contraction,” he said carefully.

Then he added, even more carefully: “To my mind, that was when murder was done.”

So there it was. Two stories, two well-observed stories, and differing in every important detail.

Around Coffin the house moved and stirred. Feet went up and down stairs, doors banged, floor-boards creaked.

“I wonder why she was empty of lodgers,” he said. “Only Undershot and the Bishops. A point there, maybe?”

He drew a little picture on the piece of paper placed in front of him by Sergeant Stone. It turned out to be a picture of Patsy Partridge, to whom he was more or less engaged to be married. As it was rather less than more at the moment, he irritably covered it up with scribble.

Mr. Undershot himself was undoubtedly a character worth studying. There was a screwed-up crazy quality to his evidence. You ended with the uneasy feeling that nothing in it was quite what it seemed. Eventually one group of facts focused sharply in his mind as even odder than some of the others. He was worried by what Mr. Undershot had said about the baby’s hand.

“Stone,” he said. “Has a thorough search of the basement room been made?”

Stone appeared at the head of the stairs.

“Not yet,” he answered reproachfully. “There’s been the photographing and finger-printing. We haven’t touched anything.”

“I want it done then. Wait. I’m coming.”

Rumours about what had happened at No. 13 Leopold Gardens reached the clinic on Monday morning with the first mother. For a time Mary Ellen was pleased as it took the heat off her a bit. One way and another Mary Ellen had been having a most difficult day. There seemed so much to do. “I ought to be in two places at once,” she told herself. Then with a little giggle, “I am in two places at once.” What an unfortunate joke, she thought, her heart sinking.

She darted here and there. She had errands of her own to perform, for the pattern of her work did not always conform exactly to what Sister would have wished. But there were occasions when Mary Ellen held that what the eye didn’t see then the heart didn’t grieve over. She found the clinic useful in this way. Like the time she spent her savings on a bright red coat and stored it away at the clinic so that her mother shouldn’t know, and the time she made the down payment (but never any more) on a scooter and kept it in the shed at the clinic for a month before the man came and took it away again. Many a little secret did Mary Ellen contrive to keep.

They all did, more or less (Juliet once kept a pet dog at the clinic for a week before Sister found out), but only Mary Ellen stowed her things away with the instinctive cunning of a magpie.

“One job, two jobs,” said Mary Ellen, ticking them off on her fingers. Even now she preferred to see something visible or tangible for her counting. She didn’t trust what shuttled round in her head. “Three. Wonder what four was?” She gazed vacantly at the window, dropping everything that was in her arms (a pile of nappies), momentarily unconscious to the world.

Then she sighed deeply. She was clumsier than ever this morning, and her head ached. She was quite glad to be sent out by Sister to get some buns to eat with their morning coffee. This was not an indulgence Sister often permitted.

“But I need it this morning,” she said. “I didn’t get any breakfast.”

“Didn’t you, Sister?” asked Mary Ellen with sympathy. Breakfast mattered to her. She hated to face the world before she’d had two cups of tea.

“My sister wasn’t well,” said Sister Goode. She looked tired and slightly grey herself this morning. Her sister, although she had never visited the clinic, was known by reputation there. Two schools of thought existed: one said that she was only kept alive by Sister Goode’s exertions, and the other that she was a bloodsucker of the first water and only Sister Goode would put up with it. Both sides united in disliking what they had heard of her. Mary Ellen was the only neutral. She found it very hard to visualise and therefore either like or dislike someone she had never seen. After one of her sister’s turns Sister Goode was irritable and tired, sometimes she failed to come to the clinic or came late. It was the only unreliable thing about her.

At the door Mary Ellen turned back. “I suppose you’ve heard the news?” she asked hesitantly. She was never quite sure of herself with Sister. “About the murder, I mean.”

Sister didn’t answer. “I saw her that evening,” went on Mary Ellen hesitantly. Then she added, “At least I think I did.”

“Aren’t you sure?” asked Sister, staring at her.

“No, I’m not,” Mary Ellen looked concerned. “I think it was her. It must have been. I went to see Mrs. Bishop. Mrs. Cox opened the door. She asked me if I’d come to see the baby. She came to the door and said: ’Is that you, Sister, have you come to see the baby?’” Mary Ellen’s hands trembled a little.

“And had you?” asked Sister.

“I was surprised to see Mrs. Bishop’s name on the list. After all she’d been in the clinic that morning.”

“What happened?” said Sister.

Mary Ellen looked confused. “She went away…Mrs. Cox I know it was now…It was as if a door had closed in my face.” She looked as if she might cry. Mary Ellen had no turn for flights of speech. If it seemed to her a door had been banged, then probably a door had banged somewhere. “I suppose she saw me, you see.”

Two faces swam together in her mind. Sister’s and Mrs. Bishop’s. Her eyelashes blinked and fluttered on her cheeks.

“You’d better tell the police,” said Sister, turning away.

“What about the buns?” Mary Ellen asked.

“Forget the buns. Go now.”

Mary Ellen buttoned up her coat. She went down the stairs, but at the bottom, instead of going out, she stopped at the front door. She had obeyed her innate impulse never to keep anything to herself and now she regretted it. She was frightened.

A small suitcase was found in the room in which Mrs. Cox had been murdered. It had been tied up with green cord which was now loose.

When it was opened one small and mummified hand stuck out.

The police search was halted.

THREE

Still Monday

Sister Goode finished the task she had been started upon before she talked to Mary Ellen and then automatically tidied herself up and went down to face the next job. She already thought of it as ’facing it’. There were a few mothers waiting for her outside her small office, not many, it was a little early for the rush. Usually she felt a surge of welcome for them, but now she longed to escape their expectant faces. She needed to sort herself out. Almost literally, she felt wryly. There was a problem she had to discuss. The question she was asking herself boiled down in the end to one of responsibility.

By long practice, while debating all this within herself, she was able to smile and behave normally.

She had once attended a criminal trial and heard the judge and counsel tossing the word responsibility between them like a ball, and then weighing it in the scales of justice. Many things could diminish responsibility: drink, disease, madness, epilepsy. She was no lawyer, no philosopher: she did not play with words. In her heart she knew that in the end you just stood up and said, like George Washington, ‘Yes sir, I did it.’

Simple, tortuous, complex-driven, she turned on the rack of her problem.

All the mothers were talking of Mrs. Bishop and the murder. Mrs. Bishop had not been a popular or admired figure, but she had apparently been a much observed one. There was a plentiful Bishop saga. Like the time she left the baby out in the pram while she went to the cinema and he got rained on. And the time when she ran out of soap and soap flakes on a Bank Holiday (and what she did then was something Sister preferred not to listen to). And the time she lost the baby, really absolutely mislaid it. Goodness knew if the stories were true. Probably not.

“And if you ask me,” said one mother, “she wouldn’t have been at all sorry if she’d never found it again.”

“Oh surely not?” murmured Sister. “Your turn now, Mrs. Fraser.” She waited patiently while Mrs. Fraser gathered up all the odds and ends in the middle of which was little Fraser. Mrs. Fraser advanced confidently. The clock struck the half-hour and at once she sat down, grabbed a bottle of orange juice from her large bag, and popped it into Baby Fraser’s mouth.

“Sorry, Sister,” she said. “Time for his orange juice. Every six hours on the hour, for three minutes, he gets two ounces,” she said proudly. “And twelve ounces of milk every four hours in twelve minutes together with four drops of vitamin oil.” She sat there timing him with her watch and after precisely three minutes whipped out the bottle, patted his back and returned to the weighing machine.

‘What does she think she’s got there?’ thought Sister irritably, ‘A battery hen?’ But the maddening thing was that Baby Fraser put on ample weight and did well. It was true he was large and pale and quiet, and had he been a battery hen would surely have laid large white eggs, but you could hardly hold that against him. His round pale blue eyes stared through her as she weighed him. Mrs. Fraser had no questions to ask: Baby Fraser never had any problems, he drank and slept and that was, apparently, all he demanded of life. ‘Wonder if he’ll ever speak, let alone walk?’ wondered Sister.

Outside there was suddenly a wild burst of barking and shouting, and she knew that Mrs. Anderson had brought her dogs again. Sister hated dogs. She had a genuine, deep, pathological hatred of them.

Presently Mrs. Anderson burst in carrying her daughter Sarah under one arm and pulling her son Simon in a carry-cot with the other. They were twins.

“Can Bengy come in?” she panted. “I’m frightened to leave him outside, I’m afraid he might get bitten.”

“We don’t allow dogs,” said Sister.

“Bengy’s my husband” cried Mrs. Anderson indignantly.

Sister felt almost as bad about husbands as she did about dogs - had it looked practicable for human beings she would have advocated parthenogenesis - but she was obliged to extend a greater tolerance. “As long as he doesn’t smoke,” she allowed.

Unlike Mrs. Fraser with her rigid schedule, Mrs. Anderson went in for freedom and demand feedings. People said she got mixed up between her dogs and her babies and sometimes put down a dish of National Dried Milk for the terriers and fed the twins puppy meal. They did look rather like wiry, bright-eyed, little terriers as they peered up at Sister through their wrappings.

There was a tremendous barking again outside and a high scream.

“Oh dear, I’m afraid that’s Bengy,” said Mrs. Anderson. “He has got bitten.”

Mrs. Anderson’s circus was succeeded by a large quiet woman, rather old for the mother of a first baby, and whose name Sister did not immediately know.

“Storm,” said the woman agreeably. “Mrs. Storm and Mavis. You’ve got it all down on your card index,” and she nodded towards the metal box at Sister’s elbow. “You’ve got us all there, haven’t you? Names and addresses, ages and dates.”

Mrs. Storm and Mavis, Mrs. Parker with Harriet, Grandmother Hislop with Jemm (Mother was ill) all passed before Sister, and were competently dealt with. But inside, her thoughts were on a roundabout which always came swinging back to the same point. Once she caught sight of her face in the mirror above her table. There she was, trim in a white and blue uniform, with curly grey hair and plump cheeks. But there was a strained look upon it. It came to her with a start that she was looking at the face of sickness.

“You could call that a sick face,” she told herself.

“Are you all right, Sister?” asked Juliet, hurrying past on an errand.

Sister did not answer. She stood there, one hand on the card-index box and the other stretched out towards the row of medical books that Dr. May kept there on an open shelf.

A baby was crying somewhere in the clinic. There was always a baby crying somewhere. What irrational feeling could trouble a woman so used to babies and their crying. Yet she was troubled. Far away in the back of her mind she was worried by that crying.

Mary Ellen had then been absent two hours.

Juliet put on her coat, locked the door of the clinic behind her, and went off to lunch with her grandmother Lady Passey. She just caught a bus at the end of the street. The conductor was a friend of hers. She usually caught this bus. Juliet was a true Londoner. Her London was a village. She timed herself by the buses, by the faces she saw on the streets, by the delivery vans. There was a late bus and an early bus and she knew them by the people sitting on them (usually in the same seat) and they knew her.

“You’re going out to lunch,” said the conductor.

“How can you know?” Juliet was surprised.

“Got your new shoes on,” he said, eyeing her acutely. “Surprising how you notice shoes in my job. I’m surprised you find those comfortable.”

“I don’t actually,” admitted Juliet. “They look nice, though.”

“It’s the length of the toe in relation to the width,” said the conductor critically. For a man who was usually speechless, although friendly, he was being surprisingly articulate. Juliet had always judged him just a little bit slow, not one of the bright boys, but she now realised that you should never judge a man too hastily, but always be careful about passing the judgement of stupid, maybe you just haven’t hit the right subject.

“Look a bit peaky this morning, don’t you?” he went on, raising his eyes from Juliet’s feet to her face. “Way you’re hanging on to that handbag, you’d think someone was a thief.”

“I’m worried.”

“Aren’t we all? As my boy said to me this morning: Shall I sit or shan’t I? You must do as your conscience tells you, I said.”

“And did he?”

“Hasn’t come to it yet. Been postponed. Meanwhile he’s practising sitting.”

“Do you have to practise?”

“It doesn’t come by nature. It’s an art. You’ve got to do it the right way. Got to know how to hang soft when you’re carried off. Some can do it, some can’t. That’s why actors are best. That and not being shy, of course.

“Supposing we are all going to be ghosts?” He shrugged. “We shall be innocent ghosts.”

But Juliet, whose worries at this moment were sharp, private and personal, and not cosmic, thought he had curious ideas about the purifying effects of death by violence. Was Mrs. Cox’s ghost innocent? She slumped down in her seat, not a bit cheered by the conversation. She gripped her handbag fiercely.

Her recently widowed grandmother was giving her a picnic lunch in her own flat. Juliet was there first and wandered round the flat, into which her grandmother had just moved, and which was still very new to her, gazing and enjoying. There was something soothing and yet refreshing to the spirit about the gaiety and optimism with which Lady Passey had furnished her flat.

Juliet could see the lunch-table already laid with pate de Joie gras from Strasbourg (by courtesy of Messrs. Fortnum and Mason, Gran’s decor evoked powerfully theatrical phrases), cold turkey and bowls of fruit; a splendid picnic, but everything was a picnic to Lady Passey unless served by at least one servant.

The curtains, the wallpapers, the pale un-darkened wood of the furniture all cried out that life, come what may, was for the living. It was the very antithesis of the ghost-ridden bus-conductor and much more congenial to Juliet. Lady Passey’s ghost, if ever she had one, would be immensely knowledgeable, and extremely worldly and really, hardly dead.

Juliet ate a grape, kicked off her shoes and sank back into a pale but gorgeous chaise-longue.

Her grandmother saw her from the door.

“Sorry to be late, love. I had an appointment.” (Lady Passey always did have an appointment. The day she didn’t would be the day of her death.) “Besides, it is Madrigal’s day off.” Madrigal was the chauffeur - a word pronounced by Lady Passey, archaically, as the ‘shover.’

“You could take a taxi.”

“Oh no. I never take taxis. They’re much too expensive. No, there was nothing for it, but tottering along on my own old pins.”

“Gran, your language.”

Lady Passey sighed. “Oh yes, I’m a reservoir of out-of-date slang.” She went over to a charming gilt mirror, the gift of her difficult divorced daughter Isobel, and stared at her pink and white complexion. Juliet looked over her shoulder. Together, they stared solemnly at their reflections. Lady Passey with her carefully naturalistic maquillage and Juliet with deep black lines painted round her eyes so that she looked like a pussy-cat. “Extraordinary to think, isn’t it?” said Lady Passey, “that in forty years time there’ll be a generation of grandmothers looking just as out of date with their heavy eye make-up as I do with my pink cheeks. There’s nothing so dating as fashions in make-up.”

From the mirror she saw Juliet’s shoes resting beside the chaise-longue.

“I’m glad you’ve taken off your shoes,” she said. “I’ve only just had that chaise-longue re-covered. What were you doing?”

“Resting my corns.”

Lady Passey removed her tiny feathered blue hat and made a low grumbling noise; if she had been a pekinese dog, which she much resembled except for the blue hair, it would have been a growl. “Cheltenham Ladies College, a short stint at Heathfield, the National Health System, and I get a granddaughter with corns.”

“You try nursing and you’d get corns.”

Lady Passey started to carve the turkey.

“On the contrary, it’s those shoes.” She looked at their narrow toes and high sharp heels. “Nurses’ shoes ought to be sensible shoes.”

Juliet opened her mouth but Lady Passey swept on.

“And I’ll tell you why, it’s nothing to do with good taste, it’s that sensible shoes are cheaper while frivolous shoes ought to be expensive and nurses never have any money.”

“Oh, money,” said Juliet glumly. “It’s funny how we always talk about money in our family. Start where you like, love, marriage, children, shoes, and that’s where we always get back. Money.”

“It’s because we need such a lot,” said her grandmother, “Come and have some hock, so that you’ll be tipsy for your lovely babies.” She giggled. “Besides, say what you like, it’s a genuine subject.”

Juliet drank her hock and sat down at the table beside her grandmother. She was low-spirited but not so much that she couldn’t enjoy the good food and drink.

“I remember once when!’ was your age I had a heavenly pair of shoes,” said Lady Passey dreamily. “They were pale green. I wore them on my honeymoon.”

“That would have been your third honeymoon if you were in Venice?” inquired Juliet: Lady Passey had been much married.

Her grandmother looked perplexed. “I had two Venetian honeymoons—the air there suited me so well, I was always at my best - and d’ye know, I cannot remember which it was? I remember the shoes, I remember my dress, I remember the way he bought me flowers to match, but I cannot remember the man. I cannot see his face.”

Juliet adored her grandmother’s reminiscences. She always wondered how much she made up. “You ought to put that in a book, Gran,” she murmured.

“We were very happy,” went on Lady Passey, still deep in her dream. “I remember that.”

“Oh Gran, how sad,” cried Juliet, moved in spite of herself. “It’s as if you had lost a part of yourself.”

“So I have, if you think about it,” said Lady Passey and they both stared into space, back at the young, the golden, the hasty Lady Passey who had been successively Miss Verinder, Viscountess Palemet, and Mrs. Le Wood, and apparently somewhere in between, a Principessa or had it been Contessa? No one, least of all Lady Passey, seemed to remember.

“Have some more hock,” she said, briskly changing the mood. She had observed her granddaughter, much her most favourite descendant, and judged her too thin. “Tell me, what have you got on your conscience?”

Juliet stared. “You’re too clever,” she said at last.

“My dear, at your age there is always something on your conscience.”

“Gran, I hate you when you pretend to be omniscient.”

“And as a nurse too, you must have endless opportunities to get things on your conscience,” continued her grandmother calmly.

“I’m not a real nurse,” said Juliet bitterly. “None of us are at the clinic, that’s the trouble. We’re training or retired or not clever enough or there’s something wrong with us. Even Sister, splendid as she is, would be in a big hospital in charge of proper wards, if it weren’t for her sister. We’re not real”

“Even Dr. May?”

“Oh, Dr. May, he’s real,” said Juliet swiftly.

So that’s the way it is, thought Lady Passey.

“And what about you?” she asked astringently.

“Oh no, in some ways I’m the least real of all,” said Juliet sadly. “I’m only the left-handed twin, the remainder out of two.”

“You miss your twin, don’t you?” asked her grandmother.

“More than words can say.” Juliet looked away. “There’s only half of me left.”

‘You poor child,’ thought Lady Passey. ‘You poor, poor child.’

Juliet went back to her work, comforted and supported by her good lunch and the sturdy good sense of her grandmother. She was also wearing the blue hat which Lady Passey had given her. Altogether, the bus conductor wouldn’t have known her. In any case, at Lady Passey’s expense, she arrived in a taxi.

She took off her hat and coat, covered herself with a white overall, and walked to the filing case to put away the cards they had used that morning. On an impulse she flipped through the B’s. Bandy, Bent, Bishop.

And there in place of Mrs. Bishop’s card was a little heap of torn up paper. Scraps of card. She took them out and placed them on the table before her. Delicately she stirred them with her finger-tip. Among them were other pieces of paper also, which looked as though they came from a book. She didn’t know which book, but it had been printed on good shiny paper, and had very dark clear print.

All the pieces had roughly the same thin curving shape as if they had been torn rhythmically and with pleasure.

Juliet looked at them; she was deeply disturbed. There was something very troubling about the scraps and the manner in which they had been torn. They posed a question, and very likely gave the answer too, if you could see it.

Across the room she heard Sister on the telephone.

“Mrs. Sarson? Is Mary Ellen there? No. She isn’t. Hasn’t been here for hours. Mrs. Sarson, I don’t know where Mary Ellen is.”

Mary Ellen had one great immediate wish when she closed the clinic door behind her, and that was never to open it again. Like most great passions it was probably going to be frustrated. She stood on the step for a moment, buttoning up her coat and putting on her black woollen gloves. She too had noticed Juliet’s new shoes and had even found the energy to wish she had a pair like them. It was extraordinary, Mary Ellen found, how many different streams of thought your mind could contain. No one, she knew, could call her a great brain, but she could think of at least three different important subjects at once. She felt a quiet pride in herself. There was a boy standing across the road, and Mary Ellen noticed him too. She looked at him from under her eyelashes and wished she could think of some way of getting to know him. So that made yet a fourth channel in her capacious mind. Capacious, she liked that word. It was a good word for a nurse. Nurses should be capable and capacious. ‘Mary Ellen is capable.’ Surely that had been written on one of her school reports? ‘Capable of what,’ Dad had asked. Perhaps he meant it as a joke, perhaps he didn’t. You never could tell with Dad. Or Mary Ellen couldn’t. Presumably Mummy could, or had once been able to, or there would never have been a marriage.

Mary Ellen crossed the road but by this time the boy had gone. Probably he wouldn’t have looked so good close to, which was something else Mary Ellen noticed, people and things were quite often better seen from a distance. She shivered a little, there were certain things she could do with being some distance from right now. She began to walk a little faster.

At the main road she was faced with a decision. If she went one way, the most direct to the Police Station where presumably she was bound, then she passed in front of her own house. If she went the longer route she would have to wind through the back streets and through Leopold Gardens itself. She didn’t fancy Leopold Gardens. She had at the same time a terrible desire to go there. The desire to approach and the desire to hide were of equal force. However, she had an errand to do.

She turned decisively towards the main roads and the shops. There was a row of small shops along the main road, all of them known to Mary Ellen, and most of them, unfortunately, knowing her too. It was even possible she would see her mother shopping among them. But her mother had a part-time job at the local school and with any luck was already handing out bottles of milk and stopping the smaller children pouring milk over themselves. There was a family resemblance about the jobs the family chose. Mary Ellen worked with babies, her mother helped at school meal-times, her father drove an omnibus.

They liked ministering to people. They were also realists, only in Mary Ellen did fantasy occur.

Mary Ellen stopped for one fleeting second to stare in the shoe shop at a pair of shoes exactly like Juliet’s. It wasn’t an expensive shoe shop, but it was a little above Mary Ellen’s reach just at the moment, with all the calls she had upon her purse. ‘Lucky thing,’ she thought, but not greedily, she admired Juliet too much to envy her. Juliet stood for something in Mary Ellen’s life. She was a standard to be aimed at, something Mary Ellen perhaps could be if she tried hard enough.

The door of the shoe shop opened and Mary Ellen hastily moved on. But she had been seen. The woman assistant, coming out to clean the window and also to see if there was anything interesting to pick up about the murder, recognised her by her coat, which having been worn first by Mrs. Sarson and then by Mary Ellen was well enough known in the road. By now it had taken on the very shape of the family figure.

Three shops farther down the road, going towards the bridge, was a large, dark, cavernous drapery-store where you could still buy corsets that laced up the back, and thick cotton stockings, with even stouter feet looking rather like pale, pink sausages. The shop was owned by a family called Boxer, who knew their market and catered for it ruthlessly. Mary Ellen chose it now because it was a shop she hardly ever used (although her grandmother had done) and because it was so dark she reckoned they would never see her face anyway.

Inside, leaning her hands on the dark brown counter, she felt unaccountably shy. She rested her eyes on the rolls of cottons and calicos on the shelves behind, dimly illuminated by one small, electric bulb high up in the ceiling. At the back of the shop, in a corner even dimmer than the rest, the real business was being conducted. As well as being a draper’s shop, Boxer’s was a pawnbroker’s, and although no one these days could call their trade magnificent, still it was steady. And it suited their customers to plunge respectably through bloomers and stockings and haberdashery towards their transactions. “Popping in to Boxer’s” had a peculiar, and not at all discreditable local meaning. Anyone might pop into Boxer’s. They always popped out again and Boxer’s never did them any harm. Coffin had never popped into Boxer’s himself, because policemen can’t, although once or twice he had certainly wished he could, but he knew all about it and was on good terms with the family. More than once they had given him information he could use.

Mary Ellen coughed, hoping that someone would come to serve her. Rosemary Boxer, the youngest of the family, came quietly towards her; the whole family seemed to be born with soft feet, low voices, and apparently, short sight.

Rosemary smiled at Mary Ellen. They were about the same age.

“I want a little woollen jacket for a baby.”

“Oh yes, a matinée jacket,” said Rosemary. “We have several sorts. How old is the baby?”

“Oh, middling,” said Mary Ellen cautiously, if unprofessionally. “Just let me see a few, will you?”

Rosemary silently produced box after box of jackets, some pale blue, some pale pink, some delicately embroidered with flowers, little lambs, rabbits, some having ‘Baby’ written in chain stitch across the front. Rosemary did not care for them herself, she had every intention of departing from the family business as rapidly as possible and squeezing herself into a couture house, but meanwhile she recognised the excellent training she was receiving.

“Here you are,” she said with a faint smile. She felt sure Mary Ellen would like them.

“I want plain white,” said Mary Ellen, not even looking at them. “Dead plain white.”

After the jacket she asked to see some dresses. Once again Rosemary produced several boxes. She opened the lids and let Mary Ellen search for herself. She had recognised her now, and knew that she worked at the Baby Clinic. Unobtrusively she withdrew her attention and began to study the French Grammar she had under the counter: she foresaw already that her business would take her to France.

Mary Ellen had extracted a plain white cotton dress. Next she bought a bonnet and mittens. Everything she chose was white, snow white and clean.

“They are for a present,” said Mary Ellen, aware the girl at the counter was now looking at her with curiosity, with more curiosity than an older Boxer woman would have allowed herself. “For a present,” she repeated. “A placatory present,” she might have said, had the word been part of her vocabulary. “White, clean,” she went on almost to herself.

There was something a little unnerving in the way Mary Ellen chose white, white, white. Rosemary was an imaginative girl, out of the common run of Boxers; she would not have thought of couture else.

“Is this baby dead, miss?” she whispered.

Mary Ellen left the Boxers’ shop in good spirits. Things after all, were going well. As her spirits lifted she started to hum a little tune. She swung round, preparing to cross the road.

And there, over the road, just about to step off the pavement and cross to the traffic island in the middle she saw her, the other one.

For a moment she stared and the other one stared back. There she was, foot outstretched to cross the road, wearing a darkish coat with a nurse’s uniform peeping underneath, the simulacrum of Mary Ellen.

“Hi!” called Mary Ellen, oblivious of the stares of the other people passing by. “Who are you?”

Then the traffic surged between them and when Mary Ellen looked again, she was gone.

Maty Ellen called out because she wanted the reassurance of hearing her speak.

But the fetch cannot speak. It must remain forever silent. If it had a voice at all then it would be an echo.

If you wanted to frighten a girl like Mary Ellen then a double, a fetch, a doppelgänger would be an imaginative way of doing it.

So little would really be needed in the way of equipment - a girl, a nurse’s uniform, a coat, a parcel.

Mary Ellen turned aside into the old cemetery of St. Bride’s Church and sat on a bench there, hunched over her parcel, breathing heavily. She felt sick.

Mary Ellen was no fool. She had a solid streak of shrewdness, especially about her own interests. What was happening to her was unnatural, monstrous, terrifying.

But mingled with her fears was scepticism. A human agency was behind what she saw. Someone was trying something on her. As she had anyway a mild development of persecution mania she soon arrived at the answer what that was. Intimidation. Someone was trying to intimidate her. What name could she tie on the label? Mrs. Bishop? Sister? Her mind cast around the solutions. Seated here in the quiet sunshine she felt calmer at last.

St. Bride’s cemetery was no longer used for burying. The newest grave was dated 1860; it was now a pleasant walled garden where sparrows and pigeons and seagulls from the river hovered around the typists and office boys sitting eating their sandwich lunches.

It was a quiet backwater protected by the grey stone walls of St. Bride’s at one end and the high walls of the Biscuit Factory at the other.

Mary Ellen sat on a stone bench and stared up at the red brick wall with the inscription ’The Best Biscuits in the World’ painted on it in white paint, but not seeing it, any more than she saw what a waggish hand had scrawled underneath: ‘We make ’em. You eat ’em.’

Mary Ellen knew the biscuit factory, everyone did; it was the largest and most benevolent employer in the neighbourhood. Most of the local factories were small employers, with often no more than a dozen workers -clothing manufacturers, turning out cheap women’s and children’s dresses; toy makers; producers of cheap scents and powders. The biscuit factory was large, hygienic and famous. Local girls liked working there because the pay and conditions were so good, but it was very impersonal and you couldn’t get worked up about producing ginger snaps; so they oscillated between there and the grubby cosiness of the smaller factories where the cups of tea were stronger and you knew all the gossip. Mary Ellen had very nearly taken a job in the biscuit factory herself; all the girls she went to school with worked there, but from the Sarsons’ point of view there were drawbacks to the biscuit factory: you took an aptitude test when they took you on and all the Sarsons felt it would be terribly degrading if it turned out you had no aptitude for filling custard creams.

A black cat walked in through the gate by the church. He was a plump worldly cat; an episcopalian cat. The birds ignored him: he for his part admitted their existence only by an occasional lash of his tail.

Mary Ellen watched him glumly. He looked through her. Then his eyes looked beyond her and focused, the pupils narrowing. He walked forward with a call.

Slowly Mary Ellen turned her head. Just behind her, seated as she was seated, as if in malicious mockery, was her double.

“Which of us is me?” she thought. She put her head in her hands. “The cat can’t see me, but he can see her.”

Then she forced herself to look round again. The figure was still there, sitting, just as she was sitting, head slightly turned away, so that the features were not easily to be distinguished, coat a little loose and feet squarely pointed, carrying the parcel.

But the parcel? Was there not something crucial about the parcel.

In St. Bride’s Vicarage the vicar’s wife was standing at the window enjoying the sun and looking at the autumn leaves falling from the shrubs and plane trees in the cemetery. The sight suited her present mood of mild melancholia. Down in the basement kitchen she had a beef stew simmering away. It was a beef stew sort of day - healthy and life-giving, but vaguely depressing: the stew smelt good and savoury”, it wasn’t roast pheasant and you couldn’t get round it. She had had roast pheasant in her life at one time, and sparkling wines, and caviare. One did not, she decided, regret the days of one’s youth and ‘richesse’ but, just occasionally, one regretted its flavours, and its smells. The smell of wine and rich tobaccos and good scent. She expected little amusement from her viewpoint. She studied the view with short sighted, rather soft brown eyes. Few people came to the cemetery garden in the winter. At the end, on the seat by the biscuit factory she could see a figure sitting. She could also see her own cat. She wondered idly what he was up to. He never took a walk except on business. He was probably on his way across to the canteen kitchens of the biscuit factory where, she suspected, he also ate regularly a second lunch. Probably in the canteen there they said, “That poor cat’s a stray,” whereas she knew he had a loving home with her in the Vicarage and possibly another one as well tucked away somewhere in an unsuspecting neighbour’s house. He was a cat all of whose nine lives were occupied.

The figure sitting on the seat was clearly that of a young girl, although with short sight it was not possible to make out anything more about her. She was sitting very still. Stiller, really, than was sensible in the autumn season. The stone seats were cold and damp. Even damper and colder than St. Bride’s Vicarage itself, which was saying something. In winter the water dripped off the walls and corners and ran into little drops in the furniture and carpets.

The girl got up and moved slowly away. At the gate she paused. From this distance it seemed as if she held the gate as if for a companion.

The observer moved her hand unsteadily across her eyes; she replaced her spectacles. Were there two girls or one? Two figures? One plodding behind the other?

Or was it all the way the girl had held the gate?

After her rest Mary Ellen had got up and turned towards the gate by which she had entered.

She moved unsteadily forward, head slightly bent down, the parcel clutched to her chest. There was a depressed air about her. From time to time she looked round as if she expected to be followed.

The cat was following her.

The quiet procession, if it was a procession, went slowly out through the gate and down the street.

Mary Ellen’s mother, standing at her bow window, saw a figure in a dark blue coat pass beneath. She recognised the old coat and leaned forward for a closer look. She was almost sure it was Mary Ellen. You couldn’t mistake that coat, not when you’d buttoned an old lady into it, buttoned yourself into it, and then given it deprecatingly to Mary Ellen. She was not able to explain to herself how this coat, with presumably Mary Ellen inside it, came to be walking up the road. And past the house.

‘Not even in to see me,’ she was indignant. ‘Home, because she’s not well, or forgotten something, that’s all right. But past…’

One moment she was standing there placidly eating a cold beef sandwich before rushing out to work at the school, and the next she was restless with a deep anxiety.

So three pairs of eyes had noticed Mary Ellen’s progress. The woman in the shoe shop, Rosemary Boxer and her own mother.

Mrs. Sarson went off to her work still worried, but it was not until early afternoon she was able to telephone the clinic, which she did on her way home. Alarm and fear entered into her worry then, when she discovered that her daughter had never returned. But she continued on her journey home to think over her worry.

She and Sister Goode were old friends. They had met during the War; it was the reason Mary Ellen had her job. Her mother and Sister had settled it between them. She was not ideal nurse material but they might make one out of her in spite of herself. She was keen, anyway in patches. You couldn’t expect a girl to hold to a thing all the time, but on the whole Mary Ellen, granted her sudden glooms, had been pretty steady, and for this her mother was thankful. Sister Goode had promised to look after her.

Mrs. Sarson went stolidly to the comfortable chair, where she spent her wakeful nights and sat down to analyse the situation. She was a thoughtful woman. “You’re slow, my dear, but you get there in the end,” her husband used to say. It seemed important to her to get there this time. Her husband admired her, she was the rock on which their family rested. He himself had married her because unconsciously he associated married life with a series of undermining operations in which it was all the better if one partner could withstand an attack from the world outside; he had very little resistance himself. His jokes, if anyone had cared to examine them, made this pathetically clear. He joked about human understanding, about reason, about inherited characteristics, because they were topics which he turned over and over in his mind and which he could only face on the assumption they were a joke. He had a club foot, his mother had been more than somewhat touched in the head, and his grandfather had been a dipsomaniac. “You’re taking on something in marrying me, old girl,” he had told his wife. “You haven’t any doubt that I’ll do the taking on, have you?” she had said, and that had been the basis for their relationship.

A burden consciously taken on and accepted. They had been happy and their life had been comfortable, their only misfortunes those such as the world at large was sharing, bad weather, recessions, wars. Still, he had a right to think himself a man misfortune had an eye on. He slept peacefully at night, tired by his job, and knowing he had delegated his fear; she was wakeful because of it.

As always with insomnia, it had been a slow thing growing. The rock, after all, although good rock, had more sandstone than granite in it.

Slowly she added up what really mattered. First, the murder of Mrs. Cox; second the involvement of Mrs. Bishop; thirdly the baby Bishop. The things touching Mary Ellen. She did not want to admit the association but it was forced upon her. Whether she liked it or not Mrs. Bishop knew Mary Ellen. Mrs. Bishop had, in a way, seemed to fascinate Mary Ellen. She had already telephoned Sister Goode and this had perhaps been a mistake. It might have been wiser not to have bothered Sister.

At length she got to her feet and went out to the public call box to make a telephone call to the police reporting her daughter missing. As she put down the receiver, she looked at her hand - thick, puffy with work and with an approaching disease of which she had not yet read the symptoms.

“Well, it’s out of my hands now,” she told herself, and added with wry humour, “But I wish I knew in whose hands.”

The murderer knew nobody else’s hands, nobody else’s mind, could enter into no one else’s feelings. This murderer was a person of very moderate intelligence and almost negligible experience. Liable to sudden headaches and fits of lassitude, the murderer was ill-equipped to meet the responsibilities of life. There was an incipient tendency to alcoholism which had so far only shown itself tentatively. One single, downward step had turned this character to violence, and this step was not the act of murder itself but its immediate precursor. Well hidden away in the murderer’s nature was a hatred of children, and particularly of babies. There was a baby crying somewhere not far away.

But for the moment, the murderer was safely shut up.

FOUR

Still Monday

The report about Mary Ellen was taken in by a constable on desk duty who was worried about his wife’s illness.

It was passed on to a weary sergeant who had seen many younger girls reported missing from their homes and was cynical and sceptical, and then placed in the records where it might have stagnated for ever. Something would have been done, but not enough.

Her disappearance, if that was what it was, was not immediately connected with the murder in Leopold Gardens, where there were now two bodies.

John Coffin knew that you can stand in a perfectly empty room and discover certain things about it and the people that have moved in it. People, events, emotions leave their impression on a room. A body can leave a scent, a mark, a track of blood; a hand can leave a fingerprint, a scrap of skin, can take with it a telling fragment of cloth or wood. A violent action can dislocate the usual pattern of a room and substitute its own. A secret action can shout loudly that it was there, there, there.

In this sense there are truly ghosts.

“Someone who goes through a room always takes something with him and leaves something behind,” said Coffin. Someone to him meant some criminal. He very rarely bent his mind to the consideration of innocent people and harmless behaviour. It was what Patsy Partridge, his betrothed, held most against him.

“Innocence isn’t one of the virtues with you, it’s lack of evidence,” she complained.

“No, you’re wrong there,” he answered earnestly. “If I was a criminologist (and I’m not, only a practising policeman) my view would be that no one’s innocent.”

Coffin stood now in the room where Mrs. Cox had been found dead, and where the second body had just been discovered. It was the body of a baby, its age and sex so far unknown. It was shrivelled and wizened and might have been the body of an ancient Egyptian.

The room was half basement with a window that let in some daylight and a small door that opened directly on to the street. The door was closed and bolted and looked as if it hadn’t been touched for years. By the door was a large old chest of drawers, in the bottom drawer of which the case, padded round with newspapers, had been found. The first police search, undertaken immediately upon the discovery of Mrs. Cox’s body, had missed it. Inexcusably, Coffin now felt. He had given Sergeant Stone a bad few minutes. On the wall facing it stood a cupboard. The only other substantial piece of furniture was the bed, and this was very substantial indeed. Large, wooden and solid, it occupied most of the floor space and judging by the dust underneath, had stood there for years. On the floor by this bed had been found the body of Mrs. Cox. By the bed was a small table with some food and crockery on it. The dishes were unwashed since their last using. The whole appearance of the room was desolate and cheap. There was nothing in this room which had cost money, nothing in it had been used with love and care. The Bishops had left their trace on the room - a pile of baby’s clothes, a woman’s skirt, a pot of jam, a little more dirt and dust in a room that already had plenty. There was a buff-coloured card on the floor, such cards were handed out on registration at the clinic, giving a list of times when it was open and of the things it provided like orange juice and cod liver oil. It also recorded the baby’s growth. Mrs. Bishop’s name and address was scrawled on the top in a round clear hand by Mary Ellen herself. Two similar cards had been handed out by Juliet and Sister Goode for Mrs. Bishop who had lost them in turn, as she lost everything. Mary Ellen had complained as she had provided this third card; Mrs. Bishop had watched with her pale expressionless eyes. You never saw any expression on Mrs. Bishop’s face. Probably she looked upon those she loved and those she disliked with the same face. Mrs. Bishop had spent some weeks in the house, which was one of her many addresses in the neighbourhood. The Bishops had moved around a good deal in their shiftless life, even though characteristically they had never moved out of the district which was their home. Coffin could see what they had left behind; what they had taken with them might be less easy to discover.

“What’s this?” asked Coffin, picking up the buff-coloured clinic card.

The sergeant was a family man. He knew the Bird-in-the-Cage Street Clinic. Mrs. Stone had been a regular attender.

“Cards given out as a normal thing,” explained the sergeant. “This is a replacement - see he pointed to a figure 3 pencilled in one corner. “She’d had two before. As a matter of fact this one was handed out on the morning of the murder.” The sergeant had already been on the telephone.

“Well, ask them if they’re sure she took it with her,” said Coffin. The sergeant made a note.

“Can’t have anything to do with the child we’ve found, can it?” said Coffin thoughtfully. “Or can it? Well, we shall know more about that when the doctor has had a look. I wonder how many babies die in London without us knowing anything about it? How many are dead and undiscovered this minute? Always one or two more than we guess, I’ll reckon.” He needed to know much more about the dead child before he could begin to work out what place it had in the murder of Mrs. Cox. It was possible there was no connection at all.

He turned back to study the room, the problem of the baby carried all the time in his mind.

“They lived in a poor way,” said Coffin. He was turning over the scraps of food left behind, the small packet of butter, the bag of tea, the pot of jam, all bought in tiny quantities and of the very lowest quality.

“They aren’t so very hard up,” said Sergeant Stone, “but they don’t waste any on gracious living.”

“What do they waste it on?” asked Coffin.

For answer Sergeant Stone raised his elbow. “And the gee-gees, and the dogs. The man anyway. And she was feckless, just as likely to buy a new skirt as the meat for dinner.”

Coffin examined the skirt. “Yes, it’s a new one.” He felt in the pockets. In one was a folded piece of paper “The bill for the skirt. Cost her two pounds.” There was something scrawled on it. “Can you read it?”

Stone bent over it. “Alteration. Jacket to be called for.”

“What’s the date?”

“Ten days ago,” said Stone after a further examination.

“If it’s not been collected and if she calls for it we’ve got her,” said Coffin, “If she calls. Would you, Stone?”

“No,” said the sergeant. “But I’m not Mrs. Bishop.

She might. Anyway I’ll get on to the shop.” He went to the door and shouted out to a constable. Then he turned back to Coffin. “It’s better than nothing. You realise we’ve no real description of this pair, nothing reliable. They could be anywhere, called anything by this time.”

“Yes,” said Coffin thoughtfully. “We shall get a proper description though, in time. They are known. They didn’t live in a vacuum. We can build something up.” He was building a little house from scraps of cardboard that someone had left on the floor, patiently he erected a little fort, it collapsed, he started again. “It’s a very, very funny picture, not at all obvious to my mind, but we shall piece things together. We shall make something of it.”

The scraps of paper were torn in long curving strips.

Coffin got to his feet. For the moment he wanted to leave the room, which was forming one great question mark in his mind.

“I’m going to make a call. Leave the room as it is. Especially the bed. Leave the bed.”

At the door he turned to look again at the bed with its grubby blankets and tumbled sheets. Yes, there was something there all right. His first impression was reinforced and added to, more, it was already influencing his actions.

He turned left at the front door, crossed the road and rang the bell at the house of Mrs. Gater. The door was opened by John Tessimond.

“Upstairs,” he said with a nod. “They’re waiting for you.”

“They’re expecting me?” said Coffin, surprised.

“You didn’t think you could have a murder in Leopold Gardens and get away without seeing Mrs. Gater and family, did you? You can’t have a natural death here without them officiating, let alone an unnatural one.”

He did not look as light-spirited as he sounded, his face was strained and tired. “Go easy on the old one,” he murmured. “She don’t mean any harm, she’s forgotten what the police are these days, and I really think she’ll be handing in her cards any day.” He had his shirt sleeves rolled up, as if he had been working. There was a tiny speck of blood on one white sleeve.

“What have you been doing?”

“Busman’s holiday,” said young Tessimond, looking back over his shoulder as they went up the stairs. “Damned cat had to have a Caesarean. And talking of busmen, I was a busman once for a week and it was the hardest week’s work I ever did.” He paused for breath.

“You’re talking altogether too much,” observed Coffin mildly. “Calm down, boy, I won’t arrest you for a little bit of blood on a sleeve.”

Tessimond stopped short and stared at him.

Coffin put his hand on his shoulder. He was quite a bit taller and a good deal sturdier. “I’ve known the Gaters and families like them for over thirty years. They don’t have female cats. They have doctored toms. They don’t like the mess, you see.”

“You are a detective,” said the young man slowly. “I was wrong, and they were right.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” went on Coffin, with grim amusement. “That blood’s too recent to have come off old Mrs. Cox. Too red, too new. And you a doctor too.”

They looked at each other. “So, no cat, no Mrs. Cox. But the blood’s not really my affair. Or I hope not.”

Tessimond turned his back on Coffin and opened the door on the narrow landing. The house was precisely the twin of Mrs. Cox’s establishment but cleaner and with a character all its own. A distinct medicinal smell hung over everything, made up of a good, strong, washing carbolic soap, with a tincture of disinfectant and a suspicion of chloroform. It was chloroform.

“Good lord, what have you been doing?” asked Coffin.

“I was telling the truth about the cat,” said the young man irritably. “You forget, they don’t hold with birth control in this house. Here he is, Mrs. Gater.”

Coffin found himself in a room which at once seemed distantly familiar. He supposed he must once have been here long ago. He was facing Mrs. Gater who was seated, rather like a spruced-up Whistler’s mother, in a low chair by the gas fire, and by slightly turning his head he could see Mrs. Prink and Miss Prink. The atmosphere in the room was heavy and stuffy with the smells of medicine and eau-de-cologne, and the fumes from the gas fire. The three women stared at him sombrely. But with gratitude he realised that they were on the same side as he was. Their code had been outraged. He had no doubt whatever they could condone many things (he had long thought that they covered up a good many tragedies that came their way), but they did not condone murder.

He also realised how right he was to call. They were the sovereigns of Leopold Gardens; protocol demanded that he wait upon them.

“I’ve called to ask you what you can tell me about the Bishops,” he began. “I can’t get any real picture of them. How old were they, do you know?”

The two older women looked at Miss Prink. “Maggy knows best,” said Mrs. Gater. “She went in there once or twice to look at the child, Mrs. Bishop had trouble with him.”

“Had she?” asked Coffin. “When did you last see the child?”

“I haven’t been in for some weeks,” said Margaret Prink. “But she is a funny woman. Doesn’t really like help. She asks for it and then ignores it. As if she wanted to know what to do, but couldn’t do it. Perhaps she tries, I don’t know. She was a little old to have a first baby,” she added suddenly. “If it was a first baby of course, I don’t really know. She could have had six for all I know. And left them scattered round the country.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Coffin thoughtfully, thinking that he might try the L.C.C. Child Care Service for information about the Bishops (provided they always used the name Bishop). There might be some trace of prosecution for child neglect.

“They already had this one child when they came to Leopold Gardens?”

Miss Prink nodded. “They had been living not far away though, for I knew her face. I think you’ll find they’ve lived in the district all their lives.”

Coffin nodded. “Yes, that ought to help. A photograph would help more, though. You haven’t got one?”

“No, of course not. Why should we?”

“What about the husband? Anything there?”

“I never saw much of him,” admitted Margaret Prink. “He’s a casual labourer at the docks and never did much of that. Spends most of his time in bed.”

A certain picture was emerging of the Bishops. He still wouldn’t be able to point them out in a crowd, but certain attributes were appearing. They were lazy, they were not clever: there were thousands like them.

“Mrs. Cox was friendly with them,” said Mrs. Prink bitterly. “She even liked Mrs. Bishop, or anyway the baby.”

“Ah yes, the baby,” said Coffin rather sadly. “Odd, isn’t it (or is anything in human nature odd?) the way she clung to the Baby Clinic, the only regular thing in her life?”

Margaret Prink considered.

“Well, it is odd, and yet it isn’t. It’s a source of free goods. She likes something for nothing does Mrs. Bishop. So does Mr. Bishop. And then she looked for authority, you see, she disliked it. She’s lazy, but she felt the need of someone over her giving orders. She’s helpless on her own and she knows it. She might ignore the orders but she wanted them given.”

“Well, don’t we all?” said Coffin. He got up to go.

The woman was still talking.

“The clinic had some sort of attraction or hold for her,” she said thoughtfully. “Yes, certainly. There was something there.”

Coffin could mark out certain outlines in the story of the Bishops now. A sad little story in some ways. Not one due for a happy ending anyway. Wherever the Bishops had come from before their mating they had probably come from a roughly similar environment - and they had promptly set about re-creating it. It’s odd, thought Coffin, give a person a home, give him a bad home and in seven cases out of ten, that’s the sort of home they go out and buy for themselves. So the Bishops had been children from poor, possibly criminal homes. No one had looked after them much so they didn’t look after their child, no one had organised their lives, so they never were organised. No crime in this, but he would swear that there was already a history behind them of debts and misdemeanour’s and petty crimes.

What had turned this shiftless unlucky couple into murderers?

Money? The lure of Mrs. Cox’s little hoard of money? Yes, possibly, and to this extent Mrs. Cox had helped her own death. But there was something more. The baby?

The room, that objective witness, was shaping itself powerfully to suggest that other factor. The most important piece of furniture in the room was the bed. Mrs. Cox’s dead body had been found by it. Coffin stared at it again, testing his eyes to see if they really saw what he thought he saw. It appeared to come through even more clearly in the photographs that had been speedily developed, other people had to be convinced. He tried to batten it down, leave it to the sorting out processes going on inside his mind, but instead it rose up uncontrollably.

Criminologists had dealt with the phenomenon he believed he saw. Policemen are not often criminologists, except in a practical way, but Coffin was an exception. He had lately taken a short course at the Institute of Criminology. He had found it interesting and absorbing, and also more difficult and tricky than in his pride he liked to admit. Most of the rest of the group with whom he worked were doctors, psychologists or lawyers. He was the only policeman. Something wrong there, he had thought. He himself was becoming known as a specialist in off-beat murders. It was a reputation he savoured wryly, not quite sure if he liked it or not. He could not escape the feeling that it must be some quality in himself that attracted him to the study of such crimes. He had already observed that many psychologists had personal reasons for seeking the truths they sought. It made him wonder too, whether Patsy wasn’t right somehow to look critically at him as a prospective husband. Would you want a husband who was deep in the seamy side of life? But other husbands had uncomfortable information and knew that the numbness in your right arm meant that you were doomed for a protracted death scene, or that the smell rising from the basement was sewer gas hot rats. Doctors and labourers could be equally uncosy. Earnest, and sometimes perplexed by his own capacities for thought and emotion, he had enough of his mother’s solid common sense to know that the way to move forward was to place one foot in front of the other and walk. Patsy would come round or the whole thing would break up. Either way life would move on. So he studied criminology, unconsciously following what was really strongest in him.

He had read of a bed like this one in Hamburg, seen a photograph of a certain couch in Milan, had been shown such tumbled sheets in Salford. He knew pretty well the significance of what he was looking at. Knew what it was, and what it probably meant.

Every criminal brings something to the room where he commits his crime, and leaves something behind.

This one had left behind the impression of a body on the bed. In deep sleep had lain down there after the act of murder.

It was rum, to say the least of it.

On the table lay the little heap of torn-up paper.

Coffin took no food and made no break but worked right through from his arrival to early afternoon. He did not leave the house again after his visit to Mrs. Gater. Sergeant Stone brought him a sandwich from the cooked meat shop at the corner but the rest of the time he stayed there, with the men who were photographing, measuring, and searching in a lunatic kind of housework. He was aware of the uneasy presence upstairs of Mr. Undershot, whose room also had been searched and surveyed.

It was almost dark before Coffin was ready to leave. By this time it was established that if Mrs. Cox had kept her savings in the house then they were there no longer.

“I suppose that’s the real motive,” said Coffin thoughtfully. “Wonder how much it would be. Any idea, Mr. Undershot?” He watched him carefully.

Mr. Undershot shook his head uneasily. “Maybe a few hundred pounds,” he suggested. “Maybe less?” He wouldn’t commit himself to any positive knowledge and in this Coffin sympathised with him.

‘Be like a fortune to the Bishops, probably felt they could buy the earth with it,’ he thought - and then of course, there was the baby, the dead baby, and the probable discovery of it by Mrs. Cox.

The police doctor who had been summoned to examine Mrs. Cox earlier that day had been brought back to see the baby where it lay. He was a robust matter-of-fact man, not of the first crack as a doctor perhaps, but excellent as a police surgeon. In the district where he worked he was much feared. He could be cold and unsympathetic, even the injured got from him only the routine gentleness of his trade. “Too many dead people,” Coffin had thought once as he looked at him, “too many rapes, too many suicides, too much violence.” In the end, he too would be like it himself, and this was perhaps how Patsy saw him now: a man lessened by his trade. This thought had been his particularly after a night in which he had seen both the victim and the aggressor in a crime of violence brought in one after the other, the one dead, the other drunk. ‘You are not the better,’ he had thought then, ’for knowing all this, nor the same, but worse.’ Ignorance is, after all, in some measure innocence. Between him and Juliet’s bus conductor there was a bond.

The doctor came in now, he had his coat on ready to go.

“Well?” said Coffin.

“Making a guess I should say the child died from natural causes. No signs of asphyxiation or strangulation. Not dead sure, but I should say it just gave up the struggle. Can’t say I blame it.

“It’s mummified of course: owing to the peculiar conditions in which it was kept. There must have been a draught. Explains how they were able to carry it round with them without complaint.”

He departed as indifferent as he had come, leaving Coffin and Sergeant Stone alone.

“A very commonplace crime,” said the sergeant.

“Is it?” Coffin was very angry. That was the worst of the Stone connection; thoroughly commonplace themselves, they saw life in commonplace terms. “Is it commonplace that a human being was cut off before it had any chance to realise any of its potentialities? Before it had a chance to become what it might become. We can’t even tell if this little object was male or female. Supposing it had happened to Shakespeare or Harvey or Einstein?”

The sergeant remained unmoved. He had never heard of Harvey or the circulation of the blood, and what he had heard of Einstein persuaded him that it would have been better if nuclear physics had never been invented and if matter had remained inert.

“Get two or three of ’em in a year,” he said. “Anyway I don’t reckon he was going to be a Shakespeare.”

“Get both those bodies moved now,” said Coffin. “I want to know how and when they both died. Especially when.” He turned away so that he should not look at the sergeant. Of course it was unlikely that anyone born of Bishop this year of grace in the Borough of Southwark was going to be memorable, no blue plaque on the wall to mark where he was born, no place in history, only in the police records. But it was the waste, in which the sergeant’s denial of its importance also shared, which rankled with Coffin. “Do you have to be six feet tall, an Indo-European, and with a red nose to be worth preserving?” he muttered. The sergeant looked surprised. “It’s just possible the baby anyway died a natural death,” went on Coffin in a low voice.

“And that would be better?” asked the sergeant; perhaps he was cleverer than he looked.

“No. Not better, but less culpable.”

At this point he began to think about the story he had heard from his mother, absorbed, and found vaguely interesting and put away. As if on a conveyor belt it moved to the top of his mind.

“Wait a minute…I heard a story about Mrs. Bishop and her baby. Something about the Clinic in Bird-in-the-Cage Street.” He paused, remembering it all. “We want this girl Mary Ellen Sarson. Get hold of her, will you, and find out what she does really seem to have seen. There may be something in it.”

Before he left the house, which was to be locked for the night, with a uniformed constable on guard, Coffin went back to the front basement room. He took a last look round the room, at the bed, now stripped, its bedclothes borne off to the forensic laboratory, at the table by the bed with its food and debris. He went back to the little heap of curled paper, torn by angry fingers. He looked at it thoughtfully. Then carefully he put it into an envelope and into his pocket.

Back at the station, he discovered for the first time that Mary Ellen had been reported missing.

“A telephone call?” he queried, his eyes on the clock. “Only a telephone call? She was gone this morning, as far as we know, her mother calls at two-fifty precisely. No one tells me, the mother does nothing else. Why wasn’t she round here?” He looked at the clock. “Nearly six. Why hasn’t she been round here since?” He asked the question again. “Why didn’t the mother make more fuss?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Had her reasons.”

“No. It’s odd.” Coffin had an idea. “Investigate. See if we have this girl on our records.” And in this way Mary Ellen moved ambiguously into the foreground, and the case flowered into its strange mathematical complexity. It was part of an arithmetical progression which had started twelve years ago and conformed to its own laws.

Coffin was sitting quietly in his office turning over his day’s letters and waiting for a telephone call from Patsy (her new play opened that evening), and when Sergeant Stone came in he was looking lugubriously pleased.

“You were right,” he said. “I don’t see how you got on to it, but you were right.” He always showed an unflattering surprise if Coffin revealed the least understanding of human nature. “We have got the girl, Mary Ellen Sarson, on our books.”

Coffin put down his letters and forgot about Patsy.

“We have? What for?”

The sergeant paused a bit to make his effect.

“She’s been missing before. Went off about eighteen months ago. Mother reported her missing then. I thought I remembered the name.”

“Did we get her back?”

“No. Came back on her own. Turned out she’d been staying in a Y.W.C.A. hostel. Very respectable.”

“How long was she away?”

The sergeant consulted his notes. “Three and a half weeks.”

Coffin pondered. “Not long. Do know we why she went?”

“We do not. Family quarrel maybe or she wanted to be an actress. They didn’t say and we didn’t ask apparently. Not on our report anyway.”

“Who did the work?”

Sergeant Stone had another look: “Mason, sir.—”

“I’d like to see Mason. Is he around?”

Detective Constable Mason was interested. “Oh yes, I remember that case all right. We never got anywhere at all.”

“You never do, do you?” said Coffin. He knew the statistics about missing girls.

“Not often. Give us time and we will, of course, something will come up. Salvation Army’s often a big help. But that’s the usual run of cases.”

“And this wasn’t?”

Mason shrugged. “It was usual in as much as she’d gone off on her own free will. I don’t go for these abduction cases. The kids often say that’s what’s happened, but that’s afterwards when trouble’s coming and Mum’s coming for them with a hatchet. Most of the people I have to find wouldn’t be too pleased if I found them when they were only just starting out.”

“You must have been given some explanation about why she’d cleared off?” said Coffin irritably.

Mason shrugged. “Oh well, she did say, that is the Mother said, she was frightened because she was in bad with some teacher at school. But I didn’t believe that myself.”

“Oh?”

“No, and I’ll tell you why: she’s been missing before.”

“You mean she makes a habit of it?”

“No,” Mason leaned forward, “just something I remembered. I live locally, you know. Got its drawbacks, but it’s got its uses too. I remember my wife telling me the tale about a little kid that went off from school round about one Christmas time. The same girl - she’s got something in her makes her take off. When she’s scared or upset, out she goes.”

Coffin frowned.

“Out she goes,” repeated Coffin, there was a sort of vividness to this phrase he didn’t enjoy. He thought of Mary Ellen dropping everything, fleeing from her mother, whom by all accounts she loved, and wandering off, driven out by a fear that she knew perhaps to be irrational but out of her control.

He shook his head. It still wasn’t quite right. He looked at Stone, he was satisfied about Mary Ellen, he looked at Detective Oswald Mason, he had made up his mind it was all right.

Coffin felt a residue of worry. The mother was a good mother. What other loyalties were on her mind?

Tom Sarson sat dozing in his chair having just come off work. His wife lay back on the opposite side of the fire. She too seemed to sleep. She stirred, muttering, then she woke her husband up.

“Oh Bertie, you do know, my real love, real loyalties are always with you and Mary Ellen.”

Puzzled, not quite awake, he was confused. “Course they are, love,” he said trying to comfort her.

“But there are other things.”

She was a woman, not clever, but with real intellectual convictions. She knew that principles were, in the end, what you lived by. Her father, a Trade Unionist of the old school, had brought her up in this creed.

FIVE

Monday 4.30 p.m. and Early Evening

Towards the end of the day, as the late-afternoon light faded from the sky, Mrs. Sarson roused herself and did what she should have done before: she went up to Mary Ellen’s room. Her husband was still sleeping off the fatigue of having done an early turn of work. He would slumber there until she woke him for his tea, then he would stagger up to bed to sleep again. He was as worried as she was, but it didn’t stop him sleeping. Sometimes she asked herself if that -wasn’t why she suffered from insomnia, the way all her family dropped asleep as soon as they had eaten.

The house was very still and empty and slightly grubby. She hadn’t done much housework today, what with her job which was helping serve the dinner at the local infants school, and Mary Ellen. And as luck would have it her job had been particularly exacting. Monday was always difficult. Or perhaps it was just that she was extra tired. She had ended up with a pool of spilt custard, a crying child, and a splitting headache. She still had the headache; it was rumbling away faintly in the background just enough to keep her from forgetting herself. Not that there was very much danger of her forgetting herself, she felt now as if every experience she had ever had, everything she had ever said or done, was hanging round her neck like an albatross. She was weighted down with herself, heavier than lead. In spite of the fact that she was a brave woman she felt near to tears.

Mary Ellen’s room was tidy. The girl must have done all her usual tasks before leaving it. The bed was made, the coverlet neat over the eiderdown. The dressing-table had been dusted and the runner on it straightened. She went over and looked in the drawers. These were in their usual chaos. Mary Ellen’s tidiness was only superficial, underneath there was usually confusion. “Muck and muddle,” sighed Mrs. Sarson. But if Mary Ellen wasn’t ill or under a stress of some sort then she kept up the appearance of order.

There was a pile of fashion magazines by the bed, some of which Mary Ellen had bought, and some of which Juliet, her friend, had given her. One book in particular was much fingered with a page of coloured photographs marked with a piece of ribbon. On this page was a picture of a girl wearing a blue silk coat. Juliet had once said idly that this model reminded her of Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen was now saving up to buy a blue silk coat. She kept her money and her savings book in a little tin box in the drawer of the bed table. Mary Ellen liked her valuables around her while she slept.

Her mother picked up the book, and straightened the ribbon gently. Usually she felt resentful and cross at her child’s absorption in the trashy magazines. The blood of her Trade Unionist father ran strong at such times and words like opiates and soporifics rose to her mind.

She hesitated before opening the drawer and taking out the money-box. She feared what she would find. Without looking, she fumbled for the box and put in her hand. The box felt empty of money - it should have contained nearly eight pounds.

You had to hand it to Mary Ellen: she made her preparations. It was at moments like this that Mrs. Sarson felt she hated the whole human race.

She did not think of Mary Ellen as lost in London. She thought of Mary Ellen as running through a tunnel. In her mind she saw her silhouetted against shining white walls with a light at the end. Deep in her mind she recognised it as the Blackwall tunnel which she had crossed often herself as a girl from Greenwich to Poplar. But in her picture, Mary Ellen was always running and always no nearer the light. Her Mary Ellen never got out of the tunnel. It was a symbol. It was a worrying symbol; she knew it, and it did not help.

Slowly she sat down, put the box on her lap and examined it. Then she saw that she had been mistaken; the money was not gone, or not all of it, four pound notes and two ten-shilling notes remained. Only the silver had gone. Rapidly she calculated it would have been about fifty shillings.

She drew her brows together in a solid frown. Why was it worse that Mary Ellen had taken only a little money?

It was very unlike Mary Ellen to raid her precious savings for casual spending. She was tough about money was Mary Ellen. She calculated every last halfpenny, weighing up what a thing was worth to her.

Now she began to ask herself: Mary Ellen was afraid? All right. She was running? Very well. As she had done before? Correct. But suppose Mary Ellen was not running from someone but to someone? She rolled the thought round in her mind, conscious she had a grain of truth but unable to work it out. It was a terrible thing to be a mother from whom your children ran.

The figure of Mrs. Bishop, ambiguous and sinister, formed in her mind.

She sat in her chair and, reverting to a trick of her childhood, started to bite her nails. One eyebrow twitched nervously. The noise of traffic penetrated the room but did not disturb her. The door bell rang. She waited. It was probably Sister Goode. She went to the door.

“Tell Sister to come up,” she called.

After a moment’s pause her husband came to the foot of the stairs.

“Come down, will you, Alice?” he said. “Quickly, will you?”

Then she remembered that in spite of her preoccupation she had heard a car stop. Sister did not own a car; she cycled. Mrs. Sarson ran to the window and looked out. There it was at the kerb, black and neat. It was a police car.

Now she couldn’t get downstairs quick enough.

Juliet, left alone, desolately went about the task of clearing up and putting away at the end of the clinic day. Sister had slipped away early, saying she had business, but it hadn’t mattered as it normally would have done because very few mothers had come in, and these had shown a definite desire to hang together, not be left alone either with Sister or Juliet, and get the whole business over and be off. The day had started normally enough, although later they had missed the willing, if heavy hands and services of Mary Ellen. But after lunch when the rumours started to build up, accompanied by a sharp decrease in attendance, then the very emptiness and comparative quiet began to unnerve Juliet. It was abnormal. The afternoon had been a depressing one.

She stared morosely out of the window as she washed out a hand towel and hung it out. Mary Ellen usually did this job. Fidgeting, she took the towel down and washed it out again. Not clean. Mary Ellen could give it a good soak when she got back.

If she got back.

Juliet thought about it. She put on her bright tweed coat (a present from Lady Passey) and put on her smart uncomfortable shoes. Then she took them off and threw them into the corner. In addition to all else her dream about young Dr. May had gone disastrously wrong. Worse, it had completely disappeared. She had been forced to the conclusion that it had never really existed. It had been a little imaginary upstart, a trouble to everyone.

“But an interesting upstart,” thought Juliet. “I liked to think he loved me, and was just too busy, too hard pressed to get around to expressing it. And the truth is he was just busy.” She picked up her shoes and put them on.

Dr. May didn’t love her, couldn’t love her, couldn’t love anybody properly. He put his work above everything. Juliet looked at the row of books that he kept at the clinic and resisted a savage desire to set upon them and tear them up. She giggled a little at the picture of herself worrying them like a dog.

Her mind reverted edgily to an episode earlier that day with Sister Goode. Probably she had been tactless. She had certainly been surprised. The truth was she herself was shocked and puzzled by Mary Ellen’s strange absence and the murder in Leopold Gardens. Perhaps they were connected.

“You have to face it. Don’t you?” she had said to Sister.

“No, let’s not face it. That’s one fact I’m not facing. Because I don’t believe it,” said Sister. “Let’s be ostriches and keep our head in the sand. That’s what I’ve been doing for some time past. And you too, Juliet, I expect.”

“Yes?” said Juliet uncertainly; she didn’t know what to make of this statement. Sister Goode always looked facts in the face, stared them out of countenance as a rule. For a moment she worked on, mulling over what Sister had said. Then she became aware that Sister was still standing there in silence.

“Are you all right?” she asked. Her eyes fell upon a bruise on Sister’s arm, beginning at her wrist and spreading up the arm to disappear under the sleeve.

“Are you all right?” she repeated, staring at it. On the left leg, lividly visible through the thick stockings was a similar bruise. She looked up at Sister, unable to believe that Sister, who had always seemed resistant to trouble and accident, almost as if she had been immunised against disaster when she became a nurse, along with smallpox and polio and everything else, could be bruised.

“Just a fall,” said Sister stiffly, drawing away.

Suddenly Juliet went down on her knees and tipped the waste-paper basket out on the floor in front of her. Among the muddle of scraps of tissues, paper bags and cigarettes (officially no one smoked in the clinic - bad for the babies, in practice everyone sneaked into the office for one occasionally), was what she was seeking.

Juliet extracted the bits of torn up paper which she had found earlier that afternoon in the card index. She spread them out in front of her. Some of them certainly had formed part, although not all, of Mrs. Bishop’s card kept in their files. As a card it was by no means complete when you tried to piece it together like a jigsaw. But it was the other scraps that interested Juliet now. She studied them with apprehension.

Yes, she knew where they came from. Collecting all the pieces in her lap, she reached over and took down one of the medical books on Dr. May’s shelf. Silently she leafed through one after the other. In at least three the tearer of pages had been at work. Here and there, arbitrarily, violently, pages had been ripped out. Juliet replaced them as she had found them. They had not been in particular order. Dr. May was far from tidy. Perhaps no one would know she had touched them; she most desperately wished she had not. A vivid memory of her own desire to mutilate these books was cutting into her mind. Could you do a thing and then forget you had done it, simply recalling that you had wanted to? Miserably the question rotated, as on a spit, in her mind, rephrasing itself: Are you mad? Juliet, always too sensitive, too full of imagination, and too aware of other peoples’ minds pressing on hers, sat brooding. Could you project another self, that was not really you, but only part of you? A sort of doppelgänger”? Juliet had always felt that she, as the survivor of twins, was particularly apt to produce a doppelgänger, as a sort of compensation. If she opened the door quickly would she see another self walking up the stairs? Would the face which met hers smile or frown? But because she was not mad, only overwrought and imaginative, she locked this thought away, and refused to continue with her imaginings, although in an odd, perverse sort of way, she would have enjoyed it.

All the same, she needed comfort and reassurance.

Juliet wished passionately that her grandmother would appear in a taxi and sweep her off, as she had once when she was at school and in trouble. It was surprising how comfort and security spread themselves about Lady Passey, who had probably never had a wholly logical thought in her life and who certainly never worried with a profound one. She just assumed, and when with her, you assumed too, that there would always be comfort and stability, pleasant surroundings and a good hairdresser.

“I’ll go and see Gran,” she decided, touching up her lipstick and brushing her coat. She always made an effort to look her best for Lady Passey, who had the very highest standards in personal appearance and expected them in her descendants. It was the one thing she was tough about. Break all the ten commandments and Lady Passey would probably pretend not to notice, but break an appointment with your hairdresser when you needed it and she could look very black indeed.

The Clinic was empty and echoing. She heard the outer door bang as the cleaning woman went away. She felt lonely and a little frightened. But there was nothing strange about this. Juliet often felt lonely and a little frightened. She had been this way ever since her twin died and she was alone in the world.

Mary Ellen had gone, Sister had gone, the mothers, the prams and the babies had gone.

But something remained. To Juliet’s strained nerves the Clinic didn’t seem as empty as it should have seemed.

She plodded up the stairs, in and out of every room, but everything was normal, everything, even the distant sound of a baby crying.

So, quite naturally, she failed to take in the significance of what really was happening in the Clinic.

“Dear Coffin,” said a voice on the telephone. “Darling Coffin, best of Coffins. Take your teeth out of my ankle, you brute. No, John, that’s the dog I’m talking to.”

“Have you got a dog, Venetia?” asked Coffin.

“You don’t think I’m biting myself, do you?” asked Venetia Stuart. “With my teeth? Can’t even tear away at a little old crust.” And she laughed throatily. Venetia played upon the theme of her age, knowing that it only heightened her timeless attractions. She was a highly successful and popular actress. The public had always loved her for her warmth and charm, the critics had lately taken to praising her superb technique, although Venetia was always exactly the same whether she was playing Cleopatra or Candida, and she was fast becoming an institution. “Stick around long enough in this trade and everyone loves you,” Venetia explained it. “However, at long last they really are my teeth. I’ve paid for them.” Venetia’s other characteristic was her extravagance; she had been known to buy herself a mink coat and a diamond parure in one wild twenty minutes, both of which had eventually to be paid for by three bad films. She had just gone through a very different patch as a result of taking up archaeology. At first this had seemed to her friends as a simple, harmless pleasure which wouldn’t do Venetia the slightest harm, but it led to her financing a whole Bronze-Age dig, culminating in the purchase (“Well, for heavens sake, for what I paid out, I ought to have bought it”) of a whole Greek island. Venetia’s efforts to extricate herself from all that ensued were violent and prolonged, and followed with passionate interest by a dozen newspapers and two continents. She was interviewed on television about it, profiled about it, and condemned in Pravda for colonialism. “They’ll be asking questions about me in the United Nations next,” Venetia said gloomily.

“And you’ll tell Patsy I can’t see her tonight?” went on Coffin anxiously. Venetia, as well as being the leading lady of the show in which his Patsy (Cleopatra Partridge) was soon to appear, was also her best friend.

“I will do that, Coffin,” said Venetia, “although in my opinion you would be better advised to do it yourself…”

“I can’t get hold of her,” said Coffin.

“She’s hiding,” said Venetia; she sounded amused. Coffin had the distinct impression she really knew exactly where Patsy was. His heart sank. So far he had never been, or supposed he had cause to be jealous of Patsy. But she was lovely, and lately, with increasing success, she looked very beautiful indeed. Also, she had been very elusive, not at home when he telephoned, late for appointments, even sometimes not coming at all. He had put it down to the approaching Opening Night. Now he wondered. He distrusted Venetia’s amusement; he suspected she knew what the joke was. He knew Venetia well enough to understand that although she liked him greatly, and flirted with him triumphantly whenever they met, she probably regarded him as expendable.

“Venetia,” he began anxiously.

He was interrupted by a voice breaking in.

“Urgent call for Inspector Coffin,” it said. “Urgent call.”

Venetia was silent, although he could her hear breathe.

“Goodbye, Venetia,” he said. “Go ahead, urgent call.” Now the telephone line became for a moment a confusion of voices, the police operator, a voice from an exchange somewhere and triumphing over them all, the voice of a woman.

“I’ve killed her,” it said. The voice was emotionless and unsurprised, but it sounded thin. “I didn’t mean to do her in, but I have.”

“Killed who?” asked Coffin rapidly.

“The girl.” There was a sound of movement at the end of the telephone.

“Where are you speaking from?” said Coffin, making gestures to anyone who could understand what he meant that the call should be traced.

“Call box in the Lower Road, corner of Tower Bridge Road. She’s in here with me…You’d better come and get her.” Then the voice rose hysterically. “Get her off me, get her off me…”

The line was dead.

Even before he had put down the receiver he had dismissed the idea that the call was a hoax. No member of the general public knew of the disappearance of Mary Ellen. Moreover the voice had been in earnest. No, whatever the meaning of this call, and he was not yet sure what it meant, it was not a joke.

“You got that call on the extension?” he said to Stone, as they hurried into the car. “What did you make of it?”

“Loony,” said Stone.

“Did you know Mrs. Bishop’s voice. Ever heard it?” Stone spread out his hands.

“Any distinguishing characteristics in her voice? Anything to pick up?”

Stone thought about the few facts he had learnt about Mrs. Bishop, from the constable on the beat, from neighbours.

“Can’t think of any.”

“Do you believe it was Mrs. Bishop?” They were turning the corner of the road now and Coffin was already opening the car door, ready to dash out.

After a pause. “Yes,” said Stone. “I do.”

“So do I. There must be something that convinced both of us it was her. And it can’t be intuition.”

The call box was placed in the angle of a projecting building, between a general store, which was also a sub post office, and a small café, called Sam’s Place. It was quite a likely spot for Mrs. Bishop to have been lurking, it backed on to one of the little streets where she and her husband could have taken a room and been ignored, provided they paid their rent. As yet there had been no general search for Mrs. Bishop, that would come, and then indeed she must find herself desperately plodding through the London streets for hiding. Meanwhile Coffin could believe that Alma Bishop, whose intelligence was not high, might well have fled only a few yards. In fact, if she was tough and could think of a good cover story, she had probably done the best she could for herself. Which just showed, thought Coffin in the flashing second as he got out of the car, how being stupid could sometimes work as well as being smart.

From the corner of his eye he saw the owner of Sam’s (who was actually called Harry) watching from his window. He was an old friend and enemy, on whom the significance of the police arrival would certainly not be wasted. Nothing was wasted upon Harry, in whom nearly sixty years of the catering trade in south-east London had produced the suspicious meanness of a mule. Coffin had seen him give a free lunch to an old man who was homeless, but he had also seen him turn away a child begging for a drink of water.

Conscious of Harry’s gaze on his back, Coffin deliberately slowed down as he approached the telephone box. This was going to be sensational enough anyway. He went up to the telephone box, but even before he was really close his eyes were sharply focused on it.

There was nothing there. The box was empty. On the floor was a paper bag and a bus ticket, but that was all. No body, no Mary Ellen. Nothing.

Coffin took a deep breath. “So,” he said. The telephone call had never been accepted by him as exactly what it appeared to be, he had always kept a question mark in his mind; but now he had to re-frame the question.

“Someone has been in here recently,” he said, “very recently. Smell it.”

The air in the box was warm and full of faint indefinable smells, the smell of clothes, and bodies, the smell of women. “It might be as well to give the box a going over, Stone.”

He turned on his heel, letting his eyes drift up and down the road. A Post Office van was collecting mail from the Post Office three doors up; a parked car marked the entry to the undertaker’s, and a red bus blocked the passage way behind the grocery shop. Late shoppers came and went from the provision shop, a man in black came out of the undertaker’s shop and locked the door behind him, and some schoolgirls giggled in front of Sam’s Place. Nothing remarkable, thought Coffin, and nothing that could help him. But someone in the café might have noticed a woman in the telephone box. He concentrated his gaze on Sam’s Place.

Then he stopped. A table stood in the curtainless window and a figure was sitting there. A girl.

He walked towards the window. He could see she was drinking a cup of tea. Even at this distance he knew it was tea. No one in their senses touched Sam’s coffee. She was stirring it and sipping it as if she found it good.

Sitting there quietly enjoying her tea was Mary Ellen. Coffin felt as if someone had kicked him.

He pushed open the glass door, resisted the temptation to go over to Mary Ellen and say: “And what the hell have you been doing all day?” and spoke to the proprietor. Mary Ellen didn’t even see him. She just sat there with her tea.

“How long has she been there?”

Harry looked at Mary Ellen. “Just come in,” he said. “Why?”

Coffin did not answer directly. “Seen her before? Do you know her?”

Harry shook his head. But this meant nothing. Harry never admitted to anything at the first question. He probably did know her, at least by sight.

“What’s she done?” asked Harry, polishing a tea cup.

“She didn’t come home for her tea,” said Coffin, walking towards her. As he got closer he was glad that he hadn’t spoken sharply to the girl; she was pale and tired with a little line of sweat around her forehead. She was drinking the tea as if she really needed it.

“Hello, Mary Ellen.”

He believed that the phone call had been made by Mrs. Bishop, he believed it was genuine, but it made no sense. He would have sworn that when Mrs. Bishop had said frantically that she had killed Mary Ellen in the telephone box she had believed it. There must have been some point where Mary Ellen had looked dead.

Yet here was Mary Ellen

“But she didn’t touch me,” said Mary Ellen. She sat with her hands in her lap and stared at Coffin. “She never put a hand on me.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Begin again at the beginning,” said Coffin with a sigh.

They were in the living-room of Mary Ellen’s home. It was evening, and Mary Ellen had been brought home just half an hour ago. Her father still sat sleepily in his chair. He had put out his hand blindly for his first cup of tea as he always did when he heard his wife’s voice and received instead a peremptory shake from which it seemed as though his head was still reeling. He had the distinct impression that events were flowing past him, and that he hadn’t quite grasped what it was all about. This sensation was not foreign to him, it was built into his life. He sat there in his little cab, eyes fixed on the road in front of him, steering the great monster he controlled safely through the traffic, and nagged all the time by the feeling that life was rolling past, people were living, playing, quarrelling, dying and he could never stop long enough to see. He had never felt this sensation at home before. He gave his head a little shake.

Mary Ellen hesitated.

“You met her in the street and she said come into the phone box with me because I want to talk. Is that it?”

“Yes,” said Mary Ellen doubtfully.

“And if she’d said Mary Ellen come with me and put your head under this chopper would you have done that too?” asked Coffin, exasperated.

Mary Ellen looked put out.

“She’s telling you what she can,” said her mother. Mrs. Sarson was sitting next to her daughter, one hand protectively on her arm. She was happier now her daughter had returned, but her hand trembled slightly.

“Oh?” Coffin turned his blue stare on her. “You think so, do you?”

“I do,” she sounded definite. “Certainly, I do.”

Coffin sighed again. Between them Mary Ellen and Mrs. Bishop had built up a contradictory picture.

This was the second time it had happened to him today and this was once too many for any policeman. The first time had been the clash between the stories of Mr. Undershot and young John Tessimond.

“Give me another cup of that tea, Mrs. Sarson,” he said, holding out his cup. Wearily he started again. “Come on, Mary Ellen, right back to the beginning again.”

“I was walking about for a long time,” began Mary Ellen dutifully, “because I was nervous of coming to see you like Sister said I should…” Her voice tailed away.

“Why were you scared? Of me?”

Mary Ellen turned to her mother. Blue eyes met slightly blood-shot brown eyes in a question but got no help from them.

“Mrs. Bishop?” said Coffin gently. “She made threats to you, didn’t she? You’re not telling me the whole story are you? Did she threaten you?”

Mary Ellen looked too frightened to speak.

“And then you met Mrs. Bishop, or she was on the look-out for you, and she suggested you come into the telephone box with her.”

‘Just the spot for a nice quiet murder,’ thought Coffin to himself, ‘with a policeman on the beat, passers-by every second and Harry keeping watch from his café in between poisoning his customers with stale fat.’ And in fact there was no reason to believe any attack had taken place, Mary Ellen said not. Mrs. Bishop said she thought she had killed Mary Ellen. What had happened in the telephone box?

“I may have gone a bit faint,” admitted Mary Ellen. “She did frighten me. I do get frightened.”

And she did get frightened, this girl.

“Mary Ellen,” he said gently. “I want to ask you about your earlier scare with Mrs. Bishop. Do you remember? That was about the baby too. The story got round to me. The story that you saw someone other than Mrs. Bishop wheel her baby away from the Clinic. You didn’t really tell us the whole story there, did you? There was something more?”

Mary Ellen’s large gentle face set in an expression that Coffin recognised. He had been seeing this expression in the faces of women all his life, in his mother’s face, in Patsy’s face, in the face of the teacher he had had at infant school. It was an expression women’s faces fell naturally into. It meant: Silence.

“She isn’t going to tell us another damn thing,” said Coffin to himself in exasperation. He leaned forward. “This is serious trouble, Mary Ellen. You must speak.”

She didn’t answer.

“She’s just a green girl,” he told himself. “Doesn’t know what it’s all about in terms of real life. She’s got in a huddle over it and won’t loosen up.” Then he thought that she was kind to her father and added to himself, “Well, not entirely green, but yellowing at the edges.”

Coffin finished his tea while he tried unobtrusively to sum up mother and daughter. Dad, oddly enough, was almost asleep again. He saw Mary Ellen pat his hand and say gently, “Another cup of tea, Dad?” Yes, she did like ministering to people, it was there. She responded more to her father, who lay back and looked tired, than to her mother, who bustled about and looked exhausted. He drained his tea, swallowing a mouthful of tea leaves, and put down his cup with decision.

“Mrs. Sarson, would you let my Sergeant Betty Andrew examine your daughter?”

The colour drained from Mrs. Sarson’s face.

“I’m not suggesting anything,” said Coffin harshly. “I’m not suggesting anything. Just I should like it done. Like to see if there’s any basis for any story of attack. Maybe some concussion has affected her.” The child was pale enough. She could be concussed from a fall. “A doctor if you prefer,” he said. “Your own doctor.”

“No, not a doctor,” said Mrs. Sarson, she belonged to the race that consulted doctors only when convinced death was imminent, and not always then. She was deeply concerned about Mary Ellen and there was a question or two, notably about the money, she longed to ask her.

“I thought you’d prefer Sergeant Andrew. She’s a nice soul,” he said reassuringly to Mary Ellen. “Been a nurse once.” He saw the flicker of Mary Ellen’s eyelids. ‘Not too keen on nurses there,’ he recorded. ’Odd, if she’s going to be one.’

But this woman police sergeant’s gentle examination of Mary Ellen provided no evidence of attack or attempted murder. But it was also very clear that Mary Ellen had undergone a shock. Her underclothes were damp and stained with urine. The cause? Fright, suggested the sergeant, sharp, sudden fright.

Eventually, tearful and exhausted, Mary Ellen went to bed.

No one noticed the absence of the parcel of baby clothes, and Mary Ellen did not tell them.

SIX

Later Monday Evening

Alma Bishop, born thirty-six years ago, having aged ten years in the last two. Alma Bishop, often called Lal, factory worker, wife and mother. Alma Bishop, now a wanderer in the London streets - Alma, in whose life a quiet little time bomb is ticking away.

Of what crimes do you accuse Alma?

She is accused of murdering her landlady. The evidence here seems strong and circumstantial. The landlady lies dead in the room the Bishops rented from her, dead by the very bed they occupied. There is a witness in Mr. Undershot, a fellow lodger, although Charley Undershot’s story is puzzling at some points and he himself is a questionable figure. There is a motive, for Mrs. Cox’s money is missing, and the Bishops were demonstrably, unmistakably poor.

Alma Bishop is suspected of infanticide, but here the doctors say there may be no case to answer, the child possibly died naturally, so that the total of her guilt may be neglect of her child and concealing its death.

She is suspected of attacking Mary Ellen, but Mary Ellen says she never laid a hand on her.

She is surrounded with suspicions of death and violence; she appears at once stupid and wily, easily found and easily lost, aggressive and yet timid; like all criminals she is a mass of contradictions.

How she figures in human relationships is not easy to tell. She is a wretched mother but someone once saw her being kind to a cat. She was a poor payer as a lodger, but her landlady was supposed to have liked her.

What she is as a wife no one knows.

No one knows very much about her, she has lived in an inarticulate, unobservant world which has noticed nothing special about her and could not express it if it had. She is inarticulate herself, but not, it seems unobservant. She had detected Mrs. Cox’s little hoard. She had found Mary Ellen when she needed to find her.

Her appearance is insignificant. Everyone notices Baby Bishop but no one takes in Mrs. Bishop. Her very features seem elusive. But there is something about her voice that puzzles Inspector Coffin.

Notice also that she appears to be alone. Her husband is not with her.

John Coffin perceived at once the significance of Mrs. Bishop’s solitary appearance.

“They’ve split up,” he told himself. “Husband’s gone. Probably thinks they’re safer apart.” There were other reasons of course why they might be apart. They might have quarrelled. Or the husband might have deserted his wife. Or he might simply be frightened of her. There might be plenty about his wife to frighten him. Coffin had not forgotten the evidence of the bed and the sleeper’s impression on it.

“We’ve got to find her,” he told Sergeant Stone. “What have you done so far?” Stone shrugged. “The usual. Circularised all stations in the London area with her description.”

“I don’t believe we need to go outside this district,” said Coffin, looking down at the pile of neat notes he had made. He was waiting for a telephone call. “I don’t think she has.”

“You realise what a very poor description we have of her?” said Stone. “Practically forty per cent of the women in this district look like that. Forty per cent of any women anywhere,” he added thoughtfully.

“Then we must get a better one,” said Coffin shortly. On the desk in front of him was the bill for the skirt, the skirt itself lay in a cardboard box on the floor, and in another cardboard box were the miserable little remains of the groceries found in the Bishops’ room. “She bought these somewhere. They may remember her.” He looked at the skirt hopelessly. Surely no one who chose a skirt like that would ever be memorable? It was drab and plain, the only striking thing about it was a bright red handkerchief tucked in the pocket, perhaps put there as a sales lure, and no doubt indeed this was what had attracted Mrs. Bishop to it. If you felt any touch of sympathy for Mrs. Bishop there was something pathetic in this longing for bright colours.

The bill, on which was written ‘Jacket to be called for,’ was headed Boxer’s Stores. “Who’s been round there inquiring?”

“Young Prescott went,” said the sergeant. “He didn’t get anything. All the Boxers say they can’t possibly remember when or by whom the jacket had been collected.”

“They would say that to him, of course,” said Coffin. He got up and reached for his coat.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ll go myself” - No use waiting for a call from Patsy. The curtain would be going up with the hour. She’d never ring him now. If she ever did ring again. He had a depressed feeling that somehow they had come to the end of a chapter. Maybe the end of the whole book. It hadn’t been so much of a story after all.

At the door, he paused for a minute, hoping the telephone would ring and call him back, but when it didn’t, he closed the door behind him with a thud.

Even as he left the telephone started to ring.

Boxer’s Drapery Stores, at which Mary Ellen had called that day, was closed and firmly shuttered for the night, but Coffin knew where to go. He trudged round the corner and banged firmly on the side door.

A light shone through the window, and a smell like kippers and also like bacon floated out through the letterbox. A slight fog had drifted across from the river, it was a cold raw night, and Coffin stood there banging gently and sniffing the savoury smell, feeling tired and hungry. Eventually he heard a soft padding along the hall and the door opened. Mrs. Boxer smiled at him. She always wore slippers in the house.

“Come in, Inspector,” she said. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“Have you?” he asked, following her in. He hung his hat up on the hook behind the door and followed her. He knew the Boxers and knew, with rising spirits, that not only would he get some information now, but also, with luck, a cup of tea. He repressed the thought of the kippers and bacon sternly.

“Yes,” she led the way into a brightly lit sitting-room. “We’ve been talking it over.”

Inside the room was a scene of great animation. An elderly Boxer was doing his football pools at a small table by the fire; a younger man was typing a letter; by the table Grandmother Boxer was cutting bread and butter, and on the floor Rosemary Boxer was spreading a paper pattern for a dress on a length of rough brown material.

“We couldn’t talk to the young constable,” said Mrs. Boxer. “We didn’t know him, to begin with, and he didn’t tell us what it was about.”

“It’s about Mrs. Cox’s murder,” said Coffin. He was always absolutely straight with the Boxers; he had found it paid. They never let him down and had often helped him. In return they expected the truth as far as he could give it. “We think the woman who bought the skirt is concerned in it, and we want to get a good description. You are good at descriptions,” he reminded her.

“If it’s Mrs. Cox, I certainly want to help,” frowned Mrs. Boxer. “She shopped here regularly. I was quite fond of her.”

“This is the skirt,” said Coffin, showing it. “And there was a jacket to be collected. It was collected.”

“I remember the skirt and jacket,” said Mrs. Boxer. “It was Rosemary’s idea to add the hanky. Thought it would help sales.”

“And did it?”

“It did,” Mrs. Boxer nodded. “We only had two red ones though and I recall one is left, so we only sold one exactly like that one. I’ll ask Rosemary.”

Rosemary came away from the toile she was cutting, practising her trade with an eye on the Paris collections and her own couture house one day, and smiled at the inspector. They had known each other since Rosemary could talk, and before.

“Did you sell this coat and skirt?” asked Coffin.

“I must have, mustn’t I?” said Rosemary. “I asked Mum to leave all that line to me.” She frowned. “But remembering…. well, that’s different. I do remember some people.” ’For instance like that girl in today,’ she thought,

‘I won’t forget that one in a hurry.’

“But not all. You couldn’t expect it.”

Coffin nodded sympathetically.

“Not unless there’s something I can tag a memory to -like they had one arm or were terribly fat or tall or something - then the clothes would probably need altering and I’m more likely to remember. Even then I might not remember the face.”

“This jacket needed altering.”

“I see that,” said Rosemary. “That’s certainly my writing on the ticket. I’m trying to bring something back.”

She sat there in her trim white overall, scissors and pencils protruding from her pocket and stared solemnly forward, much as she had sat staring in her pram when Coffin had first made her acquaintance. It didn’t seem so long ago he was picking up her rattle for her to drop again.

“There is something,” she murmured. “Something at the back of my mind.”

“Yes?” Coffin leaned eagerly forward. He waited while she sat there in thought. “About her voice maybe?”

She stared at him, but not seeing him, her eyes remote and concentrated. For a moment it seemed as if she would respond to this and he waited eagerly. Then her features relaxed and she shook her head. “No, not her voice.”

Coffin sat back disappointed. ’For a moment I thought I had something there,’ he thought.

“We made the jacket shorter,” she said suddenly. “That means she must be quite a little woman. The suit’s a small size, anyway.”

Coffin said nothing. He already knew that Mrs. Bishop was a short woman. “Did you fit it on her?” he asked presently.

Rosemary shook her head. “We don’t do fitting here,” she said dryly. “No, I just took an inch off the bottom as she asked. Must have thrown the whole jacket out of balance,” she added regretfully.

“Does that mean you never saw it on her?”

“It must mean that, mustn’t it?” said Rosemary recognising the implication. “No, I never saw it on her. And yet there’s a sort of feeling of something visual in my mind.”

“Something you could draw?” asked Coffin, ever hopeful.

She exclaimed sharply: “That’s it. The photographer.”

“What?”

Rosemary started to speak rapidly, the words tumbling out. “There was a street photographer outside, you know, like at the sea-side, and I’m almost sure she had hers taken.”

“Wearing the suit?”

“I think she came wearing the skirt, I remember now, and then she put the jacket on, and I thought I bet you get your photograph taken…Parry was very quick on people, didn’t let them get away. Have to be, I suppose.”

“Parry’s the photographer? You know him? Where does he come from?”

“From Thomas’s the photographers, next door to the chemist, of course,” said Rosemary, losing interest. “He’s their son.” She turned back to her toile.

“She’s got too big for Parry since she’s going to Paris,” said Mrs. Boxer coming forward, there was a slight irony in her voice.

“Thanks,” said Coffin, rising to go. It was the way of it. You interviewed someone you hoped had information and they turned out to remember nothing, but they in their turn led you on to the next contact, where you might turn up something. There was a fifty-fifty chance and you went on patiently in the hope. This, in the end, was the way a case was broken, by patiently going from A to B to C, right through the alphabet if necessary. Rosemary knew nothing, but she had remembered the photographer.

At the door he turned. “So Rosemary’s going to Paris?” he said. Now he came to think of it, he was surprised, the Boxers were not ones for travelling far from home.

“Oh, it’s necessary. For the future,” said Mrs. Boxer. “It’s finished, the sort of job we do here. Pawnbrokering, cheap clothes. It’s had its day. There’s no more need for it. We know that as well as anyone. But we’ve got capital tied up here. We’ve got to look around us. So we’re going into the quality trade.”

Coffin looked surprised.

“Oh yes. There’s plans for this district, you know. The whole area’s going to be redesigned. Big flats, car park, supermarket, big stores. We know.”

The Boxers always knew this sort of thing before anyone else.

“We’re going in,” said Mrs. Boxer firmly. “It’s the future. Mark me, it’s all going to be altered. Look around you here - in five years time you won’t know this place. Altered. Even your job may be different, Inspector,” and she laughed.

Coffin said good-bye. He felt a little sad, as if his whole life was changing under his feet and no one had bothered tell him.

He walked round the corner to where he remembered Thomas’s the Photographer’s Shop had stood. It was there all right. Dimly at the back of his mind he thought he could recall going there as a small boy with his mother and sitting on a black and white rocking horse (or had it been a tiger?) and having his picture taken. The photographer had been a thin Welshman from Cardiff. He saw that it belonged to a family named Thomas even now.

He squinted up at the name. Was it really true that behind the door he would find a photograph of Alma Bishop? A photograph that he could have flashed on television and cinema screens and could hand to the constables that walked the beat? He had very mixed feelings.

But the shop was locked, shuttered and in complete darkness. He would have to come back in the morning. And this, as in his experience with Rosemary Boxer, was completely in accordance with the job.

“Any telephone calls for me?” said Coffin, hopefully, as he entered his office. Sergeant Stone was putting a pile of papers on the table.

“There has been,” said the sergeant. “The medical report on the baby was phoned through. They thought you’d like to have it.”

Coffin studied it. Then he read it again.

It was the body of a baby boy, aged about seven weeks. It had died naturally about three years ago. Mummification had taken place. It was the third great discrepancy in his case. Each one by itself could be resolved, taken all together they made him ask if his whole understanding of the case wasn’t out of true.

“The time sequence is all wrong,” he said. “It must be another baby.” Then he added “Whose baby? There’s a long arm of coincidence here, and I don’t like it.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences nor accidents,” said the sergeant, thus ranging himself unconsciously on the side of Freud.

“I’m frightened by this,” said Coffin. “I tell you! I’m frightened. I’m frightened we’re going the wrong way. There’s only one thing to do: we shall have to get on to the Baby Clinic in Bird-in-the-Cage Street and get the Sister down here.”

“And the girl?”

“And the girl,” said Coffin.

“Tonight?”

“No,” said Coffin. He was recalling that he had just seen a tearful Mary Ellen packed off to bed. He’d had enough of her tonight. “We’re packed up there for tonight. First thing tomorrow.”

He looked at the clock. Nearly ten o’clock. Patsy’s first night would be drawing to an end. And he had still no word from her.

“No personal call for me?” he murmured; his large square face was wistful.

The sergeant shook his head. Did Coffin know that the Station called his girl the Gilded Cage?

“But there was this,” said the sergeant with a curious expression. He went out of the room for a moment and returned with a little posy of flowers that some careful but masculine hand had placed in a jam jar. There were still traces of marmalade stuck to the rim.

Coffin stared at it, going faintly pink. There was a card in an envelope. “Love from Patsy,” it said. ‘And probably farewell,’ he thought. Lilies of the Valley embedded in thick green leaves. Their scent washed over him.

‘Damn her,’ he thought, ‘she might have sent forget-me-nots.’

There was one source of information about Alma Bishop that Coffin decided to tap. Surely it was not the first time a woman like Alma Bishop had brushed against Society. Someone had her on their books.

On the telephone he spoke to the home of the Welfare Officer covering his area. They were friends. It was only a chance, but he believed there was the possibility that a woman like Mrs. Bishop would have come their way.

“I’m not sure,” said the Welfare Officer cautiously. “Let me get at the records.” She lived round the corner from her office. “I’ll ring you back in fifteen minutes.”

It was half an hour before the call came through.

“Yes, we have got her, I found her card. I remember her now, she was a poor creature.”

“What was your contact?”

“Someone reported her for not looking after her child adequately.”

“And was she?”

“The child was naturally sickly. We sent them both to the local hospital, but I heard later she never kept up the treatments. We were not able to trace her. She dropped out. And we had nothing against her.”

“You didn’t blame her?”

“She was a poor creature, as I said. I daresay if we had her history we’d find quite a record of being neglected herself. It repeats itself, you know, that’s what’s so depressing,” she added sadly. “And I’m afraid we failed with Mrs. Bishop. We frightened her. I’m afraid she got the idea that if the child died she would face a charge of infanticide,” she sighed. “I’ve wondered what happened, if the child died, and what the Bishops did.”

“It died. I won’t tell you what the Bishops did,” said Coffin.

“You can’t tell me anything,” said the Welfare Officer.

“No,” said Coffin. He put down the receiver.

He knew now why the Bishops had moved so often and why they had concealed the death of their first child.

It was the most macabre and yet at the same time the most obvious thing, granted their strange mentality, that he had heard of. But people did strange things. He remembered the case of Louie Calvert.

Later that night…in the passage behind Bird-in-the-Cage Street, two Borough cats were growling and spitting. Or perhaps it was a love dance. Anyway it was noisy.

Their cries disturbed Barny Fletcher of Rolfe Street, which backed on to Bird-in-the-Cage Street. He and his wife slept in the back (their twin sons slept in the front) and so they were well-placed to hear cat fights on the garden wall. Barny stirred. He was not a cat lover, and he was concerned about his greyhound bitch Sylvia downstairs who was shortly expecting her first pups. She was a highly strung animal and detested cats. He hoped she wasn’t disturbed.

“Filthy noise,” he muttered to himself, listening for Sylvia. His anxiety was no sentimental emotion. Sylvia represented hard cash, and after a bad experience with a high-born boxer bitch who had eaten her litter when alarmed, he had no illusions about over-bred motherhood. Also, Sylvia reminded him of a very neurotic woman he had known in Alexandria in the war. It had taken Sylvia three trips to the stud to produce at all, and he for one wasn’t surprised. Still Sylvia could run. So for that matter could the girl in Alexandria. God, those sprints across the sands to catch her. Any day now, meeting Sylvia’s pale intense eyes, he was going to find himself telling his wife all about the girl in Alexandria, just to get it off his mind, and then there would be hell to pay. He rolled over on his side, with what could not help being an entirely pleasurable sigh of reminiscence.

Then he lifted his head from the pillow irritably. He could hear another noise now the damned cats were quiet. “That baby’s crying again,” he said fretfully to his wife.

“What baby?” she said from her sleep: she was only half aroused.

“The baby next door.”

He went back to sleep. So did his wife.

Then she jerked awake.

“I didn’t know we had a baby next door.” She lay there listening, then she murmured to herself: “There’s one there now.”

Maybe it wasn’t just next door, but it was very close.

SEVEN

Tuesday

Grumpy and gloomy, Mary Ellen went off to work the next day, her yesterday’s outing tacitly put aside by both her and her mother. They did not mention it. Equally, neither made any comment on the fact that Mrs. Sarson accompanied her daughter to the clinic and waited until the door closed behind her.

‘Here I am again,’ thought Mary Ellen. ‘Here I jolly well am again.’ She could foresee a difficult day ahead of her. Perhaps as a result of her recent experiences she felt irritable, hypersensitive, and tired. She felt strongly that it would please her to give something or somebody a good kick. Juliet was in the cloakroom: she had been told by Sister of Mary Ellen’s adventures and asked not to mention them. The two girls stared at each other silently, then Juliet held out a cigarette and Mary Ellen took it. Together they leaned on the window-sill and smoked, one ear cocked for Sister Goode (although Sister seemed off the beam lately, as if she wouldn’t bother anyway if they were smoking cigars), the other ear turned inwards on their own thoughts.

Under this therapy, Mary Ellen had one of her rapid changes of moods and she cheered up. “I saw some shoes like yours yesterday,” she said. “Not quite like, but nearly.”

“There’s a policeman in the basement,” said Juliet, bringing out her big bit of news.

“There is?” Equally rapidly Mary Ellen’s cheer was gone, and she now felt quite sick. She put out her cigarette. “What’s he doing?”

“Talking to Sister.”

“Oh.” Mary Ellen looked glum.

“He’s a lovely man,” said Juliet. “I just caught a glimpse. I hope he interviews me.”

She was a new Juliet today, rebuilt from scratch, with nothing of the old left in. She was going to be a gay, bright, hard, witty Juliet, a little like her mother, more like Lady Passey, and very much like Venetia Stuart whom she had seen in a film and much admired. She had already met and passed young Dr. May with no more than a brisk good morning. It was no accident that all the models Juliet had chosen were at least thirty years older than she was and in one case fifty. Unconsciously or not she knew what she wanted to eliminate from her life: it was her own youth.

“Oh, I’m so tired.” Mary Ellen sat down, she did indeed look tired, and cross and low-spirited too.

“Yes, you must be,” said Juliet, thus incautiously laying bare that she knew all about Mary Ellen’s doings yesterday.

Mary Ellen looked at her balefully. She recognised she had got a new Juliet today and wasn’t sure she was going to like her. Also she hoped she wouldn’t be around too much. Mary Ellen felt like being on her own a good deal today.

There was a faint buzz on the bell, it rose above all the other sounds of the clinic, the chattering of voices, the crying of the children, the sound of banging and of doors opening and shutting. It was still pretty quiet in the clinic and Juliet wondered if this was going to be another day like yesterday with the clinic gradually being put in the deep freeze. Tuesday was usually hectic because it was the day the psychiatrist came and all the mothers loved the psychiatrist. If there was not something madly wrong with their babies then there was with themselves or even with their husbands, or, if they were lucky enough to have them, with their nursemaids. (Juliet had noticed that nursemaids were creeping back as street after street in the Borough became fashionable again. She could foresee a future in which the greatest status symbol for the Borough mothers would not be as now a brand-new perambulator, but a loopy foreign nurse-girl.)

The bell rang again, with unmistakable command this time.

“That’s Sister for us,” said Juliet.

“I know.” Mary Ellen seemed prepared to ignore it; she was adjusting her overall, which was far from clean. The sleeves were crumpled and the front of the skirt marked.

“That was a very dirty baby,” said Juliet, looking fastidiously at it. She tried very hard not to mind whether the babies she weighed and checked smelt fresh and clean but it was no good, she could really only take to the clean ones. That was where Mary Ellen was so splendid; she didn’t distinguish, and handled them all with the same careful clumsiness. Juliet could quite see that she wouldn’t have minded Baby Bishop being a grubby baby, perhaps might even have preferred it.

Mary Ellen went to the cupboard and took out a fresh white overall and put it on.

The bell buzzed again; this time it sounded angry. It was amazing the feeling Sister could get into a bell.

“Come on,” said Juliet, beginning to run up the stairs.

“Oh Ju, I’m frightened,” wailed Mary Ellen.

“Oh come on. I told you: he’s nice, madly attractive in a tough kind of way.”

‘The new Juliet preferred this kind of way, and had had enough of pale intellectual doctors.

Behind her she heard a despairing sniff and even as she ran she interpreted this correctly. Mary Ellen had met Coffin already, she wasn’t afraid of him. Surely then she wasn’t afraid of Sister.

Sister looked utterly wretched. Juliet thought she had the look of someone who was starting a bad illness, or had just received bad news. Sister was ignoring Juliet, her entire attention focused on Mary Ellen sidling reluctantly into the room.

She gave a small sigh of relief when Mary Ellen finally got in, as if she had been afraid somehow that she wouldn’t make it.

Then the three women turned and stared at Coffin, their whole attention focused, for entirely different motives, on him. He sat there for a moment, quite aware of what was happening and almost understanding it.

Sister had answered questions about Mrs. Bishop and the baby, and also questions which she thought irrelevant and therefore feared the more. During her interview she had come very close to unburdening herself of what she thought of as her secret (but wasn’t her secret at all). Only one thing prevented her. The thing that kept her quiet was ignorance. Just ignorance, medical ignorance. She might simply be wrong in her diagnosis, but when he asked her if she had noticed anything sick, anything abnormal about Mrs. Bishop she knew that the pieces in the puzzle were even more out of place than she had speculated; she had the sensation now of being part of a mirror image.

“I am asking you as the person most likely to have noticed. You have the trained eye.”

Sister gazed at him, wondering if he spoke in some dreadful irony. He looked sincere enough.

“Abnormal? Was the murderer, the murderer of Mrs. Bishop…” she stumbled.

“That’s a very strange slip of the tongue,” he said eyeing her curiously.

“Yes, isn’t it?” she answered, almost fainting.

Mary Ellen, too, gazed at Coffin, hypnotised by the air of determination to get at the truth which was spreading from him. A large, cross, interfering man, she thought glumly. She had seen enough of him last night to know that she didn’t like him. He had been very gentle and kind, she recognised that, but he hadn’t thought of her as a person, she was part of his investigation, and if it suited his investigation that her private thoughts and fears should be turned inside out like a filleted herring, then turned inside out they would be. Ruthless. She wondered what he would think if all her thoughts and fears were laid out before him. Not at all what he expected, no doubt. People like him and her mother knew that if you added two and two together then you got four, but Mary Ellen knew from bitter experience that you often got five or even six. She sometimes had the very strong feeling that events were growing all round her, a feeling perhaps absorbed unconsciously from her father.

Juliet gazed at Coffin with interest. She had successfully locked away in a deep cupboard all her fears of yesterday. Anyway, she could tell straight off that any feeling you had for this man would never be neurotic, would never load you with guilt, could never lead you to ask yourself if you could hate this one enough to injure him. With Coffin it would all be out in the open. You might quarrel, but without vindictiveness. He seemed exactly what she needed.

Coffin, as he sat there in momentary silence, was sombre and preoccupied. He looked at the three women without really seeing them. Sister’s words had not been without their effect. He was thinking of another woman. The dead Mrs. Cox. For someone had to bring Mrs. Cox back into the case. She was strangely overlooked, this poor dead woman. Even Sister Goode slipped into that strange mistake, denying her very death.

Mrs. Cox had received professional attention from doctors and laboratory technicians, but her personality had been eclipsed by the elusive character of her murderer. She was the subject of the report rather than a person. It had been established that she was a childless widow, whose only remaining relative, her sister, was now on her way from Nottingham to see the police. The sister had been winkled out reluctantly; she had not seen Mrs. Cox for fifteen years and was not enthusiastic now. In the district, however, Mrs. Cox was well-liked and bore a good name. This could mean everything or nothing. Coffin could recall a case where the victim had received tributes of respect and affection from everyone who knew him and who had yet been known to the police as a particularly nasty blackmailer, well ripe for murder. Behind the murder of Mrs. Cox there was no such story. Coffin believed that Mrs. Cox owed her death to the fact that she had taken in the Bishop family. When she had opened the door to them and let them in, showed them where to live, taken their rent, she had let in her murderer. There ought to be a textbook, thought Coffin, written for the benefit of old ladies who keep sweet shops and lodging-houses and newspaper shops, explaining to them what they should look for in their patrons and how to protect themselves against attack. He was suddenly sick of women. Of dead women, murdering women, anxious women, beloved women, and he longed for a Masculine Murder, a nice straightforward drunken brawl and everyone up before the magistrates the day after.

He gathered his papers together and hunched his shoulders. Juliet thought it was the most attractive gesture she had ever seen. She smiled at him.

Coffin, unaware that he had been elected the other half of her missing twin, smiled back. He knew who she was and why she was nursing here. He knew Lady Passey. ‘We met years ago, Baby,’ he thought, ‘but you don’t remember.’ Anyway if it came to that there was nothing to remember. Juliet had sat there in her nursery with her twin painting on the wall: he had been more absorbed then with her pretty sister Perdita and her even prettier mother, Isobel.

“How’s your sister?” he asked.

Juliet’s expression froze.

“Perdita, I meant,” said Coffin hastily, remembering she had lost her twin sister.

“Married,” said Juliet regaining her smile. “Hundreds of children. She manages them, though.”

There was a sound, or rather a mounting series of sounds, beginning to worry him, and he could see by Sister’s face that these noises were worrying her too. Sounds of a muddle, of voices and babies. Sister rose.

“There’s no one on duty,” she said.

“Don’t you go, Sister,” said Coffin, also rising, “I need you. Tell you what…” He got up and opening the door through which the sounds of rage poured louder and louder, beckoned to Juliet. “They’re rioting for their orange juice. You go out and quell the riot.”

Juliet smiled at him again, her eyes were on a level with him, she was a tall girl. He put his hand on her shoulder and gave it a little shove. He could feel her thin bony yet pleasantly rounded young shoulder through the print dress and overall. This time he smiled first.

There had been no word from Patsy since the gift of the flowers which he now recognised as her parting gift. ‘Goodbye, Patsy,’ he had thought sadly.

Unconsciously for a moment Juliet leaned against him enjoying the contact and unconsciously for the moment he held her there with pleasure. A little of the pain about Patsy seeped away.

“Do you think you could leave her in charge for half an hour?” he asked Sister.

“If I had to,” she said. “The psychiatrist is here today. She’s some help.” The tone of her voice suggested she did not think Miss Golden very much help (although since Miss Golden had married, become Mrs. Lash, and produced a daughter, Sister trusted her a little more, especially as she had seen with delight that Mrs. Lash could not manage to put Miss Golden’s theories into practice at all).

“Then I’d like you two to come with me, I want to show you something.” He added, “But before we go there’s something I want to get clear.” He was looking at Mary Ellen. “You say that on the morning of the day on which the murder took place, the Friday, Mrs. Bishop came to this clinic with her child and you attended to them?”

Mary Ellen nodded.

“You gave her this card?” He held out the pink card found near the scene of the murder.

Mary Ellen glanced at it. “Yes. It was the second or third I’d made out for her. She was always losing them.”

“And it had that day’s weight of the baby on it?”

“Yes.”

Coffin nodded; the weight did not correspond with the estimated living weight of the baby they had found.

“Then when they went off there was an incident that puzzled and alarmed you?”

This time Mary Ellen did not answer so readily: they were entering the area she was reluctant to discuss. Eventually she said a grudging “Yes.”

‘And that’s not the only thing either,’ thought Coffin, ’There’s something you could add’; but he pressed on.

“And then that night you called on Mrs. Bishop - in mistake really, seeing she had in fact visited the clinic and wasn’t a defaulter.”

“Yes, that was a mistake,” whispered Mary Ellen, looking white.

“And Mrs. Cox herself opened the door and called out something about the baby and then shut the door in your face?”

“Yes,” said Mary Ellen quite animated. “One minute the door was open in front of me, and the next moment I was standing on the doorstep in the rain.” She hesitated, then went on, “She was crying too…and she said…”

“Go on,” said Coffin, “it’s like forcing you to open a door.”

“She said ‘It’s you bastards down at the clinic that did it, really’,” said Mary Ellen in a choking voice, as if the memory was dragged from her with pain.

“Mary Ellen, you thought she meant the baby you knew. It is possible that she meant another baby? One already dead?”

“There was a baby crying,” said Mary Ellen, as if listening to a faraway voice. “I think I heard it.”

‘Heavens knows what you heard,’ thought Coffin.

Aloud, he said, “Sister, if she’s going to faint, then it’s up to you to stop her.”

But Mary Ellen didn’t faint, she sagged for a moment, then recovered herself. It was Sister who rose to her feet, stood for a moment glaring in front of her and then slipped to the floor.

‘Dead women, fainting women, absent women,’ thought Coffin, ’they spare you nothing.’

While Sister was recovering Coffin spoke alone to Mary Ellen.

“To go back to your story, Mary Ellen, where you came in, as it were.”

Mary Ellen raised her eyes to his. She was not responding to his charm.

“Can you describe the woman you saw outside the clinic on Friday?”

Mary Ellen looked doubtful.

“Short? Tall?”

“Didn’t really see her much,” mumbled Mary Ellen.

“The woman you thought you saw,” said Coffin patiently. “Say what you thought you saw.”

“I don’t know,” said Mary Ellen. “I’m muddled.”

“Was she really there at all? You saw Mrs. Bishop? Right. Where was the baby?”

This was the part Mary Ellen found difficult to answer. Coffin looked in her anxious face. “Did she threaten you then? Why aren’t you telling the truth? Out with it,” he said.

“I don’t know if she really left the place at all,” said Mary Ellen, forced into a desperate truth.

‘So that’s it,’ thought Coffin. ‘I always knew there was more to that tale than we were getting.’

Mary Ellen was plainly terrified. ‘What half truth is she sheltering behind now?’ Coffin asked himself.

“Come on, Mary Ellen. Tell me more about the woman you thought you saw. What did she look like?”

“It looked like me” whispered Mary Ellen. No mistaking the genuineness of her conviction; she could hardly speak. “Me.”

“What was she wearing?”

Maty Ellen looked confused. “Something light. I was wearing a white overall. It looked like me.” She stared at him. “I’m not mad, you know. I’m not mad.”

“No, Mary Ellen,” said Coffin sadly. “You’re not mad.”

“Gruesome job, eh Sister?” said Sergeant Stone cheerfully. “Identifying a baby” (he said babby). “But we’ve got to use you and the girl. No one else. And you’ve got the professional eye, after all.”

Sister did not answer. This was the second time that someone had used the phrase ’the professional eye’ and she liked it no better the second time than the first. Less indeed, because it showed that in spite of the sergeant’s genial casual manner there was close communication between him and Coffin.

Mary Ellen tagged silently behind. She was seriously displeased at being dragged away from the clinic and she was showing it with a sullen crossness that she had previously reserved in the past for the school-teacher she had hated.

Coffin was rapidly taking on the position of most hated god in Mary Ellen’s pantheon. He was a god because he appeared to have unlimited power and knowledge, and because he had the same supernatural trick that teacher had of popping up when you didn’t expect him.

There were one or two dark gods in her pantheon on whom she kept a closed shutter: at the thought of them she gave her forehead two or three hard raps with her closed knuckle: it was one of the little tricks that caused her mother to despair.

Mary Ellen had by no means forgiven Coffin for appearing in the café yesterday. She had been sitting there enjoying her cup of tea, deliberately giving herself a rest, ironing things out, when he planted himself in the chair in front of her. Another few minutes and she would have got herself quietly home and soothed down Mother. Mary Ellen was a great believer in burying tiresome events decently if you could, even if they were bound to pop up in the morning. Such a course of behaviour would have minimised everything. Now everything was in the floodlights. So she stumped on gloomily.

Sister gripped her wrist tightly in a manner she disliked. Her fingers were very cold and seemed to chill Mary Ellen’s skin.

“I could do this thing by myself,” said Sister suddenly. “Surely there’s no need to ask a young girl to do such an unpleasant task?”

“We wouldn’t do it, unless we had to,” Sergeant Stone sounded faintly reproachful.

“Naturally not. But this girl was the last one to see and weigh the Bishop baby at the clinic.”

Coffin did not appear and Sergeant Stone alone took them into the room where at last they saw the child that had been found in the cardboard case. Sister took Mary Ellen’s hand and they both stared at it.

“No,” said Mary Ellen, after a pause, “That’s not our baby.” She was crying openly.

“How can you tell?”

Mary Ellen looked at Sister and receiving a silent assent, went on, “It’s too little for one thing, ours was older, several months older. This one’s tiny, only a few weeks old, I should think.”

“Anything else?”

“They’re different babies. I know this one’s dead,” her voice choked, “But they look different. I don’t know who this baby is, but it isn’t ours.”

“You agree?” Sergeant Stone turned to Sister Goode.

“Yes I do,” she added, “I would put it even more strongly. There is no possibility that this can be the child who was brought into our clinic on Friday. This baby has been dead some time.”

They were led out of the room into a small waiting room.

“Thank you for all that,” said the sergeant. “I won’t hide from you that it confirms what we knew already.”

He seemed satisfied but Sister Goode was not. Tension and worry had sharpened her sensitivity, and she was at all times a much more perceptive woman than she seemed. She was puzzled and disturbed. Why had the police got her and Mary Ellen down here to confirm something they already knew? She began to feel convinced that they had an additional purpose and one perhaps of which she and Mary Ellen were unconscious. She stared from the baby to the sergeant and then to Mary Ellen, her mind casting around for the truth.

“I don’t suppose you can offer us any lead that will help us identify this child?” asked the sergeant.

Neither of them answered.

“You being in the trade, as it were,” he added.

‘If he says anything like that again I shall bite him,’ thought Sister Goode, all the careful training in restraint and gentleness that she preached to her mothers falling away from her. She had a sudden dreadful picture of the consequences, the blood dripping from his wrist, the newspaper headlines: Nursing Sister, thirty years experience, attacks Policeman. So instead of biting the sergeant she bit her own lip.

“I’d like a chance to speak to you on your own,” she said.

‘Now I’ve put the cat amongst the pigeons,’ thought Stone. He had not been unaware of the Sister’s attempts to get away from Mary Ellen and to manage the interview on her own.

He assured her: “Yes, of course. You certainly can. But all in good time. This young lady is going to speak.” He looked at Mary Ellen.

“That shawl the baby is wearing came from the clinic,” she burst out hoarsely.

“How do you know?”

For answer she pointed to the faint initials on the frayed edge. “B.C.” They could barely be seen. Not Bishop as they might have been, but Bird-in-the-Cage Street Clinic. It would not have been characteristic of Mrs. Bishop to have an embroidered shawl, except that people are sometimes very uncharacteristic of themselves, and perhaps there had once been a time when Mrs. Bishop welcomed her baby and wanted it to have an embroidered shawl.

Into the momentary silence the sergeant said: “And didn’t you notice the shawl, Sister?”

“I’m not at all sure Mary Ellen recognises it,” she cried. “She’s not at all reliable.”

“Oh,” cried Mary Ellen.

“Or sensible, or truthful, or straightforward,” cried Sister, her voice rising.

“Gently, gently, ma’am,” said the sergeant.

He seemed in no hurry to let them go. He offered them chairs and sent a constable for a cup of tea. Coffin had put in no appearance yet.

When the tea arrived Sister touched the cup to her dry lips. Mary Ellen removed herself as far as possible from Sister and sat drinking.

No one mentioned Sister’s few words alone with the sergeant again; there seemed a tacit agreement that no good could now come of it.

Outside in the corridor there had been sounds of life and movement, men walking on heavy feet, once the sound of whistling and the sound of typing. Now everything seemed quiet. Along the corridor a door banged twice.

The sergeant got to his feet and let them know he would now show them home. Perhaps he had received the signal he was waiting for.

As they got half way down the corridor a door at the bottom opened and three people came out.

They were a uniformed policeman, John Coffin, and Mr. Undershot.

A few yards further on they met. Mr. Undershot was shuffling along and looked as though he had been crying.

The two parties halted, face to face. Mr. Undershot gave a cry and stretched out a hand. Sister shrank back against the wall dragging Mary Ellen with her. She was frightened. Mary Ellen was uncomprehending. Then Mr. Undershot was hustled on before he could speak.

Mary Ellen had completely lost track of what was important and what was not. In a confused way she felt she might just as well say what she thought as not. Which was why she had spoken about the shawl. Now she wondered if she had done right. Under her lashes she peeped at Sister. No mercy there.

The woman and the girl paused at the main door, poised for departure, the sergeant waiting just behind them. Sister Goode buttoned up her coat and felt in her pocket to see what money she had there: she had a journey to make. It irritated her that she heard Mary Ellen give one of those sudden rap-raps of knuckle on forehead. She knew as well as Mrs. Sarson that this meant Mary Ellen was remembering something. What the hell was the girl remembering now? It would be better if she forgot everything, everything. She gave the door a push, meaning to walk rapidly forward, but as she did so, the sergeant cleared his voice and touched her shoulder. He already had a friendly hand on Mary Ellen’s arm.

“I wonder if you’d mind, ma’am,” he said, almost apologetically. “Not just yet. I’m afraid you can’t go just yet.”

Juliet was frantically busy. And she was very glad to be so, it made it impossible for her to think about events and feelings she preferred to obliterate. But it did not prevent her enjoying a warm glow at the thought of John Coffin.

Yesterday people seemed to have kept away from the clinic. Today they were pouring in. Aided by the psychiatrist, Mrs. Lash, and Dr. May (to whom Juliet now felt quite impersonal), and old Mrs. Bolter who came in as a voluntary worker twice a week, Juliet kept chaos under control. She worked in the inner room with Mrs. Bolters bringing in the news from the outer waiting room. Mrs. Lash was tucked away in Sister’s little office, and Dr. May rather crossly, because he had planned this day to be dedicated to his own work, laboured away in his room. He only saw babies whose mothers had a special query or problem which defeated the other team, but today Juliet, with some malice, for she had observed his crossness with pleasure, shunted nearly all of them along to him. She had known for some time that he was dedicated; she now thought he was a little lazy.

“We’ve got the Oliver Twist contingent out there today,” observed Mrs. Bolter staggering in with a big paper parcel. She was a thin upright Scot.

“What do you mean?” Juliet wrote ‘Laundry to be checked’ with a false air of efficiency on the parcel and turned to Mrs. Bolter.

“The ones with little hands stretched out asking for more,” said Mrs. Bolter tersely. She was an ardent believer in self-help and despised what she thought of as the present weak-kneed generation. She herself had left school at fourteen, had educated herself and her younger sister, and had been for years the headmistress of one of London’s newest and most advanced nursery schools. She was now a J.P. Her sister was a successful doctor, and of her two daughters one was a Labour M.P. and the other the mother of six clever children. She knew what could be done on a shoe string. “Always wanting what comes for nothing.” She sighed. She had worked and voted for this Elysium, and having got it, she now despised the people who lived in it. Still, she had read today that with the high increase of the world’s population the standard of living was sure to drop everywhere by the 1990’s and with this stimulating thought of the whole job to be done again by future generations she cheered up.

“Well, it’s their right to have orange juice and cod-liver oil,” said Juliet, puzzled; she knew Mrs. Bolter was cleverer than she was.

“And how much nicer people would be if they weren’t always insisting on their rights,” said Mrs. Bolter. “Somehow one never thought of it being quite like it is. I know the effect on me is to make me think: well, if that’s their right, how much can I rightfully refuse?”

“But their rights” Juliet was even more puzzled, and a little shocked now.

“Oh, you’ve got the law in your blood. Anyway,” said Mrs. Bolter grimly, “it isn’t their free milk coupons and orange juice that’s worrying them at the moment, but information, news, gossip.”

Juliet did not answer. “You’re a little hard on them,” she said finally and turned back to her work. She was worried.

“How long is Sister going to be away?” asked Mrs. Bolter almost fretfully. She was worried too. She had been the person chiefly responsible for getting Sister Goode appointed to the clinic. The clinic itself was something she had created out of hard work and faith. At the time the appointment of Olive Goode had seemed the best possible thing both for Olive, and her problem, and for the clinic. Now she wondered if Olive really had been the ideal choice. A chill wind of anxiety touched her.

Juliet watched unobtrusively. “I think we’d better get on, Mrs. Bolter,” she said timidly.

“You know more than you ought,” said Mrs. Bolter sharply and turned on her heel.

“Send in the next baby,” said Juliet. Her voice trembled. Mrs. Bolter came back and put an arm round her waist.

“I’m an old horror,” she said. “But oh, my dear, I’m so worried.”

“So am I,” said Juliet in a whisper. “So am I.”

A large head was poked round the door and in a penetrating whisper Mrs. Lash said crossly: “Is there a holdup or something? I’m sitting waiting and there’s practically a riot going on in the room outside. If you can’t hear it you must be deaf.” And the head was whisked out again.

“Oh dear, she’s angry,” said Juliet, wiping her eyes. The head was suddenly popped round the door again.

“Won’t you please stop that baby crying?”

Then Mrs. Lash was gone again.

“What baby?” asked Mrs. Bolter. “They’re all crying.”

“I don’t know,” said Juliet, and she looked worried.

The rush subsided, Mrs. Bolter and Mrs. Lash departed, only Juliet and Dr. May were left at work. Juliet was clearing up and making the mortifying discovery that in disposing of one muddle she was creating another. “One step forward and two back,” she said to herself, understanding for the first time what her mother meant when she said, “Juliet, you are not practical.”

She worked on for some time, gradually becoming aware of the silence. It was a comparative silence only, there was an electric drill working some doors down the road, a train rumbled past the end of the garden at intervals, a baby was crying, but within the clinic the silence grew. There was nothing unusual in Juliet being left to clear up by herself, one or other of them very often did a late turn of work; she was not usually nervous. She was not nervous now but she kept turning her head uneasily to look behind her.

Juliet was not a low spirited girl, but she was not a particularly happy one. She had a strong sense of doom, a feeling that in the end the bad thing was going to happen to her. She would come to a door and she would know that beyond it lay the ultimate terror, and that in spite of all her prayers she would be obliged to pass through. In a way she was always on the look-out for this, always waiting for it.

“We are not real,” she had said to her grandmother, but to herself she suddenly said that in one thing they were very real: they had produced a murderer.

“What an extraordinary thing to say, Juliet my girl,” she told herself. “You’re loony, Mrs. Bishop is no responsibility of the clinic.” She scratched her head, wondering what the words that had flashed into it really meant. Sometimes she wondered what her subconscious would come up with next.

She would certainly be happier when Mrs. Bishop was found. For the first time she asked herself where Mrs. Bishop really was. It would be the joke of the century if she turned up at the clinic, thought Juliet uneasily. Supposing she did have access to it? Supposing there was a quiet foot on the stairs, and it wasn’t Dr. May? There was a warren of little attics and passageways connecting the two houses that made up the Bird-in-the-Cage Clinic. Mrs. Bishop could hide if she wanted. And, Juliet realised, there was a second front door, supposedly closed and never in use, but possibly, even probably, easy to open.

She lifted her head and listened. No, all the sounds were absolutely normal. The sound of the electric drill from the rebuilding further down the street, the traffic, the child crying and Dr. May moving about quietly in his room.

Reassured, she turned back to her work. In ten more minutes she could escape and go to see Lady Passey and have a quiet feminine talk about scents and hairdressers and the new position of the waist. Then almost against her will, a feeling began to creep into her, and over her, slowing down her movements until she sat there rigid.

There was something wrong in the noises of the house. Someting so utterly normal and to be taken for granted that she had not perceived until now that she should not be hearing it at all.

She sat there listening to the baby crying.

She knew there was a question to ask, but before she could form the right question, in the split second before her thoughts could shape themselves, Dr. May interrupted her.

He came into the room and stood silently before her. He was holding out a book, one of the torn books, to which she was horrified to see a few curling shreds of torn pages still clung.

“Look,” he said. “I just found this. Do you have any idea when it was done?”

Silently Juliet shook her head. That, at least, was the truth.

“I should be glad to know. I should be easier in my mind if I could find out. In fact it is necessary that I do find out.” He always had a pompous way of speaking.

“Don’t you want to know who did it?” asked Juliet, at length finding her voice.

“Naturally.” He was matter-of-fact. “But that will not be difficult. The answer will be obvious.”

“But you don’t know now?”

“Yes,” he spoke after a moment’s thought. “I think I probably do.” For a moment he studied her. “Hold out your hand, Juliet, please.”

Obediently she did so. He took it for a moment in his own, flexed it, then returned it to her. Remembering Coffin, she no longer took pleasure in his touch.

“Not you, anyway, Juliet. Your fingers aren’t strong enough. Now, or under any physical conditions. You haven’t the length of finger. Nor, thank God, do you have the other traits.”

He was alert, and professional. There was something almost clinical in his manner, as if he had found a symptom and meant to assess it accurately. He was also very grave.

“I must go now, Juliet, and find Inspector Coffin.”

Juliet was surprised and frightened by his attitude: it was infinitely more dismaying than anger.

At the police station Sister Goode sat on a chair before John Coffin. Her defences had crumbled. She had no more fight.

“I will tell you all I know. I really will…I always meant to.” Her voice was strained and tense. Coffin found it difficult to hear what she was saying. Her head dropped down. She muttered something. He leaned forward to catch the word. It was the same word, over and over repeated. “Ashamed. Ashamed.”

EIGHT

Tuesday Morning and Back to Monday Night

“Shame?” said Coffin, when she told him this. “Well, that’s a good human feeling. I’d begun to wonder if anyone concerned with the case had any human feeling at all.”

Now at last the two women, Sister Goode and Mary Ellen, were separated, and Sister was on her own.

“Suppose you tell me what led up to this shame of yours?” he said with a sympathetic gentleness: in fact he felt coldly angry with Sister Goode. “A shame in which I admit you are entitled to a share. But when did you begin to recognise that you had a share?”

“I always knew she had this abnormal condition,” began Sister.

“You knew?” Coffin was incredulous. “Not just suspected or ought to have guessed, but knew?’

Sister flushed and closed her eyes as if to shut out his cross, contemptuous face. “Oh yes. But I thought it was controlled. It can be, you know.”

Coffin remained coldly silent.

She went on wretchedly. “I had no reason to believe there was anything wrong.”

“And when did you connect this abnormal condition of which you speak with the murder?”

“After the murder - my eyes gradually opened.” Only it had not been gradual; it had been more as if someone had torn a bandage off her eyes.

“Well, go on - what special incident enlightened you?”

“I saw—” She fumbled for words to express what she had seen, and then started off again. “It was the Appearance.” She placed an unconscious emphasis on the word. Still, what she had said did not exactly describe what she had seen. “I saw one girl when I expected two.”

“Yes, that would turn you up,” said Coffin with a touch of genuine sympathy. Privately, he thought Sister must be in a pretty strong neurotic state herself. “One girl instead of two.”

In this respect, he reflected, her experience had been the exact opposite of Mary Ellen’s. But of course it was illusion; a mirror image, and she was the other side of the mirror.

He sent her away soon after that.

Coffin was beginning to look ragged and tired. Far away and long ago, he was beginning to feel, there was a world where he had gone to bed and slept and got up again in the morning. Last week he had slept little and last night not at all. The Bishop case was not the only one which concerned him, he had others. There was the boy who had killed himself and his sister by creating a homemade- explosive; there was the attempted safe-breaking in the laundry down by the railway station: and there was always the chronic problem of the teen-age gangs that wandered in the area near the docks, never quite as dangerous or sinister as they thought they were, but nasty and tiresome enough.

Over and above all this as a cause for insomnia, there were his relations with Patsy. Was he in or was he out?

He didn’t give much thought to Juliet, but she too was there, at the bottom of this layer of his mind, which with all the conflicting feelings and thoughts was rather like an emotional mille-feuille cake.

He had seen the morning papers and knew that Patsy was now apparently, since last night’s play, one of the newest and brightest, if not exactly one of the youngest, stars in the London theatre. The morning papers gave him indigestion.

But it was the murder in Leopold Gardens that had kept him up last night and provoked his mother into an irate telephone call that if he didn’t want his kipper for supper he didn’t have to be there to eat. A docile Coffin had departed to eat the kipper which now churned reminiscently within him; he felt fully convinced that kipper would be with him for the rest of his life.

In between the kipper and morning he had taken a journey. He felt as though it had been a journey in time as well as space. At the end of it he had expected the photographer Thomas to say to him, as he had said years ago, ‘Watch the Birdie and smile.’ It is always surprising when someone out of your remote past turns up unchanged and apparently uncaged. You start remembering things. When Coffin saw old Mr. Thomas again after a gap of about thirty-odd years, he remembered that his mother had tickled him to make him laugh for that picture, and that his wide-opened mouth was the result of the angry pinch that succeeded the tickle. The memory of that pinch added fuel to his feeling about the kipper, and the adult Coffin felt as cross now as the baby Coffin of all those years ago. What perhaps maddened him more than anything else was that his mother still had that picture and had given a copy to Patsy.

Photographer Idwal Thomas had not expected to be greeted on his arrival from an evening at the theatre by an anxious policeman. But Coffin had been driven to try another contact by a sense of urgency that he could not shake off. Mrs. Bishop must be found, and found soon. If not, then he had to face the possibility that there might be another death. The killer of Mrs. Cox was unpredictable.

Or rather, in a different sense, was terrifyingly predictable.

Late that evening, following hard upon the delivery of Patsy’s flowers, he had received the first rough medical report on the body of Mrs. Cox. The report said that the attack on her had been one of extreme violence, but that the nature of the injuries suggested, all the same, an assailant of only mediocre physique, probably, but not certainly, a woman. Mrs. Cox had had very little warning of the attack, which appeared to have been spontaneous and unpremeditated. She was caught unawares. The report went on:

Taken in conjunction with the other evidence to which you have directed my attention, namely the appearance of the bed, with its indentation suggesting the murderer slept there after committing the murder, and with the torn-up paper, it seems likely that your suggestion about the murderer is a correct one. It also suggests the very great likelihood of another unexpected murder.

Urged on by this report, which had been brought round for him to read over the kipper, Coffin wearily put on his shoes and departed again, this time on foot. His mother muttered darkly that it was time he was married, and gave the remains of the kipper to her cat, a wary tabby named Nabob, who sniffed them cautiously.

“If anyone calls me, say I’ve gone round to the photographers, Thomas’s in Lower Road,” Coffin called as he departed. “And if you want to kill that cat, Mum, it’s all right by me, but don’t expect me to bury the body.”

He felt bad about this almost as soon as he had said it because he knew that in the tough, cruel struggle for power, the war of the jungle, between the cat and his mother it was his little mother that suffered most. Even as he fled he heard a shrill feminine scream, and knew the animals were winning again. Life in his household frequently outbid science-fiction.

All the time he was walking round to the photographer, at the back of his mind he was considering the strange conjunction of the lives of Mary Ellen and Alma Bishop. They had come together at the Bird-in-the-Cage Baby Clinic; that was their meeting place. Alma Bishop represented a danger to the girl Mary Ellen, and until she was found that danger must grow. There were two parts to the story of Mrs. Bishop; one centred around the house of Mrs. Cox in Leopold Gardens, and the other round the clinic, which was known to him from a small earlier case. It had been broken into one night and the petty cash raided. This investigation had given him the chance to meet Sister Goode. Afterwards he was surprised that she had chosen to call in the police. He got the impression that she ruled the clinic like a kingdom. The evidence suggested that Mrs. Bishop kept out of the way of Sister if she could, and patronised Mary Ellen. Coffin could understand this withdrawal. What he found difficult to understand was why a women of Mrs. Bishop’s idle, shiftless habits had continued to call at the clinic with her child. Yet the testimony of Mary Ellen showed she had done so on the very day of the murder, and there was the clinic card in the room of the murder itself. The clinic had some attraction for Alma Bishop, some pull over her. He doubted very much if she went there simply to get her baby weighed. Everything suggested that she was happier not knowing what the baby weighed. He shook his head at the thought of the baby. Babies did not thrive in the Bishop family. One had died. How was the second doing? His very first contact with this case had come with the story of Mary Ellen’s fear that the Bishop baby had been kidnapped, handed over as part of her news of the day by his mother. For the first time he let his mind dwell seriously on that tale.

Mr. Idwal Thomas, widower, and his motherless children Gwynny and Parry Thomas, sat in the sitting room in their best clothes and professed themselves willing to help the inspector. Puzzled, they implied, but willing. There was a curiously festive air about them that Coffin couldn’t quite understand. The Thomas’s, as he remembered them, had been rather a glum lot.

“I want to take a look at some of your photographs, Mr. Thomas,” Coffin asked him. “Some you took in the street, probably about two to three weeks ago.”

“Then that would be my son Parry’s part of the business,” said Mr. Thomas, turning to his son. “I don’t touch the street work any more, Mr. Coffin. I’ve done it in my day, but I’m past it now.” He showed no real surprise at a visit from the police. In his time he had photographed quite a few criminals and wanted men, had even made a practice of it, Coffin suspected.

“If Parry’s got any negatives or developed prints, then I’d like to see all he’s got for the months of September and October,” said Coffin. Mrs. Bishop had seen and purchased her suit in the middle week of October according to the sales slip but it would be better to check on either side of that date. After was more likely, he decided. Rosemary had been pretty definite.

Parry went off heavily to get his records. If he was the boy who was more than half in love with Rosemary Boxer, as the Boxers had implied, then he seemed a good strong stalwart lad and not likely to pine away and die of it.

“May I ask why you are wanting the photographs, Inspector? Gwynny, get off and bring us back a cup of tea,” said Mr. Thomas.

“No tea for me, thank you,” said Coffin hastily. “It’s in connection with the murder in Leopold Gardens.”

“What murder?” said Mr. Thomas.

“You don’t know?” Coffin was incredulous. The Thomas’s were probably the only people in the whole district who didn’t know. It wasn’t like them either. “Where have you been?”

Mr. Thomas looked half embarrassed and half pleased.

Coffin remembered the gay clothes, the slight air of festivity, and he took in the new pieces of furniture in the room. An idea dawned.

“I’m getting married again, Inspector,” said Mr. Thomas. “We’ve all been so excited we’ve hardly had a thought for anything else.”

“You are?” said Coffin. “Who are you marrying?”

“A Mrs. Shorebrightly,” said Mr. Thomas with quiet pride. He added: “She’s a widow.”

This time Coffin was quiet for a moment.

“Yes, she’s a widow, all right,” he said. She was a widow because her husband had blown himself up while trying to burst open the bullion vault in the Bank of England. Archy Shorebrightly had overreached himself that time, but his past had been studded, bejewelled, you might say, with successes. The Diamond Corporation Head Office; London Airport; The International Bank in Grosvenor Square, all had received his attentions at one time or another. Mrs. Shorebrightly was a widow, but almost certainly a rich one.

“She’s had a hard life,” said Mr. Thomas, putting his head on one side. “And I’m only too thankful to have the chance of making it up to her now. All she wants is a little peace and quiet.”

“You giving up here?”

“I shall hand over to my son Parry’ - and here he comes with your pictures.”

Parry Thomas returned, bringing with him a neatly-labelled cardboard box. He seemed a business-like boy. Round his wrist he was wearing a thin gold watch on a matching band, which was almost certainly the gift of his step-mother-to-be, or, it might be argued, the gift of the Diamond Corporation or the International Bank. Coffin, who had excellent eyesight, noticed that he had a thin gold safety chain attached to it. Yes, he was a careful boy, as well as a business-like boy. Or perhaps he moved in company which made such caution necessary.

Coffin fidgeted uneasily in his chair. In this room there was a mixture of seediness and easy money, and a feeling that a keen eye was turned on the pennies and a very blind eye on the manner of gathering them in. His lips began to tighten.

Gwynny came in with the tea-tray while Coffin was examining the box. She was a tall girl, lumpy like her brother, but nevertheless quite pretty. She was wearing a pair of diamond ear-rings.

Coffin looked at the box quickly. He saw it was carefully arranged according to weeks and then sub-divided into days. There were not a great number of photographic prints in the box: business had not been brisk. Flipping quickly through them he saw quite soon that there were perhaps half a dozen pictures there that might possibly be of Alma Bishop. These six, at a rough glance, seemed approximately right for age and size, and of course, none of them might be of her. She might not be in the box at all.

“I’ll take the whole box with me,” he said.

Idwal looked at Parry and Gwynny looked at them both, then Mr. Thomas nodded his head and the box, on which the old man had placed a proprietary hand, was given into Coffin’s keeping. Whether they had genuine reason for caution or whether they were naturally inhibited from parting with any piece of their property, Coffin could not decide. He thought it was a case of a repeated action building up what amounted to an instinct. Future generations of Thomas’s would have built-in hesitation before saying yes, and if the line went on long enough probably the power to give a straightforward affirmative would have atrophied altogether.

“I won’t stay for tea,” he said, getting to his feet.

Coffin was thoughtful as he left the Thomas’s. At the nearest call-box he telephoned his mother.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the Thomas’s,” he demanded indignantly.

“Oh,” said his mother, unsurprised. “I never thought about it.”

“Biggest twisters I’ve run across for years. I’ve never seen such a shady set-up. I should think they’ve got their fingers in any number of dirty pies,” went on Coffin. He was running over cases in his mind.

“Know who he’s going to marry? Archy Shore-brightly’s widow.”

“Oh yes,” said his mother dryly. “We all know that. They’ve been walking out for years, waiting for Archy to blow up. Some people think Mr. Thomas planned it all.”

“What, even the blow-up at the Bank of England?” asked Coffin incredulously.

“Especially the blow-up at the Bank of England,” said Mrs. Coffin firmly.

Coffin put the receiver down with a bang.

From the same call-box he telephoned Sergeant Stone, rousing him from his first sleep and summoning him back to work. The sergeant, who had been up at five, called to duty on a drugged figure dead in an alley, worked through his dinner and tea break without a meal, and got to bed only after setting the alarm for six the next day, was philosophical. To his sleeping wife he said: “There aren’t good policemen and bad policemen, only policemen that can live without food, drink and sleep, and dead policemen.”

His wife murmured ‘dead’ obligingly, but didn’t really come awake, and then, out of long habit she said mechanically, “Coffee in the thermos in the kitchen.”

“Dead asleep, anyway,” said the sergeant enviously.

Coffin’s directions to Stone were simple.

“Get round to Leopold Gardens. Anyone living in the house?”

“We let Undershot go back, he carried on so,” admitted the sergeant. “Most of it’s locked up. And there’s a man on duty.”

Coffin decided quickly.

“Get Undershot round here. And young Tessimond and Miss Prink. Undershot saw Alma Bishop most and the other two are good observers.”

“Tonight? Now?” The sergeant was appalled. He knew only too well the virtuous fury and indignation and flow of speech a late night call could provoke in his fellow citizens, the unflattering references to Gestapo, and bullies, the threats about Members of Parliament and letters to the newspapers. He also knew that unless he moved with great secrecy and quiet (thus also arousing cries of ’underhand methods’) a crowd would gather with the speed of light. There might even be a question asked in the House of Commons.

“You’ll find those three won’t make a fuss,” said Coffin absently: something had started a train of thought in him.

The sergeant raised his eyes to heaven. A peace-loving man who liked to live well with his neighbours, his slow-moving Stone blood disposed him to take things carefully. He had never recovered from a traumatic experience as a young, raw constable when he had been required to bring in a drunken, old, but fierce lady walking with a stick, from the basement of a cinema where she had made a gallant attempt to entomb herself. The old lady had been silent and fierce, the onlookers hostile and far from silent, and young Stone had lost his helmet, and his dignity. The shame, the agony were burnt into his soul. It was shortly after that he got married: he had to have some popularity somewhere. But to this day he crossed the road when he saw an old lady with a stick.

Coffin spoke. “Odd the account Undershot gave of the night of the murder Remember his words? The time discrepancy? ‘I thought it was just after but now I think about it there was a gap in between. Do you think I dropped off to sleep?”

“Do you think he had a black-out?” asked Stone.

Coffin shrugged.

“But Undershot did make a fuss to stay on in the house, you say?” questioned Coffin. He added: “Who searched the house?”

“Mason and Forbes, and me,” answered Stone frowning. He scented criticism. “We went all over the house.”

“Do it again,” said Coffin. “And this time while he’s out of the way concentrate on Undershot’s room.”

The sergeant considered this.

“What are we looking for?” asked the sergeant.

“I don’t know, said Coffin. “Undershot was upset, Undershot was dead keen to get back into his room. There’s something there Undershot wants to keep check on. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but by God you’d better find it.”

Mr. Undershot, together with young John Tessimond and his landlady Mrs. Gater (Coffin had asked for the granddaughter Miss Prink, but she was out on a case) sat waiting for Coffin to enlighten them. Undershot looked sleepy, the old lady curious and John Tessimond a little belligerent. But Coffin thought that beneath his apparent sleepiness Charley Undershot was both frightened and alert. His interest in him increased.

“Have a cigarette, Charley,” he said affably.

“No thank you.” Mr. Undershot was sulky. Presently however he reached out a bony wrist and took one.

“Something worrying you?” inquired Coffin.

“Course there’s something worrying me,” said Charles Undershot with spirit. “Wouldn’t you be worried if you’d been roused from your hard-needed sleep to come on some fancy expedition?”

“I want you to watch a picture show,” said Coffin.

“Where?” asked Mrs. Gater.

“Here.”

“What a good thing I brought my spectacles.” And the old lady planted them firmly on her nose.

John Tessimond laughed. “You put us all to shame, Gran,” he said. “Come on, policeman, let’s get on with it and get it over.”

“Got over your bad humour, have you?” inquired Coffin, getting up and going behind an epidiascope. He put out the light and directed his picture on to the bare white wall.

A deep silence settled on the room.

On to the wall flashed a picture of a short thick-set woman of about thirty-five. She was wearing a loose, pale coloured coat and carrying a fur over her arm. On her head was a hat strikingly made of what seemed to be white flowers, arranged in a barrel-like structure. Beneath the smart unbecoming hat, her face beamed cheerfully.

Mrs. Gater cackled. “That’s the Lady Mayoress,” she said. “My, you’ve caught a tartar there all right.”

Coffin hurriedly removed it. Mrs. Gater continued her reminiscence. “You know about her, Inspector, she went on one of these marches or sit downs, I forget now whether she was sitting down or whether she was against the sitting down, and your men said move on Madam, and she said ‘I’m the Lady Mayoress’, so then they arrested her.”

“I remember,” said Coffin stiffly. He inserted another snapshot.

This time there appeared the picture of a thin little woman, standing stiffly side by side with a man. This one didn’t smile. She stood there tense and lean, wearing a tweed coat and skirt and no hat.

The silence was breaking down now into separate tiny sounds. Coffin could hear old Mrs. Gater’s light, shallow breathing, hear the uneasy rustle of Charley Undershot, and John Tessimond’s occasional movement. All three were staring intently at this picture.

“Well?” asked Coffin hopefully. “Is this her? Come on now.”

“No,” said Mrs. Gater, speaking for them all. “Never saw her before.”

Picture number three was the same street scene with two different protagonists this time. There was a motorcar and a fair-haired girl getting out of it. She was a pretty girl, and she was wearing skin-tight jersey trousers. John Tessimond gave a whistle. It was answer enough. Coffin removed the negative.

He looked down at his collection of photographer’s prints. Only two more possibles left. Hope was seeping out of him. He would never find Alma Bishop this way. In the same darkness he could hear Charley rustling around. Did he wear paper underclothes? Charley was anxious, it was spelled out in every nervous little rustle.

Picture number four was the one Coffin thought most likely to be Mrs. Bishop. It fitted her description aptly. This was a woman aged about thirty-four, short, with thick clumsy bones, and dark long hair. She was hatless and wearing a plain dark coat; she carried a shopping bag over one arm. She stared straight forward into the camera with wide pale eyes. There was something mean and unpleasing about her, and yet at the same time she was wiry and determined-looking, with the air of having been, as it were, preshrunk and pre-toughened for life.

His three witnesses stared at the picture in silence for a long time. He waited anxiously, hopeful again. This was his candidate.

“Come on,” he said.

Mrs. Gater spoke. “No,” she said. “No.”

“Nor me,” said Charley, echoing her unspoken statement.

John Tessimond, with characteristic economy, did not speak at all.

Coffin bounced the final picture in to the epidiascope with irritation. This one was hopeless. A great woman of six foot or more who certainly couldn’t be Mrs. Bishop, if indeed she really was a woman at all. She looked more like a man dressed up. She stood there in the foreground enormous and smiling, wearing a furry tweed coat, almost blotting out the busy street scene behind her.

His crew greeted this with dead silence. In the silence Charley rustled and Mrs. Gater’s breath grew faster; she was adjusting her spectacles. Coffin crossed over to switch on the light.

Mrs. Gater started to bounce up and down in her chair with excitement. “There she is, there she is,” she cried in triumph. She pointed with her handbag to the screen. “There, behind.”

Behind the large furry woman, stood a small neater figure, her face seen in profile, half turned away from the camera. There at last, characteristically hidden behind someone else, was the elusive Mrs. Bishop.

Coffin pressed down all the switches and flooded the room with light in triumph. He studied the picture. Mrs. Bishop had been caught by the camera in the act of turning to someone by her side. This person was completely obliterated by the large woman in front, his or her presence only to be deduced by Alma Bishop’s posture. Alma Bishop had her mouth half open as if she was speaking. But it was a good photograph and Coffin felt he would now know Mrs. Bishop when they met face to face.

The door opened and Sergeant Stone walked quietly in and placed a note before Coffin.

He read it slowly. Then he folded it carefully in two.

He knew now what was the trouble with Charley Undershot. Anxiety was not the word. It was fear.

The net was spread out and had embraced all the people it was going to embrace. Within twelve hours of receiving the note Coffin had in the station all the people he knew to have the key to the murder of Mrs. Cox in Leopold Gardens.

On a pad of paper before him he had scribbled out his thoughts. Certain words were heavily underlined. These words were—

Motive.

Abnormality.

Trains of thoughts with unconscious links joined these words but they spelled out the murderer’s name.

NINE

On Monday Night

“It’s been a tough hard trail, Charley boy,” said Coffin. “But at least we seem to be getting somewhere.”

Charley boy snuffled quietly in his corner. Fear and tension had robbed him of his small self-possession. He didn’t want to cry, he was ashamed to cry, but the tears poured down his face and out of his nose.

“I don’t suppose you found this out on your own,” he said spitefully. “That bloody woman told you. Always did think she knew everything. Watching. Watching all the time. All three of them. But especially that old Ma.”

Coffin ignored the reference to Mrs. Gater.

“Well, I reckon I’ve got a right to that money. My God, if anyone’s got a right it’s me. Do you know what my life’s been like in that house?”

“I think I’m beginning to.”

The police had discovered that Mr. Undershot had lived in the same house in Leopold Gardens for nearly twenty years. They had been quiet, sullen years.

“I was a slave, I was. ‘Charley do this for me,’ she’d say.‘Charley, please do that.’ The please didn’t mean anything, it was do it or get out. And I had to listen to her talk, make her tea, run her errands. I was a young man when I went there. Look at me now.”

Coffin looked, even with sympathy.

“I ought to have got out after my first attack of my gastric illness I had. But I was weak. I got in her debt and I never got out. She saw to that. She liked me dependent.” He waved his hands. “My name is Charles. It’s a good name. A distinguished name. She never let me be called by it. Always Charley. Like you. That’s what you call me.”

Coffin shook her head. “So you took her money. You took her savings.”

In the police search of Mr. Undershot’s room no money had been found but they had found a large key, carefully wrapped in a sock. The key had proved to unlock the old shed at the bottom of the garden. And buried in the soil underneath an empty rabbit hutch was Mrs. Cox’s little hoard of money.

“Killed her and took her money,” said the sergeant without satisfaction. He liked a case to be cleared up neatly, but the sight of Mr. Undershot made him feel sick.

“No, no, no,” cried Mr. Undershot shaking with terror.

There are always two sides to every picture, and what had seemed plenitude and ease to some of the neighbours of Leopold Gardens was servitude to Charles Undershot, denied even his name, no longer Charles but always Charley.

“You did a good job on the money, Stone,” said Coffin. He was standing by his telephone. Inside him he debated whether to stretch out a hand, pick up the instrument and try to get Patsy. At the same time, he was remembering an episode from his childhood when someone had bet him that he wouldn’t jump from the highest board in the swimming-pool and he had jumped and had felt sick just like he did now. Simultaneously, he started to form in his mind the first sentence of his report for the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The sergeant gave his neck a prolonged and thorough scratch. Coffin glared at him. “Sorry,” he apologised. “Just tired,” he added. “I always itch when I’m tired.”

Coffin thought back over the past week. Monday to Monday. A murder, one of the major felonies, various petty offences, and all the backlog of paper work that went with them. It had been a tough week for them both.

“What do you do when you’re not working?” he asked suddenly.

Stone thought for a little while. “Sleep,” he admitted honestly after a little while. “Don’t seem much time for anything else.”

“Not even time for sleep the last week.” Coffin had his hand on the telephone now. Then he drew back. Two o’clock in the morning is no time to wake a sleeping actress who, like a sleeping dog, is better left to lie. “Yes, you did a good job there. I was worried about Undershot from the beginning, weren’t you? I knew that discrepancy between his story and John Tessimond’s had to mean something. Ten-thirty in one story. Two-thirty in another. It didn’t match.” (It still didn’t, but he repressed the thought.)

“Then that point that there was a gap between hearing this quarrel and going down to see that glimpse of the baby lying there. Funny story, funny mixture of truth and lies.”

Stone started to yawn, he got to his feet and reached for his coat.

“Hang on a bit, Fred,” said Coffin. “Wait, I’ve got a telephone call to make. Don’t yawn like that, I’ll send for some tea.”

Stone listened to Coffin telephoning with foreboding.

“Dr. Jason? I know it’s the middle of the night, but can you get down here straight away? Yes, I want a report on a man.”

Stone put back his coat and stifled the next yawn. The imminent arrival of Dr. Jason reduced his chances of getting a night’s rest to zero. He took the tea from the door, handed it to Coffin and started to drink his own.

“Mine’s got sugar in,” complained Coffin.

“Give you energy,” said Stone vindictively. As so often before he wanted to give Coffin a shake, and say: “Look, you’re a policeman, you’re not paid to work out what physical or mental stresses make a murderer, but to get together a good honest workable case we can take into court.” But he knew it was hopeless.

Dr. Jason, indifferent and cold as ever, examined his reluctant patient. Briefed as he had been by John Coffin he knew the line he must take. Quickly he ran over Charley Undershot’s body. Charley sullenly did nothing, but his body tacitly answered the questions that were put to it. After about twenty minutes of examination Dr. Jason had finished.

“You can get dressed,” he said indifferently. “Are you taking any medicine?”

“Yes,” said Charley after a pause.

“Is it liquid?”

“Tablets,” said Charley.

“Ever had any Epanutin?”

“No,” said Charley. “Not that I know of…and if you want to know what me tablets are for, they’re for chilblains,” he ended with a shout.

Charley, whether he knew it or not, was cleared.

So Coffin had one discrepancy, one violent contradiction cleared up, the clash between the stories of the two witnesses from Leopold Gardens and so was that much nearer the truth. Charley Undershot had discovered the dead body of his feared and yet loved landlady (for now that she was dead he missed her terribly) and had taken advantage of the confusion to steal her money. But he had not killed her. Mrs. Cox had not therefore been killed for her money. Another motive for her murder had to be found. So in solving one problem Coffin had produced another for himself.

Coffin still had on his hands the other two discrepancies. The strange clash between the accounts of Mary Ellen and Alma Bishop about what had happened in the telephone box. The girl was fearful and was probably not telling the truth, but exactly how and why was she lying? What was the area covered by her life? It was a problem. And the more he thought about it, the more he saw that it really turned upon the ambiguous figure of Mrs. Bishop herself.

She was beginning to show a decided personality with pronounced character. She had a face now and a voice. There was something interesting to him about that voice. And even more interesting, certain people were beginning to show up in definite relationship to her.

There was the clinic.

There was Sister Goode. It was inconceivable that every aspect of life in her clinic was not known to her. For much of it she must, ultimately, be wholly responsible.

There was the unfortunate Mary Ellen upon whom Mrs. Bishop had seemed to exercise a hypnotic influence. She was certainly afraid of her. Coffin had the feeling that Alma Bishop had preyed upon the girl.

There was Alma Bishop’s husband, who had almost certainly left her, for what reason no one yet could know.

The police had been able to discover very little about him except that he could not keep a job for long.

There were the babies, both the dead one and the living one. If it still lived. And if it still lived, then where did it live?

Coffin sat there brooding. He thought he understood something of the motive behind the murder. It was written in the impression on the bed, the torn paper, the very silence which had descended after the murder. So it had been in Hamburg and similarly also in Liverpool.

Already, the early hours of the morning of Tuesday the ninth of November, the pictures of Mrs. Bishop, hastily developed and printed, were going out to constables on the beat, to the newspapers, to the Television centres. Alma Bishop, aged thirty-six, five feet four inches, looking as you see her in this photograph, is wanted by the police to give information concerning a murder in Leopold Gardens. The murder of a kind, unkind, mean, generous woman. Mrs. Bishop may or may not have a baby with her.

Even while the picture and descriptions were circulating Coffin, white and tired, had started on his trip to the Bird-in-the-Cage Street Clinic for his interview with Sister Goode and Mary Ellen which was to end in the police station with the confession of Olive Roberta Goode.

TEN

Tuesday Morning Again

Amongst the people who saw a picture of Mrs. Bishop in their Tuesday morning papers was Mrs. Church, a widow in her late forties, with a son and a daughter both out at work. The Churches lived in Fraser Street, which was a small sedate terrace of houses in one of the nicer streets off the main road. Mrs. Church lived next door to a Mrs. Chapel and the joke amused her. She was a woman of conscious rectitude. “You can’t be called Church and it not affect you,” she used to say. “Good job you’re not called Mrs. Wrong,” joked her son, a more secular figure. Mrs. Church was a large, fair, pretty woman who would certainly remarry once she could adapt her character to another name. She occasionally let out a room on her top floor to a suitable lodger. She didn’t really need the money, she had a good pension and both Tim and Peggy were in well-paid jobs, nor was she above going out and earning herself if she needed extra, but she liked the feeling of the house being crowded. She had someone in the room at the moment. It didn’t look as though this one was going to be any trouble. She’d been here three days and been out all the time. However, if it had not been for the recommendation of her daughter Peggy she would not have got the chance of the room. Mrs. Church preferred a more solid type of lodger. This one didn’t look all there.

She saw the picture, which was a very smudged reproduction, hurried in to the very late edition of the paper, as she drank her morning tea. No one got up very early in the Church household and she was the first one to be down. Tim was, in any case, away at the moment, travelling for his firm. Peggy had a job in a factory where she often worked late. Last night she had not been in bed until after twelve.

Mrs. Church sipped her tea and studied the paper. Then she put down her cup and very deliberately studied the picture. She went over to the window and studied it in a better light. No more detail could be seen, it was a bad reproduction of a not very large photograph. All the same, she fancied she knew it. The face was the face of her new lodger upstairs. The new lodger introduced into the house by her daughter Peggy, sleeping peacefully upstairs.

Mrs. Church grimly poured out another cup of tea, tucked the paper firmly under her arm, and mounted the stairs. In spite of her slowness she was a shrewd woman and she had noticed a kind of tension in Peggy the last day or two; this she had attributed to worry over a young man, entirely natural in her daughter’s age group; Peggy was a muscular twenty-nine, and if she wasn’t settled soon she never would be. Mrs. Church had been seven years a wife and mother at that age. What with keeping her son out of bed, and getting her daughter into one, she sometimes, but not often, despaired. (After all her name invited hope.)

She knocked on Peggy’s bedroom door, marched in, and ruthlessly drew back the curtains, ignoring her daughter’s angry mutter.

“Have a look at that,” she said, thrusting the paper under Peggy’s nose. “That’s the woman we’ve got upstairs.”

Peggy pushed the hair out of her eyes and peered at the paper.

“And,” went on her mother, giving her no time to say anything, “what’s more, you knew about it.”

There was an accusing silence while Peggy studied the paper.

“I didn’t know about this,” she said, with a white face. “Not murder. You couldn’t think that, Mum?”

“You knew something though,” she glared. “I ought to spank you. And if you weren’t twice my size, I probably would.”

“I knew she was in trouble. That’s why I got you to let her come here. She used to work at the factory. I like her face, Mum, I know it sounds silly.”

It was probably the first time anyone had passed a vote of confidence of any sort in Alma Bishop, and even then it was qualified by the judgement that it was silly.

“We’ll have to get the police in before she wakes up,” said Mrs. Church significantly.

Peggy started to put on her dressing-gown. “I’m going to her room.”

“No,” said Mrs. Church. She put a restraining arm on her daughter.

“I must, Mother,” said Peggy pushing herself free. “Anyway I mean to.”

“She’s dangerous,” cried her mother, hanging on to her dressing-gown.

But the door was swinging open, the room was empty. Early as Mrs. Church was up, Mrs. Bishop had been up earlier.

“Oh, why did you do this to us, Peggy?” exclaimed Mrs. Church, breaking down and starting to cry.

“I was sorry for her,” said Peggy, staring at her mother. “I thought she’d had a rough deal and I was sorry for her. And do you know,” she added slowly, “I believe I still am.”

People had been sorry for Mrs. Bishop before. Scornful, resentful, angry, sometimes sorry, but never sorry enough. Perhaps none of the things that happened would have happened if they had been.

The murderer always brings something to the scene of the murder and leaves it there, or else takes something away with him. This was what Coffin believed, following on good police precedent.

But when the police swarmed all over the room, there was very little for them to find. Plenty of signs that someone who was probably Mrs. Bishop had been there but nothing incriminating, nothing to make it easier for them to prove she had definitely murdered Mrs. Cox.

Of all the rooms crucially connected with the case it was the most normal.

ELEVEN

Tuesday

The story began to go round the Divisional Station that Coffin had got a confession in the Leopold Gardens case. Clever boy Coffin. Even the canaries sang for him.

Like many stories it was compounded half of truth, half of untruth. Coffin had got a confession of guilt. But not of murder. It was not that sort of confession.

He was studying the notes he had made when Sergeant Stone came in. He looked pleased with himself.

“We’ve got the husband,” said Sergeant Stone.

“Good,” Coffin was pleased. “Where did he come from?”

“Came is really hardly the word,” said the sergeant after a pause.

“Like that?”

“He wasn’t pleased to see our faces. He knew us though. We’d met before.”

“Oh, we had?” Coffin appreciated the regal ‘we’.

“Where and when and why?”

“This district, 1959,” said the sergeant succinctly. “Pinched an old lady’s purse out of her shopping basket.”

There was a pause.

“Well, come on,” Coffin was impatient. “Give me more. Fill in the details. What sort of a man is he?”

“Biologically he’s a man,” said the sergeant after consideration. “Humanly, practically speaking the matter’s in doubt.”

“How did you get him?” In this matter Coffin was interested. They had had no real description of Bishop. How had this faceless wanderer been picked up? “Don’t tell me he came up and said: ‘Here I am’.”

“Routine check at the doss-houses,” said Stone.

The district was well provided with cheap lodging houses but there were, in addition, one or two hostels providing a night’s lodging for a nominal sum. ‘A twopenny rope,’ Sam Weller called them. The price has risen a little since his day. The police check these places regularly.

“Go on,” said Coffin sharply. “Calling himself what?”

“Calling himself Bishop.”

There was a pause.

“You do surprise me,” said Coffin. He thought for a minute more. “Yes, you do indeed.” Then the question emerged logically: “How long had he been there?”

“Ah, you’ve got it. One week. Seven nice long days.”

“I see.” Coffin considered it. Seven days. Seven clear days. The implication was clear. Bishop had parted from his wife before the murder. The chances were then that he was not implicated in the murder. “Where is he now?”

“I’ve got him here. Helping us.” There was a satisfied irony in the sergeant’s tone. “But we can’t keep him here for ever. And he hates the sight of us.”

Generations of forbears, all hating the sight of a policeman, back through the days of the Peelers to the Bow Street Runners, lay behind Mr. Bishop’s hate.

He looked vindictive, spiteful and resentful. He was a little animal that would not only bite the hand that fed him but hate it while he bit. Coffin wondered that anyone had ever got close enough to him to marry him. Or cared to, when they’d got there. And yet there was something interesting, a sort of residual toughness which might not be entirely admirable or endearing but had survived failure and which had brought him and his forbears through a hundred odd years of poverty and would do so for his descendants, if he had any. Coffin remembered that he had.

He met the blinking, restless, pale blue eyes. “Smoke?” he said, pushing a box forward.

Bishop took one silently, as he took everything that was offered him.

“You know why I want to see you?”

“Yes. I’ve read the papers.” He had a surprisingly sweet voice. “I don’t know nothing, though. I was away the week before. What Alma did she did on her own. We were parted.”

“For good?” It mattered. Mrs. Bishop deserted, might have been driven to a desperate position.

“I’m not likely to go back now, am I?”

“What about the child?” There was an edge to the question.

The pale blue eyes flickered. He said nothing. He had always known that silence and inaction was the best defence. Better than surprise, better than claiming ignorance; just silence. So he scuttled under a stone and stayed.

He had left his wife. Beyond that he admitted nothing. Murder, theft, child, the words evoked no response, except perhaps deep down in him where knowledge was stored.

Coffin had another try. “Why did you leave your wife?” And, as Bishop showed no sign of answering:

“You can’t expect me to believe in your quarrel unless you give me good reason to.”

“I don’t care whether you believe me or not.”

“A jury is going to care. You’ll have to do better than that. You’ve got too much interest in pretending to quarrel.”

“We didn’t quarrel,” muttered Bishop. “I just cleared out. I’d had enough…she started to frighten me.”

“She started to frighten you…I’d say you’d got plenty in your life to frighten you anyway.” He thought of the necrophilic travels with their dead baby. ‘I’ll get Bishop for that,’ he thought. ‘He’s got some responsibility to bear.’

“She kept on…about some more…and the way she talked…it frightened me, see?”

Coffin raised his eyebrows. “The nurse did?”

“No.” Bishop moved uneasily in his seat as if he wasn’t quite convincing himself either. “What Alma said…said the nurse had two faces…or two heads or something. Made her sound like a monster.”

Coffin still looked sceptical, as if he thought that wouldn’t scare a boy like Bishop.

“Whether there were two heads or one or who had them, I don’t know,” said Bishop, “but there was trouble coming, and that’s why I got out.” He looked at Coffin. “I was scared Lal was going mad.” The fears, the prejudices that had created Bedlam stared from his eyes. The fevers of the mind would find no sympathy in him. “I was scared, see.”

This time he did carry conviction.

Juliet telephoned Mary Ellen’s mother. It was always possible to get Mrs. Sarson on the phone by telephoning her at the school, or, if you missed her at the school, at her next door neighbour’s. Juliet knew this, everyone knew it, except people like John Coffin who was at that moment rather anxious to find Mrs. Sarson. Juliet telephoned the kind neighbour and in fact Mrs. Sarson was there having a quiet cup of tea, for the moment peaceful under the illusion she had Mary Ellen comfortably settled.

“I just wondered if Mary Ellen had got back yet?” said Juliet.

“Got back? Where’s she gone?” demanded her mother.

“Well, she went off with Sister and the inspector,” began Juliet, not quite knowing how she was going to finish the sentence.

“What?”

“And they haven’t come back yet. Not here, anyway.”

“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Sarson sounded bewildered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My Mary Ellen came in here a little while ago, had a bite to eat and tidied herself up and is having a little rest.”

“Oh, is she?” Juliet was indignant, thinking of all she had to do, Dr. May chasing after the police, Sister Goode actually with the police, the clinic to clean up and Mary Ellen having a rest. “You send her round here right away.”

“Wait a minute.” Juliet waited, the noises of the house seeping in through her tensions. There was some clinic noise going on that was familiar yet puzzling. She heard Mrs. Sarson come panting back. “She’s not there. Mary Ellen’s gone.” Mrs. Sarson sounded as if she was crying. “And I don’t know where she’s gone, but she’s put on all clean clothes.”

Juliet put the receiver down and listened.

“My Mary Ellen, she’ll always be the victim,” sobbed Mrs. Sarson. “I know she will. It’s the way she was born.” She was thoroughly unnerved and alarmed by Mary Ellen’s departure. Now she came to think of it her arrival this afternoon had been odd enough; but her going was even more so.

Her friend and neighbour said nothing but patted her hand helplessly.

“She’s so unworldly, Mary Ellen,” said her mother after a bit. “If anything happens to her it’ll be a judgement on us all.

“I always knew that Bishop woman would bring us harm,” went on the distraught Mrs. Sarson. “I knew from the minute Mary Ellen started talking about her and worrying about the baby.”

“It’s funny about the clean clothes,” said her friend. “Almost as if she was going to be run over or have an accident…” her voice tailed off. There was something sacrificial about the clean clothes of Mary Ellen. “Loony,” she muttered under her breath, taking care the mother should not hear her. “Do you think she knows where Mrs. Bishop is?” she whispered.

Mrs. Sarson stopped crying. “No,” she said. “I don’t know where my Mary Ellen is.”

Her friend looked surprised. “That wasn’t what I said.”

Mrs. Sarson mopped her face and straightened her dress.

“I shall have to go to the police,” she said. “I’ve tried to put it off, but it must come. What will be will be.”

Her friend looked up surprised. “Of course, of course, you’ll have to go to the police.”

Mrs. Sarson started to laugh, as if she suddenly saw the joke, then she went on laughing.

* * * * *

Juliet mounted the clinic stairs to the top of the building. She was heading for the attics. She was walking resolutely, even bravely, but she was very afraid. She knew the noise she was heading for and feared what she might find there.

As she had stood in the room below she had gradually become aware of what it was that had troubled her in the sounds of the two old houses which made up the clinic.

It was the sound of a child crying.

All the babies and mothers had departed, the waiting room was empty and yet she could hear a baby crying. It was crying within this house. With every step she took she was getting nearer to the source of that noise.

She stood there at the top of the stairs, trembling slightly. Yesterday she had been a girl with a broken heart. Today she was a girl in love with a policeman. Humbly she accepted her destiny and went forward to investigate. Unconsciously she was running true to her family, generations of marrying into the job, whether of law giver, law maker, colonial administrator, or political agitator. She had a sister, the pretty Perdita, this moment packing her bags to accompany her thrusting young husband out to be the second Attorney General (the first being now in prison) of a recalcitrant ex-colony. Lady Passey had been a loyal supporter of her succession of husbands, being in turn the mistress of a country house, the puzzled patroness of an art gallery, and finally the owner of six slow race horses. Only Juliet’s mother Isobel had been a renegade.

There was a frantic note in the crying as she got closer, as if the crier had cried and cried and was now desperate.

Slowly Juliet approached the door that led to the further attic and turned the handle. The door was not locked, there had never been a key in living memory, but it had been rather cleverly wedged so that it was difficult to open.

Juliet gave the door a hard thrust and stood back. She was sharp enough to work out that whoever had wedged the door had done so from the outside…And had not yet returned.

Inside the room a thin net curtain had been pinned against the one small window, obscuring the view but not keeping out the light. And in one corner, on a rug rested a small cot (a clinic cot, Juliet noticed). Inside the cot, swaddled in with numerous blankets and coverings, was a baby.

It gave a sort of hiccough as Juliet approached and thrust one fist into its mouth and sucked vigorously. She had no difficulty whatever in recognising the Bishop baby. It was clothed in spotless new, white clothes that were certainly neither clinic property nor the property of Mrs. Bishop. It had, however, been sick. It was certainly a trouble, that baby.

The baby stared at Juliet above its fist and Juliet stared back.

“You’re hungry” said Juliet.

The early darkness of a November day was diminishing her area of vision. She stared uneasily around the room. But there was no one there. If Mrs. Bishop was in hiding there with her child she was not there now.

Down below a door banged. It sounded like the front door. Then feet started to mount the stairs.

It could be Sister Goode returned. Possibly it was Mary Ellen.

The feet came on, slowly, hesitantly, and very quietly, as if trying not to be heard.

Or was it Alma Bishop coming to reclaim her child?

Juliet knew now the sickness from which the murderer suffered. Dr. May had told her before rushing round to find John Coffin. She realised too that the murderer appeared to have access to the clinic.

Not very bravely, not very willingly, but determined to do what she thought best, Juliet waited there. Outside the street light flickered on. She knew well enough that she might never live to see the sun.

“Sister?” called a voice hoarsely. The voice seemed just outside the door. “Sister?” it called again.

There was a little shake at the end of the voice and for a moment Juliet was puzzled by that, then she knew it for terror.

“Sister?” The voice called hoarsely.

Far down below the front door banged again.

“It’s all there,” said Coffin. “It was written into the picture of the murder. Left handed. Temper. Violent. The torn paper. The sleep of deep fatigue after the murder. Petit Mal. Epilepsy.”

“Undershot?” said Stone, momentarily losing his bearings in the case.

Coffin shook his head. “No. Not Undershot. I did think it was him for a bit - when it seemed that he’d had a strange loss of memory, a black-out, in the night of the murder. But no. He had a good solid reason for losing his memory.”

“Mrs. Bishop?” said Stone. He had not yet heard Olive Roberta Goode’s story.

Coffin said nothing at first.

“No, it’s worse than that,” he said eventually. “Yes, I think you’d say it was worse.”

“But you think the Bishop woman would attack the girl Mary Ellen?” asked Stone.

“Sure of it. She’s heading that way. Got over her first nerves, and has boiled herself up to attack. I’m convinced of it. What is more I can understand it. Can’t you?”

“Yes,” agreed Stone reluctantly. “Yes, I must say I can. Well, I’ll be glad when we’ve got our hands on Alma Bishop.”

“She can’t attack the girl though. I’ve got that all sewn up. The girl is here. Safe.”

It then became apparent that he had not got it all sewn up, and that Mary Ellen was not safe.

Mary Ellen had taken her chance and walked out of the police station. The day was a busy one, the Leopold Gardens case was not the only one to be worried about; a drunken quarrel had started down at the dock and men were being brought in. Order broke up temporarily into chaos and noise. For about fifteen minutes no one had time much to think about Mary Ellen.

“She said she felt sick,” said the despairing young constable. “She was sick a little,” he added desperately, “I only went to get a basin. Clever little devil.”

“Doesn’t take brains to be sick,” said Coffin fiercely. “Only a finger down the throat. The best thing you can do is to be sick too.”

“You know where she’s gone?” Stone was on his feet too.

“I’m no magician. But I know where she will go. Where she must go.” He got to his feet with a sigh. “There’s only one place she will go. The other centre for the case: the clinic.”

So there they were, Mary Ellen and Mrs. Bishop, both loose. Mary Ellen was by now fully aware of what was in store for her, and blindly obstinate. And Mrs. Bishop -but who could say what really motivated Mrs. Bishop? What affections and hates obsessed her, deep-rooted or superficial? Perhaps she was as likely to be swayed by a minor irritation of the minute as by one of the genuine tragedies of her life. Possibly what she hated most about Mary Ellen was the loss of her check skirt. Perhaps she didn’t really know herself. But she was certainly after Mary Ellen and just as certainly Mary Ellen knew that she was.

Meanwhile the vulnerable Juliet was manoeuvring herself into the position of danger between the two; she was now between the hunted and the hunter, the sacrifice and the sacrificer.

TWELVE

Later on Tuesday

Mary Ellen made her feet sound heavy on the clinic stairs. She was angry and defiant and didn’t mind who knew it. She was alone. On the stairs above her was Alma Bishop. She could hear the hoarse breathing. Mrs. Bishop still had that cold.

Her mother would have recognised that fatal look upon her face: so she had looked as a child when she was at odds with her teacher.

But when she got to the top of the stairs there was no sign of Mrs. Bishop. Somewhere between the top two floors she had disappeared.

Juliet came out on to the landing.

“Mary Ellen. Mrs. Bishop’s here. She was calling to Sister, but it was you she meant, Mary Ellen, I’m sure, she always called you Sister.”

“I know,” said Mary Ellen. The two girls faced each other.

There was a wail from the room behind.

“Oh, the baby” cried Juliet, distracted. She didn’t know which way to turn.

“I’ll have to find her,” said Mary Ellen. “She’s here somewhere.”

“I think she’s come for the baby,” whispered Juliet.

“I dare say,” said the now grim Mary Ellen. “I notice you don’t use the word want. Does she want it? Is she fit to have charge of it? You know one died already?”

“But what’s it doing here?’ cried Juliet.

Mary Ellen gave a short laugh.

The room was bare of furniture, although neat and clean, except in the one corner where the baby’s cot was placed. The cot rested upon a rug, and the rug upon newspapers tidily spread. A chair with a covered bucket and a table stood conveniently placed just where a hot-water pipe ran down the wall giving off some heat. Thought and planning had gone into it all but someone had knocked over a jug of water and dropped cotton wool into it. There was a zany clumsiness about it which was familiar to Juliet. “Put two and two together, bird brain,” her father instructed. Juliet was now putting two and two together.

“It was you, Mary Ellen,” she said. “You brought him here. Not Mrs. Bishop. But you.”

Mary Ellen stared past her.

“I hope she knows I’m here” was the thought that formed irresistibly in Juliet’s mind. She had the disturbed impression that Mary Ellen had, as it were, switched off and would as soon walk through her as not. Then she realised that Mary Ellen was talking about Mrs. Bishop.

“She did something terrible to me. She wished a double on me. You don’t know, Juliet, what it’s like to be two people. Twins.”

“You forget,” said Juliet. “I do know.”

Mary Ellen went on: “For a time, I thought: ‘Someone’s dressing up as me to try and frighten me.’”

“Not likely,” said Juliet.

“No,” agreed Mary Ellen. “And something convinced me - a parcel I was carrying, which we were both carrying.

No one could have known I was going to carry that parcel. I knew then that it was a true double. A ghost.”

Juliet looked frightened. This was her own private horror dream come out into daylight.

“I don’t think Mrs. Bishop could do that,” she said.

Mary Ellen looked at her blinking.

“It wouldn’t be in her mind.”

“You mean it would have to be someone cleverer?”

Mary Ellen came and looked in Juliet’s eyes. “You for instance?”

Juliet began to tremble.

Coffin entered the room on quiet feet. “Well, well, the little birds in the nest,” he said coldly. “Your mother’s downstairs in the car, Mary Ellen. Go down to her. The sergeant will show you.”

Mary Ellen did not move.

“Like a good girl,” said Coffin in a patient voice.

Mary Ellen’s eyes were turned towards the window.

“Can’t you see?” she said in a whisper. “Can’t you see her? She’s there.” She paused. Coffin turned to look.

“It’s her. The other Mary ‘Ellen. She’s over by the baby.” Mary Ellen’s voice reached a high note.

The murderer’s deepest feelings were coming out: all her real deeply suppressed dislike of the child, her impulses towards death and destruction.

“She’s going to throw the baby out of the window. Can’t you see her arms reaching out?” Her own arms rose as if in imitation and she moved towards the window.

“They are your own arms, Mary Ellen,” cried Juliet in bewilderment. “It is you that is reaching for the baby.”

Mary Ellen faltered, looked down at her own arms, and then started to moan.

Coffin fixed her in a vice-like hug and, his arm round her, led her out.

On his return he knocked abruptly on the door of the cupboard on the landing.

“You can come out now, Mrs. Bishop,” he said. “I can see your feet under the door.”

So there she was. A little skinny woman with scared brown eyes. More tidily dressed than reports implied, and younger than her anxious bent posture suggested, There was also, as Coffin realised straight away, a different quality about her from what he had expected, the impact she made upon you was not what he had imagined. She was not worse than he had expected, nor better, but utterly different. It just showed that you should never judge a person on hearsay. She was one more example of the endless capacity of life to come up with just the variant you were not expecting (giving life the perpetual edge on you). It was what made a policeman’s life hard work and yet it was also what made life worth living. Alma Bishop, aged about thirty-six, but looking rather older than her years, a woman with a bad medical history who had suffered all her life from slight malnutrition. A woman who had a good deal to express and hardly any means at all of expressing it.

‘All the time we’ve been looking for her,’ thought Coffin, ‘and we never knew she was like that.’ He looked at her again. ‘A poor cowed little creature, like Burns’s mouse.’

So what crimes do you now accuse Mrs. Bishop of?

Of being unintelligent?

Of being scared? Scared of Mary Ellen, scared of a charge of murder, scared of the events happening all round her which she could not really understand.

Scared of having a husband who deserted her? Who did not love her because he could not love anyone?

“Come on, Mrs. Bishop,” said Coffin as kindly and gently as he could. “We’ll get you and your baby home.”

“Home?” said Alma Bishop, after a pause.

This was the first word she had spoken. Her voice was hoarse and rough as if something was torn in her throat. T always knew there was something about her voice,’ thought Coffin. ‘She has a bad cold. That’s how I knew her voice on the telephone. Poor little beast, a murder, she’s lost her baby and her husband, and on top of it she’s got a bad cold.’

Then he understood what she had said. Home. Where was home for Alma Bishop? Was it the house in Leopold Gardens where Mrs. Cox had been murdered? Was it the room she had in the house of Mrs. Church who had reported her to the police? Where was it? She had no home.

“You haven’t got a home, have you?” said Coffin. He scratched his head.

The guilt then must be shared out.

Mrs. Bishop had her little share of guilt. She was guilty of stupidity; she was guilty of concealing the death of her elder child because she feared the police, even though the death was natural and innocent. She was guilty of belonging to the luckless, but unloved company, to which certain convicted murderers clearly belong, of those who almost seem to go about looking for a noose. To this extent she was guilty. But there were others who had a much greater share.

She was not as guilty as Sister Goode who had acted from the best of motives. But they were the best of motives restricted by her own judgement. She thought she knew more than she did. She thought she knew best.

As a close friend of Mrs. Sarson, Sister Qoode had advised her to send Mary Ellen to work for her, where she ‘would keep an eye on her’. She knew the disability under which Mary Ellen suffered but she believed that she was big enough and strong enough to see that no harm came of it, in other words, to wipe it out.

She took Mary Ellen into the clinic as a nurse, meaning to train her into a useful profession and at the same time keep her where she could be watched. But she hadn’t watched Mary Ellen carefully enough. She had not realised how obsessed the girl became with the state of one child, nor had she grasped how this obsession began to fasten upon the feckless Mrs. Bishop. She had not seen the ascendancy Mary Ellen had gained upon the mind of Alma Bishop, so that the woman came constantly to the clinic because she dared not stay away. The abnormal mind of Mary Ellen had impressed itself upon the simple plastic mind of the older woman in the way a normal mind could not.

Sister Goode had failed to recognise the danger signals of Mary Ellen’s increasing irritability and clumsiness, and hypochondria, with its tensions and fatigues, and her strange seconds of absence of mind when her eyelashes drooped, and she yawned and for a moment was completely, and typically, withdrawn from the world.

In extenuation, it must be said that Sister certainly believed that Mary Ellen was under treatment from her doctor and was taking the drug Epanutin. She did not know that Mrs. Sarson had never taken the girl for treatment and had refused to admit that she suffered from epilepsy.

But Sister Goode was herself a preoccupied and sick woman. Her own elder sister was a hopeless dipsomaniac. Lately, it had needed force to cope with her. There were quarrels in which Sister got hurt and bruised. The double strain of her exacting job and her terrible home life was exhausting her.

So she let things go on, failing to notice the signs of danger, until the night on which in a fit of blind and futile rage, Mary Ellen killed Mrs. Cox. Very soon Sister Goode had suspected who might have killed her. She knew what could spring from the pattern of epilepsy. She knew her own guilt was clear. She bore a terrible responsibility, and in the end, she admitted it. She feared also, as her strange slip of the tongue to John Coffin showed, that Mary Ellen might kill Alma Bishop.

Here Dr. May failed to use his professional sense. Mary Ellen was nothing to him but a clumsy pair of hands. He was so immersed in his own researches and work that he saw nothing morbid in her, and recognised no clinical symptoms, even after the murder when they began to be obvious.

But even Sister Goode and Dr. May were not so guilty as Mrs. Sarson. Mary Ellen’s mother was moved by deep maternal love. It was genuine, but in the end it destroyed Mary Ellen. Treatment would have palliated her condition but she was never allowed treatment. The disease was buried under other names: she was ’easily frightened’; she was ‘highly strung’. The two earlier episodes, at the ages of six and twelve years (conforming to a six-year cycle sometimes met with in the disease) had been obscured and passed over. The true name was never given to the disease, if indeed Mrs. Sarson allowed herself even to believe in it. Yet it had its roots in her husband’s family. His bitter jokes about the physical abnormalities present in his forbears were not idle.

The compact between Sister Goode and Mrs. Sarson that Mary Ellen should work at the clinic under Sister’s eye was a dangerous one, for it placed too great a strain upon the relationship between them. Even before Mrs. Cox was murdered, they were no longer as friendly as they had been.

The signs Mary Ellen had shown of excessive preoccupation with Mrs. Bishop and her child were familiar to Mrs. Sarson as dangerous signs. Looking back, she was to blame herself for the way in which Mary Ellen had taken and hidden the baby. At the beginning of things, back in the early summer before that dreadful autumn when Mary Ellen was only just beginning to talk about Alma Bishop and her child, before she had scented danger and when it still seemed safe to make a joke and pass a judgement, Mrs. Sarson had said: “Someone ought to take Mrs. Bishop’s baby child away from her if she can’t take better care of it.”

Behind the quiet background of the Sarsons’ family life a great deal had been going on in the weeks before the murder. Meal times came and went, television programmes were studied, gossip was exchanged, on the surface all was as usual. Their life of service to others continued; Mrs. Sarson worked at the school, Mary Ellen went daily to the clinic and her father drove his bus. Underneath, Mary Ellen was building up a sullen reserve from her mother who, equally, was telling nothing to her husband. Every day Mary Ellen performed some small action, nothing remarkable perhaps in itself - she blinked and yawned herself into a second’s oblivion, or jerked her hands and body in clumsy movement - but it intensified her abnormality; every day her mother observed with increasing disquiet a reference to babies, to Alma Bishop, to anger. And increasingly, her father slept, whenever possible during the day, longer at night; sleep was always his refuge, it was his manner of hiding.

Of Mary Ellen the word guilt can hardly be used…

Through the confusion of pride and compassion with which her mother and Sister Goode had acted, she had been exposed to a situation to which she was found to react adversely. Sister Goode had placed her in a milieu where circumstances were bound to rub against her. At the same time her mother had allowed her physical and mental condition to deteriorate.

Coffin had arrived by a study of evidence at the conclusion that it had been her hands which had attacked Mrs. Cox. When he first began to suspect the identity of the murderer, he didn’t know that Mary Ellen had put an additional frill upon the case by secreting the baby of Mrs. Bishop.

There were no fingerprints found in the basement that could be deduced to be those of an outsider. None were found on the pieces of paper which littered the room. There were plenty of Mrs. Bishop’s prints on cups and plates and furniture; plenty of Mrs. Cox’s prints, even a few of Mr. Undershot’s. Therefore it was clearly an abnormal crime, hence probably unpremeditated and spontaneous. Therefore if gloves were worn it was by chance. The crime happened to be committed at a time the murderer was wearing gloves. This was the final pointer to Mary Ellen. She had worn gloves on that chilly November night.

Once the money was dismissed as a motive then Mrs. Bishop began to look less and less likely as the murderer for profit. She might still be the abnormal murderer. There was after all the dead body of the other baby which apparently Mrs. Cox had found just before her death.

At this point Coffin considered all the other testimony of the room and the body. He took into account the extreme violence of the attack, the curiously torn paper, the lethargy of the murderer after the burst of violence and understood that he must look for someone with a history of epilepsy. This still could be Mrs. Bishop. It could be Undershot. But Undershot cleared himself. Mrs. Bishop remained a question. In favour of her epilepsy was her poor physique and her strangeness.

But he turned again to the theory of someone from outside. A visitor. They knew of one visitor. Mary Ellen. “The murderer always brings something to the scene of the crime and leaves it there,” was his belief. A clinic card was found on the mantelpiece. It could have been brought there by Mrs. Bishop. It could have been left there by Mary Ellen. Inquiries established that it had been filled in that Friday by Mary Ellen and left behind by Mrs. Bishop.

Then came the episode of the disappearance of Mary Ellen and the phone call from the telephone box. The examination which the woman police officer gave Mary Ellen suggested clearly to Coffin, who was already thinking on these lines, that Mary Ellen had experienced a slight epileptic fit in the telephone booth. The sudden voiding of urine is often an accompaniment of this state.

It added up.

A doppelgänger, a phantom of oneself, is also an illusion that can spring from the sickness of epilepsy and Mary Ellen had told him of her double. Mary Ellen was unusual in that her double was not her constant companion but even this was not an unknown phenomenon. Coffin had his murderer.

A succession of witnesses came forward to testify to the behaviour of Mary Ellen. The woman from the shoe shop who had watched her go into the Boxers’ shop. Rosemary Boxer who had sold her the baby clothes. “They have to be all white,” she had repeated, as if there had been something alarming in this preference, as indeed perhaps there had been.

Dr. May produced the torn up scraps of paper, torn from his book, and torn in the characteristic curving way of those discovered in the house in Leopold Gardens. “Tearing paper in this way is symptomatic of an epileptic,” he explained.

Sister Goode, Dr. May, Rosemary Boxer, Juliet, they all had their tiny quota to add; and all of it pointed to the fact that the murderer was Mary Ellen.

On that cold November evening Mrs. Cox opened the door of her house to welcome in the death which Sister Goode and Mrs. Sarson had unwittingly prepared. Ironically enough, she was glad to see Mary Ellen. She had just discovered the body of the baby in the Bishops’ bed-sitting-room. Herself horrified and distracted she welcomed Mary Ellen, and adopting Alma Bishop’s own phrase, she wrongly styled her Sister. Mary Ellen had called because of a genuine mistake on Sister Goode’s part in placing Alma Bishop’s name on the list of those to be visited.

But Mrs. Cox was ushering in a sick girl. Puzzled by her welcome, conscious that she had the Bishop baby in her secret care, and uneasily aware of the second figure, her double, standing behind Mrs. Cox, Mary Ellen was under heavy pressure. Her young awkward tense figure followed Mrs. Cox down the stairs into the basement. At this point she was doubtless as innocent in intention as Mrs. Cox herself. But when she saw the body of the child all these pressures mounted into an overwhelming irritation that flared into violence. It was sudden and uncontrollable. Maybe there was some small cause for quarrel between her and Mrs. Cox.

Perhaps Mrs. Cox exclaimed when she saw Mary Ellen start to tear up the paper in rhythmic gestures, or possibly Mrs. Cox became hysterical, maybe she only trod on Mary Ellen’s toe. Precisely what triggered off the violence must be for ever mysterious, even to Mary Ellen. It was dictated by the chemistry of her blood. The picture of the killing can never be wholly clear. Mary Ellen attacked and killed Mrs. Cox and she fell into the curious lethargy which can afflict those who have killed violently, on whom in these circumstances either strange energies or strange fatigues descend.

Hans Von Hertigen has written of the stunned exhaustion which can obliterate even the fear of discovery and override the natural desire of the killer to be as far away from the crime as possible.

It was when she awoke from her strange sleep that she gave the great cry, wrung out of her, that John Tessimond heard and rightly diagnosed to be involuntary. Thus the accounts of both Charles Undershot and John Tessimond had their elements of truth. The murder did take place early in the evening and there was a great cry in the night. But it was Mary Ellen who cried out.

By then she had no clear idea of what had happened, nothing probably except a confused feeling of events having happened. That was the door which banged in her mind, and which she spoke of in her first statement to Coffin. She had a feeling of having done wrong. Guilt pursues the epileptic.

But it was Coffin who fitted all the little facts into their right place. Mrs. Bishop had come very close to being arrested for a murder of which she was innocent. She was the only one he didn’t actively dislike by the end of the case (what with Sister Goode thinking she was God), perhaps because he had seen least of her. He marched out of the clinic (which was then closed for the rest of the day) and noticed Juliet staring wistfully at him. ‘

Patsy -was waiting for Coffin when he got back to his own flat. She looked fresh and glowing and successful.

“I eat up girls like you,” he told her gloomily.

“Try me,” said Patsy, tossing off her pretty hat. “Have a nibble.”

“Is that a promise?”

“And what did we quarrel about?” asked Coffin dreamily later on. “You know; all those long years ago?”

It didn’t seem in the least important now.

“I wanted you to ask me to leave the stage, to give it up and just be your wife,” explained Patsy.

“But you’d only say no,” said Coffin, bewildered. It was some sort of battle between them, only he couldn’t tell what. But with Patsy you could never win.

“I wanted you to ask,” she persisted.

“Well, all right, here I am asking. Will you?”

“No,” said Patsy.

The subject was never mentioned between them again. Six weeks later they were married.

Juliet wept on her grandmother’s shoulder.

“He never noticed me,” she cried. “Another one. And he never even noticed I was there.” Tears rolled down her nose. “What can you expect when you call a girl Juliet?”

“They’re all so old for you, darling,” said Lady Passey. “You must try to love someone younger.”

Juliet sniffed.

Her grandmother stroked her head. “Darling,” she said. “I’m taking a party to the Opera next week. A really grand party, and you must come. We’ll go on to supper afterwards.”

“Opera?” said Juliet doubtfully, but she looked more cheerful.

“You can wear your very worldliest clothes, you know,” said her grandmother, “in fact that’s why one goes to the opera very often. It is in Rome anyway.” She paused for a moment, remembering how gorgeous she had looked in Rome once in creamy satin (the bodices were all cuffed that year, so becoming) and what had happened afterwards. For a moment she stopped, thinking of Juliet, but no, nothing like that could ever happen to Juliet. “In fact you shall have a new dress. And I have such a nice young man coming. And then it will be your turn.”

Their eyes met. A look of delicate cruelty, wholly feminine, appeared upon Juliet’s lips.

“I met an absolutely wonderful girl last night,” said a very nice young man. “At the opera.”

“Did you?” said his friend.

“I don’t know if you’d call her beautiful but I think she has the most lovely face I’ve ever seen.”

“Mmmmmm,” said his friend.

“But do you know,” said the very nice young man sadly, “she never even noticed I was there. The most wonderful girl I’ve ever seen. And she never even noticed I was there.”

Coffin’s last contact in the case was with the Bishop baby. The baby lay in a new pram outside the clinic. One day Coffin, walking past, looked down and recognised him. He was cleaner, but the same.

“They think they’re God in there, baby,” he said. “They think they’re God…That was really part of the trouble.”

The child stared up at him.

It had been a week in which a super bomb had exploded in the atmosphere, and many little bombs in Algeria, and two great aeroplanes had collided in midair. An epidemic of black small-pox had started in Pakistan and there was famine in China.

“It’s a funny present we’re giving you, baby,” said Coffin, leaning over and putting out a large gentle hand. The baby took his forefinger in a firm hard grip. “But it’s the one you seem to want.” And Coffin went off strangely cheered.

Detective Fiction and Thrillers

Glyn Carr

LEWKER IN NORWAY

DEATH FINDS A FOOTHOLD

HOLIDAY WITH MU RDER and others

Roger Simons SILVER AND DEATH THE KILLING CHASE GAMBLE WITH DEATH and others

Fiona Sinclair

MEDDLE WITH THE MAFIA DEAD OF A PHYSICIAN SCANDALISE MY NAME

Margot Neville DROP DEAD MURDER BEYOND THE P A L E and others

Elizabeth Salter

THE VOICE OF THE PEACOCK THERE WAS A WITNESS WILL TO SURVIVE

Osmington Mills AT ONE FELL SWOOP HEADLINES MAKE MURDER TRIAL BY ORDEAL and others

Simon Nash

KILLED BY SCANDAL DEAD OF A COUNTERPLOT from GEOFFREY $LES 52 Poughty Street, London, WG1