Free Coffin's Ghost by Gwendoline Butler

spell it all out.
    ‘When I was living there in Barrow Street, I was interviewed by a young journalist on the local paper. Anna Michael. Iliked her. We became friends. She came to the house once or twice. I took her out to dinner. Max wasn’t open then. Before his day.’
    I hate apologizing, he told himself, especially to Stella. I hate admitting that I was in the wrong.
    Usually with Stella, I have managed to avoid it. Been grouchy, shifty and shuffled away.
    I am not proud of this.
    Perhaps he was overdoing the wallowing in guilt bit, but it seemed right to feel churlish.
    Phoebe Astley was still staring at him. ‘You said something but I didn’t hear, sir.’
    ‘I think I was talking to myself.’ A sudden pain on the site of the old injury made him draw in his breath.
    Phoebe saw it. ‘Are you all right, sir?’
    ‘Yes, just memory of where the knife went in. Pain’s like that. Gets you when you don’t expect it.’
    ‘You went a bit white . . .’ She stood up. ‘Can I get you something? A drink?’
    ‘Nothing. Sit down. I want to tell you something.’
    Phoebe sat down obediently.
    ‘The young journalist.’ The one who took my fancy, he said to himself. ‘Anna Michael was not her name, just her writing name. She was Joanna Carmichael. J.C.’
    Phoebe stood up again. Whereas just now the Chief Commander had gone white, now a blotchy red was creeping up his face. ‘I don’t think you are well, sir. You shouldn’t have come to work today.’
    Coffin ignored her. ‘Did you hear what I said? J.C., her initials. Her real initials. Joanna Carmichael. I think the limbs may be hers.’
    ‘I suppose it’s possible, sir.’ Privately, she thought the Chief Commander was having a kind of fantasy fit.
    ‘I want to see the limbs.’
    DCI Astley was not the only one who thought the Chief Commander had come back to his office too soon.
    Stella Pinero was even more anxious. She was worried about him, worried about their relationship. She had neverseen him quite so troubled as he was now over what she called crossly, ‘Bloody Barrow Street.’
    She knew the Serena Seddon Refuge to which she had donated money. When it was setting up, the St Luke’s Theatre Company had given a special performance of Michael Frayn’s
Noises Off (always
a crowd-puller) to help raise money. Stella herself had performed in it.
    On this occasion she had met Mary Arden and thought her pretty and gentle, possibly too gentle for the disturbed and distressed women she would have to live with. Not to mention the husbands who would certainly be both disturbing and probably violent.
    I’d be better at it, she had thought. I mean, when you have coped with a cast of performers all rampantly enjoying one form of sex or another (she was thinking of the cast of
Major Barbara
which she had just produced . . . It was surprising how sexy Shaw was when you came up against him), then you can cope with almost everything.
    Mary Arden’s assistant she knew better because Evelyn’s husband worked in the theatre, a nice brawny lad with curly hair. A bit younger than his wife, Stella assessed.
    He had found an opportunity to talk to her about the limbs deposited on the Serena Seddon Refuge. His wife was upset, he said, and all the present residents were, as he put it ‘on the twitch’.
    ‘Must be a woman with some connection with the house, you see, Miss Pinero, and that makes them nervous. For themselves, each and every one having a close experience of violence. Her now, one of us next, that’s how they reason. And I’ve had the kid, Alice Gilchrist, she used that name, working for me. A nice girl, if simple, she’s off. It’s worrying. You can understand it.’
    Stella agreed that you could, but put in the proviso that the police would be watching the house and protecting the women in it.
    The warden thinks the limbs belong to a girl who used to live there . . . Helped run the place, I think, not a battered wife. French girl, Henriette. Etta, they