Free Coffin's Ghost by Gwendoline Butler Page B

I was in the van. You weren’t. Where the hell were you? That was a long shit!’
    ‘And what were
you
doing? Didn’t let the police know.’
    ‘I was parked illegally,’ said Arthur. ‘Besides, the man in the PO Telephone van rushed to do it. Not my business.’
    Arthur took his hands off the wheel to adjust the hat in the car mirror and wave to Stella. There was no doubt, she thought, that a touch of madness helped in the entertainment world.
    Perhaps that was what was the matter with her and Coffin: they were not mad enough.
    But no, she knew that wasn’t the trouble, there was an unease between them at the moment which she couldn’t account for.
    Not my fault, she thought.
    ‘Do you want to go alone, sir, or shall I come with you?’ asked Phoebe Astley.
    ‘I’m not a child, this isn’t a trip to the park,’ said Coffin irritably.
    The chief inspector took this for a kind of backhanded permission, which suited her as she intended to go with the Chief Commander anyway. He was the boss figure and entitled to look in at whatever he chose, but it was her case too. In the end, she would be responsible for what happened or didn’t happen. She admired and respected Coffin, but she had her own career to consider.
    The limbs were in the care, if you could call it that, of the Pathology Department of the Second City University Hospital.
    ‘Slung in a refrigerator and waiting for Dennis Garden to give tongue,’ as Archie Young had said sardonically. He was no friend of Professor Garden. Socially and intellectually, they lived in different worlds. Archie did not admire the carefully chosen blue and pink shirts from Jermyn Street with matching ties, nor the equally carefully chosen band of young men with whom he consorted. The professor’s technical skills he respected.
    But the new laboratories for which Garden had foughtseveral successful wars in favour of dead persons getting the best, Archie Young, no mean fender-off of cutbacks, did admire. The Second City Police Forensic Unit was first class, Coffin had seen to that, and it maintained a small pathology group, but for anything major then it called on the University Hospital and Dennis Garden.
    ‘Been in here, sir, since it was rebuilt?’ asked Phoebe as she led the way into the gleaming, sterile, antiseptic new laboratories.
    Coffin had to admit that he had not. ‘Was invited to the grand opening but I couldn’t go. Stella went and said that there was more champagne than seemed decent in the presence of so many dead.’
    Phoebe had been there herself – one of our best customers, Garden had said – and had heard Stella Pinero say something on the lines Coffin reported, and had heard Garden say: ‘Not all dead, I have a few bits and pieces of people who are just dying.’ You couldn’t best Garden, Phoebe had thought.
    The great man was not to be seen, having been drawn away to an important committee in London, but his assistant Dr Driver was on hand.
    He was talking to a tall, pretty woman who held herself very straight.
    ‘That’s Mary Arden,’ said Phoebe Astley. ‘Now why is she here?’
    ‘Pretty obvious. To see the limbs. To identify them. Did you ask her to come?’
    Phoebe shook her head. ‘Certainly not. She wouldn’t be on her own, I’d have sent someone with her. I was thinking of getting her in, but Davley was off on something else.’ Which had seemed more urgent.
    ‘What’s Sergeant Davley doing?’
    ‘Checking the local doctors . . . as far as we can without a name, but the owner of the limbs must have been on someone’s list.’
    ‘Is there any chance Mary Arden could make an identification?’
    Phoebe shrugged. ‘Who knows? She was worried that thelimbs belonged to a girl who worked in the house. Etta, she called her. But those legs belonged to no girl.’
    Coffin was watching Mary Arden, who was shaking the doctor’s hand and turning towards the door. ‘She’s leaving. Better talk to her.’
    ‘She’s seen us,’ said