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PROLOGUE

Letter to John Coffin from Professor Lessingham, The Institute of Mental Health, Bury Hill.

‘I am coming to the opinion that there are certain types of killers who might be called periodic serial killers in as much as they will only kill when the victim offers exactly what is required. So there may be long gaps in the cycle.

‘In these cases there is a symbiotic relationship between killer and victim: they move towards each other.

‘The rules as to the victim, manner of killing, disposal of the body have to be kept … But even the most dedicated of serial killers will be frustrated by circumstances, something the killer did not take into account, or could not control. There will always be cases out of pattern, that do not conform.’

CHAPTER 1

A day in early autumn

One day in early autumn the neighbourhood newspaper, Second City News, carried a special supplement on the university, then celebrating its fifth birthday and welcoming that year’s intake of students. As well as a large photograph of the head of the university, Sir Thomas Blackhall, there was a page of photographs in colour of some of the students.

Students at tutorials, seen in a booklined room, are neatly posed around their tutor. One of them is reading an essay, the others listen.

Students at lectures, observing the lecturer write an equation on a large board spread across the wall behind him. He does it with some electronic device that he does not understand because he would prefer old-fashioned chalk. Once he failed, unknowingly, to use it correctly, so that nothing appeared on the board, and then, absent-mindedly back in the days of chalk, he turned round and wiped what wasn’t there clean away with the back of his sleeve. This brought down the house.

Students in the library, heads bent over their books. Because this is not Oxford (where the habit was abandoned years ago) and because the university is so young, it is the fancy here for all the students to wear shortish academic gowns.

Students at parties, at their summer ball. A crowded scene with many outsiders, among whom John Coffin might have recognized one of his own officers if he had looked more closely. Later, he was to regret this. The girls wear long dresses and the lads wear black ties and dinner jackets. There is even a couple where the girl wears what looks like a Christian LaCroix crinoline and the boy wears tails.

A golden pair, thinks John Coffin, head of the Second City Police, and he remembers his own youth was so far from golden. A line underneath says: Amy and Martin. Well, good luck Amy and Martin, he thinks.

Tutorials, academic gowns, formal evening clothes, the new university is building its traditions. Unfortunately, it looks as if murder might be one of them.

John Coffin took the Second City News regularly and it happened that he had seen this photograph while sitting in the sun by the river. Not far from where he lived in his home in an old church was a small park which overlooked the Thames. It was an ancient, rundown little park, all that remained of the grounds of a mediæval bishop’s palace. A stretch of old stone walling, probably all that was left of the old place, ran along the river for a few yards and this was where Coffin sat.

In the first place he liked the wall, in the crevices of which yellow and white weeds flowered in the autumn, and secondly there was a smell to it that reminded him of his childhood.

It was communicating something to him, that smell. Opening up a window through which he could peer at the past.

He had grown up by the river. This river, just as dirty and travelworn by the centuries, but winding through a different part of London. South, where the river takes a deep curve and looks up to the hills of Kent.

It had not been a happy childhood. More or less orphaned (although mother, as it turned out, was still alive but missing), brought up first by a grandmother and an aunt, and then by the aunt alone, and finally fostered out to one family after another.

There were a lot of memories of that childhood that were thrashing around in his mind, some he was busily engaged in repressing but others were getting through.

He remembered sitting by the river, aged ten. He was fishing with a bit of string, a hook, and a tin can for the fish. But inside he was dreaming of himself in an open motorcar with a princess beside him. She was faceless but definitely royal.

The beginning of sex, he supposed. Late, by current standards.

Well, he eventually got the motorcar, although not the bright red open speedster of his dream, but never the princess. Although he had had several shots at it.

And that brought him back to Stella. Darling, beloved, infuriating Stella to whom he had never been totally faithful nor totally unfaithful either.

Which was where you had to think about it, because Stella was angry with him. She had opened her eyes wide and said: ‘To hell with you.’

They hadn’t met for a few days now. They would meet again and things would be patched up, neither was prepared for a decisive break.

There was another aspect to the problem of Stella, and he had a letter in his pocket, highly personal and very unwelcome, and one which caused him fury but which would have to be addressed.

And all the time he was thinking about Stella and the golden pair of students, he was conscious of dry bones moving at the back of his mind. So that of all the people presently concerned with the murders, he was the least surprised.

CHAPTER 2

October. The first two days

A girl’s sweater, striped blue and white, lay on the edge of the River Thames near where Herring Creek and Leadworks Wharf looked across the water to each other. It was stained and muddy. On the front was an initial which might have been a D or a C but some small river creature had nibbled away at. No one had noticed the sweater yet, but it ought to be found soon.

‘The trouble with opera is the singers,’ said Philippa Darbyshire gloomily. She shook her head so that the slightly greying fair curls bobbed around her face; she was large but pretty and enjoying her middle years more than she would admit to her women friends. She had banned the word menopause, women didn’t have it now, you had hormone replacement. A smile lightened her face. ‘It would really be better without them.’

‘But not nearly so much like opera,’ suggested John Coffin. The two of them were seated in the bar of St Luke’s Theatre late on the chill October morning. This theatre was the creation of his talented sister, Lætitia Bingham, who had taken a derelict church in the old docklands beyond the Tower of London and turned it into a theatre with a theatre workshop attached. The main theatre was due to be opened officially this summer by the Queen, but of course it had long since been opened and running unofficially, operating at a handsome profit. Recession, it seemed, was not hurting the theatre.

John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Second City of London police force, lived in one of the three apartments which had also been formed from the old St Luke’s Church. He had come through a difficult three years since his appointment to this new command and the lines around his eyes had deepened and the once dark hair was neatly silvered at the temples. He had fought his way up the career ladder to the top and now wondered whether and when he would fall off.

But he liked heights. He had a flat in the tower of the old church with a fine view across his troublesome bailiwick. Hard by, in another apartment, lived the actress Stella Pinero, the love of his life or the bane of it, depending how their relationship was going.

He was waiting for her now. Stella had been playing in a West End revival of Mourning Becomes Electra. It had not gone very well, although she personally had had delightful reviews, and she was now back at St Luke’s Theatre of which she was Director and guardian spirit. It had been created around her.

Philippa had seized on him with the joy of one who needed to talk, beginning with a brisk: ‘I suppose you’re waiting for Stella? She came in, said you were late and went out again.’

I wasn’t late, Coffin thought sadly. I’m never late. Or if I am, it isn’t my fault. What he was, was not there much. As a serving police officer of high rank, he had a crowded life. But Stella herself was often absent and her excuses were nebulous and vague.

‘But she left you Bob,’ Philippa had added.

‘I know.’ Bob, a mongrel of loving disposition, had already pressed his head on Coffin’s foot. You are my friend and half-owner, the pressure said, and now I can look after you and you can look after me. ‘Move over, Bob.’ Coffin tried to lift his left foot which was going numb. Bob growled. He believed fiercely in physical contact. Coffin patted his head which was rough and wiry, he knew that there would now be gingery hairs all over shoe and trouser leg. ‘Good dog,’ he said.

He sipped his coffee and looked at Philippa, whom he liked and admired and somewhat feared: she seemed capable of everything, and had once persuaded him to take part in a play production. But he would have nothing to do with singing. Not even as a goblin.

His mind moved back to his own purely personal and private problem. Several weeks ago he had had a telephone call. A man who did not announce himself.

The call came through in the early morning, at home, in his sitting-room, which outraged him even more. This place was his sanctuary, his refuge.

‘Copper, watch your back. They’re gunning for you. Better get your answers ready.’

It was repeated several times.

‘Copper, watch your back. Watch your back. Watch your back.’

He had slammed the telephone down without answering it, shrugged and gone back to drinking his coffee. Not exactly forgotten it, but taking not much notice of it, either. He was used to the odd mad call.

A week later to the very day, to the hour almost, came another call. Someone who knows when I drink my morning coffee, he had thought wryly. Same message, not exactly word for word but close enough.

Some days later he came to find a message on his answering machine. More of the same. He thought he recognized the slight cough that prefaced the advice.

But it was different this time.

‘This is a message from a friend: tidy up your private life or you will be in trouble. Serious trouble. No joking.’

He turned the machine back, slowly and carefully.

The letter came several days later, as he had always supposed it would, and it was now festering inside him like a bad boil.

His unknown caller had had good information. All this was at the back of his mind while he listened to Philippa.

Philippa was still going on about singers: ‘Oh, we have to have them, but off stage, that’s the place for them. Where we can’t see them. Just their voices. On stage we would have actors, dancers, who would look right. Singers have the wrong shape. They can’t help it, they need it to produce the voice, but we shouldn’t have to look at them trying to be Tosca or Mimi. Not to mention Siegfried and Brunnhilde.’ Mrs Darbyshire gave a feeling shudder. ‘And the Valkyries … Overweight, all of them. How can you dress them as warriors, I ask you?’

Coffin looked his sympathy and tried again to shift Bob from his foot. Bob sank deeper down.

‘And I’m having such trouble with the students from the university. Such sharp little critics. Must think things through, they say. Just sing, I say.’

Coffin offered sympathy again. ‘You’ll manage.’ In his experience of the ladies of Feather Street, of whom Philippa was one, they managed all they wanted. Even this production of extracts from The Ring would work out.

‘I think it’s university life. They’re spoilt, those kids.’

‘They have their troubles,’ he said softly.

He knew something she didn’t.

He knew that two students were missing. A boy and a girl. Whether together or otherwise was not yet clear. They had last been seen standing by her car.

Gone two days. Not long, but in the circumstances, long enough.

In the new university there were three residential blocks in which the students had rooms. The rooms were tiny, but each had its own bathroom and tiny slip of a kitchen. This was not so much for ease of student living as because in the long vacation there was much lucrative letting for conferences.

The three blocks were named after benefactors, they were Armitage, Barclay and Gladstone. Each block had its own character, or was thought to have, and which was perhaps self-perpetuating: Barclay was rowdy and thus attracted the drinkers and the rugger players; Gladstone was near the library and the science buildings, so the industrious and the scientists settled there; Armitage was the fashionable and social block, the smartest place to live, and it attracted as well as the party-goers, the drama and music students.

The missing students had lived in Armitage. Their group of friends there were among the first to be worried by their disappearance.

In Angela Kirk’s room a small meeting was taking place.

‘It’s horrible.’ This was Mick Frost, tall and thin.

‘Don’t exaggerate, Mick, we don’t know that anything’s happened.’ Beenie was a year older than Mick and inclined to slow him down.

‘We know what’s been happening,’ said Mick. ‘We’ve seen, we’ve known the state she was in even if we haven’t talked about it.’

‘It wasn’t easy to talk about it. That sort of thing isn’t easy to talk about, and anyway part of it was us guessing.’

‘Pretty clear,’ said Mick. ‘Pretty clear. Sex and violence.’

Angela said: ‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘Mick’s right,’ said Beenie from the floor where she was stretched out. ‘We should have done something … After all, there was Virginia last year.’

‘We don’t know about Virginia.’ Angela again.

‘I think we do,’ said Mick.

Beenie shifted uneasily. ‘OK, OK, so let’s do something.’

‘I’m frightened,’ said Angela. ‘I don’t want to go that way.’ She was scared and yet excited.

‘Oh, come on,’

‘No, I tell you, it’s evil, talking like this.’ The word dropped into the room, cold and hard.

Angela bent her head to let a long fall of shining blonde hair cover her face. She stretched her thin white arms and imagined them with blue bruises and saw herself as victim.

It can’t happen to me, she thought. If I keep quiet perhaps it will all go away … Beenie’s all right, she’s brown and tall and strong. She crossed her arms across her chest, protecting herself.

Aloud, against her will, she heard herself say: ‘We owe Amy something. I could go down to Star Court, offer to help.’ It was as if she wanted to be a victim, that was what she had chosen and it would do.

‘Don’t let her, Beenie,’ said Mick. ‘Stop her.’

Beenie shrugged.

There was silence in the room.

‘I’ve got to go,’ said Mick, standing up. ‘I’ve got to audition for some creepy amateur performance of Wagner.’

‘Why do you go, then?’ asked Beenie.

‘Sucking up to our dear Professor,’ said Mick with a ravishing smile. ‘Also, we get paid, not much but something and if you are aiming at a professional singer’s career (and I might be) you have to learn to take the money where you can find it.’

At the door, he turned and said: ‘While I am singing Wagner, look after yourself, Angie. Wagner, here I come.’

The Friends of St Luke’s Theatre, a group of local ladies important in Coffin’s life for all sorts of reasons, who put on an amateur performance once a year, were attempting an opera. Not the whole opera, just a scene or two. The choice bits, as they said. They had considered Rosenkavalier, The Marriage of Figaro, and La Bohème (a strong lobby for this last opera), but they were long-time supporters of the rights of women and the Ride of the Valkyries seemed just to fill the bill.

There was an added motive: they had a vibrant dramatic soprano among their ranks, Lydia Tullock, and Lydia was also rich. Others among them had good voices. So they had joined up with the Spinnergate Choral Society and the very strong Music Department of the local university, the University of the Second City, to launch their production.

Mrs Darbyshire was the designer for costumes and sets for this ambitious enterprise; in her youth she had been an assistant to Motley and then gone on to work for Douglas Duguid. She had retired to marry Harold and bring up her family in their Victorian house in Feather Street, but now in middle age she had gone back to work, and had been hired by the Friends of St Luke’s. Of course, she was a Friend herself, but she was a professional, as she pointed out fiercely when they suggested she should do the job for nothing, and women must be paid. She would have done it for nothing, she loved her work, but standards had to be maintained. Also, Lydia was rich and could afford anything and Philippa was poor, but she had her problems and was being vocal about them.

‘Our Siegfried now, Turnwall Taylor, he’s a lovely man, I have nothing against him personally, but he is frankly fat. Imagine dressing him up in brown leather togs and getting him to woo Brunnhilde. She’s outsize too, and every one of the Valkyries has a weight problem.’

She sighed heavily. ‘You never get everything. I remember saying to Larry once what a lovely Wotan, King of the Gods, he would make. He had the majesty, you see, but he hadn’t the voice.’

She probably had known Lord Olivier, Coffin thought, or at least met him. Philippa did not lie, but she had the trick, familiar to him from his theatrical friends, of slight exaggeration.

‘He’d have brought in the customers. Bums on seats, we need that, money is so short, and opera costs. I hoped to get more out of the university, but …’ She shook her head.

‘Money’s short all round,’ said John Coffin. He had budget problems himself. In the few years that he had been Head of the Force in the Second City of London, he had never had enough resources to do all that was required in the turbulent area for which he was responsible. The old villages of Spinnergate, Swinehouse, Leathergate and Easthythe that were bound together in his Second City were expensive to police.

‘But they have been very generous with help, the Drama Department there, so vital, isn’t it? And such a vigorous Music Department.’ The Music Department was providing the orchestra, musical director and conductor as well as a few singers to audition. Philippa Darbyshire was half in love with the conductor, a beautiful young man, some sixteen years her junior and none the worse for that, she thought.

My goodness, she said to her inner self, how times have changed. My mother wouldn’t have dreamt of letting herself be attracted to a man so much younger than herself, wouldn’t have admitted the possibility, but I’m not only admitting it, I’m enjoying it.

She even enjoyed the fact it was not reciprocated. It might have been awkward indeed if it had been, for Harold might not have liked it. Well, wouldn’t have done. Harold was her husband. Once a banker, now enjoying early retirement, he was doing a course at the nearby university. Not in drama or anything dangerous like that, thank goodness, she thought (she was the one allowed temptation, not Harold), but in fine art.

The university had been put together out of a Polytechnic and College of Advanced Technology, when it was decreed that the new Second City of London must have its own university.

This Second City had several great hospitals, one of which had a history going back to a monastic foundation of the thirteenth century, three museums, two art galleries and an assortment of old and new industries. It was represented in the House of Commons by two MPs and in the House of Lords had one recently ennobled peer who bravely called himself Lord Brown of Swinehouse.

Many of the old warehouses of the former docklands had been converted into smart apartment blocks, but old streets and grimy old housing estates still supported the old poor who eyed their new rich neighbours without love.

It was no easy area to police, with violence never far below the surface and always threatening to break out. A large garage attacked only yesterday. A few days ago a robbery with savage violence in a shop in the Tube station in Spinnergate, two badly injured, a crime that was still being investigated, no leads.

On the two large housing estates which were separated by a railway line and a belt of expensive upper-class apartments, gangs formed, fought each other, and the police too if they could, then melted away as fresh and younger outfits took their place. The Dreamers, once the most powerful group, had gone into decline when several members had been sent to prison and another couple had married, which as far as active gang life went came to the same thing. This had left the field to their rivals, who called themselves The Planters after the Planter estate where most of them lived. But somehow, without the competition, The Planters too had gone into decline. With no one to fight, what was the point to being? There was a short-lived revival of Dreamers Two, but it failed to inspire. Either the police were getting quicker to stamp out trouble-makers or the gangs were getting weaker. Who could say?

At the moment there were no big gangs, but Coffin had heard stories of a new one forming itself around a female leader. He believed it.

He had not met her yet, but no doubt he would if she became powerful enough. He had heard she was called Our General.

Such was the Second City where John Coffin held the Queen’s Peace and in which he lived.

‘You can’t think,’ said Philippa, ‘how hard it is to find women warriors who can sing.’

Wonder if I should suggest she tries Our General, thought Coffin.

‘I’m not sure if I like the Valkyrie concept anyway,’ said Philippa. Under the influence of the Drama Department, whether she admitted it or not, she had started to intellectualize her reactions to plots and story lines. ‘I mean, I don’t know any.’

They exist, thought Coffin.

Philippa finished her coffee, looked regretfully at a plate of chocolate croissants, but she mustn’t, she really mustn’t, that last inch on her hips since she had given up being a vegetarian was one inch too many, and got to her feet. ‘I must be off. Got an appointment with the Head of Drama at the university, he’s going to help me find some extra Nibelungs. I could do with some really short, dwarflike men with good voices.’ The Head of Drama was a handsome man too, she was looking forward to the half-hour together. She picked up her bags, Philippa always travelled with a full complement of shoulder-bags, clutch bags and the odd plastic carrier. Her mood was good in spite of the difficulties with the Valkyries. She would see her beautiful young musician, he had promised to be there, bringing a few young male singers to audition. It was wonderful how a family growing up and leaving home emancipated you. I am a New Woman, she announced to herself.

‘I’ll hang on a bit longer,’ said Coffin. He watched her departure with indulgence and a touch of sympathy; he could guess her motives. There was one thing about being a policeman: you often knew more about your friends and neighbours than they guessed. He knew about the young conductor, Marcus Deit. He even knew more about Marcus than she did, but that would be telling. ‘Goodbye.’ He was glad to sit thinking.

‘They have been gone two days. This is day two and we are into day three, and nothing, not a word. With students, you never know, just gone off, you say to yourself. But she’s my child, my child.’ He could hear the man’s voice, rough with worry. ‘And her car has been found.’

John Coffin would not normally have been concerned with the story of the missing students. Or not so soon. The Chief Commander of the Second City Force had access to all information about what was going on in his difficult and lively territory. He was responsible for all and was meant to know all. That was the theory. As with the Queen, all important documentation came his way for signature but it took time. Reports were filtered through subordinates, prepared and then presented on his desk. His secretaries might do a bit of selection here too, he was protected and had to keep a wary eye on that protection. He knew that things were kept from him.

So he had developed the habit of just dropping in on departments. Of prowling round and asking questions. The CID inevitably got a lot of his attention. He couldn’t give up the habit; once a detective, always a detective. Also inevitably, this interest did not meet with the total approval of the CID teams, and although obliged to grin and bear it, they had ways of getting their feelings across.

Coffin had noted with amusement and understanding the tactics of Chief Superintendent Paul Lane and the wily manœuvring of Chief Inspector Archie Young. Young’s tricks were cleverer but Paul Lane got away with more: experience did tell, Coffin had told himself wryly while furthering the recent promotions of both men. The nominal head of the CID was Harry Coleridge, but he was a quiet, efficient administrator who would soon be retiring.

Jockeying for Coleridge’s position was already going on, but John Coffin was considering bringing in an outsider. What about a woman? Was there one? Yes, there was, he knew a name. Keep quiet, he told himself, and watch events. He had learnt politics, willy-nilly, in his job.

But in the matter of the missing students he had not had to go out and ask: he had been dragged in on Day Two of their disappearance. In person.

He got a notebook out of his pocket and put a photograph of the missing girl on the table before him.

There she was: small, dark-haired, not really pretty but interesting, a good face. Amy Dean, nineteen years, with a birthday coming up next week if she was still alive to enjoy it.

She had been snapped against a background which he recognized as the University Senate and Library, she was sitting on the steps in the sunlight with a bag of books at her side and the columns of the portico showing behind her.

The older buildings of the university were undistinguished, having been taken over from the earlier establishments from which it had been put together. Utility was all they aimed at, but the new blocks had higher artistic ambitions.

A grant from Whitehall, a subsidy from the Corporation of the Second City (which was fully alive to the prestige of its own university) and several private donations, had enabled a competition to be held to produce the best design.

The winner of the competition, which had been fierce and bitter, was a young American architect who had survived the battle between modernist architects, neo-modern architects, post-modern architects, classicists and the neo-classical men, and come out with what his critics called ‘nostalgia’ architecture. His building was pretty and much loved by the students. Oddly, since the whole was built of pale stone and wide open, the new building had not suffered the ravages of graffiti writers or vandals. Perhaps it really was too nice to touch.

A telephone call from the Rector’s office had got through to Coffin yesterday; he was on his own in his office, working late.

‘Tom Blackhall here.’ The Rector of the University (this was his preferred title as opposed to Vice Chancellor or Principal) had a pleasant, deep voice. He was Sir Thomas, recently knighted, but to John Coffin he said Tom, they were two heads of mini-states meeting on equal terms. John and Tom.