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Coffin on Murder Street. Gwendoline Butler
Читать онлайн.Название Coffin on Murder Street
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007544684
Автор произведения Gwendoline Butler
Издательство HarperCollins
GWENDOLINE BUTLER
Coffin on Murder Street
HarperCollinsPublishers,
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1991
Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1990
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Gwendoline Butler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780006471851
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN 9780007544684
Version: 2014–07–02
Contents
‘In the real world, Proust would have killed Albertine.’
Gus Hamilton, speaking of the new play written about Marcel Proust.
March 5
John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Police Force in the newly created Second City of London, made up of the old boroughs of Spinnergate, Leathergate, Swinehouse and East Hythe, sat in the window-seat of his living-room in St Luke’s Mansions; he was preparing the text of his mad mother’s diary for publication. The arrival of this diary had been one of the greatest shocks of his adult life. He had been brought up, fatherless and motherless, by an aunt and a grandmother who had fostered the notion that his parents were dead. It was later in his life that he discovered that his mother had not died when he was a child but had gone on to have numerous other relationships and at least one other marriage. Other discoveries had followed. Mother had been quite a character.
He was a tall man, going grey neatly at the temples with sharp clear blue eyes from which the innocent confidence he had had as a young man had long since faded. They were still kind eyes, yet wary. It was a good face, but held no promise of being easy. Life had toughened him. Presently he stood up, stretched himself and looked down upon the territory where he was responsible for maintaining the Queen’s Peace as Chief Commander of the New City Force.
There was a killing taking place down there in Murder Street at that very