LITMIR.BIZ

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There was a lot of intermarrying and probably a bit of incest as well. Such a way of life was dying out of course, but pockets still remained. Kindred loyalty went back to the Anglo-Saxons and earlier, when an eye for an eye meant just that.

      ‘What’s the name of this new unit?’ asked Sir Alfred, examining his papers. ‘Seems to have escaped me.’

      Coffin let his eyes flicker round the room before he answered. Teddy Timpson had married a local girl and that meant he was sometimes biased. The trouble with being a detective was that you automatically suspected everyone of having secrets.

      Especially when you had one or two yourself.

      Coffin said, ‘The provisional name is Unit AN, but it hasn’t got a settled name yet,’ he went on. ‘Perhaps the committee can think of one.’

      ‘Leave that to Geraldine, shall we?’ said Ferdie. ‘She’s the word girl.’

      ‘Long time since I was a girl,’ called Geraldine over the top of her whisky, ‘but thank you for the name.’ She took a swig of her drink, but actually, as Coffin observed, drank very little. ‘When are you going to let me have a look at your mother’s memoirs? I could make a lovely TV series out of them.’

      He laughed. ‘That’s what worries me.’

      ‘What a lady!’

      A lady, in the genteel, white gloves and carrying-a-handbag style, his mother had never been, thought Coffin. A wanderer, an adventurer, and several-times-married lady, probably several times a bigamist and probably a liar into the bargain, leaving behind three abandoned siblings who only discovered each other late in life. There was John Coffin himself, his beautiful sister Letty and industrious William in Edinburgh and goodness knew who had sired him.

      ‘I think Stella wants to get her hands on it.’

      ‘I bet she does … Where is she now?’

      Coffin hesitated. ‘In New York at the moment …’

      ‘I thought it was Spain.’ He saw the glitter in her eyes which was not drink nor sympathy. ‘It was Spain.’ Damn you, Geraldine, for being so well informed. ‘But she flew straight on to New York.’

      He let them linger with their drinks for one more minute, then he caught Teddy Timpson’s eye and nodded. Time to begin.

      Round the table, they shuffled the papers in front of them. Why did a committee always fidget? But they always did, some worse than others; this lot were moving the papers as if they were about to play a hand of cards with them … In a way they were – poker – but they didn’t know it.

      ‘We have three candidates, whom we will see in alphabetical order,’ began Chief Inspector Timpson. ‘Two men and one woman.’

      He had their names in front of him: Simon Daly, from the Met, a very strong record and destined to go high; James Wood, who was from his own force, ambitious, pushing, a difficult character but able.

      And Phoebe Astley.

      ‘The woman is good,’ he had said to Timpson. ‘She was doing a very fine job where she was. I was surprised when she put in. She deserves serious consideration. You’ll know when you see her.’

      And that is where I will go out, Coffin nodded to himself, partly because I know Phoebe – she is a friend and for a time was more than that so I don’t want to seem prejudiced – and partly because I am absolutely determined she is chosen.

      And also because I have fixed it that you will, Phoebe.

      I want you here, Phoebe, and I want you now.

      He looked across at Teddy Timpson who stared back. Both of them were skilled at communicating without words. They were both remembering a conversation that they had had earlier in the month, and behind that conversation was a train of events which explained why he wanted Phoebe on his team.

      He had spoken to Teddy Timpson two weeks ago. Not a man with whom he felt wholly at ease or wholly safe. He had a lot to tell him; information that Timpson had to be told, but all the same, Coffin had edited it carefully. Placed as he was, at the top of an uneasy pyramid, he kept a lot quiet inside him. Some topics were hotter than others.

      Security, for instance, where he was in communication with various government agencies. Sometimes he was obliged to pass on all he learned to the responsible units in his force; at other times, he kept details to himself.

      For a few months now he had had meetings in the old City of London with a committee made up of men from the Treasury, the Bank of England, the City of London, the Inland Revenue and the hard boys from Customs and VAT, a man from Scotland Yard and Coffin; the major clearing banks were represented also.

      The committee was called the Resources (Police: London) Committee – RPC for short – and a man from the Treasury kept the minutes, in his head presumably, since no one ever saw them again. Too secret. Coffin made his own notes of what went on. There was never an agenda, the Chair, Althea Adams from the Bank of England conducted the meeting in her own terrifying way.

      The resources of the three London Forces, the Met, the City of London, and his own, it did not discuss. Money, it did.

      They were a group of men of influence and power who were really looking into what one member called ‘dirty money’.

      Coffin found these meetings, which took place at irregular intervals and in different rooms, both stimulating and alarming. He enjoyed meeting all the trained, tough-minded professionals.

      Earlier in his career, he would have found them intimidating, products as they were of schools and universities he had never entered; the Treasury man, Winchester and New College (of course); the two men from the clearing banks, Eton and Trinity, Cambridge (again, of course) and Althea, Cheltenham Ladies College, Girton and Harvard (this time, not of course, but predictable). Now he took them as he found them: clever and hard-working.

      Besides, he had done his homework: he knew that Althea had a sick child whose care preoccupied her, that the Treasury mandarin was about to divorce his wife, and one of the men from the clearing banks had just come through a gruelling treatment for cancer.

      He hadn’t been able to get much about the Inland Revenue and Customs chaps, which he regretted because he suspected them of being the prime agents behind this committee.

      What the committee made of him, he did not examine, but he kept quiet and took it all in. He was not surprised at his own self-confidence, but he did remember the thin youth with the dark hair who would once have been ill at ease in such company. Anyway, what could they have said of him? There’s John Coffin who’s having a bad time with his missus?

      It was with all this in his mind (and when he already knew that Phoebe would be up for the new job), that two weeks ago he had suggested that Teddy Timpson meet him for a drink in the pub near Spinnergate tube station, a comfortable establishment too far away from police headquarters to be used by the local coppers. He sat waiting in the Black Dog where they had no air conditioning on this hot day so that the ice in his glass was melting fast. It was not like DCI Timpson to be late, he was a brisk and cheerful man.

      But he found himself glad of the quiet time. It wasn’t the best of days. He was alone in his home in the tower of the old St Luke’s church, now converted into the three flats with the theatre complex adjacent. Stella was away, filming in Spain, leaving him in charge of the cat and the dog. The dog, Bob, who answered to any name and the cat, Tiddles, who never answered at all unless it suited, were his sole companions.

      His sister Letty was in Scotland visiting brother William, probably with a view to extracting some money from him for her reeling property empire. She’d be in for a disappointment there, he thought, as William was a tight man with money. Still, it would be an interesting meeting – Greek joining battle with Greek. On the whole, he backed Letty but you could never be sure.

      Then, like someone probing a sore tooth, his mind went back to Stella. She had telephoned from the airport in Madrid to announce she would not be home just yet, love, but was flying

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