LITMIR.BIZ

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people had wigs. His own wife had several, which she said were essential to her professional life.

      He fixed Coffin with a commanding blue eye. ‘Good of you to come, sir. With all your responsibilities it cannot have been easy. I appreciate your courtesy.’ It was a rich deep voice, but age had introduced streaks of lighter tones.

      ‘You know who I am?’

      ‘I keep up to date, sir.’

      So you do. Coffin thought, noticing a small television set on a table by the chair. Shelves underneath the table were stacked with more modern books, and magazines. The present did get a look in then.

      Janet fussed forward, adjusting his shawl. ‘Of course you do, Uncle.’

      He ignored her. ‘Helped by my good friend, Bradshaw.’

      ‘You pay me, sir,’ said Bradshaw, somewhat sourly.

      ‘Not enough.’

      ‘Probably not enough, but I am bearing it.’

      The old man chuckled. ‘Other things make it bearable, eh? You enjoy working with me, and we will both make money out of my autobiography.’

      ‘So you hope.’

      This sparring is in fun, they like each other. Coffin thought. But even this might be wrong, you had to remember that one at least of them was a politician, used to wearing a false smile, dissembling. Lying, in short.

      ‘Nice collection of books you have there, sir. Dickens and a complete Thackeray.’ Not many other houses in Spinnergate had a library like it, he guessed.

      ‘My mother ordered me to buy them. Said it was what I should have, but I never opened them. I was a Shaw and a Gissing man, myself. She didn’t read them either, not what she liked; Ethel M. Dell and Ruby M. Ayres, they were her goddesses. I don’t think anyone has ever opened those books there. But they look good, don’t they? Nice covers.’

      ‘Very nice.’

      ‘You’re just making conversation, lad,’ said the old man with a sudden shift of character from nostalgic son to old headmaster talking to a former pupil.

      What a politician he must have been, thought Coffin, able to change his stance as it suited him. ‘I have been wondering what you wanted from me.’

      ‘And when I was going to get down to it?’ He looked at Janet, who drew chairs forward for Coffin and Bradshaw, then retired quietly from the room. ‘And you can shut the door, Janet,’ he called out. ‘She listens at the door, you know,’ he said to Coffin in no soft voice. ‘I know you are still there, Janet, I can tell.’

      Bradshaw clicked his teeth. ‘You’re hard on Janet; you wouldn’t find it easy to get anyone else to do what she does.’

      ‘She doesn’t like me, you know.’

      ‘Do you want me to leave as well?’ asked John Bradshaw with a show of irritation.

      ‘You can stay.’ The old man looked down at his hand. ‘I’m dead in a way, dead to a lot of people, you probably thought I was dead, been off the scene a long while, a bit of old history,’ he said to Coffin.

      ‘English history, sir.’

      ‘And that’s how I want to stay. I want to be remembered for the good things I did for English society, what I opened up, what I swept away.’

      ‘That’s how it will be,’ said Coffin, wondering what was coming.

      ‘I was born round here … Different world then.’

      ‘Born not so far away myself, sir.’

      ‘Much later, you are a younger man. A different world even so and even then.’ He got up and walked slowly to the window. ‘All changed out there. New buildings, and an empty river. Different sort of people live here. When I was a kid, there was a tenement block here, dozens of families all crammed in with a lavatory and pump in the yard outside. I remember the stink.’

      ‘We all have memories like that, sir. I remember when there were big ships on the river here, and barges.’

      ‘And men at the dock gates, fighting for work, with the guv’nors coming out and picking and choosing … I remember that too … I helped put that away. Made a start.’

      Still looking out of the window, he went on: ‘At night, it’s bright with lights, they shine across the water. Keep me awake sometimes.’ He turned round: ‘It was gaslight on the cobbled walks then, and not much light at all anywhere. Pools of light under the lamps and then blackness. A dark world. I want you to remember that.’

      ‘I can imagine.’ Coffin began to feel like Alice through the Looking Glass. Not going into another world, but back in time. He looked at Jack Bradshaw who gave him a faint sympathetic smile. He lives like this all the time. Coffin thought, walking in and out of the past.

      ‘The streets were different too, narrower as well as worse lit, not so much traffic and a lot of it still horse driven. Courtyards with little houses round them. Broken windows with old clothes stuffed in them to keep the draughts out, unlocked doors – with so many souls under one roof, families crammed into one room, you couldn’t keep the front door locked much. A thieves’ paradise, and worse …’

      Bradshaw met Coffin’s eye and gave a small nod. He’ll be out with it soon, the nod said. He has to work up to what’s coming.

      ‘We had a very hot summer the year I was thirteen,’ Lavender went on, ‘followed by a bad, foggy winter. I remember how the fog hung over the street we lived in and seemed to creep slyly into every crack of the little house. My school was just around the corner and I spent as much time there as I could. There was a little library, I could get into that and sit reading, it was warmer than home … quieter too. My mother used to take in washing, it was a common way then to earn some money, the washing was collected and taken home to be washed. Rubbed up and down a dolly board. We had a boiler in the kitchen with a coal fire beneath. I used to help my mother by delivering the clean washing in an old pram … I had a younger brother, but he died …’

      ‘I used to do errands, delivering messages, collecting shopping, to earn a bit of pocket money,’ said Coffin, dredging up a memory, long forgotten. Did he say it aloud? If so, the old man took no notice, but went on:

      ‘So I was out and about the streets at all hours, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes late at night. I saw all things … there wasn’t much I didn’t know about the ways of men and women and of men with women. Stood me in good stead, I can tell you, when I went out into the world … But even so …’ He paused. ‘There was a lot of violence on the streets that winter … the fogs, I suppose, being particularly bad made it easier for attackers to get away. Four women were killed in Spinnergate and East Hythe that winter and spring.’

      ‘You remember exactly?’

      ‘I remember; there was a lot of talk and boys listen to that sort of thing … One woman was found dead in a gutter, another in a park, another up an alley. And I have cause to remember.’

      ‘Four, you said?’

      ‘Yes, all strangled, just one killer for the lot. What we now call a serial killer. Monsters, was the word then, that last winter before the First World War.’

      Lavender stopped, his voice had been tiring.

      ‘You could do with a drink,’ said Bradshaw, standing up. ‘You should have let me tell all this.’ He went to the door. ‘Janet, bring a glass of water.’

      Janet must have been at the door, she was in so quick, holding out a glass. ‘Here you are, I dropped some whisky in it.’

      More than a drop, thought Coffin, observing the colour. Still, she knew the old man and what he could take.

      Dick Lavender took a sip. ‘I came home one day of a deep fog, I’d been delivering the washing to a local pub: the Rock of Gibraltar … the Gib, we called

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