Cracking Open a Coffin. Gwendoline Butler
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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