A Grave Coffin. Gwendoline Butler
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GWENDOLINE BUTLER
A GRAVE COFFIN
HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1998
Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1998
Gwendoline Butler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
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Source ISBN: 9780006510123
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007545452
Version: 2014–07–08
With my thanks to Dr Colin Fink for
all his help on scientific and medical matters.
CONTENTS
A brief Calendar of the life and career of John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Second City of London Police.
John Coffin is a Londoner by birth, his father is unknown and his mother was a difficult lady of many careers and different lives who abandoned him in infancy to be looked after by a woman who may have been a relative of his father and who seems to have acted as his mother’s dresser when she was on the stage. He kept in touch with this lady, whom he called Mother, lodged with her in his early career and looked after her until she died.
After serving briefly in the army, he joined the Metropolitan Police, soon transferring to the plain-clothes branch as a detective.
He became a sergeant and was very quickly promoted to inspector a year later. Ten years later, he was a superintendent and then chief superintendent.
There was a bad patch in his career about which he is reluctant to talk. His difficult family background has complicated his life and possibly accounts for an unhappy period when, as he admits, his career went down a black hole. His first marriage split apart at this time and his only child died.
From this dark period he was resurrected by a spell in a secret, dangerous undercover operation about which even now not much is known. But the esteem he won then was recognized when the Second City of London was being formed and he became Chief Commander of its Police Force. He has married again, an old love, Stella Pinero, who is herself a very successful actress. He has also discovered two siblings, a much younger sister and brother.
The room had a view of St Paul’s Cathedral if you looked hard over the rooftops. To get into this room, you were required to press the red button on the door before entering; inside there was the distinct impression you were photographed from every