Cold Coffin by Gwendoline Butler

Stella said she thought she was hungry. ‘We didn’t eat much. Would you like some soup?’
    She couldn’t make soup, but she was good at opening tins, and these days the best soups came in cardboard containers that you kept in the fridge. She investigated and found none. Oh well, it would have to be hunger and bed.
    She knew how to make bed attractive.
    To her surprise, Coffin found the alternative attractive. He had been half asleep; now he woke up, pointing out that it was just as well there wasn’t a dog to take for a walk before going to bed.
    â€˜You’re better than tomato soup,’ he said at one point, ‘but you smell of vanilla.’
    â€˜It’s my new scent.’
    â€˜What a shame, I thought you might be a new biscuit, edible of course. Vanilla cream . . . That third arm might have its uses now,’ he observed a little later on. ‘Not to mention various other bits of the anatomy.’
    Stella laughed.
    There was no more conversation for a bit, only what Coffin later called a congress of the spirit.
    Later still he said sleepily, ‘You will hide the bronze, won’t you? Don’t want to live with an elongated version of myself.’
    â€˜I believe Letty will want to borrow it for an exhibition she is mounting in London.’
    â€˜As long as my name is not on it.’ He was almost asleep.
    Stella did not tell him that his name and rank were inscribed on the back of the bronze head under the third eye.
    Chief Inspector Phoebe Astley was not sleeping well. The sex games she played with her friend Jo were just that, games, but she was beginning to be aware that they could fire into something more serious. The trouble was that she wanted a child, but she didn’t want a husband. Well, there were ways round that problem, and Jo knew them. She was a doctor, but her price would be a relationship with Phoebe. You ought to want a husband, she told herself, or anyone who would make a male partner, or just think of offspring from an anonymous source. Of course, it didn’t have to be anonymous, but it had to be said there were no eager applicants around at the moment.
    Her friendship with the Chief Commander, going back some years, frightened a lot of colleagues away.
    She turned over in bed, then reached out for a glass of water. Would the Chief Commander be prepared to make a helpful donation? Joke.
    She drank some more water. What a terrifying child it would be, with her genes and his.
    She lay back on her pillow, drifting towards sleep. She knew that she would never forget the infant skulls, first the little Neanderthal heads and then the collection in the medical museum. It was hard to know which was the most poignant.
    â€˜I heard someone say that Neanderthals could not speak, they had no language. It’s thought they could make grunting noises but that their throats, tongues also, were the wrong shape for speech.’
    It made it worse to Phoebe that those long dead little creatures had had no names.
    An evolutionary change altered the shape of our throats and mouth, one which moved the tongue forward and shortened the jaw. Thus modern man learned to speak, and speaking pushed the Neanderthals into oblivion. They might, in their way, have been loving family creatures, but since they could not say so, they were lost.
    On the other hand, Phoebe remembered, they might have made a sacrificial offering of the infants. So they had gods whom they could not name but who demanded a tribute.
    As she relaxed into sleep, she drew up a list of what she should do in the morning, as she always did.
    Read the interview with the cousin Natasha and her husband, Jason, that Sergeant Helen Ash had undertaken. Helen was good at these sensitive first interviews, but she herself would conduct another questioning. Inspector Dover would be talking to the husband, Dave. Once again, Phoebe would talk to him.
    She would also interview the SOCO, studying his photographs