Coffin’s Dark Number

Coffin’s Dark Number Gwendoline Butler Three little girls are reported missing in the same district of South London and Superintendent John Coffin suspects there could be more. A gripping crime novel from one of the most universally praised English mystery writers, perfect for fans of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.Three little girls have been reported missing recently in the same district of South London and Superintendent John Coffin believes there might be others.The area has more than its fair share of cranks, and Tony Young’s club of UFO watchers is no exception. But Tony’s concerns start to grow as more children disappear, always at a time when members of the club are out investigating a sighting.While Coffin probes the backgrounds of the victims, trying to establish a pattern, Tony takes matters into his own hands and does some detecting of his own… GWENDOLINE BUTLER Coffin’s Dark Number Copyright (#ulink_c3a1c8c4-7601-5b07-8e75-446aa22f1a36) This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published by Geoffrey Bles Ltd 1969 Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1969 Gwendoline Butler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780006176312 Ebook Edition © JUNE 2014 ISBN: 9780007544653 Version: 2017-04-25 Contents Cover (#ubb48f989-44c4-5b7a-821d-4b8f1c4abbe7) Title Page (#u5c988136-61c1-5edb-af98-4fa261ba1c1e) Copyright (#ulink_f5be1521-7bae-5218-aad4-8946cb37c901) Chapter One (#ue84cd7bd-a749-5616-94ab-1565346aa1b3) Chapter Two (#u9742fe6b-3cc2-5bba-9252-73dbf6b5f304) Chapter Three (#uc4f94eeb-e9ec-5f36-aeb6-ef2eaab568db) Chapter Four (#u84a690b8-3c03-53b9-ad07-fca98d54f33c) Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) There were three tapes, running about twenty-five minutes each, but Coffin played them for hours and hours. Over and over again. He was listening to the sound of voices and snatches of music. Some of the voices he knew. It was a strange way to conduct a murder investigation. Chapter One (#ulink_437be554-d713-5eaf-a6b4-d20b8ef80add) Tony Young I organized my first club when I was fifteen. It was for boys interested in birds; it lasted six months, but for the last four I was the sole member. I did better with the next. The Harper Road Fan Club for Tommy Steele. We had twenty-five members, all contributing, monthly typed hand-outs and occasional meetings. But the meetings weren’t so important, it was the thought between us that counted. Then there was the Radio Ham Club and the Philatelists’ Club. I’m not a stamp collector but a club collector and I was getting liberal in my tastes. The next year I tried Young Lads for Labour. But this was kids’ stuff. I hadn’t got on to the big things yet. Fate directs you, that I strongly believe. All these earlier efforts were training me for what was to be my real work. I won’t say life work because my life hasn’t run so far and there are lots of surprises in this package for everyone. Who can say what there really is in the universe? I’m a boy with a lot of faith, a good deal of it in myself. Some people say this is egotistical, but that’s not how it is at all. If you have faith in yourself, stands to reason you have a lot of faith for other things too. I have plenty. I can feel myself reaching out. Maybe there is someone sitting on some medium hot star somewhere sending out messages to me. The light years problem worries me a bit. I mean that message started out when my ancestors were just crawling out of the slime so it can’t really have my name on it. Or can it? I like to think of that message winging its way through the centuries before I was born with my name on it. Tony Young, it would say. But there is what people call an ‘area of sensitivity’ about a thought like this and at the moment I am highly sensitive. I always have been. ‘You’re a sensitive boy,’ Mr Plowman said once, and he was absolutely dead right. I am a sensitive boy. I hated it when he died. If he is dead, that is. There’s another sensitive area. You might have thought that Mr Plowman and I would have cut across each other because he was an executive man like me. But no, once he realized how good I was in the organizational area he left it all to me and devoted himself to the spiritual side. I soon had this new Club going like a bomb and I made the heart of it our meetings. I sensed right away that with this lot it was the meeting that counted. For the same reason I insisted all members were on the telephone; we had to be in contact. It was the contact of our minds that counted. All told I don’t suppose we had more than a dozen members. There was a tight little inner bunch and then a number on the periphery. It wasn’t the size of membership that made this my biggest operation so far, but our potential. For what we were after was the universe. Leave us alone and we might have our members strung out in the galaxies. And some of us thought we already had. But don’t misunderstand me. We were scientific in our approach. Nothing we regarded as proved. We just didn’t have closed minds, that’s all. Any report of an unidentified flying object being sighted and we took it seriously. We didn’t laugh things off. Some were checked and got through our tests. Others, however much we might want to accept them, might fail on some little point of detail in our test and would have to be dismissed. I had it beautifully worked out. A report of a UFO appeared in the press and was given to one of our members; they telephoned it to me. I got in touch with Plowman, and Plowman and I appointed two agents to go out into the field and check. Sometimes he’d go himself, although he was better on the theory than on the practical. I hardly ever went, just sometimes, to see if the machine was running smoothly. I’m entirely an organization man. What John Plowman tried to do was to place his mind completely at the disposal of anyone or anything trying to get in touch with him; he wanted to be a focus. He was too. He gave all his spare time to being a focus. Once a week on a Tuesday we all met in his house and his wife gave us cake and tea and we waited for John to give his report. Sometimes there wasn’t much. Sometimes nothing at all, but sometimes he’d say he had a strong feeling that if we went to the coast just outside Dover, or stood on the road leading towards Bath (his feelings always came clothed in precise detail) then we should see something. I didn’t usually go on these expeditions, but sometimes I’d take my girl friend along and we’d go together. I can’t say I ever saw anything but on the other occasions, when I wasn’t with them, the others frequently did. Once they saw four UFOs flying in formation and they dipped in salute over John’s head. I’d have given a good deal to have seen that, but no. Three of our most dedicated members were present that night: Esther Glasgow, a sweet girl but a little too inward-turning for my taste, Cyrus Calways Read (known as Cy) and old Miss Jones. If anyone deserved a viewing Miss Jones did. She was going into hospital within the next few days for a serious operation and we all knew she might not come out. She was being very brave about it, though, and had promised to see what soundings the unconscious mind could pick up while under the anaesthetic. If the worst came to the worst and she became disembodied she was going to try to observe and pass on what information she could. She didn’t promise anything. She was a very honest woman, old Miss Jones. I thought Cy didn’t seem too contented after this last viewing. I would never call Cy a really satisfied person; there was usually a worm or two eating at him. ‘Touches of unfairness here and there,’ he grumbled. We often walked home together. He lived just near my home. He had introduced me to John Plowman. ‘Touch of favouritism, I’d say.’ ‘I don’t see that.’ ‘I’m not as close to John as I ought to be. I don’t feel the flow between us. Perhaps it’s his wife. I feel she is rather dark.’ ‘She dyes it, I think. Touches it up, anyway.’ ‘I mean spiritually. You don’t believe really, do you?’ He gave a sharp look at me. ‘I’m an organization man,’ I said, not committing myself. ‘Anyway, what did you mean by favouritism?’ ‘Oh, you’ll find out. Goodbye. This is where I turn off.’ Our part of London isn’t the best part of London to live but it has a certain cosiness. It’s near the river and the docks, and the sea-gulls come racing in when there’s bad weather out at sea. I wouldn’t say I’m fond of it and a boy of my ambitions plans to get out of it, but I reckon even when I’ve left I’ll come sometimes to say hello. Of course, it’s changing fast and I dare say if I do come back I won’t recognize it. I live in Harper Road, Cy lives across the little square – we call it the Banjo – in Peel Terrace. There’s a subtle class distinction, which naturally I despise, between Peel Terrace and Harper Road. Harper Road is one step lower down in the social scale than Peel Terrace. You wouldn’t know it walking past, but the people who live there, we know it. Mind you, you can rise in the world, you can put out window boxes and paint the front gate white and count yourself as good as Peel Terrace. My family haven’t risen in the world. My father preferring birds to flowers in boxes and watching television to painting his gate white. You might even say we’d sunk because we did once have a sundial in the middle of our front garden, but my sister took it away and made it a tombstone for her old dog. He didn’t die at the time, in fact he isn’t dead yet, but his name is painted on it in blue paint and also the date when he didn’t die. Against this, you could say that I, single-handed, have given us a kick upwards. I’m known as that clever red-haired boy that lives in Harper Road, or as “that mad one”. Of course, I know what they call me. I heard plenty during the short period when I took a job as night-watchman in a local factory so as to have more time during the day. I work days now. I chose not to go to university. My sort of life doesn’t need learning. Around the corner from Peel Terrace and Harper Road a great new complex of building is going up. They’ve knocked down the old jam factory and in its place is a new jam factory, a quadrangle of shops that they call a shopping precinct and two new office blocks, including a police station which in my opinion is a luxury. The jam factory is finished but nothing else yet. The building has been going on for nearly two years, and one way and another it touches all our lives. We often smell of strawberries round here in the season. ‘Good job they don’t make kipper jam,’ I said to Cy. He started. ‘Kipper jam,’ I repeated. ‘Or we’d smell of that.’ He didn’t laugh. He has no sense of humour. A good-looking wife, four daughters, the only man to have seen four UFOs dip in salute and no sense of humour. It frightens you. ‘You couldn’t make kipper jam,’ he said. ‘There’s no pectin in it.’ Although he’d said goodbye and hadn’t laughed at my joke, he didn’t seem to want to let me go. We stood at the corner, looking at each other. ‘See you next week,’ he said, without moving. ‘Same time. I’ll have it all written up by then. We might get this one in the press.’ ‘John doesn’t want publicity.’ ‘He hasn’t said so.’ I was thinking how a bit of publicity would buck Miss Jones up. Publicly she would deplore it, inside it might be her last big thrill. Why shouldn’t she have it, if I could give it to her? ‘John’s always against publicity,’ Cy said firmly. ‘Maybe.’ No one knew what John thought, we only knew what he said he thought. ‘What do you get out of this?’ Cy said suddenly. I was right, then, he did want to talk. ‘Work. Interest. Information.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s not enough.’ ‘I think it is.’ ‘I mean to explain you. You’re young.’ ‘Oh, you’re hard. If not on me, then on yourself. Relax. You want drums and parades and heads off all the time.’ ‘I’m serious about it all, I admit that. If that’s a fault. I’ve got a scientific mind. You can’t do work like mine without having a scientific mind.’ I’d forgotten the work he did. Drove a van. I suppose it did need a scientific mind. ‘It worries me how unscientific some of the others are.’ ‘It’s a subject with a lot of emotion in it,’ I reminded him. ‘You’ve got to reckon with that.’ He still looked angry. ‘I reckon we take it all very calmly all things considered. That’s John Plowman.’ ‘Oh, John.’ He bit back his words. I was junior; he wasn’t going to discuss John with me. He was naturally protocol-minded. It went with being scientific, I suppose. Scientists always think they’ve got a hot line straight through to Cod. ‘You know I was the first person in the whole group to make serious checks. The first. The others came later. And I had the first photograph.’ Light dawned. ‘You’re jealous.’ He flushed. ‘That’s it, that’s exactly what I’m complaining about. You just naturally think in terms of emotions.’ ‘All right. Emotion’s out,’ I said peaceably. ‘No jealousy.’ As we stood there talking a policeman walked by, studying us unobtrusively as he passed. Hang about the streets these days and that’s what you get. It’s been this way ever since our troubles started in this district. Particularly for men, any age group. ‘Good night,’ said Cy, hastily. ‘Next week then.’ He walked off. Cyrus’s job was not heavily intellectual and there was no doubt he resented it, even though he did say it needed a scientific mind. He sold ice-cream from a Kandy Kream Kart which he also drove. And don’t think the police hadn’t investigated him pretty thoroughly just lately. He and his van were a natural for the sort of trouble we were in. But he was clear. The van was painted fondant pink and Cy wore a blue overall. I’d often wondered why he didn’t hold down a better sort of job. ‘Next week,’ I called. The policeman watched me go into my house. He knew me all right, but that wouldn’t stop him watching me. They thought it was a local, you see. With these child crimes it’s nearly always someone the kid knows. This is what gets them off their guard. There are other factors; I’ll go into them some other time. The Club was in a peculiar mood this last week, and that worried me. I’m obliged to be responsive to mood. I have to see the danger signals before anyone else. Today it seemed to me these signals were being run up from certain quarters. Of course, we’d never been what I’d call a united group, each of us approaching the common aim from a different viewpoint, from Miss Jones’s open-minded optimism to John Plowman’s detached belief. In the centre were three or four members, like Esther, who were convinced that all UFOs were genuine for emotional reasons. Cy was right there. These people believed because the idea of little men flying in from space fascinated them. They were living out a fairy-story they’d read when they were kids. Oh, I knew that all right. I say nothing about Cy’s claims to scientific rationalism because I was never quite sure how far this existed. Esther Glasgow had objected to the report John had drafted and I had written; her friend Peter had objected to the letter I had written to a similar club in the USA. “Too cagey,” he’d called it. The secretary (technically I’m secretary of the Club, in practice I’m everything that requires pen and paper) has to be. I form the public image. We don’t want it formed in a crackpot image, do we? Or do we? Yes, there was no doubt where the danger was coming from. The central emotional block. And behind it I strongly suspected was Cy Read. He was jealous of John Plowman. I could see his point. After all, it was in John Plowman’s name I corresponded with our contacts across the Atlantic and it was John Plowman who organized the sky-watching routines and got first chance to prove or disprove an “incident”. A brief conversation with John Plowman was worrying me also. To a limited extent he made me his confidant. ‘Of course, one has to ask oneself about these visitors from space: what their intentions are. I’ve always assumed their interest in us was a benign one.’ He looked uneasy. ‘Just lately, I’ve wondered if we were wise to rely on this.’ I know I didn’t answer, but I suppose he saw the look on my face. ‘There seems to have been a concentration of activity in this district. We seem to be a focus,’ he went on, ‘and I don’t feel the result has been towards tranquillity.’ It certainly was not. There was a bad feeling everywhere lately, arising from the matter of the children, of course. ‘Indeed, I’ve been getting strong intimations that something was going to happen.’ ‘How? Where do you read these intimations?’ I asked bluntly. ‘Naturally they don’t put it in the newspapers,’ he said irritably. ‘I receive it in my mind. We are to get some sort of proof. There will be a sign.’ ‘Yes, that is quite worrying,’ I said, carefully keeping all feeling out of my voice. ‘Any details?’ ‘Just an impression comes into my mind that it will relate to someone who thinks he can fly.’ ‘I only know one person round here who thinks he can fly,’ I said, surprised. ‘And I thought he’d given the idea up.’ Butty. Tom Butt. Butty (as we sometimes called him in unkind reference to his over-large buttocks) was at school with me. Spotty, dirty, fat, he had all the stigmata of the born victim, and seemed to know it too. He went out of his way to set us off. Like telling us that he dreamt he could fly. Without a doubt there was a sexual pleasure in our sport with him, just as there was in Butty’s dreams that he could fly. ‘I’m not happy about it all,’ observed John Plowman. ‘These ideas I get disturb me.’ They disturbed me. Without committing myself one way or another to the behaviour of the visitors from space (which might be good or not good, we had to see), I was beginning to be anxious about our little group. Wasn’t there a strong sexual element in our preoccupation? We were a focus for something all right. I did wonder exactly what we were letting out into the world. Or stimulating. I hung my coat up and went into the kitchen where my sister, Jean, was sitting drinking tea. She looked up. ‘Back from meeting your loonies?’ I’m afraid she’s picked up that rough way of talking from my father. It won’t get her anywhere. I didn’t answer but poured myself a cup of tea and started to drink it. They weren’t loonies. A little unusual perhaps in their interests, but not loonies, or I wouldn’t be associated with them. ‘Seen anything lately?’ ‘You know I’ve never seen anything,’ I said. ‘I don’t even look. That’s not my job.’ She snorted. Very few women can make that noise, but she could. ‘What do you get out of it?’ The second person who had asked me that tonight. ‘I’m practising,’ I said, and sipped my tea. ‘It was me that made that tea you’re enjoying so much,’ she said. That’s another thing she’s learned from my father; how to make a good cup of tea. They’re remarkably alike. There are just the three of us, me, elder sister, and my father. My mother died a long while ago. I half remember her. Some days more than others. And I suppose that’s how it is with my sister too. Some days she looks more like the photograph of my mother and the other days not. I’m always frightened she’ll get to look like my father. ‘You’re pretty,’ I said. ‘Why the compliment?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m a bit low-spirited tonight.’ ‘Oh.’ She considered. ‘Where’s Judith?’ Judith was my former girl friend. Former, since last night. ‘We’ve split up.’ ‘Why?’ There again she was like my father. She had to know why. No tactful silences. Still, it was easy to answer. ‘She said I don’t raise her spirits.’ ‘Oh.’ Once again she considered. ‘You raise mine. I often get a good laugh out of you.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘Oh well, you’ll get another girl.’ ‘I won’t get one with a car. Not round here.’ It was luck having pulled in one girl friend with an automobile in this neighbourhood. Hers was a beautiful little white Triumph convertible, too. You froze in it in winter (she never let you put the hood up) but you felt a real he-man in summer. We only had one summer together, me, Judith and the car. ‘She still on the stage?’ ‘Resting. Trying out for a part tomorrow.’ I got up to go upstairs to my room. ‘Dad out?’ ‘No. Out the back watching his birds.’ At the door, I said: ‘Can I have the front room this day week?’ Jean nodded. The Club occasionally met here. When it did Jean served coffee and cake and popped in and out observing us. I think she rather enjoyed it. I’ve noticed that this family’s pleasure tends to be vicarious. Jean watches me, I watch the Club and Dad watches his birds. I must check this tendency. I enjoyed the Club meetings myself. When we were really functioning well, comparing notes, checking photographs, suggesting future projects, all of them looking to me for directions, I had the feeling of the chain of power stretching directly from John Plowman to me and going no further. That was how I wanted it in that group and that was what I meant by practice. We might be stretching out to other galaxies, but as far as I was concerned it was strictly an exercise in politics. On my way upstairs I looked out of the window on the stairs and saw a police car go past. Three children in eighteen months and all living within one square mile of each other. Three children just gone. Sixpence in the pocket, ta ta, Mum. And then never seen again. She was the first, Shirley Boyle, aged eight. I went on into my room and sat down on my bed. Jean didn’t come into this room much; I dusted it and looked after my bed. Jean knew I liked my secrets. I drew the curtains on the night. The police car came back down the road. This time I could see a man in the back. He had a solid official look. We have a high-ranking policeman living round the corner from us. He’s called Coffin. He has a wife who is observed sharply by the old cats of the neighbourhood because she is an actress and this naturally alerts their moral sense. Judith was going to introduce us before we broke up. Down below I heard the telephone ring. When I’m established in my chosen way of life I shall have a telephone in every room. I hate people shouting up the stairs for me. ‘Coming,’ I called. ‘David,’ she said, when I got to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Hello, Slave.’ I called him this. David Edmondstone was someone I’d known at school and then lost sight of for a bit. The last year we’d seen each other regularly. If we’d had lags at the sort of school we went to, Dave would have been my fag. When we were “streamed” (that was their jargon for a sorting out process according to ability) I was A and he was C; that was the measure of our relationship. But when he came back I was glad to see him. He sort of fitted into my life. There had been a hole vacant and he came into it. ‘Hello, Tony. Long time no see.’ ‘Only yesterday. And talk English.’ I’d never cure him of using second-rate slang. He laughed. ‘Tony, I want to talk, I’m excited.’ He sounded it. ‘Well, what’s excited you?’ ‘I’ve got a new girl. You ought to see her.’ ‘Good.’ Perhaps this one will last. They didn’t usually. I mean no one wants fidelity but his turn-over was too rapid. I don’t know what he did to them. I didn’t take literally his remark about seeing her. I knew he wouldn’t let me see her; he never did. ‘Where did you meet her?’ Jean was waving at me not to make a long call of it, but Dave might go on for hours. ‘Where are you speaking from?’ ‘Call-box outside Lowther’s.’ Lowther’s was a big all-night chemists which was a great place for night birds (which Dave and I intermittently were) in the New Cut Road. Fine old slum it have been at one time but now it was a newly built disaster area. ‘Oh, I met her around,’ he said vaguely. ‘You know.’ ‘If you’re going to talk all night, let me know,’ whispered Jean. I scowled at her, nodding my head like a mandarin. She didn’t know what to make of that and it kept her quiet for a bit. Always keep your signals contradictory, that’s a good rule with an opponent. It puzzles them and they don’t know what to do. Quite scientific really. All animals have aggression or submission signals which other animals of their kind recognize. The dog snarls or cringes. We smile and nod or else frown and clench our muscles. Then the other animal knows what to do. But mix the signals and this throws them. ‘You two,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t like to watch. I mean, it’s such a funny way to live.’ This time I smiled but shook my head slowly from side to side. Jean went and sat down, still keeping an eye on me. Dave was getting quite frantic on the end of the phone. ‘You there? You still there? Well, are you listening then? Well, it was a lovely night, lovely night …’ He was working himself up. ‘Calm it down, boy. So what did you do?’ ‘Talked,’ he said dreamily. ‘We’re going on talking, too.’ ‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Is that all?’ ‘No, then I came home and baby-sat for my sister. Those kids were a drag. Then I came out to phone you.’ ‘It was a big evening then?’ ‘Yes. What about you?’ ‘Oh, Club, home, Jean, you know.’ I darted a look at Jean who was still watching. It crossed my mind she was expecting a call herself. ‘Cy get home?’ ‘Yes, he certainly did.’ Stronger feeling than even that aroused by his girl friend coloured his voice. ‘And wasn’t he sour! Came in, sat down in his chair and started writing his notes. Didn’t say good evening or thank you for staying here or anything. He makes me sick. So I came out.’ David Edmondstone was Cy’s brother-in-law and he lodged with his sister and Cy. Dave had gone away for a time to work in Birmingham but now he was back. In a way it was through knowing Dave that I found my way into the Club. Of course, it wasn’t really a club till it got me. More of a loose association of people with a common interest. It was me and John Plowman that shaped it. ‘How have you soured him up?’ asked Dave. How had we? ‘I didn’t know he kept notes,’ I said. ‘Well, he does. After every meeting. And sometimes he puts things on a tape. Not always. Just every so often. Not that I’ve seen. But I’ve heard him talking away to himself.’ ‘How do you know he has a tape recorder?’ ‘I’ve had a look round.’ Dave laughed. ‘Maggie doesn’t know. And every so often he talks into it.’ ‘How often?’ ‘Well, I’m not watching him all the time. Not only that wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t be easy.’ In a way Dave ran away from home when he went to Birmingham. He said it was because his sister beat him. I didn’t exactly believe him but I dare say she might have done. Or there’s Cy. Since you ask me about him, I’ve always thought he was a bit of a sadist. I saw a strap hanging on the wall of their kitchen. And they don’t have a dog as far as I know. Dave was a bit slow in those days. But when he got back he’d grown up a lot. ‘Since I’ve been here he’s only done it a few times. But I tell you what: sometimes I think he plays back things he’s done earlier. Yes, I think so.’ ‘I wonder what he puts on it?’ I thought he was probably keeping his own record of sightings and investigations and no doubt adding a few sharp words about me and John Plowman. He was creating a Club of One. ‘He keeps it locked up,’ said Dave regretfully. ‘He’s got a little case where he keeps things. Regular old Bluebeard is Cy.’ He laughed. This isn’t the image I would have found if my sister had been married to him, but Dave’s imagination was as limited as his mother’s had been. I just remembered his mother. Her idea of bringing up a boy was to whack him soundly every so often. At intervals she would go away from home and disappear for a few months. I think they really got on better when she was away than when she came back. I had an idea that Dave was going to take after her and turn into a disappearer. He was shaping that way. I was shifting round vaguely in this conversation with Dave, trying to get at something – I didn’t quite know what. Perhaps Cy was up to something. I didn’t know. I just felt a pool of unease inside me. ‘I must go now,’ said Dave, almost as if it had been me that kept him talking. ‘Tomorrow?’ ‘Tomorrow,’ I agreed, although I hadn’t really made up my mind about tomorrow. I like to feel free. Jean watched me finish the conversation. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘You worry me, you two. Such a funny way to live.’ Personally, I thought hers was a funny way to live, always dreaming over the teapot. She was only twenty-two and pretty. And my dad’s way, wasn’t that funny, worrying over his birds’ breeding habits? I heard Dad coming in from the back. This hastened me. ‘Remember, even a sad and lonely life can be beautiful,’ I said, giving her a smile as I passed. I went back upstairs, drew back my curtains so I could see the sky. Clearly not the kind of night for a sighting. Anyway, John didn’t expect anything over this neighbourhood at the moment. There was something unfavourable about our position. Perhaps it was just all the policemen. He thought in the direction of the New Forest was the most likely spot. There were signs, he said. It was always through John that our messages and first intimations of a sighting came. Afterwards Cy told us the scientific explanation and I wrote it up, but John knew all about it first. I wondered about this sometimes. I took out my papers. I knew Jean worried about me. But she didn’t need to. I had my life well arranged. Like Cy I made notes and kept records. I had an account of all the weekly meetings. I had a brief on each sighting of a UFO involving a Club member. When a special expedition had been launched by John Plowman then I had it all down: how information of the incident reached us first, with times and dates, when the checking expedition set off, again with times and dates, and the results. I looked at my notes, then raised my head to stare at the dark starless sky. I felt so alone, but I wasn’t really alone, there were a hundred little dark figures tagging around with me. I have a very crowded memory. I feel sometimes that I can remember everything that happened to everyone in the whole wide world. But this can’t be, it must just be that I’m a sensitive boy. Now I kept thinking about murder and there had to be a reason for it. I knew why Jean was sitting hunched over her teapot. The last child that had disappeared was a kid she taught. Did I tell you Jean was a teacher? Yes, she’s a clever girl really. Brave, too, eight to eleven is the age range she specializes in. It’s the best age, she says. When I asked for what, she simply smiled at me and let it go. Had eleven been the best age for Katherine Gable? Katherine Gable, eleven last June, third of a family of nine. The only girl. On Thursday June 26 Katherine had eaten her supper and gone out to play with little friend Milly Lee in Saxe-Coburg Street. Little friend Milly had come home in due time and gone to bed. When questioned she said that she had only played a little while in Saxe-Coburg Street with Katherine. No one had seen Katherine again. I remembered Thursday June 26. It was one of our big days. There had been a reported sighting near the Thames in Buckinghamshire and John and a select little party had driven out to see it. I wasn’t quite sure who had been on that expedition. I should have to consult my records. Not me, not Miss Jones. Katherine Gable on June 26. May had been a clear month both for us and missing girls, but one day in late April – the 23rd – we’d had a sighting and another girl had gone missing. I knew the date because that was one UFO that had got into the papers and the two sensations got headlines side by side. Grace Parker was only ten, but in her photograph she looked older. I never find it easy to guess a kid’s age; especially a girl kid. I would have said this one was around thirteen, but no, the newspapers said she was ten. She had elderly parents. Perhaps they let Grace run around more than she should. No one had found Grace, but they had found her scarf. It had been left hanging from a tree in the park. There’s no need to wear a scarf tonight, Grace. It’s a warm night.’ And the answer, ‘I like to wear a scarf, I feel comfortable with a scarf round my neck.’ A blue and yellow scarf, a present from someone for Christmas, I knew that. It must have been in the newspapers. I’d never spoken to Grace, had I? Unlike the Katherine Gable affair, no one I knew had known Grace. But she was walking there in my mind, a tiny figure, seen as if through the wrong end of the telescope, with every feature perfectly clear. I consulted my records. Spaced out among the six months behind me had been several Club expeditions. Nothing important, you understand. I suspected that one or two of the trips were arranged by John Plowman for his own amusement. At all events there had been UFO sightings. I already knew that two of these sightings coincided with dates on which two girls had disappeared. Katherine Gable on June 26 and Grace Parker on April 23. I had been turning this thought over and over in my mind and wondering what people would make of it if they knew. What should they make of it? What was true and what false? Was it something you could brush off as just coincidence? Or were people going to think the girls had been kidnapped into space? Could you expect anyone to think that? Should they think it? I couldn’t make up my mind. Jean came into my room and dropped the old cat on to my bed, where he always slept. ‘Sorry if I was irritable about Dave.’ ‘You weren’t.’ She saw I looked troubled. ‘I know I shouldn’t interfere in these boy-to-boy relationships.’ ‘We don’t have a boy-to-boy relationship.’ I think one of the things that draws me to Dave is that we both started up acne at the same time. Mine has cleared; his hasn’t. ‘No.’ She knew something was worrying me, but she didn’t have any idea what it was. How could she? But she can catch on fast, can Jean, and she was watching me. Give her time and she’d read me like a book. People think that boys like Dave and me don’t understand. But it’s not true; I know that if you’ve got someone like us, you’ve got a monkey in the family. So I always tried to be good to Jean. Now I got up and offered her a chair, but she wouldn’t stay. She never would. There was something about my room she didn’t like. Me, probably. ‘Don’t talk too much tonight, Jean,’ I said. ‘Somehow I don’t think it’s a good night for talking.’ She left me alone. I went to the window and looked out. It was an ugly time for talking. An ugly night and I felt ugly with it. There are so many crimes that no one gets to know about. ‘The dark number’, the police call it, don’t they? At the window I could just see the house where Dave lived with his sister and her husband in Peel Terrace. Although Peel Terrace rates itself above Harper Road they’re so close together you could throw a stone from us to them. I wondered if Cy was sitting there dictating into his tape recorder. I looked at my own machine. The thought of all that tape whirring round gave me a funny feeling. They’re dangerous machines, closer than a friend, easier to talk to than a woman, but terribly, terribly likely, at the flick of a switch, to tell all. I started to play a tape. Strange noises began to play themselves out in my quiet room. I kept it low. I didn’t want Jean to hear. There were strange sounds on this tape. Sometimes I think it sounds like a tiny, tiny girl, sometimes like a man. But crying, man and girl, both are crying. One day I’ll tell you how I got these sounds on my tape. I’d like to tell someone. It’s on my mind a lot. Chapter Two (#ulink_33c28d8c-6b6b-5dbb-bfa9-c2f26a4a498f) John Coffin I know all about the dark number that Tony Young was talking about. As a serving police officer I have to. It’s the Dark Number of Crime, the number of crimes that take place and never come to the attention of the police. Some criminologists think that the crimes that come into the open and get punished represent no more than 15 per cent of the crimes that are committed. That makes the dark number a good 85 per cent, which makes it a bad figure to go to bed on. Every day I have to face the reality of the dark number. A criminal convicted of a small robbery asks for several other offences to be taken into consideration. Most of them are known to the police, but some of them are new. A scrap-iron dealer whose premises are being searched on suspicion of another crime turns out to have a neat little forging business running in a back room. Tony Young and I both know that there’s plenty of things going on in society that stay in the dark. There’s an act of cruelty, probably against a child, going on now, at this minute while you listen to this. I’ve encouraged Tony Young to speak freely, to put everything down that he wants to say and from listening so often to the important tapes I’ve come to feel the relief of talking into one myself. Also, it’s practical. I can arrange my thoughts, form a picture better this way than any other. Yes, Tony Young’s right when he says a tape is one’s most receptive audience. Perhaps there’s a danger to it. I can see you might get to trust it too much and it might start to stimulate the wrong centres of the mind. I think that happened with the maker of one of the tapes. Perhaps that one started out ordinary enough and ended up a monster. A monster bred from the tapes. I learnt a lot of what makes a man a monster in the time that I was dead. The doctors say it was an illness following upon concussion but to me it was the time I died. Between the man who lived before and the man who lives now is a gulf, bridged only by the name John Coffin and the same body. And even this isn’t quite the same body. Or else I fit in it differently. However, I was glad enough to come back to life, death not being what I’d expected it to be. Back in life again, I discovered to my surprise that during my demise I had received promotion and become responsible for the detective bureau in a large area in a big police division in South London. So I was Superintendent Coffin with a few satellite inspectors. That was something to come back to life for. My wife says I talk differently since I returned to the world. She says she can’t put her finger on it but she’s working on it and one day she’ll tell me. So I have that to look forward to. It’s this sort of thing that makes coming back to life worthwhile. For the first three months of my renaissance I had a clear run. Crime and violence, oh yes, even a nicely planned bank robbery. (But it turned out the bank was undergoing a security inspection of some sort and didn’t have much cash on hand. Still, we pulled in one or two old friends and put them away.) No crime in those few months, however, to make you feel sick. I remember rejoicing. Even from the grave you bring back hope. A policeman too! It was waiting in the wings though. And this is where we get back to what I said about the dark number of crime. When the first small girl was reported missing, was this truly the first or was it just the first we heard about? If you’ve had no experience of the sort of society I’m talking about you’ll say I’m crazy. ‘What, a child go missing,’ you say, ‘and no one report it? Why, the parents’d be round there creating as soon as they could.’ Well, in the first place, not every child has parents. And then secondly, the parents of any child do not always behave in the way you might expect. Especially the parents of a girl child. Especially mothers. I’ve met the whole range of mothers in my job, from good mothers and baddish mothers to downright wicked mothers, and there are a few poor damned souls who just get lost. So the picture that is in my mind is this: the first few girls who were missing came back. But they came back having been assaulted. Perhaps they didn’t know quite what had happened to them. They don’t want to talk about it. And the parents of these particular little girls being silly and fearful and ashamed just wrap it up. Tell no one and hope the child will forget. You could only offer them pity and despair. So I am calculating that ahead of all the missing children we know about there is a dark number that we don’t know about. The first case was probably relatively trivial. The next a bit worse. And so it built up. Katherine Gable on June 26, Grace Parker on April 23, and a whole year previously, Shirley Boyle aged eight on March 18. What had happened in the year between? Was it the dark number operating? Were there in fact episodes in these months about which, for some reason or other, we knew nothing? On the day after Christmas a girl called Kim Simpson had disappeared. She had come back, unharmed, but with nothing much to say about where she had been. Perhaps she was another. And then there was the other. The disappearance that no one knew about yet. ‘Anything wrong?’ my wife said. ‘No, nothing special,’ I said. ‘Just wondering where people go when you’re not looking at them. And that’s not a problem in philosophy. Just something Dove and I think about a lot lately.’ ‘Yes, of course. The children.’ Little as she liked police work, she looked sympathetic and understanding, because after all, she is a mother. Not always a particularly good mother, but still a mother. My wife didn’t say any more. She’s trying very hard to be tactful at the moment. She’s temporarily out of work. Resting, as those in her trade call it, and this gives her a lot of time to be tactful. All the children had come from the one small heavily populated area. Unluckily it’s a district where the children play in the street and sit on the doorsteps. There’s even a playground in a corner by the river. If anyone was hunting children he could have all he wanted in this district. Even now, when mothers were on the alert, he wouldn’t have to look around too much. All the same, there was an eerie quality in the way the last incident had happened. One minute the child was playing in the street, the next the street was empty. Someone had come down in a fiery chariot and picked her up. It was late afternoon. Not a bad day with my work going well. I was getting ahead with my paperwork, for which I have lately developed a taste. I used to hate it, but now it satisfied me to have everything orderly about me. A good enough day for me. I was glad to be alive. But a bad day, or no day at all for the parents of Katherine Gable and Grace Parker and the other girls. And only good for me because, for the moment, I had buried the thought of it, and could get down to the work which I had neglected because of it. I had set up the mechanism, you see. I was at the controls of the machine investigating the disappearances, and I had Inspector Dove to back me up and we both had the assistance of that stout young sergeant with the red hair called Parr who got the Police Medal last year. You saw him in the paper, I expect. He wasn’t a great brain but he was thorough. And I am thorough and Dove is thorough and we were getting help from any scientific and technical bureau we wanted to tap but still we were getting nowhere. The girls had gone, one on a sunny afternoon, another on a cold spring day, the third in the evening. We knew the people who would admit to seeing them last and that was all we did know. And, of course, this wasn’t all I had to worry about. There was a suspected case of arson in a local mosque; an illicit drug trader trying to set up a centre in a hostel down by the docks; and someone was unloading fake half-crowns in all the pubs in the district. One of my office windows overlooked Saxe-Coburg Street, which is a busy road off New Cut Road. I could see New Cut Road from my other window. It wasn’t a view any tourist would rave about and no one had painted it, but I was fond of it. A good deal of my life had been built around Saxe-Coburg Street. I’d been walking up and down it all my life. I’d seen it in war when the bombs dropped on it and I saw it now in prosperity. Because it was prosperous, make no mistake about that. It was getting the taste of big wages and steady employment and enjoying it. On all sides there were prophets of every sort of doom, economic and moral, but Saxe-Coburg Street couldn’t help appreciating the virtues of a world which gave it refrigerators, motor cars and cheap birth control. When the road had been run up by a speculative builder to celebrate the Prince Consort’s Great Exhibition of British wealth not even the Queen in her palace had had the benefit of any of these and Saxe-Coburg Street knew it. My room was dark and small. I was probably the last policeman who was going to work in it. Across the road they were building a new police station for us. Every day I watched its progress with interest. Sometimes (like the day they had a fire) it seemed to go backwards and not forward, but equally sometimes it shot forward and I could even imagine us moving into it. Not today, though. The site looked deserted and I could only see one man working there. He seemed to be working in a workman’s lift running up the front of the building; it had reached the fifth floor. Did I tell you we were to have a tall, narrow, police building? I believe I was scheduled to have an office on the third floor. I hoped I’d still have my view. I could see Saxe-Coburg Street with a professional eye too, of course. It’s not exactly the road where you’d leave your car unlocked, or leave the cream too long on the step; someone would nick it. But you probably could send the baby toddling out with a five-pound note to buy your paper and she and the change would come back unscathed. There was a great love of children in Saxe-Coburg Street and neighbourhood, due perhaps to a wave of Italian immigrants it had had at the turn of the century, whose descendants, cockneys to a man, were still there. Until now I would have said the child was as safe in our district as it could be anywhere. That wasn’t so very safe perhaps, but until now it hadn’t been downright lethal. Inspector Dove gave my door his usual swift knock which didn’t wait for an answer and sat down, again without waiting to be asked. He looked tired. He was hoping for promotion and was working hard on this account, as well as being genuinely anxious about the missing children. ‘Like that?’ I said. ‘It’s always like that.’ He was usually gloomy, anyway in speech, and at work. I dare say he sparkled at home. But he was a good policeman. We had known each other a good many years and a lot of the memories that were written on my face were written on his too. Perhaps he thought I was gloomy too and that I sparkled at home. ‘I hate these kid cases.’ ‘Don’t we all?’ He got to his feet and went and looked from the window. ‘I’d like to believe it’s an outsider coming in, but I don’t believe it.’ He rapped on the window. ‘It’s someone in that area out there, someone local, that’s responsible.’ ‘What makes you so sure?’ He turned round from the window and came back to stand in front of me. ‘Not one thing. Lots of little things.’ ‘Such as?’ He took a deep breath. ‘The way the kids go. First you see them, then you don’t. If that had happened once I’d take it as luck, but it’s happened every time. No one has seen the child go. No one has seen a stranger come up and speak to her, no one has seen any unusual contact, no one has seen anything.’ ‘So?’ ‘That must mean it’s a local. Either someone so well known he fades into the background, or someone who knows every inch of the ground round here, and how to take advantage of it. I think he must have known the children too.’ ‘Where are the children then?’ I asked. ‘Yes, you’d think we’d have found a trace of them, wouldn’t you?’ ‘If they haven’t been taken out of the district, yes, I would.’ ‘But we haven’t. They’re dead. Packed up somewhere in something. Even buried. But dead.’ ‘So we check the neighbourhood.’ ‘But that takes time, John, and I can’t wait.’ We were both silent, because this was the terrible worry; that while we were working another child would go. ‘Perhaps something will turn up to give us a lead.’ ‘Not from this lot, John; with them there’s been nothing. So if you’re looking for anything it must be with another child.’ ‘Who have you had a look at?’ I said. ‘Every crawler in the neighbourhood.’ Crawlers were what we called the sex offenders. We had our share. Lately more seemed to be moving in. Perhaps we were building up a coven. ‘And they all are covered. Either in hospital, in prison or well chaperoned.’ ‘Someone could be covering for them.’ ‘Yes, there’s always that,’ he agreed. ‘Or else it’s a new one we don’t know.’ There’s usually a beginning to that sort of thing,’ I said. ‘Something that stands out in the way of oddness, even if it’s only wearing a hat where you don’t usually wear a hat.’ ‘I’ve even checked them. Even the man who sells papers at the corner and swears at everyone who comes past. The kids tease him.’ ‘Might be something there.’ ‘Could be. I’m not crossing him off. He’s a woman, by the way.’ ‘Oh.’ It was surprising what you turned up when you started looking. ‘Well, I didn’t know that.’ ‘No, even his mother didn’t. Used to put him in trousers. Her, I mean. But I’m still no nearer,’ he went on. It meant we were missing something, of course. We had our fair proportion of nuts in the neighbourhood, you can’t help it in a district like ours. We also had our share of crank organizations. In fact, we were rather above average there. We had a sociologist from London University down here once doing a survey to find out why, but all the conclusion he could come to was that we just had them the way other districts had rats. So I knew all about Tony Young’s Club of UFO watchers. I had them on my list and thought them pretty harmless, although undoubtedly they were going to be useful if a flying saucer landed in my bailiwick. But when such organizations get mixed up with young men like Tony Young they are asking for trouble. From Tony Young’s description perhaps you haven’t got quite the right picture of the Club. Let me consolidate it for you. To begin with, he didn’t quite invent its organization the way he thinks he did. Secondly, he isn’t quite the powerful figure in it he believes. He’s using them all right, but they are using him too. Ask me how I know. I’ve met John Plowman before. Before he became interested in UFOs, he had been investigating the possibility of radio signals from beings in outer space. He showed a long and protracted interest in that subject, but I don’t know that he ever got anywhere. He had a little group of about six or seven working with him, some of whom went on to form the nucleus of the UFO group. And before that he housed for six months a woman who said she was the channel through which beings from Venus could pass into this earth world. He investigated her claim while she stayed as his guest, but I don’t know what he discovered and she dematerialized one day. Or so he supposed, but he never quite committed himself to belief. I’m almost sure I saw her eighteen months later in Lewisham Road, but perhaps not. So although John Plowman had some strange interests he was perfectly consistent in them and carried out his investigations in a thorough, detached way. I believe he had a degree in engineering from London University. You may wonder why, if he’s so harmless, I continue to take an interest in him. Pehaps because it’s my job, you can never tell when one thing is going to branch out into another and I believe in preventing crime; and perhaps because he picked up some strange characters on his way. So I knew about John Plowman and his group and as soon as we ran into trouble I had the idea of looking at them afresh. I though of calling in that young sociologist again. When all is said and done, a policeman is only as good as his informers, and in a specialized world like John Plowman inhabits I have to have a special sort of informer. I don’t suppose my sociologist would like to be called an informer. But if I use him (and I probably will use him) that’s just what he’ll be, one of a fellowship made up of men like Frank Bowen (aged forty; at least half of those years spent in prison. Incompetent but hopeful. Perfect for my purposes); little Ned Thaw (a liar, but so stupid that even his lies showed me the truth, like the other side of the coin), and smiling, bad-tempered Happy Boy Hooper whom nobody liked. ‘I’ll do some asking around,’ I said to Dove. ‘Thanks.’ He knew what I meant. He stood up to go. ‘They’re getting on with that building over the way,’ he said. ‘I suppose we’ll be in it soon. I shan’t be sorry. This place is falling down round our ears. Know what I heard. The rats from here have moved into the new building in time to meet us.’ He was quite serious. He was one of those people who find rats deeply interesting. So did I, for that matter. ‘Wonder what they’re living on?’ I gathered my papers together, preparatory to leaving. I should have to come back in later this evening, but I could have an hour at home. I was hungry too. This was what made me wonder what the rats were eating. ‘Wood shavings, debris, food the workmen leave behind. Or they bring stuff in. They’re clever boys, those rats are. There’s a delicatessen next door.’ He was full of admiration for the rats’ skill. ‘Remind me not to shop at that delicatessen.’ I was ready to go. ‘Wait for me, I’m coming along.’ We went out of the building and into the street together. You never know what you’re walking into. There was a group standing on the pavement by the half-completed building: a small group made up of six men and one woman. They were staring upwards. ‘What’s this?’ said Dove. Before we could walk across a boy detached himself from the group and ran across to us. ‘There’s a man up there in trouble,’ he said, pointing upwards to where, high on the structure of scaffolding, the lift-cage was. ‘He’s stuck,’ he said breathlessly. He was a boy of about seventeen wearing working clothes. We joined the group and looked up. It was still daylight but it had been one of those sultry, overcast days you get so often in London. You really couldn’t see much. I could see the cage and make out a shape. ‘Why’s he crouching there?’ said the woman. ‘Is he crouching?’ I wasn’t sure what I could see. ‘He was standing up a little while ago, I swear it. Now he’s on his knees … He’s ill.’ She was breathless with interest. ‘That’s what it is, he’s been taken ill.’ ‘How did it happen?’ ‘Well, I don’t know. I was just coming by with my shopping when this young boy says there’s a man stuck up there.’ She looked round for the boy, who nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, he’s up there,’ he said, with interest and apparent pleasure. ‘Supposing he falls down?’ said the woman. ‘No, he won’t fall down. It’s like a great cage, see.’ ‘How did it happen?’ I asked, stepping back to get a better look, but it wasn’t easy to get details clear at that angle. The boy shrugged. ‘He phoned down to me and said: Help me, help me, they’re getting me.’ ‘That was a funny thing to say.’ ‘I didn’t know what he meant. And I said: Come down, then. And he said: I can’t, the power’s gone. Then he said he was falling.’ ‘But he hasn’t fallen.’ I squinted upwards, trying to see. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ agreed the woman. ‘I think the lift’s stuck,’ said the boy. ‘It was working all right this morning,’ said one of the other men, turning round to talk. ‘Much you know about it, Patsy Burden.’ ‘I know what I’m told,’ retorted Patsy. ‘And what’s been done about it?’ I aked. I was beginning to think the man up there was ill. Or worse. ‘I heard him call out,’ said the woman, reading my thoughts, ‘when I got here first. He’s dead silent now.’ ‘I got the foreman coming,’ said the boy. ‘I reckon he’s dead.’ ‘The foreman’s coming,’ repeated the boy. ‘He’s not God, is he?’ demanded the woman. ‘Supposing the poor chap’s gone, he can’t bring him back.’ ‘He’s not gone,’ said the boy. ‘I see him.’ He pointed. ‘Not gone in that way, stupid. Gone, passed away. Dead.’ I was still silent. I had that itchy, scratchy feeling I get when things are going wrong. I scratched my wrist absently. I’d had an infection there once and my skin still remembered it. ‘Here is the foreman,’ said Dove. ‘It’s Joe Davies. I know him. Hello, Joe, trouble here?’ ‘There shouldn’t be,’ said the foreman, a tall spare man with a brush of fair hair. ‘But this lot can foul up anything.’ He glared at the bunch of men. ‘Have you tried bringing it down?’ ‘No,’ said one of the men. ‘I saw one of those cages drop from top to bottom once with the man in it. You do it.’ ‘Who is it up there? Whoever it is he shouldn’t be there. We’re not working that face today.’ ‘I bet he’s thinking he shouldn’t be there.’ ‘I think it’s Tom Butt,’ said one of the men. ‘And what’s Butty doing up there?’ ‘I dunno. Anyway, he’s a nervous type. If he went up there it was because someone told him to.’ ‘I’ll give him nervous when I get him down.’ He moved away. ‘I’ll come with you, Joe,’ said Dove. ‘Thanks.’ But he hardly looked at Dove as he strode off. We both followed him towards a small wooden hut which stood at the bottom of the scaffolding. It was empty, but smelt of men in sweaty clothes and cigarette smoke and stale tea. ‘I have all the controls here,’ said Joe. He looked white. He put out a hand towards a panel of switches, then hesitated. ‘Maybe I should get the police.’ ‘I am the police, Joe,’ Dove reminded him. ‘How does the lift work?’ I asked. ‘By electricity. We don’t pull it down by hand.’ He was irritable. ‘He has a control up there. I have an emergency switch down here.’ ‘How can you get in touch?’ ‘We have a telephone.’ He pointed at it. ‘But either it’s gone dead or he’s not answering. I’ve tried to get him three times.’ ‘Pull that emergency switch.’ ‘If that man gets killed …’ ‘Yes,’ said Dove gently. ‘Why is this hut empty?’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t there be someone here?’ It looked like the technological heart of the building operation. ‘Yes, me,’ said Joe briefly. ‘And the boy’s about. He took the call.’ ‘Pull the switch, Joe,’ advised Dove. ‘And quickly. If the power is on then that cage will come down safely. If it’s not then it’ll stay put; it won’t fall.’ Joe still hesitated. ‘Get him down,’ said Dove. I was letting Dove take charge because he knew the man. Without another word, Joe reached out and pulled down a red-coloured lever. ‘Go outside and watch,’ he said, now calm. ‘I’ll stay here.’ When we rejoined the watching crowd it had grown in size. There was a pause and then the cage began to descend, slowly at first and then more swiftly. The crowd sighed with relief. Gathering speed the cage slid towards the ground. I thought it was travelling just fractionally too fast for safety. I looked at it and looked again. The cage slid to the pavement. But this time we had all seen. There was a heap of crumpled clothes in a corner and a pair of shoes, but otherwise the cage was empty. The woman gave a little tiny muted shriek. We could see a jacket, some shoes, a shirt, and a white protective helmet. But Tom Butt was gone. He had left his clothes and disappeared. Chapter Three (#ulink_bc7eb70e-9535-51c6-847f-70b6bb37e105) John Coffin On the corner of Saxe-Coburg Street and Harper Road we examined the clothes. I didn’t know what to make of the episode. It was a strange thing, but the clothes were there all right. An old pair of working trousers, not too dirty all things considered, a short-sleeved shirt and a woollen cloth jacket with a zip up the front. There was also a pair of black leather shoes with rubber soles. The shoes were pretty worn. ‘Tom’s clothes,’ said one of the men. ‘That’s his jacket, anyway. About the shoes and shirt I couldn’t say.’ I ran my hand through the pockets of the jacket and drew out a few coins and a letter folded in two. The letter was addressed to Tom Butt and the address was a hostel in Farmer Street. I knew the place. I looked at the envelope, but decided not to open it just yet. It was still Tom Butt’s private life. He still had one. We’d let him keep it as long as we could. No one knew better than me that his chances of keeping it, under certain circumstances, were slim. ‘Yes, they’re Tom Butt’s,’ I said. I folded the clothes and handed them back to Joe the foreman. ‘You better keep these for the time being.’ ‘But you’re the policeman.’ ‘I don’t know that there’s a case for us here.’ ‘But where’s Tom?’ I shrugged. ‘Wherever he is he’s got on his underclothes and a pair of socks.’ ‘And his overalls,’ put in one of the onlookers. ‘He wore overalls over that lot.’ ‘And some overalls, then,’ I said. ‘But where’s he gone?’ ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps better. Where’s he likely to have gone?’ ‘But how could he go? One minute he’s calling out for help from the top of the building and the next he’s gone. How could he go?’ ‘Well, he didn’t walk,’ I said. ‘And I don’t suppose he could fly.’ ‘If he didn’t come down, then I bet he’s up there still. He could hardly crawl through the bars of the cage. He must have lost his nerve,’ said Joe, turning back to look at the shell of the building. ‘Search the place, boys, and shout as you go, so as I’ll hear.’ Dove was very quiet and so was I, but we eyed each other. Dematerialization wasn’t something we’d worked with much. ‘If there’s a screwy situation, there’s a screwy answer,’ muttered Dove. ‘But there’s an answer.’ He was right, but it wasn’t always an answer you wanted to hear. They searched the building site from top to bottom but there was no sign of Tom. But rolled up in a bundle, not far from the cage, they found some overalls. They were reasonably clean and not stained or torn in any way; they appeared to be Tom’s. So now, wherever Tom was, he didn’t have overalls either. It was a perplexing thought. ‘Like I said, there’s an answer,’ said Dove. ‘Just wait and he’ll come walking in.’ ‘You may be right.’ ‘Or he won’t come walking in. He’ll be carried in. Or we won’t ever see him again, but there’ll be a picture and we shall know how or why.’ It was because he really believed this that Dove was a good policeman. He never took no for an answer. But sometimes he had to put up with two answers and not knowing which one was right. Joe came back, looking worried. ‘My God, I don’t know what’s become of him,’ he said. ‘It’s like he’s been snatched up to heaven. Where’s that boy Patsy Burden? What was it he said to you? Tell us again, Patsy.’ ‘He called, “Help me, help me, they’re getting me”. That was the first time. And I said, “Come on down then”. And he said, “I can’t, the power’s gone”.’ ‘Only it hadn’t,’ said Joe. ‘No. And then he said, “Help me, help me, I’m falling”.’ ‘I don’t know. It’s mad.’ He looked up at the building. ‘He’s our first casualty. If he is one. On a big site like this the building always gets one or two. But this is the first time anyone’s absolutely got eaten up.’ ‘That’s a strange way of putting it,’ I said. ‘Well, it’s what it looks like, isn’t it? If one thing’s certain it’s just that he didn’t fall.’ He stared upward again, then shrugged. ‘He’ll be back,’ said Dove, maintaining his unshakeable belief in the laws of the universe. But perhaps the laws of this world don’t hold good for all other worlds. There might be a way on what the scientists call the “space-time continuum” for a solid block of earth-matter called Tom Butt to disappear from our view. He might be gone and yet still be there. Perhaps he could hear us. ‘Call his name,’ I said suddenly. ‘Call his name. Tom! Tom Butt!’ We all called, once, twice and three times, but the wind brought his name dustily back to us and there was no other sound. ‘A weird little business,’ I said. ‘But nothing to do with us.’ ‘No. Nothing. Leave him alone, and he’ll come walking in.’ Certain things are clearer to me, now that I am getting this on the tape, than they were at the time, and one is that Dove was putting on an act. He was not altogether genuine in his portrayal of an unimaginative down-to-earth policeman. Underneath he was already deeply disturbed. ‘I’ll give you a lift home,’ he said. He was proud of his car, which was new. ‘It’s over here.’ ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll walk.’ It was only just round the corner. And I think better walking. There seemed plenty to think about. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said furiously. ‘My car’s gone. It’s been lifted.’ There were cars in plenty lining the kerb, but his car, smart and shining, was gone. Those that were left had suffered a little from their life in London. He was white with rage. ‘Come on, let’s report it missing and start things moving.’ He stamped forward. ‘God, I’m angry,’ he said. But after his first outburst, he didn’t say much. My wife complained I was silent that evening. Probably Dove’s wife did the same. I suppose he spoke about his car, but I don’t believe he said much else. ‘No, different,’ I remember I answered my wife when she had asked me if this case was like the case of the missing children. This wasn’t quite true. I was wondering if there was not some similarity. We had set up a temporary headquarters for the missing children investigations in a small house annexed to the station. We had to have a special place because we were getting a lot of outside help. By which I mean that everyone who knew something that might help or thought they did or hoped they did called us and wanted to talk. I don’t blame them, in a case like this it’s almost inevitable, but it makes work harder. You have to listen to them, but all the time you know that the person who could tell you something is keeping quiet (because almost certainly there is a wife or a mother or a sister who could tell you a lot) and yet you listen, because the very flow of these stories puts pressure on the silent one, which in the end is going to break her. I say her, but it could be him. Usually it’s a woman, though. Dove had just finished a briefing session with the detectives assigned to the case when I came in next day. ‘Nothing,’ he said straight away. ‘There isn’t anything new.’ ‘But you thought there might be?’ ‘Well, I was hoping.’ ‘Anything new on Tom Butt?’ ‘He hasn’t turned up, if that’s what you mean,’ Dove said in a sour tone. ‘Well, we don’t have to look for him, do we?’ I sat down at Dove’s desk. All his papers were thrown about. I could see he’d doodled a huge circle on a piece of paper and then dug a hole in it with a pencil. It was how he felt, I suppose. Inside a circle and he’d got to dig himself out. It was how I felt too, come to think of it. ‘No one’s yet asked us to look for Tom Butt. He’s an adult and can go where he likes.’ ‘Eighteen,’ I said. ‘Just eighteen and a nervous type. Not such an adult. And in a strange country.’ ‘I’m wondering now if he isn’t in a stranger one,’ said Dove. ‘Hasn’t it struck you that there’s a resemblance showing up between the way Tom Butt went and the way the children went?’ ‘And lots of points of difference too.’ ‘And that that’s the stranger country he’s now in.’ ‘It did occur to me,’ admitted Dove, ‘but it’s ridiculous.’ He walked around the room. This house had once been a small school and it still had blackboards round the walls which we used. Dove had written a list of dates on them. Thursday June 26, 1969. Wednesday April 23, 1969. Monday March 18, 1968. I knew what these dates stood for: they were the dates of the last three disappearances. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ Dove repeated, turning his back on the dates. ‘He just left, that’s all. He wasn’t taken. He just left.’ I went over to the blackboard and wrote the day before’s date on it. ‘There, if Tom Butt comes back, we can rub it off. Otherwise, it stays.’ ‘Either he’ll turn up or he won’t turn up,’ said Dove, with a shrug. ‘Either we’ll find out all about it or we won’t find out about it. That’s how I feel.’ But Coffin felt a little sick. Chapter Four (#ulink_53a058ec-a2fe-579b-95c6-78ec657c9726) At this stage Coffin had only the one tape, his own. He played it over to himself because it seemed to him he had thoughts and words down on it that were useful. Dove was shrugging his shoulders but Coffin was uneasy. He was surprised to realize how much he (and Dove too for that matter) seemed to be reaching forward to put into speech things they didn’t quite understand. Why for instance had they both seized on that phrase ‘A strange country’? Perhaps it was he and Dove and not Butt who were in a strange country. Tom Butt, aged eighteen, five feet four inches tall, weighing 140 pounds, had disappeared into thin air. He had gone from a closed cage stuck up high on the building, flying away like a bird. He was a man in a puzzle. If you could think of him like that then you reduced the human element. But nothing could reduce the human element in the case of the missing children and it would be obscene to try. Coffin put the tape in a drawer and got back to the routine of his day. He had reports to read, three reports to dictate and in forty minutes he had to attend a conference to be held in another division about the amnesty of firearms. He was going to be late for this conference. And in his opinion there were still plenty of firearms floating around his bailiwick that the amnesty wasn’t going to touch. No amnesty was going to make a man give in a gun that he had paid for, polished, worn next to his skin and, whether he knew it or not, was looking forward to using. Only the people who were never going to use a gun were going to be influenced by any police offers of oblivion. At the most, you removed a few outmoded weapons and left behind the really lethal equipment. He could think of at least two men who almost certainly had a nice little armoury left. ‘Charley Barnes for one,’ he said aloud thoughtfully. ‘He was looking pretty cheerful the other day down the Blue Anchor.’ The Blue Anchor was the local street market. Charley had certainly been looking cheerful and his wife had been wearing a mink wrap. Of course, mink was getting cheaper, but still … ‘It might be an idea to make him less cheerful. Might get a search warrant and have a look round.’ He made a note to start this ball rolling and at once felt more cheerful himself. Out of his window he could see a uniformed constable walking along the row of parked cars and testing the doors to see if they were locked: he interpreted this as the arm of Inspector Dove reaching out. He hadn’t seen his colleague today, but the grapevine reported that his car had not yet been returned. Also out of his window he saw an untidy straggle of children headed by a teacher pass on their way from the new swimming pool on the main road to their old school (due, like the police station, for imminent demolition). He had long eyesight and recognized the teacher in charge as Jean Young. He had interviewed her over the disappearance of Katherine Gable. Anyway, they were old acquaintances and enemies. At the age often she had asserted her defiance of law and order by heaving a stone through one of his windows. In a way she was heaving them still. Coffin looked at her with something like sympathy. She headed every action group in the district, marched on every protest march and had organized the petition against police cruelty when the Peace Marchers had camped down by Daffodil Fields (no daffodils but a good square of concrete), but she had had to be mother and practically father as well to her brother Tony since her mother had died. He looked at her organizing her flock to cross the road. No doubt about it, there was a lot of maternal feeling seeking an outlet in Jean. ‘Jean,’ wailed one of her pupils, as they turned into the school. It was the sort of school building that had been built at the turn of the century on the lines of a prison with boys, girls and infants on separate floors with iron gates all round them. A more liberal generation had tried to brighten it up with bright paint, but its days were drawing to a close. Not before time, Jean thought. ‘Don’t call me Jean,’ she said mechanically. ‘I’m Miss Young.’ Miss Young for ever and ever, she thought rather sadly. She didn’t really fancy a virgin life, but she could see it coming. ‘My mum calls you Jean.’ Mother was a neighbour and a friend. No, hardly a friend, more someone Jean had known all her life. There wasn’t much time for friendship in Maggie Read’s life; she had Cy and four children and that brother on her hands. As Maggie Edmondstone she had been a pretty girl, now she was plump and quiet, and still only twenty-nine, older than Jean. ‘Jean, I’ve left my bra behind in the baths.’ ‘You shouldn’t be wearing a bra.’ Jean cast an eye on her pupil’s skinny frame. ‘I feel really cosy in a bra.’ She scuttled round in front to prevent her teacher getting away. ‘And now I’ve left it behind. Can I go back and get it?’ ‘No, certainly not.’ Jean was sharp. No girl was let out unattended these days. Not even Connie Read, who ought to be indestructible if anyone was. ‘I could take Rose Allen with me.’ ‘Not even with Rose Allen.’ ‘I’d only take two minutes and it’s only Scripture. No one’d notice.’ ‘No.’ ‘That’s gone for good then,’ said Connie in a resigned voice. ‘Can’t leave a thing behind in that place.’ Jean gave her a gentle push in the direction of her classroom and herself turned towards the staff room. She had a free period. There was one woman sitting at the table by the window marking exercise books with a huge red pencil. Everyone has to have an outlet somewhere and this red pencil was Madge Cullen’s. At her elbow was a big brown teapot and a tray of cups. Jean put her hand on the teapot. ‘Cold,’ she said. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/gwendoline-butler/coffin-s-dark-number/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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