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 e
ating.
‘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.’
Coffin's Dark Number Page 3
