Coffin's Dark Number

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘No. Just sometimes.’

  ‘They alter you a bit. Hide your face.’

  ‘You think that’s why I wear them?’

  ‘I just noticed it,’ said Parr. ‘After all, you put them on.’

  ‘I think you’re deliberately working on me. Trying to make me nervous. I don’t think you have found a girl.’

  ‘Did I say found?’

  ‘I thought you did.’

  ‘Well, it was a mistake. Perhaps I should say “came back”.’

  ‘How did she come back? Did she walk back? How was she?’

  Parr said: ‘No one told me.’

  ‘Was there – was there any blood on her?’

  ‘Did you think there might be?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have asked,’ said Tony, tormented.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Parr politely.

  ‘It always matters when you speak out of turn.’

  ‘I meant it doesn’t matter what questions you ask me because I have to take you in to see my boss now.’ He was still being polite. He led the way to the door.

  ‘I bet he didn’t tell you to tell me about the girl coming back,’ said Tony suddenly. He took off his spectacles, revealing his bright blue eyes. ‘I bet you took a risk. And now you’re regretting it.’

  Coffin was waiting for them in his room. He had moved away from the window and was sitting at his desk. He and Tony knew each other by sight and Tony knew that his girl friend Judith was a friend of Coffin’s wife. But it didn’t seem the time to acknowledge any relationship and they both looked at each other silently, summing up.

  ‘I’m sorry I had to keep you waiting.’

  ‘I thought you did it on purpose.’ Tony had recovered his nerve and was getting more aggressive.

  ‘In a way. It wasn’t an accident, anyway.’

  ‘I thought not.’

  ‘I mean that something happened.’ He’s clever, thought Coffin.

  He’s cleverer than I thought, said Tony inwardly. He hardly ever thought anyone over the age of twenty-five was clever, having an unconscious belief that mental deterioration set in around then. In most of the people around him it was true, of course.

  ‘It was good of you to come in, Mr Young. We do get quite a lot of people coming in with stories. It’s one of the reasons I had to keep you waiting now.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  Coffin looked enquiring.

  ‘I mean I thought I might be the reason you had to keep me waiting,’ said Tony. ‘I sort of got the idea from Sergeant here that you were interested in me.’

  ‘We’re interested in all young men in your age group who live in this district and fly kites of any sort.’

  ‘Do I fly a kite?’

  ‘Higher and higher,’ said Coffin.

  ‘Yes, well, I suppose I asked for that. But I didn’t like the sergeant coming round and asking for my fingerprints.’

  ‘We’re asking for every man’s. Everyone who can count as a man.’

  ‘You can have mine now, if you like.’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘It’s late now.’

  It was still day enough to see the street through the window, and from where Tony sat with the light full in his face, he could see the new police station across the way. Construction hadn’t stopped on it, in spite of missing Tom Butt, and the building was beginning to look more like a building ever day. It was going to be very ugly.

  ‘You know, you could be in serious trouble,’ said Coffin. ‘You refuse a fingerprint, you come in here offering information, which doesn’t amount to much if I may say so, and you have other liabilities too.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, that’ll come out as you go along.’

  Coffin’s voice was neither kind nor unkind, simply as if he knew all the rules and could see the picture and where Tony fitted into it. Tony began to understand where he had put himself.

  ‘Not if I stop talking.’

  ‘You won’t stop talking, Tony. Not now. You can’t,’

  And it was true. You can reach a point when the words themselves have taken over and one leads on to another. That is the danger of tape recorders.

  ‘Anyway, it’s as well you came. Let’s have everything out.’

  Out, like a box of bricks, child’s toys, Tony thought.

  ‘There’s only what I’ve told you,’ said Tony. ‘And what you haven’t told me.’

  ‘Let’s go on then from what you’ve told us.’

  ‘I’ve said it once. I don’t want to waste time and energy going over it again.’

  ‘But you’ve got lots of time and energy to spare. That’s one of the things I’ve noticed about you. You run risks when you’ve got as much extra as you have.’

  Tony looked at him warily.

  ‘Now you came round here with a story, with information. But there’s something more than that, isn’t there?’

  ‘I don’t know why you say that,’ said Tony after a pause.

  ‘Because in my experience there nearly always is. What is it? Where’s it coming from? Is it your sister? Some trouble about her?’

  Parr shifted uneasily. This was an area he didn’t like.

  ‘No,’ said Tony.

  ‘She knows all the missing children though.’

  ‘Leave Jean alone.’

  ‘Sisters often cover up for their brothers. Especially if they stand in the relationship of a mother to them.’

  ‘Jean’s no mother to me.’

  ‘No.’ Coffin studied Tony’s face. ‘But something is worrying you. You feel guilty about something. You look it, too. Is it the two children, the brother and sister? Is there something about their disappearance?’

  ‘That doesn’t worry me. I don’t feel guilty about them.’

  ‘There’s only one thing left. Tom Butt. It’s Tom Butt that’s upsetting you.’

  ‘I don’t feel guilty,’ muttered Tony.

  ‘But responsible.’

  ‘I might be. I just might be.’

  There was a long pause. Coffin knew he had got somewhere, that things were moving at last.

  ‘Get the boy a cup of coffee,’ he said to Parr, ‘and ring up his sister and tell her we’ve got him here and that he’s all right. She might be worrried.’

  When the coffee came, they both drank it thirstily.

  ‘I knew Tom a bit. A bit more than I’ve said.’

  ‘Yes. You were at school together. Some other boy’s fingerprints in Tom’s room. Would they match with yours?’

  ‘He could have had other friends,’ said Tony. ‘First thing I want to say is that Tom was not a jokey boy at all. He was dead serious. And the other thing I want to say is that I’m not a jokey boy either. So what we did had a meaning. In a way.’ He paused.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When he was a kid Tom thought he could fly. There’s nothing in that, lots of kids have fantasies and they forget them when they’re older, but Tom didn’t forget his. I think he half believed he had been able to fly. The way he’d dreamt it, he’d flown off and disappeared. Or the flying act and the disappearing were the same thing. It wasn’t clear.’

  ‘But you didn’t believe it.’

  Tony shrugged. ‘I believe what I see. I haven’t seen anything positive yet.’

  ‘Someone did believe it, though.’

  ‘Yes. John Plowman did. He heard about it and asked to see Tom. I said to Tom – let’s make you seem to fly. He didn’t like the idea at first, but he wanted to be friends.’

  ‘And what were you going to do?’

  Tony paused. ‘I’d really been looking for someone like Tom for some time.’ He paused again, as if waiting for them to speak, which they did not. ‘I told you I had a serious purpose. I’ll explain.’ He was getting into his stride. ‘John knew about Tom, was interested, perhaps half believed in him already. That was my beginning.’

  ‘And what was your end?’

  ‘A test. I thought I’d make Tom a test case. Let’s see what o
ld John makes of him, I thought. Let Tom disappear. I know it’s a fake. I wanted to see what John did.’

  Coffin raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I wanted to see if John Plowman went for fakes,’ said Tony bluntly.

  ‘So all the apparatus of Tom Butt’s disappearance was a fake?’

  ‘I thought it was. It was meant to be. I arranged it all – voice on the telephone – it was Tom himself, of course. You can speak on that telephone from more than one point. We left the clothes in the lift, to create an illusion Tom had been there. That was the plan.’ Unconsciously, he put an accent on the verbs.

  ‘And when did it go wrong?’

  ‘From the beginning, really. Tom got frightened. “Maybe I will disappear”, he said. He had this thought, you see, that he had once disappeared. He had a lot of superstitions. He thought he could tell the future. He couldn’t tell his own, though.’

  ‘Perhaps he could,’ said Coffin grimly. ‘So what’s your theory? Someone stepped in and made your plan real?’

  ‘I think Tom told someone.’

  ‘And that someone killed him? Why?’

  ‘There must be a reason.’

  ‘But you don’t know it?’

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ said Tony. ‘You think it was me.’

  ‘You seem very closely involved in it all.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Tony bitterly. Too close. I’d better tell you this. I’ve got a tape-recorder. You’ve got one yourself.’ He glanced across the room. ‘Did you ever go to it one day and find there were sounds, voices on it that you hadn’t put there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. It wouldn’t happen to you. But it did to me. I thought it was a child calling and crying. Just snatches, you know. Jumbled up and indistinct as if taken from some way away.’

  ‘You’d better give me this tape,’ said Coffin.

  ‘The sounds were there one day, then gone the next,’ said Tony. He looked pink cheeked and young and nervous. ‘Maybe I imagined them. That’s the best thing to think, isn’t it.’

  ‘For you it probably is,’ said Coffin. ‘But unless you suffer from hallucinations, it’s probably not true. Do you suffer from hallucinations?’

  Tony pulled a face.

  ‘You could have put them there yourself. And erased them.’

  ‘I didn’t do that.’

  ‘Or you could be telling lies all round the clock,’ went on Coffin, ignoring him. ‘But anyway, suppose you let me have the tape?’

  ‘Yes. You can have it. You’ll have to let me go and get it, though.’

  ‘No. You stay here.’ He gave Parr a look. ‘We’ll go.’

  ‘Jean won’t like that. Why not me?’

  Coffin did not answer.

  Usually when you ask a child a question he will give you the answer he thinks you want to have. Belle’s brother was doing his best.

  He had come wandering in, grubby and thirsty, about two hours ago. Alone and without Belle.

  ‘Where’s Belle?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Where have you been? Where have you been hiding?’

  In slightly varying forms these were the two questions that first his parents, then the police asked. Where’s your sister and where have you been?

  To the first he shook his head, and to the second he said: ‘in a little house.’ He repeated it hoarsely: ‘in a little house.’ It seemed a good answer to him, but he was only three years old.

  His mother began to cry.

  ‘What have you come back for?’ said Jean, as she opened the front door to Parr.

  ‘Your brother sent me to get his tape recorder.’

  Tony sent you? That doesn’t sound like him. Still, you’d better have it.’ She led him upstairs and watched nervously as he went into the room. Tony had left it tidy. She pointed. ‘There it is – on the table.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Silently they went downstairs together.

  ‘Goodnight and thanks again,’ said Parr.

  She held the door open. ‘Are you keeping Tony?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Will he be home tonight?’

  ‘I expect so. Don’t worry, Jean.’ The name slipped out and he coloured. He had red hair and the thin skin that goes with it.

  ‘Well, I do worry. I worry over Tony. You have to.’

  When he got back, Parr handed the tape and the machine over to Tony who considered for a moment and then handed it over to Coffin.

  ‘Here,’ he said.

  ‘You look as though you’re thinking thoughts,’ said Coffin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tony, ‘thinking thoughts.’

  Afterwards when Tony had to describe the moment to himself, he said: So I gave up the tape and stepped out as a commentator. From now on I was an actor, and as liable to get mauled as anyone else.

  Chapter Eleven

  In the small hours Tony Young was sent home. His sister Jean called to him from her bedroom, where she was lying awake, when she heard him on the stairs. ‘Tony? Oh, I’m so glad you’re back.’ He stood at her bedroom door and looked at her. ‘Of course I’m back.’ She looked at her clock. ‘After midnight. What have you been doing?’ Tony sighed. ‘I’ve been doing what’s known as “helping the police with their enquiries”. If I ever read that in the papers I shall know exactly what it means. How many hours hanging around, how much waiting while someone does something mysterious down the corridor that they’re never quite specific about. How many cups of tea you get offered. How much …’

  Jean spoke sharply from her pillows. ‘Shut up, Tony, and go to bed. You’re all wound up.’

  Tony went to bed, in his room which seemed strangely empty without the tape recorder he had come to regard as his other self; he did not sleep much.

  No one who knew the Anderson boy was back without his sister, slept much that night.

  Coffin didn’t try to go to bed at all. He played Tony’s tape. He listened to his own and dictated a few notes for it. Then he lay down on the camp bed he had had made up in one corner of his office and waited for the nearly summer dawn to come creeping into the room.

  He had the feeling that, although he could do nothing while it was dark, he wanted to be on the alert. But in spite of himself his eyes closed. He had omitted to telephone his wife. In the morning he might, or he might not be greeted with anger. She was a little undisciplined in her moods at the moment. He never knew whether he was going to be greeted with chilling nonchalance or real enthusiasm. Some of it was his fault, he wasn’t sure how much.

  He came awake to hear the telephone ringing and as he had expected it was his wife.

  ‘Where are you?’ she said.

  ‘You know already.’ Why answer a rhetorical question, she knew where he was all right or why was she ringing? But you couldn’t say anything.

  ‘It’s morning now.’

  ‘Yes, I can see it.’ He squinted at the sky. Raining. But daylight was struggling through.

  ‘There was a night in between.’

  He paused. The trouble with the telephone line, as with a tape recorder, was that it didn’t register the quality of your silence. This silence of his was apologetic, defensive and hopeful. He was hopeful that his wife would yet pack up the quarrel and put it away.

  But surprisingly, it got across. He heard her sigh. ‘I wish I didn’t worry over you. But I do worry.’

  ‘I’m really all right and I should have let you know.’

  ‘I’m just making the coffee. Will you be home for breakfast?’

  ‘Don’t wait. I’ll try in about an hour.’

  Satisfied and apparently cheerful, she rang off. It was the day’s little miracle. No others followed.

  The news that Belle’s brother had returned, but not Belle, had become public. There was a small crowd hanging about outside the police station and a slightly larger one outside Belle’s home.

  There was a strange atmosphere everywhere.

  ‘Don’t you feel the violence th
ere crackling under your feet as you walk the pavements?’ said Coffin to Dove, who had just come in.

  ‘I didn’t walk,’ said Dove, who had a literal mind.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Coffin turned away from the window. ‘Your car all right? Find out who’d lost the rubber duck?’

  ‘I’ve had other things to do.’ He dumped a file of reports and statements on the table in front of his chief. ‘There’s nothing there, but you’ll want to read them,’ he said with a virtuous air.

  ‘Yes, well I have different ideas,’ said Coffin, pushing them aside. ‘Get me one of the girls.’ They had three women attached to the station as aides. Their duties were usually concerned with women and children. They didn’t lead quiet lives.

  ‘They’re already worked off their feet,’ said Dove.

  ‘I only want one.’

  ‘When they first came you wouldn’t use them at all, now you’re working them all the time,’ said Dove.

  ‘They don’t argue back like some of my colleagues.’

  Coffin had no favourite among the three policewomen and didn’t seem to distinguish between them. And they, finding him rather alarming, didn’t try to get closer. ‘I don’t think he knows one of us from the other,’ said Joan Eames. But he did. He knew that Joan Eames was the one who was always a bit late and came hurrying in for duty, not quite making it at a run, but moving fast. He knew that Lucy Bates had an allergy of some sort which resulted in bursts of sneezing periodically. He had heard it was caused by wood dust, in which case she was in for a thin time when they moved to the new building. Thirdly, he knew that Katerina McKenzie, who had a German mother and Scottish father, moved silently and neatly and that if the door closed quietly and someone slid into the room then it was Katerina who had arrived. Joan banged doors.

  This time the door banged and someone hurried in, so he knew it was Joan he had got.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said politely. He had already learnt it paid to be polite to Joan; it gave her time to get her breath back.

  ‘What have you got lined up for this morning?’ he asked.

  Joan took a deep breath and started: ‘Nine-thirty, magistrates’ court, two boys shop-lifting. Ten-thirty, visit to child welfare officer about a child-cruelty case. Eleven, interview with Vicar of St Mary’s, but I’ll be late for that, and before I start out I’ve got my notes to do and …’