After seeing Coffin that morning I went round to the shop. It was shut and my boss John Plowman not there. I wasn’t too surprised. I’d seen it coming. He’s been restless lately. I thought I could probably get in round the back, but I didn’t try. I wasn’t interested in working that day.
There was a policeman right behind me. ‘Well, so you’re following me,’ I said. He didn’t deny it.
I gave the door of the shop a little rattle just for show, and then went on.
I knew where I was going. Perhaps he knew where I was going. I dare say he did. We had the same facts to be drawn upon.
These were the facts: the times the children went, the people they knew, those that they trusted.
The trouble was that nearly all of us in this district had two lives. We were poor, you see. We didn’t have the resources to maintain consistency all through our lives. It takes money to do that. So I am both businessman and errand boy. Cyrus is an ice-cream salesman and a scientist in the evening. John Plowman is a shop-keeper and a seer. We’re all two-faced round here.
I set off to walk. It may have looked as if I was just taking a desultory path through the streets. But I knew where I was going.
I called on John Plowman’s wife. I wasn’t sure if I should find her at home. She too had a day-time job. As a nurse, I believe. But she was in, and opened the door herself.
‘John in?’ I knew he wasn’t, of course.
She shook her head. She didn’t seem pleased to see me. And I could see signs of packing in the hall behind her.
‘I’d like to have seen him.’ Not true, of course. I was only probing.
‘He’s gone. I don’t know what we’ll be doing about the shop. Or the Club. You’ll have to find another job.’
‘I wasn’t planning on going back to it. He’s gone for good then?’
She crossed herself. It was a hangover from a previous life of hers; I don’t think she was any longer a believer. ‘Yes. Gone for good. I’ve seen it coming.’
‘He’s not dead, is he?’
She shrugged. ‘He might have chosen what you call death. Yes, that might be the vehicle he chose to use.’
I liked that bit about ‘what you call death’. She made it sound quite dignified too. ‘He did have a choice then?’ I said thoughtfully.
‘Of course. He told me it might be happening. He couldn’t give me an exact date, of course, one never can. But I knew it would be soon.’
‘I’d like to have said goodbye.’
‘I’m sure he’ll get a message through to you if he can,’ she said kindly.
I didn’t suppose he’d get a message through about the ice-cream van though, and that was what I wanted. In whatever after life he was now engaged in, John Plowman wasn’t going to answer questions about that van. I turned away.
Knowing this district like I did, I knew everybody’s habits. I knew that Charley Di Finzio would be just going into his brother-in-law’s café to have a second breakfast. He was not off- his food just because Tom’s body and several others had been discovered in premises he had bought up for development. He might be worrying about his investment, but he wouldn’t be worried about the bodies. He didn’t believe in death. I know he thought he was immortal. He knew other people got it, of course, but he thought that he personally had thrown it off. ‘I didn’t die in the war, boy,’ he said to me once. ‘I won’t go now.’ Frankly, I thought he had died during the war and what came back wasn’t what had gone into it.
‘Where’s your asistant, Mr Di Finzio?’ I said.
‘You want to see him, you can see him,’ he said, still chewing his bacon and egg. ‘It won’t do you any good. You won’t get any good out of him. I can’t get any good out of him. You did me a bad turn there.’
‘Sorry, Charley.’
‘He just sits there, you know.’
‘I’m sorry. I thought it would work out.’
‘You don’t think at all, Tony, that’s your trouble. And don’t call me Charley.’
I did think, but I admit I hadn’t been thinking about him particularly.
‘Nice boy and all that,’ said Di Finzio, still eating, ‘but no good as a worker. Just sits. I let you kids play around my fairground. I employ you even. And what do I get for it? Nothing. He does nothing.’
‘I’ll go on round.’
‘In the office,’ he said, nodding across the road to the two-room office he had rented when he went into the property business. He was our local tycoon. I had been studying his career to pick up points. I hadn’t learnt much though. His career and mine were not going to follow a similar pattern.
I went across the road to the office. There was an outer room and Di Finzio’s small inner room. The assistant used the outer office. As far as I remember he wasn’t meant to be in much. Assistant to Mr Di Finzio meant messenger boy, really.
The assistant was rummaging round in a cupboard with his back to the door.
‘Hello,’ I said. He turned round slowly, as if he didn’t want to see me.
‘Hello, Dave,’ I said.
‘Oh, it’s you.’
‘Yes.’ I smiled at him. I suppose it didn’t come out too pleasant a smile because he flinched.
‘You know what I’ve come for?’
He didn’t answer, but sat down. I saw what his employer meant.
‘Get up,’ I said promptly. He did get up. ‘Well, Dave, this is the end. Where’s Kim Simpson?’
‘Not here.’
‘I know that. But where?’
Once again he didn’t answer.
‘Look,’ I said patiently. ‘The police aren’t fools. They can count. They can see that you had the right opportunities. Any minute now they are going to realize that the reason the girls always went on the nights there was a sighting was because those were the nights Cy was out. And the nights Cy was out he left his van parked at the back of John Plowman’s shop. And you could use it. I suppose you stole his van keys and copied them. Like the keys to the Liddell and House factory when I had them. You got them too, I suppose.’
‘I was lonely,’ said Dave. Tony, you know that.’
‘Was that enough, Dave?’ I asked, ‘for all you’ve done?’ But even as I said it, I knew, in a way, it was.
It all went back to when we were fifteen years old. That was the summer when for all we knew of the outside world we might have been on a desert island. Me, Dave, and Butty made three. Not that we paid him much attention either, but he was there on the island with us. The island was created this way: we were the only three boys in our class not going on a school trip to Norway. Various reasons produced the same result for us all. I didn’t have any money, Dave didn’t have any money, Butty didn’t have any money. But behind this different circumstances enmeshed us. In my case my father was going a bust on his birds. In Dave’s his mother had just died. (He never knew his father anyway.) I don’t know what operated with Butty, perhaps his family just wanted him at home. We were outcasts among our better endowed peers.
I was reading a good deal at the time.
‘What’s the book?’ asked Dave.
I told him.
‘Oh, a grown-up book.’
‘I’m a grown-up boy,’ I said.
‘I don’t read much myself.’ I went on with my reading. ‘D’you think I should?’
‘Up to you.’
‘Could you –’ he paused. ‘Instruct me? Help me.’
I looked up. ‘Can’t you read?’
‘Not really.’
So I taught him to read. I suppose everyone at school but me had known Dave couldn’t read, but I hadn’t concentrated on him before. He didn’t make an easy reader, but I got him along pretty well in the end.
One day Butty joined the reading class. We read our way through various books, some of which I could stand and others which I couldn’t, but I had to bear their tastes in mind. And perhaps I let Butty and Dave into worlds they shouldn’t have entered. But for me they would never have heard of Freud, Lawrence,
Maldoror.
I tried out too many writers on them. I let them into too many minds, it was a bad thing.
When school closed and the happy boys went off to their foreign land we transferred ourselves to the long grass in the park. I’ve never been back there a lot. I saw too much of it that summer. Perhaps nothing but good would have come from our relationship but for the heat and the drought and the long grass. We weren’t the only animals hiding in the long grass. The dry weather had drawn in lots of other little creatures. We couldn’t see them, but they were there.
One morning when we came in a great machine was cutting swathes. A family of little field mice had been uncovered and were scuttling about. The cutter, driven by a park-keeper, one of those we knew, a surly figure, had already killed two. Not much to say about them, but a third, frantic to escape, darted in front of the machine. The driver took a slight swerve to make sure of hitting it.
‘He did that on purpose,’ said Butty.
‘Yeah. A swell fellow,’ I said. Where he had passed was a squashed pink heap an inch or two around.
‘It was little, soft and dead,’ said Dave.
‘He ought to be punished,’ said Butty (who, no doubt because of his history, always had a strong sense for him levelling up) in a suddenly deep voice.
Dave was silent.
It was his bad luck that we met that park-keeper as he was leaving work. It was his double bad luck that it was a narrow alley behind the cricket pavilion across which we were spread out, although not by design. We had him halted whether we wanted or not.
‘Best not to go near him.’ I don’t know whose voice that was, mine probably, but it was too late. Butty pushed him, Dave kicked him, I stood over him.
The man had the bag that he’d kept his lunch in strung on a strap round his neck. We tore it off him and emptied out the contents, rubbish all of it, and threw it on the roof behind us. Funny about roofs and how they attract you when they are low. I suppose they seem out of touch but aren’t really.
We ran off and left him lying there. There was a little trickle of blood from his mouth and I thought I could see the pearly gleam of bone through the hair. We thought he was dead. We went on thinking that for days.
Well, we hadn’t killed him and I saw him one day in a pub drinking beer, and he didn’t even look sick, but you might say he’d killed us. It had been bad, living through those days when we’d thought he was dead.
‘We didn’t kill that man, Dave,’ I remember saying, glad to get the news across. ‘I don’t believe we even hurt him much and he isn’t going to do anything about it. He just turned away when he saw me and went on eating pork pie.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t know you.’
‘He knew me.’
‘Better tell Butty then.’
‘I already have done.’
’What did he say?’
‘He said: that’s over then.’
‘That’s over then,’ repeated Dave reflectively. ‘We needn’t ever see Butty again then?’
‘I don’t think he wants to much.’
‘We’re bound to run into each other, though.’
‘Yes. You can’t throw off things like that.’
‘But you and I’ll stay together, Tony?’
‘If that’s how you want it, Dave.’
And that was how it was: you can’t throw things off.
Dave was most the gainer from that episode, if gain is the right word. It wasn’t that he liked violence. He didn’t like it any more than I did but it wasn’t alien to him. He was interested. He wanted to know more. He wanted to know more about it in a certain context. Already he knew more about the man who drove over the field mouse than we did. Much much more.
But Dave isn’t really able to live on his own, and although he went off once and took a job in Birmingham, he came back, as I knew he would.
Now he said to me piteously: ‘I had to have some affection. But, Tony, why are you talking to me like this?’
‘Why do you think? I am angry.’
‘Why are you talking to me like this, Tony?’ He sounded puzzled.
‘Lipstick on my shirt, voices on my tape put there by you: why did you do this to me, Dave?’
‘Why Tony! How can you talk to me this way? You were there all the time and you knew how it was.’
‘No. Don’t.’
‘Yes. Tony. Why are you going against me like this? It was us together.’
‘No. Don’t.’
‘Lipstick. It got on you because you were there.’ He shook his head. ‘You taped the voice yourself, Tony. Don’t be that way to me.’
‘I’ll have you crying soon, Dave, won’t I?’
‘Has it worked on your mind so you’ve forgotten?’ he said, wide-eyed.
‘You hate me, Dave.’
‘You’re acting as if we weren’t partners,’ he said almost in tears. ‘As if all I did wasn’t on your orders. I’m your slave, Tony. You know I am. You’ve often said so.’
‘You’re a liar.’
‘You wouldn’t let me down, Tony, would you?’ he pleaded. ‘I’ve done it all the way you wanted. “For my pleasure, slave”, you said.’
‘I’ve underestimated you, David.’
‘It was to be an academic exercise, you said.’
‘I never used that word,’ I said in a level voice. ‘And I didn’t think you knew it.’
‘Your word. Your own word,’ said Dave obstinately.
‘I’d never use that word of murder and cruelty.’
‘Don’t talk like that. You’re turning against me now.’
‘I’ve never been for you, Dave. What exactly were you doing?’
‘I was making a collection. You know.’
‘They were your girl friends, weren’t they? The ones I never got to see?’ I leaned forward. ‘Your baby-girl friends.’
‘I admit I chose them,’ he protested. ‘But you knew. And you saw them. Later.’
‘You’re going to say that, are you?’
‘I wasn’t going to say anything. You started it. Please, Tony.’
I certainly had underestimated him. ‘How did you choose then?’ I asked. They were all pretty.’
‘The first one, the one before I went away, had a silk scarf. I noticed the silk scarf and saw she was a pretty kid … You’ve never asked me this before.’
‘You’ve never told me before, Dave.’
‘But you told me.’ Once again he sounded bewildered. ‘I did it the way you said. Make them feel little women. Dress them up. Make-up. Love them a little: it’s what they’re looking for. But remember they’re only kids. Give them ice-cream.’
That’s a truly appalling picture you’re drawing me, Dave,’ I said, closing my eyes. ‘You’re showing me too much.’
‘It’s real, Tony,’ he said in a soft voice. ‘Real for us both.’
‘No. I deny that. I’ll always deny it. And I certainly didn’t tell you to kill Butty.’
‘Butty? You had a bit of luck there, Tony, if you did but know it. He came into the fairground after me. He didn’t like you any better than I do. He said: “Tony Young could be in trouble with the police about a trick he wants to play. Why don’t you and I gang up on him?” But I was loyal, Tony. I stayed with you.’
‘You hated Butty, just like you hate me,’ I said, the surprise all mine this time. ‘It goes back to when we were kids. You were the one Butty made cry. You were the one whose bag he used to throw up on the shed roof.’ It was bad to think that murder had come out of that group of boys, but it had.
‘I did it all for you,’ said David. ‘Whatever I’ve done, you shared it with me.’ He fixed his eyes hard on me, protuberant and blue. ‘Butty came round to the fair-ground after he’d tried to pull your little trick for you. We went up to the top of the Big Dipper where I was doing a little repair for Mr Di Finzio and I pushed him right over. Broke every bone in his body. He didn’t even scream and no one was there to see.’
‘But why did you put the
girls’ things and Butty’s knife where they would be found?’
That was no hiding-place, it was a showing place,’ said Dave. He laughed.
‘Now you’ve admitted something,’ I said quietly. ‘You don’t realize it, but you’ve shown yourself up. Not me. Not Butty. Just yourself. You demonstrated malice towards Butty by placing his knife together with a few of the girls’ possessions in that spot you associated with his humiliation of you.’ I could feel the words rolling out of me like an act of condemnation. ‘More than that: you demonstrated you had been close to the girls.’
‘Perhaps it was a false move,’ he said sulkily. ‘But there’s no need for you to sound off at me like that. I did it for your protection.’
‘Nothing to do with me, David.’
‘Don’t throw me off,’ he said. ‘You can’t say you aren’t in it too.’
‘You’re forgetting something: only you used the van to trap the kids and transport their bodies, and Butty’s. Because you must have done that. How did you get the girls in there? By showing them all the ice-cream and offering a free one? Soon, Dave, the police will be checking that van. You didn’t work with that van and leave no trace.’
‘But you killed them.’ He looked at me. ‘I shall swear it’
I knew that once he’d used the word kill his state was hopeless. He was really wicked. Not mad. He knew what he’d been doing because he said ‘kill’. He ought to have said something else.
‘And my tapes?’ I said. ‘The stuff you put on them and then took off?’
He smiled. This time it was my turn to be on the receiving end of a smile. But it was enough. I knew how he felt about me and a lot of other things then.
‘Thanks,’ I said, taking a deep breath. ‘Just a joke, eh? I took it quite seriously. To tell the truth, I take the whole thing seriously.’
Coffin's Dark Number Page 18
