Coffin's Dark Number Read online

  GWENDOLINE BUTLER

  Coffin’s Dark Number

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  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

  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 despis
e, 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 b
e 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.