Coffin's Dark Number Read online

  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 kaving 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 wen
t 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 t
o 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

  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.