Meanwhile Dove went out and interviewed the girl who had disappeared for a few hours and then come back. When previously questioned she had simply said she’d got lost. She had been so silent that among the police who’d questioned her she was known as the Silent Girl. No one had been sure if she really had something to tell or was silent because she had indeed just got lost.
Now Dove could ask her about Tom Butt.
A stone’s throw from where Coffin was working was an old building which had been a livery stables some fifty years ago and probably had a history even older than that. It had a cobbled courtyard around which were the boxes where the horses had lived. It had housed a taxi service and for the last ten years had been let out as garages. Now even this usage was coming to an end and it had been bought for the value of the site, which was not inconsiderable. The new owner, Mr Di Finzio, was having a look round.
He was going round it with his assistant, who was reluctant and nervous.
‘Terrible job they made when they put doors on these old horse boxes,’ he said, giving one a kick. He had started life as a carpenter in a circus and knew what to look for.
‘It was done just after the war when they didn’t have the timber.’
‘Well, it’ll all go now. This whole area is going to be rebuilt.’ He sounded gleeful. ‘Dunno how it hung on so long. Wouldn’t have done, either, but for some bit of trouble about the land title. Bit of luck for me, though.’ He kicked at another spintering door. ‘This is where I make my fortune.’
‘Yes,’ said his assistant, who was poorly paid.
‘What’s in here?’ Di Finzio said, giving the door yet another blow. ‘You checked on everything like I told you?’ He had owned the place a few weeks now, but this was his first look round.
‘I’ve been over everything. That’s a sort of storage place. Must have been let out as that some time.’
‘Well, it ought to have been cleared out.’
The assistant shrugged. ‘I suppose it wasn’t worth anyone’s while. Anyway, there’s nothing valuable there, I can tell you that. If there had been it would have gone.’
‘Anyone could get in here.’
‘Can’t keep ’em out.’
They were progressing, slowly and inevitably, towards a certain point. The broken door had swung open, revealing the remains of packing cases and straw.
‘What’s that smell?’
‘I don’t smell anything.’
The new owner sniffed. ‘Perhaps I imagined it. Oh well, what’s it matter, it’ll all be gone soon.’ He moved away. ‘Let’s get out of here. To tell you the truth, I don’t like it so much. Know what I was during the war? I was a Heavy Demolition Worker. You won’t know what that was. Who cares now? And that’s how I smelt smells like that …’ He stopped uneasily.
‘There can’t be anything here.’
‘No. What’s in that packing case? You looked?’
‘Not in that one, no.’
‘You’ll have to be more thorough than that, boy, if you’re going to make your fortune. Look now.’
The top of the packing case was covered with an old sack. Underneath that shavings. And underneath that …
‘Gawd!’ said the new owner, forgetting the new language he was learning to go with his new home and his new car and his success. To his horror he felt violently sick and began to tremble. ‘I didn’t imagine that smell then. Cover him up. Where’s the ’phone?’ He stumbled off.
Tom Butt had come rushing back into everyone’s life. The speed of his arrival increased when they discovered how he had died.
‘So what’s it all about?’ asked Dove. He had seen the Silent Girl, who was still silent. ‘Is it suicide or murder? Well, which is it? Did he kill himself?’
‘He didn’t put himself where he was found,’ said Coffin. ‘Or cover himself up. So it could be murder.’
But there was a strange note in his voice and Dove waited.
‘And you’ve got to remember he had no clothes on. We ought to have expected that, as we found his clothes in the cage.’ Dove still waited.
‘On the other hand, he could have killed himself,’ went on Coffin.
‘How?’
Coffin got up and looked out of the window at the building site. ‘Here’s the news. Every bone in his body seems to have been broken. It looks as though he fell from a great height.’
Chapter Seven
Tony Young
So then the news about Tom got around and we all heard it as we came home from work. I felt really sick. And I rushed up here to my tape and poured out all I knew, which wasn’t much. I may have set the wrong tone in talking about Tom Butt, may have let you get sorry for him beyond what he deserved. We were bad to Butty. Yes, all right. But that wasn’t the end of it.
For Butty hadn’t stayed still. His character, in case I haven’t made it clear, developed. From being a cowed fat boy with a touch of colour (yes, there was that too) he became an aggressive fat boy. One day he rounded on us. We were doing something vaguely hostile to him. I can’t remember what, when, stimulated I suppose by all the glands that dominate a boy’s life, he kicked our shins and bashed our surprised noses. He had great beefy hands so the blows were heavy. One of us (not me) cried. Then he grabbed someone’s schoolbag and books and threw them up on the roof of the old shed where we kept our football boots. We couldn’t get them down and the boy who had to go home without his luggage got beaten.
We left Butty alone after that. In fact, I think it was then that Dave took over as scapegoat and was put in Butty’s place.
What I didn’t like was the way Tom had gone. I didn’t think the birds had picked him up and then dropped him down from a great height, but it happened somehow. And if I didn’t like the way he had gone, even less did I like the way he had come back. Or, to put it differently, where he had been found. I didn’t know what the police made of it, but the police didn’t have my sources of information.
I really poured out my heart on that tape, being very careful not to put too much too clearly. Who can say who could hear what? After all, once a thing’s been put into speech you can never keep it quiet, however discreet you think you’ve been. The police thought none of us knew the nature of Tom’s injuries, but we did. Of course we did.
From next door I could hear the Lees kid crying. He’d been at it all day. It was really beginning to worry me. I stumped down to the kitchen and asked Jean what it was all about.
She shrugged. ‘He’s lost something, I think.’
‘Haven’t we all?’
‘It upsets him.’
‘I can hear it.’
I could hear his father’s voice as well. He too seemed upset.
‘Has he lost something?’ I asked. But Jean didn’t answer.
Then I went upstairs again. I thought I’d just check up on the tape with the strange noises. There might be something there to help me.
I put it on, sound very low. I waited. At first I thought I’d got it too low, because I couldn’t hear anything. So I turned the sound up. I ran the whole reel through.
But there was nothing. Nothing at all. The tape had been wiped clean. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard, and when she got there the cupboard was bare. That was how I felt.
I stumped downstairs to the kitchen where Jean was working. I sat down at the table and drank some bitter tea. I wasn’t unhappy, but I wasn’t exactly happy either. More unsettled in my mind. To be honest I was considering if I’d gone mad. Or perhaps had been mad for some time.
Jean was pleased to see me. ‘You know I think he has lost something,’ she said in an excited tone.
‘Who has?’
‘Mr Lees next door.’ She sounded pleased and interested. I could see she was enjoying the small mystery. ‘I’m sure he has. I can tell from his voice.’
I wondered if she could tell from my voice what I’d lost. I was beginning to think it was my reason that was gone.
‘And I think I know what it was,’ she said
triumphantly.
I didn’t answer, so she prodded me a little. ‘Haven’t you noticed something that’s missing?’
‘I’m not good at noticing something that isn’t there.’ Which was a lie: I was sharp on noticing something that wasn’t there. Like the noises that had been on my tape.
‘His car,’ she said. ‘His car’s gone.’
‘Perhaps he’s sold it.’ I didn’t care much. I cared about the girl in the white Triumph and I cared about Tom Butt.
‘No! He’s only just bought it. No, the car’s been stolen. I bet that’s it. And perhaps the child left something in it and lost that too.’
I let her go on with it. I could see her deductions were taking her mind off our real mystery, what was really missing round here.
So Tom was dead. I hadn’t wanted him dead. But now I had to decide if I was in any way responsible.
Chapter Eight
The premises where Tom Butt had been found were closed up and a policeman put on duty. The police were not finished with it but for the moment there was a lull. They had no idea yet who was responsible for putting him there. ‘We’ve had a good look round and done all the usual, but nothing obvious has come up,’ said Dove to Coffin.
‘No, there wouldn’t be. All that straw and dirt.’
‘Yes. We found an old bridle that must have been there thirty years at least. But the body hadn’t been there for long.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘I know so.’
‘Come on, then, tell me.’
‘Well, he was the wrong shape. He didn’t fit into that box. Someone had a job shoving him in. He’d already stiffened.’
‘Yes,’ said Coffin reflectively. ‘I saw that. And the pathologist?’
‘Confirms it. I had the report through. He hasn’t had time to do much, but as we thought, he died from injuries due to a fall.’
‘Someone dropped him or he was pushed.’
‘Or he jumped,’ said Dove, giving his superior a sharp look. ‘It still could be a suicide.’ He thought his superior was moving on too rapidly.
Then he said: ‘But the real thing is, do we treat it as part of the missing girls business or as something out on its own?’
‘It’s connected,’ said Coffin. ‘Where’s the knife? It’s connected all right and we didn’t do the connecting.’
He caught sight of Dove’s expression. ‘And don’t think I’m not bearing that in mind. Someone could have put the knife there just for us to make a connection.’
‘I love that thought,’ said Dove. ‘It gives just one more complication to add up.’
‘And it already adds up,’ said Coffin. ‘We have three missing girls. We have Tom Butt’s knife which turned up with some possessions of one of the girls. And now we have the dead body of Tom Butt himself.’
‘I’d like to believe it was suicide,’ said Dove wistfully. ‘That might wrap it up. Butt kills the kids and then kills himself.’
‘He didn’t bury himself.’
‘Nothing’s impossible,’ said Dove who knew that anything could happen and that once you knew how, it looked easy.
‘There’s one thing I’m going to do,’ said Coffin vindictively. ‘I’m going to tear apart that garage where Tom Butt was found, to see what is there.’
‘I’m rather short of men,’ said Dove apprehensively.
‘Then borrow. But go over it with a toothcomb.’
In the old stables now a garage there were a dozen old loose boxes grouped round a central cobbled yard with a drain in the middle. Over the stables ran a huge loft where the grooms had once slept. Bits of it were partitioned off. All of it was full of lumber.
‘It’s going to take a lot of time,’ said Dove.
Time gallops for children when they are playing. When they are imagining something, it disappears altogether. Belle Anderson had a watch, but as she never wound it up, it had stopped permanently at three o’clock. Belle didn’t mind. Inside her was her own particular clock which told her all the time she needed to know and which by no means marched with Greenwich Mean Time.
Belle was very pretty. She had thick curly hair, bright eyes and a clear skin. She was a little plump, with a hint of future stockiness; this didn’t matter now, but perhaps when she was adult she would not be quite so pretty.
To be a ten-year-old girl child, to be dreamy, and to be prettier now than you will ever be again makes a dangerous combination.
Without being able to put it into words her mother was aware of it and was uneasy.
‘Where have you been all this time, Belle? You’re late,’ she said as her daughter came in from school.
‘Out playing.’ Her daughter gave her a radiant smile.
‘I know that. Playing what?’
‘Games.’
‘Who with?’
‘The man from the moon.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Belle.’
Belle was silent, but gave her mother her sweet, secretive smile.
‘I know girls like to play imaginative games, Belle, but you mustn’t say that sort of thing. It’s practically telling a lie.’
‘Well, perhaps not the moon. I don’t know that it is the moon. I just thought the moon. But from somewhere far away.’ Her face became dreamy.
‘Oh, Belle.’
‘I don’t believe in fairies, mother.’ Belle looked amused. ‘I know what’s real.’
Her mother swallowed the exasperation her daughter frequently aroused in her. She knew that Belle had her own idea of reality and that it was no good banging your head against it. She had been a great romancer in her own youth, often getting punished for “telling lies”. (Her mother had not hesitated to use that word.) Adult herself now, she saw her own child’s dilemma. You did tell the truth, but the words you used sounded different to those outside your dream world.
‘Well, you shouldn’t go off on your own,’ she said, getting down to what really worried her.
‘Oh, I wasn’t alone,’ said Belle. ‘There were ever so many of us. Hundreds and hundreds.’
‘And where were these hundreds? I don’t know any place round here big enough to hold hundreds of you,’ said her mother in a sharp voice.
‘Not big,’ said Belle. ‘Tiny, tiny.’
‘I ought to shake you.’
‘Yes, mother. I’m just packing up my things.’ For the last few weeks she had been treasuring a tiny toy plastic suitcase. ‘You see. I brought some of the little things back with me and I’m putting them in my case.’
‘Treasures from the moon, I suppose.’
‘Yes, mother. If it’s the moon.’
‘Oh, it’s the moon, all right. We don’t believe in dreams, you and me.’
‘They are real things, mother. I’ll just put my little things away.’ She opened her suitcase, pale blue with a dog painted on it. As far as her mother could see, it was empty except for a pink silk scarf. ‘Now mind, Belle,’ she said, ‘Don’t go wandering out by yourself again. Never mind the hundreds and hundreds of others. Just don’t go out by yourself.’
‘No, mother.’
It was a lovely evening.
‘Go and play in the garden.’
‘Yes, mother.’
The house had a small but pretty garden with a shed and an apple tree in it. Even though it was London, apples grew on this tree in season. The family had one other child, a small boy, and an aged mongrel dog.
The boy and the dog were in the garden too.
Belle went out and stood near the apple tree. After a while the boy went and joined her. The dog stayed where he was, which was lying in the shade near the house. He was getting old and only moved around now when he had to.
Belle’s mother went inside and finished sewing a cotton dress she was making for herself. Then she pressed it with a warm iron, then she hung it up to admire it. Then she walked over to the kitchen window to see where the children were, Belle, aged ten, and the boy, Jim, aged three. He was rather a slow three-year-old and not
much of a talker yet.
When she had put the dress away in a cupboard and tidied the room, she looked out of the window again. The children were not to be seen. There was the garden, there was the tree and there was Sam, the dog. Sam hadn’t moved, hadn’t been disturbed. Fancy, she thought, I don’t remember Belle having a pink silk scarf.
‘Sam,’ she called. ‘Where are the children?’
Sam looked at her and then looked at the end of the garden as if he could see them clearly.
From the window, she called ‘Belle, Belle, where are you?’ But there was no answering cry.
She stumbled back into the kitchen, into the arms of her husband who had just come in.
‘I’ve lost the children,’ she said. They’ve gone. They’re not in the garden.’
He looked at her in surprise and then looked over her shoulder into the garden.
‘Lost them?’ he said. Gently he turned her round to face the window.
Through it she could see Belle and Jim, hand in hand, comeing up the path. Belle was carrying her little suitcase.
‘Belle, where were you?’
‘We were right there all the time, Mummy. Couldn’t you see us?’
‘No, I could not see you.’
‘We were there,’ said Belle again. ‘Behind the tree.’
‘Why didn’t you answer when I called?’
‘We came, Mummy,’ said Belle.
The episode still rankled with their mother even after the children were in bed.
‘I could have sworn they weren’t there.’
‘They were there,’ said her husband awkwardly. He hated to get into arguments between his wife and his children. He had a strong feeling that in such a situation he could only lose.
‘I didn’t see them.’
‘That’s just it: you didn’t see them.’
‘I didn’t see them, but they were there?’ She sighed. ‘Well, I suppose so.’
They sat for a while in silence and he read his evening paper. Then she said suddenly, ‘She’s playing some kind of a game with me.’
‘Who is?’
‘Belle. She was playing with me.’
‘She’s a bit young to do that.’
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