Coffin's Dark Number

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘Oh no, she’s not.’

  She went to the bottom of the stairs and listened quietly. ‘Still asleep.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘I don’t know what I expected.’ She came back wearily. ‘All right. They were there all the time and I didn’t see them. Where do people go when one can’t see them?’

  It wasn’t a question to be answered and he didn’t try to answer it. ‘Come on back and sit down and leave it alone. Next time you can’t see them don’t decide you’ve lost them.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right.’ She came back and sat down.

  ‘It’s good advice. Take my word for it.’

  So the next sunny evening when the children went out to play, Belle and her brother together, their mother did not worry when she could not see them in the garden. A little later she looked in the street, but making it a casual glance, without too much anxiety.

  She couldn’t see them, but after all, they must be there. She had her husband’s word for it.

  By the time they were reported missing it was late evening.

  ‘Four hours ago she noticed they weren’t around. Four hours before we were let know,’ said Coffin angrily. ‘Who’s responsible for this?’

  ‘The husband and wife about equally between them,’ said Dove. ‘But the children may turn up, of course.’ He didn’t sound hopeful.

  ‘Well, it clears Tom Butt. Whoever’s responsible, he’s not.’

  ‘Any news there?’

  ‘About three tubs full of rubbish left behind by previous tenants of the garage, but nothing much about Tom. He’s still our problem, he hasn’t solved anything for us.’

  ‘No, I never thought he had.’

  Coffin went over to his window and looked down Saxe-Coburg Street. He often stood there thinking and had no idea that his figure silently looming there was in itself one of the sights of Saxe-Coburg Street.

  ‘Crazy business,’ he said aloud. ‘You realize that, don’t you? Tom didn’t disappear from that lift, he was never in it, he was probably already dead.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘But someone rigged up that business, spoke to that other lad on the ’phone, pretended to be Tom, thought it worth while to get up a charade. That’s crazy. But you and I have to take the fantasy out and put it back on its feet.’

  ‘It’s not normal, no.’

  ‘But we’ve got to make it normal. Or no, we can’t quite do that, but we’ve got to find out what is real and rational about it. Why it happened just the way it did.’

  ‘I’d like to be around the time we ever do that,’ said Dove.

  ‘And it’s coming from out there.’ Coffin tapped on his window. ‘Some boy out there knows plenty. And some woman knows he knows plenty and isn’t saying.’

  When Tony Young heard the news about the children, which he heard as soon as he came in from his work on the evening of the day following, he at once rushed upstairs and put the tape on his recorder and played it back.

  No, there were no noises. No new noises, which was what he had feared.

  He came downstairs.

  ‘Where was I last night, Jean?’ he asked.

  ‘Where were you?’ She looked surprised. ‘Well, you were out for a bit. You went round to see John Plowman but he’d gone out on one of his trips and you came back.’

  ‘I wasn’t gone long, was I?’

  ‘No, you were back sooner than I expected.’

  ‘Expected, Jean?’

  ‘Yes. Usually when John goes off on one of these trips you’re gone a long time.’

  ‘But this time I was back soon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s right, Jean,’ said Tony. ‘That’s how it was and you stick to it. I’ll be all right as long as you do that.’

  He shuddered.

  Chapter Nine

  Tony Young

  It came out of my heart, that shudder did, out of my heart and went right down to my boots. I’m a sensitive boy and I felt that shudder so that it hurt. Misery is a city, and I was on the outskirts walking in.

  That evening the police called. Not on me specially, they were simply making a house to house check on all houses with men in them. They wanted to know where Dad and I had been on the previous evening. Dad was easy: he’d been with his birds and a bird watcher friend had been in his company. But no one had ever seriously considered that Dad had any interest outside his birds. With me it was more difficult. I’d been out and then I’d been in, but there were certainly gaps in my evening when I was unattended. I could see this particular policeman give me an appraising look and I knew what it meant. Was I or was I not a likely candidate for murder?

  I suppose I didn’t look too happy, my shudder was still sitting inside me ready to break out again, and he gave me another long observant look. He was a tall, plump young man, about twice my size. I wasn’t the only one he was looking at. In a quiet way he was studying my sister as well. Jean too was interested. Not everyone would have known it, but I knew it. I would have been happy to see her married. But perhaps not to a policeman. All this time I had been bringing home thin mates for her to get to know and what she had been looking for was a plump policeman. Then too he had a faint reddish tinge to his hair and this may have appealed to her. I remembered that our old dog was a golden-coloured spaniel and she’d always been very fond of him.

  ‘Would you be willing to let the police take your fingerprints if necessary?’ he asked me politely.

  ‘No. That is, under certain circumstances the answer would be yes. But at the moment it is no.’

  ‘And what would those circumstances be?’ he asked smoothly.

  ‘That you had a fingerprint to check them against. But you haven’t, have you? You haven’t found anything, even a child.’

  ‘We may have done,’ he said in a noncommittal way.

  ‘No. You couldn’t keep it quiet. In some districts, yes. But not here. We all live too close together.’

  ‘I’ll just put down that you prefer not to be fingerprinted, shall I?’ he said.

  ‘You would be willing, wouldn’t you, Tony?’ put in Jean; she looked shocked.

  ‘No. I don’t want them just bearing away my prints. I don’t know what they’d do with them. Be reasonable, Jean. I’m not being objective or anything. I just have a feeling that I’d like to keep my fingerprints to myself. Unless it’s absolutely necessary, which it isn’t.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t ask for it,’ said the policeman.

  ‘No. You just wanted to see how I reacted. Well, I have reacted.’

  Jean showed him out. When she came back, although she was still mad with me (showing off, she muttered) she was pleased deep down inside. She liked him. Well, let him like her too, if he could.

  ‘I’m going out, Jean,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Out.’ I was putting on my coat. In the evening I usually sit around in jeans and a cotton shirt. ‘You’ve got Dad to look after you.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about being looked after,’ she said furiously.

  ‘What did that policeman say to you as he went out?’

  ‘He said to tell you not to be foolish.’

  I weighed it up. ‘No, he never said that. That’s the school-marm in you coming out, Jean.’

  I bet he’d said something, though, and it was probably on the lines of ‘Can we not meet again sometime, Miss Young? Surely we were at school (or Sunday School) together?’ He was perfectly neutral about me, but I was not neutral about him.

  I walked pretty slowly, because I wanted to think. Remember what I said about there being other factors in the disappearance of the children? I said: with these child crimes it’s nearly always someone they know. This is what gets them off their guard. But there are other factors.

  I went over things once again in my own mind. Five children had disappeared. Shirley Boyle was the first to go. Then Grace Parker in April. Then Katherine Cable. Now two others, Belle Anderson a
nd her brother, both known to me. I knew all their names. They knew mine.

  From the way the children had disappeared I thought (and I was not alone in thinking this) that it looked as though they must have known the man who took them away.

  But it went further than that. I thought the children had co-operated. I suppose I’d better explain what I mean. It seemed to me that these missing children must have held out a helping hand to the person who wanted to carry them away. Maybe this was over-stating it. Perhaps they hadn’t actually helped in their own abduction but they must have been willing.

  Willing or merely docile?

  What makes a child docile? None of the young inhabitants of this quarter were docile by nature. From what I remembered of my schooldays we were a rough, aggressive lot. The girls were as bad as the boys, if not worse.

  So I was considering how these suspicious kids could have been made so docile.

  But, come to think of it, adults can be docile too. Weren’t we, in our circle of UFO watchers, an easily led little group? I often wondered, to tell you the truth, how John Plowman managed over his “sighting”. He had some mixture of personal magnetism and persuasion that operated on the minds of some of our group. They believed what he wanted them to believe. Whether he believed himself I am not quite sure. I think he did and that was his strength.

  Once or twice I had thought maybe he had some drug he used, something he slipped in that tea his wife handed out. I never took it myself. If I accepted a cup to look easy I slipped the drink in her azalea plant. I noticed that plant never flourished.

  I suppose I’m making John out to be a pretty complicated character, but the truth is, I think he was.

  It seemed to me there was a choice. Once you accepted that it was no coincidence that the children disappeared on days when a little group of us were out checking on a reported UFO sighting, then either you believed the kids had gone into outer space on a flying saucer, or you believed one of us had the responsibility.

  I knew which I believed. To begin with, we’ve never had any sightings of UFOs over Saxe-Coburg Street.

  That brought it down to a select little group: John Plowman, Miss Jones, Esther Glasgow and Cyrus. There were one or two other possibilities, such as Esther Glasgow’s boy friend, but the ones I named are those who most often went out on night expeditions with John and had been out on the nights in question. They weren’t all out on all the relevant dates, but most of them had been out on most of them. And of course John always had been. There was a certain sick little thought in my mind connected with Tom Butt, but I didn’t want to go into this now.

  It was always on an evening the children went. I wondered if I could make that mean anything. Tom, however, was different.

  Anyway I thought I’d go round and go over our Club papers (we have a little shed in John’s garden I use as an office) and see what I could find. On the way round I picked up Dave. Or he picked me up. I think he was on the look out for me. I had a passing wistful thought about Judith and her car, but I didn’t think she’d be back. Perhaps we would meet one day when we were old, old people and spare a smile for what might have been. Or more likely, be glad we’d given each other a miss. Dave was surrounded by the crowd of little kids he always seemed to have with him. At a close look most of them were his sister’s brood. He shook them off and came to walk beside me.

  ‘I was waiting for you.’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘I’m going on business, Dave.’

  ‘Can’t I come?’ He always said it like that, like a child.

  ‘I suppose so. Keep quiet, though, and don’t touch.’

  ‘I’m never much of a talker, Tony.’

  ‘You talk to me a lot.’

  ‘Yes, only to you. Not to my sister. Can’t talk to her.’

  ‘And Cy?’

  ‘I watch Cy.’

  ‘That’s enough, I should think. How’s the job?’ He had a new job. But he was always getting new jobs. To tell you the truth, so was I. I worked on a roundabout at the fairground once, enjoyed it too. Sometimes Dave and I followed each other in jobs. ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘It’s something in the city.’ He was a terrible liar in a fluent kind of way. You could never believe him, but it was difficult to fault him. He wasn’t at all clever either; it was just a gift.

  ‘Banking, I suppose?’

  He looked solemn. Perhaps it was banking.

  I could guess from the shut-up look of his house that both John and his wife were out. I knew they had plenty of outside activities. There was a faith healer they were rather devoted to out in Ealing and they might be there: John’s rheumatism had been bad lately.

  I let myself into the shed with David silently behind me. He was breathing exceptionally heavily, though, which I knew meant extreme interest.

  I went over to the cupboard where I kept my papers and pretended to sort through them. I’d never let Dave in here before and he couldn’t keep his hands off anything. I knew how it would be, he’s like a child.

  ‘Don’t touch,’ I said, shuffling through a pile of correspondence we’d had about a woman who came down from Venus to call on a housewife in the Essex marshes. She’d had pale golden hair and intense eyes. I thought she sounded a find, but she was never likely to call on me.

  ‘Pictures,’ said Dave.

  ‘Yes, we have pictures.’

  Having got Dave happily sorting over pictures of the Flying Saucer that landed in a field in Buckinghamshire one day last April, I went on to what I really wanted. (Well, they weren’t actually pictures of the Flying Saucer, but you could see the hollow where it had landed, denting the ground, and a bare patch where it had burnt the grass. There was also a large and helpless looking sheep in the picture, but I don’t suppose that had anything to do with it.) I went over to the set of drawers which John reserved for himself and tried to open them. I knew they were locked. I tried one after another, but it wasn’t going to be easy to get one open.

  ‘Here, let me,’ said Dave, abandoning his pictures and coming over. A locked drawer was something that really got him excited. He tested a drawer. ‘I couldn’t see anything in those pictures. Was I missing anything?’

  ‘You might be.’ I had sometimes wondered if I was missing things in these pictures, because I never seemed to see what the others saw, not even as much as Miss Jones, who was so honest. They all looked like normal country scenes to me. I never seemed to see the signs of where a saucer had landed.

  Dave produced a metal rod from his pocket, slid it into the lock, fiddled with it for a moment and then gave me a broad smile.

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘You’re wasted in that bank.’ I pulled open the drawer, only to find nothing but a few boxes of letters. I would have liked to read them through, as they looked promising: the first one was addressed to “Dear Earth Brother”. But there wasn’t time, and they weren’t what I was looking for. Maybe I could come back here later.

  ‘Can you shut this up again so that it won’t show we opened it?’

  ‘Sure.’ Dave performed his magic again, and I thought what a dangerous person he was to have around.

  The next drawer had nothing much either except a length of muslin that I thought might have played a basic part in one of John’s productions. I knew he had once been important in the spirit world and had received a visit from Mr D. D. Home. You wouldn’t think dead mediums would drop in on other mediums, would you? But I suppose it’s a sort of inspection, and they have to see that standards are kept up.

  But the third drawer had the right sort of smell and I knew straight away that I had got what I wanted. I think John must have been a herbalist in one manifestation or another. Here were neatly packaged transparent envelopes of herbs. Some were undoubtedly the makings for the herb tea we drank. I knew his wife grew and dried her own herbs. But as well as these I found a box of other dried leaves. I smelt them. They just smelt of bay. But I did wonder if a few of these infused with our peppermint tea might no
t have an interesting effect.

  I put some of the dried leaf on my tongue and sucked; I gave some to Dave. It tasted peppery and my tongue felt first hot, then thick as if I’d bitten it.

  ‘Here, Dave,’ I said hurriedly. ‘Spit it out before it gets dangerous.’

  ‘No, I like it.’ He sounded dreamy.

  ‘Shut the drawer, then, before we pass out on the spot.’

  ‘Right.’ We both seemed to be sitting on the floor, but he heaved himself up, shut the drawer and then sank back.

  ‘You know my new girl friend,’ said Dave, turning towards me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s wonderful. The best yet. I wish you could meet her.’

  ‘You never let me.’

  ‘I feel funny about it.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘You might laugh,’ he said shyly.

  I felt awful, as if I really had treated him terribly when he said that.

  ‘Tell me, Dave,’ I said. ‘Is it my fault? Have I destroyed your confidence?’

  He looked at me as if he didn’t understand what I meant. I’m not sure if I did either. We were sitting there with our backs to the wall when John Plowman walked in on us.

  He gave me a sideways look. I suppose I looked pretty dopey sitting there. I stood up. Then I saw he was not alone.

  ‘This is Mr Jasna, who has just flown in from Sagitarius,’ he said, introducing us politely. ‘Sagittarius in the Inner Galaxy.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Mr Jasna. He was a tall thin person with almost no hair; he wore a tight-fitting suit of some green material. No buttons were discernible but something like a zip up the front.

  ‘Flown?’ I said.

  ‘You call it flying,’ said Mr Jasna. ‘It’s a loose term for what I did. Not true flying. It’s a sort of superphysical projection.’

  ‘He talks English,’ said Dave.

  ‘I studied it before I came on my trip,’ said Mr Jasna modestly. He had studied a slight cockney accent too.

  John Plowman was looking at him with pride, rather like someone who has at last caught that rare spotted tiger he was looking for.

  ‘I have come on a mission, of course,’ said Mr Jasna.