Coffin’s Dark Number. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 to 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.

      I’ve encouraged Tony Young to speak freely, to put everything down that he wants to say and from listening so often to the important tapes I’ve come to feel the relief of talking into one myself. Also, it’s practical. I can arrange my thoughts, form a picture better this way than any other. Yes, Tony Young’s right when he says a tape is one’s most receptive audience. Perhaps there’s a danger to it. I can see you might get to trust it too much and it might start to stimulate the wrong centres of the mind. I think that happened with the maker of one of the tapes. Perhaps that one started out ordinary enough and ended up a monster. A monster bred from the tapes.

      I learnt a lot of what makes a man a monster in the time that I was dead. The doctors say it was an illness following upon concussion but to me it was the time I died. Between the man who lived before and the man who lives now is a gulf, bridged only by the name John Coffin and the same body. And even this isn’t quite the same body. Or else I fit in it differently.

      However, I was glad enough to come back to life, death not being what I’d expected it to be. Back in life again, I discovered to my surprise that during my demise I had received promotion and become responsible for the detective bureau in a large area in a big police division in South London. So I was Superintendent Coffin with a few satellite inspectors. That was something to come back to life for.

      My wife says I talk differently since I returned to the world. She says she can’t put her finger on it but she’s working on it and one day she’ll tell me. So I have that to look forward to. It’s this sort of thing that makes coming back to life worthwhile.

      For the first three months of my renaissance I had a clear run. Crime and violence, oh yes, even a nicely planned bank robbery. (But it turned out the bank was undergoing a security inspection of some sort and didn’t have much cash on hand. Still, we pulled in one or two old friends and put them away.) No crime in those few months, however, to make you feel sick.

      I remember rejoicing. Even from the grave you bring back hope. A policeman too!

      It was СКАЧАТЬ