Coffin’s Dark Number. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ small girl was reported missing, was this truly the first or was it just the first we heard about? If you’ve had no experience of the sort of society I’m talking about you’ll say I’m crazy. ‘What, a child go missing,’ you say, ‘and no one report it? Why, the parents’d be round there creating as soon as they could.’ Well, in the first place, not every child has parents. And then secondly, the parents of any child do not always behave in the way you might expect. Especially the parents of a girl child. Especially mothers. I’ve met the whole range of mothers in my job, from good mothers and baddish mothers to downright wicked mothers, and there are a few poor damned souls who just get lost. So the picture that is in my mind is this: the first few girls who were missing came back. But they came back having been assaulted. Perhaps they didn’t know quite what had happened to them. They don’t want to talk about it. And the parents of these particular little girls being silly and fearful and ashamed just wrap it up. Tell no one and hope the child will forget. You could only offer them pity and despair.

      So I am calculating that ahead of all the missing children we know about there is a dark number that we don’t know about. The first case was probably relatively trivial. The next a bit worse. And so it built up.

      Katherine Gable on June 26, Grace Parker on April 23, and a whole year previously, Shirley Boyle aged eight on March 18. What had happened in the year between? Was it the dark number operating? Were there in fact episodes in these months about which, for some reason or other, we knew nothing?

      On the day after Christmas a girl called Kim Simpson had disappeared. She had come back, unharmed, but with nothing much to say about where she had been. Perhaps she was another.

      And then there was the other. The disappearance that no one knew about yet.

      ‘Anything wrong?’ my wife said.

      ‘No, nothing special,’ I said. ‘Just wondering where people go when you’re not looking at them. And that’s not a problem in philosophy. Just something Dove and I think about a lot lately.’

      ‘Yes, of course. The children.’ Little as she liked police work, she looked sympathetic and understanding, because after all, she is a mother. Not always a particularly good mother, but still a mother.

      My wife didn’t say any more. She’s trying very hard to be tactful at the moment. She’s temporarily out of work. Resting, as those in her trade call it, and this gives her a lot of time to be tactful.

      All the children had come from the one small heavily populated area. Unluckily it’s a district where the children play in the street and sit on the doorsteps. There’s even a playground in a corner by the river. If anyone was hunting children he could have all he wanted in this district.

      Even now, when mothers were on the alert, he wouldn’t have to look around too much.

      All the same, there was an eerie quality in the way the last incident had happened. One minute the child was playing in the street, the next the street was empty. Someone had come down in a fiery chariot and picked her up.

      It was late afternoon. Not a bad day with my work going well. I was getting ahead with my paperwork, for which I have lately developed a taste. I used to hate it, but now it satisfied me to have everything orderly about me. A good enough day for me. I was glad to be alive. But a bad day, or no day at all for the parents of Katherine Gable and Grace Parker and the other girls. And only good for me because, for the moment, I had buried the thought of it, and could get down to the work which I had neglected because of it.

      I had set up the mechanism, you see. I was at the controls of the machine investigating the disappearances, and I had Inspector Dove to back me up and we both had the assistance of that stout young sergeant with the red hair called Parr who got the Police Medal last year. You saw him in the paper, I expect. He wasn’t a great brain but he was thorough. And I am thorough and Dove is thorough and we were getting help from any scientific and technical bureau we wanted to tap but still we were getting nowhere.

      The girls had gone, one on a sunny afternoon, another on a cold spring day, the third in the evening. We knew the people who would admit to seeing them last and that was all we did know.

      And, of course, this wasn’t all I had to worry about. There was a suspected case of arson in a local mosque; an illicit drug trader trying to set up a centre in a hostel down by the docks; and someone was unloading fake half-crowns in all the pubs in the district.

      One of my office windows overlooked Saxe-Coburg Street, which is a busy road off New Cut Road. I could see New Cut Road from my other window. It wasn’t a view any tourist would rave about and no one had painted it, but I was fond of it. A good deal of my life had been built around Saxe-Coburg Street. I’d been walking up and down it all my life. I’d seen it in war when the bombs dropped on it and I saw it now in prosperity. Because it was prosperous, make no mistake about that. It was getting the taste of big wages and steady employment and enjoying it. On all sides there were prophets of every sort of doom, economic and moral, but Saxe-Coburg Street couldn’t help appreciating the virtues of a world which gave it refrigerators, motor cars and cheap birth control. When the road had been run up by a speculative builder to celebrate the Prince Consort’s Great Exhibition of British wealth not even the Queen in her palace had had the benefit of any of these and Saxe-Coburg Street knew it.

      My room was dark and small. I was probably the last policeman who was going to work in it. Across the road they were building a new police station for us. Every day I watched its progress with interest. Sometimes (like the day they had a fire) it seemed to go backwards and not forward, but equally sometimes it shot forward and I could even imagine us moving into it. Not today, though. The site looked deserted and I could only see one man working there. He seemed to be working in a workman’s lift running up the front of the building; it had reached the fifth floor. Did I tell you we were to have a tall, narrow, police building? I believe I was scheduled to have an office on the third floor. I hoped I’d still have my view.

      I could see Saxe-Coburg Street with a professional eye too, of course. It’s not exactly the road where you’d leave your car unlocked, or leave the cream too long on the step; someone would nick it. But you probably could send the baby toddling out with a five-pound note to buy your paper and she and the change would come back unscathed. There was a great love of children in Saxe-Coburg Street and neighbourhood, due perhaps to a wave of Italian immigrants it had had at the turn of the century, whose descendants, cockneys to a man, were still there.

      Until now I would have said the child was as safe in our district as it could be anywhere. That wasn’t so very safe perhaps, but until now it hadn’t been downright lethal.

      Inspector Dove gave my door his usual swift knock which didn’t wait for an answer and sat down, again without waiting to be asked. He looked tired. He was hoping for promotion and was working hard on this account, as well as being genuinely anxious about the missing children.

      ‘Like that?’ I said.

      ‘It’s always like that.’ He was usually gloomy, anyway in speech, and at work. I dare say he sparkled at home. But he was a good policeman. We had known each other a good many years and a lot of the memories that were written on my face were written on his too. Perhaps he thought I was gloomy too and that I sparkled at home.

      ‘I hate these kid cases.’

      ‘Don’t we all?’

      He got to his feet and went and looked from the window.

      ‘I’d like to believe it’s an outsider coming in, but I don’t believe it.’ He rapped on the window. ‘It’s someone in that area out there, someone local, that’s СКАЧАТЬ