Coffin’s Dark Number

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 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 (#ulink_33c28d8c-6b6b-5dbb-bfa9-c2f26a4a498f)

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 waiting in the wings though. And this is where we get back to what I said about the dark number of crime. When the first 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.