my wife when she had asked me if this case was like the case of the missing children. This wasn’t quite true. I was wondering if there was not some similarity.
We had set up a temporary headquarters for the missing children investigations in a small house annexed to the station. We had to have a special place because we were getting a lot of outside help. By which I mean that everyone who knew something that might help or thought they did or hoped they did called us and wanted to talk. I don’t blame them, in a case like this it’s almost inevitable, but it makes work harder. You have to listen to them, but all the time you know that the person who could tell you something is keeping quiet (because almost certainly there is a wife or a mother or a sister who could tell you a lot) and yet you listen, because the very flow of these stories puts pressure on the silent one, which in the end is going to break her. I say her, but it could be him. Usually it’s a woman, though.
Dove had just finished a briefing session with the detectives assigned to the case when I came in next day.
‘Nothing,’ he said straight away. ‘There isn’t anything new.’
‘But you thought there might be?’
‘Well, I was hoping.’
‘Anything new on Tom Butt?’
‘He hasn’t turned up, if that’s what you mean,’ Dove said in a sour tone.
‘Well, we don’t have to look for him, do we?’ I sat down at Dove’s desk. All his papers were thrown about. I could see he’d doodled a huge circle on a piece of paper and then dug a hole in it with a pencil. It was how he felt, I suppose. Inside a circle and he’d got to dig himself out. It was how I felt too, come to think of it.
‘No one’s yet asked us to look for Tom Butt. He’s an adult and can go where he likes.’
‘Eighteen,’ I said. ‘Just eighteen and a nervous type. Not such an adult. And in a strange country.’
‘I’m wondering now if he isn’t in a stranger one,’ said Dove.
‘Hasn’t it struck you that there’s a resemblance showing up between the way Tom Butt went and the way the children went?’
‘And lots of points of difference too.’
‘And that that’s the stranger country he’s now in.’
‘It did occur to me,’ admitted Dove, ‘but it’s ridiculous.’ He walked around the room. This house had once been a small school and it still had blackboards round the walls which we used. Dove had written a list of dates on them.
Thursday June 26, 1969.
Wednesday April 23, 1969. Monday March 18, 1968.
I knew what these dates stood for: they were the dates of the last three disappearances.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ Dove repeated, turning his back on the dates. ‘He just left, that’s all. He wasn’t taken. He just left.’
I went over to the blackboard and wrote the day before’s date on it. ‘There, if Tom Butt comes back, we can rub it off. Otherwise, it stays.’
‘Either he’ll turn up or he won’t turn up,’ said Dove, with a shrug. ‘Either we’ll find out all about it or we won’t find out about it. That’s how I feel.’
But Coffin felt a little sick.
At this stage Coffin had only the one tape, his own. He played it over to himself because it seemed to him he had thoughts and words down on it that were useful. Dove was shrugging his shoulders but Coffin was uneasy.
He was surprised to realize how much he (and Dove too for that matter) seemed to be reaching forward to put into speech things they didn’t quite understand. Why for instance had they both seized on that phrase ‘A strange country’? Perhaps it was he and Dove and not Butt who were in a strange country.
Tom Butt, aged eighteen, five feet four inches tall, weighing 140 pounds, had disappeared into thin air. He had gone from a closed cage stuck up high on the building, flying away like a bird.
He was a man in a puzzle. If you could think of him like that then you reduced the human element.
But nothing could reduce the human element in the case of the missing children and it would be obscene to try.
Coffin put the tape in a drawer and got back to the routine of his day. He had reports to read, three reports to dictate and in forty minutes he had to attend a conference to be held in another division about the amnesty of firearms. He was going to be late for this conference.
And in his opinion there were still plenty of firearms floating around his bailiwick that the amnesty wasn’t going to touch. No amnesty was going to make a man give in a gun that he had paid for, polished, worn next to his skin and, whether he knew it or not, was looking forward to using. Only the people who were never going to use a gun were going to be influenced by any police offers of oblivion. At the most, you removed a few outmoded weapons and left behind the really lethal equipment. He could think of at least two men who almost certainly had a nice little armoury left.
‘Charley Barnes for one,’ he said aloud thoughtfully. ‘He was looking pretty cheerful the other day down the Blue Anchor.’ The Blue Anchor was the local street market. Charley had certainly been looking cheerful and his wife had been wearing a mink wrap. Of course, mink was getting cheaper, but still … ‘It might be an idea to make him less cheerful. Might get a search warrant and have a look round.’
He made a note to start this ball rolling and at once felt more cheerful himself.
Out of his window he could see a uniformed constable walking along the row of parked cars and testing the doors to see if they were locked: he interpreted this as the arm of Inspector Dove reaching out. He hadn’t seen his colleague today, but the grapevine reported that his car had not yet been returned.
Also out of his window he saw an untidy straggle of children headed by a teacher pass on their way from the new swimming pool on the main road to their old school (due, like the police station, for imminent demolition). He had long eyesight and recognized the teacher in charge as Jean Young. He had interviewed her over the disappearance of Katherine Gable. Anyway, they were old acquaintances and enemies. At the age often she had asserted her defiance of law and order by heaving a stone through one of his windows. In a way she was heaving them still.
Coffin looked at her with something like sympathy. She headed every action group in the district, marched on every protest march and had organized the petition against police cruelty when the Peace Marchers had camped down by Daffodil Fields (no daffodils but a good square of concrete), but she had had to be mother and practically father as well to her brother Tony since her mother had died. He looked at her organizing her flock to cross the road. No doubt about it, there was a lot of maternal feeling seeking an outlet in Jean.
‘Jean,’ wailed one of her pupils, as they turned into the school. It was the sort of school building that had been built at the turn of the century on the lines of a prison with boys, girls and infants on separate floors with iron gates all round them. A more liberal generation had tried to brighten it up with bright paint, but its days were drawing to a close. Not before time, Jean thought.
‘Don’t call me Jean,’ she said mechanically. ‘I’m Miss Young.’ Miss Young for ever and ever, she thought rather sadly. She didn’t really fancy a virgin life, but she could see it coming.
‘My mum calls you Jean.’ Mother was a neighbour and a friend. No, hardly a friend, more someone Jean had known all her life. There wasn’t much time for friendship in Maggie Read’s life; she had Cy and four children and that brother on her hands. As Maggie Edmondstone she had been a pretty girl, now she was plump and quiet, and still only twenty-nine, older than Jean.
‘Jean, I’ve left my bra behind