got a little case where he keeps things. Regular old Bluebeard is Cy.’ He laughed.
This isn’t the image I would have found if my sister had been married to him, but Dave’s imagination was as limited as his mother’s had been. I just remembered his mother. Her idea of bringing up a boy was to whack him soundly every so often. At intervals she would go away from home and disappear for a few months. I think they really got on better when she was away than when she came back. I had an idea that Dave was going to take after her and turn into a disappearer. He was shaping that way.
I was shifting round vaguely in this conversation with Dave, trying to get at something – I didn’t quite know what. Perhaps Cy was up to something. I didn’t know. I just felt a pool of unease inside me.
‘I must go now,’ said Dave, almost as if it had been me that kept him talking. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow,’ I agreed, although I hadn’t really made up my mind about tomorrow. I like to feel free.
Jean watched me finish the conversation. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘You worry me, you two. Such a funny way to live.’
Personally, I thought hers was a funny way to live, always dreaming over the teapot. She was only twenty-two and pretty. And my dad’s way, wasn’t that funny, worrying over his birds’ breeding habits?
I heard Dad coming in from the back. This hastened me.
‘Remember, even a sad and lonely life can be beautiful,’ I said, giving her a smile as I passed.
I went back upstairs, drew back my curtains so I could see the sky. Clearly not the kind of night for a sighting. Anyway, John didn’t expect anything over this neighbourhood at the moment. There was something unfavourable about our position. Perhaps it was just all the policemen. He thought in the direction of the New Forest was the most likely spot. There were signs, he said.
It was always through John that our messages and first intimations of a sighting came. Afterwards Cy told us the scientific explanation and I wrote it up, but John knew all about it first. I wondered about this sometimes.
I took out my papers. I knew Jean worried about me. But she didn’t need to. I had my life well arranged.
Like Cy I made notes and kept records. I had an account of all the weekly meetings. I had a brief on each sighting of a UFO involving a Club member. When a special expedition had been launched by John Plowman then I had it all down: how information of the incident reached us first, with times and dates, when the checking expedition set off, again with times and dates, and the results.
I looked at my notes, then raised my head to stare at the dark starless sky. I felt so alone, but I wasn’t really alone, there were a hundred little dark figures tagging around with me. I have a very crowded memory. I feel sometimes that I can remember everything that happened to everyone in the whole wide world. But this can’t be, it must just be that I’m a sensitive boy. Now I kept thinking about murder and there had to be a reason for it.
I knew why Jean was sitting hunched over her teapot.
The last child that had disappeared was a kid she taught. Did I tell you Jean was a teacher? Yes, she’s a clever girl really. Brave, too, eight to eleven is the age range she specializes in. It’s the best age, she says. When I asked for what, she simply smiled at me and let it go.
Had eleven been the best age for Katherine Gable? Katherine Gable, eleven last June, third of a family of nine. The only girl. On Thursday June 26 Katherine had eaten her supper and gone out to play with little friend Milly Lee in Saxe-Coburg Street. Little friend Milly had come home in due time and gone to bed. When questioned she said that she had only played a little while in Saxe-Coburg Street with Katherine. No one had seen Katherine again.
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