Coffin’s Dark Number
Three little girls are reported missing in the same district of South London and Superintendent John Coffin suspects there could be more. A gripping crime novel from one of the most universally praised English mystery writers, perfect for fans of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.Three little girls have been reported missing recently in the same district of South London and Superintendent John Coffin believes there might be others.The area has more than its fair share of cranks, and Tony Young’s club of UFO watchers is no exception. But Tony’s concerns start to grow as more children disappear, always at a time when members of the club are out investigating a sighting.While Coffin probes the backgrounds of the victims, trying to establish a pattern, Tony takes matters into his own hands and does some detecting of his own…
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GWENDOLINE BUTLER
Coffin’s Dark Number
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published by Geoffrey Bles Ltd 1969
Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1969
Gwendoline Butler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006176312
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2014 ISBN: 9780007544653 Version: 2017-04-25
Contents
There were three tapes, running about twenty-five minutes each, but Coffin played them for hours and hours. Over and over again. He was listening to the sound of voices and snatches of music. Some of the voices he knew.
It was a strange way to conduct a murder investigation.
Tony Young
I organized my first club when I was fifteen. It was for boys interested in birds; it lasted six months, but for the last four I was the sole member.
I did better with the next. The Harper Road Fan Club for Tommy Steele. We had twenty-five members, all contributing, monthly typed hand-outs and occasional meetings. But the meetings weren’t so important, it was the thought between us that counted. Then there was the Radio Ham Club and the Philatelists’ Club. I’m not a stamp collector but a club collector and I was getting liberal in my tastes. The next year I tried Young Lads for Labour. But this was kids’ stuff. I hadn’t got on to the big things yet.
Fate directs you, that I strongly believe. All these earlier efforts were training me for what was to be my real work. I won’t say life work because my life hasn’t run so far and there are lots of surprises in this package for everyone. Who can say what there really is in the universe? I’m a boy with a lot of faith, a good deal of it in myself. Some people say this is egotistical, but that’s not how it is at all. If you have faith in yourself, stands to reason you have a lot of faith for other things too. I have plenty. I can feel myself reaching out. Maybe there is someone sitting on some medium hot star somewhere sending out messages to me. The light years problem worries me a bit. I mean that message started out when my ancestors were just crawling out of the slime so it can’t really have my name on it. Or can it?
I like to think of that message winging its way through the centuries before I was born with my name on it. Tony Young, it would say. But there is what people call an ‘area of sensitivity’ about a thought like this and at the moment I am highly sensitive.
I always have been.
‘You’re a sensitive boy,’ Mr Plowman said once, and he was absolutely dead right. I am a sensitive boy. I hated it when he died. If he is dead, that is. There’s another sensitive area.
You might have thought that Mr Plowman and I would have cut across each other because he was an executive man like me. But no, once he realized how good I was in the organizational area he left it all to me and devoted himself to the spiritual side.
I soon had this new Club going like a bomb and I made the heart of it our meetings. I sensed right away that with this lot it was the meeting that counted. For the same reason I insisted all members were on the telephone; we had to be in contact. It was the contact of our minds that counted. All told I don’t suppose we had more than a dozen members. There was a tight little inner bunch and then a number on the periphery. It wasn’t the size of membership that made this my biggest operation so far, but our potential. For what we were after was the universe. Leave us alone and we might have our members strung out in the galaxies. And some of us thought we already had.
