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Chapter Three

John Coffin

On the corner of Saxe-Coburg Street and Harper Road we examined the clothes. I didn’t know what to make of the episode. It was a strange thing, but the clothes were there all right.

An old pair of working trousers, not too dirty all things considered, a short-sleeved shirt and a woollen cloth jacket with a zip up the front. There was also a pair of black leather shoes with rubber soles. The shoes were pretty worn.

‘Tom’s clothes,’ said one of the men. ‘That’s his jacket, anyway. About the shoes and shirt I couldn’t say.’

I ran my hand through the pockets of the jacket and drew out a few coins and a letter folded in two.

The letter was addressed to Tom Butt and the address was a hostel in Farmer Street. I knew the place. I looked at the envelope, but decided not to open it just yet. It was still Tom Butt’s private life. He still had one. We’d let him keep it as long as we could.

No one knew better than me that his chances of keeping it, under certain circumstances, were slim.

‘Yes, they’re Tom Butt’s,’ I said. I folded the clothes and handed them back to Joe the foreman. ‘You better keep these for the time being.’

‘But you’re the policeman.’

‘I don’t know that there’s a case for us here.’

‘But where’s Tom?’

I shrugged. ‘Wherever he is he’s got on his underclothes and a pair of socks.’

‘And his overalls,’ put in one of the onlookers. ‘He wore overalls over that lot.’

‘And some overalls, then,’ I said.

‘But where’s he gone?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps better. Where’s he likely to have gone?’

‘But how could he go? One minute he’s calling out for help from the top of the building and the next he’s gone. How could he go?’

‘Well, he didn’t walk,’ I said. ‘And I don’t suppose he could fly.’

‘If he didn’t come down, then I bet he’s up there still. He could hardly crawl through the bars of the cage. He must have lost his nerve,’ said Joe, turning back to look at the shell of the building. ‘Search the place, boys, and shout as you go, so as I’ll hear.’

Dove was very quiet and so was I, but we eyed each other. Dematerialization wasn’t something we’d worked with much.

‘If there’s a screwy situation, there’s a screwy answer,’ muttered Dove. ‘But there’s an answer.’

He was right, but it wasn’t always an answer you wanted to hear.

They searched the building site from top to bottom but there was no sign of Tom. But rolled up in a bundle, not far from the cage, they found some overalls. They were reasonably clean and not stained or torn in any way; they appeared to be Tom’s. So now, wherever Tom was, he didn’t have overalls either. It was a perplexing thought.

‘Like I said, there’s an answer,’ said Dove. ‘Just wait and he’ll come walking in.’

‘You may be right.’

‘Or he won’t come walking in. He’ll be carried in. Or we won’t ever see him again, but there’ll be a picture and we shall know how or why.’

It was because he really believed this that Dove was a good policeman. He never took no for an answer. But sometimes he had to put up with two answers and not knowing which one was right.

Joe came back, looking worried.

‘My God, I don’t know what’s become of him,’ he said. ‘It’s like he’s been snatched up to heaven. Where’s that boy Patsy Burden? What was it he said to you? Tell us again, Patsy.’

‘He called, “Help me, help me, they’re getting me”. That was the first time. And I said, “Come on down then”. And he said, “I can’t, the power’s gone”.’

‘Only it hadn’t,’ said Joe.

‘No. And then he said, “Help me, help me, I’m falling”.’

‘I don’t know. It’s mad.’

He looked up at the building. ‘He’s our first casualty. If he is one. On a big site like this the building always gets one or two. But this is the first time anyone’s absolutely got eaten up.’

‘That’s a strange way of putting it,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s what it looks like, isn’t it? If one thing’s certain it’s just that he didn’t fall.’ He stared upward again, then shrugged.

‘He’ll be back,’ said Dove, maintaining his unshakeable belief in the laws of the universe. But perhaps the laws of this world don’t hold good for all other worlds. There might be a way on what the scientists call the “space-time continuum” for a solid block of earth-matter called Tom Butt to disappear from our view.

He might be gone and yet still be there. Perhaps he could hear us.

‘Call his name,’ I said suddenly. ‘Call his name. Tom! Tom Butt!’

We all called, once, twice and three times, but the wind brought his name dustily back to us and there was no other sound.

‘A weird little business,’ I said. ‘But nothing to do with us.’

‘No. Nothing. Leave him alone, and he’ll come walking in.’

Certain things are clearer to me, now that I am getting this on the tape, than they were at the time, and one is that Dove was putting on an act. He was not altogether genuine in his portrayal of an unimaginative down-to-earth policeman. Underneath he was already deeply disturbed.

‘I’ll give you a lift home,’ he said. He was proud of his car, which was new. ‘It’s over here.’

‘Thanks, but I think I’ll walk.’ It was only just round the corner. And I think better walking. There seemed plenty to think about.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said furiously. ‘My car’s gone. It’s been lifted.’

There were cars in plenty lining the kerb, but his car, smart and shining, was gone. Those that were left had suffered a little from their life in London.

He was white with rage. ‘Come on, let’s report it missing and start things moving.’ He stamped forward. ‘God, I’m angry,’ he said.

But after his first outburst, he didn’t say much. My wife complained I was silent that evening. Probably Dove’s wife did the same. I suppose he spoke about his car, but I don’t believe he said much else.

‘No, different,’ I remember I answered 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.