ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Coffin’s Dark Number. Gwendoline Butler
Читать онлайн.Название Coffin’s Dark Number
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007544653
Автор произведения Gwendoline Butler
Жанр Современная зарубежная литература
Издательство HarperCollins
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
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
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