LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Four

      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

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