be a bit of an old liar. It almost seemed as if she had written for publication. A mystery there. He would probe it, and one day might get to the bottom of it. Meanwhile, it gave him something to exercise his mind on in the wakeful stretches of the night. A recent recruit to the ranks of insomniacs, he had plenty of those.
He checked his answering machine: no messages. His telephone remained quiet. Such inactivity was unusual, since he had instituted the rule that he received notice, even if briefly, of all important activities involving his force, whatever the time of day or night. He never wanted to be caught off guard. He was well aware that the social tensions in his area between those who had and those who had not, between the new inhabitants who had paid a lot for their property and did not want it sullied by the proximity of the old inhabitants who had ways of their own, not to mention various racial undercurrents, made for an inflammable mixture. If there was going to be a riot, he wanted to be the first to know.
As he handed out some food for the cat and then prepared for bed, he found he was more worried by the quietness than by a stream of messages. He checked again all the machines that ought to have been speaking to him, but found nothing wrong with them. Just a very quiet night.
Tiddles, fed and let out through the window which gave on to a roof so that he could descend, tail waving, upon the town like a Restoration gallant, had gone about his business, and Coffin poured himself a drink.
He would have to come to some resolution of his relationship with Stella Pinero. That was why he wasn’t sleeping. He loved Stella, had loved her for years, but Stella engaged in her own career and living elsewhere was one thing, Stella always on the premises was quite another. They had tried it once, in the distant past when they were both a good deal younger, and it hadn’t worked.
I jolly nearly did her in, he reflected, that night she threw the saucepan at me and I threw it back. Stella had missed; he hadn’t. It had been the instinctive action of a good games player, but it had brought him up short. Violence towards Stella was not something he wanted to exhibit. He had helped her up, asked her to forgive him and moved out. Shortly after Stella had gone on a long tour of a Rattigan play with the first company, and he had gone on a course in Cambridge. They had not met for years.
Over, he had thought, all over. But it was never over between him and Stella, it was like a disease they had both caught, in which there were many remissions (in one of which he had married, and in another, Stella had done so) but no real cure.
She was part of his life forever, and living, moreover, only a stone’s throw away. Those facts had to be faced and dealt with.
I’ll do that tomorrow, he thought.
Tiddles leapt back in through the window, his fur smelling of the fresh air.
Coffin turned his mind to other things. Odd about the child. No, not odd at all. Everyone, all young achievers, had one these days, in or out of wedlock, they were fashionable. Even if you didn’t fancy one for its own sake, then it was the smart thing to do. But this kid was loved, you could see that.
Was it Gus’s? The age was about right, according to the chronology of the story as transmitted by Stella, who was actually accurate about things of this sort. She could be madly wrong and ill-informed about matters of national importance but about personal details she could be relied upon.
A night without a single crime, he thought, a peerless, uncorrupted night. What a treat. Nothing to think about.
He and Tiddles were just about to go to bed, they shared one, not from Coffin’s choice but because Tiddles offered none, he was always there, soundly asleep with his head on the pillow. The utmost freedom allowed to Coffin was to take the other pillow. He had Tiddles and Tiddles had him.
He was just choosing which book to read in bed when the telephone rang.
‘Sir?’ It was the duty officer at his headquarters. ‘Just to inform you that a coachload of tourists on a trip through the City has disappeared.’
‘How many?’
‘Twelve plus the driver.’
Thirteen people missing, then. A bumper crop, the peerless evening effortlessly racing ahead of itself and creating a record.
Still, no reason to believe they were dead or otherwise harmed. Just missing.
‘No accident reported?’
‘No, sir, not in our districts or outside.’
Of course not, that would have been the easy answer and he would not have been bothered in the small hours. It was now nearly one o’clock in the morning.
‘Any messages, demands for ransom, anything of that sort?’
‘No, sir. Silence.’
‘There may be something later.’
‘Not a very rich firm that runs the tours, sir. And the people they get on the tours aren’t in the millionaire class.’
‘They’ll turn up,’ Coffin said confidently. They’d have to, dead or alive, you couldn’t easily dispose of that many bodies.
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Let me have the details,’
‘Just faxing them, sir.’
The sight of Tiddles’s well-licked food bowl made Coffin feel hungry himself, so he put together some coffee and a sandwich, not a neat one, which began to fall apart. He stopped in the window of his sitting-room to take a hasty bite.
By this time, the faxed pages were arriving, slipping out of the machine and neatly disposing of themselves. Along with them came information about several committee meetings tomorrow, a multiple accident on the motorway (not in his area, but a number of people had been killed and that was bad), and a survey, with graphs, of the fire risks in all the police stations in Thameswater. None of which statistics he wanted at this moment. A fax about a suspected child murderer who was believed to have moved into the district was different. He paused to read:
William Arthur Duerden, believed moved into this area. Suspected of several child murders (details attached) but no proof. He goes under several aliase. (names attached). Born 1945. Five feet four, brown hair, blue eyes, no distinguishing marks. May alter appearance with wig and contact lenses.
All this paper just waiting there to spring out at him.
He picked out what he needed to read. That was the trouble with machines, the desire to take over was built into them. They always wanted to do too much. Otherwise they broke down and were called failures, and scrapped. Naturally no machine wanted that to happen, it was better to overdo it.
Whoever had kidnapped, murdered or mislaid thirteen people had overdone it. Thirteen was too many.
The missing coach belonged to Trembles Tours Ltd, a licensed operator having two coaches. The drivers were the twin brothers, John and Alfred Tremble, who owned the firm. The brothers always set out their route and approximate timetable and informed the traffic police. They had never been in any trouble and had no record.
Now one of the brothers, together with his coach and all his passengers, had disappeared.
‘Damn.’ His quiet night had gone. Crime in his bailiwick was like the rain over
