The Shut Eye (15 page)

She stopped and swallowed, then went on, ‘My son, Daniel, he’s missing too.’

‘Daniel Buck.’

She nodded.

Marvel knew of the case. He and DCI Lloyd over in Serious Crime had compared notes briefly a few months before, but the two cases hadn’t had anything in common apart from vague geography. One boy, one girl; one toddler, one twelve-year-old; one who’d run out of a door left open, the other the victim of what looked like a planned abduction and possible foul play. A few miles wasn’t all that separated the cases.

Anna nodded and went on, ‘I suppose I thought – I
hoped
– that helping her … I mean, if I helped her, maybe … somehow, someone would help me find Daniel too. Do you see?’

She looked at him with such hope and sincerity that Marvel found himself nodding in ridiculous agreement. ‘What goes around comes around,’ he said.

‘Exactly!’ She smiled, and when she did, Anna Buck’s face lit up, as if from within. ‘Exactly that. What goes around. Like karma, you know? I wasn’t trying to interfere or … or …
obstruct
anyone. I was only trying to help find the dog, in case someone could help me …’

She tailed off into silence and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

Marvel sighed. ‘The dog’s back home,’ he said. ‘It was returned this morning.’

Marvel had been driving to work when Sandra Clyde called to say Mitzi was home.

‘I just opened the door and there she was! And she
jumped
into my arms and gave me a million kisses and then went running, running, running round the house and the garden and her bowl and her little green monkey! So happy, weren’t you, baby girl? Who’s mummy’s Mitzi Mitzi Moo-moo? Hmmm? Who’s mummy’s—’

‘Who found her?’ Marvel interrupted.

‘A boy!’ said Sandra. ‘A dear, sweet little boy! He had her on a lead made from his school tie! It was like something out of
Just William
! I just opened the door and he said,
Is this your dog?
and I said,
Yes, it is! I’ve been looking everywhere for her!
and I kissed him and I kissed Mitzi. I think he was quite embarrassed, poor child!’

‘How did he know where you lived?’

‘He said he just knocked on doors and someone recognized Mitzi from one of the photos I’d given out. I put them through hundreds of doors, you know.’

Marvel knew that. He also knew it meant the dog wasn’t home because of anything he’d done. That was bad news. How could Superintendent Clyde be
very grateful
to
him
now that some random brat had returned the bloody dog because of the efforts of his
wife
?

If
that was what had happened.

Marvel’s natural suspicion stirred in his belly. How could he find out? He needed to regain his lost leverage. His mind darted about, feeling for a chink.

‘Don’t pay the reward yet, Mrs Clyde.’

There was a stuttering break in her stream of doggy consciousness and Marvel knew before she even said so that the reward money had already been paid. A thousand pounds. The idiot.

‘… He didn’t want to take it, of course,’ Sandra Clyde was babbling. ‘He was such a sweet boy. I had to make him, and then you should have seen his little face—’

‘Cheque or cash?’ he interrupted bluntly.

‘Cheque.’

‘So you have his name?’

‘Well, no. I mean he’s just a little boy, you see, so he doesn’t have a bank account and so I made it out to cash.’

Marvel swore under his breath and did a U-turn under a No U-turns sign, to a chorus of disapproving horns.

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ he told her roughly. ‘In the meantime, call your bank and put a stop on the cheque.’

‘Put a
stop
to it?’

‘Yes. Stop the cheque. Right now.’

He hung up on her before she could irritate him further.

The cheque would be stopped. The reward money would not be paid.

Even a guilty person would come back to find out what had happened …

And Marvel would be there when he did.

Anna Buck paled.

Now she looked Marvel steadily in the eye for the first time since they’d sat down.

‘What time this morning?’

‘Around seven thirty.’

‘Oh,’ Anna said softly, and looked away again. ‘That’s before …’

She trailed off, but her face was an open book. If there had been guilt and deception, Marvel believed he would have read it. There was neither. If anything, Anna looked embarrassed. With good reason, thought Marvel: Mitzi was safely back home before she’d had her so-called visions. Before she’d phoned Sandra Clyde. And long before she’d had a funny turn at the police station.

It all made her look pretty stupid.

‘I’m happy for Sandra,’ she said dully, then looked at him earnestly. ‘I really am.’

John Marvel nodded. He could see the bad in anyone, but he was having trouble with Anna Buck – and that uncertainty confused him. Mentally and physically, she looked smaller now, weaker and less connected. It might have been because her plan to extort money from Sandra Clyde had been thwarted. Or because her karmic leverage on the universe had disappeared the minute Mitzi had been found.

Just like his own.

His instinct was to pin her to the wall like a butterfly, pour scorn on her visions and force her to confess that she was just a scammer looking for an easy mark, foiled by a schoolboy sleuth.

But something stopped him and for a moment he was at a loss.

Then Aguda cleared her throat and made eye-contact. ‘Sir?’ She lowered her voice and he leaned in to look at what she was pointing out in the photo – the gold lettering printed on the ribbons of the rosette.

Marvel squinted and leaned back. He kept a magnifying glass in his desk drawer for small print, but he didn’t have it here.

‘What does it say?’ he asked testily.

‘Beckenham Show, 1999.’

‘Beckenham?’ Marvel frowned. Beckenham wasn’t far from Edie’s home. That made sense. ‘When was last year’s show held?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

Marvel nodded and was about to let it go. It was minor; it was meaningless; it didn’t matter.

But it would get Aguda out of the room …

‘Go and find out, will you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, and left.

Without the inhibition of a witness, Marvel turned back to Anna and tapped the picture. ‘Mrs Buck, can you tell me what it was that you saw when you looked at this photo?’

‘What does it matter now? The dog is home.’

‘That’s true,’ he acknowledged. ‘But indulge me. Tell me what you told Sandra. And anything else you can remember.’

She looked at him warily.

‘Please,’ he said with sincerity that sounded genuine, even to his own ears. ‘I want to know what you saw.’

He held the photo out to her again. This time she took it, but immediately put it face-down on the table between them.

For a long moment he thought Anna Buck was going to refuse to say anything else.

But then she sat a little more upright in her chair and said softly, ‘I saw a garden …’

Marvel went cold.

His fingers pressed so hard on the Edie Evans file that the tips went white. Under his splayed hands were the interviews with the psychic, Richard Latham. Marvel didn’t believe a single word the man said, but he knew every one of them off by heart. Latham’s visions were random and unverifiable. A broken glass jug, a white disc with a red centre, rolling across a floor …

A fake garden.

Marvel’s voice was tight. ‘What kind of garden?’

‘Just a garden,’ said Anna. ‘But it wasn’t …
right
.’

‘What do you mean, not right?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘There was just something a bit wrong with it. Like it wasn’t
real
.’

EDIE EVANS DREW
a garden on the wall of the tiny concrete room.

She’d said she was bored, and two days later the alien had brought her hundreds and hundreds of wax crayons, all broken stubs, in two plastic carrier bags.

She was lucky they had them aboard the spaceship, but all the good colours were gone. There was no bright red or orange and those were her two favourites, but she started drawing flowers on the wall beside the little camp bed whenever the light was on, which usually it was.

Sometimes the alien switched it off as he left, and on those days (or nights) Edie had to be very, very patient because the gaps between stars were huge, and you couldn’t expect to see the next one soon – maybe not even in your lifetime.

But whenever the light was on, she drew flowers. Mostly blue and purple and a few yellow ones, but there weren’t that many yellow crayons either, so she had to make do. She made all the middles yellow, so that the blue and purple flowers weren’t so dark. There were a few maroon crayons and she used them sparingly too, and a blue that was too dark for anything – even the sky. There were lots of whites and blacks and browns, so she made a white window frame so that it was like looking out of her bedroom across her garden to the woods beyond. She coloured the trees, enjoying the bobbly-rough sensation of the wax passing from each crayon to the cement trunks. It wasn’t like using a pen; the crayons shrank in her determined fist as they escaped to the wall, layer by layer. She could watch it happening and wonder at the change from coloured stick to coloured wall. Often she would have to stop and peel back paper from the wax crayons so she could keep colouring.

After Edie finished the window and the garden, it wasn’t enough, so she re-created the rest of her bedroom around the walls – all from memory. Her wallpaper, her posters, the door with Neil Armstrong on it, the old fireplace, the shelf with the clock and Pink Ted and Pengie the penguin, and her books. She wrote the title on each spine, trying to remember all of them:
Island of Adventure
,
Chocky
,
The Silver Sword
,
Matilda
. There were more, and she drew blank books so she could write on the spines as she remembered. She drew Peter in his cage and hoped Frankie was feeding him and playing with him. She drew his cage much bigger than it really was, just in case, and put in extra toys. Then she made sure there was plenty of water, and lots of brown-and-black food in the little purple bowl.

It was hard to fit everything on to the walls because the room was so small – only as long as the camp bed and three times its width – but Edie did her best. Her fingers quickly smelled of wax, and were tipped with little crescent rainbows under each nail.

The alien came every day. He was tall and skinny and his face was a mask above a flowing black shroud that hung to his hips. The eyes did not blink, and in the wan glow of the small fluorescent strip, the teeth glimmered sharply within the rictus of the lips.

At first she was scared of the mask. She had been scared a lot at the beginning, despite her mind’s best efforts to construct a story she could live by.

Remain sane by.

But after a while she became more scared of what might be behind the mask, and hoped she never found out.

On that first day, the alien had brought a dead chicken with him, and Edie had crouched in mute terror as he’d sung a strange song and swung the chicken over her head in circles. There hadn’t been any blood, but white feathers had fallen from the bird on to the bed, and after the alien had left, Edie had gathered them together and cried for the poor chicken. There were seventeen feathers ranging from the little tufty fluffy ones right up to the single long wing feather, like something you could write with. It had slender spines that separated with an actual tiny sound, and then knitted back together so perfectly you couldn’t see the join.

But every day after that, he brought her water in a tall glass jug, and proper food. Bread and butter, old bananas, and dented pots of custard or rice pudding. A mug for drinking and a plastic spoon. A bowl, and a bar of yellow soap that smelled like lemons but tasted like soap.

‘What do you want?’ she asked him once, early on, and when he didn’t answer, she got cross and shouted, ‘What do you
want
?’

‘Ssh,’ he said. ‘Ssh, ssh.’ And then he left.

Every time he went, Edie shuddered with relief – and then fretted in case he didn’t come back. But he always did, with more water and a bruised apple or a box of Ritz crackers. They were soft, but she didn’t care. She liked to imagine that she was in a space station where you couldn’t go out, and supplies had to come from Earth once a year. Right now they were having to eat up all the stuff from the back of the cupboards, but soon the supply ship would dock and then they’d have Brazil nuts and shampoo, and Marmite sandwiches.

Edie wondered whether the other astronauts—

prisoners

—were humans too. Maybe if they were beings from all over the galaxy, like on
Star Trek
, then the cupboards were full of all kinds of foods from all kinds of planets. She wondered if there was an alien whose job it was to feed the right thing to the right species – just like she gave Peter mouse food, not dog food – or if they all had to eat Ritz crackers. When she wasn’t drawing on the walls, she liked to wear her space helmet and imagine that she was piloting the ship and that the other astronauts were right next door and she only had to call out or knock on the wall and they would call or knock back. She didn’t do it, of course, in case they were busy with scientific experiments, or in hypersleep. And because that first shouted
Hello!
had scared her so badly that she didn’t want to put another to the test.

Getting nothing back would be confirmation that she was really alone.

Once, the alien reached out slowly and touched her hair. Edie pressed herself into the corner at the far end of the bed.

She started to cry; she couldn’t help it.

‘Please don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Please don’t touch me.’

The alien withdrew.

For now.

‘
TAKE A TRAY
,’ said DS Brady, handing him one.

‘What for?’

‘Cover.’

Marvel dropped the tray back on to the pile with a clatter.

Brady held on to his, and put an iced bun on it defiantly.