The Shut Eye (10 page)

For a second she couldn’t speak at all, and thought she might cry instead. Then she pulled herself together. She had to stay strong for Daniel. She couldn’t fall here at the very first step.

Anna drew a deep breath and her words came out in a rush. ‘I need to know where my son is. He’s been missing for over four months. He’s nearly five now and his name is Daniel and here’s a photo of him, it was taken last summer so his hair will be longer now but you can see it’s him, and Sandra told me you can just look at photos and you know things, so can you look at his photo? Please? I can pay you. I have money. I only have twenty-five pounds at the moment but I can get more if it’s more. I just have to know where he is, or whether he’s—’

Daniel’s not dead.

She took a deep breath and rushed on. ‘He’s not dead. I know he’s not dead because I’d
feel
it, I think. I know I would, so I know he’s not dead, but can you please just look at it? Please? And tell me?’

She held out the photo to Latham, but he didn’t take it from her trembling hand.

‘Please?’ she said, and her voice cracked.

Latham reached out, but instead of taking the photo, he took both Anna’s hands in his.

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Yes, you can. Sandra said so. She said you’re a shut eye and you talk to her dog and you can just look at a photo and—’

‘I can’t,’ he repeated. ‘I’m very sorry.’

‘She said you can. Can you just
look
at it? I mean, that’s all I want you to do! It’s not much to ask! My son’s
gone
! He’s four years old and he got out of the door because James left it open when he went to buy fireworks and now he’s
gone
! Please just look at it.’

Latham hesitated, then took the photo from her and Anna’s stomach churned frantically. She could feel the blood heating her cheeks, and she shook in anticipation. Felt faint with it.

But he didn’t look at the photo. He looked at her through thick lenses with moony, uneven-brown eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I don’t do this any more.’

The blood in Anna’s ears was so loud that she cocked her head and asked, ‘You what?’

‘I don’t do missing people any more. I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t
do
them any more? What do you
mean
? Won’t you even
look
at it? Look at the photo! Please!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘But this is what you do! You helped the police look for another child; why won’t you help me find
mine
? I need your help! Nobody else can help me. Please!
Please just look at the picture!
’

He blinked slowly behind the thick lenses. ‘I’m sorry.’

Anna looked down. He was offering the photo back to her, but she didn’t take it. She stared at it. Daniel smiled up at her from next to Richard Latham’s big thumb. There was a black mark on Latham’s nail where he’d dropped something on it, or hit it with a hammer. It was her best photo of Daniel. He was in his red dungarees, like a jolly little hillbilly. She’d got them from Oxfam and they were his favourite things. Loose and cool and with lots of pockets for lots of things: crayon stubs and pennies, and discarded toys from other children’s Happy Meals. She thought of the way he was so fascinated by the dungarees’ bib fastenings that she always had a job to do them up, because his head was always in the way. His little blond head, with the short curls, craning to see how the metal button slid into the buckle. She never minded how long it took to do up the bib, as long as she could kneel there and breathe in the heady aroma of Daniel: innocence and joy.

Innocence and joy.

‘I’m sorry.’ Latham said it again. He wasn’t going to change his mind.

Slowly Anna reached out and took the photo.

She had been ready to beg him, to threaten, to shout and scream. She would have slapped him; she would have slept with him.

But when the moment came, she had nothing.

She was empty.

So empty, she couldn’t even ask why.

‘OK,’ she whispered.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.’

Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t? No difference.

‘OK,’ she said again. She got up and put the photo back in her pocket.

‘Please come back next week,’ he said. ‘Maybe somebody else will bring you a message from Daniel.’

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t think about other possibilities. The pain of losing this one was too great.

‘Goodnight,’ he said.

Anna pushed the buggy up the old green carpet and put her wet shoes on at the door.

‘Don’t give up hope,’ he said.

It was too late for that.

Outside the rain was coming down hard and the baby bawled loudly all the way home.

THE SMELL OF
dogs filled John Marvel’s nose, and their echoing barks made him wince.

‘This is it,’ he said and showed the photo of Mitzi to the perky girl in the peaky polo shirt. She had her name, Rachel, embroidered under the Battersea Dogs Home logo on the slope of her bra-less breast.

‘I don’t recognize her,’ she said. ‘But owners usually like to look at the dogs themselves anyway, to be absolutely sure.’

‘Surely you’d know if you had a ginger poodle in?’

‘I think it’s called apricot, not ginger.’

‘
Apricot
poodle.’

‘Well, dogs that come often don’t look like their pictures,’ said Rachel. ‘Specially if they’ve been gone for weeks or months or even years. Sometimes they’ve been stolen and when they’re found they’re unrecognizable.’

‘Why would nicking a dog make it unrecognizable?’

Rachel’s pretty brown eyes widened. ‘They might be fatter or thinner, or injured, or clipped to disguise them and be sold on, or mutilated.’

‘
Mutilated?
’

She nodded sombrely. ‘Some dogs are stolen for fighting.’

‘We’re talking about a ten-pound poodle.’

‘Or baiting,’ said Rachel. ‘To train bigger dogs to fight. Give them a taste for blood.’

‘You’re joking,’ said Marvel.

Rachel shrugged. ‘It happens,’ she said, then added hurriedly, ‘Not to your dog, I’m sure. All I’m saying is, when a dog’s been missing for more than a week or so, you have no idea how bad they can look and smell when they come in here. She may not even look like a poodle any more. So it’s best you check them all, really.’

Marvel finally conceded the point. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘How many do you have here?’

‘About five hundred.’

‘Five hundred
dogs
?’

‘Give or take.’

Marvel frowned. This case was turning into a huge pain in the arse. Plus, somebody had talked. Nobody had
said
anything, but somehow word must have got around the squad room about his new case.

First a toy dog had appeared on his desk. A blue puppy with a bone in its mouth.

Hilarious.

He’d made a free shot into the rubbish bin with it.

Then people had started barking at him. Not to his face, but behind his back. Small growls and whimpers – now and then a yap. It got so that even when nobody growled at him, he imagined it anyway. He snapped ‘Fuck off and die’ at the vending machine gurgling as he walked past, he turned furiously and glared at a small child making car noises in reception, and rounded on DI Averiss in the lift when he mentioned that he had no new leads in his case.

What the hell does that mean? No new leads? Are you trying to be funny?

If he wasn’t fast-tracked to superintendent after this, he’d put in an official complaint.

Rachel was unlocking a door with a small window in it.

Marvel sighed. ‘Just show me the small ones.’

Rachel laughed and swung open the door. The echoing noise and the smell increased tenfold and Marvel gagged. The corridor between the rows of steel kennels stretched off into the middle distance like something from a spaceship in a sci-fi film.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘How do you stand it?’

He meant the noise and the smell, but Rachel was made of kinder stuff. ‘I know,’ she said, making a sad face, ‘It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? A third of them will have to be put to sleep. I only wish I could take them all home with me.’

Marvel wished she could take them all home with her too, and save him the bother of trudging up and down the stinking passageways.

With a heavy sigh he set off down the first corridor, cursing Debbie and her good ideas.

Marvel looked at thousands of dogs. He was sure of it. Thousands of yipping, yapping, yowling dogs – every one of them on a tireless spring, and all stinking of shit and old sofas.

Marvel reckoned he’d spend ten minutes in the corridors and then go back to the office and tell Rachel some cock-and-bull story about being called out on a triple homicide. Dazzle her with murder.

But by the time he was halfway down the first corridor, he found he couldn’t stop. The next cage might contain Mitzi, and the next cage was only a few feet away. How could he not take those three more paces that could ensure him his promotion? It would be stupid not to. And at the end of the first corridor, how could he resist the second? And the third? And so on. Hundreds of kennels; thousands of dogs; three paces at a time, his hopes raised and shattered and raised again, every few seconds.

Every dog was so
hopeful
, so bright of eye and waggy of tail, and the noise and the smell were extreme. The whole thing was exhausting. By the end he was walking with his hands cupped over his ears to take the edge off the high notes, and after a while he went dog-blind, and started to think that almost any small dog might be Mitzi. None of them were, but it was lucky he had her photo with him to refer to, or he might have left the place with a red spaniel, a panting ginger Pom, or a tan mutt with a dick that almost touched the floor.

Instead he left with a scruffy terrier that looked like a dust-bunny with legs, and with an expression on its face that said that this was a shock to both of them.

He paid Rachel two hundred pounds for the dog – which was worth at least twenty – and bought a cage for another eighty in which to take it home. Fifteen more on two bowls, twenty-five on a collar and lead, and a tenner on a sack of food.

By the time he put his debit card into the machine he was so hysterical with altruism that he rounded the payment up to £350.

‘Oh, thank you!’ gushed Rachel. ‘Please let me know if there’s any other way we can help you, Chief Inspector.’

Marvel gave her a photo of Mitzi, which she promised to copy and give to all the dog wardens.

‘Great,’ he said. ‘What else do you suggest?’

‘You might want to offer a reward,’ she said. ‘No questions asked.’

Marvel drove the suspicious dog to the flat and left it in its cage with food and water in the kitchen, where Debbie would see it as soon as she got home.

He hoped she would understand that this meant they were finally quits for Valentine’s night.

As he shut the cage, the little dog licked his hand with a surprisingly strong pink tongue – as if to say thank you.

Marvel was almost fooled.

But when he got back into the BMW he found the dog had also left him the gift of a small turd on the back seat. He had nothing to pick it up with, and had to drive through drizzle with the windows open all the way to Lewisham.

So he was already in a bad mood when he pulled into the parking garage back at the station.

As he got out of his car, DS Kominski glanced down at his bumper sticker and said, ‘Lost your dog, sir?’ in a tone that was so bland, so neutral, so
completely inoffensive
, that Marvel just knew he was taking the piss.

He told DC Kominski to fuck off, but instead of following orders, Kominski stopped and said, ‘There’s no need for that, sir.’

‘What?’ said Marvel angrily.

‘I said, there’s no need for that language, sir.’

‘Come here and say that!’

Looking a bit bewildered, Kominski did.

Marvel threw a punch and missed, then Kominski threw one back and missed too. There was a split second of relief on both sides that they hadn’t connected – and then they just grabbed each other by the sleeves and fell on the ground and rolled around in the dirt for a bit until Marvel got lucky when Kominski caught his funny bone on the wall. It allowed Marvel to roll to his knees and scramble to his feet while Kominski was still shaking his arm and going ‘
Shit!
’ – thus affording Marvel the victory.

He helped Kominski to his feet and told him to let everyone know that he would do the same thing to any bastard who gave him shit.

‘Shit about what?’ panted Kominski.

Marvel didn’t dignify that with an answer, just strode away.

‘
Shit about what?
’

ANNA HADN’T CLEANED
the flat, and it was shocking how fast the germs took over. They started in the kitchen sink, where the dishes piled up and where food dried and hardened in the pans until cleaning them would have meant cleaning the last of the nonstick right off them too.

The germs overflowed from there and ran along the counters, down the cabinet doors and across the floors – out of the kitchen and into the lounge and from there to the bathroom.

And every time the germs met a wall, they bounced off and colonized a different angle, another corner, a new space.

Even James noticed how fast things got dirty when you didn’t keep them clean.

Eventually – after three days of eating cereal from a mug – he did the washing up. Afterwards he went into the bedroom where Anna was still in bed and said, ‘What about the baby?’

‘What about him?’ she said dully.

‘Aren’t you afraid he’ll get sick?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid of anything any more. What could happen to us that’s worse than losing Daniel?’

James stood at the door for a while, wondering whether there was anything he could say that would cheer her up. Or get her out of bed, at least. But there was nothing. Anna was right: nothing could be worse.

‘Are you going to church again?’ he asked tentatively.

‘No.’

He nodded slowly. ‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. I thought it would help, but it didn’t.’