The Shut Eye (19 page)

Marvel stared at Emily, but she could tell he wasn’t thinking of her, so it didn’t seem weird.

‘James,’ said Marvel at last. ‘James Buck.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Emily.

‘OK,’ he said.

She started to go and he said thank you so softly that she wasn’t sure she’d heard it. And when she turned to say you’re welcome, he already had his back to her and his feet on the desk.

After Aguda had gone, Marvel lowered his feet and logged on to his computer. He typed in James Buck’s name and got nothing.

Marvel never trusted the computer when it said it couldn’t find something. He always suspected laziness, rather than an absence of something to be found. But apparently James Buck of 148 Northborough Road had no previous convictions.

He sat and glared at the screen for a bit, not really seeing it, while his mind tested and discarded possibilities. His instincts were on the alert, just waiting for the right possibility to put its head above the parapet so that he could pounce on it. Mental whack-a-mole.

Marvel got up and went over to the big map on the wall near the door, which showed the South East murder-team patch. With one blunt finger he traced the roadway between Bromley, where Edie Evans came from, and Bickley, where James Buck lived.

It was two miles of suburbia – houses and little rows of shops and traffic lights and schools. Now and then a small patch of green – a cricket pitch, a football field, a strip of parkland or playground.

He saw nothing obvious. No reason why Edie Evans and James Buck might ever have been in the same place at the same time.

Marvel groaned inwardly. He was going to have to call Edie Evans’s parents. He hated to do it. He knew that just hearing his voice would bring the pain back for them, along with the adrenaline shot of instant dread or hope that she was dead or alive.

Right now, Edie was neither, and that was the hardest thing of all.

He reached for the phone, but before he could pick it up, Colin Brady pushed off hard from his desk, so that his chair rattled across the lino towards Marvel at speed, only slowing down a few feet from him.

‘What did Abooba want?’ he grinned.

Marvel was in no mood. ‘She had an interesting insight,’ he said coldly.

‘Yeah?’ leered Brady. ‘I bet it’s
interesting
insight her knickers.’

He laughed to encourage Marvel to get the joke, but Marvel said, ‘At least she
had
a bloody idea.’

‘Really?’ said Brady.

‘Really,’ said Marvel. ‘And I don’t want to hear that name again, right?’

‘What name?’

‘Abooba.’

Brady’s expression said he suspected a joke, but he erred on the side of ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell the others.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now fuck off.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Brady slunk back to his desk as quietly as he could on castors, and Marvel picked up the phone. Whisky used to give him courage to do shit like this. Nowadays he had to rely on just not thinking about the consequences.

He called the Evans’s number from memory. Mr Evans – Mark – answered the phone. Good.

‘Mr Evans?’ said Marvel.

There was the smallest hesitation, then, ‘Chief Inspector?’ And the hope and the terror were right there in an instant.

‘There’s no news,’ Marvel said at once, and Mark Evans made a noise like someone undoing a radiator cap. The sound of tension leaving his lungs.

The next natural thing to ask would have been
How are you?
but Marvel had been in this job long enough to know that that only prolonged the agony. How was
anyone
when their child had been missing for over a year and they didn’t know whether she was alive or dead?

Shit
was a given, he always supposed.

So Marvel went straight to: ‘I wanted to ask you a question.’

‘Of course.’

‘Did Edie ever go to Beckenham to a dog show? On her bike?’

‘
Beckenham?
No.’

‘You’re sure? Or maybe just to a park or somewhere there might have been a dog show taking place?’

‘No,’ said Mark Evans. ‘Definitely not.’

‘What about Bickley?’

Evans mused. ‘I know
Frankie
went to playschool over that way …’

‘You remember the name of the playschool?

‘Ummmmm … Tiger something. I think.’

‘TiggerTime?’

‘I think so. Hold on, I’ll ask Carrie.’

A little chill ran up Marvel’s spine. Edie’s brother had gone to the same playschool as Daniel Buck. Edie’s
brother
. How had they missed it?

‘Hello, John.’ Carrie Evans was trying to be bright, but he could hear the tremor in her voice.

‘Hello, Mrs Evans.’ Marvel couldn’t bear to use her first name, even though she always used his, and he didn’t mind that. But calling her
Carrie
would have obliged him to make much more personal investment than he wanted to.

‘Frankie went to the TiggerTime playschool. Why? Is it important?’

‘I don’t know,’ Marvel told her truthfully. For some reason, he had always been completely honest with the Evans family. He supposed it was because he had worked so hard on the case – so far above and beyond what might reasonably be expected of him – that there had never been anything to hide. He couldn’t even hide the fact that he wanted Edie home almost as much as they did.

‘Did Edie ever go with you to pick him up?’

‘Yes. If it was nice we would walk, and Edie went on her bicycle. After a while she left her bike at home and we walked together.’

Walking’s for OLD people.

Marvel had never heard Edie Evans’s voice, but he almost laughed out loud as the words popped into his head as clearly as if she was sitting beside him. Certainly, the Edie
he
knew would have wanted to ride her bike whenever possible.

It piqued his curiosity.

‘Why did she stop riding?’ he asked. ‘Did something happen?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Carrie Evans. ‘Certainly nothing she told me. One day she just walked with me instead and she said it was so we could talk. I thought that was lovely. Before that she’d be racing on ahead and coming back to me, then racing off again – you know what I mean?’

‘She didn’t have a fall or knock into someone or get shouted at? Any kind of a fright?

‘Not that I know. Why is this important, John?’

‘I really don’t know whether it is, Mrs Evans. I’m just trying to work that out.’

‘OK,’ she said, and Marvel could almost feel the self-control it took for her to keep calm, keep answering his questions, not scream and tear out her hair.

‘Did you or she ever speak to anyone, even just to say hello, on your way to or from the playschool?’

‘No. Nodded at a few regulars, but that was all.’

‘But one day she just stopped riding her bike?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How long was that before she went missing?’

‘Hmmmm,’ said Mrs Evans. ‘Maybe a month? I’m really not sure.’

It felt relevant, although Marvel couldn’t have said how. He almost pressed the point about the dog show, but he didn’t want to reveal the photo at this point. Not until he was sure of exactly what it was.

One tenuous clue at a time, he thought wryly.

‘Does Frankie still go to TiggerTime?’ he asked.

‘Oh no,’ she said hastily. ‘He’ll be going to big school next year, so I thought it would be nicer to … you know … keep him at home …’

She gave a weak laugh. She was fooling nobody. But Marvel didn’t blame her. She’d lost one child on her way to school, after all. She wasn’t taking any chances with the other.

‘Do you know the address of the playschool, Mrs Evans?’

‘Sure,’ said Carrie. ‘One-five-two Northborough Road.’

Marvel had a pen in his hand, but he didn’t write it down. Instead he thanked her and said that he would call them if he ever had any news, good or bad.

The usual.

Then he hung up and got his notebook out of his drawer for the second time in half an hour. He flicked to the Anna Buck interview.

There it was, right at the front of the interview.

The man Anna Buck was married to – but still didn’t trust with children – lived four doors away from the playschool.

AS JAMES CUT
across the forecourt to work, he saw a stocky child with pigtails squatting beside the five footprints. He stopped beside her.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hi.’

‘What are you doing?’

She glanced up at him, but lowered her head again before answering.

‘Cleaning.’

‘Why?’ he said.

‘Just helping,’ she said.

He watched her pick tiny twigs and petals of blossom out of Daniel’s footprints. Her hands were small and pink and she had a plastic ring on one forefinger, with a fake green emerald in it. She had to keep stopping to adjust her school bag, which kept slipping from where it was slung across her back. She pushed it around patiently each time and carried on with her task.

‘Do you know who made those footprints?’ he said.

‘Daniel,’ said the girl. ‘He got lost and this is all his mummy has left.’

James felt unbalanced by hearing their lives summed up in a single bald sentence from a small girl he’d never seen before.

‘She still has
me
,’ he said.

The child stared up at him. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Daniel’s daddy.’

The girl looked away again, and carried on picking grit from the next print.

‘You left the door open,’ she said.

All the breath left him as if he’d been punched.

He stared down at the back of the girl’s head. Her shiny dark hair was parted in the middle all the way down to her nape and there were two hairclips holding the strands in place. Two little goldfish, smiling up at him, waving their fins.

Was she even real?

Was
any
of this real?

Was this how Anna felt when she had her visions? Shocked and sick and kicked in the belly?

‘Yes,’ James said slowly. ‘I left the door open.’

The little girl stood up and brushed her hands together, then wiped them on her thighs for good measure. She left dusty finger marks on her black uniform trousers.

She hitched her bag up on to her shoulder and looked up at James. ‘You must feel
terrible
,’ she said solemnly.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘You didn’t
mean
to do it though, did you?’

‘No,’ he said huskily. ‘It was a mistake.’

The girl looked down the road, pushed a strand of hair behind one ear and took a deep breath. ‘Miss Henderson says everybody makes mistakes, but it’s what you do
after
the mistake that’s important. Like, I pushed Bethany Court over because she called me fatty four-eyes, but then I said sorry, and she said sorry too, so it was OK.’

James nodded and the girl hitched her bag up again and said, ‘I have to go to school now. Bye.’

‘Bye,’ said James.

They headed off in opposite directions.

Before he went into the garage, James looked down the street. The girl was still there, walking away.

She
was
real.

He watched her until she turned the corner, just to be sure. Then he went inside.

Marvel parked across the road.

Number 148 was next to a garage which had been built into a gap in the houses most likely caused by a wartime bomb.

Just a few doors down the same sooty terrace was 152 – TiggerTime playschool.

It might have been a coincidence. If Marvel had believed in them.

A tall man in dirty blue overalls leaned against the garage wall, smoking a black cigarette. Marvel took a photo of him – and of a Chinese kid with a broom who was sweeping the forecourt. Even through two lanes of traffic, Marvel could hear him singing. It was tuneless and yet with curious little lilts and curlicues that made it sound deliberately so.

The door of the flat opened and a slim, dark-haired young man in overalls and work boots emerged.

He presumed it was James Buck, and took three photos.

As Buck cut across the cement forecourt he stopped and chatted to a stout, bespectacled girl, who was squatting, playing some sort of game on the ground.

Marvel took another photo.

After a minute, the girl got up, and after exchanging a few more words with her, Buck walked slowly across the forecourt. He stopped briefly and looked back down the road, then disappeared inside the garage.

Some commute.

Marvel fiddled about until he found how to review the photos on the complicated digital SLR camera he’d checked out of work. One was of a blurred lorry. One was of the top of Buck’s head. The third was his profile. The fourth was horribly over-exposed, even though the tech moron had assured him that the bloody thing was automatic. All he could see were Buck’s legs, and the girl’s, under a pale-blue haze. He’d have to use the profile shot. It wasn’t great, but it was better than nothing.

He waited until the boy had finished sweeping the forecourt and gone back indoors. Then he got out of the car and crossed the road. On a whim, he took the camera with him.

There was a narrow alleyway between Number 148 and its neighbour, and Marvel went down it. It was a dank passageway, green with algae from gutters that must always be blocked and dripping.

The sound of the traffic muted behind him as he went, until his own footsteps were the loudest thing in his ears. It was so long since he’d been conscious of the sound of himself that it almost creeped him out.

He emerged behind the buildings into a slightly wider alleyway, and turned left. The rear of TiggerTime was easy to spot because the brick wall at the back of the tall Victorian house had been amateurishly painted in a Disneyesque nightmare. There was a spotted rat with a broken leg that he guessed was supposed to be Bambi, and a gurning axeman who looked like Richard Nixon. Marvel assumed it was one of the Seven Dwarves, but only because there were six similar others – each armed with a different tool.

The back gate was locked, and there was a skip outside filled with playschool junk. Black bags overflowing with disposable nappies, broken toys and great sheaves of shite art. Finger paintings and sheets covered with thick black wax crayon. Marvel scraped at the black with a fingernail and – lo! – the colours underneath were exposed.