The Shut Eye (22 page)

‘What about the bicycle bell, sir?’

‘What about it?’ said Clyde. ‘Look, I’m not being facetious, but really,
what about it
?’ It’s a bell. From a bicycle. Granted, you found it under unusual circumstances, but even if I believed that this woman saw it in a crystal ball and led you to a big spot marked with an X … what does it tell us about what happened to Edie Evans? How does it
help
?’

‘Sir, the garden, the other drawings, the bicycle bell – I’m not sure we can just ignore all these things. I’m not saying Anna Buck’s not bonkers; I think she’s as mad as a bucket of frogs. But maybe she’s being used without understanding it. Maybe she has some involvement – some
knowledge
– and this is the only way she can reveal it. Maybe she knows much more about the Edie Evans case than even she knows. There may be other … insights she could offer. Other leads that might emerge from things she says that will prove to be useful. Maybe even vital.’

Clyde got up and shut the window. It was Friday afternoon and the demand for kebabs started early.

‘You know my feelings on psychics, Marvel.’

A little alarm went off in Marvel’s head.
Whatever happened to ‘John’?

‘I do, sir,’ he said. ‘And I share them, believe me. That’s why I worked so hard to get Mitzi returned to Mrs Clyde as soon as possible. To avoid embarrassment for you, sir.’

Marvel hoped the super knew that he meant more than just the embarrassment of a wife and a small fluffy dog. Had the man forgotten so soon that he had paid a thousand-pound reward,
no questions asked
, to some anonymous kid? How embarrassing would that have been for Clyde if it had got out?

Very
.

The super owed him. Big time. Owed him, even if it was only for not revealing the humiliating details to the entire second floor. Owed him a bloody sight more than putting him back on the Edie Evans case! That should be just for
starters
.

Apparently Clyde didn’t see things the same way.

‘I don’t think your suspicions hold water,’ said Clyde. ‘And I certainly don’t feel that re-examining the Evans case on the basis of such tenuous evidence would be worthwhile.’

Marvel could feel it slipping away from him.

‘Superintendent Jeffries seemed to think it was worthwhile, sir.’

‘Well, maybe that’s why Superintendent Jeffries is gone and I’m here,’ said Clyde sharply. ‘That case was a bloody embarrassment to the force, to be frank. From beginning to bloody end.’ He sighed, then went on more kindly, ‘The trouble with the Evans case, John, is that you want it too much.’

Marvel stared at him in mute wonder.

The fucking
idiot
.

How could you want to solve a murder
too much
? It would be like being too keen on world peace; too anti-cancer.

He suddenly knew he wasn’t dealing with a reasoned argument, so he stopped and reassessed the situation.

Superintendent Clyde was a prick. A lamb-scented prick with a fat wife, a gay dog and a bull’s cock on his living-room wall.

But Marvel wanted back on the Edie Evans case, and he still wanted that promotion. And he needed Clyde on his side on both counts.

The Mitzi strategy had gone wrong on him but there was still leverage in the matter of the reward – whatever Robert Clyde said. When the kid who’d brought the dog home finally came back for his money, Marvel would be all over him like acne. He’d show the super that when he was given a job to do, he
finished
it and got results.

So, although it churned him up inside, he backed down. ‘Maybe you’re right, sir.’

Clyde looked somewhat mollified. ‘Good man,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘That’s the spirit.’

Arsehole
, thought Marvel.

Screw Superintendent Clyde. If he couldn’t do it with his superior’s support, he’d do it alone. He’d ask some questions. Get some answers.

Be a bloody detective!

He couldn’t wait to see Clyde’s face when he unravelled the Mitzi Clyde scam – and handed him back his thousand pounds for good measure. And when he’d done that –
then
they’d be back in business on the Edie Evans case.

Psychic or no bloody psychic.

ANG WAS CRYING
in the kitchen and putting all his worldly goods into a carrier bag.

‘Hi,’ said James.

‘Hi,’ Ang said through his tears. He cried in long, monotonous strings of sound, not unlike his singing.

‘What’s wrong?’ said James.

‘I’s fired,’ he wept. ‘To China.’ He rolled up his mother’s story cloth and tucked it carefully between half a pack of Penguin biscuits and his Goal aftershave.

‘For peanuts?’ said James cautiously. Maybe Brian Pigeon had changed his mind and decided to cut Ang in on the whole
getting fired
thing.

But Ang just shook his head and carried on keening.

James went to find Brian. It wasn’t hard – he was standing under a VW Beetle, shouting at someone on the phone about the old pit and the new lift.

James laid out his tools and waited for him to finish.

When he had, Brian snapped his phone shut and shouted, ‘What?’

‘Did you fire Ang?’

‘No!’ he yelled. ‘Jesus
Christ
!’

James ignored the yelling. It was Brian’s default. Once you ignored it, it usually went away. ‘He thinks you fired him and he’s going back to China.’

Brian laughed and waggled his phone. ‘Well, I might have said I was calling immigration.’

James pursed his lips. He caught Pavel’s eye and Pavel shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

‘He’s packing his stuff,’ said James.

‘Let him! What a little drama queen.’

‘He’s crying.’

‘Good!’ said Brian. ‘I’m the one who should be crying. He bumped the bloody Alfa.’

James glanced across the garage at Brian’s green Alfa T-Spark. ‘Shit,’ he said.

Ang’s first job every morning was to move the cars out of the garage and on to the forecourt, so there was space to work. But he had to sit on a cushion to see over the dashboard, and James knew he couldn’t possibly have passed his test, given that he was an illegal immigrant. And Brian knew those things too, so James’s sympathy was not with him, even though this was not the first car Ang had bumped, and was unlikely to be the last.

‘Expensive?’ he asked.

‘Nah,’ said Brian. ‘It’s a scrape. But I’m not made of bloody money and Nicole wants to go to Prague for Christmas.’

‘Very beautiful,’ said Pavel.

Brian looked at him. ‘You what?’

‘Prague is very beautiful,’ shrugged Pavel. ‘But everybody steal.’

‘Oh, fucking great. Just what I need. More foreigners with their hands in my pockets.’

‘If it’s just a scrape,’ said James irritably, ‘why scare the shit out of him over it?’

Brian rounded on him. ‘Don’t
you
start! This is my garage, and if you don’t like the way I run it you can piss off and find another job, and another place to live too!’

James didn’t answer him. He just turned and headed back towards the kitchen to explain things to Ang.

‘Don’t you bloody mollycoddle him!’ yelled Brian. ‘He’s a grown man!’

OFFICIALLY, MARVEL WAS
back on the Tanzi Anderson case. He’d asked to review the file to bring himself up to speed, and did just that – while he sat in Jimmy the Fix’s BMW and watched Robert Clyde’s house.

It was three days before the boy who’d found Mitzi came back for his money.

He was a thin white boy, with neat brown hair. He was wearing jeans, big white trainers and a Spurs shirt. Marvel was a West Ham fan, but that wasn’t the only reason his suspicions were raised. The boy looked about thirteen or fourteen – certainly young enough to be accompanied by a parent in the matter of a thousand pounds, if he really had been denied a legitimate reward.

But this boy was alone.

He went up to the door and knocked on it and Marvel slid lower in his seat, although he was across a road that was cluttered and narrowed by parked cars.

Clyde himself opened the door. Even from here Marvel could hear Mitzi yapping.

The boy and Clyde talked briefly. The boy had a piece of paper that Marvel assumed was the stopped cheque.

They talked, Clyde smiled and nodded, then replaced the cheque with what looked like another one. Clyde
himself
handed it over. Marvel wished he had brought that camera again. It would have served Clyde right. He had promised he’d be
very grateful
and he hadn’t been. Fair enough, thought Marvel, if he’d done a bad job, but he hadn’t; he’d done a good job, even though it wasn’t one worth doing – let alone well. Now Marvel couldn’t let go of the idea that he’d somehow been cheated out of the gratitude he’d been due, and therefore cheated out of his chance of a promotion.

If he had been cheated by this kid, Marvel wanted to know about it. And if there was a chance that he might still derive some advantage from the case of Mitzi Clyde, then Marvel wanted to know about that too.

Across the street the boy left Clyde, folding the cheque and putting it in his back pocket as he trotted down the garden steps and carefully closed the gate behind him. Before he turned away, he waved, and Clyde waved back and then shut the door.

Didn’t even watch the kid go. Some bloody copper.

Marvel waited until the Spurs fan got to the end of the street and turned left before he pulled the BMW out of its space and followed him.

The boy walked like all kids did nowadays – like a gangsta with an
a
, and his underpants showing. That underpants thing never failed to get Marvel riled.

The boy passed the police station and went into the kebab shop. Five minutes later he came out and continued his journey, eating a huge doner, leaning well forward so the shredded lettuce and sauce didn’t drop down his nice white Spurs shirt.

Marvel hadn’t had a kebab for years. The smell of the super’s office always put him off, but now he could see the food, he remembered the taste of pungent fat in his cheeks, and his mouth watered.

A thousand quid bought a lot of kebabs.

A thousand quid bought a lot of everything when you were fourteen.

The boy ate quickly, and when he’d finished, he balled up the wrapper – and then held on to it until he got to a litter bin.

Surprising.

His civic pride belied his underpants.

It made Marvel doubly suspicious when people didn’t behave the way they should. Or at least, the way they looked as if they should. He was a firm believer in stereotypes. As far as he was concerned, stereotypes were there for a reason, and trying to ignore them for the purposes of objectivity was political correctness gone mad.

He continued the slow-motion pursuit with new interest. There was something about this kid he didn’t like. More than just the Spurs shirt and his arse hanging out of his jeans.

Marvel’s hackles rose even further when the boy slouched through the doors of Marks & Spencer – that bastion of the middle-aged and middle-class. Marvel pulled the BMW into a bus stop and hurried across the pavement to follow the boy inside. As his instincts had told him he would, the boy got on the escalator and went up to the second floor.

Straight to the café.

Marvel stood in the queue a few places behind him. He picked up a tray, for cover, and peered around the café’s clientele.

There were the same well-to-do grey-haired customers and the same women in their monkey outfits, bustling between tables with trays and teacakes and toasted sandwiches.

There was nobody else in the café under the age of fifty. Marvel frowned. Had his instincts deserted him? He had been so sure he would see Richard Latham here. He looked down the line behind him, confused.

The boy up ahead stood out like a sore thumb. He’d picked up a tray but hadn’t put anything on it. Yet.

Marvel swore to himself that if the kid bought a pot of tea and sat down and drank it alone, he’d hand in his resignation from the Metropolitan Police Force.

It was a close-run thing.

The boy got all the way to the till and ordered something. Then he pulled out a few coins and his green loyalty card – and the cheque. If Marvel hadn’t seen him tuck the cheque away at the super’s house, he would never have spotted it now, folded neatly under the card.

The woman behind the till didn’t miss a beat. She put the money in the till; she stamped the card; she pocketed the cheque.

The boy picked up his coffee, put it on his tray – and left them both on the table nearest the door on his way out.

Marvel was momentarily torn over whether or not to go after him, but quickly decided to stay with the money. He reached the till himself and asked for a coffee. The generic middle-aged woman with the fez was as chatty as a chimp. ‘Anything to eat with that, sir? Do you have a loyalty card, sir? Do you want one? Every ten coffees you get one free …’

When she opened the till for his change, he looked at her big bosom and read her name tag.

Denise.

‘No thanks, Denise. The teacake will be fine for now.’

This was the woman who had come over and made a lame joke about Richard Latham. She’d patted his shoulder. They knew each other. And she had just received a thousand pounds in reward money for finding a lost dog that Latham had promised would ‘be home soon’.

Jackpot
.

When Denise handed Marvel his change, he snapped a handcuff on her wrist and told her she was under arrest for extortion – for starters.

She said ‘What?’ then burst into loud tears while her colleagues rushed over from all corners of the café, screeching and chattering their confusion and outrage.

Marvel left M&S with Denise trailing reluctantly behind him, feeling like an extremely smug organ-grinder.

The moment they opened the door to Denise Granger’s home, Marvel could smell the dogs.

There were four of them in a back bedroom, all pedigrees and each in a wire cage, turning circles in its own shit. Marvel thought of Denise giving him his change, and wished he could wash his hands.

‘I
knew
he was hiding something,’ Marvel told the super – but Clyde said nothing.