The Shut Eye (3 page)

She’d been in the kitchen, making packed lunches for playschool and work. Peanut butter and carrots and a little chocolate bar shaped like a frog for Daniel, peanut butter and a Mars bar for James. From the garage next door the radio had gone on – the tinny sound of Duran Duran maybe, or Culture Club. Something from the Eighties. She’d glanced through the kitchen window at the street below, beating out its own rhythms: the number 32 bus waiting at the stop, the man walking two rocking Dachshunds, the woman jogging so slowly that the tall man with the
Daily Telegraph
under his arm overtook her with ease, the paving slabs cracking and tilting as the lime trees refused to be contained by concrete squares. There was a cement truck parked outside the garage, and the driver was laying thick, corrugated-plastic pipes across the pavement.

In a minute, James would sneak up from behind and put his arms around her …

Oh!

She had turned in his arms and kissed him long and hard.

I’ll bring home the fireworks tonight
, he’d said.

She’d laughed and said,
I bet you will!

He’d laughed too, and reached around her to pick up his lunch. Slowly. Their bodies touching all the way down.

Smiling.

See you tonight.

She’d see him a lot sooner than that.

And never the same way again.

Anna had heard him leave. Heard him go down the narrow, dark stairs, heard him open the door …

She hadn’t heard the door shut. She hadn’t even thought about it until afterwards – until it was far, far,
far
too late. James opened the door, James shut the door. That was what had happened every day for the three years they’d lived here. She knew it like
Toy Story
– so well that she could tune it out and have other thoughts while it droned on in the background.

Unheard.

Daniel!

She’d taken out the chocolate and put in another carrot.

Daniel! Come on!

She’d taken out the carrot and put back the chocolate.

She’d make cornflake cakes for tonight. Daniel’s favourite. And she’d pick up some apples for bobbing, on her way to work.

She’d never go to work again.

Daniel!

She’d gone into his bedroom. She’d gone into the bathroom. She’d gone back to his room. She hadn’t gone downstairs; there was no reason to. The only thing downstairs was the front door, and that was always shut because they were on a main road.

Instead she’d stood by the telly, wasting time, wasting life, wondering where he might be – and by the time she’d peered down the stairs, it was too late.

One hundred and twenty days ago, the door had been left open …

Everything after that was just a fast-forward blur of panic: of running and shouting and of the cement-truck driver looking up from the fat, jiggling hose to see what was wrong, of Pavel and Mr Pigeon scooting up and down the street, stopping strangers, holding their hands at hip height to show the top of Daniel’s imaginary head. Of Ang clutching his broom, wide-eyed and tearful at the commotion. Of Mikey shouting
Danny! Danny!
from the alleyway behind the garage.

Of James finally appearing from the direction of the shops, with an armful of sparklers and rockets that he then forgot about so completely that they dropped from his grasp one by one as he ran frantically up and down the street.

All to the smell of fireworks in the dull air, and the sound of tinny hits floating from the garage.

The first police car had pulled right up on the pavement and one of the coppers had found this place. This place where Daniel had cut the corner across the freshly laid cement. Five tiny footprints heading across the forecourt, before he’d turned and jumped back on to the pavement, heading for the road …

And disappeared.

Nobody had seen him.

Nobody saw him again after that bitter November morning. Anna didn’t remember much more about that day, and didn’t remember much about all the days since. The blur of police and cameras and newspaper stories growing smaller and smaller. DCI Lloyd calling now and then to pick her brains about things she might have remembered, just in case she had vital information that she hadn’t bothered to share. The offers of medication and counselling – as if they could make her forget that Daniel was gone. As if that would be a good thing!

Anna couldn’t honestly have said how she’d got all the way from that day to this; how she’d survived.

Why
she’d survived.

The girl was still standing beside her.

Anna gathered up the cloth and the toothbrush and the wax polish and got to her feet. Now that she was standing, she looked at the child’s face properly. It was round and ruddy and about eight years old. Black wire-rimmed glasses and dark-brown plaits with hairclips shaped like flowers.

‘Where did he go?’ the girl asked, and Anna realized that she must have thought all of those memories out loud.

‘Nobody knows,’ said Anna, and that truth sounded as brutal to her ears now as it had when she’d first overheard a policeman saying it to a concerned passer-by on that fateful – careless – day.

‘Did you look?’ said the girl.

‘I’ve looked,’ she said. ‘We’ve all looked. We’ll never stop looking.’

‘Is he dead?’ said the girl, with her eyes widening in horror.

‘No,’ said Anna firmly. ‘He’s alive. Somewhere.’

The child nodded sombrely, relieved to hear the good news.

‘If I see him I’ll tell you,’ she said, and Anna was touched. She tried to say ‘thank you’ but her mouth was too wobbly.

She’d forgotten how sweet children could be. A week after Daniel had disappeared, somebody had pushed a tatty drawing through the front door – two goldfish in a pond. She guessed it was from one of his nursery classmates at TiggerTime a few doors down. His teacher had knocked a few times too and offered comfort she had no real way to provide.

Anna and the little girl with the pigtails stared down together at the five footprints, now so glossy and dark that they were like works of art in a fancy gallery.

‘They’re all you’ve got left,’ the child said sadly.

Anna nodded. They were all she had left.

Then the girl said she had to go to school.

And she disappeared too.

THE LONGER DCI
John Marvel worked in homicide, the more he disliked people. He’d never met one he didn’t hate – or despise, at the very least – and he could see the bad in anyone.

It was a useful quality in a detective.

Not so much in a human being.

Murder was DCI Marvel’s favourite thing in the whole world – even above Sky Sports. There was no other crime that had the sheer black-and-white finality of murder, and it was one of the few things in life he took personally. He was good at it, too. He had hunches and insights; he had the dogged obsession to keep going when everyone else had given up – not because he wanted to solve the crime, but because he hated to lose. Solving murders was a competition, make no bones about it. The killer won, or the cops won.

How could you not love something that was so unambiguous?

So
biblical
?

Even when he used to go to the King’s Arms of an evening, Marvel talked shop – as long as that shop sold murder. While his colleagues had tried to switch off and forget the underbelly, Marvel had mulled over the gory details; he mentally sifted evidence, he bullied colleagues into long, intricate discussions about blood spatter and rates of decay and dodgy evidence. And when they made excuses to leave early, he would sit alone and brood on the endless permutations of how and why and who and what and when.

He took case files on holiday. While other men read Lee Child or Wilbur Smith, Marvel pored over autopsy reports and crime-scene photos. And he got results – his solve rate since taking over South East’s G Team was a staggering 84 per cent.

He looked at his watch.

It was exactly five minutes to opening time.

Old habits died hard.

He heaved himself out of his chair, went to the machine across the room and got a cup of tea. Or it could have been soup, it was hard to tell. Either way, he put two sugars in it.

He took the cup back to his desk and lit a cigarette.

The murder-squad room at Lewisham was a low-ceilinged, overcrowded place, with every sharp corner softened by towers of bulging brown files. Computers the size of wheelbarrows pumped out heat and hum on each desk, but the paperless office was still the stuff of science fiction. At an outpost of this information Jenga, Marvel had annexed a corner desk by pulling rank on DS Brady. As soon as he’d secured the desk, Marvel had turned it to face the corner, where he taped a
Reservoir Dogs
poster and a selection of case-file photos. Having his back to the room discouraged casual interaction. Marvel didn’t give a shit what the rest of G Team did behind his back, as long as they were still there when he turned around.

He sipped his tea-slash-soup and grimaced, then sucked hard on the Rothman’s, loving the acrid warmth that filled his throat, and squinted at the photos on the wall.

They weren’t from the case he was working on now. That was about a thirty-four-year-old prostitute called Tanzi Anderson, who had been found in her wardrobe, with a lapful of her own skimpy clothing pulled from wire hangers, and a single bullet hole between her shocked eyes. Marvel had no doubt that very soon another whore would spill the beans and they would track down Tanzi’s pimp, who had coincidentally disappeared on the night she died, along with Tanzi’s money and heroin.

It was a no-brainer.

And if it didn’t require a brain, it certainly didn’t require photos on the wall to prick his memory.

No, the photos John Marvel chose to look at every day were from an unsolved case.

The case of Edie Evans, who had left home on her bike one frosty January morning over a year ago, and had never arrived at school.

For one long, tortuous, timewasting day, Edie had been treated as a truant. She was almost a teenager; she was an adventurous child; she was on a bicycle; she knew how to catch a train to the city … The police did the maths, even though her parents insisted it wasn’t like her. Edie was young for her age, they said – by today’s standards, at least. She didn’t have a boyfriend; she didn’t wear make-up; she had little brother she adored and a pet mouse called Peter. She was popular at school and good at her lessons, they said. Edie not going to school made no sense.

Not coming home made even less.

And they were right. Just before dark, a man walking his dog had found Edie’s bicycle under a giant rhododendron on a stretch of grass alongside the road, its back wheel buckled – folded almost in half – and its chain hanging in a sad loop.

That’s when Edie Evans became a missing person.

And, early the next day, when a few drops of what proved to be Edie’s blood were found on the pavement that ran between the green and the road, the case was turned over to the murder team. It was only logical – although they’d never found a body, and probably never would now.

Marvel tapped his cigarette against the edge of an ashtray shaped like a pair of lungs, then sighed at the photo through twin jets of smoke. He knew Edie’s face better than he knew anyone’s, apart from his own and the Queen’s. Edie was a slightly goofy-looking child, with teeth she’d never grow into now, a sprinkling of summer freckles, and bobbed brown hair caught behind one sticky-out ear. In the photo, she was standing astride a BMX bicycle, in jeans and a Simpsons T-shirt, looking slightly upwards into the camera with a determined expression on her face.

‘We call that her space face,’ her mother had told Marvel with a sad little laugh. ‘She wants to go into space.’

He
had wanted to go into space!

Marvel had forgotten it until the very moment Edie’s mother had handed him the photo, but remembering it had brought a wash of memories that had left him glowing with long-lost happiness. Sneaking into the stone merchant’s on Abigail Road with his best friend Terry Stubbs, to make an ascent of the giant grey-gravel mountain at the back of the yard. The favoured West face – to avoid being seen by the old man in the caravan-cum-office – and moving ponderously, to show they were on the Moon and lacked gravity. In the dirty, overstuffed city, the harsh gravel – made pale by the elements – was the closest landscape they could find to what they’d seen on grainy black-and-white TV. The winner was the one who could plant his flag closest to the summit without being seen. Although they didn’t have flags: Terry’s was a spatula and his own was a plastic sword with rubies on the hilt …

Sitting in the Evans’s suburban front room, John Marvel had still been able to feel the hot gravel under his belly, and the betrayal of sharp stones clicking down the slope behind him like unlucky dice. They’d been chased a few times, but never been caught. Not there, at least.

Not on the Moon.

They’d played in the stone yard tirelessly, until they’d grown tired of it and never went back. Later he’d wanted to be a bus driver, then a scientist, then a fireman. He couldn’t remember ever wanting to be a detective, but there you go and here he was.

Another day, another game.

It had been years – decades – since he’d thought of Terry Stubbs and the Moon, and it had given him a strange, syrupy feeling that anyone else would have quickly identified as sentiment.

After showing him the photo, Edie’s mother and father had shown him Edie’s bedroom.

As soon as he’d walked in, Marvel had known that she’d been taken, just as surely as they had known, from the very moment that they’d realized she was missing.

Edie Evans was going places, but not up to Oxford Street for a day out shoplifting mascara with a gang of girlfriends.

The walls of her room were completely covered with posters – not of pop singers and celebrities – but of
real
stars. There were planets and star maps and rockets and spaceships, Captain Kirk on one wall, Han Solo on another, Neil Armstrong on the back of the door; a space shuttle landing, and an Apollo mission taking off, robots and stormtroopers and willowy aliens with slanted black eyes. Between the big posters and pictures were cuttings and clippings and cartoons of constellations and close encounters, filling the gaps like grout. Even the ceiling was dotted with the pale-green stick-on stars that Marvel knew would suck up the sun and then glow in the dark over a child’s head.