The Shut Eye (4 page)

Marvel looked out of the window and into the mouse’s cage. One looked over the neatly tended back garden to the trees beyond; the other was filled with curly wood shavings and old cardboard toilet-roll tubes, nibbled at either end. The mouse – Peter – pattered along in his wire wheel, going nowhere at a fair old lick.

Marvel had worked long into every night in his efforts to find Edie. He had asked to have the case kept open long after it had started to chill; he had tried everything.

Even a psychic.

He
hadn’t consulted one, of course – that would have been the ultimate admission of failure – but when DS Short had suggested it, Marvel had only laughed derisively in her face, not forbidden it outright. And when the expense request came in, he had signed it – comforting himself with the thought that it said it was for ‘church-roof donations’.

Nothing wrong with denial.

After that, Marvel had only seen the psychic once, briefly, on TV, talking earnestly about his efforts to help.

Help schmelp. Marvel might as well have consulted the tealeaves-slash-rehydrated noodles in the bottom of his cup of tea-slash-soup. All the psychic had done was bring the weirdos and well-wishers out of the woodwork. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference; Marvel wasn’t sure there
was
one. Mark and Carrie Evans had been inundated with letters and trinkets from around the world – visionaries, kindred spirits, children all sending hope and Bible verses and talismans and charms.

There was even money. Twenty Australian dollars miraculously still stapled to a postcard from Perth, a hundred pounds in dirty notes stuffed into an ornately decorated envelope, and a crisp fifty with a long letter detailing another child missing in another place.

As if money would help.

There were the sickos too. There were always a few who trawled the papers for vulnerable targets, and reached out in their own repulsive way. Three Polaroids of a man’s erect penis; a jewellery box containing a turd, and a newspaper photo of Edie with the eyes cut out and scrawled with the words
I kilt yuor girl
.

The world was full of wankers.

Including the so-called psychic, who’d had woolly visions for a few weeks before the trail had gone cold. Marvel had been so angry that he’d been to see Superintendent Jeffries about getting their money back. But Jeffries hadn’t wanted to risk dragging their embarrassing experiment through the courts. A lesson learned, he’d said.

Marvel took another hard drag of his cigarette and felt the heat warm his thumb and finger.

The only tangible clue they’d had in the case was Edie Evans’s bicycle.

It had been found half hidden under the rhododendrons on the broad strip of green that lay between the Evans’s home and the school. Marvel had been there more than once.

More than fifty times.

It was a half-wooded, half-grassed area, where local people walked their dogs and children played hide-and-seek. In the summer, parents could sit outside the pub across the road and watch their kids kick a ball about on the green.

Safe.

Not safe.

The line was so fine …

Marvel had never met Edie, but he had met her bicycle. The BMX was propped against a wall in the evidence room downstairs right now, still bent and drooping. It was an old, cheap bike and had been hand-painted in broad black and white hoops.

‘Like a rocket,’ her father had said, looking at the photo in her room. ‘We painted it together.’

‘Did it have a bell?’ Marvel had asked.

‘Not that I remember. Why?’

‘There are some scratches on the handlebars where a bell would go. But there’s no bell in this picture.’

Her father had shrugged. ‘It’s an old bike. It had lots of scratches.’ He’d looked mildly puzzled. Not puzzled about the bell, but puzzled about why it even mattered when his daughter was gone and there was blood on the pavement.

It
didn’t
matter, so Marvel hadn’t pressed the point. He’d noticed it; that was all. It was his job to notice things, but sometimes the things he noticed weren’t meaningful or logical, weren’t things you could put in a report and call evidence. Sometimes they were just things.

But he noticed them all the same.

Not that it had helped. The case had gone cold; the mystery remained unsolved; Edie remained lost.

And the world moved on without her.

But still she watched him from the wall above his desk – as determined now as she had been on the day he’d caught the case. How could Marvel be anything but equally devoted to the mystery of her disappearance?

Somebody somewhere knew what had happened to her. All he had to do was find that person.

It seemed a very simple task when he looked at it like that. Not something he could just give up on. Not rocket science.

Along with fresh air and roughage, Marvel thought that children were overrated.

But he had a soft spot for Edie Evans.

THE DOOR WAS
open
.

Anna woke in a panic – already half out of bed.

‘Is that the baby?’

‘No.’

‘I think it’s the baby.’

‘Don’t get up.’

‘But—’

‘Don’t get up,’ said James. ‘Lie down.’

She did, turning on her side away from him so he couldn’t watch her creased brow, concentrating on listening for the smallest sound.

Behind her, she could feel James thinking. Feel him wanting to say something. Anything.

She waited and waited and waited and waited—

Then she got up to go to see to the baby – just as they’d both known she would. Once the thought was in her head, it must be completed. And, once completed, it would be repeated.

Endlessly?

Behind her, James got up and went to work.

Anna didn’t go to work any more. She used to work for a company that made packaging for make-up. Not on the factory floor, but in the office – at a desk under her sixty-words-per-minute typing diploma, slender fingers flashing.

Now those same fingers were red and chapped from when she cleaned the flat.

And cleaned the flat.

And cleaned the flat.

Anna cleaned the flat on a loop, like the Forth Bridge. It wasn’t a big flat, but it was in an old house, and it didn’t stay clean for long – or not as clean as she needed it to be.

There were two bedrooms, a bathroom and toilet, a living room and a kitchen – and every single room was full of germs.

Full. Of. Germs.

Anna could hear germs breeding on counter tops and under sofa cushions. They filled her mouth when she yawned and gritted her lids when she blinked. She bleached the kitchen counters five times a day; she changed the baby even though he hadn’t dirtied his nappy, and every item in the fridge was wrapped so tightly in plastic film that it took her four minutes to crack an egg.

Charlie was not allowed on the floor, and Anna kept antibacterial wipes in her jeans pocket. Twenty times a day, she got up from the table, out of her bed, out of the shower, just to swab his fingers and face. When Daniel came home, he would be
so safe
. Nothing would ever harm him again. Not a cough or a cold, not a stubbed toe or a paper cut. Not nits.

She often started cleaning before she got dressed, scrubbing the paintwork around the doors and bleaching the mugs. She swept James out of the front door every morning and then covered his tile tracks with cream cleaner followed by polish – running a cotton-wool bud against the bottom of the skirting to be sure she was getting right up to the edges.

She had James buy a foldaway three-step ladder, and scrubbed her way around the ceilings in concentric rings, coaxing daddy-long-legs into jars and releasing them through the kitchen window.

James did everything else that required leaving the flat – work, shopping, errands. And he always returned.

The smell of him alone could make Anna panic. That dark, oily reek of the garage that kept her away from it like garlic does a vampire. Sometimes she could smell it seeping upwards through the floorboards and plaster along with the tinny music, despite the pine and the lemon and the lavender that she lavished on every surface.

James always took off his steel-toed boots at the bottom of the stairs, but he refused to remove his overalls.

‘I’m not taking off my clothes to come in my own bloody house,’ he’d say.

‘Not your clothes. Just your overalls,’ Anna said anxiously.

But he wouldn’t, even though it was all his fault –
all
of it!

So every night James led his smell up the stairs and across the kitchen to the sink, where Anna had already run a steaming bowl of soapy water and put out a pot of Swarfega and a nailbrush, for him to wash his filthy, black-grained hands and wrists. Right up to the elbows.

It was there, at the sink, that he would strip off his overalls so that she could bear them the three paces to the machine. She didn’t start it immediately; first she had to wait for him to finish washing, so that she could swab down the sink and the counter and the floor where he’d been standing, and then she could wash that cloth too. Two biological tablets and a boil wash every night. Their electric and water bills matched those of a family of six, although it was only them.

And always would be, now that she wouldn’t let him touch her any more. Not with those hands he scrubbed so hard but were never really clean.

Anna shuddered.

Then she looked up from washing the dishes and cocked her head.

She thought she’d heard Charlie crying. Not hard – more of a whimper. That was worse. Crying would show he had a healthy pair of lungs, while a whimper and then silence filled her with dread.

Some noises might be the children out behind the TiggerTime playschool a few doors down. But this sounded
inside
.

There it was again.

She removed her hands from the water and splashed Dettol liberally over them. A fresh towel was employed for drying, before she hurried into the nursery. Or the bedroom. It depended on who was talking.

By the time she got there, the baby had gone back to sleep. Anna breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Hey, sweetheart,’ she whispered, as she pulled the soft lemon blanket over one adventurous leg. ‘Have you been kicking, you little monkey? Have you been dancing? Hmm?’

Charlie’s golden lashes were laid on his peach cheeks; one wrinkled fist curled beside his ear. She laid a soft hand on his chest and his heart fluttered like a baby bird under his white towelling pyjamas.

Anna closed her eyes and – for a brief, precious moment – everything was all right.

Then the letter-box clattered and the circle started again.

The letter-box was in the door.

The door that was open …

Anna went slowly downstairs. Bills and junk all over the mat.

The bills she opened but didn’t read; everything else she folded neatly three times. If she didn’t, the kitchen bin would soon be full and her panic rose with its contents. She’d spoken to the postman about the junk mail but he’d explained that he got extra for delivering it.

‘Why?’ she’d asked. ‘So I can carry it from the door to the bin?’

He’d only shrugged, and at Christmas Anna hadn’t tipped him – even though he’d knocked on the door on the pretext of handing her a small package that would certainly have fitted through the slot.

Two-for-one pizza with free garlic bread!
Fold
.

Release the CASH in your home!
Fold
.

£1,000 could be yours in TEN MINUTES!
Fold
.

THE DEAD ARE WAITING TO SPEAK TO YOU.

Anna stared at the leaflet. It was not glossy like the others – just cheap white paper and black ink. But somehow that, and the lack of an exclamation mark, made it seem more honest, made it seem that speaking to the dead was a more believable offer than free money and double pizza.

The dead were waiting to speak to her …

Anna swayed a little and touched the banister for support.

Daniel’s not dead.

She’d been telling herself that for months.

Daniel’s not dead!

At first it had been a blind belief. Then a crazy hope. Then a desperate, marginal faith that made other people avoid her fevered gaze and nod at their own feet when she insisted it was a fact. As if she’d joined the Moonies.

Eventually the words had started to sound meaningless even inside her own head.

Daniel’s not.

Dead.

Daniel
…

Anna folded the leaflet once. Folded it twice …

Slowly, she unfolded it again.

THE DEAD ARE WAITING TO SPEAK TO YOU

Mediumship and open circle £2.

Private Consultations with the dead by

RICHARD LATHAM

(As seen on TV)

Why not come along and join us at

Bickley Spiritualist Church, Fridays 7 p.m.

Free tea and biscuits.

ALL WELCOME

Anna touched the words as if she could glean more meaning through her fingertips than through her eyes. She wasn’t stupid; she guessed that ‘free tea and biscuits’ was a sign of desperation on the part of the church, not generosity. And yet somehow they tempted her. She imagined dunking free biscuits into free tea, while someone who’d been seen on TV gave her all the answers to every question …

Daniel’s not dead
, she told herself fiercely.
I would feel it. I would know.

Except that she
didn’t
know.

Feeling and knowing were two different things, and not knowing was the rat that gnawed at her heart in the dark early hours of the morning, before the buses started to rumble.

Was he cold? Was he hungry? Scared? Was somebody hurting him? Did he miss her? Did he wonder where she was and why she wasn’t coming to get him?

Did he think she didn’t love him any more?

That last thought was the worst, and had the power to make her twist in physical pain.

On Bickley Bridge she’d planned an end to the daily torture of not knowing, and only the lies of a passing stranger had saved her.