The Shut Eye (9 page)

‘And how has that been helpful?’

‘Well,’ she said again, ‘it’s given me hope, you see?’

‘I’m sure it has,’ agreed Marvel. ‘But what if it’s false hope?’

Sandra Clyde’s face crumpled. ‘You mean Mitzi might be dead?’

‘No, no, no!’ Shit, he didn’t want her crying! He didn’t want to make the super’s wife cry. How in hell was
that
going to help his chance of promotion?

‘No, that’s not what I meant,’ said Marvel. ‘Not at all. I only mean that if somebody is desperate, like you are, to find …’ he glanced at his notebook, ‘… Mitzi. Sometimes that hope – that
completely valid
hope – can be abused by an unscrupulous person.’

‘Oh, he’s not unscrupulous, Chief Inspector! I was very careful. He’s not some fly-by-night. He’s even helped the police on a case! That’s how I knew his name. Richard’s been on TV and everything.’

‘Richard Latham?’ said Marvel with a heavy heart.

‘Yes,’ nodded Sandra Clyde eagerly. ‘Do you know him?’

‘Not personally,’ said Marvel. ‘But I worked on the Edie Evans case and I have to tell you, Mrs Clyde, that he was really no help at all to us. None whatsoever. A year on, and Edie’s still missing. All Mr Latham did was waste police time and possibly distract us from what might have been more fruitful lines of inquiry.’

Sandra looked crestfallen all over again.

‘Have you paid him any money?’ Marvel asked.

‘Oh no!’ she said instantly. ‘Only some little donations for the church roof.’

Marvel grunted and reddened and pretended to write something in his notebook while he gathered his thoughts.

The church roof! It sounded so … so
stupid
! It
was
so stupid, and it made him furious to think that he and Sandra Clyde had that stupidity in common. The coincidence knocked the schadenfreude right out of Marvel, so, instead of being scathing, he just said weakly, ‘Well, don’t give him any more, OK?’

Sandra bit her lip and nodded and became slightly less red in the face and the danger of tears seemed to have passed. Marvel was relieved. He was no good at riding the rollercoaster of female emotions.

‘Listen,’ he went on. ‘We’ll find Mitzi without the help of a con-man like Latham. If he or anyone at the church contacts you, claiming to have a message or a vision or a dream or
anything
about Mitzi, I want you to tell them you’re not interested, OK? Tell them the police are now involved in the investigation and you don’t need their help. If they don’t take no for an answer, let me deal with it.’

Sandra nodded, but looked far from convinced. ‘But if we can’t believe Richard’s visions, we’re back to square one!’

Marvel wasn’t crazy about her use of the word we. It made it sound as if they had
both
believed Latham’s so-called psychic visions at some point, which he absolutely never had.

‘Square one is a very good place to start,’ he said brusquely. It was a great line, he thought: like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. He’d have to remember it if he ever needed to deliver a motivational speech to G Team that went beyond ‘Do your fucking job.’

Sandra Clyde gave a tremulous smile. ‘Like Julie Andrews in
The Sound of Music
. Do-Re-Mi!’

‘Of course,’ he said, although he had no idea what she was talking about, and wished she hadn’t introduced Julie effing Andrews just as he was thinking about blood and guns and Tarantino.

But he let it go. He was so exhausted by having to be nice to the Super’s wife that he just wanted to get the hell out. He closed his notebook with a flourish and got off the low sofa with surprising difficulty; Christ, the Clydes must have hydraulic knees.

Sandra Clyde showed him out.

On the doorstep she said, ‘So what happens now, Chief Inspector?’

‘We’ll take it from here,’ Marvel said, planting the seed in her head that there would be some kind of
team
dedicated to finding Minnie, not just him, so that if something went wrong in the future, there was someone else to blame. Someone imaginary.

‘Thank you so much,’ she said, and, without warning, the super’s wife leaned forward and gave him a big hug.

‘OK,’ he said when it was over. ‘We’ve got things in hand now.’

‘Thank you, Chief Inspector!’

He walked to his car. Normally he’d have a pool car but there had been a spate of bumps and write-offs and he’d been driving his own for a few weeks now. It was a black BMW M3, with tinted windows and Wolfrace wheels, which had once belonged to a drug-dealer called Jimmy the Fix. After Jimmy had been sent down for fourteen years, Marvel had bought it cheap from the police pound before it could go to public auction, and it was his pride and joy. He paid ten grand a year for a garage to keep it nice – and to keep it his.

Just as he pulled open the car door, Mrs Clyde called from the doorstep, ‘Ooh, wait a minute, Chief Inspector, I have something for you.’

Marvel waited, imagining cake in a tin-foil wedge.

Instead Sandra Clyde bustled out and handed him something flimsy. ‘This is for your car.’

It was a bumper sticker that read FIND MITZI. It was pink and at either end there was a heart-shaped photo of the poodle, with a bow on its head.

The bow was pink too.

In a Tarantino movie, Marvel would have pulled out a .357 Magnum and blown Mrs Clyde’s head clean off her shoulders, in an ironic pink spray.

In the movie of his own life, he took it and said, ‘Interesting.’

‘Robert has one on his car,’ smiled Mrs Clyde encouragingly. ‘And he’s given them to everyone at work.’

If Superintendent Clyde had told his wife that, it was a boldfaced lie.

‘So you should really have one,’ she added, ‘as you’re in charge of the case.’

There was no denying that annoying truth.

And, because she was standing there watching, Marvel had to peel off the backing and place the bright-pink poodle sticker on the rear bumper of Jimmy the Fix’s shiny black BMW.

That night over dinner, Debbie said brightly, ‘You should put up Wanted posters. Like in the cowboy films.’

Marvel snorted. ‘Dead or Alive?’

She nodded. ‘It would catch people’s imagination. Make them remember what she looks like. Maybe put a little cowboy hat on her,’ she mused, then quickly said, ‘No, that would be silly.’

As if Wanted posters weren’t.

Usually Debbie didn’t like to discuss his cases. Usually she got all touchy if he read a file over dinner – especially when he shifted her candles aside so he could lay out autopsy reports.

‘Not at the dinner table, John,’ she’d say. ‘It’s sick.’

‘This is my
job
!’ he’d snap back. ‘I don’t expect you to take an interest, but the least you could do is let me work!’

‘Well,
I’m
trying to eat!’

‘Eat then! Who’s stopping you?’

Trust her to enter into the spirit of things on a case that wasn’t even a murder, thought Marvel.

‘You should go to Battersea Dogs Home,’ she suggested as she helped herself to more green beans. ‘If someone found Mitzi that’s probably the first place they’d think to take her. We had a dog from Battersea when I was little. A funny old scruffy thing like a dust-bunny on legs.’

She smiled softly and added, ‘He used to drag our shoes into the garden. We’d be getting ready for school and we’d have to go hopping around in the bushes looking for our other shoe!’

Marvel thought that if a dog did that to his shoes, it would be back in the pound before it could say ‘euthanasia’. Still, he smiled because Debbie looked so happy at the memory. He hadn’t seen that look on her face for ages, and he wondered briefly whether something or somebody had upset her. Maybe someone at work. Debbie worked in some sort of community arts centre with lots of women and effete men, and they could be real bitches.

He reached out and took her hand, and she looked up in surprise and gave a small smile. Then she sighed deeply and pushed her beans around with a fork. ‘I was heartbroken when Pip died. But losing him and not knowing where he was would have been even worse.’

Marvel thought of Edie Evans and grunted his agreement around a mouthful of spaghetti Bolognese.

‘Maybe you could look on the internet,’ said Debbie.

‘For what?’

‘They have those sites where people put pictures of dogs they’ve lost or found. Doglost or Lostdog. One of them, anyway.’

‘I’m already doing that,’ said Marvel, although he wasn’t. But it sounded like a good idea. It was just as well, because when it came to finding lost dogs, Marvel realized he didn’t have many ideas of his own.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘And if you get some more copies of the photo I can give them to the girls at work.’

‘OK,’ said Marvel. Those women and other do-gooders all loved animals and children. He started to wonder whether he could hand the whole operation over to Debbie and just reap the spoils of the promotion to superintendent.

‘Anything else?’ he encouraged her.

She hummed a little while she thought, and Marvel wondered when they’d stopped being like this all the time – with Debbie interested and backing him up, and being happy to do it. Certainly, it was before she’d started making the faces that told him his feet were on the Habitat couch, or that there were photos of corpses on the kitchen table.

‘You could offer a reward,’ she mused.

‘Good idea,’ he said – even though it was redundant – because he wanted to extend the moment of mutual goodwill.

Debbie smiled again, all pleased with herself. ‘And you should put on it,
no questions asked
.’

THE NEXT FRIDAY
night, Anna left the flat much more easily. She only went back inside twice, her tummy fluttering, before hurrying past the five footprints with the hood of the blue anorak blinkering her view.

She had the money.

The drizzle was slow but meant business, and by the time she reached the hall her jeans were soaked up to the shins by the spray from the wheels of the buggy.

There was a shiny new red plastic bucket under the damp patch.

Sandra wasn’t there, but otherwise the congregation was mostly the same as last week’s and the dust certainly was. Anna could feel it in her throat.

The format was the same too. Latham bouncing slowly about the stage like a Thunderbirds puppet, poking his glasses up his sweaty nose and giving living people pointless snippets of non-information from dead people.

Dad says he saw you break your heel.

Toby’s here and he wants to say everything’s going to be fine.

Caroline’s showing me you have pain in your hip.

Ugh. Anna thought Richard Latham must be communicating with the dead, because if he were making this stuff up, surely it would be more interesting?

It didn’t get better when he threw the floor open to the amateurs. The nodding-dog boy was still confused by which spirit was which, and a small woman with the ruddy nose of a cider drinker stood for a full minute, swaying back and forth without speaking into the microphone, before they realized she’d gone to sleep.

Last time it had been novel and bizarre enough to hold her attention. This week – with her new-found hope making Anna itch with impatience – it was like a slow-mo action replay of something that hadn’t been worth watching the first time around.

The only thing that had changed was Australia. Queensland now bulged slightly sideways into the dirty white Pacific ceiling. There was also a new, smaller patch on the lower right, which Anna thought might be the start of Tasmania.

There was no message from Daniel, and with every dead dullard her spirits rose. He wasn’t dead; he wasn’t dead;
he wasn’t dead
.

The low buzz of anticipation in her gut grew and grew until she could barely sit still. She jiggled the buggy compulsively with her foot, careless of whether Charlie was sleeping or not.

The session ended and the two ladies at the front got up to make the tea and put the biscuits on a plate.

Anna couldn’t wait any longer. She edged through the little knot of people around Richard Latham, who was telling a story about how he’d come to the aid of a Rolling Stone. A dead one, presumably.

‘Hi,’ she interrupted. ‘Can I have a consultation?’

‘A chat, you mean?’ He smiled.

‘Well, yes. But a proper one. One you pay for.’

Latham looked a little embarrassed and so did the people around him. He put down his cup of tea and pointed at the chair opposite his. ‘Why don’t you sit down and have a cup of tea and a biscuit and we’ll have a chat afterwards?’

‘OK,’ she said. She sat down, feeling the panic of having passed the point of no return. She’d done it; she’d asked. She’d even told him she’d pay, so she would be able to ask him anything she wanted to about Daniel.

She gripped the handle of the buggy so hard that her hands hurt.

She hadn’t asked how much it was going to be. Shit. What if it was hundreds of pounds? The bag filled with the gas meter money had felt very substantial when she’d left home. But here, now, it didn’t seem like a lot at all – not for someone who’d been on TV.

She felt sick with worry. She’d asked now, and she needed answers. What if Latham laughed at her heavy, light money and refused to tell her what had happened to Daniel? What would she do then? What
could
she do?

Anna bit her lip and felt her eyes grow hot with threatening tears.

She would
make
him help her. She would beg or threaten, or cry and get angry. Something would work; something would
have
to, because Anna Buck was crazy and anyone could tell—

‘Now,’ said Richard Latham, ‘what would you like to talk about?’

Anna looked around to see that while she had been panicking, everyone had left, and it was just her and Latham in the dingy little hall. Her eyes lit on the crucifix over the doorway, and she felt guilty that she wasn’t praying, instead of paying for help.

But James was right. Where was God when Daniel disappeared?

Nowhere.

This was the moment of truth. A minute from now she might know where her son was. The hope in her heart felt as swollen and fragile as a soap bubble.