Authors: Belinda Bauer
They all stood and watched her, stunned by the depth of her madness.
The burglar held the door open for her and she left, still crying.
When the glass door closed behind her, there was a subdued silence. Then, very slowly, things started to return to normal. Aguda began to soak up the water from the floor with paper towels; the two officers picked up the defibrillator and went back to work; the sergeant who’d taken over behind the window called out a name and the old man in the hat shuffled over to him to report whatever he’d come in to report a hundred years ago.
Marvel bent to pick up the photo he’d dropped in his skid across the floor.
‘Is this hers?’ he asked Aguda, and she looked at it and nodded sadly.
‘She said it was telling her things,’ she said. ‘Poor woman.’
He snorted. ‘Telling her how to pull a scam. The fake baby was probably a part of it.’
Sandra Clyde’s roots were showing in this photo, and he wondered idly whether Debbie dyed her hair. He wouldn’t hold it against her – not after the crazy thank-you sex they’d had when she’d come home to find the dog.
Then Marvel’s heart pitched like a rollercoaster ride. It got stuck in his throat and swelled there like a sponge.
‘Get her back,’ he choked.
‘Are you OK, sir?’
He shook his head. It felt like a heart attack but that wasn’t important. He hobbled to the benches and sat down heavily next to the woman with the tattooed arms, still staring at the photo.
‘Get her back!
Get her back!
’
Aguda dropped a ball of wet paper towels and yanked open the door. Through the glass he could see her running, hear her calling.
Marvel looked again at the photograph.
Not at Sandra; not at Mitzi. But beyond them to the line of blurred people caught in mid-clap.
So far, so faint, so fuzzy.
So familiar.
One of them was Edie Evans.
FOR A LONG
while after she was abducted, Edie Evans hoped it was by aliens.
She woke from a deep sleep – still wearing her space helmet – and stared up at a dark ceiling with gleaming pipes and flared ports running along it.
She recognized it immediately; it was the ventilation system of a spaceship.
A little flower of mist blossomed and died on her visor every time she breathed out and breathed in. The close sound of her lungs filling and emptying only added to her certainty.
She was in space!
Edie was excited by it. The mist on her visor bloomed a little bigger at the thought.
She started to turn her head to look at the walls, but it hurt to do that and she winced and stayed still for a couple of minutes, blinking at the pipes.
But now her head was hurting.
She tried to ignore it, and to think about how she might have got here.
She had been riding her bike to school … and then she’d woken up. And between those two moments things were fuzzy. Edie frowned and tried to remember if there had been a bright white beam, or any sense of floating. But because she couldn’t remember either, they both remained possible in her mind, like that cat in the box. Daddy had told her the story about some guy who had a cat in a box that was both dead and alive until you opened the lid and found out which it was. So, until she remembered something different, she definitely could have been abducted by aliens.
Edie could remember earlier things though. She could remember saying goodbye to her mother as she pedalled away in the half-light of the early January morning. A brief glimpse over her shoulder, and the feeling of the bike wobbling slightly as she raised a quick hand in farewell. She could remember doing a good swerve to miss a dog poo on the pavement. She could remember stopping to zip up her anorak because it was even colder than it looked.
She could remember cutting across the corner of the wide green patch they all called the woods. There wasn’t a proper path there, but local people had made one just by taking the shortest route through the grass. In the winter the path was mud; in the summer it was flat and hard. Today it had been cold and dry – the grass alongside it encrusted with dark diamonds of frost.
She could remember swinging out of the woods and on to the pavement next to the road …
After that she couldn’t remember anything until now.
Edie tried turning her head again and this time when it hurt she thought about being at home in bed, with Mum stroking her forehead and Dad calling the doctor.
Maybe she’d ask the aliens to take her home soon. She was pretty sure they would; there wasn’t much Edie Evans didn’t know about aliens, and she knew that nobody got abducted for
ever
.
Maybe they’d take her home right away.
For some reason, thinking about going home made her throat ache and she nearly cried and her visor misted right up.
It wasn’t really a space helmet; it was a skateboard helmet that Dad had fixed with a tinted visor so she could be an astronaut as she rode her rocket bicycle to school every day.
One small BMX for mankind
, he always said.
Without turning her head again, Edie carefully reached out her hand and felt around the floor for her bike. It wasn’t there. They must have left it on Earth. She got a pang, and hoped Frankie wasn’t riding it already; much of Edie’s life was devoted to keeping her bicycle out of her little brother’s clutches. He never took care of anything. He’d left his own bike outside so often that his trainer wheels had rusted right through. The thought of him mistreating her bike the whole time she was in space was infuriating and, at the same time, made her miss him.
Her visor misted up again, obscuring the gleaming pipes overhead.
After a while Edie fell asleep with her arm still outstretched, her delicate fingers curled and weightless.
When she woke for the second time she was in a bed, but it wasn’t her own. Even though it was so dark that she couldn’t see a thing, Edie felt sure that was true because this bed smelled like a road.
She sat up carefully. Her head had stopped aching and she was sorry she’d cried. Cross with herself for being a baby. Being in space was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her, or to anyone she knew, and she should make the most of it. Then when she got home she could tell people all about it, especially Dad.
Slowly she stuck her left hand straight out into the darkness and moved it about. There was nothing in front of her, but to her left she felt a smooth, cold wall. She kept her hand there, feeling safer for touching something solid.
‘Hello!’ she shouted.
Her voice sounded short and dull and like it wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t like it, so she didn’t shout again.
From somewhere a long way off there was the rhythmic hiss and underwater thudding of a great engine.
The spaceship was on the move.
Where were they going? Were they leaving their orbit of Earth and heading for the stars? She got a little thrill of terror.
With her left hand flat against the cold wall, Edie felt the bed with her right. It wasn’t a proper bed; it was like a camping one. The canvas sides were stitched over a tubular steel frame. She crawled slowly to the end and bumped her head on a wall. She felt around and found her space helmet and put it on. Then she turned and crawled even more slowly to the other end until the helmet hit another wall. Wherever she was, it was only as long as the bed.
Edie leaned as far as she could to the right without leaving the anchor of her left hand on the wall, but couldn’t feel the floor or another wall.
Maybe she was in a pod hundreds of feet up a wall in a hive of other captives. She imagined the beings around her – of every intergalactic species, each one thinking it was alone in the dark.
‘Hello?’ she said carefully. ‘I’m Edie.’
Nobody else said anything. Maybe they didn’t understand English. Maybe to them English was just like an oink or a purr would be to her. She wouldn’t talk back to a pig or a cat.
There was a blanket folded at one end of the bed. It wasn’t a nice soft one like the one they put over Nanny’s knees when they took her out in the wheelchair. It was cold and itchy.
In the black nothingness, and with one hand flat against the wall, Edie fingered the thin, rough wool.
In all this weirdness, the blanket was the only thing that made Edie really uneasy.
Since she’d been a little girl, Edie had read hundreds of books and watched dozens of films and TV shows about space. She knew that the first spacemen were fruit-flies and monkeys and a dog called Laika; she knew that Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the Moon, and that Buzz Aldrin was the second and that Michael Collins had stayed in the getaway car. That’s what Dad always said.
They got dropped off on the Moon and he stayed in the car for a quick getaway
. She knew about Sally Ride and Helen Sharman and satellites and Hubble and the rings of Saturn. She knew that the sun was really a star and that all the other stars were so far away that it would take her years and years to get there, even if she went in a beam of light, like a speck.
Alongside all the real stuff, Edie knew all about Vulcans and Jedis and Close Encounters. She knew about their light sabres and mind melds and the metal chips they put in your head so they always knew how to find you again. And even though that stuff wasn’t real, maybe one day it
would
be – or already was, on another planet.
So there wasn’t much Edie Evans didn’t know about aliens.
And she was pretty sure that they didn’t have itchy blankets.
Edie started to worry then, started to be afraid that she had been taken by a human being, and for another reason entirely.
She knew about those things too.
But before that fear could properly dig its claws into Edie’s fertile imagination, a light went on – and an alien walked into the room.
MARVEL GOT ANNA
Buck a cup of tea from the machine. This time he made sure it was tea, because that’s what she had asked for.
‘Thank you,’ she said softly when he put it on the desk in front of her.
‘Do you want something to eat?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
Marvel had brought Aguda into the room with them. Partly because she was a woman, which might be useful, and partly because he was grudgingly impressed by the way she’d handled things so far. Handled herself and handled other people.
Even hanging up on him made sense now, with the benefit of hindsight.
Aguda spoke carefully to Anna. ‘Do you want me to call someone to come and fetch the … baby?’
Anna hesitated, then shook her head and looked at the table top. ‘I don’t trust James,’ she said. ‘Not with children.’
Aguda shot a quizzical glance at Marvel, who sat down opposite Anna, wincing at the pain in his knee and his groin.
Like everything else on this case, he wasn’t sure where to start. He wasn’t even sure which case he was working on.
Did Anna Buck know that Edie Evans was in the photo of Sandra and Mitzi? Was she a dumb stooge in the opening gambit of a cruel negotiation? Or an unlikely mastermind? Each option had a million implications and permutations – all built on the bizarre quicksand of a five-by-seven snapshot carried into his world by a crazy woman and her phony baby.
Whatever the answer, Marvel needed to know what the hell was going on. And if that meant being all touchy-feely with a nutcase while he found out what she had to tell him, then he was prepared to do it.
For Edie Evans.
The photograph lay on the table between them, starting to curl at the edges now that it was drying out.
‘This photo …’ Marvel started, then looked at the picture and stopped.
Every time he saw it, it hit him again.
Edie was the third person along, behind the blue rope. Her face was turned away from the camera, and even if it hadn’t been, it would have been too blurred to be identified as anything more than a girl by almost anybody else.
But Marvel
knew
it was her. He’d spent a year learning Edie Evans. A year learning her shape. The way she stood. How her hair hung, pushed behind that one sticky-out ear. He knew her like a parent, with his
gut
. And when he’d studied the photo more closely, the strange, abstract, angular
thing
glimpsed between the hazy legs of the people had suddenly become Edie’s bicycle – lying in the grass behind her.
It had almost brought tears to his eyes to see it there.
He thought he had exhausted the evidence in the Edie Evans case. He’d been over it so often he knew it by heart. It had become meaningless with repetition.
But this was
new
.
Out of nowhere – a tiny spark that might illuminate everything.
And it had come in a photo of Sandra Clyde and her lost poodle, Mitzi.
John Marvel didn’t believe in coincidence any more than he believed in global warming, and the convergence of the two cases made him deeply suspicious.
But it also made him feel like the very start of being drunk: foolish and disorientated.
‘Tell me about this photo.’
‘It’s of this woman, Sandra, and her dog.’
‘Do you recognize anyone else in the picture?’
She frowned. ‘There isn’t anyone else in the picture.’
‘Do you know where it was taken?’
‘No.’
‘Or when?’
‘No.’
‘And where did you get it?’
‘From Sandra. A few weeks ago. At the church.’
‘Did you speak to anybody about it?’
‘No.’
‘Nobody from the church?’
‘About the photo? No.’
Aguda interrupted:. ‘May I see it, sir?’
Marvel nodded and she slid the photo across the table and bent closely over it.
He turned his attention back to Anna Buck. ‘You called Sandra earlier today. Why?’
She shrugged. ‘I told you already. On the phone. It sounds stupid now.’
‘Tell me again.’
There was a long, reluctant silence before Anna said haltingly, ‘I saw … things. Because of the photo. I think I did, anyway. I wanted to see if they meant anything to her, in case it would help her to find her dog, because my son—’