Authors: Belinda Bauer
He smiled. He couldn’t help it. He was a child again – and then, just for a moment, he was overwhelmed by the sense of the past and the future colliding. Right here, in his very own hands – the hands of the child he had been and the man he continued to be, existing simultaneously.
For a split second the understanding was huge and brilliant, exploding like a supernova in his head, illuminating
everything
.
Then the wonder of it slid through his fingers like silk, and he was left thinking stupidly of lottery numbers.
Marvel sighed and dropped the papers back into the skip. He wondered if the mothers who cheerfully left their children at TiggerTime ever came round the back to look at the arse-end where all the crap was.
A door opened at the back of the playschool and Marvel withdrew quietly. He didn’t want to make contact on any terms but his own.
He walked down the dirty alleyway. The side away from the houses was bordered by a tall metal fence above the steep drop down the embankment to the railway line. He stopped at the back of Number 148. There wasn’t much to see. There was no garden, just a brick-walled yard. The downstairs windows had metal grilles across them.
He didn’t know what he’d expected to find. Nothing, really. But it was always worth seeing things from every possible angle.
He went back down the alleyway, where a monster drip of water caught him right on the crown. When he put a hand up to wipe it away, he found what felt like the beginning of a bald spot.
Great. He’d peaked.
He went round the front of the building and knocked on the door of the flat.
Anna Buck opened the door, already suspicious – as if she’d seen him snooping, although he doubted she had.
‘Hello, Mrs Buck,’ he said brusquely. ‘Can you spare a minute, please?’
She frowned. He could see she didn’t want to say yes, but he had saved her life, and British people found it so hard to say no at the best of times.
A nation hogtied by its own social graces.
So, inevitably, Anna Buck said ‘OK,’ and opened the door.
The flat was a mess. A blue mess. Someone had thrown a lot of paint around. It was on the taps and the sink mostly, but there were drips across the floor too – through the living room and to a door that Marvel assumed was a bedroom.
There was a bucket filled with blue water next to the kitchen door. Anna Buck had been cleaning up.
‘What happened here?’ said Marvel.
‘I spilled some paint.’
‘I see that,’ he said, but she didn’t volunteer any more.
‘Couldn’t have a cup of tea, could I, Mrs Buck?’
She hesitated. She was desperate not to encourage him, he could tell, but she was the host and she had to be hospitable.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said neutrally.
‘Thank you.’ He sat at the kitchen table. The chair was so cheap he felt it give a little under his arse.
He waited until she had made the tea, so that she couldn’t stop halfway through and ask him to leave. Once he had the tea, the rules said he must be allowed to finish it.
She put it down in front of him, along with a bag of sugar, and he noticed her hands were blue too – right into the sleeves of her cardigan.
Marvel stirred two spoons of sugar slowly into his tea.
Anna Buck didn’t sit down. She stood nervously by the sink.
‘I noticed the playschool a few doors down,’ said Marvel. ‘Did Daniel go there?’
‘TiggerTime? Yes.’
‘Nice place?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘Edie Evans’s little brother used to go there. Frankie. Bit older than Daniel.’
Anna Buck gave a small frown and then said, ‘I don’t think he was there when Daniel was. I don’t remember a Frankie.’
‘No?’ he said, and sipped his weak tea. She hadn’t left the bag in long enough. Wanted him out of there.
‘Did you take him there every morning, or did your husband?’
‘I did. After James went to work.’
‘And you’d pick him up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Daniel like it?’
‘Loved it. He grew up so much.’ She smiled. Then she stepped to the fridge and slid two pictures from under a magnet. ‘These are his. He was always drawing and colouring in. His teacher said he was good.’
Marvel stared down at the scribbles on the paper. Might have been a house, might have been a fish. Parents were delusional; teachers
must
know it.
‘Very good,’ he said, because he needed her to want to help him. ‘Childcare’s pricey nowadays, isn’t it?’
‘And how,’ she said. ‘I went back to work to pay for it. I mean, I loved having Daniel at home, but children need to socialize, don’t they?’
‘Yes,’ said Marvel, although he’d never felt much need for it himself.
‘Do you have children?’ she asked.
‘No.’
That wasn’t true, but he didn’t want to answer awkward questions. Names, ages.
Whereabouts.
So he said, ‘Where did you work?’
‘I was a secretary at a little cosmetics firm in Penge. Part time, but it was enough.’
‘Nice,’ said Marvel, although he imagined it was shit. Typing, tea-making, slapping the boss’s hand off her thigh. ‘And your husband? Where does he work?’
‘Next door. At the garage.’
‘Mechanic, is he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good money?’
‘No.’
‘That’s a shame.’
She shrugged. ‘Who makes good money nowadays?’
‘Exactly,’ he agreed. Then he tapped the camera and said, ‘He doesn’t know anything about cameras, does he? I’m taking this to be fixed.’
She shook her head, uninterested, and stared at his cup, as if willing him to drink up and get out.
Marvel changed tack. ‘Must have been hard on him when you lost Daniel.’ It wasn’t the right time to ask the question, but sometimes that could
make
it the right time.
‘I didn’t lose Daniel,’ she snapped. ‘
He
did.’
Jackpot
.
‘Really?’ he said, trying to sound casual. ‘What happened?’
‘James left the door open. Daniel ran outside.’
It wasn’t what Marvel had been hoping for. He’d wanted to hear that James Buck had never loved his son anyway, or that he’d been a discomfortingly strict disciplinarian. Even just the impression that there was a terrible secret …
Something
he could hang a motive on.
He suddenly felt a little sorry for James Buck. Leaving a door open didn’t seem like much of a crime.
‘I’m sure he feels terrible,’ he said.
‘He should.’
Marvel was taken aback by the chill in her voice. ‘He didn’t do it deliberately, did he?’
Anna made a face. ‘Does it matter?’
‘It would matter to me.’
‘Well, not to me,’ she said. ‘I miss Daniel too much for it not to
matter
—’
She stopped talking and Marvel could see the tears fizzing close to her surface.
He changed the subject. ‘Could I use the bathroom?’
She pointed through the living room and said, ‘You can’t miss it.’
Before he’d even left the kitchen she was filling a new bucket of warm water, ready for him to be gone.
Marvel stopped short of the bathroom, glanced behind him, and opened the door to what he assumed was a bedroom instead.
‘Bloody
hell
!’
Four huge blue circles were scrawled across two walls. The rest of the room was spattered with paint. The doll thing was in a carry-cot on the single bed, but even the cot was splashed with blue. For some reason that disturbed Marvel almost as much as the walls, even though he knew now that it wasn’t a real baby.
‘I had to do them,’ Anna Buck said from the door.
He started to say he’d opened the wrong door, but she didn’t seem to care that he was in here and not the bathroom. She sat on the bed with her hands upturned on her lap, and spoke just above a whisper. ‘It made a bit of a mess, but everything is circles, so I had to really.’
Richard Latham’s words popped back into Marvel’s head:
Life’s a circle and a circle never ends
.
Had Latham put her up to this too? First the photo, now the circles. Marvel couldn’t see the angle, but there had to be a connection …
‘What did Mr Latham tell you about the garden, Mrs Buck?’
‘Mr who?’
‘Richard Latham. The medium. From the church.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and immediately looked puzzled. ‘I didn’t tell him about the garden, only about Daniel.’
‘No, I said, what did
he
tell
you
?’
She shook her head. ‘He said he couldn’t help me,’ she said sadly. ‘He wouldn’t even look at Daniel’s photo.’
She had misunderstood him – and Marvel wasn’t sure it was deliberate. Richard Latham hadn’t told her about the garden. Marvel was convinced of it now. He could see no chink in the woman, apart from the obvious madness. She seemed to have no interest in Richard Latham now that he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – help her. She had no interest in anything but her lost child.
She stared dully into the cot and said, ‘Sometimes I hear him cry, you know? Sometimes I wake up and run in here and it’s like I can hear—’
She stopped talking and Marvel didn’t start, and in the silence that ensued, Marvel became aware of the faint sound of traffic in the street, and of music seeping from somewhere. The garage, most likely.
Anna was looking at her blue hands now, as if she was seeing them for the first time. Marvel watched her open them out and turn them over, peering at the darker lines around her nails and in the folds of her knuckles.
Suddenly John Marvel felt like an intruder. If Anna Buck was crazy, she was crazy for all her own reasons. And they were reasons that were wholly understandable, and unbearably sad.
‘I should go,’ he said.
‘OK,’ she said.
‘Thanks for the tea.’
She nodded almost imperceptibly. She showed no signs of standing up or seeing him out. She didn’t even watch him go – her eyes were fixed now on the four blue circles.
‘Will you be OK?’ he asked, and actually listened for the answer.
She turned and gave him a small, grateful smile. ‘When Daniel comes home, everything will be fine.’
He stood there, not knowing how to answer her. Finally he simply said, ‘Yes.’
As he left the room, she said, ‘Did you find the bell?’
‘Excuse me?’ Marvel stopped and turned to look at her again.
‘The bicycle bell,’ said Anna dreamily, without turning her face towards him. ‘In the drawing I did of the garden. It’s on the window-sill.’
By the time he next had a cogent thought, Marvel was outside in his car and heading back to the station.
He wasn’t even sure he’d said goodbye.
Edie Evans’s bicycle was exactly where Marvel had last seen it a year ago – leaning against the back wall of the evidence room, at the end of a canyon of ceiling-high metal shelving packed with evidence in clear bags and wire baskets.
He peeled back the plastic sheeting that covered it and felt his chest knot up.
The back wheel was still buckled, the chain still drooped. The bike’s only visitors in a year had been small spiders that had woven the wheels into delicate doilies.
The chrome handlebars were still pitted with rust and dusted with print powder.
Mr Evans had told him Edie never had a bell. He’d told Marvel it was an old bike and covered in scratches.
He was not lying – about the scratches, at least.
But these scratches – these
particular
scratches – were not old. Not as old as the other ones on the bike, anyway. They were an inch or so from the right handgrip, exactly where a bell would be, and some of the scratches were long and almost parallel, as if the clamp had been twisted back and forth on the bars. Some of them had actually cut through old pimples of rust, and trailed it minutely across the surface.
There was no bell on the bike.
But there was definitely a place where a bell had been.
EDIE EVANS PICKED
a lamppost and pedalled towards it as fast as she possibly could. Sometimes she would launch into space if only she got there fast enough – her front wheel lifting and people’s eyes popping as they realized that what they had thought was a girl on a bicycle was actually a brave and skilled astronaut on an experimental one-man rocket. Other times she was winning the Tour de France. On a BMX! The crowds called her name and people lifted her on to their shoulders – and more cheering people lifted her little black-and-white bike on to
their
shoulders – and they were both carried through the streets of Paris through fountains of champagne.
Edie skidded to a juddering halt just beyond the lamppost, spun the bike around in an arc and pulled a little wheelie. Only a small one because she’d gone over backwards once and nearly knocked herself out, and that was on grass, not pavement.
While she waited for her mother to catch up, she flipped up her visor and gave a TV interview in fluent French, even though the only French she knew was
Frère Jacques
.
‘
Dormez vous
,’ she said with a dismissive wave, to show it had been barely an effort at all. And when the interviewer in a beret asked her how it felt to win the greatest cycle race in the world as a twelve-year-old girl, she gave a Gallic shrug and said, ‘
Sonnez les matines
’ – and the crowd went wild.
Edie turned a half-circle and set off again slowly, and told Houston they needed to adjust the rocket boosters before she could make another attempt to launch.
As she navigated a series of potholes shaped like moon craters, a man fell into step beside her.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hello,’ said Edie. She knew not to speak to strangers, but she was on a bicycle and there were loads of people around.
‘For you,’ he said and held out a bicycle bell.
‘Oh,’ she said uncertainly.
‘Stop,’ he said, so she did, and twisted to look behind her for her mother. She could see her coming, pushing Frankie’s buggy. Frankie was too big for a buggy really, but it was a long walk home for a four-year-old and he got stroppy when he was tired.
When Edie looked back, the man was using a screwdriver to attach the bell to her bicycle.