Authors: Belinda Bauer
She didn’t want a bell. A rocket ship didn’t have a bell – especially not one with a picture of Mickey Mouse on it! Why was he putting a bell on her bike anyway?
But she said nothing.
He finished quickly, then rang the bell for her to show her how it worked. It was a coarse, rattling sound.
‘Good?’ he said.
It wasn’t good; it was rubbish. But Edie had been brought up to say
please
and
thank you
almost as a reflex, and so she said ‘Thank you’ and looked around again to see if there was any sign of Mum. She hoped so, because she wanted an excuse to ride on and not to have to speak to the man any more. He was friendly and full of smiles, but something about it was not right. She shouldn’t have stopped; she shouldn’t have said hello. If Mum saw, she would be cross that she’d spoken to a stranger.
Edie kept staring over her right shoulder as her mother approached with the three-wheeled buggy bumping easily over kerbs and pavement cracks, as her mind raced through all the explanations she was going to give – all the excuses – if her mother looked up and saw them.
And when she turned round again, the man had gone. She didn’t even see where.
Edie sighed in relief.
‘Hi, Edes,’ Mum smiled brightly. ‘Chain fall off?’
‘No,’ said Edie. ‘I was just waiting for you.’
‘Aww, thanks sweetheart.’
Edie rode the last fifty yards to TiggerTime slowly and close to Mum. It wasn’t very daring, but she could be Neil Armstrong again tomorrow.
Mum went to the Moon to get Frankie and Edie stayed outside, guarding the buggy, and feeling like Michael Collins. She kept looking around but the man was nowhere to be seen.
She slowly rang the bell.
All kinds of little jangly mechanical things clicked and clunked inside it, as if it was broken. It was more grinding than musical.
She rang it faster and it improved, but not much.
She wiggled it on the bar and it moved, so she wrenched it back and forth to see if she could dislodge it by force. Then Mum came out with Frankie.
She didn’t touch the bell again, or Mum might notice it and ask where it had come from.
Edie thought she should take it off before Dad came home.
MARK EVANS OPENED
the door.
‘Come in.’
Marvel had called first to say he had no news, but there was still an air of nervous apprehension about the man.
Marvel and Brady followed him down the passageway to the kitchen. Breakfast was still on the table, and Frankie was still playing with it.
‘Hello, John,’ said Carrie Evans. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘No thanks, Mrs Evans.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Brady. ‘I’ve forgotten your name.’
‘DS Brady, ma’am. Colin.’
‘Colin. Of course,’ she said, although Marvel could tell from her expression that she had not remembered Brady’s name, nor cared to now. She was just being polite.
‘Hi,’ said Frankie, and they both said hi back to him.
Then the four of them stood in the centre of the kitchen, held there by tension. The Evanses looked less haggard than the last time Marvel had seen them, but that expression of tense not-knowing put ten years on a face overnight, and Marvel had never seen it completely reversed, not even on those rare occasions when the result was a home win.
He took three photos from a card-backed envelope and laid them face-up on the counter. ‘Mr Evans, do you recognize any of these people?’
Mr and Mrs Evans looked down at them.
‘Well, we remember Richard, of course,’ said Mark.
‘From the case?’
‘And the church,’ said Carrie. ‘I went a couple of times.’
‘Before or after Edie disappeared?’
‘After,’ she said.
‘I didn’t realize that,’ said Marvel, wondering why that wasn’t in the file.
‘Yes,’ said Carrie. ‘It was me who suggested asking him for help.’
That was why. DS Short had claimed it was her idea, but then it had backfired on her. Maybe that was why she’d gone off and got herself pregnant and stung the force for leave
and
pay.
‘I’m not really a believer,’ Carrie Evans went on, ‘but you’re desperate, you know? You want to believe in
something
.’ She shrugged her narrow shoulders and looked out of the kitchen window.
‘Did Mr Latham ever come to the house?’
‘No,’ said Mark Evans, and when Marvel looked at his wife she also turned and shook her head.
‘He wasn’t a friend. Just a straw to clutch at.’
Marvel nodded. ‘And you don’t know these two?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Mark.
‘Take your time,’ Marvel said.
They did, while the kitchen clock ticked, and Frankie dribbled milk back into his Shredded Wheat.
‘They’re not the best pictures in the world,’ said Carrie Evans. Marvel had taken them both. The Polaroid of Anna Buck and the profile shot of her husband.
Mark and Carrie Evans both shook their heads.
Then Marvel showed them the photo DCI Lloyd had sent over. Daniel Buck in a Transformers T-shirt, riding a Trafalgar Square lion.
‘This is Daniel Buck. He attended TiggerTime too, and went missing in November.’
The Evanses pored over the photo for far longer than it must have taken for them to know that they didn’t recognize him. Marvel understood the desperation. That need to find a connection, almost
willing
the fragments of the mystery to come together and form a picture they could understand.
He knew they had nothing to tell him, long before they said they were sorry.
Marvel picked up all the photos and put them back in the card-backed envelope.
‘How are they connected to Edie?’ said Carrie suspiciously.
‘I’m not sure they are,’ said Marvel. ‘But we are always alert to anything that might be.’
‘Thank you,’ said Carrie. ‘We appreciate it.’ She took her husband’s arm and he nodded his agreement.
Marvel glanced at the kitchen ceiling. ‘Would you mind if we had a quick look in Edie’s room?’
‘Of course,’ said Carrie.
‘Why?’ said Mark.
‘Just to refresh my memory,’ Marvel blocked. He wasn’t going to tell Mark Evans why they were there. He told himself it was a precaution. After all, Mr Evans was the one who had said there was no bell, so he wasn’t going to reveal right up front that they were interested in finding one.
Just in case.
He also wasn’t going to confess that he’d been sent to find a bicycle bell seen in a vision by a certifiable nutcase.
He hadn’t even told Brady that they were here because of Anna Buck.
‘Of course,’ said Mark.
‘Thank you,’ said Marvel. ‘We won’t be long.’
Evans nodded and sighed and gestured back towards the stairs. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know where it is.’
Marvel did.
The bedroom was exactly as he remembered it.
He stood at the door and looked around while he wiggled his fingers into the powdered latex gloves.
The same posters and pictures, the same books on the shelves, the same mishmash of tomboy toys, the same mouse running circles in the same wheel.
He walked across the room towards the old-fashioned sash window.
‘Where shall I start, sir?’ said Brady, but Marvel didn’t answer him.
About six feet from the window, a strange, tingling feeling came over John Marvel.
Weird
.
The human brain was hard-wired to notice the slightest anomaly, the tiniest deviation from the norm. The scar on the face, the limp in the gait, the flaw speeding by on the factory conveyor belt.
But sometimes the brain caught a glimpse of something so
weird
that it had to take a second look to make sure.
He backed up a few paces, then reached into his pocket and took out the sketch that Anna Buck had done of the garden through the window. Then very slowly he walked forward again until his hips were almost against the window-sill.
‘Sir?’ said Brady again, still waiting for instructions. ‘Where shall I start?’
Marvel ignored him and very slowly bent his knees.
Too low.
He raised himself up, pressing the wall for support, half-squatting, thinking of the super and his wife and their piston joints, until he reached the perfect height.
The height of Edie Evans.
A cold shiver ran up his back.
‘Sir?’
Marvel held the sketch out in front of him; from this height, the perspective matched perfectly. The old wooden window frame, the sweep of the flower beds. Even the dark, scribbled areas, which Marvel now saw were the walls at either side of the window, and the trees beyond the garden.
It was amateurish, but it was all absolutely
right
.
‘Here,’ he said softly. ‘We start here.’
The thing he had thought was a flower inside the room was on the right bottom corner of the window frame that Anna Buck had sketched. Marvel looked down at the right corner of the windowsill. It was old and broad, and had cracked as if it had split along the grain. He pressed his fingers into the wood alongside the crack and it tilted downwards, opening a dark triangle in the sill.
Marvel was blocking the light as he tried to peer into the space, so he reached in blind, hoping nothing bit him. His beefy fingers barely fit through the gap, but he managed to pinch something between two fingers and to lift it out, dangling like a prize from a seaside arcade machine, and drop it into his other hand.
It was a Mickey Mouse bicycle bell.
Was it possible? He was holding it in his hand, but still Marvel wasn’t sure it was
possible
.
His mind was almost completely rational when he was sober, and he had been sober for a long time now, so he struggled with the irrationality of finding the bell exactly where Anna Buck had said it would be.
She must have been here; it was the only explanation. She must have seen the view from Edie Evans’s bedroom window, and hidden the bell for them to find. Maybe Richard Latham
had
been here and told Anna Buck about it?
Or had somebody been in Edie’s bedroom for even more criminal reasons?
But who? James Buck, who wasn’t to be trusted with children? Mark Evans, who had insisted that the bell did not exist?
Marvel was suddenly bombarded with suspects and possibilities, when before he had had none. It didn’t matter. Rather too many suspects than too few. And any one of those explanations would have satisfied him; any one would have been something he could work with – follow up, write in a report, put to his super.
Live with.
The only other explanation was not rational, and Marvel shied away from it, even though it was what had led him here – to this dark crack and this shining bell.
That explanation was that Anna Buck had a psychic connection to Edie Evans, or to her killer. That she possessed mystical powers and had the secrets of the universe at her fingertips.
When she wasn’t trying to jump in front of a train, of course.
Or breastfeeding a fucking
doll
.
‘Oh,’ said Brady. ‘You found it.’ He sounded disappointed, as if tearing a twelve-year-old’s bedroom apart had been top of his bucket list.
‘Give me an evidence bag,’ said Marvel.
Brady opened the bag for him and he dropped the bell into it.
‘How did you know where to look, sir?’
‘Just a hunch,’ said Marvel.
JAMES BUCK WOKE
with his wife screaming beside him.
‘Get it off me! Get it
off
!’
She was thrashing crazily, slapping at her own face and head, gripping great handfuls of hair and trying to tear it out by the roots.
‘Anna!’ he shouted. ‘
Anna!
Wake up!’
She didn’t. Instead she started to punch and kick him, hysterical with terror.
James rolled out of bed, turned on the light and picked his spot.
He hit her.
Just once, but just right. An open-handed slap to the face that woke her and stopped her in the same instant.
She looked at him with wide, shocked eyes.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and burst into tears.
He got back into bed beside her, and held her while she cried. It was the first time she’d let him hold her in nearly five months. She’d lost so much weight! Everywhere James touched her, he could feel her bones through the thin, stretched skin. He hadn’t noticed; he had hardly seen her naked in all that time, but touching her now, he felt a jagged edge of fear. He’d already been worried about her mental state – what with the church and the police and the blue circles – but her physical frailty was now obvious to his hands in brutal relief.
‘What happened?’ he said next to her ear, but she was crying too hard to tell him.
But she did allow him to hold her, to stroke her inflamed cheek, to spoon up behind her and soothe her like a baby, with soft ‘shushes’ while she sobbed out her fear until she knew she was
here
and not
there
, and could speak again.
When she did, she spoke so softly that James had to lean even closer, putting his ear on her neck to hear her.
‘There was an alien,’ she said.
James didn’t laugh, she was too upset.
‘It had this metal …
thing
– like a crown with wires – and it put it on my head …’
She ended in a small whining sound and touched her own head, as if she could still feel it there, and James touched her hair gently, reassuringly, in those same places.
‘You’re safe now,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘It was only a dream.’
‘I know,’ she said again. ‘But it felt so real.’
He squeezed her, and she let him.
They lay together while the room grew light.
Anna was quiet for so long that James thought she had fallen asleep. He was close to dozing off himself when she whispered, ‘They want to know what I’m thinking.’
MARVEL LAID ALL
his new evidence before Superintendent Robert Clyde and submitted an official request to be put back on the Edie Evans case.
‘But John,’ said Clyde, ‘this isn’t evidence. This is speculation based on the supernatural rantings of a mentally disturbed woman.’