Authors: Belinda Bauer
‘Shut your fucking
mouth
.’
Brady and Marvel stopped laughing and stared at Richard Latham.
The man was shaking with fury, his fists gripped the edges of the table so hard that his knuckles were white, and there was spittle on his lips.
‘You shut your fucking
mouth
.’
Suddenly Marvel felt uneasy being this close to Latham. Even here in the police station, with Colin Brady by his side. There was something off-kilter about the man that he’d never noticed before. Not just his eye, not just the marionette bounce.
Something else.
Something that made him want this to end.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right. Let’s all just calm—’
‘Fuck you, Marvel! You think you’re the only one who wanted to find Edie Evans? It was just another case to you. To me it was my future on the line. My career. My whole reputation!’
Marvel looked at him coldly. ‘If your reputation depends on a lie, how much is it worth?’
‘It’s not a
lie
!’ Latham shoved his chair back hard as he got to his feet and leaned over the table. ‘It never
was
a lie!’
‘Sit down, Mr Latham,’ said Marvel coldly, and when he didn’t, he and Brady got up too, exchanging wary glances. But Richard Latham didn’t come at them. He leaned on the table, punching it with his knuckles and poking the air for emphasis.
‘I know things!’ said Latham. ‘I see things! I see
you
and I see
you
! I see you both!
Your
wife is pregnant. And
you’re
burning up in the ice and snow, with all the questions and none of the answers!’
Marvel tutted. ‘Typical.’
‘These things are true!’ shouted Latham. ‘These things are
real
!
These things are not a lie!
Oh my God! My
God
!’
He stopped suddenly to draw wheezing breath, leaning on his fists, red in the face; his glasses had slid so far down his nose they were held only by the fleshy tip. Then he slid slowly back into his chair.
The silence pulsed off the walls of the little room, making its own pressure, which Marvel could feel like a heartbeat under his eyes.
‘If you were a shut eye you’d have told me where Edie Evans was. You’d have been able to tell me what had happened to her, at the very least. But you couldn’t. And you still can’t.’ Marvel looked at him coldly. ‘Because you’re not psychic, Richard. You’re not
special
. You’re nothing but a liar and a fraud and a common thief.’
Latham started to say something, but his voice caught in his throat. He cleared it and tried again in a hoarse whisper.
‘I did find her.’
‘No you didn’t.’
‘Yes I did,’ said Latham.
He spoke with none of his previous fire, and yet Marvel felt his balls shrink into his body in a primal response.
Latham unclenched his fists and took off his glasses and sighed. He looked and sounded exhausted. He rubbed his red face and looked up into John Marvel’s eyes. ‘I found her the very first time I looked for her. The very first time I was shown her photograph.’
‘Where?’ said Marvel.
Latham looked at his hands and shook his head. Marvel leaned down and shouted in his face, ‘
Where was she?
’
Richard Latham started to cry.
‘She was already dead.’
FOR THE FIRST
time since she’d been taken, Edie Evans was really scared that somebody might hurt her.
She’d been woken by a strange, persistent warbling noise unlike anything she’d heard since her abduction – or before it.
She sat up in bed and stared at Neil Armstrong on the back of the door. Neil wouldn’t be scared. Neil would be calm.
Edie tried to be calm, and it worked. A bit.
Then the bolt on the door squeaked and she tensed up again as the warbling noise grew louder.
The door squealed open and the alien came in, holding what looked like a wire lampshade, and a plate of Mr Kipling Bakewell tarts.
Ang Nu was getting married.
He was barely fifteen but his older brothers, Chen and Po, had already been married, so he knew what to do.
He had saved up the bride price. He had chosen his bride. He had given her a gift and she had accepted it. He had followed her home ….
Then – as the Hmong tradition of
zij
dictated – he had kidnapped her.
Hmong girls understood
zij
. They understood that they would be kidnapped and stay at the groom’s home while his father and brothers negotiated a bride price with her parents. After three days – if they did not come to take her home – then the wedding would proceed, with singing and dancing and so much food that Ang still dreamed about it.
It hadn’t exactly gone the way he had expected.
On a cold and dim January morning, he had stopped Edie to tell her to get into the car, but instead of doing what he’d told her, she had pedalled away from him – as if she had forgotten all about the Mickey Mouse bell!
Ang had been confused. His bride had accepted the gift; now she must submit to the
zij
, not run away! It was embarrassing, and he had put his foot on the throttle and gone after Edie, not a little flustered.
But Mr Knight’s car was big and powerful, and Ang could barely see over the dashboard. He was only used to moving cars about on the forecourt – not driving on roads and going into second gear.
He had hit her. Not hard, but hard enough to knock her off her bicycle and on to the grassy area alongside the pavement.
Ang had got out and manhandled Edie into the back seat. He was strong for his age, but she was unconscious and so it was hard work. But that was good in one way. It gave him time to carry her bike to the bushes and throw it away. The wheel was bent and it was no good to anyone. The Mickey Mouse bell had fallen off. He looked about for it because it had cost him four pounds and was a symbol of their love, the way the spirit mask had been his father’s
zij
gift to his mother. But he couldn’t find it, and only looked briefly, before losing his nerve and driving the car back to the garage with adrenaline throbbing through his veins.
Things had already started to fall apart.
And for the first time since leaving Padong village on China’s endless south-western border, Ang Nu felt completely alone.
He had left home by accident.
Two years before, he had followed his third brother, Suav, out of their house in the dead of night, just to see where he was going.
It was only when Suav spotted him a mile away that he’d found out his brother wasn’t going back. A girl called Ka Yang had rejected his zij gift and Suav thought everybody was laughing at his shame.
In fact, that was true. Even Ang had laughed, because it had been funny to see Ka Yang hold her hands behind her back so that Suav couldn’t give her the necklace he’d made. Ever since then, Suav had been angry. He’d got into a fight with Ka Yang’s brother because of it.
‘Go back,’ Suav had told him angrily, so at first Ang had kept following him, just to be annoying.
But the first time they’d stopped to wash and eat, he’d discovered that Suav had taken his mother’s story cloth, and the spirit mask his father had given her for
zij
.
‘I’ll sell them for food,’ Suav had boasted. ‘Then they’ll be sorry.’
They had fought in the dirt and Suav had beaten him soundly. ‘Go back,’ he’d shouted again.
But even if he had been able to find his way back through the dense forest, Ang knew he could never go back now. Who in Padong would believe that he wasn’t a thief? Taking the story cloth was bad enough, but the ancestors resided in the spirit mask, and to have stolen it was sacrilege.
He could never face the shame.
And so Ang had kept an uneasy alliance with his brother through the forests, across the rivers, in the cities and on the ocean as they headed for their goal of England, where, Suav told him, money was easy to come by. He planned to make a thousand dollars and return to Padong so Ka Yang could see what a big mistake she had made.
Every night Ang prayed to the ancestors for forgiveness so that he and Suav would not go to
Dab Teb
, and every day he worked tirelessly to find them enough food so Suav wouldn’t have to sell the mask or the cloth.
As punishment, Suav had made Ang carry both.
So when the two brothers finally made it through hell and arrived in Folkestone tucked precariously on the axle of a flatbed lorry, Ang was hungry – and Suav had the bagged rice and the chocolate.
The first time the lorry stopped at lights, Ang asked for something to eat, and Suav took one hand off the chassis and reached into his shirt.
The lorry started with a jerk, and Suav toppled backwards and disappeared.
Ang didn’t even have time to call his brother’s name. One minute he was there, the next he was gone.
The next time the lorry stopped, Ang slid from his hiding place and dropped on to the wet tarmac of a foreign land. Praying fervently to the ancestors of the spirit mask, he walked all the way back to the docks.
But he never found Suav, or even the chocolate.
Only when the
zij
started so badly did Ang realize the true depth of his isolation. He hadn’t only left his home and the fields and his parents and brothers, he had left a world he understood, and which understood him.
His bride had already tried to escape the
zij
. Who was to say she would not reject him when she found out that he was completely without family? Just as Ka Yang had rejected Suav. She was asleep for now, but what would happen when she found out that he had nobody to negotiate for him? Nobody to prepare the feast? Nobody to perform the ceremony of welcome in her new home?
In desperation, Ang had tried to explain
zij
to James and Mikey, who were the closest thing he had to a family now, but his English was so bad that even
he
got confused and all they did was laugh and say that his girlfriend’s family didn’t want him in their home. Ang started to think English people were too stupid to understand
zij
. He wondered for the first time whether
Edie
understood, even though she had accepted the bell – and even though she’d thanked him for it. But Ang Nu had not survived a thirteen-month journey through
Dab Teb
without a backbone.
He would just have to make another plan.
He would have to be father, brother, uncle and – when the wedding came – mother to himself. Maybe Edie wouldn’t guess until after they were married that he was all alone in the world, and after they were married, she would see that he was a hard worker and a good husband and by then it wouldn’t matter.
So Ang had donned the spirit mask to perform the welcoming ceremony – fixing it atop his head and covering his face with a long black cloth, in the way of the shamen. Then he had taken the bride price to Edie’s home himself. He had put all the money he had saved – one hundred pounds – in an envelope he’d found in Brian’s desk. He’d posted it through the door before dawn and run away before anyone could see his shame – that he did not have a family to negotiate for him. On the envelope, he’d let Edie’s family know where she was, as was required. He wrote the details of where they could find her in his most careful Hmong script, so they could see he had been to school and was worthy of their daughter.
Now it was their turn to act.
Edie’s father must come and get his daughter within three days.
If he did not, Edie was his.
This was Hmong.
While they’d waited nervously, Ang had treated Edie with great respect. He had brought her food every day, and water in a heavy glass jug. Even crayons from the bottom of the skip behind the nursery school, with which she had started to decorate their home. That made him happy. She was not Hmong and yet she was making something like her own story cloth already! He had chosen well. His mother and father might never see her, but he hoped the ancestors would be proud.
Edie’s father never came for her.
So Ang made a marriage hat.
He used mechanic’s wire from the stockroom and copper wire from old flexes on toasters and microwaves he found in skips. Wire was very Hmong, and Ang and his brothers had always made their own toys. Now he put every bit of skill he had learned into the marriage hat.
The frame was made of dozens of straight wires, twisted together at a central point and fanning out evenly like bicycle spokes in a spectacular symmetrical round. Each wire turned down sharply at the end to make a stiff metal fringe. Once he was sure that the frame was firm, he started to decorate it with the copper wire. He remembered the toys of his childhood and recreated them in miniature from the fine, beautiful red wire. Each twist, each turn, was lovingly wrought, each loop of copper was a conduit for an array of meaningful symbols and intricate charms. Some were copied from the story cloth, some remembered from his mother’s own marriage hat, which had had pride of place on the only shelf in the hut they called a house. Other charms told his own story – his and Suav’s – since leaving home. Little copper flying fishes; the bowl he had bought in the market – before they’d learned that a bowl just delayed food on its way to your mouth; the key to the garage, which gave Ang the freedom to come and go as he pleased, with nobody knowing or caring what he did as long as he kept the place spotlessly clean.
When Ang had finished the hat, he wished his father could see it. He wished his mother could. He was not a boastful boy, but the hat was the most beautiful thing he had ever held in his own two hands. Not every part of the
zij
and wedding had been or could be so Hmong, but the hat made up for all of it.
Three weeks after Edie stopped belonging to her father and became his property, Ang washed his clothes and his hair and went to the shop and bought brand-new cakes. They were the first food he’d paid for since coming to England, and each had white icing on top and a lucky red button in the middle.
He rolled up the story cloth and tucked it into his waistband; it would become Edie’s after today.