Authors: Belinda Bauer
‘
What?
’
‘And she’s not in any of the other copies. She’s only in yours.’
Anna’s scalp prickled. ‘I … I don’t … has it bee ….’
‘Doctored? Tampered with? Manipulated?’ Marvel shrugged. ‘Our lab says no.’
‘Then how?’ she said. ‘How can that be?’
‘It can’t be,’ said Marvel, and slowly stubbed out his cigarette in the saucer. ‘
That
’s the impossible bit.’
Anna’s hand made an involuntary movement towards the photo, but she stopped herself.
She had to see, but she didn’t want to look.
Marvel spoke again, choosing his words carefully. ‘But then I thought of something else Latham said to me … He said the dead are in control. He said the
dead
choose what they show. And who they show it to. And that made me think … Maybe Edie wanted to show these things to
you
. Maybe she knew
you
would be the best person to see what she wanted to show you. Maybe because of Daniel. Maybe that’s why she knew you would pay attention. And maybe that’s why I stopped you jumping off Bickley Bridge. Shit, I don’t know. It’s crazy and I’m drunk, and all I know for
sure
is that they’re closing the case and abandoning Edie, and so
now
… Now I’m ready to believe in something. In anything …’
Anna flinched as Marvel took her hand and she thought of Latham doing the same that night at the church, when she was the one doing the begging.
He spoke in a desperate rush. ‘
Please
, Mrs Buck. If she’s dead, I want to know. But if she’s alive … If she’s alive I
have
to find her. And you’re my only hope.
Please
.’
They sat at opposite sides of the small kitchen table, the impossible photograph between them, while the clock on the oven ticked quietly and a bus pulled away from the stop outside.
Finally, in a very small voice, Anna said, ‘Can you get me a glass of water, please?’
James was rolling drunk, so he might have fallen over anyway.
He took two strides into the kitchen in his socks and skidded over backwards with his feet in the air.
The hand he put out to break his fall splashed down beside him like a belly flop from a high board.
The kitchen was swimming in water.
‘Shit!’ he said, as he lay on his back with his hair all cold and wet.
He could hear water running from somewhere, so he stayed there, taking a moment to examine the ceiling for leaks, but it seemed to be fine.
He wallowed about on his side and his elbows and his knees, before finally getting back to his feet.
The kitchen tap had been left open so far that the recoil was splashing the walls and the window. The plug wasn’t in the sink, but despite that, the plughole and the overflow had no chance of coping with the sheer volume of water pounding down into it.
‘Fuck!’ he said angrily and paddled across the floor and turned off the tap.
Then he looked around.
Nothing else seemed to be wrong. The kitchen was otherwise as clean and tidy as it always was.
‘Anna!’ he shouted.
He crossed to the living room. So had the water, and the carpet was like a sponge.
‘
Anna!
Jesus Christ.
Anna!
’
She was asleep in their bed, curled on her side with her knees drawn up.
James tugged the covers off her. She was fully clothed and soaking wet.
‘Anna! What the bloody hell happened in the kitchen?’
Anna woke slowly with a vacant look in her eyes. ‘What?’ she said thickly.
‘What happened? In the kitchen?’
Anna looked at the bedroom doorway as if to remind herself where the kitchen was. ‘The police came,’ she told him, still not fully awake. ‘They wanted to read my mind.’
EDIE THOUGHT ABOUT
taps.
In particular she thought about the garden tap. The one that leaked every summer when Dad put the hosepipe on it.
Every summer was the same. Once the rain had stopped for long enough for the garden to need watering, Dad got the hose out of the shed and fixed it to the tap.
Then every summer he remembered he hadn’t fixed the tap. As soon as he turned it on, some water went in the hosepipe, but some water also came out of the handle where you turned the tap on.
Every summer Dad said, ‘Washer’s gone. I’ll have to fix that.’
Edie was twelve and she could remember that happening when she was eight
at least
. So that was four years. Four summers. Four summers when water that should have been going down the hosepipe and to the flowers was instead bubbling out of the gaps in the metal and dribbling on to the concrete next to the house.
Wasted.
Curled up on the camp bed, Edie thought of that tap all the time. She thought of kneeling beside it and turning the handle and watching the water squeeze through the gaps. She thought of touching her tongue to the cold metal and feeling the tiny pressure of the flow on her tongue. She thought of waiting until her mouth was half full and then opening her throat to allow the water to trickle gently down her gullet and into her stomach. She imagined the way it would feel spreading through her whole dry, wasting body, making her plump and strong and happy with water.
Happy with water.
She checked the jug again.
It was dry.
Her tummy cramped in want, and she dropped the jug and it broke into icy shards.
Dry icy shards.
When she wasn’t thinking about taps, Edie thought about Peter. She thought about her mouse often now. She thought that as soon as she was back home, she would set him free. She’d only been here for a few days or weeks. Or maybe months, it was hard to tell – but Peter had spent his whole life in a cage.
He coped well with it. In many ways Edie thought he would have made a better astronaut than she was. He ran in his wheel and he hid in his cardboard tubes and climbed his little ladders. He cleaned his whiskers and ran his tiny pink hands over his eyes in that way that made him look so cute and human. He burrowed into the clean shavings and made a nest, and chose the sunflower seeds first from his food bowl, before eating the pellets and then those weird yellow flakes.
Peter kept himself busy.
Edie raised her head a little and looked around the spartan room. A bed, a poo bucket, a strip light, in a room that was barely bigger than a cupboard. Even Peter would have a hard time making much of it.
She got off her bed and nearly fell. She was a lot more tired than the last time she had left it.
She knelt and pulled the carrier bags from under the bed. There were great handfuls of black and brown and dark blue; the few reds and yellows were long gone, and Edie sifted through the rest, searching for the last stubs of maroon and purple.
The sound of the crayons was comforting – a soft, hypnotic clicking as they rolled off her palms and tumbled back into the bags.
For a while she just sat and did that, not really thinking about anything but the sound and the dull feel of the wax sticks falling through her cupped hands.
Space isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The thought caught in the back of Edie’s throat and made her feel like crying.
Then another much better thought popped into her head and she giggled out loud with the fun of it, although the giggle came out all dry and soundless.
She picked up one of the bags and walked unsteadily to the wall opposite the bed, where she had drawn her bookshelf and Captain Kirk. She selected a dark-blue crayon that was almost complete and stood for a moment, judging the space and the approach. Where to start? How to proceed? There was no going back really – even on these smooth cement walls, it took ages to scrape mistakes off with a thumbnail.
Edie’s tongue poked out a little from between her lips, the way it always did when she was thinking really hard. She was thinking so hard that she had forgotten how dry she was.
She didn’t take long to decide; when it came, the idea was so perfect that she really only needed to step forward and reach out her arm and press the blunt point of the blue crayon against the wall.
Then, with one big, satisfying loop that sent a little thrill up the back of her neck, Edie Evans started to draw herself an escape hatch.
JAMES COULDN’T REMEMBER
the last time he had been this angry. He leaned hard on the heavy glass door to the police station and looked around, spoiling for a fight. There was a little window in one wall, like a Tube station ticket office, and behind the window was a police officer.
‘I want to make a complaint,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the woman. ‘What about?’
‘About some copper who’s been bothering my wife.’
‘OK,’ said the officer, pulling a pad of plain paper towards her. ‘Can you give me your name, please?’
James told her his name, and his age and address. And the name of his wife.
The officer tapped her pen on the paper for a moment. ‘And do you know the name of the officer involved, sir?’
‘Marvel,’ said James.
She wrote it down. Very slowly.
‘And what is the nature of your complaint, sir?’
‘This arsehole has been coming round my flat and forcing my wife to help him on a case. She’s already stressed. My son is missing and she’s mentally not so great, you know? The last thing she needs is this …
prick
coming round and making her do stuff that’s making her worse!’
The officer nodded up at him. ‘I understand, sir, but please could you watch your language? There’s no call for it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said James. ‘I’m sorry. But I got home last night and my kitchen was flooded because my wife didn’t know what she was doing, because this idiot had come round and upset her so much.’
‘I understand, sir,’ nodded the woman.
‘
I
’m upset too,’ said James. ‘My wife’s very fragile. She just doesn’t need it.
We
don’t need it, and I want something done. I don’t want this man coming round again. I want him to leave us alone.’
‘Absolutely, sir,’ she said, and James felt the tension starting to leave his body. The officer was very calming, and now that he was calmer, he looked at her properly for the first time. She was young and attractive, with big, intelligent eyes that made him instinctively trust that she would do the right thing.
‘You take a seat, sir, and I’ll see how I can help you with this, OK?’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to fill in a form or something?’
‘No, sir,’ she said. ‘You have a seat.’
There
was
a form to fill in, but Emily Aguda didn’t give it to James Buck.
She still might. Procedurally speaking, it was the right thing to do and so she wasn’t ruling it out. But she didn’t want to do anything that couldn’t be reversed.
She got up from her desk at the window, met eyes with Sergeant Caxton, who would relieve her for five minutes, and left the office behind the window.
She didn’t go far. After going through the double doors into the corridor that led to the cells and the cafeteria, Aguda leaned against the wall and thought about everything she knew about Anna Buck and James Buck and the Edie Evans case.
There wasn’t a lot, but she figured every detail was important in the decision she had to make.
For a start, Anna Buck was crazy.
Mentally fragile
was as kind as you could be about it, so Aguda reasoned from that that James Buck was kind and loved his wife. And a man who loved his wife, even though she was crazy, couldn’t be all bad, could he? Couldn’t be a killer of children, surely? Sure, she had gone to see Marvel about her suspicions over James Buck, but now that she had met him – albeit briefly – she thought those suspicions were probably wrong. After all, if Anna Buck’s idea of a baby was that hideous thing with a battery-run heart, then her concerns over her husband’s childcare skills were probably similarly skewed. James Buck could be Father of the Year for all Aguda knew.
But if he were a dangerous man, Aguda couldn’t see how it would help the Edie Evans case or Anna Buck’s lost son if the first official police contact with James Buck was in the form of a complaint. That would complicate everything – especially as Aguda had a feeling that it was a complaint that would be upheld. She had no doubt that Marvel had been round to James Buck’s flat and had bothered the hell out of his wife. No doubt whatsoever. However good the reason, that was pretty outrageous behaviour, and Aguda seriously doubted that Buck’s complaint would be the first one that had ever been made against DCI Marvel. The man was too abrasive, too rude, too much of a prick to have escaped previous brushes with the disciplinary system.
Thanks to her role as a glorified force mascot, Aguda recognized that her opinion on all these scores was less scientific deduction and more feminine intuition. It wasn’t something she was about to write up in a report, but it felt like common sense.
And that was her favourite of all the senses …
So she beckoned James Buck off the bench and led him up to the second floor, past the drinks machine, through the Jenga and to the desk in the far corner, and introduced him to a surprised-looking DCI John Marvel.
Then she left.
As her mother used to say,
Let nature run its course
.
Marvel and James Buck both looked a little embarrassed.
Aguda had merely introduced one to the other and walked away, but she might as well have made them shake hands and told them to play nice.
In awkward silence, they watched her leave.
Then Buck said, ‘If you’re Marvel, I came here to complain about you.’
‘Yeah?’ said Marvel. He was angry with Aguda for bringing the man right to him, when his instinct was always to keep trouble as far away from himself as was humanly possible. Maybe she hadn’t understood that this man had wanted to make a complaint
about
him, not
to
him. Idiot.
But James Buck was here now, looking sullen, and Marvel would have to make the best of a bad job. He gestured to the empty chair at the next desk. ‘Have a seat,’ he said, ‘and complain away.’