Authors: Belinda Bauer
Buck sat down angrily. ‘You came round my house and upset my wife.’
‘I’m investigating a murder,’ said Marvel. ‘I’m allowed to do stuff like that.’
‘Yeah?’ said James. ‘At nine o’clock on a Friday night? Don’t tell me that’s official!’
Marvel shrugged. ‘Justice never sleeps.’
‘Maybe, but Justice flooded my bloody kitchen.’
Marvel frowned. ‘I didn’t flood your kitchen.’
‘I get home and my wife’s soaking wet in bed and the flat’s ankle deep in bloody water!’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said Marvel. He decided not to tell James Buck about the several glass of water he’d fetched for his wife. Or about how he’d left her still gulping greedily from the kitchen tap. ‘All I know is that I went round there to ask for her help on a very serious matter—’
‘What matter?’
‘The kidnap and possible murder of a child.’
‘What would she know about that? Just because we lost our son doesn’t make us bloody CSI Bickley.’
Marvel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He didn’t want to look like a fool, but he also didn’t want this bozo taking his complaint any further. ‘Mr Buck,’ he said, ‘are you aware that your wife claims to have some psychic power?’
‘Yeah.’ To Marvel’s relief, Buck looked as uncomfortable as he himself felt about it, now that he was sober.
‘Do you believe it?’ he asked.
‘Course not,’ said Buck. ‘It’s mental. Like something out of Harry Potter.’
‘Exactly,’ said Marvel. ‘
Exactly
.’
For a second they were on the same page.
It was a shame Marvel had to turn it.
‘Except …’ he said, and opened his hands at James Buck, hoping the young man would jump at the opportunity to admit he secretly believed it after all.
‘Except what?’ said Buck suspiciously.
So Marvel sighed and told him about the photo of Edie Evans, and about the garden and the bicycle bell.
James Buck stared at him as if he were mental too. Which he’d started to wonder himself lately. ‘You saying you think she
is
psychic?’
‘I’m just saying maybe – even subconsciously – she heard something from someone who knows something about the case …’ He tailed off; it sounded so lame.
Buck looked at his hands. Then he gazed around the squad room until his eyes settled on the wall behind Marvel’s head.
‘Why have you got a photo of me up there?’
Shit
.
‘Where?’ said Marvel, even though he knew exactly where James Buck was looking. His Edie Evans montage.
Buck stood up and leaned across the desk. ‘There,’ he said. ‘One of me and one of Anna! What’s that all about? Are we under suspicion or something?’
‘No, no,’ said Marvel quickly. ‘Those are just people who might be helpful on the case I’m investigating. Which is why I’m glad you’ve come in today, Mr Buck.’
Marvel was proud of the segue. It was pretty smooth.
Not smooth enough. Buck peered more closely at the photos. ‘They’re not good pictures even.’
Everyone was a bloody critic.
Buck pointed at Richard Latham. ‘Who’s that?’
Marvel hesitated. He still had no hard evidence that Richard Latham was anything more than a fraud, and he was unlikely to find anything else, now that Edie’s case had been officially closed. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t try – even if it meant doing it in his own time. He would have to re-examine every bit of evidence by the light of Richard Latham. He’d have to comb through his interview in the file for inexplicable knowledge of Edie or her home – particularly her bedroom. But right now, all he knew for sure was that the man claimed that Edie was dead, and that he didn’t want to talk about it.
‘He’s a psychic who was called in when the girl first went missing.’
‘Another loon,’ snorted James, and sat down.
Marvel laughed and the tension relaxed a little.
‘Did Anna help you … that way then?’
Marvel hesitated.
Had she?
Had the horror that had unfolded at Anna Buck’s kitchen table helped him? Or had he been witness to madness? The kind of madness that – in another time – would have seen her in a straitjacket.
Still might.
He’d been drunk, of course, but it had all seemed so
real
. Watching Anna Buck go away into another place, another time.
Maybe even another person.
Begging for water through cracked lips, clawing at the walls as if she could pass through solid brick. Curling into a foetal position of arid pain.
All he had asked was how Edie had died.
After she’d showed him, Marvel had left Anna Buck’s home and reeled out of the flat and vomited on to the garage forecourt. Dropping to all fours so he wouldn’t splash his trousers, he had vomited and spat and vomited again, his knees wet and his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat that had made him shudder all over …
But he
had
been drunk.
Not so drunk that anyone else would notice. Not
rolling
.
But drunk, after years of being dry …
So he was careful in his reply to James Buck. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘This kind of thing is hard to quantify.’
‘Because it’s bollocks, right?’
‘Because it’s bollocks,’ said Marvel.
‘And what about me?’ said James Buck warily, nodding at the photo on the wall. ‘How can
I
be helpful?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Marvel. ‘Yet.’
Buck looked at Edie on her bicycle. ‘Is that the girl?’
‘Yes,’ said Marvel. ‘That’s Edie Evans.’
Buck looked at the picture for a good long minute, then said softly, ‘Poor kid.’
‘Yes,’ said Marvel and got up. ‘You want a coffee or something?’ he said.
‘Yeah, OK,’ said James Buck. ‘Two sugars, please.’
Marvel went to the machine. While he waited for it to rip him off in liquid form, he watched James Buck from across the room.
Despite his own suspicious nature, nothing about the man made him suspicious. He just seemed like a bloke who’d come in to defend his wife, even though he thought she was crazy. It was almost endearing.
Endearing-cum-stupid.
Marvel wouldn’t have done it. If Debbie had come home from work and told him she’d been talking to dead people, Marvel would have asked her to turn in her key.
Not so James Buck.
But he was glad now that Aguda had brought Buck up here, even if it had been by mistake. At least Marvel was pretty sure he wouldn’t be filing a complaint now. He was just as sure that James Buck couldn’t be helpful to him in any way whatsoever.
He carried the two cups back to his desk.
‘What about our boy then?’ said Buck. ‘It’s all very well us helping you with your case, but what about Daniel?’
‘Ah …’ Marvel reached into his top drawer and took out the photo of Daniel on the lion. He pinned it on the wall next to the others. ‘I took this out on a job with me,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s forgotten about Daniel, Mr Buck.’
‘Thanks,’ said Buck, and the mood in the room palpably relaxed.
‘Did Anna do those?’ Buck nodded at the drawings pinned between the photographs.
‘Yes,’ said Marvel. ‘She said they were visions.’
Buck sipped his coffee. ‘Can I see them?’
‘Sure.’ Marvel unpinned the two pieces of lined paper and laid them on the desk between them.
The garden through the window, and the weird candelabra thing with ‘88’ on it.
‘She saw the garden first,’ he explained. ‘And it turns out to be very like the view from Edie Evans’s bedroom window.’
‘Yeah?’ said James Buck.
‘And this thing here that I thought was a flower … Anna said it was a bicycle bell, and we found it right there, hidden under the wood of the window-sill.’
‘Yeah?’ Buck seemed more interested this time. ‘She painted huge circles on the walls of Daniel’s room too. Huge blue circles. Made a right mess.’
Marvel nodded; he thought it best not to admit that he knew. ‘Did she say what they might be?’
James Buck shook his head and frowned into his paper cup. ‘There are noodles in this coffee.’
‘Yeah,’ said Marvel. ‘Sometimes they mix up the soup with the other things.’
‘Oh,’ said Buck. ‘OK.’ And he went on drinking it. ‘What’s this?’
‘I don’t know what that one is either,’ said Marvel. ‘It looks like a candlestick or something. With the number “88” on it.’
Buck picked the drawing up and held it as he sipped his soup. A splayed bottom, a long kinked stem, branching out into a thick top with two things that could well have held candles.
He turned it sideways.
He turned it upside-down.
‘I know what this is,’ he said. He looked at Marvel in surprise. ‘Hey! I know what this is!
Marvel put down his cup. ‘What?’
Buck frowned at the paper. ‘But how the hell would
she
know?’
‘Know what? What
is
it?’
James looked at him, clear eyed with confidence. ‘It’s the exhaust system on Mr Knight’s Audi TT.’
‘
THERE’S VOMIT ON
the bloody forecourt!’ Brian Pigeon slammed the door of the Alfa and sought out Ang, who was skulking across the workshop with his broom.
‘There’s vomit on the forecourt!’ he shouted again. ‘I nearly drove right through it!’
‘Yes,’ said Ang, although he looked confused.
For a start, he worked from the inside out every morning, and he hadn’t seen the vomit yet.
Also, he’d never heard the word ‘vomit’.
‘Well, don’t just stand there! Get a bucket!’
‘Yes,’ said Ang. ‘I know.’
He looked around but he didn’t move.
Brian Pigeon took out his phone and shook it at him. ‘Jesus, Ang! Are you going to clean up that mess outside or am I going to call Immigration?’
He hit the Dial key.
‘Shit, no,’ said Ang and hurried towards the door with his broom.
‘Not a
broom
! A
bucket
!’
Someone answered the phone and Brian Pigeon said, ‘Hello? Immigration?’
Ang ran back to the kitchen for a bucket so fast that Brian Pigeon almost choked laughing.
‘Hello? Hi, yes – sorry about that. Brian Pigeon in Bickley here. Listen, Autolifts should be delivering this week. Are you ready to roll when I call—’
He stopped as Ang passed him with a bucket and a big roll of polishing cloth that cost four quid a metre.
‘
What are you doing?
Jesus Christ. What a complete moron … Sorry, not you. I’ll call you back.’
He tossed the phone down on the workbench and steamed towards Ang Nu, who didn’t know what he’d done wrong this time.
Marvel studied Anna Buck’s drawings as they drove to the garage. Of course, now that he thought the candlestick was actually an exhaust system, it was obvious. The splayed bottom was the engine manifold, combining smoothly into one pipe and running almost straight to the big square silencer at the back of the car. The bits he had thought were candle-holders were exhaust pipes.
The number 88 was apparently the letters BB. Buck said they stood for the makers of the custom exhaust – Billy Boat.
And the four circles were an Audi logo.
It all made sense now.
In a nonsensical kind of way.
DS Brady drove. He’d been nervous about coming at first because of the case having been closed, but when Marvel had shown him the drawing and explained the new lead, he’d been too excited to say no.
Now Marvel twisted the rear-view mirror away from Brady so he didn’t have to turn around to speak to James Buck. ‘Do you know this Mr Knight?’
‘Only from the garage. He’s rich. Bit of a dick.’
‘And you don’t know where he lives? We could go straight there.’
Buck shook his head and stared out of the rain-spattered window at row after row of small, cheap shops selling dusty cake tins, second-hand furniture and other people’s jewellery. ‘Not around here,’ he snorted.
James had caught the bus to the police station, but the ride home was a lot quicker.
That was good. He needed to speak to Anna about the drawing. He was sure he was right; he had admired that exhaust as it hung over his head on the lift in the workshop. Mikey had called him over to have a look at it because the whole thing was chromed and was the cleanest thing James had ever seen under a car. Billy Boat made exhausts for a range of top-line cars – each distinct from the other – and James remembered thinking that this single exhaust unit probably cost more than he could have earned in two months. So he was sure he was right, even without the BB insignia that confirmed that Anna hadn’t just drawn a weird, coincidental shape.
How could she know what Mr Knight’s exhaust looked like from underneath the car? She sat outside the garage all the time, but she didn’t come in.
He needed to speak to her.
He would be able to soon. The shops became their local shops – the newsagent, the playschool, the florist …
The car stopped across the road from the garage. James could see Ang scrubbing the forecourt in the drizzle. For a moment he thought he was cleaning the five footprints, but then realized he was a few yards from there.
‘Wait here a minute,’ said Marvel and got out with the sergeant.
James had no choice; the back doors didn’t open.
He watched Marvel and Brady stride purposefully across the road, their coats flapping around them in the bitter wind.
‘Oi,’ one of them said – James couldn’t see who, and the sound was too muffled to tell from inside the car with the windows up.
Ang looked up at the two men bearing down on him, and even from the fifteen yards away, James could see the expression on his face turn from mild interest to fear as he scrambled to his feet, holding the bucket, and started to back away.
‘
Shit!
’ James yanked at the locked door again and then dived over the front seats in a desperate scramble to get out.
Even as he opened the door, James saw Ang hurl the bucket at Marvel.
Then he turned and ran.
If he hadn’t run, they wouldn’t have chased him.
Marvel and Brady had no reason to chase Ang Nu, other than getting a bucket of something thrown at them. They weren’t there officially and they weren’t there for him, and if Brady hadn’t been there too – hurtling after the kid like he was storming Goose Green – Marvel would have given up before they even reached the garage door.