‘Yes,’ nodded Sandra Clyde eagerly. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Not personally,’ said Marvel. ‘But I worked on the Edie Evans case and I have to tell you, Mrs Clyde, that he was really no help at all to us. None whatsoever. A year on, and Edie’s still missing. All Mr Latham did was waste police time and possibly distract us from what might have been more fruitful lines of inquiry.’
Sandra looked crestfallen all over again.
‘Have you paid him any money?’ Marvel asked.
‘Oh no!’ she said instantly. ‘Only some little donations for the church roof.’
Marvel grunted and reddened and pretended to write something in his notebook while he gathered his thoughts.
The church roof! It sounded so … so stupid! It was so stupid, and it made him furious to think that he and Sandra Clyde had that stupidity in common. The coincidence knocked the schadenfreude right out of Marvel, so, instead of being scathing, he just said weakly, ‘Well, don’t give him any more, OK?’
Sandra bit her lip and nodded and became slightly less red in the face and the danger of tears seemed to have passed. Marvel was relieved. He was no good at riding the rollercoaster of female emotions.
‘Listen,’ he went on. ‘We’ll find Mitzi without the help of a con-man like Latham. If he or anyone at the church contacts you, claiming to have a message or a vision or a dream or anything about Mitzi, I want you to tell them you’re not interested, OK? Tell them the police are now involved in the investigation and you don’t need their help. If they don’t take no for an answer, let me deal with it.’
Sandra nodded, but looked far from convinced. ‘But if we can’t believe Richard’s visions, we’re back to square one!’
Marvel wasn’t crazy about her use of the word we. It made it sound as if they had both believed Latham’s so-called psychic visions at some point, which he absolutely never had.
‘Square one is a very good place to start,’ he said brusquely. It was a great line, he thought: like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. He’d have to remember it if he ever needed to deliver a motivational speech to G Team that went beyond ‘Do your fucking job.’
Sandra Clyde gave a tremulous smile. ‘Like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Do-Re-Mi!’
‘Of course,’ he said, although he had no idea what she was talking about, and wished she hadn’t introduced Julie effing Andrews just as he was thinking about blood and guns and Tarantino.
But he let it go. He was so exhausted by having to be nice to the Super’s wife that he just wanted to get the hell out. He closed his notebook with a flourish and got off the low sofa with surprising difficulty; Christ, the Clydes must have hydraulic knees.
Sandra Clyde showed him out.
On the doorstep she said, ‘So what happens now, Chief Inspector?’
‘We’ll take it from here,’ Marvel said, planting the seed in her head that there would be some kind of team dedicated to finding Minnie, not just him, so that if something went wrong in the future, there was someone else to blame. Someone imaginary.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said, and, without warning, the super’s wife leaned forward and gave him a big hug.
‘OK,’ he said when it was over. ‘We’ve got things in hand now.’
‘Thank you, Chief Inspector!’
He walked to his car. Normally he’d have a pool car but there had been a spate of bumps and write-offs and he’d been driving his own for a few weeks now. It was a black BMW M3, with tinted windows and Wolfrace wheels, which had once belonged to a drug-dealer called Jimmy the Fix. After Jimmy had been sent down for fourteen years, Marvel had bought it cheap from the police pound before it could go to public auction, and it was his pride and joy. He paid ten grand a year for a garage to keep it nice – and to keep it his.
Just as he pulled open the car door, Mrs Clyde called from the doorstep, ‘Ooh, wait a minute, Chief Inspector, I have something for you.’
Marvel waited, imagining cake in a tin-foil wedge.
Instead Sandra Clyde bustled out and handed him something flimsy. ‘This is for your car.’
It was a bumper sticker that read FIND MITZI. It was pink and at either end there was a heart-shaped photo of the poodle, with a bow on its head.
The bow was pink too.
In a Tarantino movie, Marvel would have pulled out a .357 Magnum and blown Mrs Clyde’s head clean off her shoulders, in an ironic pink spray.
In the movie of his own life, he took it and said, ‘Interesting.’
‘Robert has one on his car,’ smiled Mrs Clyde encouragingly. ‘And he’s given them to everyone at work.’
If Superintendent Clyde had told his wife that, it was a boldfaced lie.
‘So you should really have one,’ she added, ‘as you’re in charge of the case.’
There was no denying that annoying truth.
And, because she was standing there watching, Marvel had to peel off the backing and place the bright-pink poodle sticker on the rear bumper of Jimmy the Fix’s shiny black BMW.
That night over dinner, Debbie said brightly, ‘You should put up Wanted posters. Like in the cowboy films.’
Marvel snorted. ‘Dead or Alive?’
She nodded. ‘It would catch people’s imagination. Make them remember what she looks like. Maybe put a little cowboy hat on her,’ she mused, then quickly said, ‘No, that would be silly.’
As if Wanted posters weren’t.
Usually Debbie didn’t like to discuss his cases. Usually she got all touchy if he read a file over dinner – especially when he shifted her candles aside so he could lay out autopsy reports.
‘Not at the dinner table, John,’ she’d say. ‘It’s sick.’
‘This is my job!’ he’d snap back. ‘I don’t expect you to take an interest, but the least you could do is let me work!’
‘Well, I’m trying to eat!’
‘Eat then! Who’s stopping you?’