Trust her to enter into the spirit of things on a case that wasn’t even a murder, thought Marvel.
‘You should go to Battersea Dogs Home,’ she suggested as she helped herself to more green beans. ‘If someone found Mitzi that’s probably the first place they’d think to take her. We had a dog from Battersea when I was little. A funny old scruffy thing like a dust-bunny on legs.’
She smiled softly and added, ‘He used to drag our shoes into the garden. We’d be getting ready for school and we’d have to go hopping around in the bushes looking for our other shoe!’
Marvel thought that if a dog did that to his shoes, it would be back in the pound before it could say ‘euthanasia’. Still, he smiled because Debbie looked so happy at the memory. He hadn’t seen that look on her face for ages, and he wondered briefly whether something or somebody had upset her. Maybe someone at work. Debbie worked in some sort of community arts centre with lots of women and effete men, and they could be real bitches.
He reached out and took her hand, and she looked up in surprise and gave a small smile. Then she sighed deeply and pushed her beans around with a fork. ‘I was heartbroken when Pip died. But losing him and not knowing where he was would have been even worse.’
Marvel thought of Edie Evans and grunted his agreement around a mouthful of spaghetti Bolognese.
‘Maybe you could look on the internet,’ said Debbie.
‘For what?’
‘They have those sites where people put pictures of dogs they’ve lost or found. Doglost or Lostdog. One of them, anyway.’
‘I’m already doing that,’ said Marvel, although he wasn’t. But it sounded like a good idea. It was just as well, because when it came to finding lost dogs, Marvel realized he didn’t have many ideas of his own.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘And if you get some more copies of the photo I can give them to the girls at work.’
‘OK,’ said Marvel. Those women and other do-gooders all loved animals and children. He started to wonder whether he could hand the whole operation over to Debbie and just reap the spoils of the promotion to superintendent.
‘Anything else?’ he encouraged her.
She hummed a little while she thought, and Marvel wondered when they’d stopped being like this all the time – with Debbie interested and backing him up, and being happy to do it. Certainly, it was before she’d started making the faces that told him his feet were on the Habitat couch, or that there were photos of corpses on the kitchen table.
‘You could offer a reward,’ she mused.
‘Good idea,’ he said – even though it was redundant – because he wanted to extend the moment of mutual goodwill.
Debbie smiled again, all pleased with herself. ‘And you should put on it, no questions asked.’
13
THE NEXT FRIDAY night, Anna left the flat much more easily. She only went back inside twice, her tummy fluttering, before hurrying past the five footprints with the hood of the blue anorak blinkering her view.
She had the money.
The drizzle was slow but meant business, and by the time she reached the hall her jeans were soaked up to the shins by the spray from the wheels of the buggy.
There was a shiny new red plastic bucket under the damp patch.
Sandra wasn’t there, but otherwise the congregation was mostly the same as last week’s and the dust certainly was. Anna could feel it in her throat.
The format was the same too. Latham bouncing slowly about the stage like a Thunderbirds puppet, poking his glasses up his sweaty nose and giving living people pointless snippets of non-information from dead people.
Dad says he saw you break your heel.
Toby’s here and he wants to say everything’s going to be fine.
Caroline’s showing me you have pain in your hip.
Ugh. Anna thought Richard Latham must be communicating with the dead, because if he were making this stuff up, surely it would be more interesting?
It didn’t get better when he threw the floor open to the amateurs. The nodding-dog boy was still confused by which spirit was which, and a small woman with the ruddy nose of a cider drinker stood for a full minute, swaying back and forth without speaking into the microphone, before they realized she’d gone to sleep.
Last time it had been novel and bizarre enough to hold her attention. This week – with her new-found hope making Anna itch with impatience – it was like a slow-mo action replay of something that hadn’t been worth watching the first time around.
The only thing that had changed was Australia. Queensland now bulged slightly sideways into the dirty white Pacific ceiling. There was also a new, smaller patch on the lower right, which Anna thought might be the start of Tasmania.
There was no message from Daniel, and with every dead dullard her spirits rose. He wasn’t dead; he wasn’t dead; he wasn’t dead.
The low buzz of anticipation in her gut grew and grew until she could barely sit still. She jiggled the buggy compulsively with her foot, careless of whether Charlie was sleeping or not.
The session ended and the two ladies at the front got up to make the tea and put the biscuits on a plate.
Anna couldn’t wait any longer. She edged through the little knot of people around Richard Latham, who was telling a story about how he’d come to the aid of a Rolling Stone. A dead one, presumably.
‘Hi,’ she interrupted. ‘Can I have a consultation?’
‘A chat, you mean?’ He smiled.
‘Well, yes. But a proper one. One you pay for.’
Latham looked a little embarrassed and so did the people around him. He put down his cup of tea and pointed at the chair opposite his. ‘Why don’t you sit down and have a cup of tea and a biscuit and we’ll have a chat afterwards?’
‘OK,’ she said. She sat down, feeling the panic of having passed the point of no return. She’d done it; she’d asked. She’d even told him she’d pay, so she would be able to ask him anything she wanted to about Daniel.