Mrs Buck didn’t calm down. She started to thrash against the two men holding her, shouting and trying to break free. The woman with the tattoos looked frightened; the child was in her arms, but she didn’t know what to do next.
‘It’s OK! Look, it’s OK!’ Aguda quickly crossed to the big woman and carefully took the baby from her so that the mother could see him. ‘Look! Mrs Buck, look! He’s fine. I’ll bring him to—’
She stopped halfway between the buggy and the hysterical mother, staring down at the baby in her arms.
‘Don’t hurt him! Give him to me! I have to keep him safe!’ The woman lunged and writhed, but Emily Aguda didn’t move. Instead she looked straight across the room at Marvel.
‘Sir?’ she said, and the hackles on the back of his neck went up like a dog’s.
Then she dropped the baby.
Anna Buck shrieked and Marvel moved so fast to catch the falling child that he skidded across the wet floor and fell to one knee with a furious crunch.
‘Shit!’ he yelled at Aguda. ‘What are you doing?’
The blue blanket slid to the wet floor but the baby was suspended in mid air, dangling by one arm from Aguda’s hand. Anna Buck thrashed and shouted and Marvel thought, This’ll cost us a fortune in damages.
Aguda looked down at Marvel, wide-eyed. Then she made a fist.
Marvel held up his hands to stop her. ‘No! No!’
But too late.
She rapped her knuckles on the baby’s head and Anna Buck screamed.
The baby didn’t flinch.
The baby didn’t cry.
The baby didn’t even wake up.
‘It’s not real,’ said Aguda.
‘What?’
‘It’s not real, sir.’
Marvel realized he was down on one knee in front of Aguda as if he was going to propose, and got wincingly to his feet. He hadn’t moved that fast since he was sixteen. He’d pulled a groin muscle and his knee was a ball of pain.
‘What the hell?’ he said.
Aguda held the baby out to him and he took it from her gingerly.
It was remarkable.
Even through his anger and pain, and Anna Buck’s hysteria, Marvel was amazed. Every eyelash, every vein, every fingernail. The weight of it; the way the head lolled. It was all absolutely perfect. There was even a little bubble of saliva on the wet lips. He touched it with a finger, and it was solid, like glass.
‘But … but the heart’s beating,’ he said; he could feel it under the heel of his hand.
Aguda leaned in curiously and opened the top buttons of the little blue romper suit.
‘Don’t hurt him!’ cried Anna Buck. ‘Don’t hurt him!’
They both ignored her.
Stitched to the cotton body of the baby there was a soft, heart-shaped pad, with two wires running from it, that beat a baby rhythm.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Marvel in awe. ‘That’s the creepiest thing I’ve seen in my whole fucking life.’
All around him, the thieves and the victims and the liars got slowly off their benches and moved closer to wonder at the fake baby, like fake wise men and shepherds.
Marvel let them. They’d earned the right and it could do no harm.
Mrs Buck had screamed herself out and was sobbing quietly between the two officers now.
‘Let her go,’ he told them. ‘She’s nuts.’
They did, and she rushed across the room and reclaimed the wondrous, hideous doll, picking up the wet blanket and wrapping it up, then placing it carefully back in the buggy, weeping all the time.
They all stood and watched her, stunned by the depth of her madness.
The burglar held the door open for her and she left, still crying.
When the glass door closed behind her, there was a subdued silence. Then, very slowly, things started to return to normal. Aguda began to soak up the water from the floor with paper towels; the two officers picked up the defibrillator and went back to work; the sergeant who’d taken over behind the window called out a name and the old man in the hat shuffled over to him to report whatever he’d come in to report a hundred years ago.
Marvel bent to pick up the photo he’d dropped in his skid across the floor.
‘Is this hers?’ he asked Aguda, and she looked at it and nodded sadly.
‘She said it was telling her things,’ she said. ‘Poor woman.’
He snorted. ‘Telling her how to pull a scam. The fake baby was probably a part of it.’
Sandra Clyde’s roots were showing in this photo, and he wondered idly whether Debbie dyed her hair. He wouldn’t hold it against her – not after the crazy thank-you sex they’d had when she’d come home to find the dog.
Then Marvel’s heart pitched like a rollercoaster ride. It got stuck in his throat and swelled there like a sponge.
‘Get her back,’ he choked.
‘Are you OK, sir?’
He shook his head. It felt like a heart attack but that wasn’t important. He hobbled to the benches and sat down heavily next to the woman with the tattooed arms, still staring at the photo.
‘Get her back! Get her back!’
Aguda dropped a ball of wet paper towels and yanked open the door. Through the glass he could see her running, hear her calling.
Marvel looked again at the photograph.
Not at Sandra; not at Mitzi. But beyond them to the line of blurred people caught in mid-clap.
So far, so faint, so fuzzy.
So familiar.
One of them was Edie Evans.
20
FOR A LONG while after she was abducted, Edie Evans hoped it was by aliens.
She woke from a deep sleep – still wearing her space helmet – and stared up at a dark ceiling with gleaming pipes and flared ports running along it.
She recognized it immediately; it was the ventilation system of a spaceship.
A little flower of mist blossomed and died on her visor every time she breathed out and breathed in. The close sound of her lungs filling and emptying only added to her certainty.
She was in space!
Edie was excited by it. The mist on her visor bloomed a little bigger at the thought.
She started to turn her head to look at the walls, but it hurt to do that and she winced and stayed still for a couple of minutes, blinking at the pipes.
But now her head was hurting.