‘He should.’
Marvel was taken aback by the chill in her voice. ‘He didn’t do it deliberately, did he?’
Anna made a face. ‘Does it matter?’
‘It would matter to me.’
‘Well, not to me,’ she said. ‘I miss Daniel too much for it not to matter—’
She stopped talking and Marvel could see the tears fizzing close to her surface.
He changed the subject. ‘Could I use the bathroom?’
She pointed through the living room and said, ‘You can’t miss it.’
Before he’d even left the kitchen she was filling a new bucket of warm water, ready for him to be gone.
Marvel stopped short of the bathroom, glanced behind him, and opened the door to what he assumed was a bedroom instead.
‘Bloody hell!’
Four huge blue circles were scrawled across two walls. The rest of the room was spattered with paint. The doll thing was in a carry-cot on the single bed, but even the cot was splashed with blue. For some reason that disturbed Marvel almost as much as the walls, even though he knew now that it wasn’t a real baby.
‘I had to do them,’ Anna Buck said from the door.
He started to say he’d opened the wrong door, but she didn’t seem to care that he was in here and not the bathroom. She sat on the bed with her hands upturned on her lap, and spoke just above a whisper. ‘It made a bit of a mess, but everything is circles, so I had to really.’
Richard Latham’s words popped back into Marvel’s head: Life’s a circle and a circle never ends.
Had Latham put her up to this too? First the photo, now the circles. Marvel couldn’t see the angle, but there had to be a connection …
‘What did Mr Latham tell you about the garden, Mrs Buck?’
‘Mr who?’
‘Richard Latham. The medium. From the church.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and immediately looked puzzled. ‘I didn’t tell him about the garden, only about Daniel.’
‘No, I said, what did he tell you?’
She shook her head. ‘He said he couldn’t help me,’ she said sadly. ‘He wouldn’t even look at Daniel’s photo.’
She had misunderstood him – and Marvel wasn’t sure it was deliberate. Richard Latham hadn’t told her about the garden. Marvel was convinced of it now. He could see no chink in the woman, apart from the obvious madness. She seemed to have no interest in Richard Latham now that he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – help her. She had no interest in anything but her lost child.
She stared dully into the cot and said, ‘Sometimes I hear him cry, you know? Sometimes I wake up and run in here and it’s like I can hear—’
She stopped talking and Marvel didn’t start, and in the silence that ensued, Marvel became aware of the faint sound of traffic in the street, and of music seeping from somewhere. The garage, most likely.
Anna was looking at her blue hands now, as if she was seeing them for the first time. Marvel watched her open them out and turn them over, peering at the darker lines around her nails and in the folds of her knuckles.
Suddenly John Marvel felt like an intruder. If Anna Buck was crazy, she was crazy for all her own reasons. And they were reasons that were wholly understandable, and unbearably sad.
‘I should go,’ he said.
‘OK,’ she said.
‘Thanks for the tea.’
She nodded almost imperceptibly. She showed no signs of standing up or seeing him out. She didn’t even watch him go – her eyes were fixed now on the four blue circles.
‘Will you be OK?’ he asked, and actually listened for the answer.
She turned and gave him a small, grateful smile. ‘When Daniel comes home, everything will be fine.’
He stood there, not knowing how to answer her. Finally he simply said, ‘Yes.’
As he left the room, she said, ‘Did you find the bell?’
‘Excuse me?’ Marvel stopped and turned to look at her again.
‘The bicycle bell,’ said Anna dreamily, without turning her face towards him. ‘In the drawing I did of the garden. It’s on the window-sill.’
By the time he next had a cogent thought, Marvel was outside in his car and heading back to the station.
He wasn’t even sure he’d said goodbye.
Edie Evans’s bicycle was exactly where Marvel had last seen it a year ago – leaning against the back wall of the evidence room, at the end of a canyon of ceiling-high metal shelving packed with evidence in clear bags and wire baskets.
He peeled back the plastic sheeting that covered it and felt his chest knot up.
The back wheel was still buckled, the chain still drooped. The bike’s only visitors in a year had been small spiders that had woven the wheels into delicate doilies.
The chrome handlebars were still pitted with rust and dusted with print powder.
Mr Evans had told him Edie never had a bell. He’d told Marvel it was an old bike and covered in scratches.
He was not lying – about the scratches, at least.
But these scratches – these particular scratches – were not old. Not as old as the other ones on the bike, anyway. They were an inch or so from the right handgrip, exactly where a bell would be, and some of the scratches were long and almost parallel, as if the clamp had been twisted back and forth on the bars. Some of them had actually cut through old pimples of rust, and trailed it minutely across the surface.
There was no bell on the bike.
But there was definitely a place where a bell had been.
28