‘He wasn’t a friend. Just a straw to clutch at.’
Marvel nodded. ‘And you don’t know these two?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Mark.
‘Take your time,’ Marvel said.
They did, while the kitchen clock ticked, and Frankie dribbled milk back into his Shredded Wheat.
‘They’re not the best pictures in the world,’ said Carrie Evans. Marvel had taken them both. The Polaroid of Anna Buck and the profile shot of her husband.
Mark and Carrie Evans both shook their heads.
Then Marvel showed them the photo DCI Lloyd had sent over. Daniel Buck in a Transformers T-shirt, riding a Trafalgar Square lion.
‘This is Daniel Buck. He attended TiggerTime too, and went missing in November.’
The Evanses pored over the photo for far longer than it must have taken for them to know that they didn’t recognize him. Marvel understood the desperation. That need to find a connection, almost willing the fragments of the mystery to come together and form a picture they could understand.
He knew they had nothing to tell him, long before they said they were sorry.
Marvel picked up all the photos and put them back in the card-backed envelope.
‘How are they connected to Edie?’ said Carrie suspiciously.
‘I’m not sure they are,’ said Marvel. ‘But we are always alert to anything that might be.’
‘Thank you,’ said Carrie. ‘We appreciate it.’ She took her husband’s arm and he nodded his agreement.
Marvel glanced at the kitchen ceiling. ‘Would you mind if we had a quick look in Edie’s room?’
‘Of course,’ said Carrie.
‘Why?’ said Mark.
‘Just to refresh my memory,’ Marvel blocked. He wasn’t going to tell Mark Evans why they were there. He told himself it was a precaution. After all, Mr Evans was the one who had said there was no bell, so he wasn’t going to reveal right up front that they were interested in finding one.
Just in case.
He also wasn’t going to confess that he’d been sent to find a bicycle bell seen in a vision by a certifiable nutcase.
He hadn’t even told Brady that they were here because of Anna Buck.
‘Of course,’ said Mark.
‘Thank you,’ said Marvel. ‘We won’t be long.’
Evans nodded and sighed and gestured back towards the stairs. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know where it is.’
Marvel did.
The bedroom was exactly as he remembered it.
He stood at the door and looked around while he wiggled his fingers into the powdered latex gloves.
The same posters and pictures, the same books on the shelves, the same mishmash of tomboy toys, the same mouse running circles in the same wheel.
He walked across the room towards the old-fashioned sash window.
‘Where shall I start, sir?’ said Brady, but Marvel didn’t answer him.
About six feet from the window, a strange, tingling feeling came over John Marvel.
Weird.
The human brain was hard-wired to notice the slightest anomaly, the tiniest deviation from the norm. The scar on the face, the limp in the gait, the flaw speeding by on the factory conveyor belt.
But sometimes the brain caught a glimpse of something so weird that it had to take a second look to make sure.
He backed up a few paces, then reached into his pocket and took out the sketch that Anna Buck had done of the garden through the window. Then very slowly he walked forward again until his hips were almost against the windowsill.
‘Sir?’ said Brady again, still waiting for instructions. ‘Where shall I start?’
Marvel ignored him and very slowly bent his knees.
Too low.
He raised himself up, pressing the wall for support, half-squatting, thinking of the super and his wife and their piston joints, until he reached the perfect height.
The height of Edie Evans.
A cold shiver ran up his back.
‘Sir?’
Marvel held the sketch out in front of him; from this height, the perspective matched perfectly. The old wooden window frame, the sweep of the flower beds. Even the dark, scribbled areas, which Marvel now saw were the walls at either side of the window, and the trees beyond the garden.
It was amateurish, but it was all absolutely right.
‘Here,’ he said softly. ‘We start here.’
The thing he had thought was a flower inside the room was on the right bottom corner of the window frame that Anna Buck had sketched. Marvel looked down at the right corner of the windowsill. It was old and broad, and had cracked as if it had split along the grain. He pressed his fingers into the wood alongside the crack and it tilted downwards, opening a dark triangle in the sill.
Marvel was blocking the light as he tried to peer into the space, so he reached in blind, hoping nothing bit him. His beefy fingers barely fit through the gap, but he managed to pinch something between two fingers and to lift it out, dangling like a prize from a seaside arcade machine, and drop it into his other hand.
It was a Mickey Mouse bicycle bell.
Was it possible? He was holding it in his hand, but still Marvel wasn’t sure it was possible.
His mind was almost completely rational when he was sober, and he had been sober for a long time now, so he struggled with the irrationality of finding the bell exactly where Anna Buck had said it would be.
She must have been here; it was the only explanation. She must have seen the view from Edie Evans’s bedroom window, and hidden the bell for them to find. Maybe Richard Latham had been here and told Anna Buck about it?
Or had somebody been in Edie’s bedroom for even more criminal reasons?
But who? James Buck, who wasn’t to be trusted with children? Mark Evans, who had insisted that the bell did not exist?
Marvel was suddenly bombarded with suspects and possibilities, when before he had had none. It didn’t matter. Rather too many suspects than too few. And any one of those explanations would have satisfied him; any one would have been something he could work with – follow up, write in a report, put to his super.