His face changed in an instant. He dropped the Bakewell tarts and they rolled across the floor like little white wheels with cherry hubs. He bent to pick up the machine, holding his arms out to protect it from her. He stopped singing and shouted furiously in his alien language.
She didn’t care. Edie no longer knew for sure whether she was in prison, or was the hostage of a madman, or was in a UFO, travelling forever in the spaces between the stars. But wherever she was, she wasn’t going to let anybody read her mind. Her mind was hers and it was private and she was the only one who could say who was allowed in there, not this stranger who’d given her a bicycle bell and some soft Ritz crackers, and now seemed to think that she owed him her thoughts. Her head was the only place she had to hide now – the only place where she could be the old Edie the way she was before – and she didn’t want to share it.
It was her mind.
Edie pushed him aside and stomped on the wire thing. He shoved her away, but she was frightened and furious, and those two things gave her strength and courage. She pushed back and reached around and kicked and stamped until the mind-reading machine was a useless mass of spikes and wires, broken on the floor.
The alien knelt to retrieve it – to save it – and Edie ran for the door.
It opened on the room she’d been in before – with the dark ceiling and all the pipes.
‘Help me!’ she shrieked. ‘Help me!’
His arm snaked around her neck and dragged her back inside. He wasn’t big, but it was scary to realize how much stronger he was than she could ever hope to be.
The door slammed shut.
He let her go, turned her round and slapped her face.
Edie stumbled backwards and sat down heavily on the bed, holding her cheek in shock, while the masked man she could no longer pretend was an alien stood over her, shaking the wire mess in front of her, showing her what she had done.
‘You break my hat!’ he shouted. ‘You break my hat!’
36
DCI MARVEL HAD left his body.
He watched Richard Latham’s head, cradled on his arms, and felt very far away from the thinning patch on top of the shiny pink scalp.
A million miles. A billion. A light year from himself.
He was a murder detective. They’d found blood at the scene. They’d always been looking for a body and a killer.
And yet Marvel had never truly believed that Edie Evans was dead.
He only admitted this to himself here, now, as he watched Richard Latham weep into the elbows of his jumper, with his spectacles on the table beside him.
In Marvel’s head Edie had always been alive, and just waiting to be found.
By him.
‘You’re a liar,’ he heard himself choke.
The coming bald patch twisted slowly from side to side in denial.
‘You don’t know,’ said Marvel. ‘You can’t know.’
Latham raised his head briefly and said, ‘I know.’
Then he put his head back down on his arms and gave a sigh so deep that it ended in a shiver.
The hairs on Marvel’s forearms prickled. He had seen a thousand confessions and most of them ended like this – with a cavernous sigh, as if the body was relieved to be finally rid of the burden the mind had forced it to bear.
Mavel’s own mind whirred with connections and possibilities.
If he discounted the mystical, Richard Latham might have been a suspect all along. He’d known of Edie Evans through her mother, who had been to Bickley Spiritualist Church; his home was a bare mile from the Evans home. And, most damning of all, Latham had lied to police during a murder investigation.
At best, he had misled them by failing to disclose that Edie was already dead when he came on to the case.
At worst, he had killed her.
Marvel glanced at the recorder to make sure it was working. ‘What are you trying to tell me, Richard?’
‘ImmosheMED!’
‘What?’ said Marvel impatiently. ‘You have to take your face out of your jumper.’
He did. ‘I know she’s dead!’
‘Who killed her?’ said Marvel.
He shook his head. ‘Nobody.’
Marvel frowned. ‘Was it an accident?’
Latham hesitated. ‘I … I don’t think so. But I couldn’t see.’
‘So you know she’s dead, but you won’t say who killed her or how she died?’
‘I can’t,’ he insisted.
‘Sounds pretty suspicious, doesn’t it, Richard?’
‘I’m just telling you what I know.’
‘Well, if you knew she was dead and you had nothing to do with it, why didn’t you just tell us at the time?’
‘How could I? How could I say so? How could I tell those poor people?’
‘That’s bullshit. You didn’t have to tell her family anything. You only had to tell us.’
Latham started to cry again. ‘But what if I was wrong? What if people stopped looking for her and I was wrong?’ He shook his bowed head. ‘I couldn’t tell anybody.’
‘So you were forced to take our money and string everybody along,’ said Marvel. ‘How convenient.’
‘What else could I do?’ said Latham, pushing his glasses up his damp nose. ‘It was already too late.’ He wiped his nose on his jumper and sniffed up what he’d missed. He looked at Marvel pleadingly, his cheeks shining. ‘It nearly destroyed me,’ he said. ‘Every day she haunts me. That’s why I don’t look for missing children. I could never go through that again.’
‘Of course,’ said Marvel. ‘Poor you.’
‘That’s not what I—’ Latham stopped and shook his head. ‘Meant,’ he finished. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Well,’ said Marvel, ‘it’s a good story.’
‘It’s the truth,’ said Latham.
‘Maybe it is,’ said Marvel. ‘Maybe a jury would believe it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Maybe they’d only convict on the lesser charges – the obstruction of justice and the fraud.’
Panic started to creep across Latham’s face. ‘What do you mean, lesser charges?’
‘Maybe they would consider the case for murder too circumstantial—’
‘Murder?’
‘But that’s not up to me. It’s up to the CPS to decide on the charges. It’s just my job to present them with the evidence.’
‘What evidence?’ said Latham. ‘There is no evidence.’
‘Well, there are close parallels, Richard, you have to admit.’