‘Do you believe it?’ he asked.
‘Course not,’ said Buck. ‘It’s mental. Like something out of Harry Potter.’
‘Exactly,’ said Marvel. ‘Exactly.’
For a second they were on the same page.
It was a shame Marvel had to turn it.
‘Except …’ he said, and opened his hands at James Buck, hoping the young man would jump at the opportunity to admit he secretly believed it after all.
‘Except what?’ said Buck suspiciously.
So Marvel sighed and told him about the photo of Edie Evans, and about the garden and the bicycle bell.
James Buck stared at him as if he were mental too. Which he’d started to wonder himself lately. ‘You saying you think she is psychic?’
‘I’m just saying maybe – even subconsciously – she heard something from someone who knows something about the case …’ He tailed off; it sounded so lame.
Buck looked at his hands. Then he gazed around the squad room until his eyes settled on the wall behind Marvel’s head.
‘Why have you got a photo of me up there?’
Shit.
‘Where?’ said Marvel, even though he knew exactly where James Buck was looking. His Edie Evans montage.
Buck stood up and leaned across the desk. ‘There,’ he said. ‘One of me and one of Anna! What’s that all about? Are we under suspicion or something?’
‘No, no,’ said Marvel quickly. ‘Those are just people who might be helpful on the case I’m investigating. Which is why I’m glad you’ve come in today, Mr Buck.’
Marvel was proud of the segue. It was pretty smooth.
Not smooth enough. Buck peered more closely at the photos. ‘They’re not good pictures even.’
Everyone was a bloody critic.
Buck pointed at Richard Latham. ‘Who’s that?’
Marvel hesitated. He still had no hard evidence that Richard Latham was anything more than a fraud, and he was unlikely to find anything else, now that Edie’s case had been officially closed. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t try – even if it meant doing it in his own time. He would have to re-examine every bit of evidence by the light of Richard Latham. He’d have to comb through his interview in the file for inexplicable knowledge of Edie or her home – particularly her bedroom. But right now, all he knew for sure was that the man claimed that Edie was dead, and that he didn’t want to talk about it.
‘He’s a psychic who was called in when the girl first went missing.’
‘Another loon,’ snorted James, and sat down.
Marvel laughed and the tension relaxed a little.
‘Did Anna help you … that way then?’
Marvel hesitated.
Had she?
Had the horror that had unfolded at Anna Buck’s kitchen table helped him? Or had he been witness to madness? The kind of madness that – in another time – would have seen her in a straitjacket.
Still might.
He’d been drunk, of course, but it had all seemed so real. Watching Anna Buck go away into another place, another time.
Maybe even another person.
Begging for water through cracked lips, clawing at the walls as if she could pass through solid brick. Curling into a foetal position of arid pain.
All he had asked was how Edie had died.
After she’d showed him, Marvel had left Anna Buck’s home and reeled out of the flat and vomited on to the garage forecourt. Dropping to all fours so he wouldn’t splash his trousers, he had vomited and spat and vomited again, his knees wet and his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat that had made him shudder all over …
But he had been drunk.
Not so drunk that anyone else would notice. Not rolling.
But drunk, after years of being dry …
So he was careful in his reply to James Buck. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘This kind of thing is hard to quantify.’
‘Because it’s bollocks, right?’
‘Because it’s bollocks,’ said Marvel.
‘And what about me?’ said James Buck warily, nodding at the photo on the wall. ‘How can I be helpful?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Marvel. ‘Yet.’
Buck looked at Edie on her bicycle. ‘Is that the girl?’
‘Yes,’ said Marvel. ‘That’s Edie Evans.’
Buck looked at the picture for a good long minute, then said softly, ‘Poor kid.’
‘Yes,’ said Marvel and got up. ‘You want a coffee or something?’ he said.
‘Yeah, OK,’ said James Buck. ‘Two sugars, please.’
Marvel went to the machine. While he waited for it to rip him off in liquid form, he watched James Buck from across the room.
Despite his own suspicious nature, nothing about the man made him suspicious. He just seemed like a bloke who’d come in to defend his wife, even though he thought she was crazy. It was almost endearing.
Endearing-cum-stupid.
Marvel wouldn’t have done it. If Debbie had come home from work and told him she’d been talking to dead people, Marvel would have asked her to turn in her key.
Not so James Buck.
But he was glad now that Aguda had brought Buck up here, even if it had been by mistake. At least Marvel was pretty sure he wouldn’t be filing a complaint now. He was just as sure that James Buck couldn’t be helpful to him in any way whatsoever.
He carried the two cups back to his desk.
‘What about our boy then?’ said Buck. ‘It’s all very well us helping you with your case, but what about Daniel?’
‘Ah …’ Marvel reached into his top drawer and took out the photo of Daniel on the lion. He pinned it on the wall next to the others. ‘I took this out on a job with me,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s forgotten about Daniel, Mr Buck.’
‘Thanks,’ said Buck, and the mood in the room palpably relaxed.
‘Did Anna do those?’ Buck nodded at the drawings pinned between the photographs.
‘Yes,’ said Marvel. ‘She said they were visions.’
Buck sipped his coffee. ‘Can I see them?’
‘Sure.’ Marvel unpinned the two pieces of lined paper and laid them on the desk between them.