He sipped his tea-slash-soup and grimaced, then sucked hard on the Rothman’s, loving the acrid warmth that filled his throat, and squinted at the photos on the wall.
They weren’t from the case he was working on now. That was about a thirty-four-year-old prostitute called Tanzi Anderson, who had been found in her wardrobe, with a lapful of her own skimpy clothing pulled from wire hangers, and a single bullet hole between her shocked eyes. Marvel had no doubt that very soon another whore would spill the beans and they would track down Tanzi’s pimp, who had coincidentally disappeared on the night she died, along with Tanzi’s money and heroin.
It was a no-brainer.
And if it didn’t require a brain, it certainly didn’t require photos on the wall to prick his memory.
No, the photos John Marvel chose to look at every day were from an unsolved case.
The case of Edie Evans, who had left home on her bike one frosty January morning over a year ago, and had never arrived at school.
For one long, tortuous, timewasting day, Edie had been treated as a truant. She was almost a teenager; she was an adventurous child; she was on a bicycle; she knew how to catch a train to the city … The police did the maths, even though her parents insisted it wasn’t like her. Edie was young for her age, they said – by today’s standards, at least. She didn’t have a boyfriend; she didn’t wear make-up; she had little brother she adored and a pet mouse called Peter. She was popular at school and good at her lessons, they said. Edie not going to school made no sense.
Not coming home made even less.
And they were right. Just before dark, a man walking his dog had found Edie’s bicycle under a giant rhododendron on a stretch of grass alongside the road, its back wheel buckled – folded almost in half – and its chain hanging in a sad loop.
That’s when Edie Evans became a missing person.
And, early the next day, when a few drops of what proved to be Edie’s blood were found on the pavement that ran between the green and the road, the case was turned over to the murder team. It was only logical – although they’d never found a body, and probably never would now.
Marvel tapped his cigarette against the edge of an ashtray shaped like a pair of lungs, then sighed at the photo through twin jets of smoke. He knew Edie’s face better than he knew anyone’s, apart from his own and the Queen’s. Edie was a slightly goofy-looking child, with teeth she’d never grow into now, a sprinkling of summer freckles, and bobbed brown hair caught behind one sticky-out ear. In the photo, she was standing astride a BMX bicycle, in jeans and a Simpsons T-shirt, looking slightly upwards into the camera with a determined expression on her face.
‘We call that her space face,’ her mother had told Marvel with a sad little laugh. ‘She wants to go into space.’
He had wanted to go into space!
Marvel had forgotten it until the very moment Edie’s mother had handed him the photo, but remembering it had brought a wash of memories that had left him glowing with long-lost happiness. Sneaking into the stone merchant’s on Abigail Road with his best friend Terry Stubbs, to make an ascent of the giant grey-gravel mountain at the back of the yard. The favoured West face – to avoid being seen by the old man in the caravan-cum-office – and moving ponderously, to show they were on the Moon and lacked gravity. In the dirty, overstuffed city, the harsh gravel – made pale by the elements – was the closest landscape they could find to what they’d seen on grainy black-and-white TV. The winner was the one who could plant his flag closest to the summit without being seen. Although they didn’t have flags: Terry’s was a spatula and his own was a plastic sword with rubies on the hilt …
Sitting in the Evans’s suburban front room, John Marvel had still been able to feel the hot gravel under his belly, and the betrayal of sharp stones clicking down the slope behind him like unlucky dice. They’d been chased a few times, but never been caught. Not there, at least.
Not on the Moon.
They’d played in the stone yard tirelessly, until they’d grown tired of it and never went back. Later he’d wanted to be a bus driver, then a scientist, then a fireman. He couldn’t remember ever wanting to be a detective, but there you go and here he was.
Another day, another game.
It had been years – decades – since he’d thought of Terry Stubbs and the Moon, and it had given him a strange, syrupy feeling that anyone else would have quickly identified as sentiment.
After showing him the photo, Edie’s mother and father had shown him Edie’s bedroom.
As soon as he’d walked in, Marvel had known that she’d been taken, just as surely as they had known, from the very moment that they’d realized she was missing.
Edie Evans was going places, but not up to Oxford Street for a day out shoplifting mascara with a gang of girlfriends.
The walls of her room were completely covered with posters – not of pop singers and celebrities – but of real stars. There were planets and star maps and rockets and spaceships, Captain Kirk on one wall, Han Solo on another, Neil Armstrong on the back of the door; a space shuttle landing, and an Apollo mission taking off, robots and stormtroopers and willowy aliens with slanted black eyes. Between the big posters and pictures were cuttings and clippings and cartoons of constellations and close encounters, filling the gaps like grout. Even the ceiling was dotted with the pale-green stick-on stars that Marvel knew would suck up the sun and then glow in the dark over a child’s head.
Marvel looked out of the window and into the mouse’s cage. One looked over the neatly tended back garden to the trees beyond; the other was filled with curly wood shavings and old cardboard toilet-roll tubes, nibbled at either end. The mouse – Peter – pattered along in his wire wheel, going nowhere at a fair old lick.
Marvel had worked long into every night in his efforts to find Edie. He had asked to have the case kept open long after it had started to chill; he had tried everything.