With her space face.
‘Taunton, eh?’ said Clyde, clapping his hands together like a vicar. ‘Fresh start. Lovely part of the world. We used to go walking there. Quantocks. Exmoor. Beautiful.’
Marvel said nothing. He had passed a sign for Taunton on the motorway once. Middle of fucking nowhere. Mile upon mile of grass and cow shit, peopled by bumpkins swigging cider and riding pigs to market.
Bizarrely, Taunton had been the only DCI transfer he could get in the whole country. He could have stepped back down to detective inspector and gone somewhere else in the Met, but he’d rather have died first. And he had no future here now at Lewisham. He didn’t need a psychic to tell him that.
There’d been several DCI posts in London and other major cities on the transfer lists, but by the time he’d made contact they’d all gone. Filled internally, he’d been told again and again.
And again.
After the fourth time, he’d called the recruitment officer at the West Midlands force and asked him what the hell was going on. In an accent that had made the rejection easier to bear, the officer had confirmed that the post had been filled internally. Then, at the end of their brief conversation, he’d asked Marvel to give his best to Robert Clyde.
That’s when Marvel had realized that leverage worked both ways; that Edie Evans had made a chink in him that was too big to fill or to hide. And that Clyde was calling in favours and pulling strings to herd him out of the city and into the sticks, just as surely as a sheep.
Finally, Marvel had felt a grudging respect for his superintendent.
Too late, of course.
‘Brady finished up the dog thing,’ said Clyde.
‘Yeah?’ Marvel no longer had any inclination to call him sir.
‘Yes,’ said Clyde, apparently unperturbed by the omission. ‘He cautioned Latham and Denise Granger and spoke to the boy’s parents. He really didn’t feel there was a need for anything more.’
He left Brady’s supposed opinion hanging there, almost inviting disagreement, but Marvel disagreed via the medium of silence.
‘He’s gunning for inspector,’ Clyde said.
Marvel mused. ‘Everybody’s moving up.’
‘That’s right,’ said Clyde impassively. ‘Everybody’s moving up.’
Marvel sighed. ‘You might want to give Aguda a chance,’ he said. ‘She’s too good for the desk.’
Clyde made a maybe face. He scribbled a blunt note with a sharp pencil, and Marvel wished he’d said something earlier, when his opinion might still have carried a bit of weight.
‘Brady should do OK,’ he added, over-generously.
‘Maybe’ said Clyde. ‘If he’s not too distracted.’
‘By what?’ said Marvel.
‘The baby,’ said Clyde. ‘His wife’s pregnant, you know?’
Marvel’s belly flip-flopped with memory.
Your wife is pregnant.
And you’re burning up in the ice and snow.
‘No,’ he managed faintly. ‘I didn’t know.’
Clyde got up and moved around him to the door, and after a long, paralysed moment, Marvel got slowly to his feet and walked out in a daze.
Across the squad room. Down in the lift. Through the foyer with his cardboard box.
If anybody else said goodbye to him, he didn’t hear them.
There was scaffolding on the roof of the Bickley Spiritualist Church.
Marvel parked his rental car and walked back to the grubby little church hall next to the King’s Arms.
He stood for several minutes, staring up at the new roof and wondering what percentage of it belonged to the Metropolitan Police.
The yellowing lights were on inside, although they were wan and watery through the filthy windows, and there was a soggy paper sign pinned to the split and peeling plywood noticeboard: THE DEAD ARE WAITING TO SPEAK TO YOU.
What bollocks, thought Marvel, as he opened the door.
Inside the hall was tired and dingy, and there was a damp patch on the ceiling that looked like Africa.
Marvel put a tenner in a wooden bowl overseen by two frail old women, who panicked over it until someone came in behind him and they could make change.
He saw Richard Latham. The man was surrounded by a coterie of misfits and old folk, all gazing adoringly up into his face, or nodding like toys, listening in rapt attention to some story he was telling.
Marvel studied him. The medium was wearing a brown jumper with the label sticking out of the neck, beige slacks and scuffed black shoes.
If it was all about the money, Latham was hiding it well.
The man reached the climax of his story and his voice rose just enough so that Marvel could share it.
‘So I said, “Come on, Whitney! You’re dead!”’ Latham reached out a helping hand and his acolytes parted hurriedly, as if they’d been standing on Whitney without even knowing it. ‘And then I—’
Richard Latham froze as he met Marvel’s eyes across the blue-rinsed room. He stopped talking, lowered his arm and excused himself. Then he poked his glasses up on his nose, and left the knot of parishioners in the middle of the afterlife-and-death battle.
‘I never expected to see you here, Mr Marvel.’ The man’s forehead shone with nervous sweat, but – as usual – he was putting on a good show.
Marvel had been about to say something cutting about money and TV and dogs, but even as he opened his mouth he realized there was no point.
He had lost, and Latham had won, and both of those things were too insignificant to squabble over.
So he just shrugged and said, ‘I never expected to be here.’
Relief dawned on Latham’s face and, to his surprise, Marvel didn’t even regret putting it there.
‘I see you got your roof,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Latham. Then, after an awkward pause, he said, ‘Want to buy a bucket?’
Marvel snorted. He looked around at the threadbare carpet, the fake plastic flowers and the dusty crucifix. ‘Just thought I’d come in and see what all the fuss was about,’ he said.