Even a psychic.
He hadn’t consulted one, of course – that would have been the ultimate admission of failure – but when DS Short had suggested it, Marvel had only laughed derisively in her face, not forbidden it outright. And when the expense request came in, he had signed it – comforting himself with the thought that it said it was for ‘church-roof donations’.
Nothing wrong with denial.
After that, Marvel had only seen the psychic once, briefly, on TV, talking earnestly about his efforts to help.
Help schmelp. Marvel might as well have consulted the tealeaves-slash-rehydrated noodles in the bottom of his cup of tea-slash-soup. All the psychic had done was bring the weirdos and well-wishers out of the woodwork. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference; Marvel wasn’t sure there was one. Mark and Carrie Evans had been inundated with letters and trinkets from around the world – visionaries, kindred spirits, children all sending hope and Bible verses and talismans and charms.
There was even money. Twenty Australian dollars miraculously still stapled to a postcard from Perth, a hundred pounds in dirty notes stuffed into an ornately decorated envelope, and a crisp fifty with a long letter detailing another child missing in another place.
As if money would help.
There were the sickos too. There were always a few who trawled the papers for vulnerable targets, and reached out in their own repulsive way. Three Polaroids of a man’s erect penis; a jewellery box containing a turd, and a newspaper photo of Edie with the eyes cut out and scrawled with the words I kilt yuor girl.
The world was full of wankers.
Including the so-called psychic, who’d had woolly visions for a few weeks before the trail had gone cold. Marvel had been so angry that he’d been to see Superintendent Jeffries about getting their money back. But Jeffries hadn’t wanted to risk dragging their embarrassing experiment through the courts. A lesson learned, he’d said.
Marvel took another hard drag of his cigarette and felt the heat warm his thumb and finger.
The only tangible clue they’d had in the case was Edie Evans’s bicycle.
It had been found half hidden under the rhododendrons on the broad strip of green that lay between the Evans’s home and the school. Marvel had been there more than once.
More than fifty times.
It was a half-wooded, half-grassed area, where local people walked their dogs and children played hide-and-seek. In the summer, parents could sit outside the pub across the road and watch their kids kick a ball about on the green.
Safe.
Not safe.
The line was so fine …
Marvel had never met Edie, but he had met her bicycle. The BMX was propped against a wall in the evidence room downstairs right now, still bent and drooping. It was an old, cheap bike and had been hand-painted in broad black and white hoops.
‘Like a rocket,’ her father had said, looking at the photo in her room. ‘We painted it together.’
‘Did it have a bell?’ Marvel had asked.
‘Not that I remember. Why?’
‘There are some scratches on the handlebars where a bell would go. But there’s no bell in this picture.’
Her father had shrugged. ‘It’s an old bike. It had lots of scratches.’ He’d looked mildly puzzled. Not puzzled about the bell, but puzzled about why it even mattered when his daughter was gone and there was blood on the pavement.
It didn’t matter, so Marvel hadn’t pressed the point. He’d noticed it; that was all. It was his job to notice things, but sometimes the things he noticed weren’t meaningful or logical, weren’t things you could put in a report and call evidence. Sometimes they were just things.
But he noticed them all the same.
Not that it had helped. The case had gone cold; the mystery remained unsolved; Edie remained lost.
And the world moved on without her.
But still she watched him from the wall above his desk – as determined now as she had been on the day he’d caught the case. How could Marvel be anything but equally devoted to the mystery of her disappearance?
Somebody somewhere knew what had happened to her. All he had to do was find that person.
It seemed a very simple task when he looked at it like that. Not something he could just give up on. Not rocket science.
Along with fresh air and roughage, Marvel thought that children were overrated.
But he had a soft spot for Edie Evans.
5
THE DOOR WAS open.
Anna woke in a panic – already half out of bed.
‘Is that the baby?’
‘No.’
‘I think it’s the baby.’
‘Don’t get up.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t get up,’ said James. ‘Lie down.’
She did, turning on her side away from him so he couldn’t watch her creased brow, concentrating on listening for the smallest sound.
Behind her, she could feel James thinking. Feel him wanting to say something. Anything.
She waited and waited and waited and waited—
Then she got up to go to see to the baby – just as they’d both known she would. Once the thought was in her head, it must be completed. And, once completed, it would be repeated.
Endlessly?
Behind her, James got up and went to work.
Anna didn’t go to work any more. She used to work for a company that made packaging for make-up. Not on the factory floor, but in the office – at a desk under her sixty-words-per-minute typing diploma, slender fingers flashing.
Now those same fingers were red and chapped from when she cleaned the flat.
And cleaned the flat.
And cleaned the flat.
Anna cleaned the flat on a loop, like the Forth Bridge. It wasn’t a big flat, but it was in an old house, and it didn’t stay clean for long – or not as clean as she needed it to be.
There were two bedrooms, a bathroom and toilet, a living room and a kitchen – and every single room was full of germs.