Her bed floated in the dark.
The escape hatch that had invited her through the wall and into the blackness had repeated and widened in inexorable loops as she passed slowly into the beyond, until the walls were dark with escape.
There was nothing left now of Edie’s bedroom and books and Peter the mouse, and there was nothing left of the crayons but what was under her nails. Every last sliver of brown-blue-black wax had been pressed against the cement with her thumb; every bumpy smear had obliterated her life, and opened her eyes to other possibilities.
The view of the garden had been the last thing to go.
She missed it.
She missed it.
Now, as Edie lay curled and crisping on the bed, her hand flinched with independent desire to reach up and scratch away the dark wax and to uncover that memory once more.
She tightened her fist to keep it by her side.
Her past was gone, and trying to find it again would only make this harder.
Now Edie prepared to accept her future.
43
ANNA AND JAMES Buck had breakfast together the next morning for the first time since Daniel had disappeared.
Neither of them ate, although Anna made toast, but they sat at the table with mugs of tea and sipped them together, bonded by a tragedy that was even more immediate than the loss of their son.
‘What will you do today?’ said Anna.
James shrugged. ‘As much as I can, I suppose. Brian’s sure to be back soon. His wife will bail him out.’
She nodded. ‘Poor Ang,’ she said.
James nodded. ‘I wish I knew where to send his stuff.’
Ang’s possessions lay on the table between them. The story cloth, a wire horse in the making, a carved wooden mask with small mouth, big teeth and wide eyes. The bottle of Goal.
Anna slowly unwound the cloth.
‘He told me his mother made that,’ said James.
Anna ran her finger over the raised stitching, tracing the whorls of petals and the spiral shells of snails. She bit her lip and said, ‘Now she’ll never know what happened to him.’
James reached out and touched the back of Anna’s hand.
After a moment, she turned it over so he could hold it.
DCI John Marvel (susp.) woke with a mouth like an old sock.
He was still on the rug in front of the TV, and that gummy mark was still on the screen.
Debbie had known it would drive him crazy. That’s why she’d done it, of course.
He smelled vomit and turned his head to look at the rug on either side of him, then realized it was him. He was still wearing his coat.
He rolled on to his side with the intention of rising, and winced as something in his pocket dug hard into his left buttock. He got unsteadily to all fours and, from there, to his knees.
His head was a medicine ball full of bees.
He needed a drink.
He put his hand in his pocket and found Ang Nu’s phone.
Bollocks. He’d have to call Brady now to come and take it in for evidence.
Suspended. Shit.
He’d never even come close before. He’d had a few run-ins with arseholes in senior positions, but nothing like this.
Never chased someone to their death.
In his other pocket he found his cigarettes and his lighter. Without rising from his knees, he lit one and felt a bit better. By the time he was halfway done, he thought he might be able to make it to the chair.
It wasn’t a comfortable chair, but it was all there was and it wasn’t the floor, so Marvel shuffled over to it on his knees with his big head lolling and buzzing. He hauled himself up on to the seat like a man who’s been tipped out of his wheelchair, then sat there for a moment, getting his breath back around the cigarette.
He took the phone out of his pocket again and stared at the little screen. He fiddled idly until he found the contacts list, but it was empty.
He put it down on the side table, but it fell on the floor, which was when he realized Debbie had taken the side tables too.
He sighed and stubbed his cigarette out on the arm of the chair, then lit another one.
He thought of Ang Nu, draped over the fan of spikes like a magic-show illusion. He thought of the moment before that, when he’d grabbed his warm ankle as he went up the fence. If he hadn’t stopped in the alleyway to press a hand into his stitch, he’d have run straight past Ang Nu, just the way Brady had. The boy would have slithered over the lip of the skip behind him and run out on to Northborough Road.
Disappeared.
Survived.
It would have been annoying, but it would have been better than this.
Suspended.
Dumped.
Debbie had dumped him. He hadn’t seen that one coming. Although now he thought about it, he wondered if he should have.
The envelope with his name on it was still there, unopened, on the floor next to the TV. He didn’t think he’d bother reading it. He had no interest in a litany of his shortcomings.
Marvel smoked for a bit and brooded. Then he remembered the small beeping noise that had alerted him to Ang Nu’s presence in the skip yesterday.
He leaned out of the chair and fumbled around on the floor for the phone.
He pressed the Dial key. That was the beep he’d heard.
He pressed the Stop key. It was the same sound.
Marvel took a long drag on his cigarette and thought about things.
Ang Nu had called somebody. While he was crouched in a skip filled with toys and crayons and old powder paints, being chased by the police, the boy had made a phone call. All Marvel had heard was him pressing the key to end it.
Who the hell did he call? He had no family. And if he’d had friends, Marvel imagined he’d have been living with them instead of in that tiny shithole of a workshop kitchen.
Who would someone like Ang Nu call in his hour of need? A solicitor? A taxi? A hit man?
He pressed the Dial key again and peered at the screen to read the last number dialled. Marvel had to hold the phone further away and pull his head back on his shoulders to read the landline number, but it meant nothing to him.