All to the smell of fireworks in the dull air, and the sound of tinny hits floating from the garage.
The first police car had pulled right up on the pavement and one of the coppers had found this place. This place where Daniel had cut the corner across the freshly laid cement. Five tiny footprints heading across the forecourt, before he’d turned and jumped back on to the pavement, heading for the road …
And disappeared.
Nobody had seen him.
Nobody saw him again after that bitter November morning. Anna didn’t remember much more about that day, and didn’t remember much about all the days since. The blur of police and cameras and newspaper stories growing smaller and smaller. DCI Lloyd calling now and then to pick her brains about things she might have remembered, just in case she had vital information that she hadn’t bothered to share. The offers of medication and counselling – as if they could make her forget that Daniel was gone. As if that would be a good thing!
Anna couldn’t honestly have said how she’d got all the way from that day to this; how she’d survived.
Why she’d survived.
The girl was still standing beside her.
Anna gathered up the cloth and the toothbrush and the wax polish and got to her feet. Now that she was standing, she looked at the child’s face properly. It was round and ruddy and about eight years old. Black wire-rimmed glasses and dark-brown plaits with hairclips shaped like flowers.
‘Where did he go?’ the girl asked, and Anna realized that she must have thought all of those memories out loud.
‘Nobody knows,’ said Anna, and that truth sounded as brutal to her ears now as it had when she’d first overheard a policeman saying it to a concerned passer-by on that fateful – careless – day.
‘Did you look?’ said the girl.
‘I’ve looked,’ she said. ‘We’ve all looked. We’ll never stop looking.’
‘Is he dead?’ said the girl, with her eyes widening in horror.
‘No,’ said Anna firmly. ‘He’s alive. Somewhere.’
The child nodded sombrely, relieved to hear the good news.
‘If I see him I’ll tell you,’ she said, and Anna was touched. She tried to say ‘thank you’ but her mouth was too wobbly.
She’d forgotten how sweet children could be. A week after Daniel had disappeared, somebody had pushed a tatty drawing through the front door – two goldfish in a pond. She guessed it was from one of his nursery classmates at TiggerTime a few doors down. His teacher had knocked a few times too and offered comfort she had no real way to provide.
Anna and the little girl with the pigtails stared down together at the five footprints, now so glossy and dark that they were like works of art in a fancy gallery.
‘They’re all you’ve got left,’ the child said sadly.
Anna nodded. They were all she had left.
Then the girl said she had to go to school.
And she disappeared too.
4
THE LONGER DCI John Marvel worked in homicide, the more he disliked people. He’d never met one he didn’t hate – or despise, at the very least – and he could see the bad in anyone.
It was a useful quality in a detective.
Not so much in a human being.
Murder was DCI Marvel’s favourite thing in the whole world – even above Sky Sports. There was no other crime that had the sheer black-and-white finality of murder, and it was one of the few things in life he took personally. He was good at it, too. He had hunches and insights; he had the dogged obsession to keep going when everyone else had given up – not because he wanted to solve the crime, but because he hated to lose. Solving murders was a competition, make no bones about it. The killer won, or the cops won.
How could you not love something that was so unambiguous?
So biblical?
Even when he used to go to the King’s Arms of an evening, Marvel talked shop – as long as that shop sold murder. While his colleagues had tried to switch off and forget the underbelly, Marvel had mulled over the gory details; he mentally sifted evidence, he bullied colleagues into long, intricate discussions about blood spatter and rates of decay and dodgy evidence. And when they made excuses to leave early, he would sit alone and brood on the endless permutations of how and why and who and what and when.
He took case files on holiday. While other men read Lee Child or Wilbur Smith, Marvel pored over autopsy reports and crime-scene photos. And he got results – his solve rate since taking over South East’s G Team was a staggering 84 per cent.
He looked at his watch.
It was exactly five minutes to opening time.
Old habits died hard.
He heaved himself out of his chair, went to the machine across the room and got a cup of tea. Or it could have been soup, it was hard to tell. Either way, he put two sugars in it.
He took the cup back to his desk and lit a cigarette.
The murder-squad room at Lewisham was a low-ceilinged, overcrowded place, with every sharp corner softened by towers of bulging brown files. Computers the size of wheelbarrows pumped out heat and hum on each desk, but the paperless office was still the stuff of science fiction. At an outpost of this information Jenga, Marvel had annexed a corner desk by pulling rank on DS Brady. As soon as he’d secured the desk, Marvel had turned it to face the corner, where he taped a Reservoir Dogs poster and a selection of case-file photos. Having his back to the room discouraged casual interaction. Marvel didn’t give a shit what the rest of G Team did behind his back, as long as they were still there when he turned around.