The neighbours were out in force as Milo was taken to the police car. The cops shoved their way forward like cowboys braving a gauntlet of Indians in an old movie. Milo wondered that if he came out the other end would he, like the cowboys, be okay.
It was a short drive to the police station. Too short really. Milo would happily have taken a tour of the city; it would have given him time to think up some really good answers to the really good questions he knew the police were going to ask him. Despite the brevity of the drive, he did manage to think up a few questions they might ask, but unfortunately he had no time at all to come up with the answers. But that was life, his mum often said: ‘More questions than answers. It’s what makes us human’.
Milo was interrogated in shifts. He found this very confusing because every hour or so his questioners would change. That meant he had to start all over again making a careful study of faces and gestures, the way the cops sat or leaned, even the way they thumped the table and went beetroot red. His mum had spent many long hours coaching him in such things but the change of interrogators bewildered him, though he tried his best to answer them. The only person in the room who didn’t keep swapping was the child advocate from social services, a dumpy-looking woman with thick glasses and iron-grey hair. She kept smiling at Milo, which frightened him a little.
‘Why’d you do it, Milo?’ asked Detective Barnes who, with his partner Detective Sergeant Aminta Kosta, was back for another round of interrogation. Confusingly, though, they asked exactly the same questions as before but pretended they were doing it for the first time. Milo wondered if they had short-term memory loss, like the man in Memento.
‘Do what?’
‘You know.’
‘Do I?’ he asked cautiously.
‘Why’d you go see Mrs Appleby?’
‘Oh. I wanted her to find my mum’s shoe.’
Detective Barnes raised an eyebrow. Milo ran through the list in his head. Raised Eyebrow: a quizzical or sceptical response. Well, that was helpful.
‘What shoe?’
‘The missing shoe.’
Detective Barnes sighed. ‘And where is the one that’s not missing?’
Milo smiled. This was a new question. ‘In my backpack.’ He pointed at his bag on the floor.
Barnes picked it up, and fished out the red sparkly shoe. He eyed it curiously, then looked up at Milo. ‘You like women’s shoes, Milo?’
Milo shrugged. ‘They’re okay, I suppose. You can’t walk in them. You need special training.’
‘You like walking in women’s shoes?’
‘No, I don’t have the special training.’
Another long sigh from the detective. Kosta, a solidly built woman with narrow eyes and dark hair, scowled.
Milo sniffled and wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve.
Kosta shoved a packet of tissues across the table. ‘Got a cold?’
Milo looked at her. ‘A cold what?’
‘Right,’ the detective said, and the others nodded in confirmation.
Milo delved into his mind for what all this meant, but came up empty.
Detective Barnes clicked his fingers to draw Milo’s attention. Milo knew that he was the designated ‘good cop’ in this interview but the knowledge didn’t seem to help much.
‘Where’s the other shoe, Milo?’
‘My mother has it.’
‘Where’s your mother?’
‘I don’t know. Do you?’
‘You’re not helping yourself, mate,’ Detective Barnes said. He leaned forward. His face had turned dark.
The child advocate finally spoke up. ‘How are you feeling, Milo?’
Milo knew what he was supposed to say to that question. It was an easy one. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
Detective Barnes said, ‘Good, so let’s continue. Okay, you’re looking for your mum who left home a month ago. What did Mrs Appleby have to do with that?’
‘She’s a psychic detective.’
Detective Barnes stared at Milo. A new expression came onto his face, like he’d just worked something out. Milo was quite excited that he’d understood this. It fit a phrase on his list of looks: ‘the penny dropped’.
‘You thought she could tell you?’ Milo nodded. ‘And did she?’
‘Did she what?’
‘Tell you?’
Milo pondered the question. What had Mrs Appleby told him? Not much really. ‘She said my mum missed me and the shoe and she waved her hand in the air a bit and said not to use too much blood, but not in that order.’
Detective Barnes blinked. ‘Blood?’
‘That’s what she said,’ said Milo.
Kosta suddenly asked, ‘Why’d you kill the old woman?’
Milo turned in his seat and gave Kosta all his attention, trying to read the odd array of expressions on her face. After a minute he gave up on this and thought about her question. ‘Did I kill her? Both times?’
Everyone shifted in their seats.
Detective Barnes said, ‘Both times? She died twice?’
Milo nodded. ‘She was asleep, but not the dead “putting your cat to sleep” kind of sleep, just the normal kind. She woke up when I shook her and then she saw me and then she screamed and then she dropped dead.’
Kosta muttered something that sounded like, ‘I’m starting to feel envious.’
‘Then what did you do, Milo?’
‘I administered CPR, like on ER.’ Milo formed his hands as if applying compressions, ‘One-two-three-four-five-breathe . . .’ He inflated his cheeks and blew out long and slowly.
‘And then what happened?’
‘She woke up.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘What happened next, Milo?’
‘Oh, we had a chat. She said she’d just met her Uncle Joseph who’d been dead fifty years. She was very happy. She said she forgave me for murdering her.’
Detective Barnes smiled for the first time. ‘She did, did she? That was nice of her.’
‘She was very nice. But I think she was in a hurry.’
‘To do what?’ asked Kosta.
‘To go back and see her uncle again.’
Kosta’s eyes went stony and flat. She leaned forward. ‘Are you telling us she wanted to die?’
Detective Barnes cleared his throat. ‘So then Mrs Appleby told you about the blood, right?’ Milo nodded. ‘And then what happened?’
‘I think she was about to tell me where to find my mum when she died again.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘She couldn’t breathe properly so I gave her some of my asthma medicine.’ He pulled the asthma pump out of his pocket. When he’d arrived at the police station one man had taken it from him but another had returned it a few minutes later with an apology.
‘So you’re saying you tried to save her?’
Milo nodded again, sadly this time. ‘It didn’t work. I think she was allergic to my asthma medicine. I think that’s what killed her. Are you going to put me in prison for the rest of my life?’
‘Have you used that asthma pump since then, Milo?’
‘Yes.’
Detective Barnes opened a drawer, removed a plastic bag from a box of them, and what looked like a large cotton bud in a container. He took the bud, ran it around the edge of the asthma pump’s mouthpiece, dropped the swab inside the bag, sealed it, and handed it to Kosta. ‘We’d better get the lab to run it against the old lady’s DNA. I doubt we’ll find any but it’s worth a try.’
Milo spent a very scary and uncomfortable night in a holding cell. His dad came to see him just before midnight but said little. Mr Chrysler seemed shell-shocked. In the morning Milo was arraigned on manslaughter charges. The judge, noting Milo’s age and that he had exams coming up, released Milo into his father’s custody, and – as per the new juvenile fast-tracking programme – set the court hearing for just over two weeks time.
Detective Kosta, who’d given evidence at the arraignment, took Milo aside afterwards and made it quite clear that Milo would be ‘going away’ for a very long time. When Milo asked where, Kosta had grinned. ‘One of those homes for dangerous boys – the kind with big fences topped with barbed wire. Just the place for a little yobbo like you.’
She walked off whistling happily. It was late that evening by the time Mr Chrysler was allowed to take Milo home.
His dad didn’t speak to him as he signed documents and filled out forms; indeed, he was all hunched up and tight, as if he was expecting an attack.
On the way home in the car his dad thawed a little. He said he didn’t believe Milo had deliberately meant to hurt Mrs Appleby and that he had been hoping Milo would only be charged with breaking and entering. Milo nearly pointed out that actually it had been ‘entering and breaking’ (after all, he’d busted the vase stand after he got inside the bedroom) but in his head he suddenly saw his mother’s hand, held up in that familiar gesture, so he said nothing.
His father sighed. ‘But my God, Toby . . . manslaughter! What are we going to do?’
Milo had been wondering about that himself.
At home, Mr Chrysler got a beer from the fridge and sat stiffly in front of the TV. He made only one comment. ‘What’s going to happen to you, Toby?’
Milo very much wanted to go to bed but he’d had an idea on the way back in the car after he’d heard a film review on the radio about a cop who talked to dead people.
‘What’s a séance?’
Mr Chrysler looked up. A moment later he smacked his forehead. ‘You don’t give up, do you, Toby? Don’t you get how serious this is? You could be locked up, you could go to jail! At the very least, a juvenile detention centre. Do you understand that?’
Milo said nothing.
His dad sighed again. ‘I know what you’re thinking, so forget it.’
Milo felt a touch of panic. Could his dad read his mind?
‘You’re thinking that if you could talk to Mrs Appleby “on the other side” she might finish that sentence.’ Mr Chrysler had been regaled, in great detail and in Milo’s presence, by Detective Barnes as to the afternoon’s events. Mr Chrysler shook his head. ‘Jesus, Tobes.’
Milo looked down at his feet.
‘You’re grounded until the hearing. You go to school and come home. Nothing else. You don’t go to the corner shop without asking me first, do you hear?’
‘What about afterwards?’ said Milo.
His dad looked down at his hands. They seemed to be shaking slightly. ‘There may not be an afterwards.’ He looked up at Milo, his eyes shining. ‘Do you understand, Tobes?’
Milo nodded.
‘Do you really, Toby? Do you really?’
Milo shuffled his feet and nodded. His father told him to go to bed. Head down, Milo went upstairs and quietly phoned Fluke who seemed surprised that Milo wasn’t on his way to a high-security prison like Sing-Sing (which actually sounded like a friendly place).
Milo kept his voice low. ‘Mrs Appleby said you have to help me find my mum.’
‘Okay. Nothing ventured, nothing sprained.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Paste makes waste. When do we start?’
‘Tonight. We don’t have much time.’