billowing in righteous vengeance.
It was stirring stuff.
And Marvel was always stirred.
Eventually.
Even by a case like this in a place like this, he knew he
But until then, he was just a bit cheesed off.
Marvel sighed.
Margaret Priddy’s body had been removed to civilization – or what passed for it in this neck of the yokel woods. He hated to be out of town. He’d been born and brought up in London. Battersea, to be precise, where the stunted lime trees grown through lifting, cracking pavement were all the green he felt anyone should suffer. Once he’d carved his name in the bark and been repelled by the damp, greenish flesh his penknife had exposed. Sometimes as a kid he’d hung around a bus stop close to the park, but had rarely ventured in. Only on the occasional Saturday for a kickabout, and even then he’d never warmed to the muddy, olive-green grass. Playing behind the garages or under the railway arches was cleaner and faster. Grass was overrated, in Marvel’s opinion, and it was his constant gripe that most of the Avon and Somerset force area where he’d ended up working was covered in it.
Now here he was in this shit-hole village in the middle of a moor that didn’t even have the niceties of fences or barns on it, with the miserable prospect of having to conduct a murder investigation surrounded by the vagaries of gorse, yokels and pony shit instead of the sensible amenities of self-service petrol stations, meaningful road-signs and his beloved Kings Arms.
The Divisional Surgeon had already found cuts and bruising inside Margaret Priddy’s mouth where her lips had been crushed against her teeth, and the pathologist might find even more. All it would take now was for the Scientific Investigations Department in Portishead to confirm that the saliva and mucus on the well-plumped pillow found lying next to Mrs Priddy belonged to the victim, and they would have their upgrade to murder and their murder weapon all in one neat forensic package.
Marvel looked at the empty bed over which three white-paper-clad CSIs crouched like folk off to a costume party dressed as sperm.
‘I like the son for this,’ Marvel told DS Reynolds. Marvel loved saying that he ‘liked’ someone for something. It made him feel as if he were in a Quentin Tarantino film. His south-London accent was a handicap but not a bar to such pronouncements.
‘Yes, sir,’ said DS Reynolds carefully.
‘Sick of watching his inheritance pour down the home-nursing drain.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So what have we got?’
‘So far? Hairs, fibres, fluids—
‘Semen?’
‘Doesn’t look like it, sir. Just what was on the pillow, and urine.’
‘I thought she was catheterized?’
‘I think the bag must’ve burst.’
‘So the perp could be covered in piss.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Lovely. Anything missing?’
‘Doesn’t look like a burglary, sir. If something was taken then the killer knew exactly what he was looking for and where to find it.’
Marvel glanced around the room with its old dark furniture. A lifetime of use was evidenced by the wear around the dull brass handles on the chest of drawers. Nothing looked disturbed; even the lace doily on the dresser was flat and un-mussed.
‘I want the names of all the nurses employed and hair samples from everyone at the scene.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Prints?’
‘Not so far.’
It was a bitterly cold January and the killer could have worn gloves for that reason alone. But Marvel hoped he was not just some opportunist burglar who had overreacted to finding a woman watching him silently from the bed in what he’d thought was an empty room. Marvel hoped he’d planned ahead. Whether he’d planned burglary or murder ahead was open to question, but the fact that it looked unlikely that they would find prints made the whole case more interesting to Marvel. He hated to waste his talents on the low and the stupid, and – since coming to Somerset – he’d started to tire a little of the flailing drunks who’d turned from nuisances to killers because of the unfortunate coming together of heads and kerbs, and of the glazed teenagers whose generosity in sharing their gear had been repaid by their ingrate friends dying curled around pub toilets with shit in their pants and in their veins.
No, the gloves made the killer a more worthwhile quarry in Marvel’s eyes.
Just
Four hundred yards before the sign that read PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY THROUGH SHIPCOTT was the house Jonas had grown up in, and from where his parents had been carried to their graves. Not house really, more cottage – although cottage sounded nicer than it really was, as if it were the picture on a box of souvenir fudge. This cottage was squat and tiled rather than thatched, and attached to its only neighbour like a conjoined twin. The pair of them sat and glared across the narrow road at the high hedge beyond it, which cut off both light and the view from the downstairs windows. Both twins had identical silvered-oak nameplates on their garden gates: Rose Cottage and Honeysuckle Cottage. The John and Mary of adjoining country homes. Rose for Jonas and Lucy, Honeysuckle for old Mrs Paddon next door.
Jonas parked the garish police Land Rover behind Lucy’s Beetle in the track beside Rose Cottage and felt his heart quicken.
He had to keep hold of himself.
Had to step out on to the dry, freezing mud slowly and walk normally through the front door, and clean the bathroom and fill the washer-dryer, and make the tea – just the way Mark Dennis had told him he must.
‘
He wouldn’t fall apart. He would keep hold of himself. Even though every day for the past three weeks he had walked up the cracked and un-weeded stone pathway with his heart squeezed into his throat with fear, and his keys jingling like wind chimes in his trembling hands. The dread was almost overwhelming – the dread that he would push open the front door and it would once more wedge softly against the body of his wife. Or that he would call her echoing name and finally find her in a bath of tepid, pink water. Or that he would walk into the house enclosed in winter darkness and feel her bare feet nudge his face as they dangled in the stairwell.
Jonas shook himself on the doorstep, forcing his breathing back to normal so he wouldn’t cry with relief when he saw her, and pushed open the door.
‘Yuk’ had made it home before him.
Lucy greeted him with the word and a single questioning eyebrow as he walked into the living room. If he’d had to hazard a guess he’d say that Mark Dennis had told his receptionist, who’d passed it on to Mr Jacoby or someone in Mr Jacoby’s shop. From there it could have been anyone who finally brought it to the Holly household. Steven the paper boy, old Will Bishop the milkman, or one of the several visitors Lucy received sometimes on her couch, between the horror movies which Jonas ordered by mail for her in a never-ending supply, and which she watched with indecent joy from behind her favourite tasselled cushion.
He gave a mock-sigh and shrugged expansively, making her laugh. It lit up her face. Lucy was always beautiful to Jonas, but when she smiled, that became a universal truth – even after the ravages of disease and the strain of recent weeks. Her boyish face with its upturned, freckled nose and widely spaced green eyes – together with her cap of cropped auburn hair – gave her an elfin look.
He kissed the top of her head and she took his hand and became serious.
‘Poor Margaret.’
