Darkside

resistance it afforded. Not much, but maybe this was an easy slider. His palms squeaked slightly against the glass. The window going up might have woken Margaret Priddy, but who cared? Even if she heard, she could not move, could not raise the alarm, could not call for help …

Horrific.

Jonas stepped back slowly, hardly seeing the window any more in his mind’s eye. He looked up to the sky to let the rain fall on to his face. Big drops on his eyelids. He opened his mouth and let it fill up, then walked to the edge of the roof and spat on to the garden, feeling cleansed.

As he swung himself off the roof back on to the upturned dustbin, Jonas noticed a small curve of something plastic in the gutter. He cocked his head to get a better look and saw it was a button lying half covered in the muck; if it hadn’t been at eye-level he wouldn’t have seen it. It was maybe half an inch across, four holes, black – very like the button on his own uniform trousers. He quickly checked that he had not pulled a button off while climbing on to the roof, but he was all present and correct. Jonas resisted the urge to pick the button up and turn it in his fingers, but he could see from here it was nothing special – apart from the fact that it was here on the roof outside the window of a room where a woman had been murdered. Apart from that.

‘Hello,’ said a voice and Jonas looked down to see a middle-aged, bespectacled man.

‘Mike Foster,’ the man said, with a cheerful smile. ‘I’ve come for the vomit.’

‘Vomit?’

‘Outside the back door, apparently,’ said Foster.

Jonas felt a pang of irritation that Marvel had not told him there was something back there; he could have stepped in it, ruined it.

‘Nobody told me,’ he confessed as he dropped back to the concrete.

They both looked for it, treading carefully now, exchanging pleasantries, mostly about the lousy weather.

Foster was remarkably upbeat for a man who’d come sixty miles in the rain for the sole purpose of scooping sick into a bag. Jonas said as much.

‘Oh, it’s lovely stuff, vomit!’ Foster exclaimed. ‘If the vomiter is a secretor then you can get DNA. Or diet, at the very least.’

‘Even after it’s been rained on?’

‘It’s not the rain so much as the age. The acid in the vomit eats at the DNA, fragments it. Still, you never know your luck.’

They couldn’t find it.

Foster called the office and then called Marvel, grimacing to try to hear the DCI over the terrible connection.

‘There is no bin lid,’ he said, looking questioningly at Jonas.

‘Only on the bin,’ said Jonas.

When Foster relayed this information to Marvel, Jonas could hear the man’s blood pressure rising with his voice. It was funny really, even though it was serious.

Foster listened and covered the mouthpiece. ‘He says he covered it with the bin lid.’

Jonas shrugged. ‘The lid was in place when I came round here. I had to take it off to turn the bin upside- down.’

Foster relayed this to Marvel, then frowned at his phone before saying to Jonas, ‘I think he got cut off.’

There was a short silence while Jonas felt bonded to Foster through the common experience of being hung up on by DCI Marvel, then Jonas told him about the button on the roof. Foster said he was the vomit guy really but then seemed quite excited about taking a look anyway.

He wasn’t short but neither was he fit, so Jonas cupped his hands and boosted him on to the roof and pointed out the relevant section of guttering.

‘Ooooh,’ said Foster with a happy smile. ‘Did you move it at all?’

‘No.’

‘Excellent.’

He asked Jonas to hand him his field bags and bemoaned his own stupidity at only bringing plastic instead of paper bags too.

‘Only expected vomit, you see?’ he reminded Jonas. ‘But you should always be prepared.’

He continued to chat happily as he took several minutes measuring and photographing the button in situ, then he picked it up with tweezers and put it in an evidence bag before lowering himself gingerly off the roof and on to the upturned bin which Jonas held steady for him.

He held the plastic bag up to the questionable light and they both examined the button as if it were a goldfish they’d won at the fair.

‘Nice spot,’ smiled Foster and, for the first time in days, Jonas felt like a real policeman.

‘It was right here!’ Marvel stood in the freezing rain holding the dustbin lid like a riot shield and pointing at his feet. ‘Right here!’

He glared at Jonas, who deflected the look to Mike Foster, who shrugged for them both.

‘Maybe someone moved it,’ said Foster in a helpful tone that showed Jonas he had no first-hand experience of DCI Marvel.

‘You think so?’ said Marvel furiously. ‘The lid’s on the grass covering the vomit. Then the lid’s on the bin and the vomit is all washed away. You think someone moved the lid? You think so? You’re wasted at this forensics shit! You should be a fucking psychic!’ He hurled the bin lid across the garden. Dixie rushed from his hidey-hole all noise and thunder and little white teeth as the lid rolled into the fence and toppled to a standstill.

‘Couldn’t we have fingerprinted that to find out who?’ said Reynolds tentatively.

‘Shit!’

While Marvel stomped across the wet grass to retrieve the bin lid, Jonas and Mike Foster exchanged guilty looks, as if they were jointly responsible for whatever it was Marvel wanted to blame them for.

‘I touched the lid,’ Jonas said quietly.

Reynolds rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll tell him.’

Marvel returned, holding the lid by an edge.

‘Jonas found a button on the roof,’ said Foster with just the right note of submission.

Reynolds raised an interested eyebrow, but it was wasted on Marvel.

‘I don’t give a shit if Jonas found the fucking Rosetta Stone on the roof. I want to know what happened to the vomit.’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Jonas when it became clear Marvel expected a response and that Foster was too cowed to give one.

‘It was your job to keep the scene secure. Your fucking job!’

Jonas flared a little. ‘With respect, sir, you said my job was to stand on the doorstep and wait for the killer to come back.’ From the corner of his eye, Jonas saw Foster and Reynolds exchange puzzled looks. Good. Let them know Marvel was a prick.

Marvel glared at him, then turned away dismissively and muttered darkly, ‘Can’t protect a puddle of fucking sick …’

Nobody knew what had happened – and no amount of haranguing from Marvel could enlighten them. Finally he jerked his head at Reynolds and stalked away down the garden in his porous shoes. When Reynolds caught him up and asked where they were going next, he told him they were going to put the squeeze on Peter Priddy.

Jonas helped Mike Foster put his bags into his car and almost felt like hugging him goodbye. He was the first sensible official Jonas had met on the case.

* * *

Squeezing Peter Priddy didn’t go quite to plan.

For a start, Peter Priddy blubbing in his dead mother’s kitchen while in search of Jaffa Cakes was a very different person from Prison Officer Priddy, angry, embarrassed and defensive about being pulled off shift on a wing full of nosey cons to speak to homicide detectives.

Marvel squeezed and Priddy pushed back and the worry lines on Reynolds’s brow got deeper and more