The body on the bed had played the organ at his wedding. He’d known her since he was a boy.
He could remember being small enough not to care that it wasn’t cool to be impressed by anything, waving at Mrs Priddy as she went past on an impossibly big grey horse – and her waving back. Over the next twenty-five years that scene had been repeated dozens of times, with all the characters in it evolving. Margaret growing older, but always vibrant; he stretching and growing, coming and going – university, Portishead, home to visit his parents while they were still alive. Even the horse changed, from a grey through any number of similar animals until Buster came along. Mrs Priddy always liked horses that were too big for her; ‘The bigger they are, the kinder they are,’ she’d told him once as he’d squinted up into the sky at her, trying to avoid looking at Buster’s hot, quivery shoulder.
Now Margaret Priddy was dead. It was a blessing really – the poor woman. But right now Jonas Holly only felt disorientated and sick that somehow, during the night, some strange magic had happened to turn life into death, warmth into cold and this world into the next.
Whatever the next world was. Jonas had only ever had a vague irreligious notion that it was probably nice enough.
This was not his first body; as a village bobby, he’d seen his fair share. But seeing Margaret Priddy lying there had hit him unexpectedly hard. He heard the nurse coming up the stairs and put his helmet back on, hurriedly wiping his face on his sleeve, hoping he didn’t look as nauseous as he felt. He was six-four and people seemed to have an odd idea that the taller you were, the more metaphorical backbone you should have.
The nurse smiled at him and held the door open behind her for Dr Dennis, who wore khaki chinos and a polo shirt at all times – as if he was in an Aussie soap and about to be whisked off in a Cessna to treat distant patients for snakebite in the sweltering outback, instead of certifying the death of a pensioner in her cottage on a damp January Exmoor.
‘Hello, Jonas,’ he said.
‘Right, Mark.’
‘How’s Lucy?’
‘OK, thanks.’
‘Good.’
Jonas had once seen Mark Dennis vomit into a yard of ale after a rugby match, but right now the doctor was all business, his regular, tanned face composed into a professional mask of thoughtful compassion. He went over to the bed and checked Margaret Priddy.
‘Nice lady,’ he said, for something to say.
‘The best,’ said Jonas Holly, with feeling. ‘Probably a blessing that she’s gone. For her, I mean.’
The nurse smiled and nodded professionally at him but Mark Dennis said nothing, seeming to be very interested in Margaret Priddy’s face.
Jonas looked around the room. Someone had hung a cheap silver-foil angel over the bed, and it twirled slowly like a child’s mobile. On the dresser, half a dozen Christmas cards had been pushed haphazardly aside to make way for more practical things. One of the cards had fallen over and Jonas’s fingers itched to right it.
Instead he made himself look at the old lady’s body. Not that old, he reminded himself, only sixty-something. But being bedridden had made her seem older and far more frail.
He thought of Lucy one day being that frail and tried to focus on Margaret lying on the bed, not his beautiful wife.
Her lips flecked with bile and soggy painkillers …
Jonas pushed the image away hard and took a deep breath. He focused and tried to imagine what Margaret Priddy’s last words might have been before the accident that crushed her spine and her larynx in one crunching blow. Final words spoken in ignorance three years before the demise of the rest of her body. Jonas thought probably: ‘Get on, Buster!’
‘Glad you’re here, Jonas,’ said Mark Dennis – and when he turned to look at him, Jonas Holly could see concern in the doctor’s face. His instincts stirred uneasily.
‘Her nose is broken.’
They both looked at the nurse, whose smile disappeared in an instant. She hurried over and stood beside the doctor as he guided her fingers to the bridge of Margaret Priddy’s nose.
‘See?’
She nodded, a frown making her ugly.
‘There’s no break in the skin or apparent bruising,’ said Mark Dennis in the annoying, musing way he had. ‘I’m no CSI, but I’d say a sharp blow was not the cause.’
Jonas hated people who watched American television.
‘You want to feel, Jonas?’
Not really. Still, he was a policeman and he should …
He swallowed audibly and touched the nose. It was cold and gristly and made Jonas – an ardent vegetarian – think of raw pork chops. Mark Dennis guided him and Jonas felt the break in Margaret Priddy’s nose move grittily under his fingers. Gooseflesh sprouted up to his shoulders and he let go and stepped back. Unconsciously he wiped his hand on the dark-blue serge of his uniform trousers, before realizing that the silence – coupled with two pairs of eyes looking at him questioningly – meant he was supposed to take charge; was supposed to do something professional and policeman-like.
‘Yuk,’ he said.
The detectives from Taunton must watch a lot of American television, too, thought Jonas as he observed them striding through Margaret Priddy’s tiny home, bumping into antiques, clustering in the hallway, and thumping up and down the narrow stairs like US Marines invading a potting shed.
Despite their expertise in the field of suspicious death, Jonas secretly wished he’d never called them in. Of course,
Jonas was equipped to handle nothing beyond the mundane. He was the sole representative of the Avon & Somerset police force in seven villages and across a good acreage of Exmoor, which rolled in waves like a green and purple sea towards the northern shore of the county, where it met the Bristol Channel coming the other way. The people here lived in the troughs, leaving the heather-covered peaks to the mercy of the sun, wind, rain, snow and the thick, brine-scented mists that crept off the ocean, careless that this was land and not water, and blurring the boundary between the two. People walked on the exposed peaks but their lives were properly conducted in the folds and creases of Exmoor, out of the view of prying eyes, and where sounds carried only as far as the next looming common before being smothered by a damp wall of heather and prickly gorse.
These shaded vales where people grew held hidden histories and forgotten secrets, like the big dark pebbles in the countless shallow streams that crossed the moor.
But the homicide team now filling the two-hundred-year-old, two-up-two-down cottage with noise and action never stopped to listen to the undercurrents.
Jonas didn’t like Detective Chief Inspector Marvel, not only because the spreading, florid DCI’s name sounded like some kind of infallible superhero cop, but because DCI Marvel had listened to his account of the finding of Margaret Priddy with a look on his lined face that told of a bad smell.
It was unfair. Jonas felt he had recovered well after launching the investigation with the ignominious ‘Yuk’.
He had ascertained that the nurse – a robust fifty-year-old called Annette Rogers – had checked on Mrs Priddy at 2am without noticing anything amiss, before finding her dead at 6.15am.
Despite the obvious answer, he had dutifully quizzed Mark Dennis on the possibility of a woman being able to somehow break her own nose during the act of sleeping while also paralysed from the neck down.
He had escorted Mark Dennis and Annette Rogers to the front door with minimal deviation to maintain the corridor of entry and exit to the scene.
He had checked the bedroom window and quickly found scrape-marks surrounding the latch. It was only a four-foot drop from the sill to the flat roof of the lean-to.
He had secured the scene. Which here in Shipcott meant shutting the front door and putting a note on it torn from his police-issue notebook. He’d considered the content of that note with care, running from the self-important ‘Crime Scene’ – which seemed merely laughable on a scrap of lined paper – through ‘Police! Do Not Pass’ (too
