Darkside

of humiliation. But he’d prefer it if they caught him another way – a way that wouldn’t give Marvel the option of an ‘I told you so.’

It was a long, cold day.

* * *

Jonas got home to find Lucy asleep on the couch with the phone in her hand and Rosemary’s Baby playing silently on the TV.

‘How are you, Lu?’ he asked softly as she stirred.

She blinked in confusion for a few seconds and Jonas watched recognition float back into her eyes.

‘My legs hurt,’ she said grumpily. ‘And Margaret Priddy’s son called you. He didn’t say why.’

She shifted up and he sat down and pulled her bare legs on to his lap, covering them up again with the brown tartan rug.

Jonas started to massage her calves.

‘Are you going to call him back?’ she said.

‘In a minute.’ He shrugged.

Onscreen Mia Farrow was over-acting at the sight of the devil-child she’d spawned.

‘Let’s have a baby,’ said Lucy.

He didn’t stop massaging her, but he also didn’t answer her. Or even turn his eyes from the TV.

‘Jonas?’

‘Can we talk about it later?’ He still caressed her, but she could tell now that it was perfunctory.

‘I want to talk about it now.’

Jonas sighed and looked at her. ‘We’ve talked about it, Lu. You’re ill …’

‘That’s not it.’ She drew her legs up and away from him, and curled them under herself. Now it was her turn to look at the TV.

He said nothing. They had last had this conversation almost two years ago. He’d hoped they wouldn’t have it again.

But Lucy wanted it again. ‘You wanted children before we got married.’

‘I didn’t.’

He said it automatically and saw her eyes widen.

‘You said you did.’

There was no way out of it now. His mouth had betrayed him and he couldn’t take it back. ‘You said I did.’

‘You never said you didn’t.’

‘Well …’ shrugged Jonas with a helpless lift of one hand. ‘I don’t.’

Lucy bit her lip, determined to be an adult about this. This was an adult conversation between two adults. The fact that she wanted to slap him and cry on the floor like a child was an aberration.

‘Why?’ she said and hated the tremble in her own voice.

‘I just don’t.’

‘I think I deserve a better answer than that, Jonas.’

Jonas thought she did too. Knew she did. But stayed as silent as a coward, which he knew was his only defence.

Usually Lucy let it go. They never fought and weren’t quite sure how to, but tonight Lucy was finally hurt enough …

‘Don’t you want something to remember me by?’

Jonas stood up in an instant, and as soon as Lucy saw his face she wished she could take it back. For a second she was actually frightened.

He walked out of the room and she heard him pick up his car keys and phone from beside the flowers on the hall table.

She nearly called out to him, but then held her tongue.

She had a right to say what she was feeling! If things were the other way round, Lucy would have moved Heaven and Earth to have Jonas’s child. She could barely believe that – for once – he did not want the same thing as she did. Disagreeing was one thing, but refusal to even discuss such a vital issue was quite another. She felt her throat constrict in self-pity. She wasn’t dead yet! Her vote still counted!

Didn’t it?

She heard the front door shut quietly behind him.

Jonas drove away.

He had no idea how to tell her the truth: I can’t protect a child.

Because in his head he always heard her ask Why?

And then he’d have to tell the truth again.

Nobody can …

* * *

Marvel sat with an unopened bottle of Jameson whiskey in one hand, the TV bunny aerial in the other, and watched Coronation Street for the first time in about twenty years. He was shocked and confused to find that at some point Tracy Barlow had served time for murder, and while he was trying to work out how that could legally happen to a five-year-old girl, someone knocked on his door.

He hadn’t heard a car but he thought it might be Reynolds, who had taken the DNA swabs to Portishead. Marvel could have gone too, but had finally decided that going back to the future at this point would make it that much harder to return to Exmoor.

He was therefore more than a little surprised to find PC Jonas Holly standing in the dark.

‘I need to speak to you about Peter Priddy.’

Marvel held open the door by way of invitation, and immediately felt the cold night air invade his cottage, giving him an unexpected pang of empathy with Joy Springer and her jealous guardianship of warmth.

But Jonas didn’t come in. Instead he stood hesitantly in the yard, then asked if they could go to the pub. Marvel needed no second bidding. He abandoned Tracy Barlow to her fate and grabbed his coat.

It was warm in the Land Rover. Holly swung it round expertly in a tight turn. As he did, Marvel noticed Joy Springer peering at them from behind her kitchen curtain.

They turned right at the bottom of the drive – away from Shipcott – and headed up the hill across the moor.

‘Not going to the Red Lion?’

‘I thought it would be better to go somewhere away from the village to discuss work.’

Marvel nodded. Holly was different tonight. There was nothing of the junior officer about him. His manner was surprisingly brusque and he looked as if he was brooding about something.

‘I spoke to Peter Priddy. He’s got a right cob on.’

Marvel didn’t understand the reference but got the gist. ‘Mr Priddy doesn’t understand the process of elimination.’

‘He feels victimized.’

‘He had motive, opportunity and probably inclination.’

‘It’s his mother!’

‘You think nobody kills their mother? Or father? Or their own kids? What do you think this is, bloody Toytown? Grow up, Holly, for fuck’s sake!’

Jonas said nothing and put his foot down.

Marvel watched the empty ribbon of tarmac lined by dirty brown moor race at them out of blackness and disappear as soon as the lights had passed over it. It was like travelling through space, or a lower intestine. The blackness could have been infinite or claustrophobically close, there was no way of telling – and the motion was timeless and hypnotic.

‘Where’s the pub?’ he said.

‘Withypool,’ said Jonas just as curtly, as he stopped at a T-junction.

A porcupine of white wooden signposts bristled out of the opposite hedge.

‘Withypool two and a quarter!’ read Marvel in exasperation. ‘This place is like Middle fucking Earth.’